Sherwood Bonner's Reconstruction

Usually dated from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to the end of Union occupation of the South in 1877, the Reconstruction era is undergoing revisionary scrutiny from a sesquicentennial remove. In Reading Reconstruction: Sherwood Bonner and the Literature of the Post-Civil War South (2019), Kathryn B. McKee engages in this scrutiny through an "extended critical study of Sherwood Bonner's life and writing" (4). Once prized for their comedy and sentiment, Bonner's southern stories strike modern readers as insensitive, even cruel, in their portrayals of people of color. McKee considers this fiction to be racist, yet she argues persuasively that Bonner should be read. Her book provides many of the tools for an informed reading. As McKee says in Chapter 1, "monolithic discussions of the postwar world scarcely get at the period's complexities, experienced differently by men and women, freedpeople and free blacks, northerners and southerners, residents of cities and residents of small towns, people who lived in Tennessee and people who lived across the state line in Mississippi" (19).

Before turning to Katharine Sherwood Bonner McDowell (1849-1883) and her formative years in the small town of Holly Springs, Mississippi, McKee gives a valuable overview of Reconstruction scholarship, from William Archibald Dunning's 1905 history to more recent studies by Eric Foner, Heather Cox Richardson, Mark Wahlgren Summers, Gregory Downs, Sharon D. Kennedy-Nolle, and others. Historians disagree whether Reconstruction succeeded in achieving two of its main goals: reconciling the warring regions and extending greater equity to people of color. "Northerners quickly grew impatient with southerners' unrepentant, sometimes still hostile, stance," says McKee (28), and African Americans failed to secure political equality, much less social equality. The Civil Rights Act of 1866, she points out, "dealt only with civil equality," such as property rights (35), and the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which afforded access to some public spaces (not including schools), was overturned in 1883. Against this national turmoil, McKee places Bonner in her "historical moment" (3) by giving unprecedented attention to her work, a body of writing that ranges from travel literature to poetry. "Both her fiction and nonfiction," says McKee, "amplify the tensions and uncertainties, the ambivalences and declarations, of the post-Civil War United States in such a way that her voice stakes its own claims and intercedes in the debates of the hour" (7).

McKee is well situated, both academically and geographically, for research on Sherwood Bonner's "jumbled response to a jumbled period in American life" (3). The newly appointed director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture (and the first woman to head the CSSC in its forty-year history), she continues to serve as McMullen Professor of Southern Studies and professor of English at the University of Mississippi. An affiliate of the Sarah Isom Center for Women and Gender Studies, McKee has taught interdisciplinary courses since 1997 with the University's historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and scholars of documentary studies. Sherwood Bonner was a subject of her University of North Carolina doctoral dissertation on humor in the fiction of four 19th-century southern women; since then, Bonner has remained a focus of many of McKee's published essays and conference papers. Serendipitously, the Bonner home pictured on the dust jacket of Reading Reconstruction still stands in Holly Springs, half an hour from the Oxford campus of the University of Mississippi. McKee acknowledges the help of several Holly Springs residents, including staffs of the Marshall County Public Library and the Marshall County Historical Museum. The University of Mississippi's Department of Archives and Special Collections provided access to the Hubert McAlexander collections on both Marshall County and Sherwood Bonner. McAlexander's 1981 Bonner biography was an essential resource for McKee's volume, as was Anne Razey Gowdy's heavily annotated Sherwood Bonner Sampler, 1869-1884 (2000). Like McAlexander, Gowdy contributed many of her research materials to UM's archives.

While her book was in press, McKee's emphasis on the era's complexity was underscored by the essays in Remembering Reconstruction: Struggles over the Meaning of America's Most Turbulent Era (2018...