NOTES INTRODUCTION . Such critical studies include Sylvia Jenkins Cook’s important From Tobacco Road to Route 66: The Southern Poor White in Fiction (976), Duane Carr’s A Question of Class: The Redneck Stereotype in Southern Fiction (996), and Matthew Guinn’s illuminating After Southern Modernism: Fiction of the Contemporary South (2000). Patricia Yaeger’s Dirt and Desire: Reconstructing Southern Women’s Writing, 930–990 (2000) takes aim at a number of the field’s familiar shibboleths, but I am most interested in her treatment of the ways in which“literature by southern women explores a radically dislocated surface landscape filled with jagged white signifiers and pallid detritus that bespeaks a constant uneasiness about the meaning of whiteness” (20). Her insightful readings of works such as Eudora Welty’s Delta Wedding and Ellen Douglas’s Can’t Quit You, Baby note in particular how the wealthy white women of those texts build their posh lifestyles on the backs of African American servants, a system that threatens to break down when they are forced, sometimes in shocking and violent ways, to view their servants as individuals. Of course, the analyses discussed above represent only a sampling of the work on race and class in southern fiction. Some critics have dealt with more complicated issues of class in articles or books on particular authors, and I will deal with those studies in later chapters. 2. I should stress that “paternalism” in this study always means “interracial paternalism ” unless otherwise specified. Intraracial white paternalism also existed in the South, of course. As Joel Williamson points out, contemporary observers of the rapidly growing textile industry in the turn-of-the-century South saw the relationship between the nearly all-white mill town and the mill owners as“a direct translation into the realities of the New South of the Old South values of noblesse oblige, paternalism, loyalty, and service,” but with poor whites instead of blacks as the recipients of elite benevolence (43). At the time, the popular conception held that the mill represented“the southern community in harmony with itself and with the real and modern world. Master, trained to care for slaves on the plantations of the Old South, now brought capital and a kindly management to the white workers in the factories of the New” (434). Indeed, many textile managers believed they were effecting “the salvation of the lower class of whites by a patrician leadership” (432), and they“were convinced of their own paternalism. There was a feeling among them that they not only protected their white neighbors and cousins from the threat of black labor, but they also provided them with a life well above the level of bare subsistence” (434). I would not wish to ignore the significance of this white paternalism for the South, and I am particularly interested in the manner in which this system, as Williamson describes it, seems to equate lower-class whites with African Americans and thus complicates the 69 “whiteness” of a poor white. However, I would argue that, as my readings of individual texts will demonstrate, white paternalism did not do the same social work in creating social class in the South that racial paternalism did. 3. I should note that the collaboration between planters and industrialists that Cobb identifies was not only a phenomenon of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century. George Fitzhugh, for instance, argued in pre–Civil War works such as Sociology for the South (854) and Cannibals All! or Slaves without Masters (857) that the South should welcome industrialization but should preserve the institution of slavery and avoid the capitalist system of free wage labor at all costs. In Cannibals All! he claims that“the unrestricted exploitation of so-called free society, is more oppressive to the laborer than domestic slavery ” (5), and that“capital, irresponsible capital begets, and ever will beget, the immedicabile vulnus of so-called Free Society” (202). CHAPTER . Zora Neale Hurston’s Seraph on the Suwanee . Though I am treating Hurston’s rendering of Larraine and Carl’s dialect as a straightforward attempt to represent a poor white southern style of speech that did, as Hurston claimed, have much in common with poor black southern styles of speech, Claudia Tate has offered a compelling and intriguing alternative hypothesis.According to Tate, Hurston intentionally put black dialect in the mouths of white characters, a strategy that“carnivalizes the presumption that discernible racial differences are the natural...