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In Search of a Common Identity The Self and the South in Four Mississippi Autobiographies william l. andrews “Your delta,” he had said, “was not mine.” —willie morris A n article of faith among the first generation of southern literary modernists, writes Lewis Simpson, is “the truth that man’s essential nature lies in his possession of the moral community of memory and history.” Much has been written, of course, about what an obsession with the past has done to mold southern novelists into a recognizable and distinctive group. But if, as Hugh Holman has stated, “the southerner is not really interested in an abstract past; he is interested inhis past,” and if, according to Faulkner, “it is himself that every Southerner writes about,” then it is important to notice that southerners, especially since the Renaissance of the 1920s and ’30s, have paid a substantial tribute to the past in autobiography as well as fiction. While much southern fiction since mid-century has recorded a depletion of the mythic resources of the southern past, contemporary southern autobiographers have inscribed in their localized images of a southern past a sense of identity that invites our attention because of its social and existential, if not mythic, import. I propose, therefore, to investigate the extent to which recent southern autobiography has sought or signified a peculiar kind of selfhood and community, whether fashioned from individual or collective memory. What follows in this essay is basically an intertextual reading of four wellknown autobiographies: William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee (1941), Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), Willie Morris’s North Toward Home (1967), and Anne Moody’s Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968). These works emanate from a common geocultural region, the Deep South in general, and Mississippi specifically; indeed, they all originate in the world of the Mississippi Delta, the 39 locus of John Dollard’s classic Caste and Class in a Southern Town. Even a cursory look reveals that the books may be compared in a variety of ways. Percy and Morris recount the tranquil growing-up experiences of two members of Mississippi ’s dominant caste and upper (in Morris’s case upper-middle) classes. Wright and Moody record the bitter socialization of the children of those near the bottom class of the South’s subordinate caste. Putting caste and class distinctions in abeyance, however, one can also see some commonness of purpose between these two generations of autobiographers. Acutely sensitized by the Depression and the world wars to the ravages of history, both Percy and Wright gravitated toward autobiography as a means of psychic survival, as a way of giving form and meaning to a sense of selfhood that the incoherence of modernity threatened. Galvanized by the Civil Rights movement, Morris and Moody also came to autobiography at roughly the same time and with similar needs—to revaluate their personal histories in and evolving responsibilities to Mississippi in the throes of social upheaval. It is hard to imagine that Morris and Moody took up the form of first-person narrative ignorant of or indifferent to the example set by Percy and Wright, respectively. And yet, while one can easily point to thematic and stylistic echoes between the black- and white-authored autobiographies , the affinities between Morris and Wright and, to a lesser extent, between Moody and Percy, are probably more arresting because less expected. For instance, the aspirations of Wright and Morris take them out of Mississippi and, a bit later, the South itself on quests for intellectual fulfillment that eventually intersect in Paris in 1956. The narrators of Lanterns on the Levee and Coming of Age in Mississippi, by contrast, cannot abrogate the responsibility they feel to that sense of community that binds them to Mississippi. Percy and Moody make temporary forays outside their native state, but they always return to struggle with Mississippi’s social problems and their own conflicting, sometimes desperate , feelings about the efficacy of their efforts. Clearly, none of the obvious caste, class, generational, and gender differences among these autobiographers prevents them from sharing experiences, perspectives, and literary motives in common. But if we want to avoid simply reshuffling the deck of southern literature before we play out the familiar hands of genre criticism, our investigation of the communal identifications of these autobiographers needs to go deeper than the question of who’s different from (or similar to) whom? We need to ask ourselves, foremost, what...

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