Closer to the Truth Than Any Fact: Memoir, Memory, and Jim Crow

1. Subjectivity and the Felt Experience of History

chapter one Subjectivity and the Felt Experience of History life writing is unabashedly subjective. Sometimes autobiographers claim to speak for members of their entire race or social class; however, within the group the writer claims to represent, there are always members who resent the imposition, who claim that the autobiographer in question “does not speak for me.” Of course, because past evidence is always fragmentary, the historian must often ask the historical subjects about whom she or he has the most information to stand in for those whose direct imprint she or he cannot find in the historical record. In other words, historians must extrapolate from what evidence they have if they are ever to compose an overview of a particular era. No doubt certain generalizations can be made about similarities in the lived experiences of contemporaries who had a great deal in common, but when we look closely at two different life experiences, at two different autobiographical accounts, we often see that people from the same social milieu perceived and experienced the same moments in quite different ways. Individual experiences almost always complicate broad historical generalizations. Therefore, there is a certain amount of tension between historical monographs, which claim to describe a particular time period objectively, and autobiographies, which can only meaningfully claim to document the peculiarities of one life. In order to explore the conflict we sense between these quite different attempts to chronicle the past, we must look at the issues of objectivity and subjectivity in historical interpretation. A quest for scholarly objectivity lies at the heart of traditional conceptions of the discipline of history. However, historians and other scholars have become increasingly skeptical about the possibility or, in some instances , the desirability of such a perspective. Those who still believe that { 13 } objectivity is achievable have sometimes proved to be suspicious about the value of the memoir, which is unapologetically subjective, as a historical resource. A. J. P. Taylor views life writing this way, claiming that “written memoirs are a form of oral history set down to mislead historians” and are “useless except for atmosphere.”1 Jeremy D. Popkin, one of the few historians to explore the similarities between autobiography and history, explains the misgivings of some historians this way: “Autobiography may sometimes seem like history, but . . . it [is] impossible to maintain the pretense that an autobiography can achieve scholarly objectivity. Historians have long recognized this fact when using other people’s autobiographies as historical resources. Standard manuals for students caution them against reliance on these ‘least convincing of all personal records.’ ”2 These misgivings aside, memoirs have long been used selectively as historical resources as historians have mined them for anecdotes or for quotations to illustrate a historical point. However, this ad hoc approach to the usage of memoirs glosses over moments when a memoirist might offer contradictory observations or distort or challenge the reigning historiographical interpretation. Memoirists are not obligated to stifle or reconcile contradictions in the same way that the historian must. Because of the diversity of perspectives they capture, memoirs are unwieldy and complicated source material that many historians use only in small doses, choosing for both methodological and interpretive reasons not to analyze memoirs in their entirety. Those historians who have expressed skepticism about the truth value of oral histories or memoirs as historical resources often do so in the name of “historical objectivity.” The birth of modern history as a professionalized field of inquiry in the nineteenth century is founded on the belief that it is the historian’s duty, according to Leopold von Ranke, to tell it how it actually happened. Put differently, in 1898 Lord Acton admonished contributors to Cambridge Modern History to “understand that . . . our Waterloo must be one that satisfies French and English, Germans and Dutch alike.”3 Acton’s remarks express the belief that a professional historian should let the facts speak for themselves and that a proper assemblage of historical facts must produce an interpretation that corresponds to a reality existing outside that interpretation. According to this extreme vision of historical objectivity, all competent historians looking at the same body of historical data should come to the same conclusions. However, it quickly becomes { 14 } chapter one clear (the best of intentions aside) that this is frequently not the case, and the notion of “objectivity” is then thrown into crisis. Thomas Nagel convincingly argues that there are many things that...