Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times

Corra Harris (1869–1935): The Storyteller as Folk Preacher

341 Corra Harris (1869–1935) The Storyteller as Folk Preacher donald mathews    Corra White Harris is largely forgotten now, although an Evangelical publishing house did publish her most famous book a few years ago under a slightly modified title. For the first decade of the twentieth century, however, she was a famed reviewer of books for the Independent magazine of New York City. In 1910 she published her “circuit rider” stories between hard covers and for the next decade was one of the most famous popular storytellers in the magazines of the middle-brow middle classes, with a readership that spanned the continent despite the fact that she was an unapologetic southern partisan from Elberton , Georgia. She was also an unapologetic champion of wives and mothers, telling their stories and celebrating their courage in homely, small-town settings that were being threatened by the ravages of fast-growing cities, swift industrialization , foreign ideologies, and rapidly changing morals. Born in 1869 to a Confederate veteran, Colonel Tinsley White, and his wife, Mary Mathews White, Corra Mae White married at seventeen a fellow teacher, Lundy Howard Harris, who had just become a Methodist preacher. The shock of a newly imposed piety would provide this clever and witty young woman with the marrow of her first book, but she had not been aware of the opportunities offered her at the time. Gradually, as she followed her husband from country churches into academic life, she kept her sanity by observing the humor in the lives of sometimes humorless people and practicing her narrative skills in private.1 It was not humor, however, that launched her literary career. Corra Harris was dead serious when she wrote a letter to the Independent in May 1899. She had penned witty pieces for the Atlanta Constitution earlier,2 but her good humor had fled as she described the cultural climate within which a crowd corra harris Courtesy of Hargrett Rare Book and Manuscript Library, University of Georgia Libraries. Corra Harris 343 of white men had lynched Sam Hose in Newnan, Georgia, on April 23. Although the Independent was based in New York City, it had always reported news from the suspect South. In the issue of May 11, a black army chaplain had condemned Hose’s burning, and Harris’s friend, the Reverend William P. Lovejoy , had lamented the “mob spirit” of white savages, even though he believed it a clear response to the restless politics of unruly blacks.3 Harris’s letter, printed a week later, condemned African Americans as brutish men and sluttish women who had cloaked the region in sexual danger. This premise helped Harris understand “facts which do not mitigate the atrocious conduct of the Newnan mob, but which do explain its savage fury.” We live, she insisted, “next door to a savage brute, who grows more intelligent and more insolent in his outrages every year.” No southern white woman, Harris accused, was safe from the “insults ” of this creature, reared as he was, in a “cesspool of vice” and “brutal lust” that enabled him to accept the repeated seduction of women closest to him as a matter of course. Neither the “savage’s” family, nor his religion, nor his women could civilize him; even the performances of African American prophetic women in the transports of the Spirit were, she shuddered, “lewd and blasphemous.” If southern white women shrank from mob violence “with alarm and horror,” she added, swift and sure draconian punishment was nonetheless reasonable under the hovering sexual peril that enveloped them all. When you condemn our men, she protested to Yankees, you side with those who threaten us. “This cannot be true.”4 That the Independent published Harris’s letter was mildly surprising. The magazine had been launched by abolitionists and in the 1890s remained a consistently hostile critic of most white southerners; but there was something about Harris’s style and energy that captivated the editor. He was critical of the Georgian’s reasoning and prejudices, to be sure, but he asked her to write again, which she did a month later, this time on “Negro Womanhood.” And once again, Harris attacked the source of vice among black men, which she believed was “the debased motherhood of the negro [sic] race in the South.” The “victim of savage moods and brutal chastisements from infancy,” the black woman was “prey to the first wretch who approaches her with deceitful...