Читать книгу Constructing the Self. Essays on Southern Life-Writing онлайн

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As necessity is the mother of invention, a desire to understand what it meant to grow up Jim Crow can help illuminate a historical approach to autobiographical source material that is at once pragmatic and sophisticated and also somewhat different from Wallach’s literary analysis.ssss1 The first step is to emphasize a word Kevin Gaines uses: drama. It is also important to think critically about the nature of memory and to look for patterns across the broad genre of southern life-writing.

First, drama. Gaines identifies black autobiographers’ dramas of “social equality,” but dramas of social inequality is a more straightforward term. As historian Nell Irvin Painter explains, “social equality” was white southerners’ catch-phrase for any kind of association as equals among blacks and whites—a kind of association that was not supposed to happen for fear that it would lead to “race mixing” and, worst of all from most white southerners’ point of view, sexual relationships between white women and black men. Thus, “‘social equality’ existed only in the negative” in the South, Painter writes (53). Social inequality—how race prejudice permeates the whole American social organism—was the lesson black children were forced to learn and the lesson black autobiographers regularly recount.