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

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So, while the Atlanta riot was undoubtedly an important moment in young Walter White’s life, the obvious fictions in his autobiographical accounting of it would seem to compel a historian to focus on the literary aspects, rather than any truth-value, of such dramas of social inequality. Or, as Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explain in Reading Autobiography, “life narrative cannot be reduced to or understood only as historical record. While autobiographical narratives may contain information regarded as ‘facts,’ they are not factual history about a particular time, person, or event. Rather, they incorporate usable facts into subjective ‘truth’” (13).

This is where the importance of looking for patterns in southern life-writing becomes evident. Black autobiographers are not the only southerners who narrate dramas of social inequality. Whites who dissented from Jim Crow orthodoxy often tell these kinds of stories as well, in both autobiography and oral history. The impulse that Fred Hobson has described as white southerners’ “rage to explain” the South’s social system and their place within it has often manifested itself in autobiographical accounts of childhood events much like the ones African American autobiographers recount, but with the roles reversed. Rather than experiencing the pain and confusion of racial subordination, white children learned to inflict it, often first on black nurses and playmates. Like black-authored dramas of social inequality, whites’ stories reveal the extent to which race and other categories of identity, particularly gender and class, were inextricably linked and learned in tandem. And, like black autobiography, white southern life-writing often has an explicit political intent. For white southerners who went on to challenge all or part of the Jim Crow system as adults, usually as a result of some adult moral or political transformation, an account of their “typical” southern upbringing served not only to show how much their own racial attitudes had changed but also to suggest that if they could change, so could other white southerners and so, ultimately, could the South.