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

121 страница из 129

Smith narrated this incident as an example of a remembered experience that contributed to her eventual renunciation of Jim Crow, but apparently she did not remember it well enough to be certain of her playmate’s name. Six years before she published her autobiography, she wrote an article called “Growing Into Freedom” in which she called the girl “Julie” rather than “Janie” (50-51). Although not as big a fiction as Walter White’s invention of the shotgun, this discrepancy reminds us that white “dramas of social inequality,” like black ones, are narratives, with all of the authorial shaping that the word implies. Indeed, like blacks’ accounts of experiencing and resisting racism, whites’ accounts of learning to distance and subordinate racial others are both personal and generic. As Lillian Smith explained in her autobiography, her specific experience with Janie was “an incident that has rarely happened to other southern children. In a sense, unique. But it was an acting-out, a private production of a little script that is written on the lives of most southern children before they know words. Though they may not have seen it staged this way, each southerner has had his own private showing” (30).