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

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Part 2 “The Legacy of Race: Reconciling Selves” focuses on the lasting influence of the racial divide as a stimulus for the autobiographical writings of different authors, who have variously tried to reconcile their selves, atone for a racist past and find true brotherhood. Jennifer Ritterhouse centers on life writing that tells stories of childhood racial training during the Jim Crow era. Herself a historian, Ritterhouse reflects on the difficulty of using autobiographical material as a source of historical information, thus addressing the problem of the “truth-value of autobiography” when it contains elements of fiction. Both black and white autobiographers who grew up in the Jim Crow era narrate what Ritterhouse calls southern “dramas of social inequality” in which children were gradually socialized into the southern racial system. In fact, Ritterhouse identifies Fred Hobson’s southern “rage to explain” as the impulse behind many of the white “autobiographical accounts of childhood events,” which are “much like the ones African American autobiographers recount, but with the roles reversed.” These childhood stories also share the same “political intent” as black autobiography, in that the white adults who have undergone a moral transformation also seek to challenge the Jim Crow system and change the South. Despite the presence of some fictional elements, Ritterhouse believes that these retrospective childhood stories are not just “literary constructs” but valid sources for historians who “tend to be most interested in the patterns, the scripts—that is, in the social and cultural than the individual level.” For these white life narrators, according to Ritterhouse, “the autobiographical impulse derives from a feeling that they have achieved a mature viewpoint on past events” and from their need to repeat that unacceptable moment of the past to correct it, making amends with the racial attitudes they held then.