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

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Elizabeth Hayes Turner discusses Melton A. McLaurin’s autobiography Separate Pasts (1987) as one more example of what Fred Hobson calls “conversion narratives” to reconcile an apologetic past self. Like Ritterhouse, Turner steps into the complex middle ground between history and autobiography to analyze the life narrative of historian Melton A. McLaurin. For him, even if memory is “the most subjective of all sources,” it is also “a valuable source of both fact and truth.” Turner distinguishes three stages in McLaurin’s self-transformation: his “child self,” which learns the racial prejudices of the Jim Crow South; his “adolescent self,” which rebels against parental regulations and sees his parents’ world as illogical; and finally his “adult self,” which seeks to “reform that which is absurd”—southern segregation—and can finally find redemption. In his autobiography McLaurin records “the gradual evolution of his own critical thinking about race relations” and “the profound impact of the inequalities in southern society upon his gradual awareness.” Turner identifies McLaurin’s rejection of the role of the privileged white man as the “point of conversion” in his autobiography. But to reach this crucial juncture, McLaurin had to experience a series of enlightening episodes through his daily encounters with black people at his grandfather’s convenience store. His conversion reflects a gradual shift from the influence of white supremacist doctrines to a weakening of his racial prejudice through conversations with black men and women, which later turns into guilt. His reflections on family paternalism, a fake escape route from guilt, finally open his eyes to the pernicious effects of southern paternalism as an insurmountable obstacle keeping African Americans from achieving equality.