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

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With Wright, another dimension is added when we consider that Wright is composing about his life experiences in the Deep South, that part of the United States that had been most maligned during the days of slavery. Certainly Douglass and Jacobs were enslaved, but their enslavement was in the upper South states of North Carolina and Maryland. It was therefore possible, given the proximity of those states to northern, free territory, for those enslaved to plot their routes to freedom—as Douglass and Jacobs assuredly did. The Deep South, on the other hand, presented additional problems. The vastness of geography made it far less likely that enslaved persons could escape from bondage. Trying to navigate on foot from Alabama, for example, through Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, and other states before arriving in the North would have been almost impossible. Thinking of a southern route of escape, perhaps by way of New Orleans and stealing aboard a ship bound for the Northeast, would have been equally challenging. It is no wonder, therefore, that those confined to slavery in the Deep South viewed it essentially as a death sentence. It is thus not surprising that there are no classic narrations of enslavement in Deep South territory from those formerly enslaved on that soil. It is well into the twentieth century and with the likes of Richard Wright that narrators begin to chart their lives in the southernmost part of the United States. And you can’t get much farther south than Mississippi, which is where Richard Wright came to consciousness in the second and third decades of the twentieth century.