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

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It is striking that neither Hurston nor Wright uses southern territory for substantial political commentary, although their texts are not completely devoid of such commentary. Certainly they value the landscape and the folk traditions that surrounded them as they grew up, but southernness in and of itself, or any concentrated desire to change southernness, does not appear in their texts. Neither expresses a clear cut political agenda that would be comparable to agitating for the abolition of slavery. For Wright and Hurston, who found themselves more a part of a region than part of a nation, penning their narratives meant, to some extent, leaving their region to join the nation, the very nation that Douglass and Jacobs found so problematic.

Still, there are narrators who are thoroughly engaged in and called for change on southern territory. This is especially the case with narrators during the Civil Rights era of the 1950s and 1960s. Whether it is Alice Walker challenging Mississippi laws in her life or in her fiction, or Anne Moody in Coming of Age in Mississippi (1968), southern territory for some African American life narrators means embracing activism for the remainder of their lives. In essays as well as in Meridian (1970), Walker expresses her commitment to social activism. She deliberately married a Jewish man and moved to Mississippi in defiance of the anti-miscegenation laws in that state. In her essay “Choice: A Tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.,” she recounts how her social consciousness was developed in part as a result of hearing her mother pray for Dr. King’s safety.