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

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The writer, then, has to plan how to respond to accusations about Great Aunt Jessie if she decides to include a portrait of her. And think of neighbors. Did I really want to reveal that five men in my neighborhood noticed me too much from the time I was a mere thirteen or so years old and into my college years? That one even touched my breasts when I was cleaning house for his wife? Those men were all respected—by somebody, if not by me—and their reputations would be tainted if accurate descriptions of them appeared. In my mind, I always refer to them as “five dogs,” and I have, after all these years, written an essay about them that will appear in my second collection of non-fiction essays, which I have titled “Unspeakable.” In Summer Snow, however, I mention only one of them, the one that I encountered after I matriculated to college.

And what about teachers and colleagues? How did I want to portray them? Mostly, I had fond memories of my teachers, so that was less of a problem than the case of the five dogs. Things got a bit sticky when I considered the number of occasions on which I, as an African American woman, was a first of some kind or another—the first black professor in the English Department at the College of William and Mary, for example. Or those occasions on which I was one of a handful of black people in majority white environments, such as being one of the few black professors in English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. How did I want to treat the folks I encountered there and my interactions with them? After all, most of those people were still alive at the time of the writing and publishing of Summer Snow, and it would have been extremely difficult to disguise them in the writing. Contemplation of all these situations meant making particular kinds of creative and narrative choices. That is why I call Summer Snow a memoir instead of an autobiography. In memoir, one can be selective about inclusion, whereas autobiography suggests something more expansive, thorough, and complete.