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

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Mostly, though, Summer Snow is about claiming the South. As I point out in the eponymous essay, it is about as rare for black people born in the South to claim that territory, emotionally and physically, as it is for snow to fall in Alabama in July. Over several decades, I have grown to love the South, in spite of its viciously violent history, and I have grown especially to love the territory in Alabama in which I grew up. Still, I join James Baldwin in his claim that, because he loves a territory, he has earned the right to criticize it. So, I criticize the backwardness of the South, its continuing racism, its poorly educated citizens, and its lingering propensity to violence. Nonetheless, I call it home, and I, like Natasha Trethewey, will claim my final resting place there.

For my purposes here, however, I emphasize that I did not think consciously of some of the things I’ve mentioned as I was composing the essays in Summer Snow. In an early essay, “The Overweight Angel,” for example, I was so excited about remembering the folks in that essay that I was too naïve to change their names. Aun Sis was my mother’s only sister, so she was simply called “Sis.” She was a rather large woman, who, from my adolescent eyes, seemed always to be sitting on her porch minding other folks’ business. She didn’t take no stuff from her five children or from anybody else’s kids. There was no business that she did not consider her own. She would tell my mother how to raise us after my father died, and she would set her children against us as models for correct behavior. So, without a thought of impending consequences, I named her in the essay.