SOUTHERN SELVES:
From Mark Twain and Eudora Welty to Maya Angelou and Kaye Gibbons:
A Collection of Autobiographical Writing
Edited and with an introduction by James Watkins
Vintage, 379 pages, $14 paper
LOUISIANA SOJOURNS: Travelers’ Tales and Literary Journeys
Edited by Frank De Caro; Rosin Augusta Jordan, associate editor
Louisiana State University Press, 581 pages, $39.95
In “Southern Selves,” editor James Watkins orchestrates a series of diverse, first-person cameos that mirror historical periods and varied patterns of Southern life. Watkins, who teaches American literature at Berry College in Rome, Ga., takes a postmodern approach–no chronological thread, rather an arrangement of memoir pieces that convey floating images of the region as a place of mind, moving back and forth in time. This orchestration works well, drawing the reader around human points of a constellation, each with a free-standing quality.
In one stretch, we move frown Frederick Douglass’ reflections on slavery to contemporary novelist Kaye Gibbons’ ruminations on her hard-shell religious upbringing in the 1960s, then back again to a passage from “Witness to Sorrow: The Antebellum Autobiography of William J. Grayson”–a South Carolina planter and an apologist for slavery.
Writes Gibbons of a memorable preacher: “Then, he would move on to What Hell Looks Like. He spoke with the conviction of one who had, quite literally, been there and back. This was a true waste of time because everybody in the auditorium was Baptist. We had a very clear understanding of Hell. The children who attended the crazed, renegade Baptist churches that had splintered off from similarly outrageous evangelical congregations could’ve gone to the bathroom in Hell in the dark. No wonder so many of these children turned out to be so worthless and mean, hardened as they were over the years by such relentless descriptions of doom. I like to think I turned out neither worthless nor mean. In fact, I may be a better person and a better writer because I paid attention every time I was told What Hell Looks Like. . . . The preacher stocked me with a load of vivid and frightful images to be used in fiction.”
Some of the authors in this anthology are renowned and prolific–Reynolds Price, Eudora Welty, Richard Wright, Robert Penn Warren, Mark Twain, Maya Angelou, James Agee, Zora Neale Hurston, Harry Crews. Other selections are from famous works by less-prolific writers–notably Lillian Smith (“Killers of the Dream”), William Alexander Percy (“Lanterns on the Levee”) and Anne Moody (“Coming of Age in Mississippi.”)
Most of the pieces are linked by concerns of race and class. Percy, the Mississippi planter (and uncle of novelist Walker Percy), was an aesthete, with moderate views for the generation that ruled the South before civil rights. Nevertheless, his reflections on a favored manservant, read today, have an uncomfortable, paternalistic ring, whereas Moody, who grew up amidst the freedom marches, captures the pathos of a servant, listening to well-heeled white women talk about the NAACP–a hint of the wider world of activism into which she soon plunged.
The most affecting passages of “Southern Selves” are the words of women bent on creating spaces in a society where even well-born white females were expected to be submissive until the 1970s. In this passage from Lillian Smith’s 1949 book “Killers of the Dream,” the author’s reflections on race foreshadow a psychological tension between the sexes that gave way to the yet-unfolding journey of feminism:
“We who were born in the South called this mesh of feeling and memory `loyalty.’ We thought of it sometimes as `love.’ We identified with the South’s trouble as if we, individually, were responsible for all of it. We defended the sins and the sorrows of three hundred years as if each sin had been committed by us alone and each sorrow had cut across our heart. . . . We knew guilt without understanding it, and there is no tie that binds men closer to the past and each other than that.”
Although the anthology “Louisiana Sojourns” has a narrower purview than “Southern Selves,” the selections culled by Frank De Caro and Rosin Augusta Jordan (both of whom teach English at Louisiana State University) afford a rich panorama of the South’s most varied state. “Louisiana Sojourns” is at once a travelogue and grand slice of history.
Twain and Hurston, who appear in “Southern Selves,” appear in “Sojourns” as well. Calvin Trillin opines on food, Theodore Roosevelt on bear-hunting, A.J. Leibling on the bizarre politics surrounding Gov. Earl Long, Kate Chopin on the beauty of wildlife, John Steinbeck on the angst of a school’s desegregation, Henry Miller on a famous plantation house in New Iberia, Simone de Beauvoir on jazz, Walker Percy on the French Quarter, and then some.
The book is divided into 11 sections, encompassing the Mississippi River, New Orleans, plantations, African-American cultural life, the Civil War, Cajun country, bayous and marshes, the hill country of North Louisiana, wildlife, festivals and “The World of the Spirits,” which explores voodoo and cemeteries. The editors contribute a “Travel Update” after each section, with recent literature and general information. (The updates do not list prices or places to stay.)
Twain, as quoted from “Life on the Mississippi” (1883), is up to his usual, priceless self: “Baton Rouge was clothed in flowers, like a bride–no, much more so; like a greenhouse. For we were in the absolute South now–no modifications, no compromises, no half-way measures.” If only Twain had lived long enough to witness the destruction of the plantation houses that had lined the river to New Orleans and their supplanting by oil and petrochemical refineries to form an area known as “the cancer corridor” because of pollution. “A most homelike and happy region,” he wrote of this stretch in its pristine day. “And now and then you see the pillared and porticoed great manor-house, embowered in trees.”
It is hard not to smile at the naivete of Simone de Beauvoir’s unquestioning account of a New Orleans scene, taken from her 1953 book “America Day by Day”:
“The band stopped playing. A beautiful young woman with raven hair walked onto the platform; she began to dance and take off her clothes slowly, following the prescribed rites of burlesque. From a corner a middle-aged woman watched her indifferently: it was the girl’s mother. We heard that the dancer was of good family, had studied much, and was intelligent and cultured; but in New Orleans, strippers are readily surrounded by legendary auras.”
That depends on whose auras you believe.
Europeans have often written with impressionistic wonder of Louisiana’s exotic qualities, and in “The Air-Conditioned Nightmare” (1945), American expatriot novelist Henry Miller, who had fled his beloved Paris just before the Nazi occupation, wrote about Shadows-on-the-Teche, the famous plantation house near Bayou Teche, like a man rediscovering love:
“Technically it would be defined as of the Roman Doric order, but to speak in architectural language of a house which is as organically alive, sensuous, and mellow as a great tree is to kill its charm. For me, perhaps because of the rich pinkish brick which gives to the whole atmosphere of the place a warm, radiant glow, `The Shadows’ at once summoned to my mind the image of Corinth which . . . has always been synonymous for me with opulence, a roseate, insidious opulence, fragrant with the heavy bloom of Summer.”
Miller’s rhapsodic prose illuminates the ultimate irony of Louisiana, and indeed of the South, an irony ever-nurturing to writers. A region drenched in beauty and tender courtesies cultivated a legacy of uncommon racial cruelty and of continuing social and religious beliefs that collide with a mainstream democratic ethos. As long as the Bible is the primary agent of the mythical South, the terrain will be a fertile one for the region’s literary-minded sons and daughters.
