Beyond the back door

My talk on The Voice at the Back Door and the Carrollton Massacre yesterday went nicely. I was lucky to have a good crowd of folks who were interested in the subject and eager to talk back! The questions were large and thought-provoking. It's not exactly staircase wit, but a good night's sleep allowed me to think of some better answers to a couple of the most challenging ones.

Lloyd Kramer, noting that my talk was first about a novel, then--using the standard tools of historical research--about a historical event, asked what was the relationship between history and fiction. A large question, for which we could go all the way back to Sidney's Defense of Poetry. For a great latter-day discussion of this question, see E. L. Doctorow's recent essay "Notes on the History of Fiction."

Common to all the great nineteenth-century practitioners of narrative art is a belief in the staying power of fiction as a legitimate system of knowledge. While the writer of fiction, of whatever form, may be seen as an arrogant transgressor, a genre-blurring immoralist given to border raids and territorial occupations, he is no more than a conservator of the ancient system of organizing and storing knowledge we call the story. . . .

A proper question here is whether his faith in his craft is justified. Whereas the biblical storytellers attributed their inspiration to God, the writers since seem to find in the fictive way of thinking a personal power -- a fluency of mind that does not always warn the writer of the news it brings. Mark Twain said that he never wrote a book that didn't write itself. And no less an enobler of the discipline than Henry James, in his essay "The Art of Fiction," describes this empowerment as "an immense sensibility … that takes to itself the faintest hints of life ... and converts the very pulses of the air into revelations." What the novelist is finally able to do, James says, is "to guess the unseen from the seen."

The Voice at the Back Door is remarkable for the way in which it accurately "guesses the unseen from the seen." It isn't real history, certainly. But historians who sit down to think about it will recognize that history too is a form of narrative, and thus also, in the end, derives from "a personal power." Doctorow continues,

Historians research as many sources as they can, but they decide what is relevant to their enterprise and what isn't. We should recognize the degree of creativity in this profession that goes beyond intelligent, assiduous scholarship. "There are no facts in themselves," Nietzche says. "For a fact to exist we must first introduce meaning." Historiography, like fiction, organizes its data in demonstration of meaning. The cultural matrix in which the historian works will condition his thinking; he will speak for his time and place by the facts he brings to light and the facts he leaves in darkness, the facts he brings into being and the facts that remain unformed, unborn. . . . This is why history has to be written and rewritten from one generation to another.

An audience member, Joe Glatthaar, was too quiet in this discussion. His 1985 book on Sherman's march to the sea was an important source for Doctorow's latest novel, The March.

A second good question: Maria Winslow wondered if there was danger in keeping old history too much alive. In an email message to me she clarified the two-part question she was trying to ask:

1. As a 6-year-old child going to the first integrated school in town [Edenton, N.C.] (remember this would have been 1972!), did having no knowledge of segregation and its supporters for the next few years make it easier to break a history of racism?

2. Many of the mean bastards who protested are still alive - who are they (and in a tolerant moment, how has their thinking changed)?

To part one, Elizabeth Spencer referred to Tim Tyson's Blood Done Sign My Name, a good choice because in it Tim says things like this:

We cannot address the place we find ourselves because we will not acknowledge the road that brought us here. Our failure to confront the historical truth about how African Americans finally won their freedom presents a major obstacle to genuine racial reconciliation.

It would be nice if we could all wake up in the morning (I've heard Tim say this) and determine to exist in a world in which racism never figured. But in the only world we've got, that's not possible. To "transcend our history and move toward higher ground," as Tim (son of a preacher) urges, we first have to reckon with that history and especially what it has meant to African Americans.

To part two: I can't speak for anyone in Edenton, but it is possible to know what some of the more nortorious of the men of the old order continued to think as they got older. The Alabama state trooper who shot Jimmie Lee Jackson, whose death sparked the Selma march, spoke on the record for the first time in 2005, and he didn't seem particularly repentant; he seemed indifferent at best to the possibility that the murder case would be reopened, as it has been by now (by Alabama's first elected black district attorney). Byron de la Beckwith, convicted in 1994 in the murder of Medgar Evers, is another example. We can only hope that the thinking of many others has indeed changed.

Carroll County revisited

A little over a year ago, I blogged about a field trip I'd made to Carrollton, Mississippi, site of a historical event--a mass murder in the courthouse--that I've spent a good bit of time thinking and writing about. That blog entry gets a steady stream of traffic from google searches and occasionally a nibble of interest. The other day, for example, a man in Tennessee, from a Carrollton family, wrote appreciatively of the story, with special thanks for the photo I'd taken of the Confederate monument on the courthouse lawn. By dumb coincidence I'd taken it at exactly the same angle as a historic photo that's posted at a Carroll County genealogy site, and my photo helped to identify it as the marker in Carrollton, not the one in nearby Vaiden. (To be sure, there was a generic quality about them, as Dennis Montagna has suggested.)





That's the thing about blogs. You never know what will lead to what.

My article on the Carrollton Massacre and its part in a wonderful novel by Elizabeth Spencer, "Spencer's Voice at the Back Door and the Legacy of Reconstruction," will be published in the spring/summer 2007 issue of the Mississippi Quarterly. On September 26 September 27, I'm giving a talk from the article in the "Centering the South" series sponsored by the UNC Center for the Study of the American South. Y'all come.

UPDATE: Date changed. Time and place remain the same.

United States of the South

Today I decided to get away from it all by going to the library and working on an essay I've spent too long trying to finish. It's on a novel by Elizabeth Spencer and how it handles a historical event of 1886, a mass murder of black men in a Mississippi courthouse. Actually I was not getting away from it all at all. The story behind the story is the suppression of the black man's vote in the years after the price for that vote had been paid in blood. Outrage is a powerful motivator. Maybe I will finish that essay after all.

I wasn't expecting to come across this, a passage from W.J. Cash's The Mind of the South, published, after a long gestation, in 1941:

Proud, brave, honorable by its lights, courteous, personally generous, loyal, swift to act, often too swift, but signally effective, sometimes terrible in its action--such was the South at its best. And such at its best it remains today, despite the great falling away in some of its virtues. Violence, intolerance, aversion and suspicion toward new ideas, an incapacity for analysis, an inclination to act from feeling rather than from thought, an exaggerated individualism and a too narrow concept of social responsibility, attachment to fictions and false values, above all too great attachment to racial values and a tendency to justify cruelty and injustice in the name of those values, sentimentality and a lack of realism--these have been its characteristic vices in the past. And, despite changes for the better, they remain its characteristic vices today.

Cash killed himself, hung himself with his own necktie, in that same year, 1941. C. Vann Woodward was more optimistic about the future of the perpetually "New South," observes Jacob Levenson in the Columbia Journalism Review; he believed that somehow the legacy of Jim Crow could be overcome in a period of new economic growth, while a strong positive regional identity remained.

In the fullness of time, the South triumphed on the national political scene: "Governors like Jimmy Carter, William Winter, and Dale Bumpers encouraged biracial coalitions that cast an aura of reconciliation across the region." But the predicted demise of Jim Crow took a curious route. The shift from a historical allegiance to the Democrats, the party of white supremacy, to the Republicans, the party of Lincoln, took off when Goldwater denounced the Civil Rights Act. Lyndon Johnson, who succeeded in the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, said that he knew he was giving the South to the Republicans "for a long time to come." Then, as Levenson reminds, Nixon aligned himself with Strom Thurmond.

But it was Reagan . . . who tightened the Republican hold on the region. Reagan’s success in the South can be viewed as an affirmation of both Cash’s and Woodward’s view of the region. Reagan skillfully employed a version of the cultural code that Cash had identified forty years earlier to overwhelmingly win the white southern vote. His first major campaign stop after gaining the 1980 nomination was near Philadelphia, Mississippi, the community in which the civil rights workers Michael Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney were murdered. There he pledged to the almost all-white audience at the Neshoba County Fair—an obligatory stop on the Mississippi political circuit—that he believed in states’ rights. In another speech he denounced the welfare queen in designer jeans. At the same time, though, his message to southerners went beyond coded racial signals and incorporated a range of southern themes, some that had endured through two centuries, and others that spoke to Woodward’s transformed South. He solidified his connection to the evangelical right by speaking openly about his Christian faith, and at the same time offered tax cuts to appeal to the newly emergent middle-class, white, suburban southerner. In 1980 Reagan took every southern state except Georgia, and in 1984 he swept the region. The elder Bush did the same. And, of course, after Bill Clinton won some southern states in ’92 and ’96, George W. Bush swept the South in 2000, and is considered a good bet to do so again this year.

And the rest is our living history.