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This is to certify that

the

dissertation entitled

ISSUES OF WHERE:
THE ACTIVITY OF PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN WRITING

BY WOMEN

presented by

Tonita S. Branan

has been accepted towards fulfillment

of the requirements

Ph - D - degree in

for

English

 

Date August 16, 2000

 

MS U is an Affirmatiw Action/Equal Opportunity Institution

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Major professor

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ISSUES OF WHERE:
THE ACTIVITY OF PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN WRITING
BY WOMEN

BY

Tonita S. Branan

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department Of English

2000

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ABSTRACT
ISSUES OF WHERE:

THE ACTIVITY OF PLACE IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTHERN WRITING
BY WOMEN

BY

Tonita S. Branan

The idea that place is a constitutive feature of
southern writing has dominated southern literary criticism
for over six decades. Scholars in the field have tended to
depict place as a common-sense, transparent phenomenon: that
it evokes real sites in the South in ways native southerners
will immediately recognize, that readers all know what place
means (it represents Nature, or the various levels of a
community's social hierarchies, or female caprice and
fertility), or that place in the South, like the Civil War’s
Lost Cause, is ever on the verge of extinction. But if
critics would consider aspects of multiculturalism gaining
ground in contemporary southern texts -- e.g., that a site
may be experienced differently by different people, or that
place gives rise to misunderstanding, fissures, and loss as
well as reciprocity and shared perspectives -- place could
not be construed as obvious or depend on collective

agreement. The premise of this study is that southern

 

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literary criticism needs to problematize its understanding
of the dynamics of place to address the complexities of
regional diversity.

This study’s basis for stretching conventional notions
caf place is the spatial predicaments in contemporary
southern women’s writing. The texts it treats, Gloria
Naylor's Mama bay, Minnie Bruce Pratt’s “Identity: Skin
Blood Heart,” and Elizabeth Spencer’s The Salt Line, all
question the South's transition from white hegemony to
something else and cast place as an issue that needs
settling. These works wrestle with uncertainties along the
edge of place’s meaning: how position affects “legitimate”
occupancy, the ways dominance figures a city’s grid, whether
long-standing possession translates to southern essence.
Analyzing these texts’ place-determined complications, this
study theorizes how place is discrepant, selective,
irregular; its unorthodox definitions also jolt the non-
confrontational, stabilizing approaches to place in southern
literary criticism. Ultimately Issues of Where accounts for
the enigma of the South's continuing in a multicultural
context, amid forces that seem likely to render the region

insignificant but have not (yet).

Copyright by
TONITA SUSAN BRANAN
2000

For Brad,
who always finds a way

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Acknowledgments

Marcia Aldrich has read draft after draft of this
manuscript and always responded with unflinching candor.
For this, as well as her organized, argument-oriented
approach, I am deeply grateful. In no small measure the
shape of this project is guided by her recommendations.

Stephen Rachman insists on things making sense and
explains my ideas back in ways that are clearer than what I
started with. How will I find another such reader?

Stephen Arch and Diane Brunner have patiently sat
through too many committee meetings on my account and
offered professional advice and encouragement. Despite my
graduate-student disillusions, when I think of them
academics still seems a worthy, idealistic enterprise.
Thank you.

Linda Wagner and Jerry Leath Mills have been beacons of
light from afar. You have no idea how your notes and kind
words lifted me during the long Michigan winters. My
warmest thanks.

Deborah Grayson kept me charged on the bad days and

taught me never to ignore an instinct. I am watching your

rise with a smile.

vi

And for keeping the faith: Midge, Cason, Tammy,
Kathryn, Tricia. Kindreds all.

Thanks also to my parents, Tony and Betty Branan, and
my sister, Sarita Smith, for your prayers and constant
support. Even when the rewriting seemed interminable I

could never give up this project, because I knew my.MOm knew

I could finish.

vii

 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Figures ........................................... ix
Introduction ............................................... 1

Chapter One
Measuring Southern Measures ............................... 30

Chapter Two
Mama Day and the Trouble with Maps ........................ 86

Chapter Three

Lost Causes, Lost Space:

Tracking the Void in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s

“Identity: Skin Blood Heart” .......................... 143

Chapter Four

Toward an Almost Shareable South ......................... 197
Conclusion

Re—placement Due South ................................... 261
Appendix ................................................. 281
Notes .................................................... 294
Works Cited .............................................. 318

viii

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1
The Map at the Opening of Mama Day
(Random House, 1993) ...................................... 9?

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Introduction

Defining the American South in today’s
multicultural age is something of an enigmatic task. It is
perplexing because a multicultural South seems inherently
contradictory: can a region created on the basis of white
supremacy continue to exist in the wake of Civil Rights,
waves of ethnic migration, mass media and mass society?
Certainly it is implausible to sustain older versions of the
South. Even if the region's geographic parameters were
fixed over time (which they have not been), it would be hard
to find distinguishing features about the South that have
remained unchanged. Characteristics which once set the
region apart -— slavery, the Mason-Dixon line, Jim Crow, or
a small-farm economic base -- are now extinct, out of vogue,
or largely misrepresentative. Southern demographics are no
longer predominantly Black and white; growing numbers of
Latinos, Mexicans, and people of Asian derivation occupy the
South, often encouraging their families and friends to join
them.1 White bigotry appears to be less exclusively
southern, as well as less of a stronghold in the region:
race riots erupt in Detroit or Los Angeles as easily as in

Atlanta, and notably, since the early nineteen seventies

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African-Americans who once fled southern homes to secure
freedom and opportunity are building powerful networks in
major southern cities and electing Black mayors and State
Supreme Court justices.2 With the advent of air-
conditioning, the southern climate has turned from
impediment to attraction, and the Sunbelt brims with
northeastern transplants and Frostbelt-weary retirees.3
Considering the influx of Yankees, MTV, and newspeak, not
even the southern drawl seems safe or indelible, and with
the rise of Ted Turner’s cable empire, the Atlanta Braves
are broadcast nationally as “America’s Team.” The lines
between the South and the rest of the United States have

slackened considerably.

Yet we still talk about the South as an entity unto
itself, as if it points to tangible difference. Soul food
and Vidalia onions. The blues. The legacy of Martin Luther
King, Jr. and his Southern Christian Leadership Conference.
New Orleans’ celebrated mystique and magnetic pull at Mardi
Gras. The rise of the New South Right under Jerry Falwell,
Pat Robertson, and Ronald Reagan. The phenomenal success of
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in the late eighties and

early nineties, a small press feeding the flame of the

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southern literary tradition, promoting (formerly) unknown
writers like Kaye Gibbons or Larry Brown as obvious heirs of
Twain and Faulkner. The national obsession with Savannah
after Midnight in the garden of Good and Evil. The
influence of Athens’ alternative sound (R.E.M. or the B525),
or of classic southern rock groups such as the Black Crowes,
who model themselves after the Allman Brothers Band. The
wide readership of Southern Living.

It strikes me as misdirected to qualify the South by a
predetermined set of criteria, to try to prove whether the
region continues and to what degree —- whether, for example,
the resurgence of the blues weighs enough to cancel the
“foreign” element of Mexican migrant farming (I put foreign
in quotes because migrant farming is commonly called that
but is not really so -- it has become a staple of southern
agriculture).4 Holding an ideal of the South, a
prototypical image frozen in time, and measuring other
Souths in other circumstances by that particular brand of
authenticity is a familiar trap of this kind of thinking.

In contrast, I believe the South exists as long as people
need it to, as long as we refer to it meaningfully and
perceive effects we consensually label as regional. When

the South and southern cease to signify, people will stop

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mentioning, acting on, or judging by them; when there is no
energy within or put toward these terms, the land known as
the South will amount to latitude and longitude only, and in
a social sense, have lost its borders. But we are not there
yet. No matter how far the region has drifted from its
moorings, no matter how strange it appears to its fifth-or-
sixth generation white privileged, the South still elicits
dialogue and contention. It is represented and continues to
matter as area and issue; therefore it exists. The task,
then, of those of us in southern studies Should not be some
frenzied South-stumping: looking for clues of a
quintessential region and preaching its thin line of
longevity (barely discernible, except to the trained eye).
Instead we need to account for whatever versions of the
South are gaining currency.

The marvel is that the South circulates at all in an
age where its traditional priorities are wavering or
devalued. Protestant groups such as Baptist, Methodist, or
Presbyterian, which have dominated southern communities for
over two centuries and defined the Bible Belt’s modern
religious conservatism, are losing numbers to non—
denominational “mega-churches”; moreover, across southern

cityscapes, Buddhist temples, Muslim mosques, and Jewish

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synagogues are thriving. Following Federal mandates, public

schools cannot systematically under—educate minorities, and
for the last thirty years students in the South have been
bused across district lines to ensure balanced ethnic
proportions (a practice which neutralizes white flight and
racial separatism).5 The individualist ethic which has
characterized southern politics and was affiliated with
agrarianism (Jefferson’s yeoman farmer, the South's emphasis
on state, versus federal, control) has diminished in the
last fifty years, in the wake of southern support for FDR’s
New Deal and the encroachment of urban sprawl; also, where
farming persists in the region, corporate management has
heavily infiltrated.6 There are other large-scale changes
in southern society pertaining to an influx of new people
and/or clash of neighborhood interests: the South must now
respond to its widespread Spanish-speaking population,
tensions between inner-city Blacks (who are showing larger
voter turn-outs and tend to elect Black officials) and
suburban whites, or the regeneration of historic city
districts, which are often dilapidated and occupied by
minorities, but prized as would-be gems by developers, who

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Considering the magnitude of such shifts, I am
interested in the South’s encounter with multicultural
forces that seem likely to render it insignificant but have
not (yet). In the midst of strengthening minority
representation, a decreased sense of the North/South divide,
and white people’s awareness that they no longer carry the
majority, it is astounding that the region continues to
bear. How does the South endure when its lived reality
defies the region’s stereotypical identity markers? Why,
for instance, would self-sufficient ethnic communities want
to avail themselves of the designation “southern"? How
shall the face of the white South change -- that which has
been marketed as “the South” by television, literature,
radio commercials and the film industry and accepted as such
by outsiders -- if whites cannot legally sustain their sense
of privilege? Even if some white southerners are willing to
admit the region’s past and present racial depravities,
which stem largely from their and their ancestors’ doing,
can they take steps to amend social injustice without the
shape of the South (which has been founded on such
injustice) collapsing? If the South is to gear itself more

toward inclusion (by following the mandates of affirmative

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action, for example, in its corporate business and
educational policies), what happens to resistant pockets of
the Old South? Do they clash constantly with these newer
regional constructs, fade quietly into the background, or
sit side by side in glaring incongruity? In light of its
failed original principles, the Civil War, and its long,
lost fight with Civil Rights, the fact that the South is not
obsolete leaves me bewildered. What alchemy fuels its
transmutations and staying power?

The angle I have chosen for examining contemporary
accounts of the South is place. I first seized on this
approach out of necessity, when living for several years
outside the southeast, in Michigan. There, it seemed that
whenever I identified southern literature as my field of
specialization, peers in my English department or friends in
East Lansing and Ann Arbor would question my area of
concentration. They asked, why southern literature? How
did I define a southern canon apart from the rest of
American letters? Did I qualify the “southern" in
literature as writing style, choice of content, or an
author’s background? Initially I balked, put off that my
acquaintances would casually test the obvious to try my

patience (or so I thought). Having grown up in Stone

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Mountain, Georgia and earned my BA and MA at Wake Forest and
UNC-Chapel Hill, no one before had insisted I legitimize
southern. But eventually I had to concede that the
inquiries amounted to a trend, that people seemed genuinely
interested in what I would say -- and after all, why
couldn’t I answer them readily? So I determined to resolve
the issue of the southern in southern literature and even
became slightly obsessed: I felt I must forward a
satisfactory explanation.

Defining literary regionalism was more involved than I
anticipated, and my lines of reasoning felt circular and
hesitant. I decided against writing style as my criterion;
I did not want to claim some essence about the manner of
southern expression that would put a strait jacket around
the canon, allowing only for three or four writers who share
technical strategies (and I suspected many people would
swear by Faulkner as their standard). Similarly, I opted
against an author’s background, especially the notion that a
writer must be born in the South to produce work that counts
as regional. Though formative, an author’s experience
cannot be trusted to explain every nuance about a text (how
would one know which biographical act to match with which

literary issue?), or what various audiences do with texts.

 

 

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Also, whenever I applied the author—background formula to
Specific examples, it did not make sense: Harriet Beecher
Stowe may have spent most of her life in Connecticut and
Ohio, but I was not about to exclude Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a
book that forcibly shaped the South's self-presentation and
political pitch in the 18503, from my literary oeuvre. I
settled, then, on the flexibility of content and effect:
that any type of writing which engages the South, and by
extension, influences readers’ ideas about the South, is
southern. I liked how clean and simply my definition came
across: southern writing, on some level, conjures the South.
But unwittingly I had dug another hole. Maintaining that
the basis of southern writing is textual encounter with the
South, I felt compelled to describe that looming point of
reference. I needed to indicate, even if generally, what
constitutes the South, and found myself ill-prepared for
summarizing what I had always considered apparent.
Searching for inroads, I maintained that southern
literature concerns the South, and that the South, in turn,
encompasses the eleven states of the Confederacy. But
political-physical descriptions from one slice in time
proved unreliable: I was excluding Kentucky and Maryland,

with their bluegrass, horse derbies, and tidewater, and

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putting a wide arm around Texas and Florida. Plus, did I
want to use a state-by-state guide, when obviously within
any one state there might be resistance to a southern
designation (what about present-day Miami, which is widely
known as the other New York City, or during the Civil War,
the mountain factions of Federal sympathizers in North
Carolina and Tennessee)? I began to realize that outlining
the components of place, which you must do to describe a
place, is not straightforward. Defining a region involves
more than drawing lines around similar typography, and even
that activity is compromising: there are subjective
decisions according to who does the clustering, and a dot on
a map obscures the interplay between landscape and culture,
between a rock or a stream and its designation within
particular lived contexts. My idea of the South as
specifiable, an area you can survey with containing and
stable parameters, was naive. Its physical markers are
social and political as well as geographic, and they can
change -- due, for instance, to sweeping cultural shifts,
like Black Migration, or natural disaster, such as draught
or flooding, or urban development. Once I realized that

place itself is subject to time’s disruptions (and not a

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stalwart holding out against time), that it involves flux
and mediation and drawing and redrawing boundaries, I saw I
could never delineate a steady reference for southern. And
I became convinced that, rather than abandon my definition
of southern literature, I should embrace its reference as
open: that the South is up for grabs, and literature is one
of many cultural expressions which attempts to shape and
secure the region. Thus I did not need to outline a master
South, an impact recurring among texts; I needed to analyze
how, and to what purpose, different texts build different
“South” versions.

My interest in exploring the South as a figure of place
-- as both a figure and philosophy of place, a field across
which various notions of place intervene -- segues with my
curiosity about the region's perseverance. Place has
everything to do with the premise of a multicultural South:
if such a region is succeeding, as some writers contend, we
need to understand why people accept today’s South as viable
(how place is legitimized) and in what ways southerners
designate space around them to ensure the South’s
continuity. Moreover, regarding place as medium of social
expression, or rather, a conceptualization measuring social

expression, I believe our frames of thought are outmoded.

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Specifically, the definitions of place now offered by
southern literary criticism fail to address the complexities
of regional diversity. To this point scholars have depicted
place in southern literature as a common-sense, transparent
phenomenon: that it evokes real sites in the South in ways
native southerners will immediately recognize, that we all
know what place means (it represents Nature, or the various
levels of a community’s social hierarchies, or female
caprice and fertility), or that place in the South, like the
Civil War’s Lost Cause, is ever on the verge of extinction
(which is what makes it so nostalgically lovely and
piercing). But if critics would consider the throngs of
non-natives in the South and focus more scrupulously on
minorities’ viewpoints, place could not be construed as
obvious or depend on collective agreement. A newcomer’s eye
on southern communities is not bound to prioritize areas as
locals have been taught to do; from her perspective, the
“town center” might sit askew, obscuring actual seats of
power or active political and creative coalitions. Or, a
Hispanic migrant worker, who has come to support his family
back home and save for a decent retirement in Mexico, will

not be inclined to see the South as waning, and his

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transient status should shift his relation to southern
places -- he will not own and is not looking to root or
establish. Or to the Black southerner, the aspect of Dixie
could not be further from a South she would mourn or want to
return to, even as she personally claims the region as
grounds for African-American ethnology, solidarity, and
essence. To include multiculturalism in ongoing
constructions of the South, as I am suggesting, scholars
must revise accepted notions of place. We have to
complicate the category, allowing, for instance, that a site
may be experienced differently by different people, or that
spatial symbols issue from certain groups, rather than
diffuse ubiquitously. We need to recognize that place gives
rise to misunderstanding, fissures, and loss as well as
reciprocity and shared perspectives. In a word, our
understanding of the dynamics of place must be
problematized.

In line with my particular interests concerning place
-- that the figure of the South is brimming with social
change, stemming from an influx of many different groups of
people, and that common tenets of place must be revamped if
we are to grasp the foreign-familiar of today’s dispersing

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literary texts. First, that works be contemporary and
address multicultural issues: I am concerned with how the
South endures today (or as close to it as I can get) amid
various competitive, contiguous factions. Second, that
texts treat place as either a question or complicating
factor. I have tended toward writers who take place for
more than the equivalent of setting: rather than (just)
satisfy readers with descriptions of provocative scenes,
they cast place as an issue that needs settling -— a milieu
where rules of etiquette are undetermined, for example, or
where wrong and insult hang in the air, impending one’s way,
even as benign shapes and faces surround. These authors
wrestle with uncertainties along the edge of place’s
meaning: how position affects an acknowledged right to
occupy, the ways dominance figures a city’s grid, whether
long-standing possession translates to southern essence.
They struggle, not entirely successfully, to resolve these
complications of place, and in their struggling I find
traces of the activity and effort through which communities
of difference try to ground themselves. I have fixed my
sights on complications with place because they were the

very issues I originally stumbled over in reading these

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texts (and could not explain), and because even as they left
me disconcerted, I realized they stemmed from many competing
cultures within a single context. I felt that if I could
begin to understand these place-determined complications,
the positive and negative of their results, I might theorize
how place is discrepant, selective, irregular. I further
hoped my unorthodox definitions would jolt the picturesque,
non-confrontational, neutral approaches to place I was
discovering in southern literary criticism. Accordingly, I
devised my methodology: examining different depictions of
conflicted multicultural Souths, I identify certain
practices and procedures of place (the practices laid more
bare than usual by the fact that these Souths are cycling
through transition), ultimately to come to grips with the
phenomenon of the region’s continuing relevance.

The texts I focus on are Gloria Naylor’s Sea Island
novel, Mama Day (1988), Minnie Bruce Pratt’s consciousness-
raising essay “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” (1984), and
Elizabeth Spencer’s novel about resurrection after a
hurricane, Iha_§al;_;iaa (1984). Addressing these works I
single out disputes or quandaries involving place, to
understand what today’s Souths are challenged by, but also,

to weigh the consequences involved in the region’s

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regeneration. Among contemporary southern literature each
of these pieces is notable for pushing place to the
forefront, making place subject as much as prop or
foundation and stressing its difficulty. With Naylor,
Spencer, or Pratt we cannot casually appreciate place as a
familiar or endearing scene, because the dynamics related to
location in their work are often confusing or problematic.
Naylor’s Mama Day, for instance, puts readers in an awkward
position by first engaging them with an exotic map and then
alluding to ill omens mapmaking historically portends for
her fictional island. The text also encourages characters’
excursions to sacred places for answers to ancestral
questions, but inevitably the answers revealed by these
sites amount to “nothing," loss, or erasure. Naylor’s Black
characters may own Willow Springs island outright, with no
threat of losing it to development-hungry whites, but
occupying their home is another issue altogether: a steady,
easy abiding there does not settle out, because characters
lack information they need about their family’s past on the
island. In the end Naylor's sacred places yield only
partial clues. For African-American characters returning to

the South to find security in a Black core or southern Black

16

marrow (associated with the island’s ties to the Motherland,
Africa), Naylor offers ambiguous and ambivalent rewards.
Despite the certainty of ownership, place in Mama Day is, in
its most positive rendering, a hopeful state of dislocation,
and Naylor withholds any evidence of an essential Black
South.

In “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” white lesbian
activist Minnie Bruce Pratt construes the South as a series
of voids, a region where, in her experience, cultural
difference is traditionally erased. Because of this black-
hole dynamic, place is difficult in her work for a variety
of reasons: having been repeatedly thrown out of
conventional homes, Pratt is motivated to re-think what home
means, especially as she works to live differently than her
parents or former husband; Pratt also admits personal
shortsightedness as she negotiates her Washington, D.C.
neighborhood, realizing that what she misses circumscribes
her paths negatively; lastly, walking through one scene
Pratt may be reminded of others (sometimes jarringly, as if
she is at another Site), and this layering of places
highlights features of past inhabitances which before Pratt
failed to acknowledge. Much of Pratt’s struggling with

place in the South, then, is self-reflexive. She tries to

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see more clearly than she was raised, for instance, to grasp
all the elements of a neighborhood, or, denounces her own
complicity in dis-placing oppressed people. Furthermore,
Pratt writes as a modern-day Jeremiah, calling on the white
South to repent. She believes that if the region is to
flourish in mass society, white southerners must quit
covering the holes we make, the ways we disenfranchise those
unlike us. If the South is ever to approach Reconstruction
honestly, its voids must be apprehended, admitted, and then,
either atoned for or avoided.

With Tha Salt Lina Elizabeth Spencer probes two
concepts of the South, a nostalgic version of Arcady and a
newer community based on difference and welcoming, but
ultimately both are found wanting. Her fictional town,
Notchaki, is devastated after Hurricane Camille; the dilemma
characters face is how to manage rebuilding. A popular
contingent advocates for resurrecting the Golden Coast, with
its Old South stereotypes and trappings, but Spencer exposes
this picture as morally dubious. The transition from Arcady
toward a more inclusive South, however, is also besieged by
problems, and disturbingly, in some cases, by the same
problems as Arcady’s. Spencer warns that the gesture of

white southerners welcoming others is not enough for a

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multicultural South: the South will never genuinely practice
inclusion until we forego a predominantly white center.
Hence place is difficult in this novel because, even when
well—intentioned people want to shift their boundaries, and
see how boundaries need shifting, all too inevitably
previous lines are redrawn. Spencer’s South does get a
makeover by the end of The Salt Line, with various ethnic
groups convening on points of commonality, but Spencer makes
clear that Notchaki’s new base is precarious, and far more
threatening, that the costs of its changes are largely
minorities’.

Each of these women writers theorizes place in her own
right. Each is willing to experiment with place and tests
common southern beliefs -- e.g., that the South, which still
bears traces of African languages and medico-religious
faiths, is the heartland for American Blacks, holding
secrets of an arcane, natural Black identity; that the birth
home promises one’s surest asylum; that what you see
tangibly constitutes your surroundings; and, that places are
the way they are because they have always been that way (a
version of the “sense of place” idiom, which disavows that
local politics are spatially expressed). Although

occasionally I draw on outside sources to explain Naylor’s,

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or Pratt’s, or Spencer’s spatial predicaments, these other
voices help me build the writers’ arguments about place in
the South, and are not inserted to establish that Pratt, for
instance, merely illustrates Michel de Certeau's city-
walker. I consider the writers themselves to be conceptual
guides; the ways they quicken and dramatize place, making us
feel the improbability of safe, or reliable, or settled
bearings, or alternately, the questionable after—effects
when such bearings are achieved, offer fresh angles on the
South’s proposition. For despite its mythical stereotypes,
the South has always labored for a unified front, and riding
into a new millennium with white supremacy losing its force,
the region may fly apart altogether. Naylor, Pratt, and
Spencer indicate why the South has held (and perhaps more
important, how tenuous its foundations have been), and how

southerners must change their social geography for the

region to hang on in the future. Mama Day, “Identity,” and
The Salt Lina lean toward the South continuing, which is
partly why I have chosen them -- I am not as taken with

apocalyptic accounts, because they fail to explain the
region’s tenacity or challenges with cultural diversity.
Attention to place as a literary category is nothing

new for southern studies, and in my first chapter I review

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the meaning of place within the critical tradition. I
identify and assess five tendencies toward place espoused by
southern literary scholars, to provide a history and context
for my work, but also, to show why the category needs
revamping. Yet I do not write to dismiss previous lines of
thought; the spirit of my study is to extend a critical
conversation. Place can be hard to slice in the South and
seems especially so today, but with a region which has long
qualified itself as absence -- “the Lost Cause" —- how could
critics ever explain the traditional fullness of the South’s
rendering? To some extent my first chapter is a tribute to
those before me who, like me, have tried.

In the course of describing my work to others, people
have asked about my selection of authors and texts. My
earliest decisions regarding the shape of the project were
to define a multicultural South and revive the importance of
place for southern literary criticism, and I searched for
contemporary works that would show the relation between
these two points of interest and direct my line of argument.
Initially I worried no texts would stand out: certainly any
incorporates place on some level, and there could be dozens
which experiment with it. But my qualification that a piece

treat place as an issue, something that is thematized and

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grappled with across the length of a work, eventually
distinguished the texts I have chosen. While there are
other contemporary authors who draw unconventional pictures
of the South, framing bizarre worlds we may never have
admitted, they do not problematize those worlds’
composition. Scenes may appear odd or surreal but are not
hard to process, either for readers or characters. Cormac
McCarthy, Harry Crews, or Larry Brown might stretch the
region’s look, but the ways place operates as a dynamic is
not as much their interest. In McCarthy’s epic, 5199a
Marigian, for example, the country between Texas and Mexico
spreads wide, desolate and savage, so ragged that there is
nothing to feed characters but brutality, and the sheer
boundlessness of this wasteland wears exhaustingly across
the novel. Yet what mesmerizes readers and propels
McCarthy’s narrative are the thousand acts of “mindless
violence.” His parched territory is not, by itself, cause
for hesitation or dilemma: it is something to be gotten
across, a stage for the Kid’s quest for knife wounds,
scalpings, and blows, and not puzzling in its own
construction. Similarly, Harry Crews captures Souths that

are extravagantly grotesque, a small Georgia town hosting a

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Rattlesnake Roundup, or an offbeat Miami hotel besieged by a
bodybuilding competition, but Crews’ emphasis is characters’
psychological despair -- how clearly they perceive life’s
absurdity, and their one recourse, self-destruction. Crews
circles forward and back through freakish settings until
readers feel as dizzy as his liquored—up, Vietnam-crazed
protagonists, but his unusual surroundings generate moods
rather than controversy; place is not an interpretive
obstacle. In the same vein, Larry Brown’s tour de force,
Jga, evokes a landscape that leaves readers brooding, with
its trash-laden Mississippi backroads and square, identical
houses, where pit bulldogs lurk underneath, furious and
uncontrollable; but if Brown’s spatial impressions arouse
strong emotional response, Still, they are not difficult to
construe. You might be disgusted with the grime and wonder
how vagrants eat out of a dumpster, but it is repulsion, not
disorientation, you wrestle with.

I decided to treat writers who feature place as a
particular regional strait, and for reasons described,
Naylor, Pratt, and Spencer each uniquely meet that
requirement. However I never expected to focus exclusively
on women and have wondered at the seeming coincidence.

Obviously anyone can theorize place, and in Europe those

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best known for revising the history of western social
environments have all been white males: Henri Lefebvre,
Michel Foucault, Michel de Certeau. But because place
relates to location, which in turn depends on individual
position, it seems reasonable to assume that in any given
society, those least secure may be most likely to question
the assembly and hierarchy of their surroundings. It is no
secret that the American South has been traditionally
patriarchal and racist: in large part white men have
appropriated and surveyed the land, run the farms, designed
town squares, and sat on the boards which control community
planning. Southern Blacks, on the other hand, have been
physically bound, denied the Opportunity to own property,
forced to occupy run—down areas, and pressed to watch their
children attend impoverished, segregated schools. White
women have fared much better (on the arms of white men), but
their rank and privilege in local communities has not tended
to be their own, and by dent of gender, their opportunities
in the public sphere have been severely limited. Homosexual
men and women are usually ostracized within America’s Bible
Belt, on any side of any color line, unless they hide their

choice of lifestyle; and except in larger cities, you do not

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commonly see non-whites of any type attending the elite
churches or black—tie charity benefits, or stroking golf
balls with the country club crowd. Tellingly (I now think)
the writers I could discern who sharply qualify place in the
South are all women, and among them, an African-American
whose family migrated from Mississippi to New York, and a
politically active lesbian whose parents and husband
literally shut her out. The hardest writer to explain, in
terms of background, is Elizabeth Spencer: she enjoyed a
middle-class white upbringing in Carrollton, Mississippi.
But significantly, Spencer came of age painfully aware that
her increasingly wealthy father would not support an
unmarried, working daughter as he had supported his adult
sons, and similar to Pratt, felt compelled to leave home out
of disillusionment with its collusive (albeit silent)
racism.8

Finally, a note about my use of the term “place.” My
intent is not to overturn general conceptions of the
category -- as a particular locale, as the space between
certifiable points, or in a literary sense, as setting or
scene. Instead I want to add to these notions. With this
introduction I have invoked place as area or extent and will

continue to do so, but as a springboard for other ideas: to

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track how place is produced in the South, something that is
made and restricted and bartered; to measure aspects of
place that direct our paths but are not readily perceptible
(such as social mores or etiquette); to acknowledge what we
do to seal a natural, or immovable, aura around particular
structures; to convey the vertigo of haunting at certain
southern sites, places where the effects of oppression are
still palpably felt; to suggest how we may share the expense
of the South’s broadening, in terms of its racial and
cultural diversity. Rather than establish a unified theory
of place among Naylor, Pratt, or Spencer, I draw on them to
question and enlarge the category’s meaning. Also, I view
place as a subset of space, and with regard to space, am
persuaded by arguments in the field of the new cultural
geography. Theorists such as Helen Ligget, David Perry,
Derek Gregory, and Edward Soja share the conviction that
space is a social phenomenon. Assumptions that space exists
out there apart from human exchange, a hollow which takes
shape only as we occupy it, are deemed outdated; to
designate space is to situate ourselves within the culture
around us. Space requires at least two objects -- not that

space is the divide between them, but rather, is the series

26

of relations we design/negotiate between them (or between
ourselves). As David Harvey puts it, space is “contained in
objects insofar as it contains and represents within itself
relationships to other objects” (13); note how space for
Harvey depends on doing (to contain, to represent) in a
social context. I cannot stress enough the extent to which
the new cultural geography perceives space as an activity.
Following the monumental work of Henri Lefebvre, space is
felt to be something we make; according to Helen Liggett and
David Perry, “to consider the spatializations of life is to
fill out the context(s) of social formation -- our daily and
institutional practices, in all their ‘situatedness'” (3).
Space, it seems to me, is the starting point, the all-
inclusive category of which place is a fraction (as Lefebvre
has written, “The form of social Space is encounter,
assembly, simultaneity. But what assembles, or what is
assembled? The answer is; everything that there is in
space, everything that is produced either by nature or by
society, either through their cooperation or through their
conflicts” [101]). Place is space discussed in a particular
way -- a particular segment of space discussed particularly.
Patricia Yaeger points out that space is often described as

an anonymous, pervasive quality of the physical environment,

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whereas place suggests specificity, preserved boundaries,
and emotional attachments (4-5). For my project I want to
retain the impression that place differs from space in its
locality, its familiarity, but differs only in the sense
that we represent place as the local or familiar. Place, I
believe is technically a slice of bustling or “deep space,”
Neil Smith’s evocative term which designates “the relativity
of terrestrial space, the space of everyday life in all its
scales from the global to the local and the architectural”
(161). “Deep space,” he continues, “is quintessentially
social space; it is physical extent fused through with
social intent” (161). As with its larger source, place
implies activity and social practice. Place is space, with
the added twist of a circumscribed or territorial
designation. And significantly, because my study revolves
on place, I want to emphasize that there is no easy
translation between the familiar and knowledge. Place is
not easier than space. If boundaries with the former seem
more distinct and real than with the larger entity, more
comforting, this is an illusion: John Berger’s oft-quoted

notion that space “hides consequences” applies to both

28

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Chapter One
Measuring Southern Measures

This project centers on the conviction that theories of
place need revitalizing in southern literary studies. I
choose the term revitalize, rather than revise or improve,
because I in no way disparage and then overturn traditional
notions of place in southern literary criticism, debunking
them outright in favor of new (read: correct) place
definitions. Instead I review how place has been construed
by the southern critic, distinguish helpful ideas from any
ill-advised trends, and keep both the useful and the
potentially misleading in view as I chart additional, other
courses for place’s meaning. I conceive of my project,
therefore, as more an extension of than a departure from the
southern critical tradition.

Revitalize also captures my desire to resurrect the
aura, the hype even, that critics once afforded place as a
constitutive feature of the southern in southern writing.
In recent years the long-eSteemed “sense of place” has been
denounced in southern literary studies, and understandably
so, by critics frustrated with its hazy, rarely-defined

connotations; the widespread currency of “a sense of place”

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has achieved a myth-like status often trading in self-
referential ambiguity.1 But rather than abandon place as
exhausted cliché, a notion “too much with us" in Noel Polk’s
judgment, I propose we sharpen and reorient the category,
expecting a profound return on our readings of southern
identity (33). For if critics like Patricia Yaeger and Una
Chaudhuri are right, where goes a long way toward explaining
who (or what, in the case of regional texts and canons),
especially as, in Chaudhuri’s words, “national and ethnic
identities are often derived from or directed toward a
geography; there is a location of identity based on race,
nation, ethnicity, language.... the construction of cultural
otherness is also a mapping of the world" (3). As a badge
of regional American identity, southern continues to be a
characteristic people claim fervently: according to
sociologist John Shelton Reed, who has long studied
southerners as “a ‘quasi-ethnic group that cuts across
conventional ethnic distinctions,” data collected in the
last thirty years indicates, “the group identification of
Southerners surpassed that of Roman Catholics with others of
their religion and that of union members with other

unionists, and approached the levels of identification

31

displayed by Jews and blacks” (41, 31). Thinking along
Chaudhuri’s lines, I believe anyone’s sense of and relation
to southern depends heavily on perceptions of where the
South starts and stops, on intellectual and imagined
geographies of the South. My project maps the South’s
boundaries, expansions, special sites, and erasures -— as
they are portrayed in contemporary southern women’s writing
-- to grasp what counts as southern, who gets to say, and
what lies at stake in the notion of any essential southern
place. I map a literary South, in other words, to
distinguish features of regional identity, and more
importantly, to understand why southern functions as a point
of fascination, why it is a quality with any real staying
power.

Mapping a literary South requires the clearest
understanding of place as a critical category, the first
step toward which is tracing its history and use in southern
literary studies. Place has figured conspicuously in
showcasing regional writers’ appeal and special talent since
the late 19405 and 19505, when the possibility of a modern
southern literary canon initially evolved. At that time

academics stopped adhering to H. L. Mencken’s picture of the

32

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South as “the Sahara of the Bozarts” and began to add the
accomplishments of the Agrarians, Faulkner, Wolfe, and
Warren, bracketing them as authors from a region writing for
or about that region, bound by “the mind of the South” and
particular “themes of Southern literature" (Rubin and Jacobs
xi). In one of the earliest and most influential
collections of a new (and unabashedly proud) southern
literary criticism, Louis D. Rubin, Jr. and Robert D.
Jacobs’s 1952 Sggtharn Renascenca, an entire essay is
devoted to “Time and Place in Southern Fiction.” Here H.
Blair Rouse designates three options for place as a literary
tool: it may equal setting (“as little more than a backdrop”
[135]), may operate as spiritual as well as physical “room”
for characters, or, at the height of writerly
accomplishments, may function as an imaginative country so
concrete as to seem real, so value-laden as to convey the
essence of the human spirit (138, 142-43). Other chapters
in the volume bear names like “How Many Miles to Babylon,"
“No Faulkner in Metropolis,” “Thomas Wolfe in Time and
Place,” and “The World of Eudora Welty,” with versions of
place surfacing as the Babylon metaphor applied to America’s

modern industrial society, as property (with man’s God-given

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right to possession), as the stable utopia of
family/community/state, and as the extreme American divide
between enervating Megalopolis and nurturing rural province
(31-34, 101—11, 290-305, 306—15). Along with W. J. Cash’s
notion of “The Mind of the South” (the subtitle of the first
section of essays) and Robert Heilman’s of “The Southern
Temper” (the lead-off chapter), place weaves its way across
the collection, giving Rubin and Jacobs a perceptible, bold
backing, a recurrent leitmotif, for “the whys and wherefores
of modern Southern literature” (ix).

The compulsion to explain place’s role in writing
designated and sold as southern recurs throughout the next
decades. Critics pay homage again and again to Eudora
Welty’s groundbreaking “Place in Fiction” (first published

2

in 1954), and essays and books highlighting some aspect of
the category appear at every turn. There is Louis D. Rubin,
Jr. and James Jackson Kilpatrick’s The Lastinq,South (1957),
wherein Robert Hazel argues that the material South, a
hungry, homogenous region marked by defeat, poverty, and
cultural decay, drives and chooses its writers rather than

is chosen by them (“The Southern Writer and His Region,"

171-80). There is Frederick J. Hoffman’s “The Sense of

34

 

Place” (1961), which urges that place at its most meaningful
is a distilled abstraction, the “transmutation" of emotion
into “images large and small” (73—74). In the same year G.
T. Buckley, writing for ENLA, derides one-to-one
correspondences between Faulkner's Jefferson, Mississippi
and the real—life town of Oxford; instead, Buckley contends,
Jefferson is modeled on other Northern Mississippi county
seats, such as Ripley and Batesville (448). One of the
first pieces to unravel symbolic constructions of the South,
Annette Kolodny’s “‘Stript, shorne, and made deformed’:
Images on the Southern Landscape" (1976), reads
environmental doom in the region’s maternal stereotypes of
land and calls for better politics with southern metaphors;
reasoning that “language provides clues to the underlying
motivations behind action,” Kolodny welcomes place images
free of people’s greed toward a too—bounteous natural
landscape (73, 68). More recently, William T. Ruzicka
(1987) specifies five orders of imaginative architecture in
Faulkner’s work (the room, the townscape, etc.), maintaining
that each corresponds with and “concretizes” an individual,
a particular society, or humanity in general (114-15). And

transitioning to a feminist enterprise, Elizabeth Jane

35

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Harrison (1991) believes southern women writers have created
a pastoral tradition which contrasts that of their male
counterparts’, that the women celebrate “new worlds,
different kinds of communities" rather than mourn lost
romantic rural scenes (x).

So it is that when critics try to explain the
intricacies of southern literature, when they cast about for
topics that make a particular work of scholarly interest or
its surrounding culture of any importance, place is
constantly invoked and grappled with. Michael Kreyling has
estimated that “a common sense of place” functions as “the
foundations of the literary history of the South,” and while
I disagree that scholars have ever endorsed a collective
view of what place means, it is true that some form of the
category marks nearly every piece of southern academic
writing (234). In all its multiform guises, from the idea
of the South as a brooding, living thing compelling loyalty
and lore, to debates over the authenticity of southern
literary settings, place strongly determines what critics
say southern literature is, their understanding of the
canon’s symptomatic concerns. It is time we assess the

category’s literary history -- its diverse applications and,

36

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frankly, its instability -- rethinking the assumption that
place involves any generally accepted meaning. Our own
readings of place, South, and southern could be that much
more rich and consciously precise.

The catalogue I have just cited of random scholarship
barely hints at the volume of academic work shaping place as
a category. To manage the sheer breadth of this
scholarship, I have identified several approaches to place
shared by groups of southern literary critics. Yet I
forward a caveat: by categorizing I do not mean to suggest
that every critic’s reading of place neatly fits my scheme
or matches just one of my designations. A single reader
often endorses multiple facets of place, allowing for scene
as a starting point, for example, but then moving to
“higher" considerations, such as a location’s effects on
character development and community values. Still, in the
analysis that follows I choose usually to feature one critic
per approach, in the interest of time and space, but also to
explore particular qualities of that approach through the
cohesion of an extended example. I try always to note other
approaches to place informing a critic’s work, as well as

the range of criticism to which one approach pertains.

37

 

In my view southern literary studies is dominated by
five tendencies regarding place: the blanket approach, which
assumes that place’s meaning is self—evident and which
applies the category, without explanation, to a mixed array
of literary situations; the inclination to read place as a
vehicle for realism, which holds that an author’s best
chance for gaining an audience’s trust and infusing work
with the actual, the believable, occurs through reliable
place depictions; referring to place as a stabilizing force,
a literary rock that subdues (and in many ways bypasses) the
upheavals of real life in the twentieth—century South; the
inclination to see in depictions of the South the weighty
messages of symbol and theme, so that southern pictures
either organize, or are organized according to, prescribed
conventions; and finally, lamenting “true" southern places
as perpetually past or passing, their certain extinction
always regrettably on the horizon. In the remainder of this
chapter I am interested to define these five approaches and

reckon what motivates critics’ investment in them.

38

 

And I could say 00 oo 00

As if everybody knows

What I’m talking about

As if everybody here would know

EXactly what I was talking about

Talking about diamonds on the soles

of her shoes
-- Paul Simon
In the song “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes” off

his angalaag album, Paul Simon captures perfectly the
shortcuts toward which we are prone in communicating -- the
hope that when we reach topics hard to put words to, those
with whom we converse will bridge gaps and understand what
we mean. This is the impulse with which more than a few
literary critics refer to place, the hope that as readers we
all think alike when it comes to issues of where. It is a
problem with the category that academic writing will count
on place’s obviousness. Not uncommonly, for example,
southern literary critics market and encode their work with
place-oriented titles, while failing to nail down what place

deans or how exactly it applies to the overall project.

39

Consider Cleanth Brooks’s seminal book, William Faulkner:
Tha ngnapataypha Country (1963). In one sweep with the
title Brooks enlarges and abstracts Yoknapatawpha:
Faulkner’s county is suddenly “country,” an expansive,
profound territory, made to embody (with the colon) the
essence of its author. Yet in the body of the text Brooks’s
place categories are confusing. In the Preface he
identifies his subject as “William Faulkner’s characteristic
world, the world of Yoknapatawpha County,” but outlines his
methodology somewhat hazily:
How does one go about describing a world? Is there an
inevitable way or even one best way? I think not... I
have preferred to feel my way into the world of
Yoknapatawpha and to let my book grow accordingly.
(vii)
Further along as Brooks defends closing his study with The
Raivars, we catch, almost offhandedly, an idea of that
world’s reference points:
Here, more than in any other Faulkner novel... the
inhabitants of country, town, and city... are presented
in all their various gradations. The richness and
variety of Faulkner’s world has received no more
complete expression. (ix)

That Yoknapatawpha equals social layers is an opinion

implicitly reinscribed by Brooks’s second chapter, “The Poor

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Plain People,” and general statements throughout urging,
“The community.... is the circumambient atmosphere, the
essential ether of Faulkner’s fiction” (52). Less often
Brooks links place to nature, which initially seems to mean
unspoiled wilderness (see “Faulkner as Nature Poet”), and
then to “the female principle” and personal instincts (67).
Considering the scope of his book, it seems appropriate that
Brooks would entertain more than one prospect for place, but
he circles among them without explaining their connections
or preparing us for shifts, and fails to delineate
straightforwardly what the components are of Yoknapatawpha
Country. Readers have to search too hard and infer too much
from social “gradations,” nature, and woman, aspects Brooks
deems obviously transparent.

In no small measure William Faulkner: The ngnapataypha
Cgaaegy indicates just how difficult place is to define, how
widely applicable and unmanageable the category can prove.
But I am not sure that systematic approaches to place escape
Brooks. I do not think, after all, that when Brooks sets
out to explore “the amazingly rich and intricate world" of
the Yoknapatawpha novels he is much interested in the

construction of Yoknapatawpha, or in the methods Faulkner

41

uses to make place appear settled on the surface. The
critic’s intrigue with Faulkner’s “world" is more
descriptive than questioning: Brooks believes in the
physical and spiritual coherence of Yoknapatawpha county,
that the area “embodies its own principles of order,” and
that his duty is to identify and expound on these
controlling features (368). From Sartorie to The Mansion,
Faulkner’s country, for Brooks, is seamlessly woven and
uniform, evenly regulated; the land and climate dictate
natives’ predispositions, society is provincial, inhabitants
share “unspoken assumptions," universal lessons are to be
learned there, and every action, even violence, “exhibit[s]
purpose and value” (368). Nothing deters Brooks’s vision of
symmetrical integrity:
Even lack of purpose and value take on special meaning
when brought into Faulkner's world, for its very
disorders are eloquent possibilities of order: Joe
Christmas’ alienation points to the necessity for a

true community, and the author’s dramatically
sympathetic delineation of Joe’s plight may be said to

point to the possibility of that true community. (368)
The ngnapataypha Cgantry draws a large and full image of a
place -- its codes of behavior, the tendencies of its

aristocracy, “plain people,” and select minority figures,

its family genealogies, its “collective memory” -- the

42

structural contours of which, in the critic’s view, approach
imaginative perfection. For Brooks the description of this
dense, prodigious locale is the thing; place is a given, the
foundation piece for his picture, and not some premise in
_and of itself to be tinkered with. Certainly he fulfills
his goal with regard to detailed portraiture. But Brooks’s
reliance on place—related terms such as “country” and
“world” is as vaguely directed as the terms are wistful and
shadowy, and his massive scholarship does no help us figure
what the components are of his version of place or how the
category works in the Yoknapatawpha cycle.

By far the most dominant trend among southern literary
critics is treating place as a medium for realism.3 .As a
school of thought realism promotes everyday, common subject
matter, a mimetic theory of art, attention to complicated
ethical issues, and tightly focused characterization (Holman
and Harmon 412-14). At least two factors encourage
realistic leanings in southern literary criticism: the
reflex assumption that southern writing, by definition,
engages the materiality of the geographical American South,
and the influence of Eudora Welty’s landmark essay, “Place

in Fiction” (first prepared for a 1954 Cambridge lecture and

43

later reprinted in her collected tracts and reviews, The Eye
of Lhe Stery). Including Welty’s piece in the ranks of
southern literary criticism may seem problematic, for toward
the essay’s end Welty insists that regional literature holds
no monopoly on place, even that “‘regional’ is an outsider’s
term; it has no meaning for the insider who is doing the
writing, because as far as he knows he is simply writing
about life” (132). However critics who talk about place in
southern literary studies practically eulogize Welty’s
criteria -- Louis Rubin, Frederick Hoffman, and Noel Polk
are among the more prominent disciples of “Place in Fiction"
-- so that even if willy-hilly, Welty’s essay has proven a
touchstone in the field (see footnote #2).
“Place in Fiction" never advances a simple definition
of its subject. Although at one point Welty attempts a
concise description where she affiliates place with detail,
her requisite that detail be “credible” opens a string of
complications difficult to sort through:
Place in fiction is the named, identified, concrete,
exact and exacting, and therefore credible, gathering
spot of all that has been felt, is about to be
experienced, in the novel’s progress. Location
pertains to feeling; feeling profoundly pertains to
place; place in history partakes of feeling, as feeling

about history partakes of place. Every story would be
another story, and unrecognizable as art, if it took up

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its characters and plot and happened somewhere else.

(122)
I begin to feel less sure-footed with this definition when I
arrive at “therefore credible”; it is hard for me to
understand how believability naturally issues from
precision. Also, Welty does not specify to whom or what
“exacting” applies -- the gathering spot, the characters,
reader, or author? In the same vein, who feels and
experiences as the novel moves forward? Welty could be
hinting toward a symbiosis of author and reader, where their
impressions somehow connect at place’s meeting ground, or
toward a process where readers learn to feel on characters’
cues -- the possibilities, in my mind, are 50 general as to
be overwhelming. I am at a further loss to distinguish
location from place, and with Welty’s circling from location
to feeling to place, to history to feeling and back to
place, I am unable to trace her main point. Do the semi-
colons indicate a progression in logic, that one subject
inevitably leads to the next (location plus feeling amounts
to place)? If so, how does history affect the equation,
except to say that place, feeling, and history are

indispensable to one another?

45

 

 

Recounting what place does, Welty is less ambiguous,
treating the literary category as a set of three-tiered
functions (Gretlund 2). The first two are “objective" and
easy to pinpoint, applying to the author’s choice of subject
and particulars, “the goodness —- validity -- in the raw
material of writing," and secondly, to fiction’s “achieved
world of appearance” (124, 117). So place has to do with
the substance an author draws from real life, and on a
slightly higher level, with the author’s skill in creating
seemingly actual environs. Place’s third function is
“subjective,” the one most determining of good fiction and
the trickiest to follow: it relates to the author’s point of
view, “where he has his roots” and “where he stands” (124,
117). “Place, to the writer at work, is seen in a frame.
Not an empty frame, a brimming one. Point of view is a sort
of burning-glass, a product of personal experience and
time.... It is an instrument -- one of intensification. .”
(124). The author who is concerned to craft “a Chink-proof
world of appearance” must constantly negotiate “two pictures
at once in his frame, his and the world’s,” with the aim of
making his personal vision seem real (124-25). For Welty,

attaining such a “pleasing illusion" is to reach the “ideal"

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-- not actuality, but “the spirit of things is what is
sought” (125).

“Place in Fiction” features a brand of realism hinging
on suspension of disbelief. In Welty’s view a novel must
convey “truth” from author to reader and establish “mutual
understanding,” and place, most fundamentally, seals
readers’ faith by offering an authentic outer world, one
“continuous and unbroken, never too thin to trust, always in
touch with the senses” (117, 120). Without a plausible
“finished surface’ a story will lose its audience and fail:
“Forty hounds of confusion are after it, the black waters of
disbelief open up between its steps.... even if it has a
little baby moral in its arms, it is more than likely a
goner” (120). Fortunately the novel, as a mark of its
genre, tends toward “the local, the ‘real,’ the present" -—
which assures that “fiction is properly at work on the here
and now” and that “we” are “there” with the story -- yet
Welty cautions against loaded doses of actuality (117).

Good fiction, she insists, Sifts through life’s common
details, “disentangl[ing] the significant”; rather than

present reality in full, its “world of appearance... has got

47

 

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to seem actuality” (120, 121). How best to feign and
convince?
Place being brought to life in the round before the
reader’s eye is the readiest and gentlest and most
honest and natural way this can be brought about....
The moment the place in which the novel happens is
accepted as true, through it will begin to glow, in a
kind of recognizable glory, the feeling and thought
that inhabited the novel in the author's head and
animated the whole of his work. (121)
Note again how place fits in Welty’s scheme: its fidelity to
the apparently real hooks a reader’s confidence (“place...
is accepted as true”), opening the way for an emotional
exchange, or even epiphany, between author and reader (once
the reader trusts place, the author’s most intimate
motivations will palpably “glow"). Not surprisingly, in
Welty’s View it is feeling which “carries the crown” over
“character, plot, symbolic meaning” and “rightly relegates
place into the shade” (116). Place must adhere to realism
because the familiar secures, above all, an audience
receptive to its author’s emotive intensity.
Welty also builds a case for what I term the hyper-
real, that good writing anticipates and in a moral sense,
improves on, everyday experience (125). If fiction must

cull out and augment special effects of the mundane to

achieve believable places, for Welty the “carefulest and

48

purest representation” is “twice as true as life" (italics
added, 127). Faulkner’s comedy stands as her model: his
Story “Spotted Horses” may not have genuinely occurred, but
as any Mississippian will attest, its strength lies in its
legitimacy. Because Faulkner attends closely to everyday
plain dealing, “social fact,” and an “unerring aim of
observation,” the story “could happen today or tomorrow at
any little crossroads hamlet” (italics added, 126—27). In
Welty’s view, then, place’s faithfulness to real sources
ensures a kind of prophesying power: “Life is strange.
Stories hardly make it more so; with all they are able to
tell and surmise, they make it more believably, more
inevitably so” (128). Seeing the ordinary recognizably
sketched, we discern a “heightened” sense of the real and
gain truths more than actually exist (127). Crucially, the
physicality, the tangibility place lends fiction transforms
the “unconvincing” of what we customarily experience to
loftier places of understanding, “the very heart’s familiar”
(128). Fiction’s real is realer than we know.

Welty’s assertion that place controls and refines
character indicates another realist strain.4 In their

summary of the literary school Hugh Holman and William

49

 

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its “great concern for the effect of action on character
and... tendency to explore the psychology of the actors”;
predictably, they commend Henry James as a model
practitioner (413). For Welty, who quotes James on the
first page of her essay, believable characters are those
checked by clear margins: “... the likeliest character has
first to be enclosed inside the bounds of even greater
likelihood, or he will fly to pieces” (122). It follows
that the most reliable margins, the best checks on an
individual, have to do with place, which shapes character
outright by hemming it in. “To know [an individual’s]
size,” Welty writes, “we must see him set to scale in his
proper world.... by confining character, [place] defines it”
(122). Akin to this focus on the (narrated) individual is
realism’s doctrine that good writing communicates authorial
intention. As Catherine Belsey observes of the school,
ideally the great brain looming over a text’s
“representlationl” should be patently felt and measurable
(8). Welty evidently agrees, identifying the author's
sensibility as any story’s bona fide nucleus. She

maintains, for instance, that art is our best world

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ambassador, but with an important stipulation: “never the
voice of a country,” art “is an even more precious thing,
the voice of the individual, doing its best to speak, not
comfort of any sort, indeed, but truth” (117). And as I
have already quoted, Welty has place point ultimately to
“the feeling and thought that inhabited the novel in the
author’s head and animated the whole of his work,” and then
again she urges:

It may be going too far to say that the exactness and

concreteness and solidarity of the real world achieved

in a story correspond to the intensity of feeling in
the author’s mind and the very turn of his heart; but

there lies the secret of our confidence in him. (127-

28)

There is little doubting the author’s eminence for
Welty. She cannot emphasize enough how the figure of the
writer overshadows his text -— how, through the auspices of
place, he impresses reality’s significance, how he captures
“ideal” representations of the everyday world and wins
readerly trust, how he conveys his own range of emotion, and
indeed, reproduces it, feeling by feeling, in the audience.
The objective of place, then, is authority. Place is a
writer’s best tool for selecting, controlling, infusing,

convincing. It works as the author's direct line of

communication, the place along which (if he manages a decent

51

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illusion) the author secures his audience and marshals their
response. Moreover, Welty surrounds place with an air of
deification, making the writer’s mastery of it all the more
impressive. Introducing place as one of the “angels”
guiding fiction’s “racing hand,” elsewhere she speaks of its
“mystery,” “lasting identity,” and “magic" (116, 119).
“From the dawn of man’s imagination," Welty muses, “place
has enshrined the spirit; as soon as man stopped wandering
and stood still and looked about him, he found a god in that
place” (123). The writer’s business must be to steady
himself and evoke in his portrayals these very gods. Hulk-
like and awe-inspiring, the author resembles a great
explorer in his “translation and ordering of life” into
literary terrain, his struggle to broach “the spirit of
things” with place depictions (128, 125):
the responsibility of the writer... [is] to
disentangle the significant... from the random and
meaningless and irrelevant that in real life surround
and beset [his work].... With each word [the author]
writes, he acts -- as literally and methodically as if
he hacked his way through a forest and blazed it for
the word that follows.... though the woods may look
the same from the outside, it is a new and different
labyrinth every time. What tells the author his way?

Nothing at all but what he knows inside himself....
(120-21)

52

The real god for Welty is not place but the writer’s control
and vision; the author can trust an intuitive wisdom to seal
“the novel and its place [as] one... the same thing, like
the explorer’s tentative.map of the known world” (121). In
the same vein she lauds Flaubert’s silhouettes of French
experience as “no less conscious than... gigantic” and
estimates of Faulkner:

He was born knowing [every aspect of his home state],

or rather learning, or rather prophesying, all that and

more.... If there is any more in Mississippi than is
engaged and dilated upon... in the one story “Spotted

Horses,” then we would almost rather not know it.”

(124, 127)

Welty prefers that the buck stop with Faulkner's mind: place
begins and ends with the genius of any work’s awesome
master.

At the heart of “Place in Fiction” lie two convictions,
that place grows out of the author’s omniscience (what he
can read, evoke, and craft from his perception of ordinary
experience), and that the author’s ultimate challenge with
place is capturing realistic pictures. A truly gifted
writer uses personal viewpoint to hone in on his

surroundings and glean their important aspects; these

selections, coupled with his ability to describe them

53

convincingly, make for fictional places which readers credit
as true. Hence realism works as a kind of contract between
writers and audiences (if readers see the familiar in
fiction, they will come again and again) and depends on
authorial focus. To honor his end of the deal, a writer
must see feelingly and clearly -— “focus then means
awareness, discernment, order, clarity, insight” -- and
place must be translucent and balanced, firm:
at the moment of the writer’s highest awareness of,
and responsiveness to, the “real” world, his
imagination’s choice (and miles away it may be from
actuality) comes closest to being infallible for his
purpose.... No blur of inexactness, no cloud of
vagueness, is allowable in good writing; from the first
seeing to the last putting down, there must be steady
lucidity and uncompromise of purpose. I speak, of
course, of the ideal. (125)
Place, or the author’s purest version of real, is a
steadying, reliable force. It gives “equilibrium” and “a
sense of direction,” and Welty assures that if ever we are
“carried off” when “reading or writing something good,”
place will repair our impetuousness (128-29). “It is the
sense of place going with us [in the reading] that is the
ball of golden thread to carry us there and back and in

every sense of the word bring us home” (129). Place in

fiction is safe, it is trustworthy, it is sound. It keeps

54

us close to what we know, in terms of the familiar and our
own “point of origin” (119). And in the finest examples of
writing, an author’s version of place will always be sure.

One of Eudora Welty’s most outspoken admirers, Louis D.
Rubin, Jr., follows her formula for place closely in The
Faraway gguntry (1963), a long critical work which argues
that modern southern literature reflects the social upheaval
enveloping twentieth-century southern culture. Vestiges of
“Place in Fiction” appear throughout: against the standard
of realism, “romantic” situations are dismissed as
conventional and second-class (though unlike Welty, Rubin
does not explain realism’s natural superiority), an author's
real-life experience determines how he fashions literary
worlds (the equivalent of Welty’s “seeing double”), and any
chaos lurking in texts is largely stabilized by southern
writers’ renditions of place. Yet Rubin combines and
magnifies the latter two criteria in ways that depart from
Welty. Real life does serve as impetus for drawing literary
places, but only negatively; the twentieth-century South
troubles and even antagonizes the authors Rubin studies, and
in efforts to correct their homeland's discrepancies the

writers forge “private countr[ies1” of the mind, which turn

55

out to be the places dominating their literature (7). Thus
literary place is an abstraction of magnificently balanced
proportions, a psychological defense mechanism whereby
authors “discover through... art the order and meaning that
‘real life’ no longer afford[s] them” (8). Rubin’s
insistence that writers’ “faraway countries” impart
security, and ultimately, lessons in moral virtue makes him

an obvious prototype for treating place as a steadying

 

influence.
The central thesis of The Faraway Country -- it crops
up, in fact, across Rubin's distinguished career -- is that

only when the South began to fall apart could it produce
noteworthy literature. For Rubin, the region’s
disintegration and massive cultural shifts arose not from
the Civil War but early twentieth-century industrialization;
around the turn of the century, “sleepy, “contained”
agrarian communities were jolted from sixty— to seventy-year
repose by capitalism's gaining momentum (4). Writers such
as Faulkner, Robert Penn Warren, and Thomas Wolfe, whose
work came to fruition in the nineteen thirties, forties, and
fifties and contributed to the literary flowering known as

the Southern Renaissance, grew up witnessing the South's

56

disruption, though they failed to understand the impact of
its social changes until leaving the region as young adults.
Returning later as sensitive artists, the Renaissance
writers discovered two hard truths: they perceived how an
older, better way of southern life was dying (which many of
their families and neighbors did not), and because of their
ability to view the South from without, they never again fit
comfortably in their home communities. Some lingered on in
an alien South; others left in exasperation, fated, even so,
to contemplate the region of their birth endlessly through
their writing.

In response to their peripheral southern status, many
of these artists turned inward, churning out of their
estrangement the South’s first literature “of great moral
and spiritual intensity, of tremendous intellectual depth”
(6—7). They consulted idyllic images of a South which they
believed existed in their childhoods (but had actually
passed before that time), and these images of “an imaginary
country where ‘tasseling corn,/ Fat beans, grapes sweeter
than muscadine/ Rot on the vine'” permeate the Southern
Renaissance canon (14-15). In short, the Faulkners,

Warrens, and Wolfes create cohesive literary worlds to

57

compensate for the fact that “the Southern community as it
used to be [had] broken down" (7):
what the Southern writer has done with the South,
is to give to his experience a logic and order greater
and more accessible than that of “real life.” He
fashions his own country because... of his desire to
effect an order greater than the one everyday life can
provide for his experience.... The life of Faulkner’s
Yoknapatawpha has a moral logic greater than the life
of Mississippi.... It is not the logic of everyday
life, but it is life clarified and interpreted in the
universal light of human experience. (18)
This is Welty’s hyper-real one hundred fold, that the
rationale ordering literary worlds settles confusion
sweeping actual places -- settles it, at least, in the
artist's consciousness and in the lasting integrity of his
work as a whole. And Rubin’s appreciating the moral logic
of place in fiction cannot be understated; in his assessment
place is a steadfast medium for the expression of humanist
ethics. Yoknapatawpha, for example, serves as a permanent,
invariable stage for the “moral drama of the soul’s own
bitter travail," the scene for “Faulkner's great human
drama, the story of the attempt by human beings to translate
[‘love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and

sacrifice’] into concrete behavior" (65, 50). By the end of

his Faulkner chapter Rubin goes so far as to declare, “the

58

Faulknerian world is based on human love, with the dignity
and justice that makes possible in society, and the tragedy
that arises out of its violation. The necessity for love is
the one constant in all the novels and stories” (64).
Circling back, the other “constant" Rubin initially
recognizes in Faulkner’s cycle is the county itself, “with
its fields, rivers, farmland and homes remaining anchored in
time, while the lives of the men and women inhabiting the
land come and go” (47). Place is a fixture which Rubin
eventually links to values or abstract principles. Thus
Yoknapatawpha equals love, Altamont “time" and “the process
of 1035,; and Burden’s Landing the betrayal of “honor,
responsibility, leadership” (88, 130).5

Effectively Rubin accomplishes for the category of
place what (in his reading) Southern Renaissance writers do
for a misguided South: he makes it ordered and ordering, a
unifying force, the thread which salvages timeless patterns
from texts’ wandering views and various ethical
implications. His version of place ensures main themes and
messages, precepts for the high road to humanity. An

admirable task for criticism, this moral instruction, and

(mertainly Rubin rightly assumes that judgments and values

59

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overlay textual production. But in my view a sticking point
impairs his analysis: for the author of The Faraway Country,
literary production works one-dimensionally, issuing from
the author’s mind and the author’s mind alone. The hard-won
principles Rubin so appreciates in As I Lay Dying or All the
King’s Men originate with the writer’s genius and -- because
literature faithfully registers the designs of the mind
behind it -— abide lastingly in the texts, invulnerable to
change or blemish. Readers in no way affect the value-
making. Accordingly, a text’s lessons endure from audience
to audience, culture, to culture; they lie suspended and
crystal clear, at the height of literary cause and effect,
for readers to swallow or reject. This rock-like stability
is difficult to accept, particularly in light of the inroads
made in the last thirty years by reader-response,
psychoanalytic, feminist, and deconstructive critical
practices. Today it seems unthinkable that proper values
inhere timelessly in any one text, or that place in fiction
can freeze tine, transition, or interpretation, even if an
author does conceive of place as his abstract, paradigmatic
response to real life’s troubling changes. For Rubin’s

bedrock theories of place to be convincing, he must

60

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establish how texts purely express writerly intent, how
texts are transparent mediums. And he needs to explain how
all wise readers read the same.

More encouragingly, an extended version of Rubin’s
reality/place relation could reconstitute the work of place
in literature. In The Faraway Country, the place an author
invents and images in his text amends the disruptions of an
everyday South, yet only within an imaginary frame. That
frame includes the author’s mind and the esoteric realm of
art, both of which stand removed (loftily, in a protected,
transcendent sort of way) from the concrete. This is to say
that Rubin’s frame never touches the real-life South: any
repairs made are idealistic and psychological. However if
we relax Rubin’s boundary between real and imaginary and
allow that artifacts influence the cultures experiencing
them, then place in fiction could impact place in actuality.
We might consider, for instance, that literary place affects
our impressions of geographical parameters, reinforces
spatial stereotypes along the lines of which real
Communities orient themselves, or undermines so-called
Sacred spots which help perpetuate, day in and day out,

Ekacial injustice. With his emphasis on authors re-ordering

61

reality through/in the countries of their minds, Rubin edges
closely toward —- yet remains essentially far from —— such
possibilities.

Like his colleague Louis Rubin, Lewis Simpson tries
hard to explain how the South, long derided as America’s
economic and cultural wasteland, could produce the
twentieth-century phenomenon known as the Southern Literary
Renaissance. And like Rubin, in his conjecturing Simpson
dwells on southern writers’ alienation, though not from the
South itself so much as modernity in general and industry’s
machinistic sway. Simpson’s version of alienation differs
from Rubin’s on one other point: far from unique to
Renaissance artists, a conscience resistant to new-fashioned
trends marks some of the earliest southern writing. In The
Di r n- Pa t ral n Histo in S u h rn
Literature (1975), Simpson traces southern intellectual
estrangement (from gathering industrial/technological
forces, or from prevalent philosophical suasions of their
day) in William Byrd, Thomas Jefferson, William Gilmore
Simms, Robert Penn Warren, and William Styron, among others.
All share a disaffection with the modern, but according to

Simpson the Renaissance writers descry a huge flaw in their

62

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forebears’ discontent: a Jefferson or Simms resented the
changing world’s reproaches of chattel slavery and wrote to
defend the institution, struggling to reconcile it with New
Eden images of the South. These efforts, in the Renaissance
authors’ judgment, promoted conceits of idyllic southern
living that were hopelessly out of touch with real misery
and wrongdoing; southern literature had abandoned memory,
history, and the classical Christian ethic. Renaissance

writers, mindful of such apostasy, attempt to resurrect “the

meaning of the past by the literary mind... to arrest the
disintegration of memory and history... [in order to]
reconstruct the Western literary tradition” (70). For

Simpson, their success in this weighty mission (undertaken
out of responsibility to ages and ages of a particular,
superior culture) appropriately measures the achievement of
the South’s stunning Renaissance flowering.

What drives Simpson’s argument is a timeworn symbol, an
image of place, which affects all southern writers
differently but orders each of their objectives: southern
soil as a redemptive Garden of Eden, a fresh Arcady,

realized most typically in the stereotype of the Old South

63

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plantation. As Simpson describes it (studying Robert

Beverley’s The History and Present State of Virginia):

The glimpse of a planter like a Beverley or a [William]
Byrd seated pleasantly amid the honeysuckle and the
hummingbirds in that faraway summer, foreshadows the
evocation in literary imagining of a pastoral
plantation situated in a timeless “Old South,” a secure
world redeemed from the ravages of history, a place of
pastoral independence and pastoral permanence. To the
incomplete scene we have only to add the plantation
mansion and the planter, who has in his hand a well—
worn copy of Virgil, and within a supervisory distance
a group of Negro slaves amiably at work in a tobacco
field. (17)
Simpson locates this image’s origins in the religious quest
of early colonial settlers, which was to fulfill God’s
convenant in the New World, since the Old had abandoned it
for modern versions of politics, commerce, and national
expansion. Yet where New Englanders interpreted their
pastoral as a sacred “pleasure garden" carved from
foreboding wilderness, Virginians saw no threat in their
natural terrain; its abundance could potentially earn vast
riches (12). So Virginians revised the northeastern mission
of clearing holy ground from the badlands. Instead they

conceived of their errand as one “into an open,

prelapsarian, self-yielding paradise, where they would be

64

made regenerate by entering into a redemptive relationship
with a new and abounding earth” (15).

There was a hitch, however: the southern symbol of
paradise included a glaring deviation from Arcady in the
classical-Christian tradition, the chattel slave, and
Virginians were pressed to justify their peculiarity in
poetic terms. Hence the slave appears in eighteenth-century
southern literature as devoted gardener, and later,
beginning with Jefferson, the devoted slave and
meticulously—ordered plantation bear evidence of “the
condition of the independent (white, land-owning, upper-
class] mind” (33). Southerners’ quarrel with modernity,
focused on notions of social equality which were gaining
ground in the Age of Reason and which southerners felt were
perverse, became crystallized in their Arcadian image of an
idyllic and civilized South. This golden world is the
“dispossessed” of Simpson’s title, initially undone by
authors’ incorporating slavery in the picture, and later
because modern writers felt alienated from their forebears’
(slavery—defensive) alienation.

The value of Simpson’s criticism is that he allows his

South-as-paradise symbol a wide range of flexibility. The

65

Diepgssessed Garden does not read like a coded checklist,
where writers are assessed by how many qualities they
satisfy of an exemplary, normative image. In fact,
Simpson’s picture of the South as plantation utopia never
stagnates, is never presented as a literary frieze passed
from author to author; he documents, rather, the
transformation of that picture over time. Thus Robert
Beverley (1705) draws a South where teeming natural
resources are productively harnessed by Greek—reading,
refined country gentlemen, where, amazingly, no slaves toil
the land (a conspicuous omission on Beverley’s part);
whereas in Weoderaft (1854) William Gilmore Simms features
the happy slave who, fiercely protective of his master,
helps establish the pastoral of “‘a well-managed household,
in which the parties were all at peace with themselves and
one another,’ and ‘a sort of center for the parish
civilization,’ which draws ‘the gentry all round, within the
sphere of its genial, yet provocative influences’” (60);
while with Faulkner and his Renaissance peers, Arcady is
abandoned as an empty, perfectionist metaphor. The
Renaissance writers, Simpson maintains, exhibit their

alienation differently, not through escapist plantations but

66

by reinvoking history and memory, the “fusion” of which is
“a moral order -- a dimension of being” (75). But if these
authors prefer other channels for their cultural
estrangement, it is their reaction against Arcady, against
slavery’s worm in Arcady, that drives them to search for new
expressions of their separatism. The garden “dispossessed"
works just as potently on artistic imaginations —— if not
more powerfully, considering the Renaissance feats -- as the
southern idyll in full bloom.

Simpson himself quits the study of southern pastoral
images as he treats memory and history in Faulkner and
Warren, and existentialism in post-Renaissance writers, and
frankly, his last section’s withdrawal from the book's
central stereotype reads a little jarringly. There would be
much to consider with Arcady in modern southern literature.
Plenty of Simpson’s twentieth-century authors stress the
demise of the Old South or of a particular plantation in
their work (think of Sutpen’s Hundred in Absalem, Abealng,
or Burden’s Landing in All the King’e Men); it seems a hole
in Simpson’s argument to overlook Arcady’s ongoing
circulation, even its lines appear so exhausted as soon to

pass. Probably the critic would answer that alienation is

67

 

 

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his main thread and that the plantation symbol fails as
antidote for southern writers’ social angst, but reading The
Qiepeeeeeaeg_§a;deh, one would never know this symbol
continues in Renaissance literature and beyond. It does,
usually with violent or apocalyptic ends, and considering
the implications of Arcady’s attrition would round out
Simpson’s case and help us all better appraise a long-
standing, far-reaching picture of the South.

As The Diegeeeeesed Garden convincingly attests, in
southern literature place is often designated as a symbolic
construction, as a site which imitates other, previous
sites, as a stereotype laden with historical connotations.
There is little doubt that images of the South resonate with
coded layers of meaning. Thanks to critical work by
Simpson, Lucinda MacKethan, Kathryn Lee Seidel, Elizabeth
Jane Harrison, Louise Westling, and William Ruzicka, we know
that representations of southern places betoken the
plantation utopia, white southern womanhood (particularly
the fallen belle), ancient myth and ritual, or architectural
embodiments of a regional mind, individual or collective.6
What this scholarship helps us understand is that physical

sites in literature exist for reasons additional to visual

68

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effect; they are more than round, full pictures meant to
please our inner eye, and we need to be aware of their
hidden dimensions, their culturally-embedded implications.
In The Diepeeseesed Garden, for example, Simpson unravels
how John Pendleton Kennedy enters antebellum arguments over
slavery by tinkering with the stock plantation image. In
Swallew Barn; gr Life in hhe Qld Dominion (1831) Kennedy
portrays the southern plantation as a type of “pastoral
squirearchy" where the slaveholder acts as “lord over a less
glamorous but a more kindly and far more pleasant ancestral
estate than ever existed in England” (44). On the surface
this place issues directly from William Byrd’s or
Jefferson’s Arcadia, with its big house, immaculately-
ordered grounds, and contented slaves, but as Simpson looks
closer he discerns how Kennedy’s “‘flattering image of
“feudal” Virginia’” registers an ambivalence toward the
southern garden (45). Through a narrator from New York City
who detects “phony feudalism” on plantation tours, through
slaves who parody their owners’ misguided sense of dominion,
through pictures of tidy slave quarters that evidence the
thrift and civility of partially-emancipated slaves, Kennedy

promotes views which most of his southern contemporaries

69

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would have abhorred (44): “that at [the] heart [of the
garden] is a pathos of order,” that for the pastoral to ring
true slaves must be granted a meaningful relation to land
they toil, that slavery is an unacceptable condition in a
country based on freedom, that “slavery resists embodiment
in the hierarchical pattern of society that is in the minds
of the masters” (47, 48, 50, 45). Such profound anti-
slavery wranglings -- and in a novel that at first glance
seems enamored of Arcady.7 With his image—intensive
criticism Simpson is able to show how the outer trappings of
a heavily-circulated, bucolic picture of the South gives way
in Kennedy to more tarnished pastoral elements. Simpson
does not merely expose the cracks in Kennedy’s squirearchy;
he suggests how the cracks speak to an ideological debate.
What we see with the literary symbol is that even when
southern authors divvy up literary space along lines
verified by tradition, the designations are intentional,
political, and far from easily natural. Those designations
-- a symbol’s discernible features -- can and do change.
Obviously a knowledge of popular symbols of southern scenes
and the codes they evoke/revise proves indispensable to any

place-centered thinking.

70

 

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The final tendency regarding place which colors much of
southern literary criticism is, in some cases, a scholarly
indulgence, and in others, as much an observation on
critics’ part (about authorial frames of mind) as their own
wringing of hands: mourning the authentic southern place as
near extinction or irrevocably lost.8 This ominous mood has
not been confined to literary scholarship; for decades
cultural gatekeepers have sung a southern swan song. In
historian Edward Ayers’s assessment:

For as long as people have believed there was a South
they have also believed it was disappearing.
Virginians and Carolinians thought the South was dying
as early as the 18305, when too much easy money in the
Cotton Kingdom pulled people to raw places such as
Alabama and Mississippi, which knew nothing of true
southern gentility. Then people felt certain that the
South would be erased by the end of slavery or
Reconstruction. They did not expect the South to
survive the effects of automobiles or radios, of World
War II and the postwar bulldozer revolution. There was
reason to believe that the events of Brown v. Broad of
Education, Montgomery, Greensboro, Selma, and
Birmingham might do the trick, surely the inexorable
spread of strip malls, fast-food places, cable, and
satellite dishes marked the end of the South. (68—69)

Bleak predictions also toll among writers who brood openly
over their homeland. Contemporary author Harry Crews posits
that for four generations since the Civil War, “the entire

Deep South and all its people were one enormous

71

 

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neighborhood” in terms of “idiom and accent of speech, the
food, the music, even the manner of worship” (flaggeTTe 39).
With the onslaught of chain restaurants and television
preachers, however, the South “has been corrupted all the
way to quaint,” and for Crews, the eradication of that
monolithic neighborhood translates into thin southern
caricature, no South at all (40). Josephine Humphreys
regrets what she terms “the dirty family secret of the
South,” labyrinth and tacky urban development (297). In her
view the encroaching “condo-golf resort scene” initially
displaces a purer region of Eden-like wilderness, and now
too, threatens the South’s last bastion, its distinctive
small towns. With the loss of the Town, Humphreys
maintains, the death of the South impends (297-98). Since
southern writers who turn cultural critics often assume
cynical views of the fate of their region, it is little
wonder that southern literary criticism adopts similar
positions. At the very least, scholars have tended to take
writers at their word and read southern literature as full
of perpetually dying Souths.

The loudest keening for a fading South to affect

southern literary criticism burst on the scene in 1930, when

72

 

 

 

twelve academics associated with the Nashville Fugitives
published I’ll Take My Stand. Because so many in this group
went on to become leading poets, fiction writers, and
critics (John Crowe Ransom, Donald Davidson, Allen Tate,
Robert Penn Warren), and because Louis Rubin has over the
years championed the volume and vigorously supported two
reprints (in 1962 and 1977), I’ll Take My Stand has exerted
an influence on southern literary criticism which remains
unparalleled. The golden vision of its collaborative
authors, the Twelve Southerners, and what they strive to
preserve is “the agrarian life of the older South,”
perceived as under siege by forces of the New South’s
“industrial gospel” (xxxviii, xliv). John Donald Wade's
story, “The Life and Death of Cousin Lucius,” offers an
exemplary picture of the demise of the treasured farming
community, before the Civil War a place where settlers could
carve “almost a little nations of one’s own,” and after it a
vast specter, due to poor crop management, an ebbing labor
force, and the uneven economics of industrial capitalism
(266). No matter how noble Lucius, no matter the energy he
extends to convince his neighbors to invest soundly, alter

crop production, and read the classics, his farm—based town

73

 

slowly disintegrates. The landscape is razed for timber and
fast cash, harvests fail, and generation upon generation
move away. The sense of doom engulfing Wade’s fictional
community never lets up; war-ravaged and labor-short in
Lucius’s childhood, in ensuing decades the town suffers
natural blights, loss of peace to the automobile, a
countrified inferiority complex, and the exodus of most of
its inhabitants. By the end of “The Life and Death of
Cousin Lucius,” the motif, “Hard Times” is all that will
certainly recur; when Lucius “saw inaugurated the old
process... of people leaving their farms and putting out for
the cities,” he observes remorsefully “that those who went
prospered, while those who stayed languished” (296-97).
Nothing can stop the slow wasting of his town.

Likewise, though the Twelve Southerners intend their
manifesto as a warning of what the South might dwindle to
and believe they can inspire a revolt against the
“increasing disadjustment and instability" of modern
influences below the Mason-Dixon line, T’ll Take My Stand is
characterized most by a gloomy defensiveness (xlv). When
the authors initially ask, “how far shall the South

surrender its moral, social, and economic autonomy to the

74

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victorious principle of Union?" and offer hopefully, “that
question remains open," at the same time they admit “the
melancholy fact” that momentum for so-called progress has
swept their home region (xxxviii). Tellingly, at the close
of the Introduction they cast their rallying cry in terms
decidedly negative, seeming already to disparage any genuine
response:
If a community, or a section, or a race, or an age, is
groaning under industrialism, and well aware that it is
an evil dispensation, it must find the way to throw it
off. To think that this cannot be done is
pusillanimous. And if the whole community, section,
race, or age thinks it cannot be done, then it has
simply lost its political genius and doomed itself to
impotence. (xlviii)
Here, as accusations of loss and impotence bear the brunt of
rhetorical weight, the restoration clamored for feels
impossible to imagine. This volume’s urge to revive an old
South rises from the suspicion that there are not enough
fellow warriors to reclaim that myth-like kingdom. To twist
John Crowe Ransom’s famous words and use them ironically,
the Twelve Southerners’ urge for antebellum—like communities
amounts to getting stuck “look[ing] backward rather than

forward” (1). Their agrarian image of a purer, better

region is fixed regrettably in the past with little or no

75

 

chance of realization, most of all because, as Rubin himself
has admitted, “perhaps [it] never existed” (Introduction to
the Torchbook Edition xxxi).

The stand assumed by the Twelve Southerners opposes
changes they witness everywhere in their hometowns, the
South’s none-too-slow Americanization. As their region
blends in with the rest of the country, the Twelve judge, as
farmland is deserted and cities grow and mass production
enlists a daunting number of workers and national marketing
brainwashes the consumer’s mind, the South quickens its own
doom. Their message: close the door on industrial invasion
and re-draw time—honored lines distinguishing the South,
lines cherished and advocated for over a century by white,
land-owning males. For agrarian dreams of the southern
place resemble Jefferson’s yeoman farm, where the individual
white male tills his own soil, feeds and provides for his
family, and makes his own crafts and music. The yeoman’s
chief rewards, like the planter’s at Monticello, are an
independent mind and control of the realm of his homestead.

Unfortunately agrarian boundaries allow too little
space for women and African-Americans, not to mention that

ethnic groups other than Anglo-Irish, Anglo-Scot, and Black

76

 

are unheard of in I’ll Take My Stand. Andrew Nelson Lytle’s
“The Hind Tit,” for example, pictures the farmwife’s domain
as the kitchen, where “her victories are partial, but very
satisfying, for she knows her limitations [with regard to
the caprice of nature’s resources]” (220). Wife and
daughters “wait” first on the men before eating, “can be of
great help in the garden," and contribute to the family
economy by “mending clothes, darning, knitting, canning,
preserving, washing or ironing or sewing,” but they in no
way act as proprietors or are trained to make wide-scale
decisions (224—229). Although Wade’s Cousin Lucius believes
that his wife, “who was at best but a frail creature, was
the strongest hope he knew for the perpetuation of that
bright tradition against the ceaseless, clamorous, insensate
piracies of Hard Times” and that she demands “a sort of
worship,” this “strongest hope” moves discreetly about the
home and church and never ventures into spheres of business
or trade (279). Not surprisingly, issues of women’s rights
are “a puzzle” to Lucius, who muses that the other sex
should worry over “woes incomparably more galling than the
renunciation of [‘suffrage’1” (289). But if the Twelve

Southerners’ small farm ideal depends on women for an

77

(unseen) foundation, its lines cast Blacks off to the side
entirely. The place of African-Americans in the South is
taken up by Robert Penn Warren’s essay, “The Briar Patch” --
a title aptly modeled on a popular southern cliche, a
spatial symbol of thorny predicaments with little room for
maneuver (247). Warren in fact consigns Blacks to
precarious grounds: he advises them to remain in the South,
to resist joining a cheap industrial labor force, and to
work the land in hopes that white owners will repay Blacks’
efforts fairly (or if the Black man owns his own farm, that
the southern market will pay commiserate with the quality of
his produce). Starker still, Warren envisions separate
white and Black communities. “The Southern white man,”
Warren holds, “wishes the negro well; he wishes to see
crime, genial irresponsibility, ignorance, and oppression
replaced by an informed and productive negro community” -- a
community apart, a community that, as it self-improves,
should keep its social ills from spilling over (264). In
the conclusion Warren counsels, “Let the negro sit beneath
his own vine and fig tree” (264).

The Twelve Southerners’ conviction that the South is

fatally tainted and that its recovery depends on the

78

comeback of nineteenth-century small farming communities
disqualifies too many people from the power base of its
ideal. Even more short-sighted, theorizing place in the
present as exhausted and in the past as an utopian option
(and our only legitimate one) fails to explain the South’s
thriving longevity. Today, seventy years after I’ll Take My
Shahd, the region flourishes, as does a literature concerned
with its parameters, the extent of the South’s influence on
contemporary living. It seems to me that rather than
romanticize versions of place which no longer affect us
significantly, we need to account for the South's constant
regeneration. While the plantation or the small farming
community no longer dominates our southern scene, we still
talk about the South -- how do we now imagine its
constitution and extent? When we turn loose the archetype
of an homogenous, smoothly-hierarchical region, where do we
go?

The implicit question posed at the end of The Dream of
Aready, Lucinda MacKethan’s 1980 study of southern
literature’s nostalgia for lost place ideals, maps the start
of my critical thinking, the point at which I want to enter

southern scholarship’s conversation on the meaning of place:

79

Walker Percy has noted that the South is now
“almost as broken a world as the North, and we must
learn to live in it.” Like writers outside of the
South, the southern writer today finds perhaps his
greatest challenge in involving his characters in
quests for a way to live actively and responsibly
within a broken world. The pastoral mode requires a
viable myth in the dream of Arcady. The pastorally
grounded image of a South of old as an Arcadian
community represents for most writers today perhaps a
garden left too far behind, to use John Crowe Ransom’s
image. Yet for roughly one hundred years that garden
and the southerner’s response to the loss of it have
provided an astonishingly fertile field for artistic
response. (217)
While I do not accept that the South today is “broken” --
which implies it once was agreeably unified and whole --
MacKethan forces us to consider an important issue. Between
the lines she asks, how do we picture a South bereft of its
dearest place icons? If “the dream of Arcady” no longer
resonates in the South or speaks to its range and nature,
what does? Although MacKethan’s question turns on the
concept of symbols, I think we can widen its scope, taking
Eudora Welty’s cue and allowing for multiple possibilities
of what place in literature pertains to -— visual images of
physical sites, yes, but also the dynamics of boundary
making and changing, how trespass is determined (trespass by

characters, by readers), how past geographies undergird,

scramble, or perhaps infringe on contemporary spatial

80

arrangements, what constitutes sacred space, and how spatial
voids or erasures are dealt with and accommodated in
southern experience. In fact, a large component of my
project is exactly this, identifying aspects of place that
may strike us as unusual, immediately new, or simply
different. Even as my queries begin with wondering about
the nine lives of the South and how literature perpetually
reconceives this region, they shift quickly to gauging what
our region-making indicates about the meaning and activity
of place. I move constantly back and forth between a place
and place as a theoretical category.

Southern scholarship imparts several lessons about
place which we would do well to keep with us. Welty, we
might remember, insists on the multiplicity of place; in her
scheme the category varies between the “raw materials” from
which an author chooses, to the “chinkproof” sphere he
creates, to his own position and background. Although Louis
Rubin never commits to such himself, he anticipates that
lines drawn between the South and representations of the
South are far from clearly discernible; if we extend Rubin’s
thesis, that authors repair the ills of real-life places

through/in their fictional worlds, we come close theorizing

81

literature’s effect on, literature’s interaction with, day-
in, day—out conceptualizing of “South.” And Lewis Simpson’s
tracing the genesis and development of a seminal southern
symbol drives home how aware we should be of standard images
of the South and particular messages they have transmitted
historically.

The insights these critics afford us are worthwhile and
useful -- already we have had to grapple with the place-site
equivalence, metaphorical applications of place, and the
degree to which place and identity coalesce. Yet even as I
appreciate the headstart southern scholarship offers,
evaluating the tradition’s drawbacks can help us locate
problems in place thinking which may be avoided, or if
further discussions seem warranted, may be referred to more
recent socio—geographical theorists. In my view the
weightiest critical flaw in southern literary criticism is
assuming the self-referentiality of place; having learned
from Cleanth Brooks and a dozen like him, who believe we all
mean the same (obvious) thing when we talk about place, I
will try to define the specific contexts and elements that I
analyze of the category. This is of crucial importance,

because those contexts and aspects will change frequently in

82

my study of Naylor, Spencer, and Pratt. Moreover, the
tendency to read place as a vehicle for literary realism
poses several obstacles for our reading: How do we assess
which sites and situations are authentically real, since
southern culture changes over time, and since we cannot be
familiar, firsthand, with every community every book evokes?
Is it not true that the theoretical underpinnings for
realism toppled as early as the advent of structuralism?
And when a work deliberately upsets modern perceptions of
real-life places, as does Gloria Naylor’s Mama hay, how can
we explain its place practices? Obviously we must
reconceive the relation between place in literature and
literary realism, pinpointing alternatives to the bent of
“this is the South and it is genuine -- and therefore a good
rendering.”

I also look skeptically on the critical faith that
place functions as a stabilizing force, most often as one
which channels transcendent, universal values. My project
does not take for granted that authors and readers
automatically share values, that a text can purely express
its author’s values, or that values are safely encapsulated

and hover about a work, complete and unspoiled, ready for

83

the reader to ingest. And because the texts I analyze tend
to use place in unsettling, disconcerting ways, it would be
valuable to formulate space as “a fragmentary field of
action, a jurisdiction scattered and deranged, which appears
to be negotiable or continuous but is actually peppered with
chasms of economic and cultural disjunctions" (Yaeger 4).
Regarding the rich convention in southern scholarship of
tracking classic symbols of southern places, I intend to
read with an eye toward those symbols and authors’
manipulation of their standard features, but I do not want
my study to be image-obsessed. It seems to me that critics’
focus on single archetypes of place (such as Simpson’s on
the southern garden) might confine their place definitions,
might lead them to ignore aspects of place which do not
neatly fit their symbol hypotheses (as Simpson ignores
Arcady’s disintegration in modern southern writing).
Finally, my study of place in contemporary southern women’s
literature does not expect that the South is about to peter
out, does not seek solace in defunct pictures of southern
communities. Too often those past pictures contradict

Naylor, Spencer, and Pratt’s multicultural place dynamics,

84

and so I am interested to imagine how southern sites are

territorialized, contested, evolving.

85

Chapter Two
Mama Day and the Trouble with Maps

On the surface Gloria Naylor’s main setting in her 1984
novel, Mama Day, appears to be a southern Black utopia.
Willow Springs, a fictitious Sea Island off the coast of
Georgia and South Carolina, is Black—owned, Black-operated,
and virtually sealed from white influence, from 1823 to the
period when most of Naylor’s story occurs, the late 19705
and early ‘80s. Not only is the island stunningly
beautiful, a “primeval Paradise" in critic Helene Christol’s
words, and inhabited exclusively by descendants of freed
slaves, it also preserves cultural ties to the original
Black motherland, Africa (350). Late into the twentieth
century islanders observe rituals passed down from their
earliest ancestor, the revered conjure woman, Sapphira Wade,
who was enslaved along the west African coast around 1819
and purchased by rice planter Bascombe Wade in the New
World.1 The Afro-centric customs bequeathed by this “great,
grand mother" are widesweeping and habitually practiced, and
strongly define Willow Springs’ communal identity (48).
Although Sapphira’s name and the details of her experience

have been lost over time, islanders rely on her herbal

86

medicines to guard their health, her conjure to read signs
of Nature and maintain peaceful relations, her spiritualism
to honor and bury their dead, and legends of her reciprocal
giving for their Candlewalk celebrations in December.
Inhabitants’ confidence and dominion on Willow Springs is
also bolstered by their sense of impregnable possession. As
a result of Sapphira’s machinations, residents own every
inch of the island outright: somehow she convinced Bascombe
Wade to transfer his holdings to her progeny, the Days, and
a clause in the deed forbids living Day descendants from
selling. So legally binding are islanders’ property rights
that challenges in state and federal courts have failed to
divest this extended Black family -- through antebellum
times, Jim Crow, and luxury development of the Sea Islands
in the 19605 and 705. Amazingly, at the edge of a Deep
South systematically white-controlled, ownership and
administration of Willow Springs rests with a network of
independent African Americans for over a hundred and seventy
years.

Yet Naylor admits a shadow across the rise of her
southern Black Mecca. Despite their proprietorship and

political and cultural self-possession, residents of Willow

87

Springs feel anxious about their surroundings: they cannot
penetrate family secrets literally embedded within their
long, narrow swath of land. Certain areas around the island
bear evidence of calamities and indiscretions which
destroyed some former Days’ relations; Naylor’s present-day
characters, vaguely aware of such turmoil, either avoid
these sites, or, seeking historical information, are unsure
of how to approach them.2 Therefore the Days and their kin
might own and manage Willow Springs; they might know the
best grounds for storm-protected building, the best waters
around the island for fishing; they may have mastered the
economics of bridge construction and chemistry of soil
composition; they might successfully screen Willow Springs’
borders for unwelcome mainland deputies -- but regardless of
the Days’ local authority, they remain hesitant and
unsettled in their domain due to gaps in family knowledge.
Islanders miss particulars about the Days’ genesis and
preservation that might explain their substantive collective
identity and how they come to be prepossessed: the
conditions of Sapphira's arrival, her name, the nature of
her relation to Bascombe Wade, how she wrested the island

from him, why her issue, like herself, tend to tear loved

88

 

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ones’ hearts “wide open” (151). Naylor augments these gaps
in knowledge by representing them as site-specific
mysteries: she concretizes and enlarges the Days’ ignorance
of historical fact by concealing answers to the family’s
troubled past at various locations around the island.
Naylor distinguishes these areas as unique, allegorical, and
subject to divination: they are sacred, oracular, places
where family-altering events occurred (and where evidence of
such may be discovered), or where strange tokens of conjure
lie waiting to be construed. Accordingly, at the novel’s
climax, when the family scrambles for clues of their
forebears to combat the last childbearing Day’s impending
death, they head toward Naylor’s emblematic destinations.
Out of intuition and/or compulsion, they flounder around
these sites, confused, unaware of what to look for to solve
the family’s crisis. The culmination of this furious,
place-bound agitation is that in the end, Naylor's specified
haunts are not wholly revelatory; they yield only partial
information in masked, obsdure terms, at times too
inexplicably for characters to know how to proceed.

In what follows I explore the ways Naylor qualifies her

minority stronghold in the South, by examining the novel’s

89

spatial metaphors for lost, or forgotten, or unrecoverable

family histories. It is significant that a Black author
czreates a Black utopia in a region traditionally race—
discriminatory, and then features her community’s internally
<2cxrrosive elements -- i.e., that Naylor’s sacred sites fail
l:c> deliver historical links intact. I label these failures
c<>1:rosive because they cause one character’s death and
threaten to extinguish the Day family line, but more
iquoortantly, because they indicate the reverberating ill-
effects of the original white master, Bascombe Wade. As I
‘WfiJll establish, the lack of evidence at designated sites
beepeaks a conflicted, wrongful influence among Naylor's
Peeple that can never be wholly eradicated, the will to
CCnntrol someone else, which has marked generations of Days
through their unacknowledged relation to Wade. If place is
difficult in Mama Day because, symbolically, it is expected
tC> clarify the past and does not, I am interested in what
ills difficulties point to: an unwanted tie to a white
PrOgenitor, which complicates the meaning of ownership in a
Irlinority-strengthened South, and on another level, the
f1Tustrations of trying to ascertain a southern African-

AIl'lerican essence (a vital goal for Naylor’s characters). I

90

will consider whether Mama Day manifests and legitimizes a
southern Black essence, to determine its indispensability
(as far as Naylor is concerned) for minority grounding in a
region overwhelmingly hostile. Ultimately I intend to
figure whether some groups in the South are due a collective
essence more than others.

Uncertainty around Willow Springs is not confined to
sacred sites or the Days’ historical record: the island
itself, physically speaking, borders the edge of
believability, and for this reason more than others,
Southern literary studies is ill-prepared to treat the
Cilr'namics of place in Naylor’s novel. Critics as highly
eSteemed as Eudora Welty have predisposed the field toward
literary realism: with regard to place and southern writing,
SCholars expect credible settings which approximate scenes
tZhey recognize from personal experience; “ordinary" versions
of the South, which invite readers’ trust and familiarity
(due to the author’s choice of detail from the world around
hitn); and locations that are safe and reliable, that check
the erratic tendencies of spontaneous, wayward characters.
Willow Springs, however, could not be more at odds with such

St”—andards. Not only is the island a regional anomaly for

91

its long—standing minority ownership, but the African
spiritualism there emphasizes ghosts and conjure (voices
murmuring through surf, fatal graveyard dust, talking
cemeteries, or babies conceived from chicken eggs) to the
extent that the supernatural, or uncanny, glosses everyday
tasks and circumstances. Naylor infuses Willow Springs with
the fantastic, the eerie, daring readers to suspend our
disbelief, withholding fictional confines we might easily
grasp or identify. Even the island’s geography defies
straightforward explanation: in terms of latitude and
longitude Willow Springs sits squarely on the line dividing
Georgia and South Carolina, preventing either from laying
claim to the island, and also, prohibiting its
representation on area maps. Because of its lucky, unlikely
situatedness, technically Willow Springs enjoys a legal
statelessness. It can sequester itself from the rules and
extractions of state sovereignty, in a region of American
where, traditionally, allegiance to the state supersedes
even federal obligations. “
If Mama_2ay opposes southern studies’ preference for

realistic scenes —- as defined by the criticism -- it does

not discard plausibility altogether or its own

92

interpretations of real. Islanders regard most
idiosyncrasies around them as natural and commonplace; their
impression of what is incarnate and irrefutable is as vital
to them as the phenomena are bizarre or unreconciliable for
outsiders. Hence in its otherworldliness and
exceptionalism, Willow Springs does not overturn the
possibility of realism so much as encourage southern
literary studies to accommodate different versions of the
“actual” South. While Naylor’s voodoo-inclined, stateless,
intensely Afro-centric setting may not match some critics’
tastes for the familiar, and further, may undermine
stereotypical pictures of the South that have long been the
field’s obsession, regional studies should not pick and
choose among circulating images of the South: scholars need
to assess all of the region, incongruities included, however
it is being represented.

Another lesson for southern critics is Naylor’s
flexibility with the function of place. In her depictions
of Willow Springs, place does not amount (merely) to a
particular site, a marked-out, passive space which
characters traverse or fill. More than physical extent,

place in Mama_hay is a conundrum: sites are difficult to

93

negotiate, in terms walking/working through them and moving
forward (the moon’s shadows may play tricks with characters’
eyes, seeming to block paths, or a bridge may be out, or a
well that one needs access to may be bolted shut), but more
importantly, they raise questions which the novel leaves
unresolved. One example from among many is the other place.
Here, at the Day family homestead that islanders believe to
be possessed, a local woman suffering from infertility is
mysteriously impregnated. The ritual performed on her
requires the first new moon of the spring and a chicken on
the verge of delivering its eggs, and it absolutely must be
completed at the other place. Naylor’s description of this
island sacrament is heavily symbolic and arcane: we are
never sure exactly what transpires between the presiding
griot, the woman, and the “pulsing” chicken egg, but the
woman does bear a child later that same year; moreover, it
is never clear what the other place contains that would
ensure the operation’s success (140). What happened out
there, and why out there? Naylor’s settings can be hard to
fathom because confounding developments take place on their
grounds; not only are the sites’ physical characteristics

disorienting, but the issues or doubts that issue from these

94

settings hang in the air, unconfirmed and unsettled. Rather
than offer recognizable scenes to establish mutual grounds
with readers -- which would satisfy southern literary
criticism’s preference for settings that reassure and
encourage our trust -- Naylor uses unwieldy locations to
test our faith in her story. Her challenge for southern
studies is to discern the puzzles and predicaments of
southern sites, to figure what their loose threads indicate
about the region’s makeup. Since such open-ended elements
dismantle a secure sense of place, we need to theorize the
effects of “the South” without requiring a smoothly-
assembled picture of the region, wherein all its parts fit
together agreeably and supplement a well-rounded,
decipherable whole.

As an example of the vertigo often associated with
Naylor’s island, I want to examine a map at the novel’s
opening which, sequentially, readers have to get past to
reach Naylor’s narrative. Interpreting the map is an
exercise in spatial maladjustment: it is gorgeously complex
and hard to cipher. Readers’ difficulty with the drawing
foreshadows the problems of place Naylor’s characters

encounter as they search for family truths at sacred sites;

95

also, the map illustrates why we need critical approaches
other than (or in addition to) literary realism to address

enigmas of place within the bounds of southern culture.

Just after Naylor’s title page and dedication, the
first text readers encounter in Mama_hay is a rich, black—
and—white, flower-laden map of Willow Springs. The sketch
positions the island off the Georgia/South Carolina coast,
with a bridge running from the point of these states’
dividing line to the even middle of Willow Springs; notably,
since the island lies as squarely in one state as another,
it falls under neither’s jurisdiction. The map's most
looming features are Willow Springs itself, drawn large and
complete compared to the fragmented chip of mainland, and a
collection of teeming Queen Anne’s lace, morning glories,
and marsh grass, which appear to consume the mainside, spill
over an enlarged image of the rickety, wooden bridge, and
lean out toward Willow Springs and the Atlantic. A sense of
exoticism and fecundity prevails with this map, from the

lush flowers to the sign designating geographic direction,

96

 

 

 

97

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/ .
\ / . 1‘
‘ ’1’, W}! ‘ ‘3

ATLANTIC OCEAN

m N".

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Figure 1

1993)

The Map at the Opening of Mama Day (Random House,

with North, South, East and West etched on the four tips of
a sand dollar shell.

In terms of deciphering Mama Day’s opening document,
human geographers’ recent assessment of cartography, the art
or technique of mapmaking, provides some useful evaluative
tools. Cartography has long operated in the West as a
scientific discourse; it is a field convinced of its
subject’s direct access to and representation of reality, or
in other words, the map’s status as factually true
technology. Since the mid eighties human geographers have
called cartography’s positivist assumptions into question,
most often using deconstructive strategies to expose
“hidden” political agendas behind official maps of state, to
break the easy trust in maps as geographical or historical
records, and to stress the rhetoricity of any mapmaking
effort (Harley, “Deconstructing" 232-33, 239). In this vein
J. B. Harley asserts that all maps, “scientific or non-
scientific, basic or derived” “state an argument about the
world, and... are propositional in nature”

(“Deconstructing” 241, 242). With the terms “argument” and
“propositional” Harley signals a refrain common to his

writings: that any map “is an art of persuasive

98

 

communication” and works hard to invoke authority
(“Deconstructing” 242). Graham Huggan, who supports the
idea that maps are invitations to modes of seeing rather
than objective copies of landscapes, helpfully adds, “the
‘reality’ represented mimetically by the map not only
conforms to a particular version of the world but to a
version which is specifically designed to empower its
makers” (118).

I am intrigued to consider what perspectives Mama Day’s
map advances as well as the character of its authority. We
can begin by noting the power it overturns, the geography
traditionally imposed by white southern government; the map
curtails state and federal dominion, the standards by which,
in American culture, places are measured and fixed. Georgia
and South Carolina are reduced to a strip of seaboard and
provide more a relational background for readers (cues of
familiarity, as with the sign, “Atlantic Ocean”) than a
determining or overarching presence. What the map promotes
instead is Willow Springs itself, just as the narrative of
Naylor’s written text begins with the two-word sentence,
“Willow Springs.” And just as the island is arguably the

map’s largest, most conspicuous item -- certainly the one

99

 

 

 

presented in greatest detail, partitioned off as it is ——
likewise throughout the book Naylor confers on Willow
Springs a special aura. Mama Day features the island as
originary, as a kind of southern paradise, and as a
destination for characters who wander too far and too long
mainside. Thus Willow Springs, Naylor’s solution to, or
replacement for, shrunken images that white place—control
offers, bears the qualities of permanence, divine blessing,
and a fateful magnetism, all of which point to the island’s
particular kind of power. With the map I have already
referred to a pervading sense of exoticism; correspondingly,
across the novel Willow Springs is figured as other-worldly
and marked by conjure-woman magic. The authority of the
aging griot, Miranda (Mama) Day, for example, or of the
“great, grand Mother” Sapphira Wade, lies in the African
magico-religious tradition, and their contact with this
power has literally enabled the Black community to exist and
protected Willow Springs’ longevity (48). The power behind
and diffused throughout the island, then, is profoundly
Black-oriented, well—tuned to natural elements, and for most

outsiders, almost entirely unbelievable.

100

 

This is also the power invoked by the map at the text’s
beginning. The enlarged size and profusion of flowers, the
use of black as a dominant background in the drawn portions,
lending a rich depth to the picture, the second image of the
bridge at the bottom of the map, emphasizing its wooden and
homemade construction, and the fact that this bridge extends
from the mainland out toward -- what? -- we cannot be sure,
just as we cannot be sure of the shadowy island with its one
road and scattered, leaning buildings -- all these elements
summon an other-worldiness, a strange beauty, definitely,
but all the same, a beauty that is strange and unusual.3
And it is precisely the map’s peculiar unfamiliarity which
determines its proposition: namely, reader, will you step
over to the other side? Will you suspend your disbelief,
accept the island’s brand of normalization, and trust in
Willow Springs’ conjurin’ power? The invitation the map
extends is faith in an unknown place. The recognizable
bearings of Georgia, South Carolina, the Sound, and the
Atlantic might ease us toward committing, with the promise
that Willow Springs approximates something we know, yet if
we resemble the social scientist with his tape recorder, who

runs around the island spewing questions without respecting

101

 

font“
1

 

locals’ manners and integrity, or George Andrews in the
chicken coop, with a revelation before his eyes that he
simply cannot see -- if we resemble these seekers and cannot
affirm the island’s premise, once we cross the bridge South
Carolina may seem minuscule and distressingly far away (10).
I do not use the term “faith” casually. It is the only
means for characters and readers to find their way around

Willow Springs; it enables them to ask for directions they

 

may never fully understand, directions which, nonetheless,
they must trust and follow to discern significant island
markers. Naylor makes clear this trust-and—seek dynamic by
describing an unbeliever’s mistake. In her introductory ten
pages of the novel, the communal narrative voice recounts
the tale of a local woman’s son, identified only as “Reema’s
boy -- the one with the pear-shaped head” (7). He was
raised on Willow Springs but “never picked a boll of cotton
or head of lettuce in his life -— Reema spoiled him silly,”
and when the young man goes mainside for post-secondary
education, any island-savvy he had possessed he loses
completely (7). Transformed into an over-earnest graduate
student, Reema’s boy returns to Willow Springs for a subject

for his Master’s thesis. He finds one in the island saying,

102

 

“18 & 23," and determines to explain it rationally (7). The
communal narrative voice insists that Reema’s boy could
easily learn what he needs by knowing “how to ask... [and]
how to listen,” and had he done so, that “we woulda obliged
him” (emphasis added, 10, 8). If he would listen
sensitively and credit islanders’ suggestions, he would
likely discern Willow Springs’ most meaningful landmarks.
Reema's boy would have been directed to Abigail’s, where he
would receive mint to chew (“thirsty or not”) and
instructions to Mama Day’s trailer; where, because of the
sweet mint on his breath, he would be instructed in island
lore and guided close to a sacred patch of oak; there Mama
Day would insist that the young man put moss in his shoes.
Left alone and with his shoes untied, Reema’s boy might spy
an “old graveyard just down the slope,” and another after
that, and another after that (9). According to the communal
voice, had Reema’s boy followed these rituals to reach
Willow Springs’ pivotal destinations, he “coulda heard from
[island spirits] everything there was to tell about 18 & 23"
(9-10).

But he does not. School has made him a smart “raving

lunatic,” and his inquiries ring false to the locals, who

103

 

 

perform for the boy rather than direct him to proper paths
(8). Ignoring “the fields [islanders] had to stop farming
back in the ‘805,” Miss Abigail’s house, and Mama Day’s
silver trailer, Reema’s boy draws his own conclusions,

“talking into his little gray machine” about topics such as

“‘ethnography,’ ‘unique speech patterns,’ [and] ‘cultural
preservation” (7). In the end he determines that:
18 & 23 wasn’t 18 & 23 at all -- was really 81 &

32, which just so happened to be the lines of longitude
and latitude marking off where Willow Springs sits on
the map. And we [locals] were just so damned dumb that
we turned the whole thing around. (8)
The communal voice faults this young man for blindness and
intellectual jargon. Instructively, at the end of this
section Naylor discloses that Reema’s boy’s failure warns us
about the right attitude for reading. We can plunge ahead
with our modern—day, skeptical edge (how many people do I
know who have put the book down because they cannot figure
what happens at the other place with Bernice Duvall’s
pregnancy?), or we can affirm the island’s parameters by
playing according to its rules, the first of which is to
believe in a place that balks all explanation. On shaky

ground, completely befuddled, we have to “know how to ask"

and “know how to listen” (10). If we do not, we may repeat

104

 

 

the graduate student’s error, who reduces his childhood home
to a mistaken anomaly.

Perhaps as a ruse to compound our vertigo, even if we
proceed with the map and “cross over [to the island] from
beyond the bridge,” we learn that mapping perpetually causes
trouble for the island community (3). Just as we try to
make sense of Naylor’s lyrical first ten pages, how the very
existence of Willow Springs is tied up in the legend of a
woman who “don’t live in a part of our memory we can use to
form words,” what the island-exclusive phrase, the catch-all
phrase “18 & 23” points to, or how it is possible that
“Willow Springs ain’t in no state” -— just as we try to
absorb these incongruities, Naylor warns us of potentially
negative effects from our proceeding. The narrative voice
explains “part of Willow Springs's problems was that it got
put on some maps right after the War Between the States" and
then goes on to describe the deceitful lures of commercial
development and inane conjectures of Reema’s boy, whose
primary motivation is “to put Willow Springs on the map”

(7). Caught and bewildered! Already we have opened the
book, engaged a map, and are complicit in possibly setting

off a negative chain of events. But just as George and

105

 

_I

 

i
L,

 

Cocoa cannot un—cross the bridge during their disastrous and
baneful visit, we cannot undo our reading. Mama Day has
fated our discomfort, our sense of trespass, and
importantly, Naylor determines that discomfort with regard
to Willow Springs applies to us all. While it is true that
by sifting through the novel non-Black readers, and
especially white readers, should sense that we are treading
on another group’s guarded territory (and for southern white
readers, grounds which, historically, we have tried to
appropriate and exploit); and while non—Black readers, and
whites especially, must realize that at best, we are what
critic Jocelyn Donlon calls Naylor’s “secondary audience”
(18); still, Naylor impresses that possession of Willow
Springs is also difficult for African-American characters
(importantly, for reasons other than it is difficult for
white readers).4 First of all, Mama Day qualifies the act
of ownership -- it is always conferred two generations down
-- so that, theoretically, Willow Springs may never be sold
(219). More profoundly, the islanders straddle two home
countries: this one in America, effected out of their
wrongful past captivity, and the mother land, Africa, the

looming signifier which amounts to forced loss, the

106

characteristics of that loss even unknown and un-named.
Within the confines of Willow Springs there is always the
shadow of that other place, which bears so strongly on the
islanders’ magico-religiOus tradition and customs like
Candle Walk, but direct access to that native land is never
realized, only fragments of a historical path. Place in
Mama Day is, if anything, a process of sifting through these
fragments -- the black ledger, nearly inscrutable from
“years of dampness,” the screams issuing from the well of

Peace, the voices whispering, “waste. waste,” at the bluff

(279, 248). Place in Naylor’s novel arouses a hopeful state
of dislocation -- hopeful because of the anticipation of
discovery -- of feeling confused and undone while doggedly

working back to a story of the origins of the Days.

Characters who track genealogical information at
Naylor’s sacred, or designated, locations include Miranda
(Mama) Day, her grandneice, Ophelia, and Ophelia’s husband,
George Andrews. Because Ophelia’s pilgrimage scarcely

begins by the novel’s end, I will focus on Miranda’s and

107

 

 

George’s searches; notably, both scour Willow Springs
because they are driven by the same despair, fear of
Ophelia’s well-being. During George and Ophelia’s first
visit to Willow Springs, a jealous island neighbor, Ruby,
poisons Ophelia by braiding her hair, because Ruby
outrageously suspects the younger woman of making advances
on Ruby’s husband. The hex is shockingly insidious: through
the braids, the poison seeps into Ophelia’s scalp, causing a
heavy, dead-weight sleep and then delirium and
hallucinations, until at last it transforms into putrid,
clawing worms, which literally threaten to eat Ophelia
alive. George is beside himself: a foreigner from New York
City, he refuses to believe that voodoo, or in George’s
words, “mumbo-jumbo,” lies behind his wife’s ailment, and
more critically, that a specific ritual he alone can perform
might save her. George is desperate to find conventional
medical help, but by a terrible stroke of coincidence,
Ophelia’s hex sets in during one of the worst hurricanes in
Willow Springs in sixty years; the storm has obliterated the
bridge to the mainland, and George feels “marooned” in a
backwards, “godforsaken place” (266, 256). He panics. He

runs wildly, exhaustedly, about the island, helping a small

108

 

crew of men rebuild the bridge (a maddeningly slow
endeavor), trying to patch a small boat to row Ophelia
across The Sound (despite the fact that George cannot swim),
but primarily, George concentrates on ignoring islanders’
advice about the hex. He rages at their suggestions of what
really plagues his wife or how he can cure her, trusting
instead what he sees before him and the tasks he can
complete with his own two hands.

It is Willow Springs’ wise, old griot gifted with
visionary and conjurin’ powers, Mama Day, who alone grasps
the full implications of Ophelia’s illness. Only she knows
what information is required to save her grandniece, intuits
where to look, and can direct George in his role in
restoring Ophelia’s health and sanity. After the hurricane
Miranda heads to the other place, the Day ancestral
homestead, to try to salvage what she can of the great,
grand Mother’s garden and assess any damage on the house
Bascombe Wade built. There she senses Ophelia’s condition
before being told, and when news does come, Miranda stares
into the roaring fire under the huge family hearth: that
hearth has drawn in generations of Days, back to her

father’s talent for carving wood and her mother’s demented

109

and endless rocking, back even several families prior, to
ancient herbs drying near the blaze and “the woman who began
the Days” (262). Peeling back layers of time around this
centralized gathering spot, Miranda realizes that Ruby’s hex
feeds off of repeated misunderstandings between Day men and
Day women. The poison has tapped into a cyclical family
problem: women whose longing and grief pushed them away from
their loved ones, with an obsessive desire to leave, and
“the blood from the broken hearts of the men who [those
women] cursed for not letting them go” (263). For Ophelia
to live, Miranda needs to know more about what tore former
couples apart, what dread error keeps repeating in Day
history. Scaring her most of all, ultimately Miranda needs
George to correct that error and restore the union that for
centuries has been lost.

Miranda’s search for information centers on the other
place because Naylor endows it with the aura of a
destination. A site that holds answers. Throughout Mama
hay Miranda is drawn to the homestead to solve Bernice
Duvall’s infertility, for example, or consider legends about
Day origins that the December celebration, Candle Walk,

raises. The other place is full of Day artifacts, remnants

110

 

holding the touch of ancestral hands: Miranda’s father’s
woodwork, her mother’s rocking chair, clay jars for dried
flowers and herbs from a time far past Miranda’s experience.
No one has lived there for years —- most islanders refuse to
go to the other place, afraid of its ghosts and voices -- so
that it seems locked in an earlier period. After confirming
Ophelia’s dire state, Miranda sequesters herself at the
other place, waiting for explanations to questions she
cannot quite form; she does not know what she is looking
for, but nonetheless, she goes over the family grounds and
patiently bides her time. Instinctively Miranda expects “a
missing key” to “the door to help Baby Girl” out at the old
Day manse (280).

Mama Day’s intentional searching goes unrewarded. She
cannot will the house to speak to her, even when she tries
tactics that have stirred visions there before. It is only
when Miranda stops trying and attends unthinkingly to tasks
at hand that revelations come: Naylor makes the looking and
finding seem divinely led and fated. There are three
moments of epiphany. First, Miranda discovers fragments of
the Day progenitor’s name. Fixing a leaky roof at the other

place, in a small corner of the rafters Miranda finds a

111

 

crumbling, water-logged ledger with a slip of paper in the
back. She is able to decipher the paper as a bill of sale
for “one negress” to “Mister Bascombe Wade of Willow
Springs,” but what Miranda most prizes, the name of the
woman, is illegible -- all she can read are the first two
letters, “Sa...” (280). Racking her brain for every “Sa-”
combination she can imagine, Miranda busies herself with
housework, at every turn proposing and then dismissing
another possibility for her foremother’s name. Only when
she forgets herself and concedes to sleep is the second sign
unveiled. Dreaming, Miranda “finally meets Sapphira,” but
as a vast light of maternal sustenance, not a name (282).
Mama Day opens “door upon door upon door,” entreating “Tell
me your name,” but what is revealed to her is a set of
instructions rather than any complete answer: she must “look
past the pain” and “go out and uncover the well where Peace
died” (282). Her second clue, like her first, indicates
more searching.

The site Miranda is directed to, the well at the other
place, has been shut tight for almost a century, since
Miranda was a little girl. It is the scene of family

tragedy: Miranda’s sister, Peace, fell in and drowned as a

112

 

 

toddler. Their mother, Ophelia, lost her mind with grief,
and their father, John-Paul, bolted the well shut to keep
his wife from jumping down. Miranda has a time trying to
pry off his lid, and when she does, she waits uncertainly
for something to happen. At last the oracle erupts in
screams, high-pitched and excruciating. Miranda fights the
urge to run. “Look past the pain,” she thinks, and closing
her eyes, she tries to see into the awful sound (284). What
she spies is a series of vignettes:
A woman in apricot homespun: Let me go with peace. And
a young body falling, falling toward the glint of
silver coins in the crystal clear water. A woman in a
gingham shirtwaist: Let me go with Peace. Circles and
circles of screaming. Once, twice, three times peace
was lost at that well. How was [Miranda] ever gonna
look past this kind of pain? (284)
When she opens her eyes they rest “on her own hands,” hands
that remind her of her father’s (285). And then she
understands. Miranda begins to concentrate on the other
side of Day pain: the Day men and their hands that
restrained the women they loved, out of love, trying to stay
their partners; she perceives the losses each of these men
sustained anyway, from the trying. “Looking past the

losing," Miranda “feel[s] for the man who built this house

[Bascombe Wade] and the one who nailed this well shut"

113

 

(285). She feels “the hope in [the men] that the work of
their hands could wipe away all that had gone before. Those
men believed -- in the power of themselves, in what they
were feeling” (285). What Miranda learns at the well is
that the Day story is not exclusively about Sapphira or the
scrap of a name. The link Miranda needs for Ophelia’s well-
being is the only thing that can bring the Baby Girl peace:
Ophelia’s partner George’s hand, and the belief in that hand
that “connects... with all the [men’s] believing that had
gone before” (285). Miranda needs George’s trust and his
inevitable tie to the Day forefathers: “by holding her hand
she could guide him safely through that extra mile where the
others had stumbled” (285). Like the first two revelations,
Miranda’s third betokens more searching, but this time the
foreigner George’s quest, out of her domain.

George is an unwilling seeker. Ophelia’s illness,
combined with the fact that the hurricane has stranded them
on Willow Springs, make him half-crazed and single-minded:
he must get Ophelia across The Sound to standard medical
facilities. Natives plead with him to consult Mama Day, to
combat Ruby’s strange business the island’s way, but George

scoffs at “Snakeroot. Powdered ashes. Loose hair. Chicken

114

 

 

blood” and resolves to “work until I dropped to get you

[Ophelia] out of there" (287). He finally breaks down when,

after tiresome days and nights working on the bridge and no
end in sight, another man convinces him to make the journey
to the other place. George can hardly find his way, but as
he stumbles onto the scene, Mama Day’s instructions repulse
him: she tells him to take her daddy’s walking cane and the
black ledger, go to the chicken coop outside her trailer,
and bring her back whatever he finds in the old red hen’s
nest. Furious at “these games" in the face of Ophelia’s

deterioration, George “hate[s] [himself] for the weakness

that had taken me into those back woods,” and rushes home to

check his wife (296). When he finds Ophelia screaming in
the shower, and calming her, realizes she does have maggot-
like worms chewing the insides of her body, George returns
to Mama Day, “beaten down to believe,” and takes the cane
and the ledger (299). Reaching the coop, heading to the
northwest corner for the old red hen’s nest, George is
Startled by the intensity of the hen’s attack; she tries
pecking his eyes and rips the flesh on his hands; she flies
at him in murderous onslaughts. Between her assaults and

his throwing her off, George finally seizes the nest, only

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1

 

to find, “Nothing. There was nothing there -- except for my
gouged and bleeding hands. Bring me straight back whatever
you find” (300).

The answer to George’s search, nothing, or at best, his
hands, is not a solution that makes sense to him or one he
is prepared to test. He sinks to his knees with “tight,
airless laughter” and considers of the revelation, “All of
this wasted effort when these were my hands, and there was
no way I was going to let you [Ophelia] go” (301). Somehow
George manages to drag himself across the road to Ophelia,
grab her shoulders -- because he would keep her -- when his
heart bursts and he dies. Although Ophelia slowly recovers
and is saved, Naylor stresses the tragedy of George’s
unnecessary sacrifice: with a measure of faith in the weird
and supernatural, he could have overcome the Day curse,
lifted Ophelia’s hex, and walked away from the island with
his wife. But as Mama Day observes, “He went and did it his
own way, so he ain’t coming back” -- a realization that
sends her tears streaming, since the griot regrets the
Carnage and waste which a hand in her palm would have

avoided (3 02) .

116

Characters’ hopes about place, about the explanations
of Day history sacred sites might yield, are only partially
fulfilled. Miranda and George are directed to locales which
hold special significance, which preserve material ties to
former Days, and are led to believe that the solution to
Ophelia’s peace will be revealed in those places. What they
find are contingent half-answers. They each find something
that approximates an answer, or an important clue, but that
relies on other unknowns to be fully revelatory. These
include fragments of the original Day mother’s name; in a
dream, meeting the shape and presence of that foremother but
still not learning her name, and feeling pressed to carry
the search elsewhere; at the well, discovering that
Ophelia’s malady stems from generations of misunderstanding
between Day men and Day women, but realizing only an
uncontrolled factor (the outsider George’s skeptical search)
can assuage old wrongs; at the chicken coop, George finding
nothing but his hands, which means everything to Mama Day
and pure absurdity to the doubtful New Yorker. It is not
that sacred sites are empty or reveal the “nothing” George
thinks he uncovers. Oracles in Mama Day do speak, but their

‘messages are multiple (there is no one disclosure that

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clinches the knowledge needed for Ophelia’s recovery),
incomplete, and dependent on other, uncharted territory.
Answers denote lack: the rest of Sapphira’s name and her
questionable relation to the man who purchased her; the
resentment and communicative roadblocks -- which can never
fully be recovered -— bottled up in past tragedy, the
drowning at the well; George’s inability to trust what he
cannot see, when Willow Springs’ secrets spring from
haunting and African magico-religious precepts.
Importantly, Naylor’s partial answers are almost all
irresolute. Even after George’s sacrifice, when Mama Day
admits his pursuit “opened... memor[ies]” that make her
visits to the other place redundant, she still does not know
Sapphira’s name and passes that search to her grandniece,
Ophelia. Miranda relays to George’s spirit:
I can’t tell you her name, ‘cause it was never opened
to me. That’s a door for the child of Grace to walk
through. And how many, if any, of them seven sons were
his [Bascombe Wade’s]? Well, that’s also left for
’[Ophelia] to find. (308)
Soon after this passage Mama Day ends, with a forty-
something Ophelia making regular visits to the island, her

face “given the meaning of peace” and “ready to go in search

of answers" (312). But Naylor does not launch Ophelia’s

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investigation: questions set aside for the grandniece remain
open, with only a promise that they will be worked through.
Ultimately, then, Willow Springs does not reveal a
resounding confrontation, or a crux of the story, or a
simple cause-and-effect unfolding that makes the Day family
history clear. No definitive revelation awaits Miranda or
George at the end of their pursuits; if a site is marked as
consequential, it stirs as many questions as family memories
and hinges on other missing information to be absolute or
fully comprehensible. Willow Springs does not account for
itself completely -- its peculiarities of custom and
orientation, its spotty past that is responsible for so many
of the island’s rules and exclusions. Yet by the close of
the novel, because of their seeking, characters know more of
Willow Springs’ legacy than before they probed its grounds,
and their inhabitance there is less precarious. In Naylor’s
last sentences, as Ophelia and Mama Day commune silently at
another sacred spot, the rise over The Sound where Miranda’s
mother committed suicide, we read: “Under a sky so blue it’s
stopped being sky, one is closer to the circle of oaks (the

Day graveyard) than the other. But both can hear clearly

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that on the east side of the island and on the west side,
the waters were still” (312).

That Willow Springs never produces a comprehensive
picture of Day origins, especially in light of the
anticipation surrounding George and Miranda’s searches,
suggests an ambivalence toward southern African-American
essence -— either that Naylor herself feels, or as part of
the message she conveys about Black genesis in the American
South. I read these searches as germane to southern
Black essence for two reasons. One, because Naylor
distinguishes the Days as primordial. They are the first
Black community to control the island paradise, and
apparently the only community on Willow Springs since it was
discovered by Wade’s ancestors, the Vikings (5). Not only
their exclusive, age-old status (exclusive in the sense that
the Days have been the only established group on the island)
but also their divinely inspired proprietorship makes the
Days seem chosen, their control of Willow Springs
inevitable: Naylor associates Sapphira’s mothering and
progeny with the Old Testament Genesis story. Sapphira
rests on “the seventh day” (her seventh son), just like God,

and names her offspring after major and minor prophets.

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These Biblical allusions in Naylor’s opening document, the
Day genealogy, impress that the Days are a primary African-
American lineage, authorized by unforeseen powers.
Subsequently, George and Miranda’s pursuits for missing
links in the family chronicle imply quests for fundamental
information -- fundamental because they could explain a
crucial beginning for southern American Blacks, what about_
them enabled their success in a region defiantly set against
them. What about the Days makes them chosen and unique?
George and Miranda’s searching carries the undertone of
revealing the family’s pain, yes, but also the secrets of
their dominion and legitimacy.

A second correlation between the Days and southern
Black essence is Willow Springs’ evocation of Africa.
Through its typographic features, Sea Island setting, and
legendary conjure woman, Sapphira Wade, Willow Springs
summons the yearning expressed by Black American culture for
the lost African Motherland.5 Because the island looks and
feels like the west African coast, and more to the point,
preserves idioms, beliefs and practices from the great,
grand Mother who hailed from Africa and eventually returned

to her homeland, there is the sense that it approximates

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that other place, that it is purely derivative. Willow
Springs bears a stamp of genuine Black American experience:
it is where an African matriarch left evidence of herself
and willed the freedom of an originary African-American
line. Contributing to the island’s archetypal status, the
character George recalls the stereotype of the jaded Black
northerner who comes South looking for his people’s
authenticity, which has been watered down through Black
migration from the South to northern and midwestern cities.
With his rapture over Willow Springs’ beauty (George says it
“smell[s] like forever,” that its early morning air is “more
than pure, it was primal” [175, 185]) and urge to remain on
the island and “play Adam and Eve” with Ophelia, George
reinforces the aura that Willow Springs is “another world,”
a magic Black wonderland which “call[s] up old, old
memories” (222, 175, 184). His conviction that Ophelia’s
roots are “solid enough to be able to walk over,” more real
than his own foundling heritage, and that, through his wife,
he would like to join in “oWn[ing] this land,” where “I had
only to listen to the pulse of my blood” to fathom Willow
Springs’ eccentricities, echoes the belief among some

African Americans that the South retains the soul of their

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race (219, 214).6 Places like Willow Springs are subject to
Black pilgrimages, historically and metaphorically, because,
as Jean Toomer attests in Qahe, the Dixie Pike “has grown
from a goat path in Africa”: the South nourishes a Black
vitality because it is shaped by the enormity of African
slaves’ loss, their stolen homeland (12). African-Americans
can more closely approach the point of a slave ship’s
landing in the South. Accordingly, Naylor plants rich seeds
of African influence across her island -- Mama Day’s
conjure, the pattern of headstones in the Day family
graveyard, the standing forth at Little Ceasar’s funeral --
to impress how remnants of the motherland, even if not fully
understood, are a lifeline for the community in times of
struggle or crisis.7 Sentiments and pieces of the African
bond appear all round, usually in some disclosure regarding
Sapphira that confuses more than satisfies. And if Mama Day
and/or George can reach back to the start of Day history,
their searches might explain more than what transpired
between Sapphira and Bascombe Wade. Their searches might
shed light on what distinguishes African-Americans as a

people, in their wrenching from.Africa and forced stock in

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the New World -- what about Africa’s encounter with the
American South forged the mettle of a new social group.

Just because answers to Miranda and George’s place—
bound quests are more elusive than determining does not mean
expectations for Willow Springs are misplaced. It does not
mean the island is devoid of the information characters need
-- about the Days, about the strange improbability of their
origins -- but that details may never be clear-cut. Answers
are both suggested and put off: every nuance about the past
cannot be known. Naylor does not reward characters’
searching with resolutions; at the same time, she in no way
belittles their efforts. Encouragingly, George and Miranda
each come away with more knowledge than when they began, and
in the end Ophelia is saved. Miranda may never learn to
name Sapphira, but what she does discover, the “Sa,”
prepares her for the dream and directions to the well. By
the novel’s close Miranda has pieced together enough
information to conclude her visits to the other place (where
there are “no more secrets that’s left for her to find”) and
frame Ophelia’s future quests (307). Similarly, George may
fail with his interpreting in the chicken coop, but he does

stumble on the answer Miranda needs him to return with, and

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even though he refuses to offer his hands to the old conjure
woman, George realizes they are all that can help his wife.
He takes his hands and pure will to Ophelia, determined to
keep her with him, grasps her, and then dies. George
intuits enough to reclaim Ophelia’s life, and even in death
he remains poised over the island, a vital spirit for
Ophelia to converse with, to “retrac[e] our steps [and try]
to find exactly what brought us to this slope near The
Sound” (310). But what Ophelia learns in retrospect,
conferring with her sacrificed husband, is that there is no
single cause for their parting. She admits to George’s
specter:
I still don’t have a photograph of you. It’s a lot
better this way, because you change as I change. And

each time I go back over what happened, there’s some
new development, some forgotten corner that puts you in

a slightly different light.... [Wlhen I see you again,
our versions will be different still.... Because what
really happened to us, George? You see, that’s what I
mean -- there are just too many sides to the whole
story. (310-11)

Naylor’s dynamic of seek-and-find-incompletely signals
a complicated response to Black essence in the American
South. Certainly the novel presents the Days as a select
people, with a history stretching back seemingly before time

began, with artifacts and oracles marking their property

125

which purportedly embody the family’s character, unique
hubris, and facts of their rightful possession. With much
fanfare, Naylor sends George and Miranda to Willow Springs’
sacred, supposedly revelatory sites, and both do find
tokens, or signs, to help account for the beginning of the
Days. But overshadowing what they find, their searches’
answers rely on other, unlaunched searches and currently
shrouded information —- and this is the alternate side of
Naylor’s position on essence, the side that is not so sure.
Naylor suggests the positing of essence is an important
process for African-Americans: the Days believe and act on a
notion of propitious, shared beginnings, and because of
their faith in shared origins, and their certainty those
origins are sanctified, their cohesion as a group is strong.
Politically, they have endured as an identifiable sector
across seven generations and exerted their own force and
control: whites have been unable to confiscate Day freedom
or Day land, even amidst the turmoil of southern
Reconstruction, and into the twenty-first century, Willow
Springs remains self-governing. The Days enjoy a solidarity
that applies not only to their ownership, but to a

collective identity bound in common roots: an obvious

126

 

example is their communal narrative voice, a subconscious
voice that dares to summon unspoken, island—wide divination,
what “everybody knows but nobody talks about,” “the legend
of Sapphira Wade” (3). That voice discloses every
inhabitant’s sixth sense: a barrage of different stories
about Sapphira and Bascombe Wade, the core rapacity of white
southerners, what happens when island natives wander too
long mainside, and the various shades of meaning behind “18
& 23” (3—8). Distinguished in their thinking and feeling by
the peculiarities of Willow Springs, and by their mutual
respect for a past which sets them apart but which they
cannot fully discern, the Days adhere to their rare
election. They try to uncover basic truths about their
substance as a people because they are singularly successful
-- as Black folks, the Days defy social and legal odds in
the South —- and they are more formidable for their belief
in their special derivation, the vein that inimitably
qualifies Day character.

But Naylor is unwilling to isolate what exactly about
Black ties in the American South singularizes African-
American culture: she defers the recovery of any one,

singled-out vein, the vein of Day essence. If the positing

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of essence is necessary as a social gel for Naylor’s
minority group, an enabling factor, equally so, essence
itself is flawed and thwarted. There is no obvious key to
Willow Springs’ improbability; no clear line on Sapphira’s
revolution, or the earliest prompt for Candle Walk; no
answer to the conundrum of how the Days shall guarantee
their perpetuity. Even so, the novel insinuates that there
is “something there,” that the island does hold clues about
Black genesis and artistic expression and empowerment in
hostile, thoroughly racist environs. Although no single
take on Black individuality presents itself, and in the end
the idea of a particular Black marrow is withheld, the
promise of essence lingers throughout Mama Day, and more
importantly, a unique southern Black culture most assuredly
looms large, its manifestations direct offshoots of the
Middle Passage and old-world, mistaken shards. In Naylor’s
sphere, those shards cannot be anything other than mistaken:
characters cannot know everything about the past. It is a
condition of human experience that time and place both
invoke and maim previous occurrences.

Mama_hay also probes the meaning of ownership in a

minority-strengthened South. By all accounts Willow Springs

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is an extraordinary regional anomaly -- bequeathed for and
and managed by a group of vested, self—sufficient African
Americans. Yet islanders reside guardedly and will continue
to do so, not only because mysteries remain, but also
because vestiges of southern racism still infiltrate Willow
Springs -- despite its seclusion and inhabitants’ sure
entitlement. For there can be no such thing as an untainted
minority refuge in the American South, not in the sense of
boundaries which erase or completely repel white influence.
This does not mean the Days are misguided in their efforts
to block bigotry’s pernicious forces, to define their lives
independently of southern white culture, nor that racism is
so large and ominous it cannot be effectively resisted.
Black and white can establish worlds apart in the South but
not worlds irrespective, and this is true for both sides:
although whites have worked hard to distinguish themselves
as separate and superior, and through economic and political
advantages have systematically done so on the surface, it is
commonly accepted that vanguards of “southern” culture
(i.e., white southern culture) are comprised from a merging
of white and Black elements, or better put, from white

appropriation of Black sources -- the Uncle Remus tales from

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African folk traditions, Elvis from the Delta blues, forms
of white Protestant worship from slaves’ call-and-response
expressions. On the other hand, Blacks’ distancing from
whites is more ethically justifiable: for self—preservation,
dignity, the pursuit of happiness without “unequal”
qualifications. It seems right that southern minorities
should be able to mark off their property and designate who
is allowed access, and if historically disenfranchised
people want to exclude the traditionally privileged, then so
be it; such recompense is fitting and long overdue. Yet
Naylor disallows an all-Black, racially unadulterated
utopia, despite that her islanders are unobliging toward
whites and send unwanted intruders packing. Southern whites
do figure in Willow Springs’ politics and inhabitants’
thinking, and what is surprising and perhaps most
threatening, white influence stems from within the Day
family line. Because the hovering unknown Bascombe Wade
represents -- Willow Springs’ original white master and
likely Day progenitor -- stymies characters like Ophelia,
who cannot accept the possibility of white blood in their

veins or begin to articulate what that might mean.

130

Bascombe Wade presents a thorny, complicated figure for
the Days’ general conscience. In one sense he reminds that
the family’s possession is derivative: Wade had the land
first, straight from his Viking ancestors, and without his
claim and settlement Willow Springs never would have seen
Sapphira, his slave, or evolved into the community that it
did, so completely shaped by her conjure. Plus, Day
ownership was bestowed. Wade willingly released his land
rights to Sapphira’s children, a detail that makes it hard,
psychologically, for her progeny to separate from him; it is
confusing to position yourself at odds with an oppressor if
you feel vaguely indebted. Although some island stories
allow for clean estrangement from Wade, casting Sapphira as
a wily murderess who, before she smothered or knifed him,
took Wade’s land by working her infamous voodoo, the weight
of Naylor’s narrative does not bear this type of scenario
(3): Miranda learns that Bascombe Wade “die[d] from a broken
heart” searching up and down the main road for an African-
bound Sapphira, that the light for Candle Walk [a sacred
island tradition] “was for him” and his impossible wish to
find and detain his mistress (118). It is unclear whether

Sapphira used conjure to manipulate the man who owned her,

131

but regardless, Wade was enamored of her and “willing to
give [Sapphira] anything in the world but [the prerogative
to walk away]" (285). Another link between Wade and the
Days, besides his love and material commitment to Sapphira,
is the enduring stamp of his behavior. Wade’s fatal
decision regarding Sapphira, that “the work of his hands”
could make her stay and “wipe away all that had gone
before,” is the same miscalculation repeated by generations
of Day men -- Miranda’s father, and later George (285). In
fact Naylor strongly implies that the slaveowner begot
Sapphira’s sons, that Wade’s genes and disposition are part
of every Day's makeup: looking at her own hands Miranda is
reminded of her father’s, John—Paul’s, and contemplating her
father’s she envisions the grip of “other hands that would
not let the woman in apricot homespun go with peace” —-
Bascombe Wade’s hands (285).

The degree to which Day offspring owe allegiance or
respect to the man who founded Willow Springs, or simply
acknowledgment of some relation, is woefully problematic.
Very likely Wade is in their blood. He loved their Mama.
He set their ancestors’ free, with property to boot. Yet it

was always wrong for Wade to possess Sapphira and her babies

132

in the first place. Even if he attempted a fresh start with
Sapphira, hoping to rectify his sin of chattel slavery by
granting her children their humanity and his worldly goods,
even so, the couple’s slate could never be made clean —- not
by “the work of [Wade’s] hands [to] wipe away all that had
gone before” (285). They could never approach one another
equally, forgetting that Sapphira’s existence on Willow
Springs resulted from profound, unspeakable 1055, her
innumerable losses, which as master Wade instigated and
benefited from. Wade can never be an easy figure for the
Days because, even if he did take steps to amend his bigoted
lifestyle, even if he did come to understand the outrage of
human possession, he is forever responsible for Sapphira’s
indignities. He bought her. It was for his use,
ultimately, that Sapphira was torn from her homeland and all
she knew; because of him she could not choose a mate or path
of happiness. Because of Wade she knew the anguish of
bearing children without recognized power over their fate
and destiny -— children she may not have wanted. All Naylor
certainly reveals about this slave woman is that she was
able to secure her family’s future, and with that settled,

Sapphira seized her self-possession and returned to Africa.

133

If she did harbor feelings for Bascombe Wade, they were not
enough for her to forego what he had stolen from her.

At first glance it might seem that the complexities of
islanders’ relations to Willow Springs result from their
racialized history but not explicitly from white oppression
-- in that, since Bascombe Wade, no white has exercised
control over the island or set foot on Willow Springs more
than briefly. Implicitly, however, Wade’s legacy to the
Days entangles them in the slavemaster’s offenses, because
he is most probably their forefather and the source of their
island proprietorship. This is not to say that Sapphira’s
line is responsible for Wade’s damage or the grievances he
committed against them; nor that they should have to
identify with a man who in so many ways coerced their mother
(even if not sexually -- although Naylor leaves the question
of Sapphira’s affections open). Yet because of Bascombe
Wade the Days’ inheritance can never be wholly African, and
despite their right to side with the great, great African
mother, because of him the Days will always wonder what
aspects of the white master might surface among their kind.
Tellingly, Naylor justifies their fear of “white”

Contamination: Wade unsettles Day ownership because his

134

possessive streak, regarding his property, Sapphira, recurs
throughout Day experience, threatening Willow Springs’
survival much more than tempests or mapping quandaries.
Wade’s attitude toward Sapphira, that he can make up for the
pain between them, force her love, and make her stay, is the
same violation John—Paul Day, and later, George Andrews
commit against their spouses, the urge to control another’s
responses and bend destiny as they, the Day men, see fit.

John—Paul determines to stave off his wife Ophelia’s
descent into madness; he wants to dim the picture of their
daughter’s drowning that keeps playing inside her head, to
encourage Ophelia to rebound for their other children, to
love him enough to want to keep living. He pushes her to
get over the gulf of her grief and move on, and John-Paul
believes he can make her sound. Similarly, George Andrews
resolves to procure for (his) Ophelia the help he thinks she
needs and restore her health by means only he, among
Naylor’s characters, deems legitimate: patching a boat,
building a bridge, holding his wife with his hands. George
refuses to acknowledge that there might be other ways or
sources of recovery -- because, as Ophelia offers in

retrospect, he was fated to experience Willow Springs

135

differently than she (165). Naylor draws unmistakable links
between George and Bascombe Wade, giving George the aura of
the dead man’s chosen heir: as Miranda perceives, the vines
around Wade’s grave “twine around [George’s] knuckles, as if
they were pulling him in closer to listen, willing to hold
him there until he does” (207); and not surprisingly, it is
George who hears and empathizes with Wade’s voice (248).
George, like Wade’s direct descendant, John—Paul, is doomed
to trust himself too much with Ophelia and believes his
common sense and strength can save her.

Therefore the tendencies of the slavemaster, the man
who owned his lover and tried to bar her self-determination,
transfer tragically to men who do not own their spouses but
act as if they would —— and I make this claim realizing
John-Paul and George’s intentions toward their wives are
human and perhaps understandably familiar. But then, what
Naylor outrageously makes us wonder is, perhaps so were
Bascombe Wade’s. By placing the sting of southern racism
(in the shape of the urge to control someone else) as an
inward pressure on Willow Springs, something like which Days
themselves are susceptible to, Naylor renders White

Oppression unusually complex and emotionally approachable.

136

She demystifies it as a hardened condition of the Other,
something Black folks could never abide or admit into their
realm of possibility, and allows that even an institution
like slavery could support a range of motivations and
emotive intensity -- not just apathy, derision, or complete
disregard for a different race, but Wade’s longing,
jealousy, and unreconciliable devotion. Through the
difficulties her Black community faces, because of their
mixed lineage, Naylor suggests that racism in the South is
and is not as simple as evil white preying on innocent
Black. There is no doubting that for centuries southern
whites enslaved, dehumanized, tortured, and murdered
millions of Blacks abducted from Africa’s southwest coast,
and in this there is no confusion between who perpetuated
and who suffered from the colossal wrongdoing. Yet it is
also true that slavery was practiced in a wide variety of
ways by/on a wide variety of people, that some crossed the
lines between owner and owned and formed conflicted,
improbable bonds, that as soon as any of us believe we are
immune to bigotry’s behavioral characteristics, because we
are not white or because our ancestors were “not involved,”

we err. Time has shown prejudice to be primarily a white

137

problem and white transgression in the South, but Naylor
advises that sectionalizing bad white and good Black (as in
the Days, like the contemporary Ophelia, pitting themselves
against Wade’s image) is naive and falsely comforting.
Slavery itself was more insidious, and much more far-
reaching, than such a clean boundary. As George insists to
himself when trying to figure what transpired between
Sapphira and Bascombe Wade, “there was something more, and
something deeper, than the old historical line about slave
women and their white masters” (225).

For these three couples personally, Wade/Sapphira,
John-Paul/Ophelia, and George/Ophelia, Naylor indicates
there are some wounds which never will heal. Even with
those we love the most —- especially with those we love --
there are betrayals, calamitous accidents, terrible crossing
of stars from which people cannot recover or conquer hand in
hand. There are things we can do to each other that cannot
be undone; situations we might enter, completely unaware,
that forever negatively affect our relationships. This
applies on a larger scale to ownership in a minority-
strengthened South and new concepts of southern geography.

As far as Day ownership is concerned, there is no question

138

in the novel that Naylor’s African-American dynasty reigns
supreme on Willow Springs, that no force will strip them of
the inheritance they rightfully claim. But even in this
gated and thriving minority community, the effects of
Bascombe Wade’s slaveholding continue to plague Black
characters, posing situational and ethical dilemmas that mar
family bonds and threaten lives. Despite owning the island
the Days cannot make its regional context disappear:
slavery’s aftershocks can never fully be excised from the
South. Grounds untainted by the privilege of some and
denial of others cannot exist; the region’s foundations and
social scaffolding are too inextricably tied to injustice.
No staked-out, minority utopia can be pure in the South,
because no matter how carefully disenfranchised groups draw
lines around themselves, and define themselves apart from
white culture, the repercussions of sub-citizen treatment do
not die just because you vigorously fight them, much less if
you choose to ignore them.

By taking such an overdetermined view of racism’s
lingering imprint, I do not mean to sound a death toll for

the South or suggest minorities should never settle there.

139

Chief among Naylor’s encouragements is that Blacks deserve
and are due the fruits of their ancestors’ toil. Since the
region was built on the backs of slave men and slave women,
recompense needs to be made and/or taken, even now, even
late: African Americans can approach the South confidently,
ready to establish themselves, to seize opportunities for
regaining what their foreparents’ warranted but were denied.
African Americans can feel entitled to shares of the region
because they have significantly helped shape it; writers
like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Alice Walker, and
Ernest Gaines, artists such as Scott Joplin, John Lee
Hooker, and Johnny Mercer, and political emissaries like
Martin Luther King, Jr., Andrew Young, and Jesse Jackson
instill pride and assurance among Blacks that their people’s
contributions are among southern living’s most notable.
Even if every African-American clan does not enjoy the Days’
headstart of vested ownership, that advantage may be read
symbolically as applying to all: Mama Day is a story of
Africans’ beginnings in the New World, a confirmation that
their investments here will belatedly yield manifold
blessings for their progeny. Naylor seems to advise her

African-American southern readers: mindful of your past,

140

make your claims to home; it is time to stand up, receive,
and prosper. It is time “southern” apply to a rich palette
of people’s experiences, not just to the all-consuming
aspect of white.

In addition to a southern geography that is Black-
specific and attentive to Black areas’ restitution, Naylor
serves a good measure of celebratory Afro-centrism. Her
wide eye on a particular swath of southern territory
magnifies Willow Springs’ extraordinary, striking features;
Naylor’s Black geography, to borrow Zora Neale Hurston’s
phrase, “jumps at de sun.” An important corollary of this
atmospheric enlargement is the author’s emphasis on Black
selection: that the Days are a chosen people, that their
prominence on the island was fated, that that fate evolved
straight from the African mother’s impenetrable powers. In
Naylor’s rendering, there is something special about the
South for African Americans. Not simply because they are
due their fair share here -- although certainly possession
is crucial in her scheme -- but because they are close to
their earliest ties of African solidarity and culture (that
solidarity stronger through the humiliation of slavery than

perhaps it would have been in native Africa, because here,

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color and conditions bound together differences that, there,
tribal affiliations would have rendered distinct). Even if
the complexities of place in Mama Day prevent characters
from finding “the answer” to their African singularity, if
the maps they are stirred to use fail to solve the family’s
curse —- and alternately, the family’s dominion -- Willow
Springs provides its inhabitants tantalizing scraps of
information. Naylor’s mysteries around the island are
suggestive, stirring rather than dampening Black faith in
southern essences: she adds to a southern geography the
spark that some minority designations are “touched” and

inviolable.

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Chapter Three
Lost Causes, Lost Space:
Tracking the Void in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s
“Identity: Skin Blood Heart”

For civil rights activist and white lesbian poet Minnie
Bruce Pratt, the South poses an immediate, graphic black
hole. It is a black hole because, in Pratt’s experience,
southern communities organized and led by white males tend
to erase, or render invisible, sites and evidence of
cultural difference: Native Americans’ property rights, the
poor sides of town where mill workers live, slave blocks and
lynching trees. The region presses immediately on Pratt
because she issues from it, the daughter of a small farming
community near Selma, Alabama, and because even as an adult
living far from her birth place, Pratt finds her point of
origin bears heavily on who she is, what she sees and knows,
and how she builds more inclusive homes. As a black hole
the South is horribly graphic in that, as Pratt regrets, its
swallowing techniques depend on fear, brutality, and
bloodshed. It is a menacing place to be in or from, but
Pratt’s wanting to be away (or wishing she were from
elsewhere) does not cancel the fact of the South or its

tendencies toward exclusion and disposal. In “Identity:

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Skin Blood Heart” Pratt grapples with the downside of her
home region, the ways, for instance, southern communities
ignore certain neighborhoods, create off-limits areas, or
direct white ladies’ paths around town. With any of these
issues of orientation, Pratt strives to identify what is
lost: what the South loses in designating acceptable,
cardinal boundaries. To spin off loss (or emptiness, or
disenfranchisement), is to spin a void; it is to leave
groups of people with, literally, no place to stand. Pratt
determines to track down the voids in the Souths she has
occupied, with the hope of filling what holes she can,
helping restore (by fully recognizing) oppressed
southerners’ homes and social networks, their dignity and
their absolute right to walk about freely. Moreover, she
wants to name the black hole to avoid getting sucked in
herself, to stop further complicity with southern racism,
paternalism, with the restrictions that make the South a
sinking sand pit, superficially and politically white on
top, clutching and treacherous underneath.

Because “Identity” depicts place in the South as a
nullifying force, a dynamic that targets, excises, and

discards, and because it advocates an ethical response to

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the South’s negations, Pratt’s essay challenges southern
literary criticism to conceive of place differently, in
unflinching and unflattering new ways. Scholars in the
past, most notably Louis Rubin, Jr., have stressed the
literary category’s stabilizing influence, that place in
writing compensates for the real South’s deterioration by
offering nostalgic and idealized textual worlds. But Pratt
rejects the notion that place in literature should provide a
neat, intellectualized escape from everyday disruption and
maltreatment: “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” is a
consciously political essay, through which Pratt uses
spatial representations to uncover and intervene in southern
social discrepancies. For example, her description of
former homes reveals the extent to which security,
familiarity, and communal acceptance in the South depend on
strict and unquestioning conformity -- in Pratt’s case, on
obedience to her parents, Presbyterian upbringing, husband,
and North Carolina statutes regarding proper and permissible
sex. Place is technically demanding in her essay because it
manifests the vertigo of Pratt’s actual experience,
emotionally difficult because it testifies to her various,

distressing evictions. And Pratt never attempts to gloss

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the fissures or site-specific inhumanities in places she has
known. Her determination to expose the South’s voids and
degrees of ostracism poses a critical confrontation: if
southern studies acknowledges her work it has to begin to
theorize place as a means of dispossession. Pratt herself
provides the field with several conceptual starting points;
her essay identifies debilitating aspects of southern socio-
geography that have not been generally recognized and
grapples with their causes, their objects of harm, and the
extent of their domain. writing down the black holes, she
sets an example for ways to talk about disenfrancisment’s
spatial implications.

“Identity” reads like a quest, marked strongly by
urgency: Pratt would like to establish guidelines for
visionary homes where all types of people are welcome and
mutually respectful. But a precise blueprint for Pratt’s
utopian living situation is never attained in “Identity,”
nor in Pratt’s experience. If Pratt’s optimism for open,
nurturing homes drives the essay, in practical terms the
bulk of “Identity” deals with what, realistically, Pratt
knows is not Open or nurturing. To have a chance of

articulating her ideal, Pratt must uncover and reject the

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negative, separatist underpinnings in her current and
previous homes, all of which lie in southern territory. She
needs to absorb as full a scope as possible of her real-life
southern homes to perceive their holes and how those holes
function: where parameters stop too short or camouflage is
used to disguise undesirable areas, or how main streets
might bypass the critical landmarks of disadvantaged peOple.
Pratt wants to see everything where she lives and work
toward full integration: she wants to change how
neighborhoods are organized, what points are allowed to
touch. But Pratt is necessarily limited to what she knows.
She can move only so far as her own environs, past and
present, and her context is and has been the South: her
Alabama hometown, Chapel Hill and Fayetteville, North
Carolina, and Washington, D. C.1 In terms of the personal
reach of Pratt’s analyzing and restructuring (the exact
places she scrutinizes), “Identity: Skin Blood Heart”
focuses exclusively on the region of her birth.

A crucial aspect of “Identity” is that, structurally,
the essay wanders across Pratt’s personal history, committed
to no particular sequence. Pratt disavows a time—line

approach as she refigures the significance of prior

147

experiences; her stories about former homes skip around.
But whether her home-subjects are immediately present or in
her mind’s eye, with each Pratt struggles over the
requirements for fitting in, for familiarity with others
sharing the same environs. In her Washington neighborhood
in particular, she has trouble mastering local etiquette,
hesitating over whom to speak to, what she can assume of her
neighbors, which time of day is safest to be out. “I just
want to feel at home,” Pratt writes, “where people know me”
(12). Her efforts to be known in this place -- and
importantly, being known amounts to Pratt’s optimal
definition of home2 -- set the tone for the essay’s major
concerns: whether Pratt can comprehend the intent behind
spatial organizations in areas she has lived, whether she
has thrown up (or acquiesced to) barriers between herself
and those around her, whether she can understand the
situation of oppressed people, even if she tries, to the
degree that she may interact meaningfully with them. By
these standards home is a hard state to attain. What Pratt
laments throughout much of “Identity” is the failure of the
South, and her own failures in southern communities, to “get

a little closer to the longed—for but un-realized world,

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where we are each able to live, but not by trying to make
someone less than us, not by someone else’s blood or pain"
(13).

One of the voids Pratt faces constantly in her wide,
discriminatory South is being shut out of centers once
thought of as home. From the birth home, the marriage home,
even a Fayetteville apartment occupied alone, Pratt has been
wrenched away by family conflict and/or cultural norms and
forces. She remembers unwilled severance from her parents,
in particular, and the Alabama town in which she was raised:
the force of her differences from her family sets Pratt
apart. With her father the fact of her gender precludes any
intimacy between them. As a child she is barred from the
leisure activities available to him (no women or girls in
the pool hall or around the drugstore’s loitering circles),
but in an unusual instance where he invites her to join a
special adventure, climbing to the top of their town
courthouse, Pratt falters out of fear: “[My father] let me
crawl down: he was disgusted with me, I thought.... I had
not learned to take that height... a white girl, not a boy”
(16). Looking back Pratt registers her father’s loathing of

a reaction which, as a young female, Pratt was conditioned

149

to act out; she is estranged from him because of prescribed
cultural roles which enfeeble her (and which throughout the
essay her father’s figure reinforces). When Pratt mentions
him elsewhere in “Identity,” it is only briefly, but always
to the effect that she could not abide the values he
espoused (36-37, 52-53). Her father, she explains,
constructed safe and familiar margins from paranoia and
prejudice; she saw him “caught in the grip of racial,
sexual, cultural fears” which Pratt the activist strives to
combat by “understanding them in myself” (53). As an adult,
Pratt could not wish to perceive the world his way or remain

in his domain.

More often regarding her birth home, and explicitly
concerning her expulsion, Pratt examines her relationship
with her mother. When Pratt, as a married woman with two
small boys, declares she no longer loves her husband and
acknowledges openly her homosexuality, her mother locks the
doors to the homeplace shut. Not only does Mrs. Pratt deny
her daughter refuge when Pratt is ousted from the marriage
home, but when Pratt’s husband “threaten[s] ugly court
proceedings," Mrs. Pratt volunteers as a character witness

for him, that he may gain custody of Pratt’s two boys (26-

150

27). Her mother disapproves of Pratt’s choices, but more
damaging, works actively to strip Pratt’s right to maintain
a home and influence with the children. Pratt’s
homosexuality defiles her mother’s small-town, Presbyterian
religion and its rules for the right family make-up, and if
Pratt cannot replicate the nuclear family she was born into,
its support is promptly withdrawn. From the mother’s
perspective Pratt embraces alien, suspect elements Mrs.
Pratt’s home and community had sought to exclude: “no
niggers, no kikes, no wops, no dagos, no spics, no A—rabs,
no gooks, no queers" (39). Mrs. Pratt believes her daughter
“had walked away, and seemed to have turned my back on home”
(48). The mother accepts no responsibility for their
parting: the decision to leave had been her child’s, when

Pratt spurned basic codes of decency.

In addition to her parents’ rejection, another aspect
of Pratt’s Alabama homeplace induces “a kind of vertigo” and
leaves her ashamed and repelled (35). Determined to
research her ancestral history rather than accept her
mother’s accounts uncritically, Pratt is devastated to find
that “my foundation, my birth culture, was mortared with

blood” (35). Searching family records, letters, and texts

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by Black writers on local nineteenth-century politics, Pratt
learns: that as a matter of public record, her grandfather—
judge did nothing when Black men were lynched for allegedly
raping white women; that both sides of her family owned
slaves, increasing their holdings and wealth “from the work
and lives of others,”; that Pratt’s earliest Alabama
forefathers received land “as a bonus for ‘good work’” in
the Creek Wars, had helped drive Seminole Native Americans
from their South Georgia dwellings (34). The land Pratt
grew up calling her own, ate off of, and roamed with her
friends (under the eye of a Black nanny) was initially
“stolen” from whoever lived there previously, as a reward
for Pratt’s great-grandfather’s role in systematic, military
dispossession (34). Not just with acquisition, but through
maintenance of their properties, Pratt’s family’s
brutalities mounts: they presumed to buy and control human
beings, to reap as much as possible and avoid sharing the
profits fairly. Akin to Poe’s Usher, her birthplace
represents a gilded house of horrors. It remains solvent
only insofar as the family glosses their relations with each
other: the wife covering her husband’s drinking and

dependency on her income, the husband acting as if he

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descends from town royalty, the daughter demurring to her
father’s judgments about where she can go in Civil—Rights
Alabama and who she can side with, as Mr. Pratt frightens
her with tales of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s sexual abuses.
Pratt’s birthplace depends on artifice; for members to
recognize each other truthfully would send the home crashing
down. Worst of all, like Usher the birthplace hides its
bloody corpses, but not for the ages, as had been planned:
the voices of people whose backs broke for her home “come"
to Pratt like blows from a hammer, making her realize her

own blame for the conditions of their lives (35).

In “Identity" Pratt resolves to hear the voices out and
refrain from responding defensively, to go ahead and swoon
from their charges, as she believes she well should, sensing
that “the earth [had] opened, [and] I was falling through
space” (35). She knows she must fall away from the place
she was raised by amending its history, listening to its
muffled cries, tearing down southernscapes pieced together
by white men for “good country people.”3 If the pit she is
pushed into seems bottomless, if it wrecks Pratt’s sense of
self and the fine intentions she thought she had toward the

oppressed, if it forces her to “struggle with myself,

153

against myself,” she cannot fault the voices which started
her fall but the grounds which inflicted their suffering.
Those grounds, not the voices, have set Pratt’s black hole
in motion. Those grounds are Pratt’s birth home, unmasked
and rightly characterized, and she feels eaten alive by her
proximity to the place. The birth home is inside Pratt,
part of her, and as a white woman she has benefited from its
ill-gotten plenty, but at the same time, once Pratt assesses
that first place as compromised and base, like a parasite it
threatens to consume her. The emptiness the birth home
makes of minorities’ lives turns on Pratt and is well nigh

her own:

As I try to strip away the layers of deceit that I
have been taught, it is hard not to be afraid that
these are like wrappings of a shroud and that what I
will ultimately come to in myself is a disintegrating,
rotting nothing: that the values that I have at my
core, from my culture, will only be those of
negativity, exclusion, fear, death. And my feeling is
based in the reality that the group identity of my
culture has been defined, often, not by positive
qualities, but by negative characteristics: by the
absence of [those unlike us].... (39)

Pratt’s origins define her by elimination: from within
and without, the birth home guts elements other than white,
capitalist, Christian Protestant, male-centered, and

heterosexual. Its deletions leave Pratt with no good to

154

 

self—confirm. The voids created by a small—town South whose
collective dynamic is no, these voids eventually snag the
privileged inhabitants who beget them. Pratt testifies that
the begetters can fall in, too, and when they do, the voids
are reflective, like mirrors: the effort to make someone
else nothing makes you what you would impose. Voids created
through annulment show the South’s core as withering, show
the core to be Pratt’s own as well as her kith and kin’s.
Yet for Pratt to perceive the voids’ mirroring means she is
already standing apart from her people, willing to look

down.

There are other homes where Pratt loses her footing.
She chooses to leave her husband in Fayetteville, North
Carolina, because she wants to pursue an affair with another
woman, but Pratt does not anticipate the severity of his
response. After announcing her intentions Pratt is thrown
out of the marriage home: her white, southern liberal
husband, a great admirer of the Agrarian poets, “threatened
and did violence, threatened ugly court proceedings...
restricted my time and presence with the children, took them
finally and moved hundreds of miles away” (26-27). He has

the weight of North Carolina behind him, which he employs:

155

by dent of legal statute Pratt is declared unfit as a mother
because of her homosexuality. For women in North Carolina,
once a marriage contract is entered, “the use of [the
female] body" is set: you must tend to your husband’s sexual
urges for the “right” of a home and civil protection (27).
When she acts on her love for a woman Pratt steps outside
what rule-makers deem acceptable and is deprived of keeping
her boys with her. A Cumberland County judge labels her
“dirty, polluted, unholy” and decrees that “I was not to
have a home with my children again” (27). Pratt is once
again condemned for her difference, and the impact of the

judge’s arbitration sends her reeling:

I had held [my boys] before they were born and almost
every day of their lives, and now I could not touch

them.... The inner surface of my arms, my breasts, the
muscles of my stomach were raw with my need to touch my
children.... [From my marriage I] carried away the

conviction that I had been thrust out into a place of
terrible loss by laws laid down by men. In my grief,
and in my ignorance of the past of others, I felt that
no one had sustained such a loss before. And I did not
yet understand that to come to a place of greater
liberation, I had to risk old safeties. Instead I felt
that I had no place, that, as I moved through my days,
I was falling through space. (27)

Pratt has been expelled to another dark hole, a place
where she cannot seem to catch herself or gather resources

to stake her own territory. The marriage home seeks to

156

nullify her, to un-mother Pratt and erase options for how
she may live in Fayetteville. In this case it is Pratt who
is designated as what needs to be stamped out: her lesbian
identity puts her “in the wilderness with those feared by
white Southern men” (26). She is now the disadvantaged.
Unlike the vertigo Pratt experiences when she researches the
birth home, where she falls through self—indictment, here
Pratt is victim to emotional and tangible spiraling because
of inflicted physical loss. Pratt feels empty for reasons
different than before: with the corrected birth—home history
Pratt is nearly paralyzed by her own guilt, but with the
marriage home, her hands grasp at straws because what she
has bound to herself, her children, are forcibly taken. The
magnitude of Pratt’s immediate, fleshly loss is matched by
another palpable reality: there are no grounds, legally, for
Pratt to keep her boys with her in Fayetteville. This means
she has no where to go, not as she actually wants to be.
Eventually Pratt is shaken from another North Carolina
home she counts on, and in the same town, but this time due
to rules drawn entirely by herself. After her husband moves
north with the children, Pratt takes what is left -- “my

clothes, my books, some kitchen utensils, two cats” -- and

157

rents an apartment in Fayetteville. She supports herself by
teaching at the local Black college and becomes heavily
involved in grassroots, white feminist politics, organizing
rape-awareness programs, establishing a women’s shelter,
scheduling talks on religion. But after a couple of years
her political fervor wanes: Pratt cannot understand why
Black and other minority women never join her white peers’
efforts and is disillusioned when issues such as ERA become
lost in the quagmire of “electoral politics and social
services” (33). Except for fulfilling her teaching
obligations, Pratt draws inward and makes herself scarce.

She feels comfortably isolated staying home:

...it was so peaceful in my three-room apartment; at
night I would burn candles on the mantelpiece, no
sounds but the blapping of my typewriter.... I did not
have my children, but I had these rooms, a job, a
lover, work I was making. I thought I had the
beginnings of a place for myself. (33)
Pratt surrounds herself with poetry and the effects of a
private, simple aesthetics; her home is a break from
external contacts and the nagging of social dis-ease.
But suddenly Pratt’s walls start to give as her ideas

about safety are assaulted. Within an hour of her home, at

an anti—Klan demonstration in Greensboro, white supremacists

158

blast through a crowd, guns firing, and kill five people.
The news is shocking to Pratt, because it is hideous and
disturbingly close -- close in the sense that, for Pratt, it
is psychologically searing, because she cannot figure whose
side of the drama she fits on. She empathizes wholly with
the victims and abhors the men who would shoot, but then the
Klansmen claim people like Pratt as an excuse for the
murders: the gunmen maintain they were “rushing” to the aid
of white women under attack (34). Pratt can hardly take
this in: her own protection is draped over massacre,
transforming butchery into valor. To make white women safe,
according to southern white gentlemen, minorities and others
need be targeted -- among those killed are “Jews,
communists, a Black woman” (34).

Although Pratt disagrees with the Klansmen’s rationale,
opinion alone scarcely affects the violence laid at her
feet. Therefore she decides to resist actively those who
would protect her. Pratt sets out to learn “what white men
have been doing outside home, outside the circle of my
limited white experience,” “what had been or was being done
in my name” (34). Her resolve after the Greensboro

shootings leads to the research I have mentioned on her

159

 

hometown and family, as well as on areas immediately
surrounding Fayetteville. She uncovers the implications of

white women’s protection: on the subject of the Klan she

discovers, “[their] ‘chivalric’ behavior has meant
historically ... the systematic rape of Black women; the
torture, mutilation, and killing of Black men... the death
of Leo Frank, a Jew” (37). She concludes that white women’s

safety is nothing more than confinement: in the South white
women have been harassed into supporting their fathers,
brothers, and husbands, and when white women might reject
their culture’s brand of protection, they have been
banished, threatened, and in some cases, killed. Pratt
responds to these revelations by questioning her own sense
of safety openly. She quits her apartment’s seclusion,
moves among those unlike her, “find[s] new ways to be in the
world” (42). She educates herself on the histories of
southern Jewish women and women of color and interacts with
these peOple, “listening to [their] criticisms, not talking
back but listening” (43). She looks to “do something” to
overcome passivity and ambivalence, risking severance with

loved ones by speaking out against injustice, risking

160

severance with groups of lesbians, even, by pointing out
lack of diversity in their wary and guarded circles (46).

The shift in Pratt’s relations to her Fayetteville
apartment represents a void in the sense of rupture: her
comfortable retreat ceases to exist because Pratt disavows
retreating. She no longer tolerates screens from social
tensions or activism. Importantly, this shift marks an
abiding change for Pratt. Her choice to set out continually
from the apartment is instructive rather than debilitating;
never again does she sequester herself or refer to home as
an edifice. Her choice to quit this particular cloister --
to acknowledge its protection as a void causing others’ pain
and her own, related moral waste -- is instructive because
Pratt now recognizes its pitfalls and can avoid them in the
future. After the Greensboro murders, Pratt eventually
settles in Washington, D. C. and searches for other,
regenerative concepts of home. There, for the first time in
a manner that is comprehensive and unremittingly self-
conscious, she acts against anxieties about protection
instilled by her birth and marriage cultures. For example,
Pratt speaks to Black men she passes on the street,

“damn[ing]” “the old racial-sexual fear” [13]). or takes the

161

trouble to ponder her ignorance about strangers who are
minorities (she considers the background of a Black man from
the Yemassee in South Carolina, a man with whom she has
difficulty communicating [12]). In Washington, Pratt allows
herself to be guided by the deficiencies of her Fayetteville
apartment experience; she learns where to step because of
the voids, instead of being engulfed by them.4 Perhaps it
is too much to say that Pratt makes peace with the South’s
voids, but traversing her D. C. neighborhood she certainly
treats those voids as constructively as she can. Wise from
the past and from dissecting the past, Pratt sidesteps the
ignorance and presumption of white-woman protection,
acknowledges her own prejudices based on race, class, or
religion, and admits that her links with white southern
culture necessarily restrict others’ responses. Whether she
avoids reproducing voids which have snagged her previously
or opens herself to their humiliation and pain, Pratt does
not hold back. The last thing she will do is ignore
southern holes of oppression or pretend she does not help
create them.

The rifle-shot in Greensboro forces Pratt to question

the price of her safety: it makes her concerned for others'

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injustice, not merely her own, and this outward turn marks
the fundamental difference in Pratt’s approach to home --
the difference that is the trademark of “Identity.”
Accordingly, when Pratt moves to Washington she works to
define home by circling outside. In these environs Pratt
will not lead readers over a threshold; to describe her new
locale she hits the streets, walking, casing the wide I

physical network around where she lives. During the essay’s

 

first several pages, Pratt takes us up H St. NE, where she g
banks and gets her shoes repaired, then along Maryland
Avenue to her lover’s house, then back toward her own
building, and later out to Maryland Avenue at night. Her
walking in Washington lacks what Michel de Certeau terms “a
proper locus,” a center she journeys from and returns to
(37). Pratt walks to show us where she lives, which
encompasses myriad streets and shops and alleys and back
yards, as well as the exchanges that tie her to them -- but
not a house. She rejects the common notion that “a place...
can be delimited as [her] own," that through position and
power she can buy (or rent) a base to defend herself from
external, encroaching pressures (de Certeau 36). Such a

base would imply sealing herself off, just as her father sat

163

in his chair with John Birch newspapers, railing against
Civil Rights sit-ins and marches, what he perceived as
menaces endangering his home (36-37). Conversely, Pratt
will not possess a site for self-encasement, and unlike her
husband, does not want a post through which to extend her
long arm. Besides that she disagrees ethically with such
arrangements, experience has proven that Pratt is only
wrenched away from such places, her former southern homes.
In Washington, however, Pratt makes peace with being
endlessly torn from proper locations. She makes peace with
home—wrenching by incorporating it into her changed
conception of what home signifies. Pratt’s revised version
of home is being known in a larger community (home is no
longer place-as-an-institution); it follows that the only
way to achieve outside familiarity is by leaving her rented
bit of space. So Pratt gets out and walks, moving
physically apart from home as an authorized site. She
circulates among others to take them in as clearly as she
can and fix mutual ground through shared exchanges; she
hopes that they, too, might extend themselves enough to see
and acknowledge her meaningfully. If reciprocal contact is

made, even briefly, this for Pratt is home. To be known,

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then, she must decamp and interact: she walks away from
and/or around the site where she lives. Marcia Aldrich and
Leigh Gilmore, who also interpret walking as the chief
method by which Pratt stretches her home—concept, judge the
practice as “both spatial and epistemological” (33).
Pratt’s walking is as much about mindset and stop—and-start
learning as traceable movement. Akin to the idea that Pratt
rejects home as a power-based retreat (in a pragmatic,
workaday sense), Aldrich and Gilmore suggest that,
theoretically, Pratt “abandons home as an original site of
knowledge” (34). Pratt uses walking to scope her
neighborhood, but also analytically, as “a strategy of
consciousness” to check her nostalgia for former homes or
quixotic expectations for future lesbian embraces (34).
Pratt repeatedly “change[s] [her] mind and heart” about
home-approaches (33). As she gropes toward situations of
being known, “the work never stops, nor the love, with
coming out, with falling in love, with a fragile and shared
domesticity” (32).

Along the H. Street, NE routes, Pratt does not rely on
panoramic sight -- the kind of rooftop gazing encouraged by

her father -- to make her way through the neighborhood. In

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fact, not only does Pratt avoid a place proper with its
removed, elevated view (of such a place de Certeau
maintains, “[It allows] the eye... [to] transform foreign
forces into objects that can be observed and measured, and
thus [to] control and ‘include’ them within its scope” [36])
-- her on—the-ground wandering compounds blindness upon
blindness, and in line with her resolution “to strip away
the layers of deceit that I have been taught,” Pratt wants
to establish that she cannot see or that she perceives
certain situations only partially (39). Not that Pratt is
averse to sight: she scopes the neighborhood to make herself
see/acknowledge the young Black man, for example, whom she
was taught as a white girl to disdain (based on southern
stereotypes of the Black-beast rapist); she wants to
see/recognize the Latino and Jewish cultures around her, and
for herself and her Jewish lover to be perceived/received as
the lesbian couple they are (13). Yet for all Pratt’s work
to discern others’ individuality, in her walking she
stumbles constantly over something missed, some
characteristic or need she failed to register. She mis-
recognizes people, sometimes because she does not pay close

attention, other times because she cannot help the

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mis-taking. Specifically, Pratt cloaks others’ images with
received stereotypes, blocking her view of these people, or
follows culturally-prescripted roles, prompting others to
don masks which she, in turn, cannot see through.' Either
way, because of what she conceals or cannot penetrate, Pratt
circumscribes the freedoms others take with her: what they
might say, how close they come, how long (or how willingly)
they share contact in passing.

With Mr. Boone, for instance, a Black janitor who works
at her apartment, Pratt hopes to see the man whose proud
Yemassee legacy points to “Indian resistance and armed
communities of fugitive slaves” (12). She would like to see
his self-respect and pay homage to his remarkable
background. She would like Mr. Boone to address her in “his
own voice,” the way she has just heard him carry on with
another man (12). But her exchange with him comes undone
because Boone follows racist etiquette, that the Black man
is a boy to white ladies, that he must not “raise his
eyes... or his head” when talking to Pratt (12). Taking his
cue, Pratt answers Boone’s sing-song in the “horrid cheerful
accents” mentioned earlier. This man performs for Pratt,

refusing to let her see who he is -- he will not take the

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chance, or perhaps, afford her the privilege. He presents a
blind spot she cannot overcome, partly because of his
choosing, mostly because of “my white womanhood that drags
between us the long bitter history of our region” (12).
Pratt’s visible marks of race and gender restrain Mr. Boone
for good reason. They both know that in the South, when a
Black man greets a strange white woman frankly, the woman
will probably assume he threatens her sexually (and she
might alert white men), or, ignore him with disdain. By
playing boy to Pratt, Mr. Boone signals his sexual
insignificance and keeps his distance from a figure who,
historically, has spelled nothing but trouble for his kind.
Also, by playing boy Mr. Boone wiggles out of a tricky
position with white women: he does not risk Pratt’s ire by
refusing to speak at all, and yet, while technically his
“sing-song” acknowledges her, it is trivial, a no-brainer,
nothing in which he must invest himself. At least he has
dealt with the serpent, and the white folks’ parade can move
on. Moreover, he has salvaged his privacy; the last thing
Boone wants is for this white woman to act familiarly or
discern his actual thoughts. For her part, Pratt is keenly

aware that with Mr. Boone there are lines she cannot cross

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(because he will not abide intimacy), that his disguise is
opaque and solidly set. As she leaves him she perceives the
extraordinary breadth of their gap. To reach each other
they would have to address, and on some level reconcile
between themselves, “the long bitter history of our region”
(12). A daunting fissure to take on individually -- and
nearly impossible to bridge from Pratt’s side alone, though
she concedes that her white, policing, middle-class South is
responsible for the crack in the first place. For Mr. Boone
to meet her halfway he would have to relent and -— grown
vulnerable -- reveal himself to Pratt forthrightly.
Unfortunately there is no indication that as of yet, Mr.
Boone has reason to change.

With the young Black man, though, or a white man
dressed in a three-piece-suit, Pratt’s hesitations over
speaking derive solely from her own visual problems. Her
sight overburdens their profiles with phantom
characteristics; Pratt’s assumptions about these fellows
never pan out. Since she “makes” herself speak to the young
Black man to stifle “the old racial-sexual fear,” presumably
Pratt feels uncomfortable (emphasis added, 13): their

exchange starts off on shaky ground, as Pratt pushes her

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greeting forward, rounding it off with a slightly “what the
hell” attitude (“Damn the past anyway” [13]). But Pratt did
not take him in fairly: “When I speak directly, I usually
get a respectful answer" (13). The same with the well-
dressed white man, whom Pratt meets late at night on
Maryland Avenue. After intense self-questioning about the
meaning of his suit, his race, his reasons for being out
late in a predominantly Black neighborhood, her supposition
that he will suppose her greeting is “about sex” -- after

all these misgivings comes the denouement, “I speak and he

speaks" (12-13). Pratt squeezes in a greeting at the last
possible moment, cutting the white man’s chance for -- as
she expects -- an offensive or questionable gesture. Also,

because of Pratt’s mental ambivalence and the pervert she
thinks she sees, she and the suit-man miss contact any more
than split-second hellos: even if he brushes by closely,
because of her mis-assessment Pratt does not invite him to
linger. Reflecting later on their benign greeting, Pratt
thinks “how my small store of manners, how I was taught to
be ‘respectful’ of others, my middle-class, white-woman,
rural Southern Christian manners” do not aid her in reading

people in this strangely regional, broadly multicultural

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enclave (13). She simply cannot see straight, trained as
she is to look for particular signs. The signs she has
filed from southern cultures do not deliver their promised
one-to-one correspondences (e.g., that a white man with
enough money to dress well only strolls through a Black
neighborhood for opportunities to exploit), and Pratt is
unsure how to proceed. She knows she will never “get to the
new place where we can all live and speak-to each other for
more than a fragile moment” unless she drops her guard and
apprehends others more trustfully (14).

A last, painful example of Pratt’s shortsightedness is
especially jarring: when she smiles and says hello to the
“white-headed white woman coming with difficulty down the
walk,” the woman’s response unnerves her (14). “She spat at
me, shout-singing, ‘How much is that doggy in the window?’”
and Pratt grasps “the uselessness and childishness of my
manners in a world where [the woman] labored down the
sidewalk” (14). Pratt could kick herself that her greeting
lacked the empathy, perhaps the genuine offer of help, which
would have acknowledged the woman’s hardship. She noticed
the woman but missed the gravity of her steps; Pratt did not

really see her. Mulling over their exchange Pratt admits

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the woman’s lashing was hard to take: “The stark truth
spoken in public, the terror of what is said about my place
on the other side of the chasm between me and another, makes
me want to pretend I didn’t hear” (14). It would have been
much less embarrassing had the woman suppressed her insult,
but in that case, Pratt reasons, there also would be no
gains. Pratt wants to be known in this neighborhood, which
means she holds herself responsible for knowing others:
seeing indifferently impedes the very connections she would
make. Pratt transposes the issue of sight/recognition to
hearing/understanding and vows “to listen for the beauty in
the stark truth that someone tells me, that which seems
brutal and may terrify me” (14). Seeing straight is not a
matter of simply opening her eyes, because her eyes are
“constricted" and “only let in what I have been taught to
see” (17). Seeing straight means being slapped, sometimes,
and learning to learn from the sting. For Pratt it is a
matter of conceding when others expose her personal
blinders, as when a Jewish woman corrects Pratt’s impression
that crosses alone top gravestones at Arlington Cemetery
(the woman shows Pratt a photograph with stars-of-David in

relief, scattered across the landscape [17]). Pratt needs

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to identify and discard the etiquette that directs her to
overlook or make wrong assumptions; she has a responsibility
to work to see what her culture ignores or what people may
not reveal. While her walking disclaims any perspective
from on high, more importantly, Pratt’s groundview tactics
show there is still much she neglects from close-up. To
avoid chasms of her own making between herself and others,
where her bright “illusion of acceptance vanishes,” Pratt
must find where her sight runs short (14).

What I have noted as the circular structure of
“Identity,” whereby Pratt rejects chronological sequencing
to highligh aspects of many different home stories, is in
line with her activity of walking. Pratt darts between the
present (her home-building efforts in Washington) and
memories of former inhabitances which hit her broadside as
she roams. One home is layered over another. As she
circles the H. St. environs, as she interacts and broods,
Pratt is especially reminded of her birth home. Even though
D. C. lies “far from where I was born,” when she passes some
Black men putting on tales, Pratt recalls her father
swapping jokes at the local drugstore; or, measuring this

area of Washington Pratt rethinks her childhood town, that

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it was not welcoming to all people but “a place of forced
subservience” (11-12). Or, when she meets the elderly white
woman who shuns her greeting, Pratt’s impulse to “cover up
the truth” “comes from home,” where family tried to silence
her crazy great-great—aunt Rannie (emphasis added 14).

As Pratt’s D. C. neighborhood evokes other of her
southern experiences beyond what she physically sees, there
is a sense in which the new territory quivers. It
oscillates, as Avery Gordon would put it, between what is
there and not there. An aura of place undulating -- much
like t.v. clips of a desert, its horizon seeming to curl and
shiver through thin films of gasoline, evaporating in the
heat. A suspicion that a place is more than it is, or more
than we can take in, thick with elements unaccounted for.
Feeling that a place is overlain —- that another place (yet
strangely the same place) lies sandwiched on top or
underneath, if only we could better discern. For Pratt, not
only the Washington walk, but reminiscences of her other
southern homes suggest this phenomenon of the “wavering
present” (Gordon 178). Recalling those places in the
essay’s now, with the “changed mind and heart” Aldrich and

Gilmore have commented on, Pratt remembers what they were

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like then differently than before (33). Her pictures of
southern places change. Pratt feels overwhelmed by features
she did not see in the past: remembering her childhood town,
or her network of women/feminist friends in Fayetteville,
she senses something else there, an irritation that her
recollections of a place or community have not been complete
enough (Gordon 164).

In “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” Pratt wants to alter
the score with her memory. She wants to locate the parts of
the South she let go or never saw, to restore them and make
what peace with them she can. These fissures, these losses
in Pratt’s South induce a disorientation. They jostle her
and leave a bad taste, making her feel weighty and vaguely
guilty. I want to emphasize again that, for Pratt, the
South as a fluctuation is at once structural, a component of
her out-of-sequence narrating, and sensate. As Pratt
explains, making her way around one place she experiences
another: her immediate surroundings conjure other homes she
has known, and Pratt yields to her memory, allowing herself
to be transported back. These spatial warps, where the
present gives way to another place, are the hardest type of

void to pin down in “Identity.” Places waver, their

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wavering gestures toward loss, and the loss changes Pratt’s
pictures of a South she thought had crystallized with time.
These voids carry Pratt to spheres which are not there,
tangibly (but once were), and which continue to influence
her self-formation. They make her acknowledge oppression
she had not seen before, in scenes from her life already
played out. These voids are valuable to Pratt because late
acknowledgment is better than none, because, even late,
acknowledgment is instructive: Pratt will act differently in
the future if she understands how she should have behaved in
the past.

Pratt’s memory of a rare invitation from her father, to
climb to the courthouse roof in their small Alabama
community, comes on the heels of a section where she probes
the benefits of speaking-to, both with her neighbors in
Washington and (through the immediacy of writing) with us
readers, the audience. She yearns to speak to others
without the barriers of “gender, color, culture, [or]
sexuality” thwarting honest connections, and she wants her
attachments to be kind and impartial (there is a “right-and-

wrong" of reaching out to other people, and for

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Pratt, the right way hinges ethically on respect [14]).
When she mentions her father Pratt has just admitted how
difficult speaking-to can prove in “the world-as-it-is” and
wonders aloud how we ever feel the “need to change what we
were born into” (14, 16). Pratt next remembers the world
she was born into, and the lopsided fashion in which it was
presented to her as a child. Envisioning the courthouse
climb with her father, as an adult Pratt imagines what she
would have seen had she reached the top as an eight-year-
Old:
on the streets around the courthouse square, the
Methodist church, the limestone building with the
county Health Department, Board of Education, Welfare
Department (my mother worked there), the yellow brick
Baptist church, the Gulf station, the pool hall (no
women allowed), Cleveland’s grocery, Ward’s shoestore:
then all in a line, connected, the bank, the post
office, Dr. Nicholson’s office, one door for whites,
one for Blacks’: then separate, the Presbyterian
church, the newspaper office, the yellow brick jail,
same brick as the Baptist church, and as the
courthouse. (16)
Looking back years later, Pratt feels compelled to search
for more. She further recounts “what I could not have seen
from the top: the sawmill, or Four Points where the white

mill folks lived, or the houses of Blacks in Veneer Mill

quarters" (16). Pratt decides as an adult to fill in the

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holes of her courthouse vista -- to fill them in, not invent
them, because their content was already there, back then,
waiting to be perceived. The sections of town Pratt missed
for so long have pressed on her in ways she cannot grasp,
not until she concedes them. The vital point here is not
that Pratt, like a god, wills the areas into existence
through procrastinated acknowledgment, but that she finally
realizes how this other side always existed, influencing the
paths she took, influencing her hierarchy of social
entitlement and where she thought she fit on the scale -- it
was so close, determinative, but only now is she seized by
the foreign-familiar. Pratt describes in the first,
sanitized picture what she was routinely permitted or
encouraged to see: rows of buildings authenticating
government authority, white religion, and the pleasure of
shopping if you had money. In the second Pratt admits where
the lower classes lived and worked. Her sparse detail of
these areas (a couple of lines compared to the other’s full
paragraph) hints that she was not nearly so apprised their
features. Presumably Pratt avoided the mill and its
quarters out of obedience or privileged indifference -- she

does not say. She does disclose:

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I was shaped by my relation to those buildings and
to the people in the buildings, by ideas of who should
be working in the Board of Education, of who should be
in the bank handling money, of who should have the guns
and the keys to the jail, of who should be in the jail;
and I was shaped by what I didn’t see, or didn’t
notice, on those streets. (17)

I was shaped by what I didn’t see, or didn’t notice, on
those streets. In sociologist Avery Gordon’s terms, looking
back Pratt experiences a haunting. What was not there to
Pratt’s perception was (and in many was is) patently there,
making a difference in her character—building. The ghosts
of the other sides of her childhood town rouse her,

challenging Pratt to focus the “back-drop of [her] past”

more scrupulously, since against that back—drop she “act[s]

out the present” (“Identity” 17). I say ghosts because
something we cannot put our finger on -- rationally, at
least -- pricks the woman’s conscience, gets her to sketch a

fuller picture of the courthouse view than she has needed
before. What moves her toward this second sight? Pratt
herself calls it “the inner push to walk into change” but is
hard-pressed to say “where [it]... comes from” (16). Subtly
switching gears, she does list for readers the gains to be
had by “chang[ing] what we were born into”; these include “a

way of looking at the world that is more accurate, complex,

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multi-layered, multi-dimensional, more truthful," being “a
break” in cycles of misunderstanding, and reaching “a new
place” with other women “where with understanding and
change, the loneliness [of culturally—imposed separation]
won’t be necessary” (17-19). None of these gains, however,
were obvious to Pratt as she worked toward them; she had to
stumble onto their rewards, piece them together from various
life lessons, to be able to define them as encouraging for
others. While I do not want to draw too fine a line between
such gains and Pratt’ “originary” impulse for change, it is
worth pointing out that her reasons for pushing forward were
not always clear to her. Either way, in commencing to
act/remember differently, or in reflecting on how she has
acted and remembered differently, either way the
‘motivation(s) for change seem tied to a sense of
responsibility, whether Pratt could spell them out at the
time or not. Throughout “Identity" she attests to feeling
bound to “do something” (as Lillian Smith exhorts) where she
suspects some hardship or wrong (46). As Gordon would put
it, Pratt is willing to let ghosts in. She accepts that
“the highly visible can actually be a type of invisibility”

and that “that which appears absent can indeed be a seething

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presence” (Gordon 17). Moreover, Pratt consciously
confronts these flip sides of haunting when she meets them.
Gordon explains of such an exchange:

The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but

a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that

dense site where history and subjectivity make social

life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which
something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not
there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself
known or apparent to us, in its own way, of course.

The way of the ghost is haunting, and haunting is a

particular way of knowing what has happened or is

happening. Being haunted draws us affectively,
sometimes against our will and always a bit magically,
into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to

experience, not as cold knowledge, but as a

transformative recognition. (8)

By Gordon’s reckoning we can never account for a
haunting matter-of-factly. Language cannot make transparent
that which leaves us half-doubting and relies much on
suspicion and intuition. Thus we talk around hauntings. We
tell stories about our ghosts over and over with countless
variation; we utter a single, profound insight that seared
us one evening; or perhaps we say nothing at all, ourselves
disbelieving. The one certainty is that we are struck,
pestered, by a something related to the social scaffolding

that holds our particular culture in place -- an object

connected to or affected by (often negatively) institutions,

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“historically embedded social formations,” History with a
capitol H (19). That object incites us to change the
embeddedness: it works at our conscience and asks us to act.
It makes us feel accountable. It stirs “a potent
imagination of what has been done and what is to be done
otherwise” (18). Gordon cannot stress enough the importance
of responsibility in haunting, that to rid ourselves of
ghosts we must assume the toil, the guilt even, those ghosts
pass along:

Following ghosts is about making a contact that changes

you and refashions the social relations in which you

are located. It is about putting life back in where
only a vague memory or bare trace was visible to those
who bothered to look. It is sometimes about writing
ghosts stories, stories that not only repair
representational mistakes, but also strive to
understand the conditions under which a memory was
produced in the first place, toward a countermemory,

for the future. (22)

Further concerning accountability, Gordon holds that
the pestering object “mediates” between big dates, big
decisions, big events, and our ordinary routines (19).
Because haunting “links an institution and an individual, a
social structure and a subject, and history and a

biography,” it warns that the seemingly mundane is not at

all isolated or inconsequential (19). Meeting ghosts

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impresses that what we do every day affects situations which
seem larger and more important, situations which make
headline news and may even be relegated to the history books
(such as the Columbine High School shootings or legislation
on tobacco health hazards). We are not neatly disengaged
from “organized forces and systemic structures that appear
removed from us," and the ghost often comes as an unsettling
reminder that we must reckon with authority we thought we
could not touch (19). Still, Gordon’s point is not so much
that subjectivity wins the battle with positivism, but that
gaps between them.might be “fill[ed] in... differently”
(19). We need to be less satisfied with domination and
resistance as final explanations for modernity’s
dehumanizing, vicious cruelties -- not that these flip sides
of power are not “basic and intertwined facts,” but that
“our predominant modes of expressing and communicating the
enormity and intricacies of [these] fact[s] are wanting"
(193). The real battle ghosts pose for us is one of
comprehension, how we understand the operations of social
networks and forces: if we acknowledge the ghost and see
“what is usually invisible or neglected or thought by most

to be dead and gone,” then we can better grasp “the living

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effects, seething and lingering, of what seems over and done
with, the endings that are not over” (194-95). We can write
more comprehensive “histories of the present" that are
uncanny, provisional, enchanted with shadows, rather than
fixed conclusions of the past (195). Likewise in our
material practice we will see “the fundamentally animistic
mode by which worldly power is making itself felt in our
lives” (202). We will perceive, in Gordon’s words, a
something else to be done about broad social scaffolding
that applies to us personally.

Another instance of Pratt’s haunting reveals her
entanglement in a chain of events historically profound.
The haunting occurs as the Washington-wise Pratt re-examines
early feminist ties in Fayetteville: she vaguely recalls
aspects of the town she missed when working there as an ERA
activist, such as particular landmarks or ethnic clusters,
or ways her prejudice prevented connections with minorities
and other women of color. Pratt’s memories of her
sgrassroots politics are overtaken by what went wrong.
Looking back she pinpoints methodical gaps which never
Struck her at the time, but which, unfortunately, severely

limdted the impact of her local NOW chapter. The chapter

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was comprised of Pratt and five or six other women. To
their credit they addressed aggressively what needs they
could discern: establishing self-defense classes for women,
education programs, a rape crisis line and battered women’s
shelter; making phone calls to rally support for the passage
of ERA; fighting for Black women’s studies courses and the
appointment of a Black woman to a county advisory group
(29). Heavily outnumbered in civic battles, the members of
NOW concentrated on filling their ranks, converting other
women to their causes, and in this endeavor, according to
Pratt, they fumbled miserably:

We wanted to change the world; we thought we knew
how it needed changing.... We tried everything we
could think of to “reach more women.”

We were doing “outreach," that disastrous method
of organizing; we had gone forward to a new place,
women together, and now were throwing back safety lines
to other women, to pull them in as if they were
drowning, to save them. (30-31)

Because Pratt and her peers were intent on their own agendas
and wanted to convince large numbers of women to join their
pre-shaped platform (instead of inviting those others to

help mold a platform), they neglected the concerns of women

whose background and interests differed. They forged ahead,

planning community forums with a token panel on “minority

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women,” without approaching Black women’s groups for input
on planning or sponsorship, without thinking that “‘minority
women’ in Fayetteville included substantial numbers of Thai,
Vietnamese, Cambodian, Laotian, Korean, and Japanese women,
as well as Lumbee women and Latinas” (30). Similarly, when
Pratt’s NOW chapter organized a talk on religion, “no
representation was requested from women of the local Jewish
congregation, since ‘religion’ meant denominations of
Christianity” (31). Speaking for herself, Pratt admits how
she never thought of Jewish people as actually living in
Fayetteville, never conceived of them as southern, like
herself and her friends: “I had no place for Jews in the map
of my thoughts, except that they had lived before Christ in
an almost mythical Israel.... they were always foreign,
their place was always somewhere else” (31). Although Pratt
habitually drives past Fayetteville’s only synagogue, she
automatically assumes a Saturday will be most convenient for
NOW’s “community” talk on religion. And when she feels
anxious in a Black section of town, putting up posters on a
rape awareness program because she wants “Black women [to]
know and come," Pratt does not question the root of her

anxiety (“a fear of Black men”), or pause to think about the

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messages her white skin sends, paired with the word “rape”
on her posters. At the time Pratt does not consider how, in
that place, she may strike a threatening figure (certainly a
painfully ironic one), but the Pratt who looks back reads
the situation’s real edginess, which had little to do (but
perhaps everything to do) with her white-woman fear: that
for over a century, Pratt’s people sexually abused Black
women but then circulated stories of white women’s rape to
kill Black men, and yet here is this nail-biting white
women, running up and down Murchison Road, assuming she has
something to impart or warn about the violation of women’s
bodies.

Through hindsight Pratt evaluates previous mistakes
with feminism that once were invisible but now make her feel
ashamed and callous. Compelled to explain how her politics
were limited and limiting, Pratt’s image of Fayetteville
circles larger than what her perceptions of the town were
then: she includes groups of women she did not recognize
(the Thai, the Lumbee); the priorities of a place of worship
well within her scope but ignored; the political fervor of
Black and Jewish Civil Rights activists whose struggles were

organized long before NOW (but whom NOW did not deign to

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contact); and the deep layers of resentment by Blacks,
toward whites, for forcing rape as both a weapon and an
excuse, the resentment choking Black streets and impeding a
white woman’s way. Undoubtedly a racialized minefield,
Fayetteville was brimming with women with axes to grind over
Pratt’s race, class, and educational status, but the white
feminist had sauntered about, thinking “I was the first to
struggle” (29). Alternately, the minefield was a potential
source of power: Pratt’s town offered vast numbers of
oppressed women of various ethnicities and lifestyles, who
could have been gathered for a collective coalition, but
Pratt, obsessed with white women’s problems, did not seize
the advantage of those others’ presence or experience.
Reflecting later, she is disturbed by the possibility of
bonds which never flourished, which she personally
obstructed by adhering to bigoted definitions of women’s
liberation. She also broods over lessons she missed: since
she failed to recognize Black and Jewish women’s
afflictions, she lost the benefit of their examples of
resistance. Cruelties Pratt suffered as a lesbian in
Fayetteville may have been related to organized terror in

the South toward Jews and Blacks (each with lengthier, more

188

dramatic histories than her own), and she have could gained
strength from these other women’s insights. In retrospect,
what nags Pratt is the fact that she compromised ties with
potential allies: where there could have been mutual empathy
with minority women, she and her peers added to
misunderstanding and separation. Her present, memory—
induced haunting is a self-sick, guilty wound, but back in
the late seventies, the effects of Pratt’s behavior (which
would later cause the haunting) were tangible and direct:
Pratt drew social lines that restricted minority feminists’
options.

As Pratt reconstructs her entry into grassroots
feminist politics, she notices a historical pattern. The
oversights she made with groups of Blacks in Fayetteville
repeat the prejudiced arrogance of nineteenth-century
women’s suffragists: that feminism applies only to white
women, that the movement should not be fettered by racial
concerns, which could shift attention away from gender, and
that whites need not be aware of the motivations of other
groups of people. Specifically, Susan B. Anthony
discouraged southern Black women from organizing for

suffrage, that she might attract their white counterparts;

189

also, after the Civil War Elizabeth Cady Stanton refused to
be sidetracked by supporting Black men’s right to vote, and
by extension, a liberal Reconstruction government -- a
government which may have been more favorably disposed
toward women’s turn at voting booths. By insisting on the
priority of gendered oppression these women missed its links
with racialized suffering: to achieve their goal of white
women's suffrage, both Anthony and Stanton turned their
backs on women of color and Black emancipation in general,
losing an ideological advantage and numbers of potential
supporters. Their racism stymied their aspirations; had
Anthony and Stanton been interested in universal equality,
women’s suffragism may have made sharper gains much earlier.
Pratt reads the same writing on the wall for herself and her
contemporaries: had southern white women been more
supportive of Civil Rights in the 605 and 705, had they
helped elect more Black people to political office, the
outcome of ERA might not have been so bleak. Pratt is a
small cog in white feminism’s wheel, but she is a cog; she
realizes that the ways she pursued her feminist agenda
prevented it from making substantial gains. With her NOW

group in Fayetteville Pratt repeated the mistakes of

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higher—profile, nationally—influential feminist pioneers.
Her lesson is that her actions do matter -- they matter
corrosively -- when she fails to learn from the past and
reproduces its abortive outcomes. Looking back, Pratt is
haunted by the negative impact she had on what could have
been a decisive social movement in a small, conservative
town. In an effort to make amends and clarify future
feminist goals, she writes herself into Fayetteville’s
history of women’s politics as honestly as she can.

I have characterized the various deficiencies of
Pratt’s southern homes as voids, or black holes, using the
concept of place-bound loss loosely. By void I mean a gap
where something was or should be, usually forcefully
rendered. Voids in “Identity” are dangerous cracks, or
points of separation, that trip Pratt up, or confuse her, or
make her feel responsible for some ill done. By nature they
are physical, psychological, or perceptional (or perhaps
mixtures of these): there are forced departures from homes
(in some cases self-induced); there is Pratt’s perception of
her own soul as a rotting carcass, eaten alive by the
negativity and exclusions of her birth culture; there are

Pratt’s personal blind spots where she fails to notice

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entire sections of towns, or where she half-apprehends the
people she passes and thereby misses connections with them;
and there are spaces made empty by minorities’
dispossession, which are riddled with evidence of brutality,
pain, and betrayal, and which haunt Pratt into admitting her
hand in their emptying. Pratt associates all these types of
fissures with specific locales: that is, the voids exist
because of where they originate. They are products —- or
better put, waste stations -- created by particular
communities’ interests. The defining feature of each of
Pratt’s voids is loss: they are defined as loss and generate
loss, seeming to feed on oppression, appropriation, and
denial. It is almost impossible to fill them in or restore
what they have taken.

I do think, however, that Pratt finds ways to redeem
southern voids’ losses -- not by ignoring them, and
certainly not by pretending she can recoup what is gone, but
by facing the loss head on and saying “no.” Pratt’s
overriding declaration in “Identity” is, “no more; I will do
what I can to stop the erasure that has characterized my
home region.” She exposes the fraud of the Lost Cause of

the Old South. In effect, Pratt shows that the cause of

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racism in the South was never lost, never even went
underground: since the Civil War it has flourished, robbing
Blacks (and more than Blacks: non—Christians, homosexuals,
and women) of their rights as free citizens. The Lost
Cause of the Confederacy. For its sake southern communities
erected signposts at Civil War battlefields and statues for
dead soldiers (present today in so many town centers); they
formed the Daughters of the Confederacy as loyal, living
shrines to the Cause, and the Ku Klux Klan for organized
terror; slowly they took land back after Reconstruction,
made a farce of the Federal Government’s promise of forty
miles and a mule to Black families; they implemented
sharecropping for Blacks and poor whites, a debt-ridden,
dependence farming which was virtually impossible to work
one’s way out of; they established a legal system resembling
the separatist, antebellum one, renaming it Jim Crow. By
just about every social standard in America -- the right to
vote, to a fair trial, the opportunity to own land, get a
basic education, build a business, protect one’s family --
by all these standards the Lost Cause won out by denying
disadvantaged people in the South, and as Pratt maintains,

despite the progress of Civil Rights in the ‘605 and ‘705,

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continues to win. As the major impetus for Pratt’s southern
black holes, the Lost Cause mandates lynching and disavows
welfare, mandates pilfering and tight—lipped silence. It
buries the causes of those who have actually been
maltreated. Alive and thriving, the Lost Cause is a vacuum
sucking up the non-white and underprivileged. The only ways
to combat it are by divesting its myth of sacrifice —— the
Old South is not lost at all, but a looming social movement
digging the holes that Pratt finally espies -- and by
acknowledging where the real suffering exists and against
whom it is committed. These counter-actions are Pratt’s
mission throughout “Identity: Skin Blood Heart.”

Pratt’s repudiating the Lost Cause South carries
several rippling effects for a new southern geography. To
create better places to live she does not deny the Old
South’s holes, many of which implicate her personally: she
might try to avert the kinds of voids which have plagued her
and others previously, but Pratt acknowledges them to step
around them, and in the event that they are unavoidable, she
confronts the gaps head on. In Washington, for example,
although she desists reproducing white women’s assumptions

about how to act or where to go when Black men are around,

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still, there is her fear, which restricts her interaction
with these others; to her credit, though, Pratt recognizes
the limits she has imposed, how needless they are (when the
Black men speak respectfully), and vows to curb her
apprehension in the future. Pratt implies that if the South
is to flourish as an identifiable region through the era of
multiculturalism -- which only promises to increase -- then
(white) southerners must quit covering its holes, pretending
a smooth surface. The South must allow that its foundations
are physically and psychologically jagged -- physically, in
the sense that its parameters have been open to some and
closed to others, and psychologically, that all who live in
the South are affected in their thinking and feeling by what
has transpired on the grounds they occupy. Second, and
related, in Pratt’s scheme a new geography of the South must
account for the region’s layered—ness, the sense that one
place may be draped over another. To outline the region’s
borders and properly characterize its features, we have to
be aware, place by place, of who has lived there and in what
capacity, how towns have earned their money, how the
definition of zones has been arbitrary -- and combining all

these types of features, how places have developed out of

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their development in the past. Finally, Pratt’s new
southern geography requires an eye as fully open as
possible, committed to ferreting out its own prejudices. A
new geography of the South should restore a fuller picture
of the region than has tended to circulate. It needs to see
the sections of places which have existed all along but gone
unheeded. Acknowledging these sections, which, not
coincidentally, usually correlate with poverty and groups of
minorities, could be a first step toward creating more
equitable conditions. And for Pratt, piecemeal
acknowledgment --person by person, slow dawning by slow
dawning -- might make all the difference in the South’s
overdue reconstruction. Starting with herself, Pratt writes
to pick her own southern biases apart, because change is

worth a try.

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Chapter Four
Toward an Almost Shareable South
In a definitive scene that is actually a flashback, a
third of the way into The Salt Line (1984), Elizabeth
Spencer establishes the novel’s twin themes and a reference
for its ambiguous title. Her protagonist, a late—middle-
aged professor named Arnie Carrington, and his wife Evelyn
drive toward the Mississippi Gulf Coast, fleeing a
humiliating episode at Arnie's northern Mississippi liberal
arts college. Arnie has just been forced to resign his
English department position -- secretly, because of a former
affair and personal jealousies, but more overtly, due to his
renegade tactics for Black students’ rights and veterans’
housing on a campus resistant to the fifties and sixties’
turbulent changes. As the couple heads south, Evelyn gamely
rouses Arnie from his silence and dark thoughts: “There’s a
place along the road where you can smell the Gulf,” she
offers (110). “You could draw the line of that salt smell
on the map, I bet. Have you ever noticed it? (110)”
Gruffly, Arnie retorts, “Speaking of salt... don’t look back
or you’ll turn to it,” but glancing at Evelyn, he knows she

will not: “Turning back was never her way" (110). Arnie

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muses appreciatively on his wife’s “shining courage and
strong good sense,” and when he forgetfully asks aloud a
question that has been consuming him, “What do you do when
something’s over?” Evelyn immediately levels, “You finish
your book.... Everyone should be so lucky. You have a book
to finish” (111). Unfortunately, her answer’s wise
practicality is not what clinches this scene. Arnie, who
has been remembering the conversation several years later,
observes, “But even then, [Evelyn] was riding toward her
doom. The something over, for her, would be the everything
over, for Evelyn Carrington,” and broods on consecutive
events that upended his world (111): Hurricane Camille, an
unprecedented, murderous, 1969 fury that ravaged the south
Gulf coast from Alabama to Texas, including Arnie and
Evelyn’s newly beloved hometown, Notchaki, and worse still
from Arnie’s view, Evelyn’s death from cancer.

Evelyn’s allusion to the salt line is intriguing. She
defines it certainly, as a particular point delineating
coastal territory, the boundary of “the salt smell” 50
distinct it could be reliably etched on a map (110). For
Evelyn the line of transition from negative to positive

sphere is fixed and certifiable: she knows she has crossed a

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border, she believes it is natural and sure, and she is
confident others will experience the same sensation along
the same coordinates (at least that is what mapping
implies). Her explanation of the salt line mirrors a theme
dominant in Spencer’s novel: the desire to nail a place
down, particularly according to its historic, romanticized
links. Characters in The Salt Line trust that if they can
salvage the Old Gulf Coast as it has been known
traditionally (i.e., prior to Hurricane Camille), they will
save its innocent charm and gentility; they will resurrect
its true identity. But Spencer includes a second, competing
theme that threatens to overturn the first. Arnie's
troubling question, “What do you do when something’s over?”
is symptomatic of a consequence which recurs throughout The
Salt Line: the reality that communities are continually in
flux, subject to catastrophe and balances of power which
alter their looks, their demographics, their parameters.
Thus Spencer juxtaposes the compulsion to uphold accustomed
place stereotypes against an inevitable undoing of revered
sites or communal meeting points. In many ways The_&al§
Lane is driven by the friction of these two main themes and

the possibility of any resolution between them.

199

To grant the implications of each theme full range of
expression, Spencer offers two different approaches to
coastal rebuilding -- an Arcadian picture of her fictional
setting, Notchaki, and a looser, more inclusive town model
based on gathering disparate elements -- and subjects both
to, on one hand, an impulse to stifle change, and on the
other, an eventual, life—threatening diminishing. In other
words, each picture of Notchaki is initially characterized
by an idyllic, sentimental ambiance which characters strive
to preserve, but after a time, which collapses, or appears
on the verge of collapse. What makes The Sal; Line an
interesting treatise on place is not whether
institutionalism or iconoclasm wins out -- not whether the
novel comes to rest on an invulnerable place image or winds
up lost in some perpetual southern wasteland. Instead what
is significant is Spencer’s emphasis on the politics of
reconstruction. Notchaki’s unusual situation of having been
literally swept away allows Spencer to focus on the work and
fractious haggling and bartering of interests involved in
creating and managing a facade of place stability. She
shows how hard it is for a community to settle on the self-

images it wants to convey, and how the generation of place

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images is in fact ongoing -— Hurricane Camille represents
changes any community must face, relentless changes in the
bearing and meaning of a shared “sense of place.” Equally
important, Spencer advocates an ethics of rebuilding, a
right and wrong way for southern communities to regroup in
the midst of contemporary cultural divergence and diversity.
She makes her college English professor, Arnie Carrington, a
man who considers himself a free-thinking, radical
visionary, the champion of each of her phoenixing projects
-- first, of the Arcadian restoration, and second, of the
transition to a less straight-laced, less prejudiced
Notchaki that stresses welcoming and generosity. Notably,
each picture fails, but Spencer makes clear that their
failures are related (as contrary as the two approaches seem
to be), and that they stem from white southern liberalism’s
questionable ambitions, embodied in the tactics of Arnie
Carrington. I want to consider why the recovery schemes of
this self-styled progressive flounder. Carrington makes
similar mistakes with both Arcady and his more open,
inclusive version of Notchaki, and I want to establish what
is flawed about his well-intentioned, but ultimately

misdirected, assumptions regarding preservation and renewal.

201

Through Carrington’s example Spencer affords southern
geography a valuable lesson: what can go wrong with white
liberal attempts toward southern multiculturalism, and why
their/our kind of South may not yet be Shareable enough.
Spencer’s commitment to a post—Arcadian South is
notable. The Salt Line does not feature the demise of the
Old World Gulf (merely) as an occasion for weeping and
wailing and gnashing of teeth; rather, Spencer evenly
assesses the once-venerable image, finds numerous contempts
and disorders, and portrays an alternative as obviously
preferable. Her detached approach to an Arcadian South
differs measurably from southern literary criticism’s:
unlike the Twelve Southerners, who in the famous manifesto
I’Tl Take My Stand (1930) despair of the South’s continuing
without a small-farm, individually reliant, racially
segregated base, Spencer’s characters are willing to
experiment with the foreign as well as the familiar.
Instead of insisting on old forms as their only rebuilding
option, and st0pping dead in their tracks with a depressed,
backward glace when they realize the golden coast has long
elapsed, Spencer’s community is able to imagine a next step.

The fact that their ensuing town model might also dissolve

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by the novel’s end, having been weakened by some of the same
mistakes as the Old World Gulf, does not imply that their
efforts toward inclusion are ill-conceived. It does suggest
that dynamics of place continually evolve, that providing an
alternative to Arcady which is crystallized and ready to be
enshrined (as the next southern archetype) is far from
Elizabeth Spencer’s intention. She levels just as square an
eye on Carrington’s newer version of Notchaki, and despite
its improvements, finds it regressive and discriminatory.
Spencer provides southern literary criticism a serious wake-
up call, the chance to rethink our ingrained tendency to
idealize the South, especially through the lens of
nostalgia. She warns that the region may be flagging most
when our fondest place stereotypes are widespread and
entrenched, that our obligation as cultural critics is to
ward off image-mongering -- which may work well for book
jackets and theme parks, but should not be southern studies’
analytical project.

The Salt Line opens a couple of years after Hurricane
Camille, onto a landscape and coastal community still
reeling from the natural disaster. Widower Arnie

Carrington, a retired college professor inclined toward

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local social-change movements, responds to the surrounding
devastation with a vision of what he can do: help restore
the order and appearance of the Gold Coast, an old-South
version of the Gulf comprised of white, columned houses, a
few, gracious, privately-run hotels, and long wooden piers
standing far out in the water -- an image of the coast
bolstered by memory and longing for the past. Throughout
the first half of the novel Arnie campaigns to make Notchaki
what it was, and in large part he relies on fleeting
impressions from a single childhood experience to fashion
the shape and feel of his old—world picture. Arnie’s
recollections of the coast fix repeatedly on a day he ran
away from his northern Mississippi home and turned up with
some relatives near Gulfport, whose stately oceanside house
“with a generous high portico” lay “at the end of a long
front walk,” a series of steps, and two gateposts (97). For
Arnie the place and day are forever linked to hospitality,
warm welcome and awe. There he got his “first look at the
big water” and sensed a “great tranquillity, a kind of inner
breathing [that] came on” when “the wind made the old trees
whisper and stirred the long moss hanging to the ground”

(37). From the trip he also remembers “‘Po’ Boys and Gumbo’

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for twenty-five cents,” piers stretching out toward the
horizon, and all along them summer-dressed women “under big
umbrellas, talking through the twilight” (37-38). These are
the forms, then, that Arnie would claim from the hurricane:
grand manners, gracious living, stately white homes with
moss-laden trees, and at every small, quaint stopping place,
classic cuisine ready to serve. Arnie even finds proof of
his “earlier paradise” (97). Along the wall of his friend
Yates's business hangs a collection of pre-hurricane photos,
scavenged randomly after the storm, and Arnie is convinced
one of them was taken from his day at the cousins’
homestead. He sits before the picture as at a “shrine,”
gazing longingly at:
shrimp boats and ancients oaks, camellias in bloom,
flags flying from the old white Notchaki lighthouse,
moonlight on the Sound, softly blowing curtains of
Spanish moss, and the one rectangle Arnie especially
loved, which showed a small boy sitting on some
concrete steps between two gateposts.... The boy was
sitting with his cap in his hands; he was smiling in
the sunlight. Arnie knew that that boy was himself.
(97-98)
Carrington’s blueprint for Notchaki invokes one of the
South’s dearest, and most popular, place icons. Arcady, as

Lucinda MacKethan describes it in The Dream Qf Aready

(1980), figures prominently in southern writing and culture

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from Reconstruction through the Southern Renascence of the
mid-twentieth century. Depictions of the South as a golden
land, “a world committed... to the preservation of the
simple, good life, to a working respect for nature, and to
the practices of neighborliness,” follow the classic
pastoral tradition, which in its earliest stages derives
from Virgil and Theocritus (MacKethan 3-4). Rules of the
pastoral include nostalgia for and idealization of an
agrarian state, usually linked to childhood; a sense that
this state is, or soon will be, forever lost; identifying
former worlds as simple, pure, as tied to a “natural order”;
and the persuasion that a receding golden age exposes
modernity’s lack, expressly, its rushed, alienated, and
overly complex lifestyles (4). MacKethan argues that the
devastations of the Civil War led white southerners to the
pastoral as a way of justifying antebellum culture; they
felt anxious to venerate a society that had been condemned
by federal standards. White southerners wanted to convince
their Northern neighbors that southerners were not (and had
not been) corrupt, that their former occupations, relations
to slaves, patterns of spending, and homesteads had been

fine in every sense of the word. In particular white

206

southern writers cast the Old South as respectably as they
could, borrowing heavily from Western pastoral forms.
Popular, late-nineteenth-century southern authors, like
Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris, present the
more sincere, textbook cases of southern Arcadies compared
to others in MacKethan’s study. Of Page the critic
observes:
The three aspects of the antebellum world which Page
turned into staples of his Arcadia were the plantation
locale itself with the great house at the center; the
image of the southern gentleman; and most important,
the “old time” Negro... through whose voice the Old
South achieves mythic status. (42)
Joel Chandler Harris, often mentioned alongside Page as
champion of an idyllic South, is tagged by MacKethan as
cultivating “love of peace and simplicity,” a distaste for
city life” and firm “belief in plantation ideals” -- traits
which patently characterize the world of Harris’s Uncle
Remus (67, 82).
What makes Carrington’s version of Arcady particularly
poignant is that it no longer exists. His dreams of the Old
Coast loom larger than life because they are past time, past

experience; they embody standards which appear increasingly

bright as Arnie scowls on the rebuilding that is taking

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place. With the hurricane he despairs that every decent
thing about the coast is gone. Aged trees uprooted,
hundred-year-old homes swept away, treasured landmarks sawed
in half, the older, native generation packed up and left,
too tired to try their hands at resurrection. Worse yet,
Arnie believes that with the coast’s vast clearing comes
degeneracy: the genteel look of the old is forgotten as
newcomers and opportunists erect as much as cheaply as they
can. Arnie writes to a friend of the whole sordid process:
The Coast now is nothing but the bones of itself,
stripped bare. Of course, people are building back.
There are new houses, subdivisions out from old towns,
a lot of new motels and restaurants going up along the
beach, nightclubs, shopping centers, everything except
what your heart desires. Some of the old remains,
looking surprised at itself, and seedy, like people
after major surgery. (10)
Self-described guardian of what little of the past may be
salvaged, Arnie determines to “keep faith” with previous
forms through accumulation (38). He buys up out of the
“tumbled pathetic wreckage” as much property as he can
afford to try to monitor who invests in the Coast, to fend
off the Mafia and neon food chains (7). Therefore Arcady in
W is no longer physically manifest; it is

nothing more, nothing less than Carrington’s frantic,

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one-man crusade, an expression of values, the gauge of which
is Spencer's passionate, impulsive protagonist. As
expressly subjective criteria (although Carrington would
like to believe that the Gold Coast exists completely apart
from him and has long been carved in stone), Arcady depends
on Carrington’s convictions and preferences, chief of which
is his antithetical approach to what counts as Old Coast and
what does not. Arnie assumes his interests protect a good
coast, and pitted against this he perceives anyone with
alternate intentions, especially those ignorant or apathetic
about old forms and lifestyles. He creates a good coast/bad
coast binary, working hard to convince others and himself of
the sanctity of his plans. He refers constantly to his
vision’s perfect integrity and symmetry, and to compliment
his ideal, he must believe in the existence of other people
“with feelings like mine” (22). Arnie has to quicken his
sense of a collective effort (mine/ours) for the just and
true cause, and this is what his magnolia-and-moonlight
agenda depends on. In the long run, however, Spencer
exposes Carrington’s binary as false, breaking down his
lines between us/them, and Arcady loses its attraction and

magnetic force to compel.

209

People with “feelings like [Arnie’s]” designates a hazy
category, which at best means those with pre-Camille
experience and what Carrington would consider proper
knowledge. Really, the only character who comes close to
sharing Arnie’s vision is his friend Joe Yates, an architect
who designs the white houses and meandering landscapes in
Arnie’s mind’s eye and helps him with financing (34). There
is also, fleetingly, someone else, an unknown “somebody” who
preserves a vignette from “the olden days,” which catches
Arnie by surprise one morning and stops him dead in his

tracks (215):

[Arnie] passed the property line of a huge motel,
its name known to more of the world than any Caesar’s
had ever been.... Yet passing through the back, not a
hundred feet from this monster, he caught his breath,
stopping.

A live oak with a seat circling it -- as in the
olden days; somebody had remembered -- stood central to
a play area for children, with tiny swings hanging from
the limbs, and nearby a little seesaw, painted yellow.
A Negro boy was alone there, raking leaves. He was
wearing overalls and a dark-checkered shirt. The oak
leaves rattled against the wire rake, and just now,
moving on to a magnolia tree in the far corner of the
plot, the response of the fallen leaves was all
according to their nature, some being stiff and dried
and brown, and others of the same brown, thick and
leathery. The air, still and fresh, was like green
silk, and the boy’s movement was in tune with all they
both -- worker and watcher —- knew. And not only they
but oak and magnolia (both evergreen, shedding leaves
in early summer as new growth came), the seat around
the oak (how it cut the bark in places), the silent
swings and seesaw, and whatever there was of bird or

210

vine or lizard, all in one breath’s tremendous knowing,

held.

He held on to the fence to extend the moment. Who
knows any place like it knows itself? Why would I --

why would anyone -- be needed here? (215-16)

This excerpt neatly captures the twin elements of
Carrington’s Arcady: perfect pitch and custom of all that
lies within its boundary, and certainty of others ascribing
to Arnie’s vantage point. When he first stumbles on the
[scene Arnie reflects, “somebody had remembered,” meaning
presumably that someone caught a style and sensibility
similar to his own (215). It is notable how the myriad
elements of the picture fit in place and are just right in
Carrington’s appraisal: the magnolia leaves respond and fall
“according to their nature,” the worker’s raking is “in tune
with all they both... knew,” as are the trees, the tree
seat, swings, and “whatever there was of bird or vine or
lizard.” Fragile but pure, as opposed to the tacky,
concrete aspect of the motel across the way, the vignette
exemplifies those qualities Arnie associates with the three
properties he owns and other remnants of the Old Coast:
meet, respectable, suited to a natural order of goodness and

gentility, pleasingly inviting. Furthermore, in terms of an

inner circle of supporters drawn toward Arnie’s better view,

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there is the “somebody” who preserves the scene and the
African-American worker. In a broadly egotistical sweep
Arnie assumes complete agreement between his comprehension
and the worker’s, and really, that of any immediate vital
object. It seems a stretch, however, to imagine that the
laborer, raking and raking, is as entranced by his
surroundings as the aging white spectator. Spencer gives no
indication that the young man pays Arnie any attention: the
fellow never looks up from his work, and all that suggests a
shared respect between them is Arnie’s assumption that “the
boy’s movement was in tune with all they both -- worker and
watcher -- knew.” We have no idea what the laborer knows,
only that he chooses to ignore the white onlooker; Arnie
infers their camaraderie. But the muted presence of this
young African American profoundly checks what Arnie thinks
he sees.

Regrettably for Carrington, few along the coast seem to
share his rebuilding criteria, and from his perspective
distinctions spread wide between his inner band and those
who inhabit the Gulf with other designs. Indeed, the
developments springing up, products of outside influences,

signal to Carrington an invading depravity; he makes much of

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their dubious financial backing and shoddy frontages to
distinguish the elegant, custom-savvy forms he would
recreate. Early on in his refusal to sell his island to
local Mafia go-between, Frank Matteo, Arnie emphatically
separates his land and proprietary interests from the
Mafia’s. He tells his friend Yates, “trying to rebuild the
Coast makes no sense if you just let the crooks in,” and
later, looking remorsefully at the photos in Yates’s office,
Arnie sets the pictures of “softly stirring Spanish moss,” a
“smiling shrimp fleet,” and “white-pillared houses” against
“the ever-growing legal enterprises, the coliseums, the
Holiday Inns and Howard Johnsons, the waffle houses, and
shopping malls,” which represent so many “sleeping dragons”
in his view (34, 188-89). In the same conversation, which
occurs midway through the novel at a point when Arnie begins
to realize the impossibility of his good-coast battle, he
despairs, “My dreams of the Coast... why they’re chicken
feed, gobbled up, blown away in a breeze” (188). Arnie’s
vision of the old-world Gulf seems less and less a reality
he can mold Notchaki into; forces he views as contra-
Arcadian, such as the coliseums and shopping malls, appear

inevitable and fast encroaching. Any version of Notchaki

213

contrary to Arnie’s own counts as them, and they are
winning: from his perspective the sleeping dragons will
surely wake to define the town’s rebuilding. Voicing
equally heavy cynicism, Yates replies, “The whole coastline
is like a sieve... from Miami to Key West to Galveston"
(188).

The edge dividing Carrington’s Arcady from a gaudy,
crime—infested Notchaki does go to pieces in The Salt Line,
but not because the evil takes over. Rather, the line
itself between good place and bad, us and them, breaks down
as any meaningful, organizing structure. Primarily this is
because Carrington detects an underside to old-coast images
and changes his mind about supposed enemies: he realizes his
position along the binary is morally dubious and immersed in
the stakes of conquest. Carrington’s Arcady is exposed as
contaminated and power-mongering, much like the newer
developments he opposes. Spencer suggests that the long-
residing, land-controlling group Arnie would protect, the
white southern gentry, have had to labor, to enter into
conflict even, to bring off the gentility of the Gold Coast;
their influence and will to dominate underlie the area’s

settled, uniform, and seemingly natural identity (by natural

214

I mean a sense that this is the way things are and have
always been). In terms of places covering the rivalries and
contention that define them, as I am stipulating, cultural
theorists Alison Blunt and Gillian Rose would target Arcady
in The Salt Line as a prototype of transparent space. Their
use of the term transparent pertains to socially shared
conceptions of a place rather than any distinguishing
physical characteristics. Blunt and Rose believe that most
people -- especially those interested in occupying and
regulating an area -- tend to regard space as if it were
transparent, as if the eye could absorb and classify every
feature of significance. Analyzing subjugation in colonial
and postcolonial geographies, Blunt and Rose attribute
transparent space to the white male colonizer. He explores,
names, and believes he has realized the full extent of a
colonized area; subsequently he maps his knowledge, sure of
his record’s mimetic capacity. His reading and writing of
space depend on smooth views. Those who subscribe to
transparency create pictures of homogeneity and contented
hierarchies and carefully straighten any jagged edges of
difference or conflict. But Blunt and Rose think this

largely Western way of seeing, a matter of perspective that

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actively usurps, needs countering. As a more honest
alternative and the only politically viable response, Blunt
and Rose suggest the idea of territory, a way of seeing land
as “claimed and conquered” (15). Territory exposes the
dirty laundry of transparent space. It looks at grids
designated as transparent and finds that “there is always a
space [within them] of some kind for resistance” (15). It
acknowledges the importance of factions and neighborhoods
and admits that various forces compete for spatial rights.
Territory reveals transparent space to be “constituted,” a
site of imposition (15). In its quest for placid surfaces
and rigid corners, transparent space takes pains to erase
incompatible areas and voices, but with territory, Blunt and
Rose encourage scrutiny of those margins as the starting
point for sharper critical awareness.

In its post-Camille upheaval Notchaki compares to the
colonial and postcolonial areas of interest to Blunt and
Rose, in that Spencer portrays the hurricane—damaged coast
as site of contest between, on one side, the established
families, small businessmen, and “old-line political
bosses,” and on the other, the descending speculators and

“national crooks” (61). Arnie Carrington is involved in the

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fray as an old-guard defender, and his vision of an
aesthetically monitored, rank-conscious Notchaki dangerously
approaches the transparent space Blunt and Rose caution
against. Accordingly, applying the concept of territory to
Mississippi’s Gulf uncovers several blindspots in
Carrington’s Arcady. For one, Arnie’s conviction that the
New Coast should instinctively rise out of its hurricane
debris in the shape of the old rests too much on a
monolithic, conflict-free utopia that Notchaki’s everyday
life does not sustain: casting the Gulf as territorialized
highlights diverse groups other than Carrington’s small
band, each with its own ideas about what constitutes
acceptable areas. One of the more unsettling, and silent,
presences in The Salt Line is that of Native Americans and
their ancestral burying ground. That ground lies
auspiciously on Carrington’s property, just behind his
house, an ever-present reminder that the old, genteel Coast
extorted land and suppressed an indigenous population.
Hence Arnie’s revered, pre-hurricane Gulf was never
intrinsically primal, never “simply there” or unsullied.
Also, because the Native tribe has a contract with the local

government to visit the burial ground at any time, their

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occasional brushes with Arnie raise questions of who counts
as trespasser and the legitimacy of ownership: despite that
Arnie feels kindly toward these people and would enjoy some
friendly exchanges, they “just come and stand there, look
for awhile, and go away,” never acknowledging Carrington,
taking for granted (as they should) their right to come and
go as they wish (230).

Other sectors of Notchaki make their influence patently
felt. More conspicuous and immediately pressing than the
Native Americans, the shopping complexes, cheap hotels, and
chain restaurants have no place in Arnie’s resurrection
plans, but for better or worse implant themselves next to
cherished, old—world sites, like the seedy motel in front of
the oak-tree playground (215-16). Too, groups of vandals
such as the Weasels disfigure a staunch pine on Arnie’s
Hotel Miramar lot, torch a community treasure, a nineteenth-
century lighthouse, and engage publicly in licentious
behavior, which affronts their elders’ tastes in decorum
(125, 217). Finally, of course, there is the Mafia,
represented by Frank Matteo’s restaurant, covert gambling
operations, and efforts to buy Arnie’s island for suspected

drug—running.

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Along with the reality that Notchaki has never been
shaped exclusively by well-established white folks, either
in the past or present, Arnie must come to accept that parts
of Arcady he thinks he salvaged from the storm are not as
pure as he imagined: his second blindspot lies in perceiving
the Gold Coast and its residue as immaculate and uncorrupt.
Spencer disabuses her protagonist of this notion with a
series of personal, painful confrontations, each regarding
the properties (or “shrines”) Arnie purchased after the
storm, with the intent of saving them from hoodlums,
plunderers, and the ills of commercialization (119). One is
the old Miramar Hotel, which Arnie especially favors because
he and Evelyn liked to vacation there. Although all that is
left is a dilapidated building and scattered shrubs and
blacktop, Arnie values the skeletal holding and posts “KEEP
OUT, DANGER, NO TRESPASSIN ” signs to secure its seclusion
(121). On an afternoon stroll through the ruins he reflects
thankfully:

The old place was keeping its goodness. [Arnie]

remembered the croquet court, right about where they

were walking. No traces, anyway, of anyone having come

there to picnic, smoke pot, get drunk, find shelter,
make love. (121)

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But several paces later Arnie finds what he loathes. Having
wandered off behind the hotel he discovers “the charred

picnic fire, the used safes,” and an abomination: a message

scrawled on a pine, the bark “peeled back,” the words
painted on indelibly (125). “BEN AND EDNA FUCKED HERE,
then, I FUCKED EDNA TOO. HA! HA!” (125). Arnie is struck

to the core: “It was the tree his heart went out to,
surviving a hurricane for such as this” (125).

Untouched preservation is too much to hope for;
Carrington cannot keep the aura of the Old Coast locked in
frieze. This recognition dawns on him also about an island
he and Evelyn bought, once a sanctuary for nuns, where the
couple had retreated “middle-aged, doomed, happy, full of
empty plans” before Evelyn’s cancerous death (79). For
Arnie the island represents a “vital spot”; enchantingly,
“The Holy Ghost is a swarm of butterflies” there (81). It
holds the “mystery” that is Evelyn (she is illegally buried
on this property): “She’s out here. In spirit. Nothing
sinister. Friendly as hell” (81). Yet the point where
Arnie loses his old-world vision, in the mid-novel talk with
Yates, is the point where he admits his island has been

debased. One night when Arnie imagines he camps there

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alone, he hears boat motors and rushes to a far, desolate
end, just in time to watch Mafia-man Frank Matteo receive
packages from a vessel with a foreign-speaking crew. The
scene breaks abruptly and next we see Arnie with Yates,
where Carrington rails:
So they were there [on the island] all the time....
Have been, are, will be. Whether [Matteo] owns it or
not, he looks on it as available, he uses it as if it
were his. Rights of passage, strange cargoes,
scorpions from Oaxaca or Borneo, who knows what gets in
there? (187)
Several lines later Arnie gives up on Arcady completely: “My
dreams of the Coast... why, they’re chicken feed....
Nothing belongs to us here: power’s loose” (188). Groping
for a response, Yates compares their flailing efforts to
save Notchaki to the living nightmare of a local Yugoslav,
who had escaped drowning in the hurricane by climbing a
tree, and woke the next morning to find snakes looped all
around him (188-89). What is dawning on Arnie is that the
snakes are nothing new; they “have been, are, [and] will be”
in Notchaki, ongoing tides of adverse influence he cannot
hope to keep at bay. The image he liked to foster of his

three properties -- “the holdings of some small seafaring

principality, cropping out in orange here and there” against

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his larger mental map of the region (216) -— is losing its
distinction. Arnie cannot will his land assets to stand out
against their background, at least not as sanctified, wholly
innocent grounds.

Carrington’s fear of various powers running wild -- at
its height in the above talk with Yates, where Arnie tries
to grasp the “enlarg[ing]” “structure” backing Matteo --
shifts his final blindspot into relief: that he himself and
his vision of Arcady are enmeshed in games of control (188).
For if we frame Notchaki as territory, teasing out its
social layers and multiple boundaries, no group enjoys the
distinction of being removed or irreproachable. No group is
inherently privileged. This does not mean that all groups
and areas are equal (or that all are equally worthy), but
that every site must be negotiated, must be actively
arranged, even when a place appears traditionally fixed and
stable. And while Arnie prefers to see himself as
disempowered, nobly set apart (and following the island
spirits) in his pursuit of coastal restoration, The_SaTt
Line suggests otherwise. Often to protect his sacred spots
Arnie compromises himself to get what he wants: he is

implicated in negligible, even lawless, activities to ensure

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that his properties are well-maintained or to seal them from
outsiders’ queries. With the Hotel Miramar, for instance,
Arnie cannot afford to clear its grounds for selling lots or
his various rebuilding projects. He needs the city’s free
demolition, which is granted only when a site proves a
health hazard, and “the hotel was remarkably free of
[disease—carrying pests], pure in its bashed-in state”
(177). So Arnie and Yates capture rats, and plant and
poison them in the Miramar, calling in city officials to
witness the effects of their “exhibit” (177). The spectacle
is so disgusting that “one of the inspectors threw up” and
“[Arnie] was sick himself by now -— heartsick” with guilt
(177). Spencer writes loftily (catching her protagonist’s
tendency toward martyrdom and self-dramatization): “The
golden robes of [Carrington’s] manhood for the first time
faded to an ordinary cloth, and he longed for the island,
its distance and winds, its warming sands” (177).

Yet Arnie’s island cannot cleanse him either: it hides
evidence of further violations and remorse. The evidence is
Evelyn’s body, smuggled there and buried just after, at
Evelyn’s insistence, Arnie and a doctor named Swiggart ended

her life. Evelyn had tired of fighting terminal cancer and

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implored her husband, “You know you have to.... Anything
else would be a cop-out” (167). A needle, Evelyn’s vein,
Arnie’s “thumb had pressed the plunger” -- all arranged by
the “trusted young doctor who had so ‘understood’ them both,
had helped when they wanted to hurry death” (167, 182). But
Arnie’s compulsion to meet Evelyn’s demands leaves him
vulnerable to shady dealings. Dr. Swiggart “had faked
records, stolen lethal drugs, sneaked in dark of night over
dark waters” to help Arnie dig Evelyn’s grave, only to
blackmail Arnie, in the end, for all the professor’s life
savings. Carrington surrenders his money but has trouble
rationalizing the whole confused plot. Once, when Yates
alludes to Evelyn’s death and suggests foul play, Arnie
squirms inwardly, “Oh hell. He bent his head. Crime was
what you called it when other people did it” (190).

There is more to the island implicating Arnie in high—
stakes politics and campaigning. In a series of deftly-
executed arrangements, he and Yates sell the island to Frank
Matteo -- the man Arnie self-righteously loathes but whose
freshly laundered cash Arnie needs -— at the same time that
Yates presses Congress to annex the island as National

Seashore. The annexation comes through. Frank pays Arnie

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in good faith and loses his entire investment, a botched
deal that nearly costs Frank his life with his Mafia
superiors. Although periodically Arnie hesitates over the
plan, worried over Frank’s fate, he tries to quell his
conscience by disavowing any real involvement. He
stipulates to Yates, “Whatever you wanted with all those
addresses [which Yates uses for letter-writing and
lobbying], I wouldn’t like to know about it,” and he
“secretly” believes himself “so out of things, out of the
world he had once known and influenced, that he could not
imagine the addresses doing anyone any good at all”;
nonetheless Yates succeeds using Arnie’s information (193-
94). In light of Arnie’s considerable fringe benefits --
cash, avoiding bankruptcy, continued access to the island as
a National Reserve -- Spencer’s description of Arnie and
Yates planning their contacts assault packs a stiff dose of
irony:
they had taken on, it seemed, a common cause. It

had to do with how life in this place ought to be

lived. It was better than working hell-for-leather for

money, or power, wasn’t it? There seemed something

extra good about it, because they.had so little to
gain. (Emphasis added, 195)

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Contrary to Carrington’s self-assessment of “being out
things,” there is no question that he holds and exercises
power. Arnie must admit the shades of gray, or even black,
in his own affairs -- “rats in Eden,” the duplicity of his
transactions with Dr. Swiggart, or his mistaken assumption
that “Crime was what you called it when other people did it”
-- and as a result, the line slackens considerably between
Arnie and the “dragons” he espies around him (181, 182,
190). As the novel progresses and “the golden robes of his
manhood... fad[e] to an ordinary cloth,” Arnie’s attitudes
ease toward groups which initially he set himself against.
Having recognized aspects of the other side within himself,
he is able to affirm people whose agendas oppose his own.
These changes in Arnie’s perceptions toward himself and
once-dreaded, nefarious others indicate how thoroughly
distinctions blur in The Salt Line between good coast and
bad. With Frank Matteo, for instance, Arnie actually begins
to warm toward the man and finds points of shared interests.
When Frank openly agitates over family problems, Arnie
detects in the Italian-American from Philadelphia certain
southern sensibilities, telling Yates, “Frank’s sounding

more like Mississippi every day” (257). And when one of

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Arnie’s closest friends, the local art teacher named Mavis
Henley, becomes pregnant with Matteo’s child, Arnie not only
pushes for the couple’s reconciliation, he decides he needs
Frank to claim the baby and accept the friendship of Arnie’s
close-knit group -- Carrington needs Frank’s participation
for the group’s solidarity. By the close of the novel Arnie
hopes Frank will harbor no offense over the island deal and
join him in collaborating over new restoration plans; he
selects Matteo as an inheritor, one “to pass my notion on
to” (276). Not only with Frank, but also with a teenage
gang long the object of Arnie’s disdain, the Weasels, does
Arnie “surpris[e]” himself by mellowing (229). Although
they sneak about his property and, as he believes, massacre
Arnie’s precious ducks, as he cleans the scene of slaughter
Arnie ponders the kids’ situation empathetically:
His mind turned to [the Weasels] now, and also,
surprising him, his heart, in all its sudden
generosity. He had seen their faces when the whip fell
[during one of Arnie’s earlier confrontations with
them]. What fire did they sit by, defiant maybe, but
also lonely, and afraid? (229)
Spencer justifies Arnie’s softening toward the gang as,

eventually, they are cleared from any real wrongdoing. By

the novel’s end it is the doped-up teenagers who seem to be

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victims of injustice: two kids dead because of bumming
around and a penchant for shifty appearances.

The downsides of Arcady that Carrington initially fails
to perceive grow focused and dominant in Spencer’s
rendering. Clearly there are plans for Notchaki other than
Arnie’s, invested groups besides his own, so that
Carrington’s vision for reconstruction comes to seem not so
much paramount as one faction competing among many. More
threatening, in terms of Arcady’s marketing and
reproduction, the protagonist himself eventually questions
the whiteness of his white-columned houses; there are cracks
and inevitable contaminations within Arnie’s good-coast
boundary. That boundary relies too much on an impossible
virtue, the uncompromising ideal of purity, and not only is
the contemporary Notchaki shown to tolerate questionable
forces, but its predecessor, too, is revealed as ethically
flawed (through the uncomfortable presence of a few Black
characters and the aforementioned Native Americans). Worse
still for Arcady, its smug guardian, Arnie Carrington,
himself commits indiscretions, in the name of his nostalgic
ideal, which erases the distinction defining the Gold Coast

in the first place.

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Obsessed with recreating a feel of the Gulf he had
known for a day in his youth, Arnie grows jealous of the
forms he would recall and maintain. He draws his lines
around Notchaki and lets few others in, assuming too much
too hastily about people like the Weasels and Frank Matteo.
He builds his dreams for the town on the basis of probity,
unable to see that both he and the dreams are embroiled in
controversy and are even hurtful to others. Instructively,
The Salt Line judges Arcady differently than Carrington and
eventually rouses him (even him) to new viewpoints. Spencer
is able to evoke the brutalities Arcady stems from, just by
introducing Native American or Black characters, just by
letting them be there along the Gulf, the subjects of
awkward, vague exchanges with white southerners. Every time
Arnie glimpses Native Americans in his backyard, he wonders
if it would be appropriate to greet them, his uncertainty
speaking volumes. And with Black characters during the
earlier parts of the novel (when Arcady is Arnie’s
objective), Arnie either has nothing to say or assumes too
much: with Frank Matteo’s assistant, Dancey, Arnie stands
back and -— watching Dancey with others -- judges the boy as

uppity and disrespectful (14-15, 192); with the laborer who

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rakes behind the monster hotel, Arnie believes the young man
exists by necessity for the good of Arnie’s Arcadian
picture; and with Arnie’s lover, Barbra K., Arnie makes a
second home in her small quarters but only once invites her
to his house, when it needs cleaning (90-91). Across the
novel Arnie’s position toward Blacks resembles that of
nineteenth-century plantation authorities he at one point
critiques (192): Carrington, the champion of old-school
southern customs and homesteads, measures the Black laborer,
for instance, from an unobserved vista. Arnie is the
privileged white voyeur, who is able to assess the Other’s
work from a leisured position, more like Robert Beverley’s
philosophical (and labor-alienated) planter than he would
ever admit. Or with Barbra K., he is like the white
gentleman who hides his path to the slave cabin (for much of
the novel Arnie visits her secretively) but disallows his
mistress crossing the same lines, to enter his home.
Through such well-placed hints and shrewd characterizations,
Spencer repeatedly links southern architecture and landscape
(the plantation house, Arnie’s private property) with white
supremacy, and consequently, human indignity. The columned

homes Arnie would love to reproduce around Notchaki are

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historically tied to greed and cruelty: Arcady’s price in
the South has been human lives. Spencer also overturns
Arnie’s old-coast vision by entangling its objectives with
local political battles, i.e., arguments over the allotment
of public funds and options for land use and development.
Without question Carrington can give as well as take; his
duping of city assessors or Frank Matteo is strategically
carried off. Past or present, white houses with wrap-around
porches do not sit on the choicest sites without someone,
like Carrington, entering the territorial conflict and
managing a serious bit of finagling. Carrington’s
restoration plans rely heavily on the spotlessness of his
Arcadian boundary and an impossible wish to keep his
business hands clean, but Elizabeth Spencer challenges and

displaces both.

As Arcady recedes from Carrington’s ambitions Spencer
does not switch abruptly to an alternative conception of
place. Her transition in The Salt Line to another kind of
South is far more subtle. The book’s other kind of southern
sphere is hard to describe, hard even for characters

themselves to put words to, despite that they acknowledge a

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rare confidence building among themselves, a different pride
and aura pertaining to their location. These changed
feelings about Notchaki seem to crop up from nowhere; they
register abruptly, having been disregarded by inhabitants
until near the novel’s end. No one much notices until
locals pause from their schedules and realize how daily
routines have produced something memorable in town:
significant ties with one another based on an habitual
crossing of paths. In other words, because their comings
and goings intersect for a time, certain people begin to
feel mutually bound. A special quality of their bonding is
fragility: folks fear their attachments might collapse due
to the erratic nature of human relationships, or, as they
have experienced all too recently, because of path—altering
catastrophes like Hurricane Camille. Spencer’s main
barometer for the progress of Notchaki’s new genesis, Arnie
Carrington, reflects and models the shift in approaches to
place I am trying to describe. Busy with completing a book
on the English poet, Byron; and healing wounds with his
estranged adult son, Kelly, Arnie has no notion of an
alternative to Arcady until it hits him from broadside.

Occupied with various errands around town, Arnie stops

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briefly to appreciate relaxed boundaries around Notchaki and
is amazed where his thoughts take him:
When [Arnie] drove about the Coast from place to place,
teaching at the junior college, or drinking in a bar,
or having his boat mooring changed, meeting with the
ecology group (once off pelicans, they had gotten hung
up on shore terns), or unraveling interminably the
problems of real estate (four lots had sold), he felt
that distinctions were no longer possible here, that
all of life, good and bad together, was simply one
thing, a growth, a creature made of many creatures
within the area of its original simple structure, yet
complicating itself the more it let new creatures in,
and he felt the generosity of its doing so. (193)
Gradually Arnie accepts that if anything is natural
about communal development, it is the certainty of different
groups juxtaposed with different interests. Here he changes
his mind about Notchaki’s distinguishing features, believing
them now to be respect and collective tolerance. Following
his recognition of the town as “a creature made of many
creatures within the area of its original simple structure,”
Arnie concentrates on the gesture of welcoming. With regard
to his immediate neighborhood Arnie shifts his focus from
tasteful outer trappings to drawing dissimilar people
together: place comes to signify a gathering rather than an

edifice. With Yates’s help -- and this is the novel’s most

profound example of Arnie’s revised philosophy of place ——

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Carrington refurbishes one of his properties, a row of small
shops in the center of town, and convinces a mismatch of
entrepreneurs/friends to lease from him. There is the
white, hippie-ish, pregnant art teacher, Mavis, the Black,
voodoo-inclined, daycare operator, Barbra K., and the upper-
crust white architect, Joe Yates. What separates this real
estate venture from Arnie’s previous ones is his change of
focus; with the row-shops he zeroes in on something other
than restoration. More than capturing a vanishing
architectural style Arnie relishes the intimacy springing up

among his tenants:

As a kind of musical accompaniment to [Arnie’s
political camaraderie with Yates] was Mavis Henley.
She was often with them, or nearby, peripheral. Joe
Yates was to move into one of the shops in the row
Arnie had bought. His office would be moving there,
and Mavis had plans for a handicraft shop in another,
the one next to Barbra K. That would leave three to
rent. [Mavis] had the ducks, too, over at Arnie’s
house, and the art classes, at the junior college. And
within, as their common chemistry knew constantly, she
had Frank’s child.

But [the group of renters] didn’t talk about it.
They talked about business, about food, about
architectural drawings and the talent of the art
students, and whether Barbra K. could get a permit to
set up a child day-care center, and what toys would be
available.... Their lives lived in the spaces they
could live in, stronger than if they could live freely
in all. It was what I meant all the time, Arnie
thought. He had known you couldn’t order such things
like a meal, or write a check for them in a store.
That time he’d run away from home in grand rebellion,
and the family had sent for him: “You’ve just come for

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this nice visit with us,” his Biloxi cousins said.

“You know where we live now. Come back again.”

(Emphasis added, 195—96)

Regarding the shared interests stirring among Arnie,
Mavis, Barbra K., and Yates, the shape and look of the row-
shops does not much factor into the unique state the friends
have stumbled onto: living together “in the spaces they
could live in, stronger than if they could live freely in
all.” The group makes room for each other where they can.
Their paths are intertwining, and these people are
accommodating each other, despite the shortcomings,
prejudice, or differences of opinion that might keep their
respective doors closed (i.e., those subject they choose not
to talk about). More than simply scooting over for the
adjacent person they are extending themselves into one
another’s business and spaces -- each one, in turn, opening
her own space to the others, enabling a reciprocity. It was
what I meant all the time, Arnie thought. He understands
that a place can be made special through conscious good will
shared among the people there, people who would likely
ignore one another in other settings and circumstances.

There is another feature of Spencer’s second

alternative to place, a complicating feature, that is both

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positive and devastating, galvanizing and deleterious: the
very real threat of loss. The camaraderie building among
Arnie’s unlikely assemblage is uncertain, ever on the verge
of disappearing, in large part because this place—bound
feeling cannot be attained through will or conscious
decision. Even though its prerequisite is deliberate
tolerance, still, people’s efforts to interact amiably in no
way seal an aura of commonwealth: the chemistry among
dissimilar folks just happens. “[Arnie] had known you
couldn’t order such things like a meal, or write a check for
them in a store.” Genius of place in The Salt Lihe cannot
be marshaled or indefinitely retained. When Arnie remembers
his cousins’ consolation, “You know where we live now. Come
back again,” we realize this late in the novel that there is
no going back for Carrington; he can never recapture that
afternoon’s experience in Biloxi, much as it continues to
shine on in his mind and spur his attempts at
reconstruction. Likewise, various spots around Notchaki
enjoy a special aura of welcome and gathering, but only as a
transitory blessing. Particular sites come to feel charged
because people want to congregate there, yet the impetus for

gathering can peter out: place gods may not be fixed or

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willed to reappear. Even so, the gods, or the energy, of
places will randomly circulate. The Buddha in Arnie’s
garden, for instance, might suddenly vanish, leaving
characters without their quick-stop, spiritual nexus, yet
there is the connection among row-shop inhabitants. Arnie
might continue to visit his and Evelyn’s island, but without
the urgency or quest for healing which once compelled the
grieving protagonist; eventually he comes to terms with
Evelyn’s death, takes a new lover, and judges of the island,
“no need to go there, really, with [Barbra K.] here, ashore”
(301). There is a sense in this novel that thriving place
dynamics simply evolve, and that as soon as a special place
grows comfortable and familiar, even needed, the chemistry
binding people together there evaporates. That vanishing
usually leads to hard scrutiny of former Edens, to an uneasy
understanding of the precariousness of their foundations.
A5 Yates reflects on discovering the Buddha’s departure,
“[Its] removal was a real loss. Things encircled, sacred,
set in place, how could they be moved?... If one thing
could go, so could everything” (180).

Spencer’s revamping the meaning of place for a small,

self-consciously southern community is meticulous and

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wide-sweeping. She transitions from Arcady, an idealistic
view of Notchaki based on an hierarchical social system and
what white people thought the area once looked like, to a
willingness to open doors. Rather than comply with old-
Coast stereotypes of stately houses with wispy moss-draped
landscapes, The Salt Line modifies what a sense of place
pertains to: sites particularly valued are those where
people with diverse backgrounds feel welcome. These are
sites constituted on inclusion, and they are precious to
their regulars because the urge for meeting there may
suddenly vanish; characters must seize good karma where and
while they can. Spencer’s narrative attributes this shift
in the significance of place to Arnie Carrington, the man
who keeps Arcady alive but owns up to its repercussions, who
not only entertains but enacts new approaches to Notchaki’s
phoenixing, who from the beginning reaches out to cut-off,
misunderstood, or disadvantaged folks and in the end binds
them all together. Genuinely a positive force, Arnie tries
to do what he judges as right, tries to live by his
conscience and a healthy dose of humor, and he likes to
believe his motives stem from altruistic intentions. In

point of fact Carrington is magnanimous, he does give most

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people a chance (as well as a hand), and usually he sides
with the “lofty principles,” such as open college enrollment
and veterans’ benefits and saving endangered species (195).
But Spencer also marks him as human. Arnie makes mistakes
and contradicts himself, and sometimes to relieve his
guilt, concocts elaborate rationalizations. Notably, even
after committing to enlarging Notchaki’s boundaries, Arnie
repeats some of the same errors he made with Arcady. With
the Gold Coast stereotype Carrington had assumed his own
privilege, deeming his plans for the Gulf suitable and
legitimate and himself as aligned (theoretically if not
practically) with the local gentry. Yet even as Arnie
admits the restrictions of the Old Coast and converts to a
neighborhood ethic of “let[ing] new creatures in,” even then
he harbors former notions of superiority and takes too
strong a hand remolding those in opposite circles (193). He
risks his second option for Notchaki’s rebuilding by
supposing he may judge who belongs and under what
conditions; he monitors his associates’ public bearing too
tightly. With the minority characters in particular, Frank
Matteo and Barbra K., Arnie’s requirements for their joining

his collective are preposterous and unfair -— which exposes

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his gathering instincts as more appropriative than
impartial. Too restrictive and homogenous to extend
meaningfully, in the end Arnie’s multiculturalism shows
serious signs of flagging.

After baiting and betraying Matteo over the island
deal, incredibly, Carrington expects the restaurateur to
forgive and forget, ally with the row-shop group, and “claim
us all” (298). Arnie wants to have it both ways with
Matteo: he wants to exclude Frank on the basis of negligible
business ethics (i.e., Frank’s Mafia ties), but alternately,
when Arnie realizes that a sense of place depends on
communal rapport, he hopes to draw Frank in to avoid
severing “the knot” that is Mavis’s love (194). Arnie
reserves the right to humiliate Matteo but trusts their
friendship will be strengthened; problematically, Carrington
supposes his politics might not be taken personally.
Spencer, however, refuses to let Arnie have his cake and eat
it, too: Frank responds ambivalently at best to the
protagonist’s pleas and invitations. Ironically, Arnie’s
dreams of fastening people together and The Salt Line’s
resolution hinge on Matteo’s reaction to a community he

perceives as set against him, so that Arnie’s ill treatment

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of Frank hangs thickly in the air as Spencer ends with the
question of what Frank will do.

Since the shake—up over the island deal Frank has laid
low, avoiding everyone except Mavis, and even with his
pregnant pseudo-girlfriend he is cool. But Mavis’s shock-
induced, early delivery has all Arnie’s group keeping vigil
at the hospital, and Frank himself cannot stay away, even
though he steers well clear of the others. In the waiting
room:

Frank Matteo looked at no one. He walked outside, but

remained in shadow form visible through the beveled

glass of the door. He came back in, restless. The
things that had happened, who knew them all? Proud, he
watched over [Arnie, Barbra K., and Yates] in his own

way, alone. (300)

When news filters through that Mavis and son have survived,
Arnie expects Matteo to rouse to participation and a sense
of belonging. “Frank,” he pleads, “go to her. For God’s
sake” (302). Matteo lashes back defensively: “You think I
don’t want to? Seeing my son. Why, that's all there is!”
(302). But Spencer does not supply Carrington a feel-good
conclusion; neither she nor Matteo wipes Arnie’s slate

clean. There is a price for Arnie’s machinations with Yates

and the Federal Government, and it is uncertainty over what

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Carrington has come to value most, the ties holding his
unlikely group together. The mutual dependency among Arnie,
Barbra K., Mavis, and Yates is unsure because they need
Frank, they need Frank to acknowledge and support his
relation with Mavis, but due to the island fiasco Frank
holds back. In the hospital scene Spencer cuts her
narrative short on a precarious note, with Matteo wavering.
She does not give Arnie the satisfaction of seeing Frank
commit to the group as, in the novel’s last few sentences,
Frank hedges over whether to cooperate. Arnie has just
urged him to look in on Mavis and the baby:
Like something for the moment leashed, but about
to be cast, [Matteo] turned to look at the others. Had

they trapped, betrayed, deceived him? He had to defy
what threatened, to fend off what was always ready to

strike.

“You think that’s [seeing my son] not everything
there is?” he challenged. “You think for a minute
that's not all?” [the novel ends] (302)

Here Frank is saying what Arnie wants to hear, that
fatherhood will take high priority, yet the two men stand
worlds apart. Frank feels insulted to be told to go to
Mavis, as if he did not know himself to do so, and he lashes
out that of course this birth is important. Carrington and

Matteo make the same claims but are “challeng[ing]” one

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another; Frank’s survival instincts kick in with the man who
tried to ruin him. How discordant that Arnie knowingly
injured Matteo, whose presence Arnie deems so crucial to
Notchaki’s growing collective. Ultimately that collective
stands in the balance, waiting to see what Frank will do
about having been screwed by the people who want to include
him. Spencer creates an odd, odd situation. Arnie proffers
a slap with a follow-up invitation, and in light of the fact
that he won against Frank on the island deal, Arnie controls
the conditions of Frank’s merging with the group: Frank must
come clean of the Mafia and assume responsibility for the
woman he coupled with and the child he conceived (210). As
far as the progress of Notchaki is concerned, Carrington
might extend his arms to extrinsic forces like Matteo, but
in the end it is still Arnie’s umbrella.

The deception of Frank Matteo undercuts Notchaki’s
momentum of gathering, but another source of disquiet,
Arnie’s attitude toward his lover, Barbra K., threatens the
success of his small community more gravely still. The fact
that she is Black hovers large and negatively for Arnie.
Although he never refers to her social status explicitly,

Arnie’s bigotry surfaces in the ways he treats Barbra K. and

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what he believes she owes him. Besides the fact that Barbra
K. has a far-off husband, they keep their intimacy under
cover because Arnie hesitates to introduce her to his larger
circle. Well into the novel none of the other characters,
not even Yates, has any idea of Arnie and Barbra K.’s
affair, and the first time Barbra K. steps foot in Arnie’s
house it is as his maid, to be “told” “what needs doing” by
Arnie’s young white friend Mavis [the only explanation for
this rank and order is that is Arnie’s notion of what his
lover should do, in light of, presumably, the material help
he has given her] (90). Although gradually Arnie
acknowledges their relationship more publicly, introducing
Barbra K. among row-shop inhabitants and no longer hiding
his path to her place (even admitting to Evelyn’s ghost that
Barbra K. is the woman he loves and would prefer to marry),
his intentions to possess Barbra K. smack of ownership,
rather than mutual commitment and dependency. In one
instance Arnie expects her to use her underground chain-of-
influence and provide him information on Matteo, and when
Barbra K. turns close-mouthed and vague in response to his
queries, he feels slightly indignant:

It seemed to [Arnie] that Barbra K. ought to do most

anything for him. He had fixed up the front of her
house so she could work mornings, taking care of

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children whose mothers worked. She was earning money.

It looked as if she felt no gratitude, though in many

ways she was accommodating. (192-93)

Arnie believes his lover should jump to do his dirty work;
she should disclose intelligence on Matteo, her former
employer, and direct Arnie about reaching him. Because of
their sexual liaison and his considerable financial backing,
Arnie feels he has saved Barbra K. and earned her political
likemindedness, that she should risk her standing with the
lower-class Black network for the sake of appeasing his
interests.

There are signs far more disturbing that Carrington
blatantly overlooks the individuality and self-direction of
his lover, that he ignores her existence apart from his
determinations. In the last scene in the hospital waiting
room, for instance, Arnie has an epiphany which, in his
mind, clarifies his lover’s significance: Barbra K. is now
his center-point instead of the island. What prompts this
recognition is Arnie’s noticing that Barbra K. “looked like
Evelyn. The same amplitude,” which reinforces Arnie’s
earlier presentiments that Evelyn and Barbra K. are somehow
friends (their spirits “g[e]t along together,” he believes

[236]) and that Evelyn approves of Barbra K. (301, 166).

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When Arnie thinks he sees Evelyn in his lover and decides
the island is no longer necessary, his commitment to Barbra
K. appears as a resurrection project, a way of bringing
Evelyn around again. Where is Barbra K. in Arnie’s
attraction to her? His capacity for casual transfer --
shifting Evelyn onto his lover to assuage his guilt over a
new partner, perhaps, or to smooth the racial, cultural, and
social differences between him and Barbra K. —- slights the
actual woman Arnie wants to claim. Just as insulting, in
another instance Arnie dismisses the weight of his whiteness
in relation to Barbra K. as he fantasizes turning dark
through the alchemy of their love. He exoticizes Barbra K.
and imagines that her foreign qualities are his for the
taking:

While putting up the straight razor he always
used, clearing the basin, it slowly came to [Arnie]: an
island here [with Barbra K.] was where he’d spent his
time, and he saw the vine once more spread live and
green as a great benign lizard against the screen of
Barbra K.’s room where the dark smell of her flesh was
spread as evenly as butter. New Orleans music murmured
from the record player. Another one, a white singer,
crooned that “Love is Blue.” But it wasn’t, he was
here to testify: its color was milky brown. He should

have gone through a chameleon change. He wondered at
the whiteness of his arm. (emphasis added, 236)

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Perhaps the key to Arnie’s eagerness for passing is the word
chameleon: he never converts from his skin for a second,
except in the security of a daydream. He is slumming,
enjoying the thrill of a quick fantasy. Arnie acts as if
the price of being black is easy, merely the wanting to be
black, the admiration of a raspy style of music. He deems
another race en vogue and reads the issue of color
frivolously, as if it pertains to a box of crayons,
something one can pick up and then put back down. Arnie’s
attempts to mitigate Barbra K’s blackness/his whiteness are
unabashedly appropriative: he will make her his new Evelyn,
or in an alternate mood, become a good old soul brother
himself.

Just as with Frank Matteo, the warning signal for
Arnie’ attitudes toward Barbra K. is Barbra K. herself.
While Spencer refrains from divulging Barbra K.’s interior
observations, the woman’s behavior toward Carrington
suggests that she does not fully trust this presupposing
white liberal and has plans of her own. Barbra K. likes
having Arnie over and is portrayed as enjoying their
intimacy, but she will not dispense with her husband for

Arnie, will not rat on Matteo, and unlike Arnie, never hints

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she will become more serious with him.- Barbra K. may
appreciate her sugar daddy on the side, but she does not
allow him to control her and is firm about his peripheral
position. I wager that this good-looking, wise woman,
inclined toward New Orleans-style voodoo and adept at
forecasting other characters’ problems and secret motives
(41, 97), sees right through her aging lover and his
requisites for their romance. Barbra K. would not mop
Arnie’s floor oblivious to the fact that he has never before
invited her over, oblivious to his calling a younger white
woman to manage her work, and if she is smart enough to
intuit “something sittin’ there” over Arnie’s impotence
“[that’s] gonna take wing and fly,” chances are likely that
Evelyn’s larger-than-life dominance [over Arnie] is no
mystery to Barbra K. (41).

Carrington’s treatment of Matteo and Barbra K. mars his
predilection for gathering. Arnie may have learned that
“1et[ting] new creatures in” should be the basis for
Notchaki’s rejuvenation, yet under his system of
invitations, all creatures are not admitted equally (193).
He has professed that “distinctions were no longer possible

here,” but in his efforts to “gather everything up...

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everything we know... everyone we know,” Arnie stresses
unity and consensus—building, and notably, asks his minority
friends to conform most for the good of the group (193,
277). Matteo’s example is blatant. Arnie wants to wash the
Mafia out of this Italian-American and make him a family
man, to straighten Frank’s intentions toward the community
and Mavis. Arnie condescends to judge Frank as potentially
worthy: having dismissed Frank for half the novel based on
his dark, brooding looks, European lisp, and suspiciously
quick cash flow, it is Arnie who gets to decide to let Frank
in. [Frank, as Frank makes clear to Mavis, had always
wanted in (269).] Arnie gets to decide that Frank is okay;
he rationalizes that Frank has southern family principles,
or that Frank should be made welcome because someone Arnie
loves (Mavis) loves Frank (257, 194). And Carrington will
make Frank perform for the privilege of neighborly intimacy.
Frank must brush off Arnie’s island betrayal, brush off the
fact that his most significant lifeline, the Mafia ties,
will never recover, and embrace his role as a father. The
irony of Arnie's demands of Matteo is that Carrington’s pot
calls the kettle black: Arnie has repeatedly proven an able

swindler and has for years been negligent toward his own

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son. If it is admirable that Arnie changes his mind about
Frank and “see[s] him as still human in his motives,” even
after catching Frank at trespassing, disappointingly, to the
end Arnie assumes his superiority over the outsider from
Philadelphia. Arnie believes he will guide Matteo toward
proper conduct, as he tries to do in the emergency room,
which will assure Frank’s good group standing. Arnie’s
treatment of Matteo reveals that the rules of the chemistry
among row-shop inhabitants are largely Arnie’s: the happy
bonding we read so much about depends on Carrington figuring
who fits in and on what terms. The others will have to do
the changing. Arnie shifts the burden of who pays for the
new Notchaki away from himself, onto those who are least
like him, and this is the worst impediment to his
multicultural southern enterprise. The costs for reshaping
Notchaki will not be his own.

Likewise with Barbra K., Arnie makes a place for her
with Yates and Mavis, but only under guises he would craft
for his lover. The molds he tries to squeeze Barbra K. into
are twofold: becoming his new Evelyn and Barbra K. appearing
to his friends as less-Black, less of a social anomaly.

Arnie enables Barbra K. to pass in a circle with which,

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normally, she would have little contact, by virtue of
binding her to his reputation. Barbra K. is Arnie’s woman:
his friends would not hurt him so much as to snub her.
Certainly Barbra K. stands out as the gang’s only Black, and
in a novel/town where Blacks and whites are not reported to
mix socially, she stands out a great deal. What makes her
acceptable to the group is their respect for Arnie. They
intuit the nature of his liaison with Barbra K., they choose
to accept her, and accordingly, they prefer not to mention
her race or the fact that Arnie frequents her quarters. The
inclusion of Barbra K. reveals the degree to which
Carrington’s group feel they must suppress difference in
order to survive. Specifically, when Spencer describes the
“communion” building among row-shop inhabitants, she is
explicit about topics off-limits for their conversation
(195). Arnie and his friends may go on for hours “about
business, about food, about architectural drawings and the
talent of the art students, and whether Barbra K. could get
a permit to set up a child day-care center,” but along with
the subjects of “Frank’s business being crooked” and “what
would happen when [Mavis’s] baby came,” they will not

discuss “Reuben (Barbra K.’s husband), who had got his ear

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half cut off in a fight in New Orleans,” “or Arnie vanishing
in Barbra K.’s direction from time to time,” or “Barbra K.
being black and the others white,” “or whether Reuben would
get it in for Arnie if he found out" (195-96). The group
will not broach what is radical, or dangerous, or
problematic about their relations, and much of this involves
Barbra K. -- her racial distinctions, who she has sex with,
which man will eventually claim her. They will not broach
taboos against them in a larger world, what may have kept
them apart in the past or threaten their future accord.
Having finally made it together, having reached a point
where they can talk in casual and friendly terms (where
before they would not have spoken at all), they cannot risk
questioning the social factors that would throw thick walls
between them. Now this is true of Mavis’s unwed pregnancy
and even of Yates’s former drug-addicted wife, but as
Spencer’s plot unfolds, the weight of how well the group
will endure rests on Frank’s and Barbra K.’s shoulders. As
Mavis’s pre-term labor forces one of those unspoken factors
into relief, making the group deal with an issue they have
preferred to ignore, Spencer writes that they charge to the

hospital “riding” on “hope” -— hope, as Arnie imagines, that

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Frank will “come and claim [the baby], claim [Mavis], claim
himself, claim us all” (298). And again, the scene in the
hospital waiting room pivots on Matteo -- whether this
prowling, stand-offish figure will join the others’ vigil --
and on Arnie’s revelation that Barbra K. is his island
incarnate. At the novel’s close the status of the group
depends on Matteo’s and Barbra K.’s response to roles
prescribed for them, and tellingly, Spencer ends without
revealing what either will do. Frank is all in a quandary,
not knowing whom to trust, challenging Arnie even if,
theoretically, he agrees with him, and Barbra K. has no idea
yet of Arnie’s intent to make her his spirit place -— she
has only been sitting in the waiting room, praying, holding
her head in her hands. Hence the response of the minority
characters is -- if not nothing —- certainly ambiguous, and
Arnie’s collective never gels for sure. Frank and Barbra K.
pose vague contingencies to Arnie’s plans for a tight—knit
group, and the fact that neither fully squares with his
expectations hints that maybe they have been asked to do, or
sacrifice, or transform too much.

Ultimately Carrington's efforts to achieve a balanced

and friendly southern multiculturalism fall noticeably

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short. The white southern liberal makes good strides; with
Notchaki’s rebuilding he learns to relax boundaries rather
than swear by them and admit “new creatures” into his
circle, but in the end Arnie’s example proves that welcoming
alone will not secure group cohesion (193). It is not
enough for Arnie to invite a minority person to share his
space; as a white southerner he needs to recognize that
other spaces are available in the South, that his space may
not be appealing or sufficient for non-white southerners,
and, considering the region’s history, that folks ethnically
different may be suspicious of a trap. As a white
southerner Arnie supposes multiculturalism starts with
himself where he is, that it is something he can do from his
own vantage point, bringing others around. He considers
himself the nexus for a new Notchaki, and urges others to
conform to his expectations to approach his inner ring. But
multiculturalism should not entail Arnie asking oppressed
people to occupy his traditionally privileged spots; perhaps
instead it would succeed if Arnie let go his side of town as
opposed to another and acknowledged that the whole grid
around him (and not just the pockets he owns) surges with

meaningful activity. He does not have to allow in Black or

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Native American or Italian American peOple for them to
impact the South. Arnie must dispense with the notion that
that which he has excluded -- what he has deemed the
“outside” -— can become the South only as he gives it
access. When he reaches toward the outside without
recognizing and talking about the problems of his boundaries
(former or not), then those who have been excluded feel
cheated and will likely reject him (as Matteo, and in a
different way, Barbra K., seem inclined to do). If Arnie
continues to try to smooth over the South, past or present,
Notchaki will pass him by in its evolution. Carrington’s
example shows that there can be no inside track for those
who want to deal with a divergent and multicultural South.
Arnie may have the wanting, but his mistake is that he
cannot get over being white, cannot let go the idea that he
holds the reins for his group’s identity. Carrington’s
revised South is not fully Shareable because, like Arcady
yet more subtly, its basis is racial, that a white man knows
best and should control the community’s decorum, rapport,
and concomitantly, its physical layout.

With both Arcady and Arnie’s more open alternative,

boundaries are tenuous because the lines drawn entitle white

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folks at others’ expense, and the others are tired of
accommodating: boundaries cannot hold unless their various
sides adhere. Arcady, for example, depends on the Black
worker raking magnolia leaves: that he wear “overalls and a
dark-checkered shirt” (plain work clothes, common of the
agrarian South), that he work deliberately and with seeming
satisfaction, and that he stay put while the white man-
about-town watches (215). Arcady also depends on the
containment of Native Americans (their only property left to
visit, but not own, is relegated to Arnie’s back yard), and
a strict delineation between Arnie’s interests and the
darker Frank Matteo’s. The problem with these parameters is
their disproportion: they designate too much for one side.
Inherently they are fallible because sides given less tend
to want to edge over. From the start it is too much to ask
that Black characters occupy restricted spaces contentedly;
that Native Americans accept their dispossession and chat
pleasantly with the white man who owns their sacred grounds
(soothing his conscience and reinforcing his title rights);
that Matteo settle for being treated as a second-class
citizen, denied the opportunity to purchase land associated

with the white genteel, when he pumps sizable funds into the

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local economy and follows a business etiquette similar to
Arnie’s. The founding principle of Arcady is
circumscription: a person’s social value determines where he
can circulate freely. But those deemed subordinate seem
unwilling to comply, and when white fails to appeal as
superior, Arcady loses its shape in The Salt Line, as well
as its mystical attraction.

Likewise with Arnie’s revised version of Notchaki, his
difference—based community will not model his white, one-man
lead, particularly when that lead is damaging, as with
Matteo, or appropriative, as with Barbra K. Supporting
difference should not require others’ changing. For Arnie
to ask others to be like him, or to act as he advises, in
order to join forces suggests another kind of racism,
perhaps less obvious than Arcady’s, but prejudice all the
same: not that Carrington’s purity needs separating from the
untouchables, but that it will dominate through adoption and
compulsory similarity. Unlike Arcady, his revised version
of Notchakiis not compartmentalized in its layout, with
each compartment designating a particular ethnic group or
class; rather, its grid stipulates a near and a far, a

center and the hinterlands. With this revised picture

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difference is a matter of degree, and the more of it one can
shed to be like Carrington, the closer she may come to
Notchaki’s center. There is opportunity to advance toward
the core and make connections which before were forbidden,
but Arnie's lines of inclusion are still dictatorial and
biased.

It would be comforting if Spencer promised the South’s
continuing distinction and vitality. She does not. In
Carrington’s mind, what links his revised version of
Notchaki to the old Gold Coast is its emphasis on invitation
and open reception, but the conditions he sets for others to
enter his circle impede their admission. Arnie jeopardizes
the essential quality he would like to see characterize his
town: he problematizes welcoming by requiring uniformity.
Therefore the possibility of “gathering everything up....
everyone we know” is seriously threatened, and at the
novel’s close, Arnie’s collective hangs in the balance
(277). However in Spencer’s South there is always the risk
of losing place, of having borders wiped clear or radically
transformed: through social upheaval (Indian Removal or the
Civil War), natural disaster, bigotry, or related, the

small—scale battles of different parties with competitive

258

interests. Sometimes too, as with the Buddha’s meditative
reign in Arnie’s back garden, sacred space ebbs because it
misses the force of its allurement. What Spencer
contributes to a new southern geography is this insistence
on losing places as we know them: spatial loss and change
are part of human experience and the natural world’s
cycling. There can be no fixed South, not in practical
terms, and for Arnie’s revised version of Notchaki to
succeed, he must abandon his resolve for a founding,
stabilizing center. Like Naylor and Pratt, Spencer also
warns that, even if lost, former configurations of places
are never erased -- there may be physical remnants left that
influence newer geographic layouts, or rooted ideological
commitments (among inhabitants or builders) that determine
where and why current lines are established (between various
enclaves of people, for instance, or corporate and private,
or natural and industrial). In The Salt Line, there is no
such thing as a blank-slate community, even when a hurricane
leaves what seems like a decimated landscape: the South will
always be marked by its history of white supremacy,
violence, and oppression. The key to the region’s ongoing

existence is whether inhabitants, especially white

259

southerners, will perceive, and then combat, the effects of
bigotry in their own spaces of living, business, and
leisure, and whether they can reconcile -— with themselves,
and with those mistreated -- with the weight of the past.
These are difficult tasks, even when characters like Arnie
Carrington are motivated to achieve them, but they are

Spencer’s challenge for an honest southern multiculturalism.

260

Conclusion
Re—placement Due South
The South today is unfolding -- not unravelling but
unfolding. It is edging past stereotypical images of
itself, such as Jefferson’s yeoman farm, the large
plantation house, sharecroppers’ shacks, or the quaint small
town, as in To Kill a Meekinghird or Walten’a Meantain, to
assume different looks and social standards. Urban ghettos
and gay bars dot every southern metropolis. Atlanta boasts
upper-class Black neighborhoods, and even more influential,
Miami’s Cuban-American sector dominates the city’s business
and political affairs. Revived interest in folk art has
boosted the esteem and economy of once remote mountain
communities, like Hiawassee, Georgia or Waynesville, North
Carolina. From the southwest to the Carolinas the
agricultural work force is primarily Mexican migrant.
Perhaps most astonishing, recently a Texas town showed no
mercy for the white men who drug a Black man, James Byrd,
Jr., to his death in 1998. These new pictures of the South
appear radically different from former characterizations
because they are what I call multicultural: they center on

southern groups who were once ignored or suppressed (most

261

obviously Blacks, but also, any person other than white,
Christian, heterosexual, native southern, and preferably
middle-class male), and most of them implicitly critique the
region’s traditional white power base. Today the South’s
underside is prone to coming out —- not that these groups or
issues have attained wide acceptance from white southerners
(although some have), but that they show themselves, they
dare ask, they occupy. The wonder is that the region
continues at all with such changes, since they rock its
founding principles of exclusion. You would think the South
might come to be known as something else: flexibility is one
thing, but to absorb the opposite of what you have stood for
suggests something other than addition or modification; it
seems to require a new face completely. If the South is
beginning to show signs of diversity (or evidence of honest
struggle with inclusion), then in its self-conception and
self-labeling you would think it might break ties with its
historically repressive past. But there it is still -- “the
South” -- object of parlance and news polls, a designating
point and identity marker, even for thriving minority
groups. It disgusts and titillates in David Lynch’s Wi;d_at

heatt, flaunts rock-and—roll nostalgia and racial exoticism

262

in John Berendt’s travelling Savannah show (which stars
real-life figures from his best-seller, Midnight in the
Garden of Good and Evil), and showcases the glint and
sophistication of southern African-American chique in the
vignettes of Pearl Cleage or Tina McElroy Ansa’s The Hand I
Fan With. The South still works and convinces and passes as
the South, and despite its overburdened and often negative
associations, it is a point of origin or habitation many
various people, even oppressed people, are willing to claim
as their own.

In this project I have tried to account for the enigma
of a multicultural South. I have tried to explain in some
measure the oddities of the region’s continuing, when its
code of white supremacy is slipping, and the particular
angle I have used is one constitutive for southern studies,
the literary category of place. I focused on place for
several reasons: because I could not define southern writing
without describing its reference point, the South, and
trying to describe the South raises questions about centers,
borders, and the strength of proximity; because describing
the region is a back—and-forth exercise between determining

particulars of a place, and more complex, the meaning of

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place itself; because literary critics have long
distinguished southern writing for its sense of place but
have never explained what that entails; and finally, because
as a practice and concept multiculturalism invokes shared
space, that multiple parties with conflicting interests
divvy and mediate common ground. Place is an inevitable
battlefield for multicultural tensions. On an everyday,
tangible level, it forces choices and competition between
parties interested in the same sites or networks: everyone
must be somewhere, and most people prefer certain locales
over others. Place and multiculturalism intersect over who
has a right to be where and on what terms -- who owns, who
can visit freely, who trespasses -- so that by dissecting
the ways areas are laid out and used, we learn as much about
social dynamics of neighboring groups as physical
proportions. Place further pertains to multiculturalism
because, theoretically, any site indicates a near and a far,
a here and a there: establishing the bearings of a locale
means figuring its relation to other areas, a situational
exercise that must be enacted for various groups to claim,

share, or occupy a limited range of turf.

264

By concentrating on subtleties of place I have recalled
one of southern literary criticism’s abiding interests.
Since scholars began to identify and shape the movement
known as the Southern Renaissance in the late 19405 and 505
-- indeed, twenty years earlier, with the Nashville
Agrarians -- they have relied on place to fix the validity
of regional writing and culture. Some insist that the
southern in southern literature rests with a sense of place,
a “moonlight and magnolia” quality critics edduce as
natural, or self evident, and thereby exempt from analysis.
Others stress the necessity of realism for southern scenes.
Maintaining that readerly trust legitimizes regional
writing, these critics praise literary places mirroring
Souths they can identify. To infuse texts with credibility
(the power of the familiar) there is no force more constant,
or pleasingly subtle, than what by necessity must always be
present: backdrop, location, site. Every incident requires

a recognizable somewhere.

Southern studies’ preoccupation with place extends even
further. Scholars construe in literary depictions of the
South the complex layers of symbol and theme, tying southern

pictures to prescribed cultural conventions; they read place

265

in books as a panacea, an answer to the helter-skelter
changes of the twentieth-century South; and poignantly, they
mourn the loss of authentic southern places, convinced of
the region’s passing. So entwined is the formation of a
southern canon with “the South” that within regional
scholarship virtually every commentary espouses a phi1050phy
of place, and the range of philosophies is wide. But
despite the number and variety of approaches all tend to
stabilize the category, and this has been my frustration.

In combing southern studies for flexible ideas about place,
to help explain the interaction, and even progression, of
many discordant Souths within a multicultural South, I have
found only structures of homogeneity. Although scholars in
the field target different aspects of place (e.g., as
intuitive knowledge, verifiable site, or charged ideological
image), with regard to its function they each stress
conformity: that successful literary depictions of the South
share a unique aura; that native southern readers
instinctively grasp such an'aura; that characteristics of
the real South in literature are obvious and may be
validated; that the most prominent of southern writers use

place in texts to repair their homeland’s disentegration.

266

Also, the southern critic limits place’s role to support or
prop. He casts it as an immovable grounding point,
essential but not transformative and certainly never
overpowering -- a foundation for characters and time to
spend themselves on. When the worst is over and other
elements have given way, that foundation, he councils, will

remain, and what remains is the heart of the South.

What I have suggested is a broadening of place. My
basis for stretching conventional notions has been the
spatial predicaments in contemporary southern women’s
writing, which southern scholarship, with its emphasis on
reliability and cohesion, all but invalidates. For the
texts I set out to treat -- all questioning the South’s
transition from white hegemony to something else, by an
African American from New York City, a white lesbian
political activist, and a privileged white lady from near
the Mississippi Delta -- present place as sheer difficulty.
Far from ancillary, in Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day, Minnie
Bruce Pratt’s “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” or Elizabeth
Spencer’s The SaTt Line, place intrudes as an issue or
uncertain point of reckoning. Place in these texts upsets

personal quests, strips characters of long-held beliefs, and

267

threatens more loss than security or comfort. These
contemporary works enliven place, divulging its movements,
its momentum, its propensity for change. They show how
place registers and remembers, how it trips characters up.
Their interest in place is as an activity rather than

passive scene.

Mama Day, “Identity: Skin Blood Heart,” and The Salt
hihe are inexplicable by southern studies’ standards,
because at root they contradict what the criticism says
about place. Mama Day, for example, balks the scholarship’s
insistence on realism. Naylor spins a bizarre tale from
several unlikely threads: her main setting, Willow Springs
Island, splits the line between South Carolina and Georgia
and thus is controlled by neither (“Willow Springs ain’t in
no state” [4]); since the antebellum period, the island has
been legally possessed by a single African-American family
(an astonishing feat at the edge of the Deep South); and
eerily, disgruntled Day ghosts stalk characters around
Willow Springs, confusing steps and blurring well-worn
pathways. Geography itself is a source of agitation, with
woods closing in around pilgrims, searches on hallow ground

ending in futility, or points of direction vacillating once

268

African magic holds sway. Further, Mama Day opens with an
exotic map of Willow Springs, luring readers across
intercoastal waters from their “mainland” experience, but at
so many narrative turns Naylor weaves arcs of improbability
(such as Berenice’s conception at the other place) which
impede an audience’s crossing over. Although readers do
need faith to complete Mama Day with any measure of
satisfaction, Naylor withholds familiarity; even for most
Black characters, the propositions offered by Willow Springs
are outlandish and unthinkable. Trust in the staging of the
Day family drama is hard-won and inconceivable and precious.
Spatial realism has little room in this bewitching tale
about an African American group for whom the dominant
perspective (i.e., the southern white man’s) has been
overthrown and successfully replaced.

Likewise, in “Identity: Skin Blood Heart” Minnie
Bruce Pratt uses place to break down her former southern
homes, subverting the theory that regional writers idealize
the category to mitigate real-life ills. According to Louis
Rubin, southern writers cast place in their work as it has
ceased to be in their experience: a physical and moral

promised land, hierarchically organized. Rubin stipulates

269

that the decline of an author’s immediate surroundings makes
her textualize place as quaint, reliable, and uniform. But
in “Identity,” a sharply politicized personal essay, place
is no literary sanctuary. Pratt revisits former
inhabitances to show their divisive and devouring ways, how
they have caused humiliation and violence and outright
murder. Not only does she depict each homesite as
distressingly lacking (of human empathy, of unconditional
love, of clear vantage points and racial equity), Pratt
judges them as effecting lack. She learns, for example, her
paternal home’s foundation is stealing and bigotry; the land
Pratt grew up on was taken from Native Americans in the
nineteenth century and given to her great-grandfather for
his role in the Georgia Indian Wars. Not only Native
American, but African American oppression, has bolstered the
Pratt family homestead, by means of slavery, and in the
twentieth century, cheap labor. Her father’s home also
generates loss within Pratt. Its inheritance is prejudice,
and although Pratt cuts the cord of that birthright, she
continues to feel blighted ethically. Or, with a lesbian
home Pratt herself builds for protection, there lurks an

unexpected abyss: her own intolerance. Pratt’s concern for

270

personal safety (which she learned as a child in rural
Alabama) turns into apathy toward other oppressed people,
less sheltered than she, a dynamic so disheartening that
Pratt forsakes normative constructs of home altogether.
Places she has known in the South haunt Pratt until she
examines and disposes of those models: her main goal in her
new Washington, D. C. neighborhood is avoiding reviving the
old. Although Pratt closes “Identity” with a forward-
looking glance, hoping for an utopia of peace amid
difference, she refrains from structuring such a blueprint.
Instead Pratt works to expose the voids of previous southern
homes, and in the heat of her candor, those inhabitances
figure dangerously as swallowing, groping black holes.

In line with Naylor and Pratt, Elizabeth Spencer upends
yet another flagship of southern studies, the arcadian
stereotype of the grand old South. In The Salt Line natural
disaster wipes out the Golden Coast along the Mississippi
Gulf: Hurricane Camille dashes all vestiges of hand-built
wooden piers, white columned houses, centuries—old trees and
genteel local inns. But staging the death of Arcady is not
what sets Spencer apart; since the Agrarians, scholars have

lamented the loss of a rural, white-dominated South, heavily

271

tinged by their nostalgia. What distinguishes Spencer is
that, ultimately, she debunks Arcady as tainted. Through
her small town’s disenchantment with rebuilding old-coast
images, Spencer reveals a compromised base for arcadian
forms: the assumption that Blacks must be satisfied with
their inferior status, that “right” is defined according to
personal interests, that a single perspective suffices for
various groups. More importantly, Spencer allows characters
to move past their grief for Arcady and create a new place
standard (a willingness to look for alternatives, a gesture
the Agrarians never considered): the special aura of their
resurrected community depends on accepting outsiders’
difference. By the end of the novel a nucleus based on
common pathways forms around a stalwart old-coaster, a
hippie—ish art teacher transplanted from Florida, a poorer
Black native, and a mob figure from Philadelphia.
Tellingly, the old-coaster, who advocates vehemently for
Arcady through the first half of The Salt Line, admits that
the group’s burgeoning chemistry was what he had sought all
along. In lieu of a magically touched, aristocratic Golden
Coast, which was never the tranquil scene it appeared,

Spencer offers generous feeling among misfits to anchor the

272

growth of her phoenixing town. A “sense of place” in The
Salt Line emerges as bonds of concern between disaffected
southerners, which obscure their previous boundaries of
social separation. Yet Spencer’s lines of connection are
fragile, as is the certainty her community will hold. She
emphasizes how characters must safeguard their relations and
resist imposing molds on the group. Place emerges, then, as
sheer force of good will and utterly tenuous: a precarious
exchange-by-exchange momentum.

If Naylor, Pratt, and Spencer cause older versions of
place to stall -- in the sense that the criticism misses
their spatial dynamics, for lack of language or adaptability
-- at least these writers provide other options. Theorists
of place in their own right, they highlight the category by
stressing its complications; they force attention to place

by making it difficult to manage (i.e., difficult for

characters, readers, and Pratt’s autobiographical “I”). In
Mama_2ay, “Identity,” or The Salt Line, place does not stay
put as supporting or transversable background -- not in

terms of situating characters or serving as relief for their
dramas, not in terms of being easy to walk across, or

access, or take charge of. Nor does place function as an

273

 

entity marked off and had. With Naylor, Pratt, or Spencer
sites resist categorization/possession, because boundaries
fluxuate between the natural and supernatural, good and bad
neighborhoods, and acceptable family structures. Sites in
these texts also change with revisiting; that is, the
trouble surrounding certain spots compels characters, and
Pratt’s autobiographical self, to mull over those spots and
return, often to find lost nuances (concrete or interpretive
“keys” to the site’s dilemma) or jarring transformation (the
site looks different to the inquirer, or is physically
altered). Sometimes scenes change in that they cease to
compel, but this too is significant in works preoccupied
with the exertion and magnetism of place. Though it assumes
a variety of guises, place’s primary role in these texts is
stirring bewilderment or anxiety: it confounds. Each of
these writers authorizes hazards or confusion around place,
which is why it is so noticeable in their work, which is why
I have called on them to define my study.

However spatial predicaments are not the only point for
Naylor’s, Pratt’s, or Spencer’s stories, and not for my
critical account, either. It is true that these writers

refuse to solve place: none offers secure place images, or

274

 

answers questions raised by her locales (at least not
fully), or insures comfort with regard to orientation. But
their refusal to fix place -- in the sense of amending the
category -- is itself instructive. That we are left with
impasse, home-lessness, or shaky foundations makes us
consider, a little harder than we might otherwise, place’s
function and effects, what its difficulties suggest. The
available criticism’s explanation, that place in southern
literature works toward conformity, fails to apply: Mama
hay, “Identity,” and The Salt Line do not lend themselves to
scenes that seem widely identifiable or feel-good auras
drawing “instinctive” readers in. Instead these texts are
caught up with people negotiating unfamiliar or distorted
Souths: unfamiliar because foreign groups have moved in, or
minorities are re-claiming scenes of their former
oppression; distorted because white folks realize the
perversion of their local geographies, and areas held
orthodox or proper begin to appear offensive.

It is precisely because of such multicultural frames
that place in these texts is uncertain. In “Identity” and
The Salt Line, tables are turned on white characters because

their communities’ supremist lines are giving way, folding

275

to new and peculiar influences. Whites flounder with
accustomed spaces because social rules have changed: they
must share configurations they once owned, or frequented,
exclusively, and it begins to dawn on them how their former
possession was unfair. The implications of their ownership
are portrayed as injurious, and in Pratt and Spencer’s
rendering, white figures actually feel guilty about this
insight and desire restitution. On the other hand, in Mama
hay Black characters enjoy proprietary rights to an extent
hard to imagine -- their land can never be taken, even if
they wish to sell -- but this reversal of fortune for
southern minorities does not clinch an easy relation to
place. Willow Springs denies the Days what they think it
embodies (and what the island itself presses them to look
for), the answers to Day origins and African-American
essence. The multicultural frame of this novel -- what
makes place problematic and what place problematizes -- is
this: a dominant group of minorities tries to remain
controlling and discrete in their southern domain. They try
to find what, exactly, has made them discrete and privileged
in their relation to the island, the mystery of the

Blackness of the Day southern Black. Willow Springs appears

276

to be made and conceived for the Days, but ironically, it
withholds the secrets of their clear title. And it is
because of the Days’ unusual, historical empowerment that
place in Mama Day is bewildering: there is the clause
against selling land, hoaxed into effect by Sapphira Wade’s
conjuring, or the sacred sites that do not'yield full
explanations, nettled by Day ghosts whose misfortunes were
circumscribed, unknown to them, by a white
forefather/master. Naylor’s text proves the difficulty of
staying front and centered as a minority group in the South,
even when the opportunity to do so seems guaranteed. The
multicultural ideal of equal allotment does not
automatically heal past disenfrancisements: place in Mama
hay shows that racism’s aftershocks will torment minorities'
occupancy for some undetermined time, despite their right
and legitimacy to a fair share of the South.

Therefore as to function, Naylor, Pratt and Spencer
make place a barometer for the growing pains of diversity.
Place blocks, it disguises, it seems to come unhinged or
constantly be improvised, because it charts a profound
changing of the guard. White southerners unused to marginal

spaces begin to make room for other people; alternately,

277

Black characters assume prime locations/positions, but not

without struggle; and in general, an equitable distribution
of limited resources is sought. As an activity to be worked
through or complication raising tough issues, place in these
texts measures progress toward difference —- toward forcing
difference, reconciling with difference, toward realizing

the fulness of difference. Even place’s stalemates or moral
quandaries are fundamentally constructive: in Naylor’s case,

they withhold the mysteries of Black essence but encourage

 

the positing of collective identity; in Pratt’s and
Spencer’s, they induce guilt, and then more positively, urge
the correction of social wrongs based on personal
responsibility. In Mama Day, “Identity: Skin Blood

Heart,” and The Salt Line, place indicates the work to be
done in building inclusive, and minority-strengthened,
Souths.

As a critic who believes literature matters in the ways
we shape and interpret our lives, my hope is that texts like
the ones I have analyzed, which experiment liberally with
the application, “southern,” while remaining committed to
its viability, will begin to make more of a mark. I hope

scholars and students of southern studies will take better

278

notice, because frankly I like these texts’ politics.
Perhaps as we southerners determine benefits for Hispanic
migrant workers, for example, or approaches to revitalizing
urban ghettoes, or the suitability of chain-gang labor and
Confederate flags hoisted over state capitols, we might do
well to consider the South’s misdeeds and how we can make
amends. I think assuming responsibility for old wrongs is
the best way to feed the flame of the region’s vitality.
What this study has taught me, to my surprise and pleasure,
is that the South might actually hold as territory
perceptibly different from the rest of the nation. But only
as we open its interior demarcations graciously -- not the
lines defining the South’s perimeter so much as those

closest to us, that we abide by every day.

279

Appendix

280

 

Appendix

In my reading of The Salt Line I pay close attention to
Elizabeth Spencer’s white liberal main character, Arnie
Carrington, and his blind spots in helping establish a
version of Notchaki based on inclusion and welcoming. To
his credit, Arnie abandons an Arcadian vision for Notchaki’s
rebuilding, because he grasps how profoundly deception and
injustice mar its contours (even as seductive as those
shapes seem to him). Unfortunately, though, Arnie makes
some of the same mistakes with the newer Notchaki as he did
with its nostalgic counterpart: he is willing to betray and
swindle if he perceives a greater good; he scrupulously
protects his own interests; and, he treats his Black lover,
Barbra K, condescendingly, assuming she will rally others
around his interests out of debt to his favor and financial
generosity. In line with these ego-centrisms, Arnie takes
for granted that he defines the chemistry stirring among his
unlikely community of friends, and to the end, expects
others to metamorphose according to his agenda for the
group.

Carrington’s example shows there can be no inside track

for those who want to deal with a divergent and

281

multicultural South. Arnie may have the wanting, but his
mistake is that he cannot get over being white, cannot let
go of the idea that he holds the reins for his group’s
identity. Arnie’s South is not Shareable in that he retains
the right to speak fully for others, especially his Black
lover, Barbra K. Crucially, the trouble with his example
pertains to me personally and other white critics involved
in southern studies.

It is not always wrong to speak for others. Linda
Alcoff has argued persuasively that speaking for others must
be a political priority when encountering oppressed groups
with no viable means for communication; to the extent that
we are able, we have to help them gain footing and let their
causes be heard. But more often than not speaking for
others assumes a position of arrogance or mastery and may
insult or disempower those spoken for. It corners them as
victims and mitigates the effect of what they might say.
Rather than stimulating change or improvement, speaking for
others can reinforce the social hierarchies that
disenfrancise certain people in the first place. So while
we need to retain the practice for extreme instances where

subjugation leaves few alternatives, when we do decide to

282

speak out for someone else, we have to pay attention to the
context of our conversation; whether our intervention is
appropriate depends on the situation. Above all, Alcoff
warns, we must always be responsible for what we say.

As white critics of southern literature, born of a
tradition that was wont to acknowledge non-white or gay
writing, much less critical voices different from our own,
we have to be careful of how we change our all-white,
middle-class look. We have to be careful of how we teach
and write about minority southern writers. We must not
speak for them in the sense that we act as if we have just
discovered them, act as if we are doing these writers a
favor by reading them alongside Wolfe or Welty, or
congratulate ourselves that our attention to them fills the
holes in our canon and assuages our bigotry in the academy.
We cannot claim them as southern without juxtaposing their
history, traditions, and writerly contexts with the white
hegemony of southern literary production. We cannot claim
them as southern without revising what southern itself
pertains to, and we must account for their influence on
definitions of regionalism, not pretend these writers are

and have been an extra, foreign element. Most especially,

283

we must not speak for minority writers by pretending our
assessments of them are primary, ignoring the cultural
heritage from which they spring or the fact that scholars of
color have been talking about them for some time.

When two of southern literature’s most highly esteemed
critics, Fred Hobson and Lewis Simpson, both end their
studies (or introductions to their studies) of exclusively
white writers by forecasting the future dominance of
southern Black artistry, this lets me know that as white
critics we still have a long way to go.1‘We need to make our
critical practice match the actual diversity of southern
culture and literary output: instead we are continuing to
build a white tradition, with the offbeat apology that we
spy minority contributors in the wings (“you first heard
about them here, folks”). We are speaking for minority
writers in the worst possible way: showing that we are
politically correct enough to acknowledge them but implying
that they fail to measure up for this particular study and
with these particular white writers. We take credit for
being multiculturally aware, but heaven forbid we should
actually treat Black writers in detail -- our reference to

them is a promissory note for future scholars.

284

There are better examples to follow among southern
literary critics, scholars who not only nod to minority
writers but respect them with serious treatment. One is
William Andrews, whose massive volume, To Tell a Free Story
(1986), traces the evolution of eighteenth- and nineteenth-
century African-American autobiography; so extensive and
painstaking is Andrews’ research that the work remains,
thirteen years later, a touchstone in its field, referenced
heavily by anyone who deals with the genre. In fact across
his career Andrews has edited or written forwards for
scarcely-known (at the time) Black southern texts (e.g.,
Charles Chesnutt’s The Heuee Behind the cedars) and
published articles on Frederick Douglass, Elizabeth Keckley,
and Booker T. Washington, to name a few. Significantly, he
specifies time and again the debt of his work to Black
literary scholarship; throughout his criticism Andrews
reviews influential studies by George M. Fredrickson or
James Olney, for example, comparing his assertions to
theirs, or in the process of writing, solicits aid and
advice from such giants as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Robert
Stepto. Another white literary critic who tests the

traditional southern canon is Minrose Gwin, whose first

285

book, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar
Sisterhood in American Literature (1985) treats the complex
and often schizophrenic relations between Black and white
women in plantation novels and neo-slave narratives. Gwin
has also testified poignantly to the distractions and
hazards, as a critic and university professor, of being

white, of “attempting to teach black women’s studies at a

former military university in the land of Robert E. Lee” (“A
Theory” 22). In “A Theory of Black Women’s Texts and White
Women’s Readings, or... The Necessity of Being Other,” Gwin

holds her own fear and humiliation at bay as she reads
herself in Black women’s texts -- that is “not just as the
person I am or would hope to be but as the more general (and
thereby highly problematic) signifier of white women” (22).
Without making excuses for all the reasons she is not those
white female characters she so loathes in Black women's
texts, Gwin tries fully to absorb the distrust Black women
have historically felt for their white counterparts. She
tries to listen to what Black female writers and students
have to say without answering back defensively -- answering
back would take the edge off their accusations, and Gwin is

convinced that the accusations should rightfully make her

286

smart. Hers is not a social criticism that supplies
answers. At the end of the article Gwin does not suggest
what we all should do, we Black and white women in southern
contexts, to talk freely and work together; all too often,
she recognizes, white women in the South have been Breakers
of Promises, exploiting Black women physically,
economically, emotionally, and have been quick to abandon
common causes of gender to side with the long arm of white
husbands and Jim Crow law. White women have profited
mightily from Black women’s oppression. Gwin seems to say
that rather than erase that legacy and move on, we white
women need to sit down and let Black women speak their
peace, as she herself does by closing with a long quote from
one of her Black women students, who is fed up with “well-
meaning white friends” who have disclosed, “But can’t you
help your black sisters understand that we want to help
them?” (31).

Drawing on the examples of Andrews and Gwin, for white
critics to teach and write about minority southern
literature respectfully, a second thing we must do is
immerse ourselves in minority critical traditions. Houston

A. Baker, Jr.’s scholarship on Black authors and the blues

287

should inform our discussions as much as Lewis Simpson’s
dispossessed garden. We need to be familiar with Booker T.
Washington and W. E. B. DuBois’s classic debates over the
position of Blacks in the South, Lillian Smith’s articles
and speeches condemning the southern New Critics (“No
writers in literary history have failed their region as
completely as they did”), and Arna Bontemps’ suasion that
Blacks should reclaim the South and follow through on the
implications of Martin Luther King, Jr. addressing Lyndon B.
Johnson as “my fellow Southerner” (Smith 199, Bontemps 332).
We need to know who Blanche McCrary Boyd is, why her
personal essays have been so prized by The Village Voiee,
why Dorothy Allison calls Boyd’s The Redneck Way ef
Knewledge “a cultural masterpiece” (Introduction to the
Vintage Edition of Redneck xii). We need to recognize how
minority critics have championed Black, or gay, or Jewish
writers as indelibly southern (there is plenty of precedent
for southern applying to non-white), how these critics have
been imaging Souths fundamentally different from
conventional American stereotypes of the South. In 1993 the

Afriean_Ameriean_heyiem dedicated two issues to the Black

South, “a region in motion,” featuring such articles as

288

 

“Black South Literature,” “Black South Culture,” and “The

2
More

Black South in Contemporary Film” (27.1, p. 6).
recently, the guest editors of American Literature, Houston
A. Baker, Jr. and Dana D. Nelson, forwarded a call for
papers for a special issue on “Violence, the Body, and ‘The
South,’” with marked attention toward “the specificity of
violence against human bodies -- especially African American
bodies.”3

But as Minnie Bruce Pratt or Minrose Gwin would warn,
we white southern critics need to be careful. As surely as
we must instruct ourselves and our students about the Black
South, the gay South, the South of Oriental immigrants and
migrant workers, we need to know our place relative to
minority writers and scholars. We should be aware of these
other traditions, we should teach them and keep up with
their developments, but our attention must not, must not
ever resemble appropriation. I mean this particularly for
the Black literary and critical tradition, which has
steadily been gaining ground in the past ten years and whose
leaders and participants would rightly scoff at our slumming

-- if slumming is the attitude we take, acting as if we are

“coming down” from the establishment to other exciting,

289

 

forbidden levels. We must not swoop minority traditions
under our wing, but we can treat the Black southern heritage
as central, examine its intersections and impasses with
white southern literature, and most crucial of all,
carefully and honestly study the implications of our own
academic racism. In the spirit of Minrose Gwin’s piece on
“The Necessity of Being Other,” or Michael Kreyling’s
troubling critique of cultural amnesia in the work of Louis
Rubin, Jr., I think the weightiest job for white southern
academics is unraveling how our being white has affected
regional scholarship. To be responsible for what we have
said and condoned in the past, for the ways, as Kreyling
charges, we turned our backs on the Civil Rights movement by
worshipping literary image over concrete experience (and
separating the two), we have to figure the meaning of race
not just for the writers we study but for the pronouncements
we have made. And rather than take offense at attempts by
ourselves and others to hold our scholarship accountable,
such as Louis Rubin has done in offhand remarks at
conferences, we need wisely to remember Blanche McCrary
Boyd’s charge, “Like every white American I’ve ever

encountered, I am a racist,” and the awful certainty with

290

 

[
I
5

 

which she quotes a seasoned Black friend, “White people is
all the same story” (146-47). We need to keep quiet a
little and listen and take our prejudice to heart, and when
we do make pronouncements it should be with a sense of the
shakiness of our authority. It is absolutely essential that
we acknowledge our racism, clarify the ways we have blocked
others from the qualifier, southern, and disavow those

practices, or otherwise I despair that minority scholars

 

will ever join our conversations. A sensitive and contrite

l?‘ in? Sign

criticism is what I am calling for, first of all because it
is the right thing to do, but equally important, because
minority critics will continue to dismiss white southern
scholars if we act as if everything is peachy, every problem
is past, and why can’t we all just get along.

Finally, a word about my use of we. I have employed it
throughout this conclusion to indicate other scholars of
southern literature who are white, most of whom are also
southern. My experiences in graduate school at UNC-Chapel
Hill and an assortment of southern literary conferences have
led me to think that people who identify themselves as
scholars of southern culture are nearly each of them white,

and that, for perhaps three exceptions, scholars of minority

291

southern writing do not call themselves southern critics,
but critics of, for example, African-American literature.
Certainly at southern literary conferences the audiences are
almost exclusively white, and so are the panels and panel
topics. I hope that in ten or fifteen years my use of the
word we will seem archaic, maybe so horribly out of place as
to sound prejudiced. I hope southern itself will still be
around. But the only way southern will continue to be
meaningful, I believe, is if it applies to so many different
ethnicities and orientations -- with representatives of
those groups actively involved as southern scholars -- that
my designation here will strike people as grossly outdated.
I hope that southern as critics now know it (and know
ourselves) falls apart enough to disperse and thereby keep
its head above water in the turf-wars of popular American

culture.

292

'v t.)

 

 

)1

 

Notes

293

Notes

Introduction
1 See George E. Pozzetta’s “Ethnic Life” (401-04), Roger
Daniels’s “Asian Groups” (418-21), and Carlos E. Cortes’s
“Mexicans” (437-38), all in Eneyclopedia of Southern Culthre
(Eds. Charles Reagan Wilson and William Ferris). See also
David R. Goldfield’s “Urbanization” (34). Although since
the 19705 Pozzetta notes an increase in the South of
“Vietnamese exiles, Mexican migrant laborers, Cuban
‘boatlifters,’ Haitian refugees, and other Latin American
immigrants,” he also forcibly reminds that the South was
never exclusively Black and white; in the colonial South,
for instance, there were scores of Native American tribes
(Lumbee, Seminole, Cherokee, Choctaw, etc.), and in the port
cities especially, like Charleston, New Orleans, and
Baltimore, communities of French Huguenots, Sephardic Jews,
Germans, and Spaniards settled in ethnic enclaves (404).
2

On Black in-migration to the South, see Campbell, Johnson,

and Stangler (514-28); Marcus E. Jones (97—98); Rabinowitz

(110-11); Preston (189-90); and Goldfield’s Premieed hand;
The Sehth Sihee T245 (1987). Using 1990 census figures,

Philip Perlmutter argues that Blacks constitute 67.1 percent

294

 

nanny.

of the population in Atlanta, 65.8 percent in Washington,
D.C., 63.3 percent in Birmingham, 61.9 percent in New
Orleans, and 59.2 percent in Baltimore [notably, Black
mayors have served in Atlanta, Washington, Birmingham, and
New Orleans] (21). On the 1965 Civil Rights Act and
resulting increase of Black registered voters and elected
Black officials in the South, see Scher (246-58); Clark Hine

(183—84); Rabinowitz (111-112); and Preston (189—92).

 

3

In My Teare Spoiled My Aim (1993) sociologist John Shelton

KNEW“ ‘ ”w _

Reed claims that one out of every eight people living in the
South have transferred from the North -- mostly to fast-
growing southern cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, Austin, and
the triangle-area of North Carolina, where high-tech
industries have been booming, and along the edges of the
South (northern Virginia, the Ozarks, Texas, and Florida)
(130-34). Northern retirees, Reed contends, come to the
South just because they like it better than home (134). See
also Raymond Arsenault on the air-conditioning revolution;
and Dewey Grantham on the 19705 influx of elderly migrants
to the South (265).

4

One recent incident which highlights southern farmers’

dependence on Mexican migrant workers is the furious

295

 

response of Georgia farmers and congressmen to an
Immigration and Naturalization Services raid on illegal
immigrants in Vidalia, Georgia, in May 1998. The raid
occurred in the middle of onion-harvesting season and sent
most seasonal workers’ packing; but before the onion crop
rotted, Georgia congressmen worked a compromise with the INS
which allowed illegal immigrants to return unscathed
(Bixler, “Immigration Law Enforcement Can Depend on Labor
Needs” and “They Come with a Will to Work and a Hope for a
Better Life,” D1). On migrant farming as a staple of
southern agriculture, see also Daniel Rothenberg’s flith

These Hands: The Hidden World ef Migrant Farmwerkers Today

(1990).
5 Howard N. Rabinowitz writes decisively, “since the early
19708, southern schools have become more integrated than

northern ones, in part because of the artificially forced

nature of much of the original segregation and the success

of busing and other court-ordered measures” (112). See also

Gary Orfield et al, School Segregatien in the 198Qs; Trends

in the united States and Metrepelitan Areas (1987).

6 Dewey W. Grantham writes convincingly of the South’s

embrace of FDR’s programs and how federal support

296

 

transformed southerners’ political leanings. The New Deal
“helped create a politics of class and economic interest in
the South.... It both reinforced southerners’ regional
self-consciousness and heightened their awareness of being
an integral part of the nation” (338). The South could no
longer conceive of itself as an entity outside of
Washington’s reach. On the growth of southern agribusiness
and decline of small-to-medium-sized family farms, see
Charles Reagan Wilson (13-15), Grantham (26—61), and Hirsh
(8.A).

7 On the ever-enlarging Spanish-speaking population in the
South, particularly concentrated in Texas and Florida, see
Perlmutter (17, 19-20); see also Deborah Jackson (writing
about Greensboro, North Carolina) (R1); and Mark Bixler
(writing about southeast Georgia) (D1).

8 See Elizabeth Spencer’s memoir, L n f th H r

(1998), particularly her chapters “Homecoming” and “Leave-

taking.”

297

 

..I'NV. .1.Ln'u
. .

Chapter One

Measuring Southern Measures
1 Michael Kreyling posits in blanket fashion (seeming to
yawn), “A common sense of place... is often invoked as the
foundation of the literary history of the South; some
version of Woodward’s ‘burden’ formula is most frequently
applied as history” (234). Kathryn Lee Seidel frankly sizes
up, “The preeminence of place in all of southern literature
is by now such a cliche that one may be tempted to look
instead for other influences” (18). And best capturing the
critical irritation with this over-used yet perplexing term,
Noel Polk wonders if “the whole idea of the separate
southern ‘place’ is too much with us” (“The Southern
Literary Pieties,” 33).
2 See, for example, Robert W. Daniel’s “Eudora Welty: The
Sense of Place”; Noel Polk’s “The Critics and Faulkner’s
‘Little Postage Stamp of Native Soil,’”; Elmo Howell’s

“Eudora Welty and the Use of Place in Southern Fiction”;

Frederick J. Hoffman’s “The Sense of Place”; or Jan Nordby

Gretlund’s Ehdera MeTty’s Aestheties 9f hlaee.

298

 

”In—”‘AI—‘h. ‘1‘ 5 , ‘ ..“'...t.

Ir

 

   

 

3 Although I treat Eudora Welty at length in this section,

one could also consult Jan Nordby Gretlund’s Eudora Welty’s
Aesthetics of Place, which focuses on the “pronounced out-
of-life-into-fiction tendency in Welty’s writing” and
questions what the artist’s Mississippi scenes point to (3,
5). Comparing Welty to Anton Chekhov for her “realism” and
(in the next sentence) for the fact that “whatever [she]
write[s], it is always wedded to place” (13), Gretlund
praises a young Welty who learned early to evoke places she
knew familiarly in her settings (34-36). The Mississippi in
Welty’s fiction “serves as ‘a gateway to reality,’”
confirming the writer’s importance to cultural studies of
her home state and her characters’ spokesmanship for
“Southern life” (346-47). At the heart of this study
Gretlund regards Welty’s work as “representative of the
collective experience of the South from the Depression,
through WW II, and up through the civil rights battles of
the 19605 to the present” (1). Similar to Gretlund, the
critic Robert Daniel is amazed by the creditability of
Welty’s settings, “which are real enough to touch” (276).
In Daniel’s view, readers warm to Welty’s place depictions

because she appeals to their own reference points: “Take the

299

 

Peacocks’ shack [in The Ponder Heart], where the funeral is
held: we already know, from the sentence introducing them

into the story, what kind of place it will be. The details
of it... individualize it unforgettably. Outside, the tire
with red verbena growing in it; on the porch, portulaca in
pie pans and, of course, the mirror; inside, the cracks on
the floor and chickens under your feet. And all of it ,

authenticated by the broom standing behind the door! How

 

could skepticism greet a story that happens in such

Fink. .... “.1 ,. ,

undeniably real places?” (276-77)

It is one thing to claim an author’s finest writing is
rooted in (and indebted to) real-life locales, but two other
bodies of criticism, Wolfe’s and Faulkner’s, probe supposed
prototypes of fictional settings in nearly maddening detail.
For guidebook-like studies of Asheville/Altamont (or
comparing Wolfe’s fiction to the mountain region of western
North Carolina), see, for example, Floyd Watkins’s Themas
Wolfe’s Charaetets (1957), Anthony Channell Hilfer’s
“Wolfe’s Altamont: The Mimesis of Being,” Elmo Howell’s
“Thomas Wolfe and the Sense of Place,” or Floyd Watkins’s
“Thomas Wolfe and Asheville Again and Again and Again.” For

one-to-one correspondences between Oxford, Mississippi and

300

Faulkner’s Jefferson, see Ward Miner’s The World of William
Faulkner, Elizabeth Kerr’s Yoknapatampha: Faulkner’s “Little
Postage Stamp of Native Soil”, G. T. Buckley and Calvin
Brown’s thA debate in the early 19605 (Buckley’s “Is Oxford
the Original Jefferson in William Faulkner’s novels?” and
Brown’s “Faulkner’s Geography and Topography”), and Charles
Aiken’s “Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Country: A Place in the
American South.”

4 Certainly Welty keeps good company with her emphasis on
place framing character. In the place-oriented essay
featured in Rubin and Jackson’s Southern Renaseenee, “Time
and Place in Southern Fiction,” H. Blair Rouse contends that
setting, skillfully rendered, “involve[s] the life of the
characters in such a way that the reader comes to understand
these people as living in a physical world possessing
specific characteristics and a true and actual location”
(135). In Rouse’s view setting transcends props when it
evokes a particular mood, comprises a character’s physical
and spiritual “room,” or influences characters’ lives to the
extent that it, too, “becomes an actor in the structure of

the work” (138). Even with regard to mood, the aspect which

might appear least affected by character, Rouse manages to

301

1.”)

 

use fictional personages as criterion. If atmosphere
overwhelms character and action, an author has gone too far:
“the reader almost loses sight of narrative entirely and may
realize the central characters... only as clusters of
attitudes, customs, superstitions” (140). Hence place
potentially threatens; it should not impress for its own
sake, apart from character development. More properly, L.
setting can speak to “the poetry of human existence” by

conjuring sensory impressions directly linked to characters’

 

3’3 ....

experience (140-41). Rouse praises one of Paul Green’s
scenes, for instance, because it is “vividly present in all
its sights, sounds and smells, with its varied implications
for the whites and Negroes who lived there” (141). And no
doubt best of all, place may achieve a sort of “spiritual
stature” when it simultaneously captures “the ideal” and
“utterly factual actuality,” and when, as with Faulkner,
readers grasp “just what was the physical world of his
people and what it meant to them, how it affected them and
how it was affected by them” (142-43). All these cases of
potentially “good” scenes -- in terms of mood, an
individual’s meaning-charged space, or sacred space —- share

the common denominator of character “revelation and

302

 

interpretation” (137). There is a strong sense with Rouse’s
essay that characters must metamorphose, must either wax or
wane, and that place surpasses its humble origins by
stirring the individual to act.

Other critics who follow this scene-serving-character
impulse include W. R. Moses, Francois Pitavy, and James
Watson, all of whom write on Faulkner. In “The Limits of
Yoknapatawpha County” Moses argues, “Though Faulknerian
characters may be morally very good or bad, spiritually very
splendid or base, they are doomed to certain types of
experience... by the fact that they are dwellers in
Yoknapatawpha County” (297). Pitavy offers the following
thesis in “The Landscape in Light in Aughst”: “Faulkner’s
scenery is indeed always inhibited, one way or another, seen
by a character or related to his consciousness.... It is
thus not surprising that the landscape should have a strange
resemblance with the characters inhabiting it, and be
endowed with both their unreality and their haunting
presence” (265). And James Watson’s “Faulkner: The House of
Fiction” purports that in much of Faulkner’s work “houses so
profoundly render the reality of place because they are so

closely tied to and expressive of the characters’ own sense

303

 

 

 

of place -- not just as a physical but as a spiritual,
psychological, and moral reality” (136).

5 Other critics who conceive of place as a stabilizing
influence include Eudora Welty, who, as I have already
noted, believes, “Sense of place gives equilibrium;
extended, it is sense of direction too.... it is the sense
of place going with us still that is the ball of golden
thread to carry us there and back and in every sense of the
word to bring us home,” and further assures, “It is through
place that we put out roots, wherever birth, chance, fate or
our traveling selves set us down; but where those roots
reach toward... is the deep and running vein, eternal and
consistent and everywhere purely itself, that feeds and is
fed by the human understanding. The challenge to writers
today, I think, is not to disown any part of our heritage”
(128-29, 133); Frederick Clifford Dowdey and Donald
Davidson, who both view the South as “the” motivating force
behind any authentic southern writer (“An Inherited
Obligation” and “The Talking Oaks of the South,”
respectivelY); Mina Gwen Williams, whose dissertation The
W holds that modern

southern novelists glean overarching, “cosmic implications”

304

from “the complexities of their region,” and also suggests
that their manipulation of “geography, climate, traditions,
rituals, religion, humor, and memory, to name several
aspects of place” can evoke for the reader “the transcendent
uniqueness of a specific locale” (vi, iv); and Christopher
Edward Arthur, whose dissertation, Possibilities of Place:
The Fiction of William Faulkner offers, “The places
[Faulkner’s characters] inhabit provide some sort of counter
to the erosions of time, some sense of continuity and
stability,” and advances an entire chapter on the “sacred
center” (in the form of the pilgrim’s destination) at the
heart of Faulkner’s canon (4, 107-31).

6 Lucinda MacKethan’s The Dream ef Arcady; Place and Time in
Sehthern Literature is in many ways a more nearly full
analysis of Simpson’s Arcady thesis than that found in The
Dispessessed Garden: MacKethan follows Old South images in
nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers and devotes a
chapter to “The South Beyond Arcady” (207—17). Kathryn Lee
Seidel (Th h rn B l 'n h Am ri n Nov 1), Elizabeth
Jane Harrison (Female Pastetal; Wemen Writers Re-Visiening

the Ameriean Sehth), and Louise Westling (Saered Graves and

Ravaged Gardens; The Fietien ef Ehdera Welty, garsen
305

 

 

 

 

 

McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor) each engage feminine
metaphors of the South. Seidel is interested in depictions
of the Reconstructed South as fallen (raped) white woman
(18-25, 135—46, 146-47), and Harrison in the ways southern
women writers overturn images of the land as feminine to
establish “an empowering bond with nature” for female
characters (9). Westling examines Flannery O’Connor’s
pagan-mythic locations, the “feminine sacredness” in Eudora
Welty’s fields, rivers, and woods (179), and Carson
McCullers’s “claustrophobic,” female-inhibiting spaces
(181). William T. Ruzicka’s Fahlkner’s Fictive
Arehiteethre; The Meaning ef Plaee in the Xeknapatampha
Nevels proposes five levels of fictive architecture in the
Yoknapatawpha cycle, each of which corresponds with and
“concretiz[es]” an individual, group of people, or humanity
in general: the room, the dwelling, townscapes, landscapes,
and cosmic space (114-115).

7 Simpson is loath to claim that Kennedy intentionally
promoted anti-slavery sentiments. Instead Simpson charges
that Kennedy was himself “puzzled” by “the pattern of

ambivalence that comprises the inner structure” of Swallow

306

 

 

 

Barn, and that the author’s “attempt at a pastoral
ratification of slavery” is at best “uncertain” (49—50, 51).
8 The Nashville Agrarians’ famous manifesto, I’ll Take My
Stahd, which I treat at length in this section, was written
expressly to retard the South’s demise in the face of
twentieth-century industrialism. Louis Rubin shares the
Twelve Southerners’ fear in The Lasting South, as he
remonstrates: “The South is in danger today of losing its
most precious possession, that regional quality, and the
enemy is just as much within as without [he identifies the
enemy as “modernity” in the next paragraph]. So subtle is
that enemy and so apparently natural and inevitable, that it
is mostly not even recognized for being an enemy. Instead
it is being greeted with enthusiasm by the very people who
should be most suspicious of it” (2). Echoing the Agrarians
Rubin believes the South’s “greatest challenge” is curbing
the “menaces” of industrialism (14-15); Cleanth Brooks
worries over watered-down southern speech and the region’s
tendency toward American “standardization” (“Southern
Literature: The Past, History, and the Timeless” 14-15).

While other scholars trace patterns of a dying South across

the southern canon, they are less want to ascribe to the

307

 

blues themselves, to further the alarm over the South’s
lifespan with their own political comments. See, for
example, Lucinda MacKethan’s The Dream of Arcady or Philip
Castille’s “East Toward Home: Will Percy’s Old World

Vision.”

Chapter Two

Mama Day and the Trouble with Maps
1 According to Lindsey Tucker (“Recovering the Conjure
Woman: Texts and Contexts in Gloria Naylor's Mama Day, pp.
180—81), the customs passed from Sapphira Wade to her
offspring recall the BaKongo and Yorubu groups, who inhabit
sections along the west African coast. I hypothesize
Sapphira’s west African origins based on Tucker’s analysis
of the magico-religious traditions in Mama Day.
2 Most islanders, for example, cut a wide swath around “the
other place,” the Day family homestead, because they believe
the old house to be haunted and are unable (or unwilling) to
pinpoint the sources there of previous generations’
discontent. Or even the novel’s aging griot, Miranda (Mama)

Day, who from childhood has roamed the rough wildlands of

Willow Springs as if they were inscribed on the back of her

308

hand -- even she has trouble negotiating the west woods as
she strains (unsuccessfully) to catch snatches of ancestors’
voices, a centuries’-old argument repeating along a late-
night, shadowy path (117—118). Or more gravely still, when
Miranda's grandniece Ophelia is dying, and the older woman
realizes she must fathom the Days’ legendary curse out at
the other place to save the family line, Miranda searches
frantically, lost in her own birth home, but for what she
has no idea. In the same vein, Ophelia’s New-York-bred
husband, George Andrews, is directed to a specific location
for information regarding the same curse, but he cannot will
himself to go. Driven to near-madness by a hurricane, his
wife’s illness, and skepticism over Willow Springs’ African
magico-religious traditions, George is unable to accept that

Ophelia’s forebears’ mistakes are affecting her condition;

correspondingly, he can barely discern one end of the island

from another, and his steps are labored, misdirected, as if
he trudges along in a quagmire.

I recognize that my interpretation of the second bridge at
the bottom of the map is questionable: does it extend from
the mainland out toward the Atlantic, or perhaps from the

island back toward Savannah? I read it the first way,

309

 

 

y”:

 

because of its sense of direction: its flowers “side” with
the drawing of South Carolina and Georgia, and the bridge
extends from the flowers out toward the larger drawing of
Willow Springs.

4 I think non-white readers should have a sense of trespass
and that Naylor wills it so. The only white character in

the novel, beside Bascombe Wade, is a deputy sheriff from L.

beyond the bridge who addresses islanders as “nigger this

 

and nigger that” (80). Miranda concocts an awful storm and

has “that boy wandering down in the cypress swamp” before he
learns to speak respectfully to locals -- and also learns
Willow Springs is “a place where he had no business anyway”
(80-81).

I do not assume that all readers read the same, or that
every reader’s confusion with Mama hay is identical to
another’s. As a critic, I need to be honest about my
experience and background, about my limits in reading. It
would be naive and irresponsible for me to assume that my
uncertainty regarding Willow Springs is the same as a Black
reader’s. I do believe that Black readers can have or
desire an affinity with this place that I, a white reader,

cannot and should not claim. Having said that, it would

310

 

also be naive and irresponsible for me to dismiss place
confusion as “a white thing” and as my own problem, because
Naylor seizes on important aspects of dislocation through
the experiences of her African-American characters.

5 Historically, a major component of Black nationalist

theory in the United States has been an urge for African

 

Americans to return to Africa, or at the very least, garner

their values and political principles from African cultures.

In 1829, with the publication of Appeal te the galored

 

u—f

Citizens, David Walker advanced the notion that American
Blacks would never truly realize freedom until they returned
to African soil. Toward the end of the century, Alexander
Crummell and Bishop Henry M. Turner stirred considerable

support for back-to-Africa political momentum. But the

 

figure most famously associated with international amity
among all Black people and Pan-Africanism is Marcus Garvey,
whose Universal Negro Improvement Association (active
throughout World War I and the early 19205) championed urban
Black capitalism in the United States as a means of
challenging imperialism in Africa.

6

The idea that the South has a special hold on Black

expression, Black spirituality, and indeed, on the soul of

311

Black folks, stems from its fostering of African influences
-- foreign, non—American, uniquely Black influences. As
early as Frederick Douglass Black scholars recognized that
slave art emulated African values, that slaves’ music, folk
tales, trickster tales, and toasts were direct offshoots of
African expository (these kinds of claims were validated
later by W. E. B. DuBois in The Souls of Black Felk, actor
Paul Robeson, and most recently, by literary theorists
Houston A. Baker, Jr. and Henry Louis Gates, Jr.). Probably
the most eloquent testament to a quintessential southern
Black vitality is Jean Toomer’s game (1923), a hallmark of
the Negro Renaissance, a record of the alienated Northern
Black’s odyssey back to his family’s southern roots, in
search of southern pastoral healing. Even the slang Black
Americans have created for elements of southern lifestyle
reveal a conviction that those elements are “yeasty,” as
Arna Bontemps conveys (330): “The Southern Negro’s link with
his past seems to me worth preserving. His greater pride in
being himself, I would say, is all to the good, and I think
I detect a growing nostalgia for these virtues in the speech
of relatives in the North. They talk a great deal about

‘Soulville’ nowadays, when they mean ‘South.’

312

 

‘Soulbrothers’ are simply the homefolks. ‘Soulfood’

 

includes black-eyed peas, chitterlings, grits, and gravy.
Aretha Franklin, originally from Memphis, sings, ‘Soulfood -
- it’ll make you limber; it’ll make you quick.’” (331).

7 Again, Lindsey Tucker’s article is indispensable for
information on the African origins of some of the Days’
practices. For instance, Mama Day’s conjure and divination L-
hearken to BaKongo spiritual customs, as does arranging

family graves in the woods, in groups of seven, with planted

 

oaks to guide to guide people’s spirits (180-81). The
standing forth at Little Caesar’s funeral recalls the
BaKongo belief that “the afterlife was a reality; death was
a journey to the spirit world, which, nonetheless, did not

constitute a break with life on earth” (180).

Chapter Three
Lost Causes, Lost Space:

Tracking the Void in Minnie Bruce Pratt’s
“Identity: Skin Blood Heart”

1 A smart, suave, yuppie-ish city, Washington declares

itself an island apart from Virginia or Maryland (the

District of Columbia is state-less) and appears more like

313

another border city dotted with federal monuments,
Philadelphia, than Richmond, the nearby capital of the
Confederacy. But for Pratt D. C. counts as southern. Its
landscape matches the South, it is filled with African-
American immigrants from Georgia and North Carolina, and
unlike its northern counterparts, Washington imposed
segregation as long as legally possible (V. Hunt Interview
97).

2 Marcia Aldrich and Leigh Gilmore are the first to describe
home for Pratt as, “conceptually... where she is known”
(33).

3 Here I am trading on the heavily ironic title of Flannery
O’Connor’s well—known short story.

4 The dynamic of learning where to step because of the voids
is true throughout the essay of all Pratt’s former homes, in
the sense of Pratt-the-narrator’s epistemological practice;
that is, as she writes “Identity” looking back, each time
she revisits a dwelling Pratt looks to scrutinize its
example, testing how well it approaches or departs from her
ideal, “a place of mutuality, companionship, creativity,

sensuousness, easiness in the body, curiosity in what new

things might be making in the world, hope from that

314

 

curiosity” (24). But in terms of Pratt’s personal
experience, Washington marks the first time she interacts
with the world around her consistently aware of the damaging

effects of white-woman safety.

Appendix
1 See Hobson’s WWW
(92-101) and Simpson’s The Fahle of the Sohthern Writer
(xvii-xviii). To be fair, Hobson concludes his study of the
vanishing “southern” qualities of postmodern regional
fiction with a ten-page analysis of Ernest Gaines, arguing
that “it would be difficult to find in contemporary southern
letters any writer who is more traditional, in the best
sense of that word, than Gaines” (92). But Hobson’s
comments on Gaines are slight compared to his analyses of
Bobbie Ann Mason, Lee Smith, Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, and
Josephine Humphreys, so that the effect of turning to Gaines
so briefly at the end of this white-author study is to
minimalize the Black writer’s significance.
2 Parts 1 & 2 of the African-Ameriean Review’s special issue

on the Black South were published in the spring and summer

of 1993 (volume 27, numbers 1 & 2). “Black South

315

 

Literature: Before Day Annotations” is by Jerry W. Ward Jr.
(27.2, 315-26); “Black South Culture” is by Jerry W. Ward,
Jr. and Kalamu-ya Salaam (27:1, 7—58); and “The Black South
in Contemporary Film” is by Jacquie Jones (27:1, 19-24).

3

This call for papers was advertised in PMLA (May 1999)

114:3, 442.

316

 

 

 

Works Cited

317

 

 

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Works Cited

Aiken, Charles S. “Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha County: A Place
in the American South.” The Geographical Review 69
(July 1979): 331-48.

Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others.”
Cultural Critighe 20 (Winter 1991-92): 5-32.

Aldrich, Marcia and Leigh Gilmore. “Writing Home: ‘Home’
and Lesbian Representation in Minnie Bruce Pratt.”

Genre 25 (Spring 1992): 25-46.

Andrews, William L. Te Tel; a Ezee Stepy; The First genthpy
of Afro-Ameriean hatehiegraphy, 1760-1S65. Chicago: U

of Illinois P, 1986.

Arthur, Christopher Edward. “Possibilities of Place: The
Fiction of William Faulkner.” Diss. Cornell U, 1976.

Ayers, Edward L. “What We Talk about When We Talk about the
South.” All Qver the Map; Rethinking Ameriean Regipns.
Eds. Edward L. Ayers, Patricia Nelson Limerick, Stephen
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