(Re)Claiming Legacy in the Post-Civil Rights South in Richard Wright's "Down by the Riverside" and Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men

Abstract

Mark Arax's 2004 Los Angeles Times article In a Reverse Migration, Blacks Head he informs us that urban northern and western destinations of African Americans from 1910 to 1970, what we refer to as The Great Migrations, have been undergoing a full scale reversal as African Americans began retracing steps to a place their families once fled--the (A1). The spike southern black population--an increase of 3.6 million during 1990s--coincided with changing ethnic demographics areas to which African Americans traditionally moved opposition to Jim Crow South. Therefore, with appearance of cities like Atlanta, Charlotte, and Memphis as black Meccas, as DeWayne Wickham points out, the South has emerged as leading source of economic opportunity for black businesses and fertile ground for black politicians (A13). The realignment that Civil Rights Movement engineered resulted a southern transformation that could not overtly and legally deny rights and humanity of African Americans. Yet a landscape that maintains a deep connection to its traditions and legacy, African Americans still find themselves, at times, erased from mythic construction of South and marginalized material areas of social and political power. addition to its role conservative counterrevolution of 1980s and 1990s, a litany of recent events South--specifically dragging death of James Byrd Jasper, Texas, punitive indictments of six African American boys Jena, Louisiana, and federal government's belated response during Hurricane Katrina--have reinforced ideas of South as a site which African Americans still remain an incredibly vulnerable populace. The depiction of South as a dangerous (and at times nightmarish) space for African Americans has an extensive history African American literature. Richard Wright's 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom's Children, for example, depicts southern African Americans struggling to achieve agency an unforgiving, violent Jim Crow South, a struggle buoyed by contemporaneous events like trial of Scottsboro boys and Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. Wright's second story collection, Down by Riverside, also points to future by forecasting pervasive instances of white supremacy that accompanied tragedy of Hurricane Katrina, from governmental response to mostly black poor to media construction of black looters and refugees. Ernest Gaines's A Gathering of Old Men presents a late 1970s South that directly contradicts idea of a rapidly changing nation after passage of Voting and Civil Rights Acts 1960s. Gaines's novel, we are witness to a world that has barely changed from world of 1940s that Gaines captures works like Of Love and Dust (1968) and A Lesson Before Dying (1993). Wright and Gaines are part of a larger literary tradition that, as Anissa Wardi claims Death and Arc of Mourning African American Literature, bears witness to truncated narratives of Middle Passage, brutal practices of slavery, and paradoxical configuration of South through myth and memory (28). Instead of merely bearing witness, African Americans Gaines's south Louisiana community assert a collective subjectivity that foreshadows significance of black political, social, and economic life rewriting southern racial narrative and myth that has marginalized or erased legacy of African Americans. Jerry Ward claims that in aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and flooding of New Orleans, 'Down by Riverside' speaks to much more than Flood of 1927 (347). Similarly, return of African Americans to South leads us to view A Gathering of Old Men not only as site of a final battle Civil Rights Movement, but as a potentially regenerative space for a more inclusive, restructured South. …