Southern White Women’s Autobiographies: Social Equality and Social Change

Abstract

While most claims for in early twentieth century were recorded and urged by African Americans, a handful of white people also registered southern realities and undertook messy process by which consciousness (Hall 112-113). My concern here is to examine life writing of three white women who present themselves as root-bound, not just with family and money and domestic spaces, but with multiply dimensioned values, beliefs, and unconscious climate of their world. In lives of Belle Kearney, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, and Lillian Smith, writers upon whom this essay focuses, reality is circumscribed by fundamental principle of southern life from Emancipation to 1960s: reality of inequality based on race. How each of these writers treats issue of racial social equality discloses something of a life and a community that seems both remote and at times disturbingly familiar. (1) Elisabeth Young-Bruehl's argument that life-story-telling--[is] a way of relatedness to others ... a way of finding or refinding world as a home ... a therapy for displacement and world loss (10) helps me to see that writers I consider here are quite intentionally producing a kind of biography of their own time and place, in which their community can function as a person or character they are struggling to understand and bring to life for reader. Like Young-Bruehl's life story-teller, these southern women are crafting a self and a civilization into being (36). For them, however, material with which they must work has made extraordinary demands on them, through either huge historical changes or modest personal disturbances. Belle Kearney's world as she and her family expected it to unfold was indeed lost to her with emancipation of slaves. For her to refind world as a home, she asserts worldview that reduces anxiety to greatest possible extent. Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin and Lillian Smith look to quite other powers of conjuring a civilization. Both were raised under banner of glorious Confederacy whose resistance to a crass and industrial federal government was central to a sense of southern selfhood. For them, having been children of Lost Cause traditions of early twentieth century southern whites, potential ideal of a principled selfhood that Young-Bruehl observes in biographer is carried in their recognition and critique of self their white supremacist society has constructed (2). The principled self, they seem to argue, can not find a home in a world characterized by overt anxieties that dominated southern whites: in particular, grievous threat represented by between whites and blacks. Their writings bring into high relief material and emotional realities of living out an ethics of equality, when even to imagine such a thing was indeed an act of conjuring. When Booker T. Washington made his 1895 Atlanta Compromise address that earned him national respect and funding from whites, social equality was one of his central issues: he declared unequivocally that he and his followers had no interest in it, that whites and blacks would remain as separate as fingers, yet one as hand in all things essential (136). To Washington, the agitation of questions of [was] extremist folly (137). Almost immediately, Washington was excoriated by African American intellectuals for this stand, but there is no question that he identified key anxiety that infected white consciousness. Almost sixty years later, Ralph Ellison's hapless Invisible Man and unnamed (or multiply named) narrator experiences finely tuned antennae of apparently oblivious white men. Following graphic description of brutal Battle Royal, in which blindfolded young black men fight each other for amusement of white audience, bloodied but undiscouraged young scholar is allowed to make his valedictory speech in front of a boisterous group of drunken white men. …