The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South Lisa Hinrichsen (bio) Harris, Trudier. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line: African American Writers and the South. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2009. Resonating with W. E. B. Du Bois’s prediction in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that the problem of the twentieth century would be the color line, Trudier Harris’s The Scary Mason- Dixon Line assesses the landscape of African American consciousness one hundred years later, arguing that the afterlife of slavery and subjugation on southern soil continues to disturb and inspire African American literary production. For Harris, the lingering anxiety and fear surrounding the South as a historic site of white privilege and black degradation initiates what she terms a “confrontation” in the work of all African American writers, whereby they must negotiate a fundamental ambivalence about membership in a society that calls their belonging into question. In setting up the South as ground zero for African American literary consciousness, Harris contends that all African American writers, even those not born below the Mason-Dixon line, feel “compelled to confront the American South” (1). As her emphasis on the word “compelled” makes clear, Harris argues that the charged relationship between writer and region is part of a rite of passage into African American belonging: “African American writers cannot escape the call of the South upon them . . . Not one of them considers himself or herself truly an African American writer without having confronted the South in some way” (2). Thus, all African American authors are, as the provocative title of her first chapter indicates, “Southern Black Writers No Matter Where They Are Born.” Through negotiating a polarity of repulsion and attraction inherent to a history both traumatic and triumphant, African American writers seek the space to enable “creativity operating under the influence of history” (1). Over the course of ten brief chapters, Harris explores the fraught intersection between the South and African American literary imagination, reading native-born black Southerners such as Ernest J. Gaines, Yusef Komunyakaa, Randall Kenan, Phyllis Alesia Perry, [End Page 1384] Tayari Jones, Edward P. Jones, and Raymond Andrews, alongside non-Southern writers James Baldwin, Octavia E. Butler, and Sherley Anne Williams. The Scary Mason-Dixon Line focuses on contemporary African American fiction (1964–2003), but the scope of the work that Harris examines deliberately stretches across genres, genders, themes, and storylines to support her sweeping claims. The range of her text thus functions to interject into and expand conversations about the relationship between geography and identity formation, African American identity and creativity, intersections between African American and European American writers, and Southern literature and culture. Her introductory chapter explores the way the South comes to represent a “cultured hell” (3) for African American writers, a phrase she borrows from Claude McKay’s poem “America.” “The South” is, for Harris, a slippery nexus of meanings, and her argument shifts, at times problematically, between the South as an idea, a geographical place, and a historical experience. While her text consistently foregrounds how regionalism remains a relevant marker of social, cultural, and individual identity, Harris needs to be more explicit in detailing how both the South and the color line have been reconfigured in the late twentieth century through cultural and political changes such as the struggle for civil rights and the Black Power movement, which fundamentally altered the terms of this historical confrontation and raised key questions about cultural and individual self-determination. Subsequent chapters explore the psychosexual dimensions of this confrontation in James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964); the struggle to claim black masculinity in Ernest J. Gaines’s “Three Men” (1968); the rewriting of African American agency under slavery in three neo-slave narratives: Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred (1979), Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986), and Edward P. Jones’s The Known World (2003); the spatial and temporal portability of racial fear in Yusef Komunyakaa’s Vietnam poetry (1988); heteronormativity and queer masculinity in Randall Kenan’s A Visitation of Spirits (1989); the relationship between folk communities and fear in Phyllis Alesia Perry’s Stigmata (1998); Tayari Jones’s efforts to domesticate fear in her...