for me, the intellectual present in which I came of age, was the peak and crest of the Southern Literary Renaissance. No Southern youth of any sensitivity could help being excited by the explosion of creativity taking place during the early 1930s--in fiction, in poetry, in drama. Nor could I help seeing that the novelists, poets, and playwrights were in the main writing about the same South historians were writing about and making the whole world of letters at home and abroad read what they wrote and ring with their praise. With this awareness and the expectations it aroused, I arrived as a young apprentice at the doors of the history guild for training--and what a striking contrast, what a letdown, what a falling off! No renaissance here, no surge of innovation and creativity, no rebirth of energy, no compelling new vision. This was a craft devoted primarily at the time, or so it seemed to me, to summing up, confirming, illustrating, and consolidating the received wisdom, the regional consensus that prevailed uniquely in the South of the 1930s and--though I could not then have known it--was to continue through the 1940s. That consensus proclaimed the enduring and fundamentally unbroken unity, solidarity, and continuity of Southern history. C. Vann Woodward, Thinking Back (1986) It is our inward journey that leads us through time--forward or back, seldom in a straight line, most often spiraling.... As we discover, we remember; remembering, we discover; and most intensely do we experience this when our separate journeys converge. Eudora Welty, One Writer's Beginnings (1984) IN THE FALL OF 1924, AS THE SOUTHERN RENAISSANCE GATHERED FORCE, Grace Lumpkin wrenched herself out of South Carolina with a plan. She had dreamed of writing during peaceful Sunday afternoons spent listening to her mother read aloud. As a Young Women's Christian Association (YWCA) emissary in France during World War I, she had sent home dispatches from the front. Now, like so many southerners before her, she was convinced that only New York could give her the cultural wherewithal (the skills, the self-confidence, the fund of experience) for a project of self-invention. She wanted to become a writer. She also wanted romance and politics, preferably packaged together. (1) Within weeks of arriving in the city, Lumpkin found a job at the World Tomorrow, one of the best little magazines in New York. Two years later she broke into print, with a prescient intervention in the Harlem Renaissance debates. In The Artist in a Hostile Environment, co-authored with her roommate Esther Shemitz, Grace argued that black writers should not be limited to social protest, but neither should they be condemned for combating the insults and humiliations that assailed them at every turn. (2) Together, Grace and Esther did what they recommended: they used their art to join the political fray. Walking the picket line at the Passaic, New Jersey, strike of 1926-27, they found themselves beaten back toward a soup kitchen, screamed at by a sheriff, and dodging great blue arms swinging clubs against human, quivering flesh. Lumpkin captured the experience in a brief but vivid snapshot, published in the New Masses along with articles by some of the country's leading literary lights. (3) In 1927 she went to jail during the demonstrations in behalf of Sacco and Vanzetti and wrote her first published work of fiction, taking as her subject not this cause celebre but a simultaneous disaster, the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927. White Man--A Story is a tale of race and sex in which, like an extraordinary number of such characters in southern women's interwar novels, a black woman disappears into the landscape without proper burial; her body becomes part of a perverse political economy--a melancholic detritus in a traumatized land. (4) With this story, Grace Lumpkin turned decisively toward home, taking up a subject to which she would often return: the lives of southern women who were shaped and damaged by the sexual economies in which they circulated as well as by the terms of their labor. …