W. J. Cash--The Mind of the South (1941)

Even in retrospect, Cash’s text still remains a rather cogent masterpiece in describing the history and emergence of the “mind of the South” as he saw it in 1941.  Keeping in mind the caveats noted in the 1991 introduction by Bertram Wyatt-Brown, especially that of his audience—which was generally an audience of like-minded, white, middle class-to-affluence southern men—Cash sketches out the evolution of the current state of the South, at least from his vantage point.  Cash’s definition of the South is based on the Civil War: “roughly delimited by the boundaries of the former Confederate States of America, but shading over into some of the border states, notably Kentucky also” (xlviii).  One of the most significant reasons why Cash thinks the South has developed so differently from the North is that he sees it as kept in a series of frontier stages—pre-Civil War frontier, post-Civil War destruction and Reconstruction which returned the South to a frontier status, and then finally a burgeoning industrialization period (under the leadership of Henry Grady and those who shared his vision of a South who will beat the North at their own game), which when compared to the North continued to keep the South in a kind of frontier status (especially the poor whites, who were used as mill fodder, just as they were used as cannon fodder during the Civil War).

This continuing frontier status allowed the South to keep values more in keeping with frontier communities: fierce independence, romanticism, and violence.  This self-reinforcing values combine with what Cash identifies as gyneolatry.  After making an argument that the South has long been viewed as a quarantined area of sexual deviance (an argument which Gary Richards quite convincingly makes in his 2007 Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction), he then explains that the southern white woman grew to represent the South itself, and any attacks against her were understood to be attacks on the very traditions of the South itself: “the Yankee must be answered by proclaiming from the housetops that Southern Virtue, so far from being inferior, was superior, not only to the North’s but to any on earth, and adducing Southern Womanhood in proof” (86).  His discussion of the threat of sexual violence in the South is unsatisfying: in contrast to the white southern woman (which he does not even identify as “white,” assuming that the descriptor of “Southern woman” as sufficient (84)), and even more so in his discussion of black female sexuality: “Nor…must we overlook the specific role played by the Negro woman.  Torn from her tribal restraints and taught an easy complaisance for commercial reasons, she was to be had for the taking….For she was natural, and could give herself up to passion in a way impossible to wives inhibited by Puritanical training”(84).  I find “taught an easy complaisance for commercial reasons” a troubling euphemism for “raped.”

While his discussion of the contemporary race relations seems a bit naïve (or at least overly optimistic) for 1941, one of the most significant aspects of his discussion of racism and lynching in the 20^th century South is his insistence that it is not simply the province of the lower classes.  Rather, Cash important observes that “the major share of the responsibility in all those areas where the practice [of lynching] has remained common rests squarely on the shoulders of the master classes” (303).  He makes similar assertions about the KKK, claiming that they were made up primarily of lower class and poorer whites, though “its blood…came from the upper orders” (336).

Additionally, his discussion of the threat of sexual violence against white women by black men is equally troubling.  While he admits that “It is true that the actual danger of the southern white woman’s being violated by the Negro has always been comparatively small,” he maintains that “if the actual danger was small, it was nevertheless the most natural thing in the world for the South to see it as very great, to believe in it, fully and in all honesty, as a menace requiring the most desperate measures if it was to be held of,” because of the fear and terror of white women, the “neurotic old maids and wives, hysterical young girls”(115).  Cash scapegoats pretty much everyone for the southern rape complex—everyone, that is, except white men, of whom  there is plenty of documentation of perpetrating actual rapes (though as most of these are against slave women, I’m dubious if Cash would have characterized them as rape).

Cash claims both that the South has had a hierarchical class system, and yet is a much more democratic system than the North; the backbends of logic he undertakes to support this is rather ludicrous.  First he gives a rather essentialist depiction of class, locating class status as a biological (perhaps even genetic) characteristic: when describing the lazy type of the white trash southerner, he describes it as manifesting in a “distinctive, physical character—a striking lankness of frame and slackness of muscle in association with a shambling gait, a boniness and mis-shapeliness of head and feature, a peculiar sallow swartness, or alternatively a not less peculiar  and not less sallow faded-out colorlessness of skin and hair” (24).  Despite his subsequent claim that it is impossible for even the best southern stock to have been diluted with inferior blood, and the fact that quality southern folk still abound disprove the validity of such a genetic basis for character, his argument rings rather false to me.  Rather, the analogy that he makes in his “Of Time and Frontiers” section regarding how a family of brothers can, within a few generations, result with widely disparate social conditions—to the point that relatives with the same name will no longer be aware of their own kinship—seems a weak example of social Darwinism (albeit one which is echoed in Gone with the Wind) (27).

It is in the post-bellum South that Cash claims the real myth of the aristocratic Old South took hold (124).  Such mythology was reified by characteristics of the South which Cash throughout his text identifies as its primary values, across the entire South: sentimentality, politics, and love of rhetoric characteristics which were present in the antebellum period, but which only grew stronger under the torture of Reconstruction (126).  Importantly, though, one of the most important aspects of the South’s struggle under Reconstruction was its tragic dependence on cotton as its key crop: not only did such a one-crop strategy deplete land already unsuitable for the crop, depleting the land of its fecundity, but it also meant that the “yeomen and poor whites” who were “converted to cotton culture…no longer produced provender enough at home to take care of themselves and their animals form crop to crop, and must, therefore, somehow manage to secure it from outside” (147).  Further, once the South began to pursue technological progress, Cash importantly points out that the mill system was at heart another plantation: “the Southern mill factory almost invariably was…a plantation, essentially indistinguishable in organization from the familiar plantation of the cotton fields” (200)—because “Progress depended upon the cheapness of labor was a new and powerful block upon any possible advance en masse for the lower classes in the South” (203).  The South’s pursuit of progress encouraged a return to individualistic thinking, and the plantation/factory system meant that poor whites, needing a scapegoat for their poverty, were encouraged to view blacks as their enemy.  Loyalty, instead, grew to the twinned giants of Progress and Religion, which were considered the be-all saviors. 

Interesting to my own work is Cash’s brief description of another “type”: the “Yankee schoolma’am who, in such numbers, moved down upon the unfortunate South in the train of the army of occupation, to “educate” the black man for his new place in the sun and to furnish an example of the Christian love and philanthropy to the benighted native whites.  Generally horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame, she was, of course, no proper intellectual but at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand….if she not was not an intellectual, the South, with its vague standards in these manners, accepted her as such.  It saw her, indeed, as a living epitome of the Yankee mind, identified her essentially with Northern universities, read in the evils springing abundantly from her meddlesome stupidity categorical proof that Northern ‘theory’ was in toto altogether mad” (137).  Though he makes a brief aside to blame the northern journalist as well, it is clear that he lays the majority of the blame on meddling northern women.

He then discusses the seeming paradox that the South during Reconstruction, as it became more religious and anti-intellectual, began to for the first time develop a real literature of its own.  However, he explains the paradox that much of the literature, with the exception of Sidney Lanier, was quite propaganda-esque in nature, in its nostalgia for the Old South, noting Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and George Washington Cable (the Grandissimes in particular) as examples.  I’m a bit confused by this last characterization—while Cash notes that the The Grandissimes is “so predominately a piece of sentimental glorification that it goes mainly unread nowadays, yet had so many flashes of untrammeled insight, so many sudden lapses into realism, that his countrymen actually denounced it as libel” (143).  Certainly, The Grandissimes relies heavily on sentimentalism, but I don’t see how the story of Bras Coupé (or of Honoré Grandissime, f.m.c.) can be considered “sentimental glorification.”

Interestingly, he points to Ellen Glasgow as the first example of a writer in the South who was “approach[ing] the materials of her world almost exclusively from the viewpoint of an artist” (144).  He then gives her as an example, along with James Joyce, of authors to which educated southerners turned in the 1920s instead of traditional southern authors such as Thomas Nelson Page (325).  In his discussion of the flowering of southern literature in the 1920s and 1930s, he points to Barren Ground (1925) as “the first real novel, as opposed to romances, the South had brought forth” (374).  He considers Erskine Caldwell and William Faulkner together with Thomas Wolfe, deeming Caldwell and Faulkner “romantics of the appalling” (378).  The success of these generations of authors in creating a truly southern literature, according to Cash, was their ability to stand “intellectually at least, pretty decisively outside the region,” no longer writing about the South as “Never-Never Land” (379).  In his analysis of the rise of the Vanderbilt Agrarians in the wake of Mencken’s “Sahara of the Bozart,” he says that, “These men were mouthpieces of the fundamental, f sometimes only subterranean, will of the South to hold to the old way: the spiritual heirs of Thomas Nelson Page.  And their first joint declaration, I’ll Take My Stand, was, like their earlier prose works, essentially a determined reassertion of the validity of the legend of the Old South” (380).

Nella Larsen--Quicksand (1928)

Larsen’s first novel, this largely autobiographical novel was well-received by critics.  To a certain extent, it can be considered to fall under the rubric of naturalism, though it also is considered an exemplar of modernism as well as a racial uplift novel.  In the novel, Helga Crane is the lovely and refined mixed-race daughter of a Danish mother and a West Indian black father. He abandoned her mother and Helga soon after the girl was born. Unable to feel comfortable with her European-American relatives, Crane lives in various places in the United States and visits Denmark, searching for people among whom she feels at home.

In her travels she encounters many of the communities which Larsen knew. For example, Crane teaches at Naxos, a Southern Negro boarding school (based on Tuskegee University), where she becomes dissatisfied with its philosophy. She criticizes a sermon by a white preacher, who advocates the segregation of blacks into separate schools, and says their striving for social equality would lead blacks to become avaricious. Crane quits teaching and moves to Chicago. Her white maternal uncle, now married to a bigoted woman, shuns her. Crane moves to Harlem, New York, where she finds a refined but often hypocritical black middle class obsessed with the "race problem."

Taking her uncle's legacy, Crane visits her maternal aunt in Copenhagen, where she is treated as a highly desirable racial exotic (as with many racial uplift narratives, a trip to Europe allows the protagonist a different way to experience her racial identity).  Missing black people, she returns to New York City. Experiencing a near mental breakdown, Crane happens onto a store-front revival and a charismatic religious experience. After marrying the preacher who converts her, she moves with him to the rural Deep South. There she is disillusioned by the people's adherence to religion. In each of her moves, Crane fails to find fulfillment. She is looking for more than how to integrate her mixed ancestry. She expresses complex feelings about what she and her friends consider genetic differences between races.  At the historical moment of the novel, the question of racial uplift was a problematic one, as everyone, it seemed, was invested in a discourse of racial uplift, from Nazi propagandists to W.E.B. Dubois.  This logic was one of improvement, whether through breeding or gene manipulation.

The novel develops Crane's search for a marriage partner. As it opens, she has become engaged to marry a prominent Southern Negro man, whom she does not really love, but with whom she can gain social benefits. In Denmark she turns down the proposal of a famous white Danish artist for similar reasons. By the final chapters, Crane has married a typical black Southern preacher. The novel's close is deeply pessimistic. Crane had hoped to find sexual fulfillment in marriage and some success in helping the poor southern blacks she lives among, but instead she has frequent pregnancies and suffering. Disillusioned with religion, her husband, and her life, Crane fantasizes about leaving her husband, but never does.

Houston Baker, Jr.--Turning South Again (2001)

Generally, Baker’s text is a reconsideration of the South from the perspective of an African American academic: “a black southern mind navigating oceans and landfalls of memory, ineradicable dilemmas of black modernism, protocols of black male subject formation” (2).  By focusing on the ideas of Booker T. Washington specifically in relation to the ideas of black modernism, Baker performs a highly critical analysis of the effects of Washington’s ideas, particularly those which resulted in the stasis and ultimate immobilization of blacks in America.  Starting with chattel slavery, though the convict-leasing program, sharecropping, and the penal system today, Baker contends that the story of blacks in America is one of immobilization, one which needs access to modernity in order to escape.  Through discussions of traditional images of modernity—in particular, Baudelaire’s and Benjamin’s description of the flaneur figure—Baker highlights how the mobility characteristic of these images were not available to blacks in America.

For my purposes, Baker’s occasional discussions of physical appearance in the literature he discusses is quite enlightening.  For example, he points to “The all-American caricature of the “Yankee” schoolmarm paints her as a crabbed, aged, old maid fiddling with books, cats, and outcasts.  W. J. Cash captures this stereotype when he writes in The Mind of the South as follows: ‘Generally horsefaced, bespectacled, and spare of frame, she was, of course, no proper intellectual, but at best a comic character, at worst a dangerous fool, playing with explosive forces which she did not understand’ (140).  Contrary to stereotype and caricature, however, the ‘Yankee’ womanhood that made its way South after the War was often young, literate, predominantly white, and in the age range of twenty to thirty years old” (45).  More importantly, he points out, “Nothing is more threatening to the southern real than the critical, informed, articulate, healthy black-mass body, en proper personne” (76).  In this way, the non-conforming body (particularly, the black female body) poses a threat by its very existence to the status quo.

Mark Twain--The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885)

The first American novel to be published in the vernacular, it is an exemplar of local color and regionalism.  Narrated by Huck, it begins where Tom Sawyer left off, and follows Huck as he fakes his own death in order to escape his physically abusive, drunken father, as he and the escaped slave Jim (at times known as N----- Jim) travel down the Mississippi, escaping the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. Over the course of the novel, Huck adopts many different personas at the spur of the moment, at one point even trying to pass as a girl.  This scene in particular is a good example of the kind of social insight the novel excels at, as Huck’s real gender is found out through a series of “tests”—threading a needle, throwing, and catching.  Huck’s conditioned reflexes give him away.  Huck and Jim travel part of the way with two conmen who refer to themselves as the Duke and the King; though Huck is willing to go along with their shams to a certain extent, his realization of their effect on other people coupled with the realization that they have no sense of loyalty to him or Jim makes Huck eager to get loose of them.  Finally, in the end section of the book, Tom Sawyer reappears, and joins Huck’s campaign to free the captured Jim.  Tom makes the escape needlessly difficult, informed by his own adventure-story-fed-overactive-imagination.  Huck’s surprise at Tom’s eagerness to help a slave escape is finally explained by Tom’s delayed explanation that the Widow Douglas has died, leaving directions in her will that Jim should be freed.  Huck and Tom, then, go to great lengths to try to free a technically free slave.

It satirizes antebellum society,  from the feuding Grangerfords and Shepherdsons to the more subtle subplot of Huck’s overcoming his own racism.  While there have been debates about Twain’s use of the word n------ in the novel, his use of the words is not only historically accurate, but also helps illuminate the transformation in Huck’s thinking.  After realizing the extent of Jim’s loyalty and recognizing Jim’s humanity, Huck rejects the advice of his "conscience", which continues to tell him that in helping Jim escape to freedom, he is stealing Miss Watson's property. Accepting that "All right, then, I'll go to hell!", Huck resolves to free Jim.  By the end of the novel, Tom’s Aunt Polly appears to set everyone straight about Tom’s and Huck’s real identities (they had fooled his Aunt Sally and Uncle Silas that they were Sid and Tom Sawyer), and sets everyone to rights.  Jim’s freedom is announced, and he is commended for his care of Tom and Huck. 

Richard Wright--Native Son (1940)

This novel is the story of Bigger Thomas, a Mississippi-born young black man living in the Black Belt of Chicago, who over the course of the novel kills a young white woman, rapes and kills a young black woman, stands trial for the murder of the white woman, and is sentenced to death.  It is divided into three sections: Fear, Flight, and Fate.  The “Fear” section opens with a long scene of a rat attack first thing in the morning.  Bigger is awakened by the alarm clock in the one room apartment that he shares with his mother, sister, and brother.  A giant rat is loose in the room, and his brother and he chase it and finally kill it with a frying pan, though not after being attacked by the monstrous creature.  Bigger then goes to the pool hall, where he and his friends have planned to assemble before robbing a white jewelry store; in keeping with this section’s theme, Bigger is able to talk his friends out of the heist, realizing that their plan was too dangerous.  He then goes to the home of the Dalton’s, a rich family (who, it is revealed, are the ultimate owners of the dilapidated building in which he lives) who are big supports of Negro uplift programs, who have offered to hire Bigger as their chauffeur, as Bigger’s family is about to lose their relief money for food. 

One of Bigger’s first duties is to drive the college-aged Mary Dalton allegedly to a university lecture, though once in the car she insists that he instead pick up her friend Jan Erlone, a member of the Communist party who, along with Mary, tries to show Bigger solidarity through sitting in the front of the car with him and insisting that he eat with them in a restaurant, “one of those places where colored people eat, not one of those show places” (69).  Mary’s and Jan’s behavior toward Bigger confuses and upsets him, as his conditioning of strict deference to white people has taught him to fear what they intend as human kindness as a possible trick.  Though their intentions are well-intended, they still come across as not only condescending but racist, in Jan’s request for “authenticity” and Mary’s claim that “[Negros] have so much emotion!” and her insistence on hearing Bigger sing.  Mary gets so drunk during their night out that Bigger has to carry her to her bedroom; once inside, her blind mother comes in to check on her before Bigger can escape.  In his attempt to keep Mary quiet with a pillow, he accidently smothers and kills her.  Bigger, in his terror at having killed Mary, covers up his murder by stuffing her in the furnace (which it is his job to tend), chopping off her head with an axe in the process in order to make her corpse fit.

In the “Flight” section, Bigger tries to capitalize on his situation by attempting to blackmail the family after they discover Mary’s absence.  Bigger tries to implicate Jan in her disappearance, as he knows Jan’s Communism is as damning as his own black skin.  Mary’s body is discovered, however, by reporters who find her bones and an earring in the furnace after it starts smoking, and Bigger escapes into the Black Belt section of town.  An enormous police and vigilante search for Bigger targets this part of the city, as thousands of white men harass, arrest, assault, and attack black men (and the black part of town more generally) as part of their search for Bigger.  Bigger hides out for an evening with his girl Bessie, and tries to include her as part of his extortion and escape plan.  However, at Bessie’s refusal to participate, Bigger rapes her and then kills her in her sleep by bludgeoning her to death with a brick.  He then drops her body down an air shaft, realizing too late that the money he had stolen from Mary’s purse was still with Bessie.  The rest of this section consists of Bigger’s attempt to flee as the captors move in tighter and tighter.

The final section, “Fate,” describes Bigger’s stay in jail and his trial.  Jan reappears and provides Bigger with his attorney, Max.  Max tries valiantly to portray Bigger as a victim of circumstance: in Max’s words, “I shall endeavor to show, through the discussion of evidence, the mental and emotional attitude of this boy and the degree of responsibility he had in these crimes” (371).  Max’s devotion to justice evokes just enough hope in Bigger as to make his inevitable sentencing more poignant and painful, as Max is the first person Bigger has ever felt has seen him as a man.

In the essay “How Bigger Was Born” included as an addendum of sorts to the novel, Wright explains his motive for writing Native Son in reaction to the response to his 1938 collection of short stories, Uncle Tom’s Children.  Wright states,” I found that I had written a book which even bankers’ daughters could read and weep over and feel good.  I swore to myself that if I ever wrote another book, no one would weep over it; that it would be so hard and deep that they would have to face it without the consolation of tears” (454).  Indeed, Native Son is unflinching and “hard,” in that it forces the reader to identify with Bigger’s point of view.  Just a few pages before raping Bessie, for example, Bigger reflects on how being black in America is itself a form of rape: “But rape was not what one did to women.  Rape was what one felt when one’s back was against a wall and one had to strike out, whether one wanted to or not, to keep the pack from killing one” (227-8).