Civil rights leader John Lewis, campaigning for Congress. (Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.)

That idea of the South does not come from the outside. Quite the contrary. At least since the 1920s, many Southern writers and intellectuals have taken a perverse pride in their carnivalesque and tragic history. No one, for instance, did more to establish the idea of a singular “Mind of the South” enthralled to a “savage ideal” than W. J. Cash, a tormented, Menckenesque native son. This ideal, compounded of individualism, honor, and violence, drew white men together, supposedly trumping any possibility of class action or cross-race solidarity.

“The South,” to Cash and other similar homegrown critics, was the white South. And so it has remained in the national imagination. Yet as Cash himself perceptively observed, if there is anything distinctive about the South it is that blacks and whites have lived here together for so long, profoundly influencing one another’s “every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude,” albeit in a context of unequal power and exploitation. Martin Luther King always spoke of himself as a Southerner, and he held out a vision of an integrated, biracial South as a scene not of otherness but of national redemption.

The idea of the South as the nation’s backward (white) brother has perhaps served a useful purpose. It has allowed us to externalize and thus try to expunge conditions that were American in scope without forfeiting our belief in America as a land of equality, innocence, and success. In the years since the civil rights movement, however, we have learned too much about the national dimensions of racism and the roots of poverty in the nation’s political economy for that strategy to be anything but tattered, irrelevant, and self-defeating.

The notion that the South has disappeared (or is about to disappear) is equally problematic, for it too rests on a myth of categorical difference and on an image of the South as a place previously untouched by global change. In fact, discussions of globalization often overemphasize the uniqueness of the present era and underestimate the abiding strength of regional and ethnic identities. The South has always been shaped by global forces, even when it has been seen and has seen itself, in the words of Cash, as “not quite a nation within a nation, but the next thing to it.” Worldwide transfers of goods, people, and ideas have paradoxical effects. They can consolidate—indeed, crystallize—place-based identities as well as erode localized communities and regional affiliations.

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, age two, Gainesville, Georgia. (Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin spent much of her life outside the South. The Making of a Southerner is about writing a way home. Raised to believe that the plantation South was the real South, haunted by the dogma “that but one way was Southern, and hence there could be but one kind of Southerner,” she could not conceive of a self abstracted from time, place, and community. Nor could she turn against her “old heritage or racial beliefs” without turning her hand against her own people. In the end, she writes, it was the discovery of a different heritage—that of the “white millions whose forebears had never owned slaves,” the “Negro millions whose people had been held in slavery”—“that drew me to my refashioning.” She remade herself by substituting one imagined community for another. Shaped by myths, she became a myth-maker in turn.

I try to follow in her footsteps, lightening the burden of Southern history by reinventing the past. I pursue that goal in three main ways. First, by thinking of “the South” not as the benighted South but as a product both of the dynamic interplay of the local and the global, on the one hand, and of racial hybridity and interaction, on the other. Second, by placing new figures at the center of Southern history—blacks, women, working people—and thinking back through them. And finally, by attending to the power of memory, to my own hybrid memories as a white Southerner, a woman, a historian, and to the memories that shape the people about whom I write.

We are what we remember, and as memories are reconfigured, identities are redefined. Indeed, we are never outside memory, for we cannot experience the present except in the light of the past (“All beginnings,” writes Paul Connerton, “contain an element of recollection”), and remembering, in turn, is an action in the present. The pressure of events puts a chain of associations in motion; these ongoing reconstructions help secure the identities that enable us to navigate, legitimate, or resist the present order of things. And yet, when we speak and write as historians, we tend to position ourselves above and beyond memory, which we devalue as self-serving and inexact.

A Southern family. (Courtesy of the North Carolina Collection, University of North Carolina Library at Chapel Hill.)

Memory, according to Pierre Nora, is organic and continuous, “affective and magical.” It “only accommodates those facts that suit it; it nourishes recollections that may be out of focus or telescopic, global or detached, particular or symbolic.... [It] takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects.” History, in contrast, is an “intellectual and secular production” that “calls for analysis and criticism.” It “belongs to everyone and to no one, whence its claim to universal authority.” Suspicious of “myth” and “legend,” as well as of the vagaries of personal memory, historians take it upon themselves to piece together a plausible narrative from scattered, surviving shards. In that sense, as Nora argues, historians can represent a past that seems disconnected from living memory. And yet, for better and for worse, history can also serve as a stay against forgetfulness, perpetuating memories that secure a murderous sense of group identity or that totalitarian regimes try murderously to stamp out. Even when memory and history clash, they are still intertwined, and together they shape both personal and group identities.

Indeed, history commonly receives its guiding impetus from memory. Try as we may to break free from the overarching narratives of our time, they persist in the underlying structures of the stories we tell. To challenge those narratives, we often turn to countermemories—memories that resist the biases, exclusions, and generalizations embedded in official versions of the past. History is animated by memory in other, more ineffable ways as well. We bring to our writing the unfinished business of our own lives and times. Moreover, the experience of traveling so long in the country of research becomes our past, for our stories grow from a process of remembering and forgetting our encounters with the relics, fragments, and whispers of an always already recollected time. In all these ways, we live both the history we have learned through reading and research and the history we have experienced and inherited, passed down through the groups with which we identify, sedimented in the body, and created through talk.

Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, 1946. Photograph by Eric Stahlberg. (Courtesy of the Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.)

To me, this recognition that history gains its impetus from memory is critical because it aligns us, as historians, with our readers and implicates us in the history we write. Indeed, I was drawn to Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin’s autobiography in the first place precisely because it refuses the historian’s usual Olympian stance. The Making of a Southerner, like most autobiographies, chronicles an escape from childhood: it could not have been written if Katharine had not sprung herself free from the past. It is also marked by the presence of a “doubled subjectivity”: the “I” of autobiography is both the narrator and the protagonist, the recollecting self and the recollected self, the teller and the told. Once Katharine was the book’s protagonist, an impressionable, vulnerable girl, at the mercy of good people who created monstrous systems, drilled in a racism that, as she put it, takes “hold of us through our loyalties, affections ... [and] ideals.” Now, in the 1940s, as she writes her book, she has become the narrator, a woman who has completely altered her outlook, “rejecting as untenable on any ground whatsoever ... the Southern system of white supremacy and all its works.” Yet she takes pains to stress, not her uniqueness or the success of her flight, but her commonality with her readers. She is both an outsider and Everywoman. Like us, she is steeped in memory, yet capable of freedom. Speaking in the first person, she seeks not just to critique the past but to perform her own movement from past to present. Her writing embodies a promise: change can occur—has already occurred—from within.

It is to that sense of writing as remembering, as performance, and as utopian practice that I aspire, however haltingly, however certain of falling short. Thinking first through her family and then through ever-widening circles of experience and research, Katharine joined a long line of black and white Southerners who have struggled to rewrite, reremember, and spring free from—while also honoring—their vexed and painful, yet precious, pasts. I would like to travel in that company, writing my way home to a self that, like Katharine’s, comes partly from choices and partly from memories and histories I cannot escape.

Further Reading Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, 2d ed. (London: Verso, 1991). W. J. Cash, The Mind of the South (New York: Vintage, 1941). Stuart Hall and Paul du Gay, eds., Questions of Cultural Identity (London: Sage, 1996). David Hollinger, Postethnic America: Beyond Multiculturalism (New York: Basic, 1995). Katherine Du Pre Lumpkin, The Making of a Southerner (New York: Knopf, 1946). Frank McCourt, Angela’s Ashes: A Memoir (New York: Scribner’s, 1996). Pierre Nora, Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, 3 vols., ed. Lawrence Kritzman and trans. Arthur Goldhammer (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996).

(Continued, to part 3 of 3, "Replies")

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