NHC Home  Publications Ideas Article | Vol. 6, No. 2, 1999 |
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| by Jacquelyn D. Hall Jacquelyn Hall, a 1996–97 National Endowment for the Humanities Fellow at the National Humanities Center, is the Spruill Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the director of the Southern Oral History Program. Her research interests center on U.S. women’s history, the American South, working-class history, and biography. Among her numerous publications are Revolt Against Chivalry: Jessie Daniel Ames and the Women’s Campaign Against Lynching and Like a Family: The Making of a Southern Cotton Mill World, of which she is coauthor. She is currently completing a book on Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin. She was recently awarded a National Humanities Medal at a White House ceremony. |
Main Article "Landscapes of the Heart" by Jacquelyn D. Hall I cling to positions on the borders— the border states, where I hail from, the borderlands between women’s history, Southern history, and labor history. I have always written about the South, but I have done so through the eyes of characters who were in some sense unintelligible or incommensurable within the traditional narratives of Southern history. Now I find myself drawn into issues of “Southernness” in a way that I have resisted before. In part, that pull comes from the intimate, ongoing, interior conversation of an author with her subject. I am writing a book about Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, whose classic autobiography, The Making of a Southerner (1946), marries memoir and family history in an effort to transform the meaning of “the South.” Also figuring in this book are Katharine’s sisters, Grace Lumpkin, author of a series of left-wing novels about the South, and Elizabeth, the eldest, an indefatigable promoter of the cult of the Lost Cause. This turn-of-the-century reremembering of the past produced a powerful and pernicious narrative of Southern history, a narrative that, despite ongoing challenges of historians (and of memoirists like Katharine) persists to this day. Thinking from within my relationship with these women, I could not help reflecting on my own sense of regional identity and on how I try to intervene in the present by (re)representing the past. The Lumpkins were planters’ daughters from South Carolina, insiders to what people often see as the “real” South, the deep, exotic South. My South was not their South. I grew up in Pauls Valley, Oklahoma, at the rim where the South meets the West and Midwest. One branch of my family wandered up from Texas to farm in “Little Dixie,” the Democratic, cotton-growing, biracial southeast corner of the state; the other migrated from Republican, pro-Union “bleeding Kansas” to open a dry goods store. I gravitated to my warmer, poorer, Southern kin (my paternal great-grandfather was a cowboy; the matriarch of my mother’s family raised eight children by picking cotton and working as a cook). No Southern state had more homegrown socialists, more crosscutting mixtures of red, black, and white, a more violent heritage of appropriation, or a more multicultural, multiracial past than Oklahoma. But I learned nothing about that history in the public schools of the state. The story we were taught had been radically abridged. Purged of everything of interest and value, it was a triumphalist narrative centering on the land rush that opened the state to white settlement in 1889. I was amazed, years later, to see photographs of Pauls Valley’s founding citizens: they were not the lily-white homesteaders I had always pictured but an intermixture of Indians and whites, along with a sprinkling of slaves and free blacks. Smith Paul, for whom Pauls Valley was named, had run away from North Carolina, lived with the Chickasaw Indians in Mississippi, married a Chickasaw woman, and found himself driven west with the Indians on the Trail of Tears. In the old town cemetery are buried whites and Indians, outlaws and bankers, Confederate and Union soldiers, side by side. Blacks are present but absent: their bodies rest in private, overgrown plots.
As the Sixties opened, I slipped away to college in Tennessee, where I watched from Memphis as the civil rights movement raged toward us from Mississippi, the state that James Cobb has called “the most Southern place on earth.” I remember imagining that I could almost feel the flames. The centrifugal force of that decade broke up my parents’ marriage and flung me and my mother and brother and sisters from coast to coast. I ended up in graduate school at Columbia, exhilarated by the sheer indifference of the city, so unlike the boundedness of the communities in which I had always lived, yet more aware of the mark of region than I had ever been before. At Columbia in the 1960s, Southernness overrode the nuances of place and class. In Invisibility Blues, Michele Wallace comments on “the unwillingness of ‘American History’ to include Oklahoma in its big picture. It’s like one of those nuclear dump sites,” she says, “some place nobody wants to know anything about.” To my professors and fellow students, I might as well have been a planter’s daughter: it was hard to pass as a serious scholar but easy to claim a perverse glamour, the glamour of the outsider who speaks from “the South,” a terrible yet culturally resonant place. To me, in the wake of the civil rights movement, “the South” seemed both homey and dangerous, familiar and frightening, the embodiment of the worst of American racism and patriarchy and the site of the most heroic struggles against both. At Columbia, I began to teach myself the Oklahoma history I never knew. And I came to see myself as a Southerner, a political identity that felt half-chosen, half-imposed. Paradoxically, writing about the Lumpkin sisters has drawn me more deeply into that identity (at a time in my life when I could well have gone the other way) while, at the same time, reinforcing my conviction that “the South” is not a fixed geographic place but a construct, an idea, a metanarrative in which Northerners and Southerners have colluded, a story that can take wildly different shapes without losing its power. That story turns on dichotomies that pit the South against “elsewhere,” with the South usually figured as a monolithic, unified, static, backward “other,” as everything that the nation is not, as a place with a tragic history that stands
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Ideas, Vol. 6, No. 2 Scopes Trial | Smokechasing | Landscapes of the Heart | May Sinclair and the First World War | Director's Desk |
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