I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South

Journal of Southern History, Nov, 2008 by Eric Ashley Hairston

I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South. By Houston A. Baker Jr. (New York and other cities: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. [xviii], 198. Paper, $21.95, ISBN 978-0-19-532655-0; cloth, $125.00, ISBN 978-0-19-508429-0.) Houston A. Baker Jr.'s I Don't Hate the South: Reflections on Faulkner, Family, and the South demonstrates both the centrality of William Faulkner to the southern cultural and intellectual experience and the generational evolution of Faulkner and the southerners about whom he wrote.

For Baker, as an African American man, a son, a father, a scholar, and a southerner, Faulkner is the avatar of the South with which he and others must contend over lifetimes. The book is itself quite narrative in form but scholarly, while being consciously and hopefully southern. As regionally resonant as the text is, it sustains a national view by being deeply reflective on the centrality of race and slavery to the history of the United States, while it addresses the generation and development of southern culture, intellect, and family relations. It is in this issue of descent--cultural, intellectual, racial, and familial--which has troubled minds from Phillis Wheatley and Thomas Jefferson to Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Du Bois, Faulkner, and now Baker, that the text is perhaps most compelling. It is the passing down of the heritage of the South, experiencing the South generationally, and fearing it for children and grandchildren that begins and ends the text. And it is in this personal and professional generational assessment that Baker's work is most powerful. [ERIC ASHLEY HAIRSTON, Elon University]