An end of Southern history: the down-home quests of Toni Morrison and Colson Whitehead

African American Review, Winter, 2007 by William Ramsey

Since something seems to be ending, the time has come to ask how much force the historical South still exerts in the black literary imagination. Not that the postmodern South's concrete locale, its regional traits, as well as the speech and manners of its people have faded entirely out of existence. Rather, the time has passed when any one ideological discourse of the South can claim objectivistic grounding as authoritative history. And this is to say that no secure sectional outlook remains--in contradistinction to a national perspective--by which our next Faulkner, Wolfe, O'Connor, Welty, Warren, Richard Wright, or Alice Walker could confidently claim, "This is the essence of the South, just as I am explaining it to you."

Not the material South, but the idea of the South, has long been grounded in essentialist assumptions. The popular notion of southern mystique, primarily a white discourse, assumed the region had a uniquely defining and noble core, an objectively verifiable and innate essence--constituting a kind of regional exceptionalism--that required writers to "explain the South" to intrusive outsiders. Of course, black explanations of the South differed dramatically. In African American literature, explaining the South to outsiders began as early as the fugitive slave narratives, in which writers such as Frederick Douglass spoke past white southerners to northern audiences who would be more receptive to depictions of the South contradicting the slaveholders' defense of the region. Thus, from our postmodern perspective, the historical South is seen as a clash of social constructions, a site of dueling texts that contest the essence of the South as each vies for privileged, unitary status. Today, that contest of historical discourses that we call southern history is in its terminal phase.

To say that history can end, argues Francis Fukuyama in The End of History, is not to say that sequential, factual events stop happening. It means that when in the contest of political ideologies, one finally prevails--he cites democratic capitalism's triumph over communism--then "history understood as a single, coherent, evolutionary process" is over (xii). Factual events continue, but they do not change historical presuppositions. Extending Fukuyama's idea to the South, I find not only that long-held yearnings (whether white or black) for a unitary, monolithic southern history are dissipating but that, surprisingly, in black narratives of the South comes the most dramatic turning away from former assertions of single regional essence.

This postmodern turn from essence would seem wholly unexpected. Who, after all, would least likely forget the oppressive weight of white historical myth and then not counter it? For so long, claiming the South as home (or "down home," if one has left) has run squarely against the experience of oppression, marginality, and white ideological constructions denying the full and central place of black folk in the South. Quite understandably, black discourse always promoted an opposing or resistant truth. In fugitive slave narratives, the South was taken to be of pure and simple essence-it was a house of bondage and thus a "home" from which exile was highly desirable. Douglass, despite immense attachment to southern blacks he left behind, carefully constructed his public self as an exemplary and representative American--not a southerner but a fugitive of the South (recomposing this same identity theme in three autobiographical versions). Similarly, Charles W. Chesnutt evoked successfully in his conjure tales a distinct black culture operating on different assumptions from the slaveholders' social system. Yet, because of close familial ties to whites on the other side of the color line in Fayetteville, North Carolina, he viewed the central failure of southern society as its blindness to a common human family. Frustrated with the region's inhumane restrictions he, too, abandoned the South. (1) Even Ohio writer Paul Laurence Dunbar sought emotional links to down-home pastoral roots, but failed. In Folks from Dixie, In Old Plantation Days, and other commercial exploitations of the plantation myth, he failed to ground black identity in any authentic regional reality because such stories inescapably reinforced white supremacist premises of the myth. (2) So for such writers, the South, both as a place of oppression and as an ideological construct, exerted a strong and deeply problematic force on the literary imagination, in that the mere act of defining it was contestatory and ambivalent.

In the Harlem Renaissance, when strongly positive valuations were first given to blackness and folk culture, the urge toward essentialism increased. One thinks of Langston Hughes's declaration of a collective, historical racial unity in "The Negro Speaks of Rivers," and of his embracing Negroness in "The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain," proclaiming, "We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame" (309). With the publication of Cane in 1923, Jean Toomer (who termed himself an essentialist) lyrically depicted the South as having a fecund black essence that was needed by the spiritually deracinated North. (3) One thinks as well of Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, that memorable folk immersion in a sacral black South of the everglades' idyllic "muck." (4)