“Crashing to Bits”

2021 ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Justin Mellette
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Lillian Smith ◽  
Primary Focus ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Black Boy

Chapter 3 considers the myriad nature of southern memoir, with particular focus on the anti-racist work of Lillian Smith. Published in a decade replete with southerners writing about the South, including W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, William Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream confronts southern paternalism in a stark, direct manner. Specifically, Smith responds to many of her contemporaries by presenting the South not as a romantic site of gentility, but rather as a psychologically traumatizing hellscape, one replete with specters of violence perpetrated against blacks as well as paternalistic control levied against women and poor whites. This chapter contextualizes Smith alongside these other writers, with primary focus on Percy's nostalgia and romanticization of southern gentility, as well as his disdain for poor whites, whom he derides as scoundrels and markedly inferior versions of whiteness.

The Mind of the South.

1941 ◽  
Vol 7 (3) ◽  
pp. 400 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Vann Woodward ◽  
W. J. Cash
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
The Mind

Sachs, Chavafambira, Maggie: Prurience or the Pathology of Social Relations?

2002 ◽  
Vol 32 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Grahame Hayes
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Social Relations ◽  
Traditional Healer ◽  
The Other ◽  
Research Subject ◽  
The South ◽  
The Social ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Mind

Black Hamlet (1937; reprinted 1996) tells the story of Sachs's association with John Chavafambira, a Manyika nganga (traditional healer and diviner), who had come to Johannesburg from his home in Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). Sachs's fascination with Chavafambira was initially as a “research subject” of a psychoanalytic investigation into the mind of a sane “native”. Over a period of years Sachs became inextricably drawn into the suffering and de-humanization experienced by Chavafambira as a poor, black man in the urban ghettoes that were the South Africa of the 1930s and 1940s. It is easy these days to want to dismiss Sachs's “project” as the prurient gaze of a white, liberal psychiatrist. This would not only be an ahistorical reading of Black Hamlet, but it would also diminish the possibilities offered by what Said (1994) calls, a contrapuntal reading. I shall present a reading of Black Hamlet, focusing on the three main characters - Sachs, Chavafambira, and Maggie (Chavafambira's wife) - as emblematic of the social relations of the other, racial(ised) bodies, and gender.

Traditions of Eloquence in Afro-American Communities

1970 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 505-527 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Abrahams
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
The Mind

…In the south there was the daily impact upon the white man of the effect of the Negro, concerning whom nothing is so certain as his remarkable tendency to seize on lovely words, to roll them in his throat, to heap them in redundant profusion one upon another until meaning vanishes, until there is nothing left but the sweet, canorous drunkenness, nothing but the play of primitive rhythm upon the secret springs of emotion.W. J. Cash, The Mind of the SouthBoth in Africa and in America the Negro seems to find a decided pleasure in altiloquent speech. Perhaps this bombast is partly due to the fact that the long and unusual word has a sort of awe-inspiring almost fetishistic significance to the uneducated person, and with the Negro, at least, it indicated a desire to approximate the white man in outward signs of learning. As it is, the Negro is constantly being lost in a labyrinth of jaw-breaking words full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of Southern Negroes

The Mind of the South: Fifty Years Later.

1994 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 429
Author(s):  
Dickson D. Bruce Jr. ◽  
Bruce Clayton ◽  
Anne Goodwyn Jones ◽  
Michael O'Brien ◽  
Orville Vernon Burton ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
The Mind

Cavaliers and Crackers, Tara and Tobacco Road: The Myth of a Two-Class White South

Prospects ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 30 ◽  
pp. 505-517
Author(s):  
Emily Wright
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
World War ◽  
The South ◽  
George Washington ◽  
Early 19Th Century ◽  
Poor Whites ◽  
Thomas Nelson Page ◽  
Poor White

In Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, eminent southernist Y(stet)Fred Hobson argues that since the early 19th century, southern discourse has been dominated by a desire to explain the South to a nation critical of its practices. This “rage to explain” was particularly apparent in the era known as the Southern Renaissance — the period roughly between World War I and World War II that saw a flowering of southern letters and intellectual life. During this period, southern poets, novelists, essayists, historians, and sociologists participated in a comprehensive enactment of the southern “rage to explain” the South, both to itself and to the rest of the world. Within this outbreak of explanation, a significant pattern emerges: a pattern of resistance to what I shall call the myth of a two-class white South.Throughout American history, northerners and southerners alike have colluded to create the impression that the antebellum white South consisted of only two classes: aristocratic planters on one extreme and debased poor whites on the other. This impression was initiated in the 18th century, when William Byrd's histories of the dividing line introduced the image of the poor white in the form of the laughable “Lubberlander.” The stereotype of the comic and/or degraded poor white can be traced from Byrd through George Washington Harris's tales of Sut Lovingood (1867) to William Alexander Percy's diatribes against poor whites in Lantern on the Levee (1941) and William Faulkner's unflattering portrayal of the Snopeses (1940–59). Meanwhile, the images of the courteous, kindly planter and of the plantation as pastoral idyll can be traced from John Pendleton Kennedy's Swallow Barn (1832) through the postbellum plantation fiction of Thomas Nelson Page to Stark Young's Civil War romance, So Red the Rose (1934).

The Mind of the South

1942 ◽  
Vol 47 (2) ◽  
pp. 374
Author(s):  
Clement Eaton ◽  
W. J. Cash
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
The Mind

Lillian Smith: A Southerner Confronting the South: A Biography.

1988 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 360
Author(s):  
Darden Asbury Pyron ◽  
Anne C. Loveland
Keyword(s):  
The South ◽  
Lillian Smith
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