And Then They Drown?: Faulkner’s Quentin Compson Lost in the Borderlands

This chapter looks at the consequences of the inability to negotiate borders because of deeply entrenched narrative patterns that circle back upon themselves, perpetuating communal values that stoke division. The chapter examines the quintessential victim of the Southern Lost Cause—Faulkner’s Quentin Compson—who is a divided self because he left the South. He is even before he leaves Mississippi for Boston, “two separate Quentins,” one “preparing for Harvard in the South” and the other “still too young to deserve yet to be a ghost.” Through Quentin, Faulkner makes clear the dangers of divisions between black and white, between North and South, and the inability of Southerners to successfully navigate the psychological borderlands and leave behind the crushing past of the South. Faulkner’s Quentin is the most indelibly inked reminder of the consequences of border narratives gone awry and a warning of the harm of building walls and not bridges.

“Anywhere South of the Canadian Border”

This chapter reflects on Southern Border Formation Narratives and Border Crossing Narratives within a broader context of 21st Century wall building. Markers of Southernness are fading, yet at the same time, many of those strategies of Southern nation building are rearing their heads in American society. Bringing this chapter back around to the discussion of border building that opened the study, the book closes with a discussion of Southern Border Formation Narratives—especially those that divide races--that have been claimed by groups of people outside the South and how those narratives have blurred the line between South and not-South. Wrestling with questions about 21st Century wall building in the Age of Trump, the book closes by asserting that perhaps Malcolm X’s statement “As far as I am concerned, [the South] is anywhere south of the Canadian border” is even clearer now.

Southern Border Formation Narratives: Controlling the Flow of People

Looking back into Southern history, this chapter examines ways Border Formation Narratives disrupted cultural continuity for enslaved Africans, walled out “uncivilized” cultures, extended slavery into contested territories, and created the South’s borders. Examining hegemonic devices and struggles against them, this chapter analyzes early writings by Equiano, Wheatley, and Cabeza de Vaca, and an image of Pocahontas and then focuses on 19th Century border building that identified the Mason-Dixon as marker of Southern nationhood and pushed Native Americans and Hispanic Americans out of the Southern frame to solidify the region as based on polarities of black and white. The chapter examines Ruiz de Burton’s reflections on border circumstances of Mexican-Americans, Hentz’s fictional transformation of a Northern-born woman into a Southerner, and the revisionist history of the composition of the song “Dixie.” There is also discussion of attempts by Haley and Walker, and artist Tom Feelings to reclaim control of communal narratives.

Southern Womanhood and “The High Cost of Living and Dying in Dixie”

This chapter looks at the border as a gendered site within the context of Southern womanhood. If, as Kristeva says of woman, “the biological fate that causes us to be the site of the species chains us to space,” then the South not only lays claim to women’s bodies but also contains them. Reflecting on ways gender impacts border narratives by women, the chapter focuses on autobiographical writings by Arnow, Abbott, Hurston, Scott, and Welty to examine ways Southern women look to the horizon to claim it, struggle with firmly engrained models of Southern womanhood, and attempt to break free from these patterns. Considering texts within the historical context of the representation of woman as symbolic border guard of nations and communities, and as who needs “saving” when outside aggressors threaten, the chapter reflects on the implications of crossing borders when women’s bodies are literally used to define the line.

Securing the Border as a Creative Site: Southern Masculinities and the Urge to Tell

This chapter looks at the American success story of the self-made man and how it was reinterpreted in the context of 20th Century Southern masculinity. Focusing on novels by Wolfe, Ellison, Styron, Capote, and Warren, the chapter builds on earlier scholarship that identifies a shift from idealized images of planter and slave to new models of masculinity for blacks and whites. The central claim is that new narrative patterns were embraced that set male characters on journeys outside the South to encounter that world and find success. A mania of sorts evolved around this narrative as portrayed by Wolfe who represented wandering as opportunity for introspection, movement as a means to remake one’s self, and liminal space as a site of creativity for the neophyte writer but also a distinctly masculine zone. The chapter ends with reflections on how this journey is altered when males encounter racial or sexual prejudice.

The Border Crossing Narrative and the Disruption of Southern Borders

With the view that crossing a border is a transformative experience, this chapter provides groundwork for the rest of the study and focuses on collective narratives of movement, specifically at ways they create new communities, break down borders, and upset Southern identities. This chapter is the most expansive in examining various types of texts. Looking at personal narratives, visual arts including work by Jacob Lawrence, Aaron Douglas, and Dorothea Lange, literary texts by writers including Frances E.W. Harper, Wilma Mankiller, William Attaway, and Harriette Arnow, and articles and advertising from newspapers such as the Chicago Defender, the chapter focuses on the hybrid identities created in and by Southern Border Crossing Narratives and examines the Border Crossing Narrative as a site of confrontation and struggle, as not only a narrative that can be created and maintained, but also one that others can attempt to control.

Rescripting What It Means to Be Southern: Musical Performance as Border Narrative

This chapter looks at the role of music and performance in border crossings. Focusing on Southern Border Narratives in blues and country music, the chapter examines how those narratives re-defined what it means to be Southern by offering a platform that validated Southern migratory experience and a site for negotiating the borderlands. Migrants leaving the South found border narratives set within music could help them break from the places they came from, navigate transitional spaces, and identify with others making similar passage. Examining the evolutions of rural to urban blues and “hillbilly” music to country that came about because of the mass movements of Southerners, this chapter looks at a broad range of musicians from Memphis Minnie Douglas, Big Bill Broonzy, and the Maddox Brothers and Rose, to Bessie Smith and Woody Guthrie, aiming to look at ways communal voices shaped and gave meaning to the migrant experience.

Borders and Border Narratives

This introduction lays out the central argument of the study, identifies Border Theory as the theoretical framework, and defines key terms: Southern Border Formation Narratives and Southern Border Crossing Narratives. Grounding the study in the assertion that movements of Southerners—and people in general--are controlled not only by physical boundaries marked on a map but also by narratives that define that movement, the introduction offers a general overview of the significance of borders and bordering in human history and how deeply borders are drawn: who can cross over; who controls the border; what crossing a border signifies. Essentially, bordering is a process, a complexity of social constructions through which differences are articulated and enacted. This introduction also points to the commonalities between geographical bordering and other types of borders, such as temporal borders (for example, between childhood and adulthood), gendering (including socially constructed binaries), and textual borders.