Just yesterday I wrote a review of Colson Whitehead’s amazing novel, The Underground Railroad, on Goodreads. And today I hear he won the National Book Award.
I actually reviewed two books on Goodreads yesterday. The second was the photographer Sally Mann’s memoir, Hold Still. What might be surprising is how both of these books helped me think about race in America.
One is a novel set in the 1850s, following the journey of Cora, a runaway slave who takes a literal underground railway (with conductors, trains, and tunnels) to get north. Her experience, told in a realistic narrative style, explores the exploitation, murder, and varied experience of discrimination suffered by African Americans (not just Africans in America). Reading it builds empathy for the current fears of African Americans.
While I was reading it, I also watched a video blog by a woman in Kansas who recounts the story of how her great-grandfather established her current farm as a pioneer in the 1870s. He was born in the 1850s in Tennessee, a time and place recounted in The Underground Railroad. That is how close this history is to us. Also, many things that happen in the novel are recognizable in recent history. The establishment of Jim Crow, medical experimentation and exploitation, establishment of the role of the black housekeeper and nanny. Let us not say– “That was so long ago it’s no longer relevant.” Let us not think, also, that this is not our history, too.
Sally Mann had a black nanny. I picked up Mann’s memoir because I have always loved the photos she took of her children. And indeed, the best part of the book is the section where she discusses these photos (with lots of reproductions of photos including “drafts”) and recounts her experience of her connection with the land where her family lives and of being a mother. The descriptions of and discussion of artistic process are inspiring and revealing. Her stories of the fears involved raising children in such a wild place are equally engaging.
After those chapters, though, she dives into the story of The South. She travels, making landscape photos for a large project. And everywhere she is photographing the “haunted South,” haunted by plantations and hanging trees and the spot where Emmett Till’s body was thrown off a bridge, near the place where a historical marker is riddled with bullet holes.
Gee-Gee holding Sally Mann as a baby
She also tells the story of her nanny, Gee-Gee, their love for each other and its limits. The way that Gee-Gee could not come inside Howard Johnson’s with them when they traveled, and seemed to never use the bathroom, and the way the family accepted this. What Mann writes is this: “I loved Gee-Gee the way other people love their parents, and no matter how many historical demons stalked that relationship, I know that Gee-Gee loved me back.” It is 14 pages before she tells us “It is likely that her mother died in childbirth because as an infant, Gee-Gee, born Virginia Cornelia Franklin, was brought to Lexington [Virginia] and raised by her mother’s sister, Mary Franklin.” She tells what she knows and can discern of Gee-Gee’s life, and acknowledges her family’s “blindness and silence.” (To read an early draft of this chapter, click here.) Gee-Gee’s experience and Cora’s experience in 1850 in a “free” South Carolina (one chapter of Whitehead’s novel) are very close.
My husband and I, in one of our many recent conversations trying to discern the meaning of the presidential elections, were talking about the way the coasts and many urbanites write off working class people and huge swaths of the country, especially rural areas. And we got to the issue of The South, and the feeling of many Southerners that they are written off or treated as stupid based solely on their accents. “Just look at the stereotype of the white sheriff, that caricature with the hick accent.”
I don’t know how I would have heard that three months ago, but in the wake of reading those two books (and to be fair, I do often have this response), my response was: “No, that stereotype creates an ‘other’ out of Southern whites that lets other whites in America pretend that the racial history of the South is not everyone’s history.” I really believe that. Because when white Southerners are being stereotyped in this way, they are being seen as “the racists” and as backward in ways that primarily, I believe, have to do with the history of slavery and race. Maybe I’m wrong, but this is what I think. And so it is important to see Whitehead’s book, and Mann’s book, as about all of us, as about American identity. And to realize that as long as we make racism or the treatment of African Americans as a story about “others” (including the police), it’s not going to end.
This is the same approach I take to issues of sexual abuse and domestic violence in this country. As long as we see victimizers as “other,” and the issue as not about “us,” as long as we normalize and minimize, we continue in our “blindness and silence” even as we express outrage. I think outrage, actually, is just another way of looking away and saying it is not us. It is a form of condescension.
So let us not condescend with our outrage, and let us not dismiss by putting “in the past” the behavior of this country and its citizens. Let us read to understand the experience and reactions and expectations of African Americans and where they are coming from. Let white people, too, not dismiss it as stories about the past or the South but understand why we might should be treated with distrust. And let us work to change the systems that keep us all here.