In this issue
A William Faulkner Encyclopedia.
Politics, Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949.
Redefining Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South.
Reflections of South Carolina.
A
William Faulkner Encyclopedia.
Edited by Robert W. Hamblin and Charles A. Peek.
Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999. 504 pages. $89.50.
Since winning the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1950, William Faulkner has been the subject of more than 5,000 scholarly books and articles. Among his contemporaries, only James Joyce has received as much critical attention. Academic and critical interest in his work has been matched by popular acclaim, with some of his works adapted for the cinema. During the last five decades, growing numbers of Faulkner admirers from all over the world have traveled to Mississippi to visit his home and to the area that is the prototype for his fictional Jefferson and Yoknapatawpha County. A book recently published by Greenwood Press provides a welcome guide and ready reference for Faulkner's lifelong admirers and first-time readers.
A William Faulkner Encyclopedia, compiled and edited by Robert W. Hamblin and Charles A. Peek, is an authoritative guide to Faulkner’s life, literature, and legacy. More than 50 scholars contributed to the work, which includes nearly 500 alphabetically arranged entries for topics relating to Faulkner and his world. Included are entries for his works and major characters and themes, as well as the literary and cultural contexts in which his texts were conceived, written, and published. There are also entries for relatives, friends, and other persons important to Faulkner’s biography; historical events, persons, and places; social and cultural developments; and literary and philosophical terms and movements. Entries typically conclude with suggestions for further reading, and the volume closes with a bibliography and detailed index.
The volume is dedicated to Evans Harrington (1925-1997), longtime faculty member of the University of Mississippi and director of the annual Faulkner and Yoknapatawpha Conference from its inception in 1974 until his retirement in 1993. Evans Harrington--described in the dedication as “Teacher, Writer, Scholar, Citizen, Gentleman, Friend”--was a mentor to the encyclopedia editors, many of the contributors, and many who will benefit from it.
Politics,
Society, and the Klan in Alabama, 1915-1949.
By Glenn Feldman.
Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1999. 456 pages. $49.95 cloth,
$19.95 paper.
In Southern history, the second phase of the Ku Klux Klan--the period from 1915 into the 1930s--is by far the least studied. The first phase during Reconstruction and the third phase that grew in response to the civil rights movement have attracted far more attention, so a book that surveys Klan activity from 1915 to 1949 is immediately important. The so-called Second Klan is famous as a national movement that reacted in anger to many changes in modernizing America but aspired to be a mainstream civic organization for conservative white Protestants.
Glenn Feldman lays out the various features of the second version of the Klan in Alabama. Klansmen and women supported civic patriotism, Protestant churches, and a public identity aspiring to respectability. They opposed the sale of alcohol, prostitution, sexual and family life that offended conventional standards, and public actions by immigrants, especially Jews or Catholics. Above all, they reacted both violently and politically against violations of codes of racial segregation. The specifically Southern features of this Klan were the centrality of anti-black sentiment, the romanticization of the first Klan, and the dominance of Methodists and Baptists.
The most active point of the second phase Klan in Alabama was 1925-1927. In the mid-1920s, membership in Alabama Klans reached about 115,000. The Klan had enormous power in electing political figures in 1926, helping elect Klansmen as governor and senator. Inspired by those successes, Alabama Klansmen went on a violent tear in 1927, whipping and flogging countless violators of their ideals.
The book is best at detailing the specific features and events of the Ku Klux Klan. The reader is most impressed by the stories--narratives of 1926 Klan raids on Chinese restaurants in Birmingham for selling alcohol, 1927 beatings of white teenagers Jeff Callaway and Fannie Daniels and black landowner Arthur Hitt, and a raid on a Girl Scout Camp in 1948.
The author does a good job describing the organized opponents of the Klan. Traditional elites Feldman calls "patricians" combined with city business leaders to mount serious opposition to Klan political power. The author also shows the limits of the vision of Klan opponents, who wanted order and a peaceful business climate, but generally not a more open and just society.
In the 1930s, a declining Klan membership of about 5,000 concentrated on a few specific issues--the Scottsboro case, labor radicalism, and controversies over the appointment of Alabama Klansman Hugo Black to the Supreme Court. Feldman breaks new ground by showing that the KKK grew in membership and activism during the 1940s, when World War II nativism and opposition to mounting African American activism sparked new interest in the Klan. Feldman thus shows a degree of continuity between the second phase Klan and the better known Klan that emerged as a significant opponent of civil rights activism.
Ted Ownby
Redefining
Southern Culture: Mind and Identity in the Modern South.
By James C. Cobb.
Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999. 251 pages. $40.00 cloth, $17.95
paper.
James C. Cobb’s
new book of essays focuses on the economic development of the South and
the cultural implications of the South’s modernization. His major
argument is that “the South’s journey toward economic modernization
came in a different historical, cultural, technological, and resource
context than did that of the North” He draws from the South’s
experience broader meanings, stressing the failure of any one model of
development to explain modernity.
The essays are partly historiographical, and Cobb offers sage comments on the works of other scholars who have wrestled with issues of the South's development. “Beyond Planters and Industrialists” is a classic chapter, which the Southern Historical Association honored as the best article of the year when it appeared in the Journal of Southern History in 1988. This wide-ranging review of scholarship is an excellent place to begin any understanding of Southern economic development. He examines the seeming tensions between industrial development and agriculture after the Civil War, concluding that both systems rested “in a regional economy where labor-intensive industry and labor-intensive agriculture maintained a delicate coexistence.” The book shows the changes in the 20th century as industry came to surpass agriculture, and the coverage includes sage thoughts on the South’s position in the global economy.
Cobb emphasizes throughout this book, in fact, that the South’s economy always needs to be seen in terms of its position in the national and international economic systems. He makes appropriate use of such theorists as Reinhard Bendix and Immanuel Wallerstein. His feel for Southern culture, though, takes him beyond economic theory so that we also, thankfully, read about Bill Monroe and Alice Walker. The book’s essays on country music, the blues, and the Southern Literary Renaissance are original and interesting, among the best writing that places these forms of Southern culture in historical context.
Cobb protests the overemphasis in Southern historical study on continuities and changes, noting that scholars wanting to write on other issues “must do so with great care lest they be trampled by the galloping cavalry” that W. J. Cash used to symbolize planter dominance throughout Southern history or be “crushed by the bourgeois-piloted bulldozers” that C. Vann Woodward employed as the “vehicles of change.”
Perhaps the most compelling chapter is on “Community and Identity in the South,” in which Cobb explores the very contemporary effort of whites and blacks in the South to find common ground. In the postsegregation South, African Americans seem to have embraced the regional culture with much affection, having in the process redefined it as one they created. He concludes that the civil rights movement gave Southerners “the opportunity, or better yet, the responsibility to save southern culture.”
Cobb is witty and always stimulating in bringing together issues of the South’s cultural identity and its economic development--as no one else writing on the South does so well.
Charles Reagan Wilson
Reflections of
South Carolina.
Photographs by Robert C. Clark. Text by Tom Poland. Foreword by Walter
Edgar.
Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1999. 195 pages, 193 color
photographs. $39.95.
Reflections of South Carolina is not the first or last coffee table book one will ever need, but it is one of the must-haves. Nearly 200 color images ranging from Civil War reenactments, coastal shrimping, slave cabins, and the everyday enjoyableness of South Carolina are to be found in this 10" x 12", 195-page, hardbound treasure. There is something for everyone in Reflections. Nature lovers, historians, and antique hunters will find their interests reflected as they unfold these treasures county by county. Images dominate the book with just enough text to keep the pages flowing.
If there is one word to sum up the best of these pages it would be contrast. Photographer Robert Clark has done a remarkable job in capturing the energy of the state: the speed of horse power at the Colonial Cup steeplechase, the slow moving Sumter Irish parade, replete with color, the gentleness required from the mud covered hands of an Edgefield County potter. These and the many images overflowing in Reflections of South Carolina begin the never ending trail of Southern contrast. The bright blue/green landscape dotted with 300 rolled bales of hay, with the ubiquitous three crosses standing guard; the waterfall of blue and yellow kayaks in Easley, window washers high atop a modern building; children hunting eggs and racing frogs; these are the images that construct a state, filled with diversity of industry, people, places, and not to be outdone, by things. Big things, little things, and things in between, commonly referred to as antiques ranging from duck decoys, saw palmetto baskets, tin solders, and rocking chairs. For the "never have been" to the “returnee,” Reflections of South Carolina lets you see exactly what you are missing when you are not there.
Phoenix Savage
Wonders
to Behold: The Visionary Art of Myrtice West.
Edited by Carol Crown.
Memphis: Mustang Publishing, 1999. 144 pages. $50.00.
Myrtice
West is a contemporary Southern folk artist, representative of the extraordinary
outcropping of visionary painters who are a contemporary expression of
Southern creativity. She is from the rural white culture of northeastern
Alabama and has had a hard life. She was poor and picked cotton. She had
two miscarriages early in her marriage, had cancer, and an abusive son-in-law
murdered her beloved daughter Martha Jane. She has taken care of her own
mother as she aged and cares for her husband, who has cancer, as well
as grandchildren and great-grandchildren. It aches to recount the pain
and sacrifice of Myrtice West's story, but it is essential background
to her vibrant art. She finds redemption for her pain in painting scenes
that explode out of the Southern religious context that produced her.
She is an evangelical Protestant, ever believing in the possibility of
salvation.
This evocative book is sharply focused on a series of 13 works West painted around the themes of the book of Revelation. She painted the series during her time of awful personal turmoil, and the work helped her preserve her sanity. Rollin Riggs, an art collector who first became famous for Elvis black velvet paintings and then became a sensitive collector of Southern folk art, bought the series, and his publishing company has brought West the attention that one of the preeminent contemporary Southern folk artists deserves. Carol Crown, who was trained as a historian of medieval art and teaches at the University of Memphis, has superbly edited the book, reflecting her expertise as a scholar of religious iconography and her deep knowledge of the works of self-taught artists.
Wonders to Behold is a well-executed interdisciplinary study. Folklorist Roger Manley analyzes the most vivid and original of West’s paintings, Satan Takes Over, which came to her in a horrifying dream. Miriam Fowler, from the Birmingham Museum of Art, discusses West's depiction of the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden in light of the artist's own experience with her family, while Rebecca Hoffberger provides a complex, feminist reading of West’s Woman on the Moon Giving Birth to Christ. Adding much gusto and insight, Howard Finster comments on one of the paintings, drawing from his own visionary work.
The paintings in this book were exhibited at the University of Memphis Art Museum, and the staff there, along with Riggs and Crown, deserve much credit for providing excellent presentations of Myrtice West's work. She hopes her paintings will save souls; they represent her form of the traditional evangelical belief in testifying to the faith. Her paintings of Revelation images are strikingly original and should indeed touch many souls who ponder them.
Mama
Dip’s Kitchen.
By Mildred Council.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 230 pages. $27.50
cloth, $15.95 paper.
Automatic Y’all:
Weaver D’s Guide to the Soul.
By Dexter Weaver with Patrick Allen.
Athens, Georgia: Hill Street Press, 1999. 187 pages. $17.50.
The
culinary memoir with recipes is the literary genre of the moment. In 1998
Ruth Reichel's Tender at the Bone and Elizabeth David’s
South Wind through the Kitchen--and a dozen or so lesser works--fanned
the flames of cooks with their noses in books. In 1999 Southerners--specifically
African American Southerners--got their due, with the publication of
Mama Dip’s Kitchen by Mildred Council and Automatic Y’all:
Weaver D’s Guide to the Soul by Dexter Weaver.
To be sure, these are not the first such books penned by African Americans with Southern roots. Books like Vertamae Grosvenor’s Vibration Cooking or the Travel Notes of a Geechee Girl and Spoonbread and Strawberry Wine by sisters Norma Jean and Carole Darden have remained popular since the 1970s when soul food was first in vogue. Nonetheless, Mama Dip and Weaver D tell stories all their own, stories worth knowing.
Council’s Mama Dip’s Kitchen is the more conventional of the two: a book of recipes from her Chapel Hill, North Carolina, restaurant--banana pudding and crackling cornbread, fruitcake and fried chicken, and other Southern favorites--introduced by a 27-page recollection from Council. She calls her method of cookery “dump cooking,” and the description reads like a modified version of the soul food explications that were rife in the 1970s. “Dump cooking means no recipes, just measure by eye and feel and taste and testing,” she writes. “Cooking by feel and taste has been heritage among black American women since slavery, and that's the way I learned to cook.”
Automatic Y’all is a different bird all together, equal parts hip lifestyle primer, entrepreneurial history, and four-point plan for soulful living, with a selection of recipes tacked to the back end. Weaver, an Athens, Georgia, restauranteur who rose to international prominence when the rock group REM adopted his slogan ”Automatic for the People” as the title for their Grammy-nominated album, offers opinions on everything from backsliding vegetarians with a taste for bacon drippings in their collard greens (“Some of those vegetarians’ll eat a little pork if the pig has his back turned”), to the eating habits of our Northern neighbors: “For one thing, they just never sit down to have a square meal, meat and three. They just eat sandwiches all the time, sandwiches, sandwiches, sandwiches. Just sandwiching it and hitting it, getting on the get-go.” In response, Weaver offers a contrarian’s bounty of black pot cooking, ranging from oxtails to spaghetti pie, squash casserole to stewed okra.
John T. Edge