Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity.  Edited by W. Fitzhugh Brundage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000. 384 pages. $19.95 paper. 

Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray. 
By Darlene O’Dell. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. 192 pages. $45.00 cloth.

Photographs by Charles Moore. Text by Michael S. Durham. Introduction by Andrew Young. 208 pages. 188 duotone photographs. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, in cooperation with the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute, 2002. $29.95 paper.

   As debates go on about how people in the South should remember and commemorate sensitive and troubling topics of many kinds, “memory” has emerged as one of the more popular contemporary fields of study. The term appears in increasing numbers of book titles, and one of the best recent books on the Civil War, David Blight’s Race and Reunion: The Civil War and American Memory, studies not the war itself but the varied and conflicting ways people interpreted its meanings. Most scholars who study memory analyze the ways people make choices about what to remember, what to keep alive, what to reinterpret, and what to forget, and they very often ask how particular interpretations of the past served either to justify or to challenge contemporary power relations. These two books, one a collection of historical essays and the other an analysis of three autobiographies, represent some of the most inspired recent scholarship about memory.
The title of W. Fitzhugh Brundage’s edited collection, Where These Memories Grow, comes from Allen Tate’s “Ode to the Confederate Dead.” Ironically, Brundage has skillfully gathered a group of essays that challenge any notion that the Confederacy is the only thing Southerners have thought much about. The American Revolution, slavery, gender, paternalism, farm life, ethnic life, religion, gentility, and what one might call folksiness all play important roles in the various essays. Violence plays a role in two essays about intentional forgetting.
Many of the essays about white Southerners concentrate on ways certain memories can legitimate power relations, whether in political systems or class or household relations. As Michele Gillespie shows, Georgia artisans in the early republic used memories of how independent artisans contributed to the forming of the American republic, but, in the antebellum period, began leaving the egalitarian sides of artisan language behind in order to fit into a society based on ideas that white men deserved to dominate in a clear social hierarchy. Anne Rubin shows that leading Confederates used a “language of ancestry” (86) dating to the American Revolution to legitimize secession and their place in the Confederacy. Catherine Bishir’s essay on postbellum architecture argues that Colonial Revival architecture—which basically meant putting columns in front of big buildings—represented an attempt to fortify the wealth and status of turn-of-the-century elites by connecting them to the appearances and households of much older elites. Stephanie Yuhl’s analysis of the literature, paintings, and architecture that female preservationists chose as representing the best of the Charleston past emphasize both the preservationists’ class status but also their intensely personal, idiosyncratic concerns not to let the lives they knew be forgotten. Holly Beachley Brear analyzes issues of both ethnicity and gender in recent disputes over the control the Daughters of the Republic of Texas continue to claim over the preservation their pasts. Sometimes those pasts are big, public, and multigenerational; sometimes they are smaller and more private. But this collection is not about making a regional comparison that would argue somehow that Southerners are distinctive in their concern for remembering. Instead, the essays stress the diversity of Southern memories, the sense the memories are up for grabs, and the complex purposes those memories serve.
Darlene O’Dell’s Sites of Southern Memory studies how autobiographies by Katharine DuPre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray challenged conventional ideas about the Lost Cause and white supremacy. Studying autobiography means studying memory, because autobiographers are always making choices about what and how to remember. O’Dell is especially good at getting inside the personal memories of how the three autobiographies confronted issues of race and racism, especially in dead and living bodies. One could say that while most of the authors in Brundage’s collection study how people constructed memories, O’Dell is studying how her three autobiographers deconstructed certain memories, specifically the ways people in the South had tried to use memories as monuments to the naturalness and legitimacy of white supremacy. 
In her discussion of Lumpkin’s The Making of a Southerner, O’Dell concentrates on the scene of in which the father, heir to a tradition of paternalistic gentility that the young Lumpkin inherited and respected, beat up a young black woman employee. The rest of her autobiography involved the remaking of Lumpkin’s identity. However, O’Dell stresses that no matter how much she rejected her father’s and the South’s claims of patriarchal traditions, Lumpkin was buried near her family members, “next to the fathers and followers of Confederate nationalism and Lost Cause convictions” (79). Lillian Smith and Pauli Murry had no mixed feelings. Smith’s autobiography, Killers of the Dream, dramatized the fictional ghosts that propped up segregation, and she wrote to show how limiting and artificial segregation could be. Smith was buried on the grounds of the summer camp where she “envisioned a New South based on diversity and experimentation” (103). Pauli Murray, born a generation later in Baltimore, detailed her fascinating life as a writer-activist-priest in her 1956 book Proud Shoes. The only African American of the three writers, Murray offered a more direct denunciation of segregation, by upholding the memories of her Union soldier grandfather and activist grandmother. She saw a Confederate cemetery as offering an immediate offense to her and her family’s goals of freedom, and struggled to have her grandparents’ graves treated with the dignity they deserved.
Neither O’Dell’s short volume nor Brundage’s collection offers easy reading. The essays in Where These Memories Grow go down more easily when digested one or two at a time, and Sites of Southern Memory is filled with enough quotations, references to theoretical works, and parenthetical expressions to impress some readers and irritate others. This difficulty likely stems from the nature of studying memory, which is an inherently complex topic. But those willing to make the effort will find much to learn from both of these works.

Ted Ownby