Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility.

Matthews, John M.

Self-scrutiny turning into autobiography is a temptation which more than a few Southern writers have found irresistible; they look at their own lives and then at the region that nurtured them, ponder the connections between the latter and the former, and part of the time at least end up either criticizing or defending the section or the people in it. Born in the Delta, a recent contribution to this literary enterprise, is Margaret Jones Bolsterli's memoir of her early years in Desha County, Arkansas, in the Delta near the confluence of the Arkansas and Mississippi Rivers. She was born there in 1931 and grew up in what appear to be reasonably comfortable circumstances on a fairly good-sized plantation. Her book touches briefly on a number of subjects - family, cotton-growing, summertimes, Southern Methodism, friendships with black people, the poverty and lack of opportunity that circumscribed the lives of so many of her friends and neighbors, the effort to escape from loneliness and cultural isolation that she and her mother sought through reading many books. There is an amusing discourse on how to tell quality from common people, a distinction that evidently was once of immense value. It all takes place near the end of a distinctive era in Southern history, a time when depression, New Deal, World War II, and air conditioning were about to change the folkways profoundly.

Bolsterli has not written a long or a deeply introspective book, but there is enough personal information here to leave the reader with the sense that he is well acquainted with her and understands the complicated relationship she feels between herself and the culture around her. Within the subset of Delta memoirs, this one reflects none of the pessimism and elegiac sadness to be found in William A. Percy's Lanterns on the Levee. It possesses neither the sustained critical tone of David Cohn's Where I Was Born and Raised nor the energy and general hilarity of Willie Morris's North Toward Home, although it needs to be added that these three examples all originate in Mississippi, not Arkansas. But like these authors, and so many more, Bolsterli has experienced the going away and coming back again that have been the wellspring of so much Southern literary creativity. As a graduate student, she studied English in Missouri and Minnesota, and she lived in Europe for a while, before returning to teach in the University of Arkansas.

Her memoir may well be different from many others because she is younger and her sensibilities have been affected by the sweeping changes in the region in the 1950s and 1960s; or it may be that her interests are literary and not journalistic. For whatever reason, Bolsterli's book is a subtle and occasionally indirect essay on the shaping of one form of the modern Southerner's sensibility. Her delta, as she puts it, is both a place and a "landscape of the mind"; the tension between the two imparts to her book a particular tone. Sprinkled through it are arresting insights that lead the reader to think again about what he thought he already understood. A good instance appears in the chapter titled "Talk," in which the author subjects what many have praised as some of the South's most commendable habits - conversing and story-telling - to a bit of skepticism. "What passes for conversation in the South is frequently evasion disguised as charm," she says. "Stories, by drawing attention to images and memory, hinder the exchange of information so vital to conversation, undoubtedly the reason why Southerners are so adept at telling them. When there are so many topics that could get you killed, best deal in fiction and be safe." About race relations, she observes, "Since segregation was not so much an attempt at apartheid as an effort to prescribe the paths of communication between the races, these paths were open to a variety of possibilities within certain limits."

More than anything else, if Bolsterli is right, this Southern white sensibility is riddled with ambivalence, misgiving, and guilt. The memory of the Confederacy was a powerful one in her family - her grandfather fought for it - but in her mind Southerners never wanted to admit that the cause of the war was slavery. Her appreciation of Southern cooking is tempered by the unwillingness of white cooks to concede that its origins were African. Even as it was being created in the Delta, black blues music went unnoticed by white people. Recollections of old friendships and memories of dead relatives are tinged with tragedy. Evidently not close to her parents, she remembers the family's black cook, Victoria, vividly and hints that as a youth she was closer to black people than to whites.

A good many Southern readers are likely to encounter themselves here. Even if they might wish that Bolsterli had pressed a bit further, probed more deeply, and balanced recollection with a little more reflection and analysis, particularly in the area of Southern religion, they will surely read this graceful little book with much pleasure.