A narrative journey South to understanding

Trudier Harris' collection of memoirs, Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, is suffused with a sense of her Southernness: from her peculiar first name, to her memories of the sociability of summer porch sitting, to her admiration of the work ethic wisdom of cotton picking stories. Summer Snow is like a long Southern road, winding toward self-discovery. The journey comes full circle.

Unlike fellow Black female writers Maya Angelou and Alice Walker, who were both raised in the South and have written memoirs of their one-way journeys from the heart of American conservatism to vaster shores and international literary acclaim, Harris writes of her journey from the South to vast realms - and back again.

"I was born black and female in February 1948 in the southern part of the United States, specifically, Alabama, which means I was born into a sharply segregated environment in which the lines between black and white were visible and invisible, physical and mental," writes Harris, a professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Summer Snow encourages readers to appreciate how a racist Southern heritage was a mixed blessing, not an everlasting curse. In her essays, Harris emphasizes that the overtly separate but unequal South of yesteryear shaped her personality and strengthened her backbone.

"The South, as I have come to understand it, was an especially good training ground in my formative years. If I could survive in a place that did not have my best interests at heart, that indeed was hostile to me, then I could develop coping strategies that would enable me to survive anywhere in the world. It has taken me years to become reconciled to the conditions under which I received that invaluable education," she writes.

Harris writes well about the South because she knows the region; its ways and its blemishes and its peculiar charms are as familiar as her own reflection. Harris' critique is valuable because, though she hardly puts on rose-colored, magnolia-loving glasses, she also eschews the bitterness and rancor that can lead to static, unhelpful generalizations about the South. Her Alabama childhood was the world of the poignant chapter titled "Would You Go Out with a White Boy for Five Dollars?" an unusually frank discussion of the potential for sexual abuse inherent in Jim Crow racial relations. The titular words were casually flung at Harris when she was in the sixth grade - hurled from the window of a stranger's passing car.

In memory, this chance insult symbolizes the Southern culture of violation. "It was well-known in our neighborhood that the police car frequently parked during daylight hours in front of one black woman's house meant that the white policeman driving the car had chosen her for sexual favors," she recalls. "He had undisputed, unchallenged sexual access to her."

Although the fear of sexual abuse was terrible, her childhood world was also a locus of joyful church sounds, communalism and good fishing; the place where she cultivated "a love of expression," the habit of collecting regionalisms (So-and-so "ain't got no mother-wit" for foolishness, "fit to be tied" for complete emotional exasperation) that foreshadowed her later career as a writer and well-respected explicator of literary texts.

Summer Snow is occasionally guilty of blandness; prose of a generic order when Harris' traditional streak fails to inspire interesting or new insights - but for the most part her intelligence, and a certain sassy plainspokenness (or absence of excessive political correctness), lends the narrative sparkle, as when she describes the typical Martin Luther King Jr. Day celebration as "dead, dry and perfunctory."

Readers will appreciate Harris' candor and the Southern charm with which she weds cutting commentary and humor. Parodying the convenient use politicians make of King Day celebrations, Harris hypothetically asks the civil rights martyr, "Have you noticed how city administrators use you as a pacifier?" Worse "practically every street they ever named after you is in a predominantly black, segregated neighborhood. . . You've become such a handy catchall for so many things, causes and groups that people tend to forget what you really stood for: the complete political, moral and social transformation of America."

Harris asserts affectionate cultural kinship with the South with her eyes wide open - fully aware as a teacher that despite Black meccas such as Atlanta, racism still permeates many Southern public schools and educational systems. "It has taken me a long time to arrive at a basic fact of my existence: I am a Southerner," she concludes. Hence, her sense of an ironic fate, of having staked a claim "about as rare as snow falling in Tuscaloosa during [the] dog days [of summer]." But Harris' dilemma may be no stranger than the peculiar double consciousness of Black identity in America.

Darryl Lorenzo Wellington is a freelance book reviewer who lives in Charleston, S. C.

Copyright Crisis Publishing Company, Incorporated May/Jun 2003
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