Astrid on frontier humour, a Southern woman’s account of slavery, the dangers of nostalgia and a reading list for people who like their history with the windows open
Saturday 10 October, 1.30pm, an armchair by a window that rattles in the wind, a flashlight beside the lamp in case the power flickers and a stack of paperbacks that has been waiting for a storm to give it permission.
Dear Diary. The rain has made a reader of me, and I want to spend this entry on my chosen period: the writing of the antebellum American South, a body of work that I love, argue with and am not entirely comfortable defending. I want to be careful, because it is easy to romanticise a literature produced in a society built on slavery, and I do not want to do that. A reader’s job is to be honest about what a book is, and who it leaves out.
A Note On Method
I am working here from two encyclopedia entries and my own reading, not from a stack of scholarly monographs. Please treat what follows as a reader’s notes and not as a critical argument. If you want authority, find a historian of the period, and ideally one who foregrounds the people the era’s famous books overlooked. I will say which things I am sure of and which I am not.
The Funny One
The Wikipedia entry on Johnson Jones Hooper is where I start with the humour. As I understand it, Hooper was an Alabama writer of the 1840s and 1850s, and his best-known creation was a swindling frontier character named Simon Suggs, whose motto, as I recall it, was that it is good to be shifty in a new country. The Suggs tales belong to a tradition of Southwestern humour, comic sketches of gamblers, preachers, confidence men and politicians told in a lively vernacular. I read them as a student and I laughed, and then I stopped laughing, because the world those stories assume is also a world of enslavement, and the joke is not always on the people who deserve it.
That is the problem with this tradition, and I think the honest reader has to live with it. The wit is real, the observation is sharp, and the blind spots are enormous. I do not recommend either dismissing the books or swallowing them whole. I recommend reading them with a pencil, and noting what each page takes for granted.
The Furious One
The other pole of my reading list is Harriet Jacobs, whose Wikipedia entry describes the author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under a pseudonym. I am confident of the broad outline: that she was born into slavery in North Carolina, escaped, and wrote a first-person account of her experience that is among the essential documents of the period. It was written, as I understand it, to reach Northern women readers and to confront the comfortable fictions about the Southern household. If you read only one book from this era, I think it should be hers, in an edition with good notes.
It is worth saying that reading Hooper and Jacobs side by side makes each of them more vivid. One shows you the swagger of a society that thought itself charming. The other shows you what that charm cost. A good syllabus would put them next to each other and let the reader feel the draught.
What My Colleagues Add
My colleagues at prat.uk have a lighter relationship with American writers, though they handle some of them well. Mark Twain’s immortal wisdom is a gentle piece that celebrates the man who, more than anyone, taught American prose to be funny on purpose. Twain wrote from the Mississippi river and his own complicated Southern roots, and he is a reminder that American comic writing and American conscience have often been the same project.
For a touch of modern literary reference, there is Faulkner’s Bar, a surname with a literary ring, which appeals to me because it treats the name of a great Mississippi writer as an ornament for a pub in London. That is the kind of cultural traffic that fascinates me: a Southern surname, hung above a door in a city far away, serving drinks to people who may never have read a line. And for the food side of the South, there is the Big Easy, the Southern BBQ and crab shack of Covent Garden, proof that the region’s cooking has travelled better than its history.
Why It Matters Now
I could be accused of retreating into the nineteenth century while a hurricane and an election pass by. I would answer that the nineteenth century is never as far away as it looks. The arguments about who tells the story of the South, who is allowed to be funny about it and who is allowed to be angry, are live arguments in this state this week. They shape how people talk about monuments, schools, football and voting. A reader who has met both Simon Suggs and Harriet Jacobs is better prepared for those conversations than one who has not.
There is a danger in all regional literature, which is that it begins to serve as a brochure. The brochure version of the South is magnolias, porches and a gentle accent. The reading list version is much bigger, and much more uncomfortable, and much more alive.
A Practical List
If you want to begin, here is the plan I would follow. Read a Hooper sketch for the pleasure of the voice, and then read a chapter of Jacobs for the corrective. Read a modern scholar’s introduction before either, so that you know what you are looking at. Visit a library, preferably a public one. And do not be afraid to put a book down, close it and think, because the best reading in this field often happens in the pauses.
The power has flickered once. The flashlight has not been needed. The wind is making a sound at the window like someone turning the pages of an enormous book, which is exactly the sort of sentence I would have underlined in my twenties.
Closing Entry
I file for Bohiney Magazine, and my readers abroad ask whether Southern writers can be funny and fair at once. The best of them can, and the rest can be read as evidence. For a guide to the tradition of comic writing about power, my page on satire in literature is a good place to begin, and for a lighter ending to a heavy afternoon, NewsBiscuit is a decent companion. The book is closed and the window has stopped rattling. Goodnight, Diary. Read both sides.
SOURCE: bohiney.com