“Crashing to Bits”

Chapter 3 considers the myriad nature of southern memoir, with particular focus on the anti-racist work of Lillian Smith. Published in a decade replete with southerners writing about the South, including W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, William Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee, and Richard Wright’s Black Boy, Lillian Smith’s Killers of the Dream confronts southern paternalism in a stark, direct manner. Specifically, Smith responds to many of her contemporaries by presenting the South not as a romantic site of gentility, but rather as a psychologically traumatizing hellscape, one replete with specters of violence perpetrated against blacks as well as paternalistic control levied against women and poor whites. This chapter contextualizes Smith alongside these other writers, with primary focus on Percy's nostalgia and romanticization of southern gentility, as well as his disdain for poor whites, whom he derides as scoundrels and markedly inferior versions of whiteness.

Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and the Southern Blues Violences

One of the most frequently quoted descriptions of the blues--“an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically”--was penned by Ralph Ellison in a 1945 review essay of Richard Wright’s autobiography, Black Boy. This chapter uses Ellison’s formulation as an opening through which to explore the way in which three distinct but related modes of southern violence play significant roles in the major works of both authors. Disciplinary violence, including lynching, vagrancy laws, and prison farms, is white-on-black violence that aims to terrorize, immobilize, and punish. Retributive violence is black-on-white violence that resists or strikes back at disciplinary violence. Intimate violence is black-on-black violence driven by jealousy, hatred, and other strong passions. All three forms of violence show up in the blues tradition—and in Black Boy, where they help Wright craft a portrait of a blues-surcharged young Mississippian who, although bereft of the tools and training needed to express those blues musically, will ultimately find in literature, where words can be “weapons,” the outlet he so desperately needs. In Invisible Man and other texts, by contrast, Ellison employs the southern violences in ways that often heighten the comic element within blues’ tragicomic palette of emotions.

Loving Gorillas: Segregation Literature, Animality, and Black Liberation

Deeply rooted racial logics of Western culture have long used animal metaphors and affiliations as a method for negatively coding the species permeability between black people and nonhuman animals. Responsively, many black cultural producers have sought to acquire access to the category of the human by crafting narratives that shuttle black being away from the animal. Rejecting both negative affiliations and shifting away from the animal, this article explores the movement toward the animal in black segregation-era literature. I argue that animals and animal care in Richard Wright’s Black Boy and primate liberation in Gwendolyn Brooks’s Maud Martha provide new modes of imagining black humanism on the cusp of US racial desegregation.