Womenfolks

Womenfolks

Reading Shirley Abbott’s book Womenfolks: Growing Up Down South for a class today, I decided to save some snips. It’s fairly well written, I think, and it makes some provocative assertions:

To grow up female in the South is to inherit a set of directives that warp one for life, if they do not actually induce psychosis. This is true for high-born ladies as well as for farm women, and no one has ever quite explained it. A North Carolina journalist named Florence King made a good try, though, in a book called Southern Ladies and Gentlemen. All Southerners, she observed, are insane and most especially is the Southern woman insane. The reason is that “the cult of Southern womanhood endowed her with at least five totally different images and asked her to be good enough to adopt all of them. She is required to be frigid, passionate, sweet, bitchy, and scatterbrained— all at the same time. Her problems spring from the fact she succeeds.” (3)

Tracing the lineage of Southern settlers to the Ulster Scots, Abbott returns to colonial records to find gems. I was taken by her description of Reverend Woodmason’s (from around 1766) perception of Southern cooking:

Their cookery, if indeed it can be so called, is, he says, “filthy and most execrable.” What provisions they have consist mostly of bacon and cornmeal, and clearly the women have already acquired the habit of drowning everything in grease. (40)

Now that I think about it, the quick exploration of the cooking dovetails nicely with her thesis that Southern ladies/gentlemen see themselves as descended from the English aristocracy. British food isn’t exactly renowned either. One of the interesting techniques used to frame her elaborate historical tale of family is that she marks the ahistorical perspective of her Southern mother against her Yankee father who feels attached to history. From this perspective, she deeply explores the nature of Southern identity as manifest in Arkansas.

Abbott’s book is unusual in that it at least approaches the tri-racial character of the South, and I was taken with her description of the the native heritage.

The Southern Indians are submerged in a stratum of historical invisibility even more obscure than the one reserved for blacks. Charles M. Hudson, a current authority on Southern Indians, believes that we have “a virtual amnesia about the parts of our past in which they are involved.” In our selective memory, there is only one Indian in Southern history— Pocahontas. (53)

When she turns her attention to slavery, there is a twist I hadn’t thought of. While it is generally well known that the majority of Southerners were not slaveholders— a very high percentage of white people would have been employed in management positions. This explains the hierarchy better than just the simple poor/rich binary— people were invested in maintaining the status quo to maintain their social position, even at the lower levels. Abbott also points at an early crisis in representation as well— the reception of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Diarist Mary Chesnut railed against the representation as being totally fabricated. The reality was far different, and darker than what Stowe’s novel suggested. Another point of intersection with my current research is that the model of the Southern chivalric hero is indeed much like Milton’s Christian martyr. The South has long been a culture of defeat, and a celebration of nobility in the face of that defeat. It is a pervasive myth. I love Abbott’s take on Southern myth-making:

Political image-making, which we sometimes think was perfected along with the cathode tube, is no novelty in the South. If the production of self-serving folklore qualified as an industry, the South would have been an industrial power since colonial times. (85)

The myth that Abbott constructs is compelling as well. She builds her entire chapter on slavery around her mother’s resistance to treating her maid Emma as a “Southern lady” should. It is of course posed in the form of a loaded conjecture:

Some querulous old voice from her Scotch-Irish past told her that if you enslave somebody, you do it at the expense of your own identity. The mistress is the slave of the slave. So she and Emma fished the sheets out of the washer and laughed as they pinned them on the line, ironed the shirts, and stewed the parsnips. Meanwhile, behind the rose trellis I dressed paper dolls and harassed the dogs or read romances. It was an edifying childhood. I hope my daughters will learn something half as useful from theirs. (103).

Abbotts’ account of childhood was compelling to me because of the way it weaves two primary texts against each other: Gone With the Wind and Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Both books were favorites of her father’s, a relocated Yankee who was trying to make sense of the south. Gibbon’s book sat on the headboard of my oldest brother, David, and on his final trip back to visit us right before he died, he annoyed everyone by insisting on buying a Confederate flag to take home. But her twist on the religious nature of the South is also intriguing:

There is no mystery that fundamentalism sprang up and flourished in America— though few Baptists today might acknowledge their radical heritage. What the Baptists were, in fact, was the first counterculture in America. No hippie in the 1960s ever aroused more wrath among the righteous— violent, overt wrath— than the Baptists did in the eighteenth century. Among all American dissenters they have the oldest pedigree and certainly the most honorable. (128).

Abbott points out that there were no Tories among the Baptists, and that they joined the Continental Army in droves during the revolutionary war. She highlights many stories about the conflict caused by the rugged transgressing frontiersmen and the church roles, who could only vote to exclude those who didn’t toe the line in church. Hardly pious, she returns to Florence King’s book to admit that Southern men were just downright horny. She adds credibility to her account of the way that the church is woven into Southern society by including her childhood experience of faking being “born again” in order to reap the social rewards of belonging to the church. Reflecting on her heritage of being half Southern and half Yankee, Abbott also reveals the incredible impact of the mythic FSA photographs in her recounting of the progress of generations:

From mother to daughter for a dozen generations, perhaps a hundred thousand, had come this unspoken counsel, this taciturn resolve to work until your skin turned to leather, and your back never stopped aching, to do the labor of ten men, if necessary, and to seek in your progeny your only real sense of accomplishment. For such women, their first and perhaps only allegiance was to their children. They would have died for them, like a grizzly bear in her tracks, in a devotion equally unreasoning. (This by no means an exclusively Southern trait, but it had ample room to develop in the backwoods; it was what was written on the faces of those desperate sharecropper mothers in the 1930s photographs.)

I wanted no part of this. I wanted a pretty, well-dressed mother who kept her fingernails painted and wore a fur coat to P.T.A. meetings. (161-2)

The final chapter “Why Southern Women Leave Home” describes an interesting interlude of moving from Hot Springs, Arkansas, to California. At this point, my sympathy with Abbott begins to wane:

Southerners were Arkies, Okies, clay eaters, hicks, tramps— creatures straight out of the Grapes of Wrath and God’s Little Acre, novels accursed under my father’s roof., though at that moment he had none. To the tearful astonishment of my mother, landladies refused to rent to us. “Don’t want any cracker folks around here,’ one said, and others shut the door as soon as we opened our mouths. Housing was scarce enough, even for people from Boston. It took us weeks to find a place to live. I set off to the local school, expecting that within a week or two to install myself as teacher’s pet. But they treated me like a yokel. Contemptuous of my hair ribbons and scrupulously ironed sleeves, the principal actually checked me for head lice. A little boy asked if I had hookworm. Were those my first pair of shoes? (180)

My parents moved to California from Oklahoma around the same time. I’ve talked to them about the reaction of the locals, and there were a few stories— dad had difficulty buying the property he built our house on because they didn’t want to sell to Okies. But the cruel portrayal here is horribly slanted, though to its credit it is told through the eyes of a nine-year old. Where she really loses me is in her training to be a teacher in east Texas, where she proclaims that she just doesn’t see what teaching Macbeth has to do with anything, unless we want to prepare kids to be murderers. The engaging mythic tale ends on a note of overcoming one’s heritage, rather than appreciating it. Abbott became a New Yorker, with all the New York pretensions and baggage that goes along with it. In the end, I tend to think the book was more than a little exploitative of the Southern myths as an excuse to burn down her heritage. It was fun for a while, but I got over it quickly. I’m not sure I care for Womenfolks much at all.