Sites of Southern Memory: The Autobiographies of Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray.

By Darlene O'Dell. (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Pp. [xvi], 189. Paper, $18.50, ISBN 0-8139-2072-8; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-8139-2071-X.)

Born near the turn of the twentieth century, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Lillian Smith, and Pauli Murray all grew up at a time when white southerners were energetically commemorating a supposedly glorious Confederate past. Yet all three rejected a "Lost Cause" interpretation of southern history and the white supremacy it buttressed. Darlene O'Dell's Sites of Southern Memory examines their efforts to "reremember" the South in their autobiographies (p. 6). Borrowing the idea of "sites of memory" from Pierre Nora's work on French monuments and other lieux that "codify, condense, [and] anchor ... national memory" (quoted on p. 151 n. 1), O'Dell identifies three major locations where their reremembering took place: the graveyard, the body, and the text.

Unfortunately, O'Dell's emphasis on "sites" is more constraining than helpful in the first of these three areas. Her argument that each author made the graveyard a central metaphor in her work really applies only to Murray, who focused symbolically on the whites-only cemetery behind her grandparents' home in her 1956 autobiography, Proud Shoes. Smith equated segregation with death and frequently described "ghosts" of the southern past, but to say that she made graveyards a central metaphor in Killers of the Dream (1949) seems like a stretch. Lumpkin's 1946 Making of a Southerner barely mentions the "flower-strewn grave" of Confederate general Wade Hampton that provides O'Dell a chapter title. Yet O'Dell insists that Hampton's "dead body is central" to Lumpkin's text, "not because she spends much of her autobiography discussing him--certainly she does not--but because his body represents the Lost Cause" (pp. 50-51). O'Dell' s point may be valid, but it has more to do with the body than with the graveyard as a "site."

Indeed, the body and the text are more persuasive as "sites of southern memory." O'Dell provides interesting commentary on the structure and content of the three autobiographies, particularly on Lumpkin's rewriting of the southern epic on the heels of Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind. O'Dell also illuminates connections between the three authors, such as the fact that Smith reviewed Lumpkin and edited Murray, who acknowledged Smith's influence but also offered criticisms of her published works.

O'Dell's focus on the body is another valuable aspect of her book. She highlights each author's account of how white supremacy damaged black and white bodies. Both Lumpkin and Smith described southern bodies as fractured or schizophrenic, though Lumpkin most emphasized the physical nature of the white child's baptism into the Lost Cause, while Smith emphasized sexual repression. Murray wrote of the abuse of black bodies in her family's history, then attempted to make her own body a site of reconciliation by embracing her black, white, and Native American heritage. O'Dell's analysis suggests a promising direction for further study, but her decision to discuss her subjects' sexuality only in her epilogue is disappointing. Surely these three authors' sensitivity to fractured bodies and divided selves had something to do with "the consequences they suffered living as lesbians in the United States during the twentieth century" (p. 144).

JENNIFER RITTERHOUSE
Utah State University