Southern History Across the Color Line. (Reviews).

Nell Irvin Painter. Southern History Across the Color Line. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002. 247 pp. $37.50 cloth/$17.95 paper.

This collection of six previously published essays by the distinguished historian Nell Irvin Painter charts the shift in her methodology from one usually associated with social history to one informed by psychology, semiology, feminist theory, and the social sciences. Through her use of the latter she challenges traditional ways of interpreting the history of the American South, especially by assessing the pervasive and enduring impact of slavery on the region's society and culture. Painter skillfully analyzes the inter-relatedness of the South's social hierarchy, patriarchy, religious piety, interracial sex, white supremacy, and highly sexualized concept of "social equality." The first essay in this collection entitled "Soul Murder" (the violation of one's inner being/the extinguishing of one's identity) under the slave regime touches on the themes outlined in her introduction--material conditions, physical and psychological violence, culture and cultural symbolism, and sexuality--that are explored in detail in other essays, which, collectively, provide, in the author's words, "a more complete accounting of slavery's costs."

For Painter, race remains important in any consideration of the South's history, but she maintains that there is much more to that history. She objects to the manner in which historians, past and present, treat blacks and whites in the South as belonging to totally separate spheres, when in fact their lives were closely interwoven. By using Freudian theories and the social sciences, Painter probes beneath the "genteel surface" to uncover clues to important "hidden truths" and "secrets" about just how closely interwoven the lives of the two races were and how that intimacy figured in the psychodrama and tension that characterized the Southern past. Failure to explore the "secrets" that exist in the documentary evidence, in her opinion, has produced a distorted history of the South.

In her essay on Wilbur J. Cash's perennially popular Mind of the South (1941) she describes the work as a classic example of such distortion, because it exhibits Cash's crippling blindness to the diverse ways in which slavery skewed relations of power in the South in virtually everything from politics to the household. In her view Cash confuses race with class; displays contempt for the poor of both races, especially poor women whom he depicts as little more than "sexualized subject beings"; subscribes to a thoroughly patriarchal vision of the South as a place inhabited by "an amorphous amalgam of white men"; and considers African Americans as "a special alien group" that he defines "out of what was essentially southern." Cash's "thoroughly racist" and "deeply sexist" book, Painter suggests, has exerted a baneful influence on historical writing about the South.

These essays serve, in multiple ways, as a corrective to what the author describes as the glaring deficiencies of Cash's "quirky big book." For example, Painter focuses much attention on women in the antebellum South and the extent to which slavery corrupted or ruined their lives. In analyzing slavery's impact on black women she makes use of the autobiographical work of Harriet Jacobs, an escaped slave, who confronted the sexual component of slavery straightforwardly and concluded that the slave woman was the prime victim of the slave system. But Jacobs recognized that female slaves were not the only victims: The absolute power that white male slaveowners possessed over their wives and female slaves produced ruined lives at "both ends of wealth's spectrum." For the viewpoint of the plantation mistress, Painter delves deeply into the journal of Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas, who, born into wealth and privilege, presided over a plantation household filled with servants (slaves) until the family's wealth vanished in the wake of Emancipation and the Civil War, and spent the last phase of her life as a feminist activist. Educated and deeply religious, Thomas was a faithful wife and devoted mother who experienced firsthand the corrosive influence of slavery on the lives of white women of her position as well as on the lives of slave women. Like Jacobs, she recognized that both were considered the property of the slaveowner/husband to whom women of both categories owed obedience and submission, obligations reinforced by the region's emphasis on piety and patriarchy. Though Thomas was a white supremacist who embraced the existing hierarchies of race and class, her thoughts about race were less harsh and less contradictory than those of most whites at the time. Her acute consciousness of gender expressed itself in her solidarity with other women in need or in trouble, even when such women belonged to a race or class different from her own. Although she accepted male dominance as natural, she nonetheless believed that men, with the notable exception of her own husband, were morally depraved, and severely condemned the sexual double standard that required women of her class to maintain the highest standards of sexual purity while their husbands freely engaged in sexual relations with slave women. Thomas feared that miscegenation and the sizable population of racially mixed people it produced would lead to "social equality," but of even greater concern, Painter points out, was her fear of competition from female slaves that threatened the security of her privileged position as the slaveowner's wife.

Even though Thomas was hypersensitive about the sexual competition posed by slave women, direct references to the adultery committed by her father and husband that produced racially mixed children (as well any reference to her husband's drunkenness) were absent from her journal because such "secrets" were too painful to permit her to commit them to paper. Through the use of "deception clues" (something that has been withheld) and "leakage" (inadvertent disclosure), Painter identifies and analyzes Thomas's "secrets." In the process she demonstrates how her methodology can shed light on significant aspects of Southern life that have been omitted from journals, diaries, and other personal accounts used by historians to construct the historical record of the region.

Scholars whose historical interpretations dissent substantially from conventional historical wisdom seldom escape criticism. Painter is no exception. Some readers will be jolted by passages in these essays. They may insist that the essays contain sweeping generalizations based on too few sources or even agree with those who have denounced Painter's works as wrong-headed or as not history at all. Most readers, however, are likely to recognize her as a talented scholar whose influence on historical writing about the South is likely to be both enduring and profound.