Making Place, Making Race: Performances of Whiteness in the Jim Crow South
2003; American Association of Geographers; Volume: 93; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1467-8306.9303008
ISSN1467-8306
Autores Tópico(s)Vietnamese History and Culture Studies
ResumoAbstract This article examines the process of racialization as an essential aspect of how everyday geographies are made, understood, and challenged. It begins from the premise that a primary root of modern American race relations can be found in the southern past, especially in how that past was imagined, articulated, and performed during a crucial period: the post-Reconstruction era known as “Jim Crow.” More than just a reaction to a turbulent world where Civil War defeat destabilized categories of power and authority, white cultural memory there became an active ingredient in defining life in the New South. The culture of segregation that mobilized such memories, and the forgetting that inevitably accompanied them, relied on performance, ritualized choreographies of race and place, and gender and class, in which participants knew their roles and acted them out for each other and for visitors. Among the displays of white southern memory most active during Jim Crow, the Natchez Pilgrimage stands out. Elite white women served as the principal actors in making an imaginative geography that became a bedrock of cultural hegemony based on white supremacy. In order to reconstruct the performances of whiteness in Natchez, Mississippi, and to disentangle the constitutive relationship between race and place, this article makes use of qualitative methods that rely on previously unused archival materials and on ethnographic fieldnotes. Key Words: cultural memoryimaginative geographiesNatchezMississippiracializationsegregationwhiteness Acknowledgments This article is a revised version of two different papers first presented at the 2001 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, New York, and at the New Directions in the Study of Regionalism symposium held in Bonn, Germany, in July 2001. I would like to thank members of both conference sessions, as well as several people who commented critically on earlier drafts, especially Derek Alderman, Mona Domosh, Owen Dwyer, Felix Driver, Gaines Foster, David Goldfield, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Lothar Hönnighausen, Anne Knowles, David Montejano, Bob Ostergren Jim Peacock, Noel Polk, Celeste Ray, Mark Smith, Shirley Thompson, Yi-Fu Tuan, and William Wyckoff. I am indebted to Rob Brown, Andrew Gallagher, David Lowenthal, Carl Seiler, and Jennifer Speights-Binet for their keen insight and interviewing help during research trips to Natchez, to Jessie O. McKee for graciously sharing unpublished work on Mississippi segregation, and to Sarah Mullen for archival assistance. The research for this article has received generous support from the German American Academic Council and from the University of Texas at Austin Office of Vice President for Research, which I gratefully acknowledge, and its writing has benefited from the comments of the five anonymous reviewers and John Paul Jones. Finally, I wish to thank my informants in Natchez, especially Mimi Miller, and Kathleen Kennedy in Baton Rouge, for their insights into southern memory. Notes 1. This encounter is further described in CitationWright (1947). That African Americans, like Wright, could not even conceive of visiting Natchez as a tourist is seen in the fact that, in 1938, only five cities in Mississippi had black-operated hotels—the only option for black travelers, aside from those who could stay with friends and family. Natchez, the most important tourist destination in the state, was not among these cities (CitationU.S. Department of Commerce 1938,; 6). Wright's description might be compared with that written by another son of black Mississippi migrants, Anthony CitationWalton (1997, 20–28,; 47), who offers a revealing, contemporary travel account of Natchez, “theme park of slavery and the old ways.” 2. The reception of Black Boy among white and African-American intellectuals was by no means uniformly positive and caused discomfort especially among white liberals—a key point described nicely in CitationRalph Ellison's ([1945] 1992,; 74) review. While Ellison himself was disturbed by Wright's often-harsh depiction of black cultural life and “refusal to offer solutions,” he also believed that in the book, “thousands of Negroes will for the first time see their destiny in public print.” More directly, CitationEllison ([1945] 1992, 61,; 73) not so gently chides white critics of the book, the so-called “friends of the Negro people” [who] attempted to strangle the work in a noose of newsprint…But far from implying that Negroes have no capacity for culture, as one critic interprets it, this is the strongest affirmation that they have. Wright is pointing out what should be obvious, especially to his Marxist critics: that Negro sensibility is socially and historically conditioned. See also CitationFabre (1985), Citation, Gilroy (1993; 146–86), and CitationRowley (2001). 3. Here and elsewhere, I have preserved the original punctuation and spelling and therefore use “[sic]” only when meaning is unclear. Hence, I have left “negro”—in lower case—uncorrected. 4. The Center for Documentary Studies at Duke University has recently published a valuable collection of oral histories among African Americans who lived during the age of Jim Crow (CitationChafe, Gavins, and Korstad 2001). Their memories complement those of famous writers such as Richard Wright by giving voice to more than a thousand black southerners who remember life “behind the veil.” 5. In this article, I do not place quotation marks around the word “race,” as is often the practice of writers who wish to distance themselves from uncritical uses of the term. (See, for example, CitationGates [1986] and CitationKobayashi and Peake [1994]). Nevertheless, I wish to emphasize that “making race,” no less than “making place,” calls attention to the socially constructed nature of the concept. 6. By invoking the term “racialization,” I follow CitationKobayashi and Peake (2000,; 393) who identify it as “the process by which racialized groups are identified, given stereotypical characteristics, and coerced into specific living conditions, often involving social/spatial segregation and always constituting racialized places.” They go on to remind us of the often-forgotten and quite important point that constructions of race are inevitably both material and ideological. This is a central point of my argument that follows. 7. This article relies on two related sets of primary sources. The first are archival materials pertaining to the Natchez Pilgrimage, held at the Mississippi Department of Archives and History (Jackson, MS), the Special Collections Library at the University of Mississippi (Oxford, MS), the Natchez Trace Collection at the Center for American History (Austin, TX), the CitationHill Memorial Special Collections Library at Louisiana State University (Baton Rouge, LA), the CitationHistoric Natchez Foundation (Natchez, MS), the Archives Room of the Natchez Garden Club at Magnolia Hall (Natchez, MS), and in the Pilgrimage Garden Club records at Stanton Hall (Natchez, MS). The second set of sources comprises ethnographic notes compiled during four years of fieldwork and based on interviews with Natchez residents, attendance at two “Confederate Pageants” (1999 and 2000), attendance at two performances of “A Southern Road to Freedom” (2000 and 2001), and tours of twenty-three “old homes” during both spring and fall Pilgrimages between 1998 and 2001. Finally, any scholar of segregation-era Natchez is blessed with a remarkable ethnographic/sociological study. Conducted by two husband-and-wife teams—one black, the other white—who spent 1934 and a portion of 1935 in Natchez before publishing their findings, it is a classic in early American anthropology: Allison Davis, Burleigh B. Gardner, and Mary B. Gardner, Deep South: A Social Anthropological Study of Caste and Class (1941). Due to the sensitive nature of their study, the authors used the pseudonyms “Old City” and “Old County” to refer to Natchez and Adams County, respectively. For a recent and useful follow-up to Deep South, see CitationDavis (2001). 8. In writing about the display of memory and heritage, I am indebted to Barbara CitationKirshenblatt-Gimblett (1998,; 6–7), who notes that “[D]isplay not only shows and speaks, it also does. Display is an interface and thereby transforms what is shown into heritage” (emphasis in original). 9. I wish to make clear that the framework of performance deployed in this article shares some similarities with the influential work of Judith CitationButler (1990, Citation1997), but that it departs in important ways as well. Her explicit rejection of theatrical notions of performance is one obvious difference, as is her reliance on a strictly linguistically derived performativity. Where I find Butler of especial relevance is her insistence on denaturalizing social categories—her focus is on sexuality—by maintaining that identities do not preexist their performance. “Gender does not exist outside its ‘doing,’”CitationCatherine Nash (2000,; 655) writes in a recent interpretation of Butler, “but its performance is also a reiteration of previous ‘doings’ that become naturalized as gender norms.” As I hope this article demonstrates, the same might be said of “race.” For a useful description of Butler's importance for critical human geography, see CitationGregson and Rose (2000). 10. This is the fundamental insight of the now-canonical The Invention of Tradition (1983), by Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger. For similar arguments about the American South, see CitationRadford (1992) and CitationBrundage (2000a). 11. The slogan “Come to Natchez: Where the Old South Still Lives” made its appearance in 1932 with the first “official” Pilgrimage (Natchez Garden Club 1932, “Come to Natchez, Where the Old South Still Lives and Where Shaded Highways and Ante-Bellum Homes Greet New and Old Friends,” poster, KMP-HNF; see also CitationMiller 1938). CitationWoodward (1951,; 154–55) is again prescient here, as he describes the New South's “cult of archaism…its nostalgic vision of the past. One of the most significant inventions of the New South was the ‘Old South’—a new idea in the [eighteen]eighties, and a legend of incalculable potentialities.” Following Woodward, and as used by makers of the Natchez Pilgrimage, “Old South” does not refer to antebellum history. Rather, it is shorthand for how southern whites imagine the South to be before the Civil War: it is a paradigmatic example of how cultural memory creates what Edward CitationSaid (1995) has called “imaginative geographies” (see also CitationGregory 1995). It should be added that white northerners joined in constructing this imaginative geography (CitationSilber 1994). Hereafter, I will not use quotes around “Old South,” but this distinct meaning remains. 12. By 1930, the black population of the Natchez district's six counties had declined by more than a third from its peak of 93,327 in 1900 (CitationAiken 1998,; 92). 13. Of course, the availability and wages offered by these jobs varied tremendously by race (CitationCobb 1982; CitationAyers 1992; CitationDavis 2001, especially 115–47). 14. Describing these women as “elite” is not intended to denote only economic status. Many, in fact, were not rich, especially compared to economic elites in other American cities during this period, and a good number struggled with considerable economic hardships in a chronically poor city. Rather, and much like the “elite” white women of Charleston, South Carolina, their status was marked by distinctive local criteria: family name, marriage, and the economic and social status of their Mississippi slave-owning ancestors (see also CitationYuhl 2000). 15. Disagreements over how revenues from Pilgrimage should be distributed led to an angry dispute within the Natchez Garden Club and to the creation, in 1937, of a rival organization known as the Pilgrimage Garden Club (CitationKane 1947; CitationNicholas 1949; CitationBlankenstein 1995). 16. For a recent reassessment of the power of home as a cultural symbol, see CitationDomosh and Seager (2001,; 1–34). I want also to emphasize that white women, as much as men, were responsible for the gap between the representation of the Southern Lady and the white women's activities described below. 17. In a 1952 speech to the Natchez Lions club—“believed to be the first of its kind in the state and to mark the beginning of the Republican drive in Mississippi”—Miller lauded Eisenhower as the “one man who can restore confidence and unity, and can create a united front against Communism” and railed against Stevenson for his “obnoxious” anti-southern views. The Democratic Party was to be jettisoned because of its “trend toward socialism” and its civil-rights plank that is “an insult to the South” (Citation Memphis Commercial Appeal 1952; CitationKatherine Miller, letter to Mr. Fred Salmon, 27 August 1952, KMP-HNF). Like the other six “Lily White” delegates from Mississippi, Chairwoman Miller sat in the balcony apart from the Black and Tan wing of the state party at the 1956 Republican National Convention—a spatial maneuver that was seen by admirers as “a fine way to handle an embarrassing situation” (Citation Memphis Commercial Appeal 1956, 1; Magruder Dent, letter to CitationKatherine Miller, 24 August 1956, KMP-HNF). 18. A mock election at the Natchez High School revealed Goldwater taking 95 percent of the vote in Natchez; on Election Day, the Arizona senator carried 84 percent of Adams County (Natchez Democrat 1 September and 5 November 1964, MDAH, Rolls 30544 and 30588). 19. Such publicity was extremely wide-ranging. In addition to the many newspaper and magazine articles and the numerous licensing agreements, the Illinois Central line, for example, sponsored a “Pilgrimage train” from Chicago in 1949 that included sixty Pullman cars. In 1939, radio broadcasts about the Pilgrimage were heard as far from Natchez as Berlin and Honolulu, and the memory display attracted such national figures as First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, Henry Ford, and General Douglas MacArthur. The following year witnessed the release of two Hollywood motion pictures about the Pilgrimage, one of which—James Fitzpatrick's “Old Natchez on the Mississippi”—played in 17,000 theaters across the country (Natchez Garden Club, meeting minutes, 8 December 1938, NGC-MDAH, microfilm roll 1; Natchez Garden Club, meeting minutes, 3 January 1940, NGC-MDAH, micro-film roll 1; Over the Garden Wall, 1949, NCG-MDAH, microfilm roll 1). The Ladies Home Journal (CitationBurt 1947,; 134) claimed that “Most Americans now know of the annual Natchez Pilgrimage.” 20. Eleanor Roosevelt was one of the few commentators on the Pilgrimage to give credit to the garden-club women for their economic savvy: “Never tell me that women are not able in business. Natchez is being built up financially by a woman's idea carried out by women” (“My Day: Impressed by Lovely Natchez Homes,” article in unidentified newspaper, 1937, KMP-HNF). 21. In a 1954 interview, Miller said that “I had never belonged to any club before—I was never a joiner but in 1930, shortly after we purchased Hope Farm, I was asked to join the local garden club” (CitationHarlow 1954,; 1). 22. It is interesting to note, along with Ronald L. F. CitationDavis (1993,; 143) that, contrary to the stories told in “old home” tours, Natchez “and its surrounding hinterland had been something of a Unionist stronghold prior to secession, sending Whiggish delegates to the state's secession convention.” It was perhaps not surprising, then, that no Union action was necessary to conquer Natchez—a central reason why so many antebellum mansions survived the war. 23. In this article, “mammy” and the “butler” always refer to the representations created by whites, never to how African-American women and men understood or represented themselves (CitationThurber 1992; CitationGoings 1994). 24. Performances of whiteness, it should be noted, were not restricted to the American South. Not coincidentally, during the same decade as the invention of the Confederate Pageant, influential Afrikaners in South Africa made strategic use of performative spectacle in the 1938 Tweede Trek (Second Trek) pageant. Ostensibly designed to celebrate the Centenary of the Boers' Great Trek of 1838, the spectacle attracted considerable popular participation among whites, who donned historic costumes and rode from Cape Town to Pretoria in replicas of Voortrekker wagons. The four-month performance, Anne CitationMcClintock (1995,; 376) writes, “mobilized a sense of white Afrikaner collectivity where none before existed.” 25. My reading of the historic Confederate Pageant tableaux comes from two sources: the archives of the Pilgrimage Garden Club (Confederate Pageant brochures, 1937–1955, PGC-SH) and the Natchez Garden Club (Confederate Pageant brochures, 1933–1950, NGC-MDAH); and field notes based on performances in 1999 and 2000. 26. This is not to say that there were not efforts to make legal what was de facto segregation (CitationRice 1968; CitationSilver 1991). The Mississippi state senate, for example, petitioned the U.S. Congress for the acquisition of a territory “to make a suitable, proper, and final home for the American Negro” (CitationBilbo 1947,; 273). 27. But a racially mixed area (like St. Catherine in 1912) should not be taken as “integration.” This area had more white residences within it than in any other area, with only 69 percent residences black. But this was far from racially integrated. Whites and blacks may occupy the same block and the ratio between backs and whites may appear to be even, but the exact location of the residences within the block usually displayed a tendency toward microscale spatial separation. This is a good example of what many white southerners have looked upon as living “close” to blacks, but certainly not living “with” or “mixing” with them (see CitationRabinowitz 1978). 28. That such servant roles were meant to be silent ones was demonstrated to CitationJohn Gunther (1947,; 803) who learned that the man serving him cocktails had read one of his books. The incident “enrage[d] several people present, and puzzle[d] others to the point of consternation,” since “it was literally unthinkable to [his white hostess] that this evidence of mild literacy by a black underling could be possible.” 29. Such was the fear among affluent blacks in Natchez that many spread their savings among several banks, including northern establishments, so as not to appear “uppity” and set off alarms among white circles (CitationLitwack 1998,; 330). It is important to remember, then, with Robin CitationKelley (1994), that the unavoidably clandestine nature of black resistance during Jim Crow should not cause us to see the appearance of obedience as representing black realities (see also CitationChafe, Gavins, and Korstad 2001, esp. 268–303). 30. The specific event that brought the Defender's fury against Mississippi occurred on 28 October 1932, when an especially gruesome lynching claimed the lives of seven family members in the Delta. After an angry white mob proved unable to locate an accused African American, it took its rage out on a sharecropper named Judge Crawford, his wife, Annie Crawford, their three sons, one daughter, and son-in-law—seven people accused of no crime other than being black. “Each of the seven persons had been shot at least six times. Fingers had been cut from most of the dead, evidently by those who wished to have souvenirs of the lynch hunt” (Citation Chicago Defender 1932a). In its editorial response to the heinous crime, the Citation Defender (1932b) directed its scorn on Mississippi, but, importantly, scaled the larger problem of racial violence beyond the state: “If the crimes in Mississippi could only be looked upon as crimes in Mississippi, they then could be considered a thing apart from the rest of the nation, but Mississippi, sharing security as well as national honor, all her acts become our national shame. Hence, when she murders and scourges American citizens, her hideous and criminal acts are written in our national tradition.” 31. Ever since the pioneering work of Mississippi-born antilynching crusader Ida B. CitationWells ([1892] 1997), most scholars of southern lynchings have found that proponents routinely justified their actions in the name of protecting white womanhood from the alleged epidemic of black rape. See, for example, CitationHall (1974), Bederman (1992), and CitationNast (2000). 32. In response to increasing negative publicity a decade ago, several liberal whites began urging the two garden clubs to reconsider the city's African-American community's noticeable lack of involvement of in the Pilgrimage (Ora Frazier, interview, Natchez, MS, February 2000 Frazier, interview, 2001; Charles Harris, interview, Natchez, MS, April 2001; Selma Mackel Harris, interview, Natchez, MS, April 2001; Miller, interview, 2000). They contacted a teacher with interests in local history about helping draw Natchez blacks into the event; Ora Frazier's response was a tentative “[Y]es, but only if we could tell our own story from our own perspective.” That meant, in contemporary Natchez, that black involvement had to avoid the Confederate Pageant—a memory display so charged with racial antagonism that any direct reconciliation seemed unlikely. Beginning ten years ago, the Holy Family Catholic Church began performing an alternative pageant called “A Southern Road to Freedom.” African Americans have thus returned to the Natchez Pilgrimage, but under conditions more in step with the tenets of contemporary multiculturalism than with the scourge of white supremacy. “They tell their story and we tell ours” is a sentiment privately expressed by performers of “A Southern Road to Freedom”—one that could also be said, unwittingly, for the Confederate Pageant: these two competing performances of memory dance as separate but unequal partners in a divisive choreography of the southern past. Although a brief description of “A Southern Road to Freedom” appears on Pilgrimage brochures, ticket sellers for Natchez Pilgrimage Tours rarely mention it to tourists unless they are asked about it, and in 2000 the Mississippi tourism bureau failed to include the performance in its official tourist guide to the state.
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