Race and Repentance | by Mark Briggs -- Endeavors, Winter 2000

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the Study of Southern Literature

In Print:
Race and Repentance
by Mark Briggs

But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative. By Fred Hobson. Louisiana State University Press, 159 pages, $30 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).

“The Mother who taught me what I know of tenderness and love and compassion taught me also the bleak rituals of keeping Negroes in their place. The father who rebuked me for an air of superiority toward schoolmates from the mill and rounded out his rebuke by gravely reminding me that “all men are brothers,” trained me in the steel-rigid decorums I must demand of every colored male. They who so gravely taught me to split my body from my conscience from my acts and Christianity from southern tradition.”

—Lillian Smith, Killers of the Dream, 1949

Nowhere in the United States has society changed more in the past 100 years than in the South. Generational pressures have produced a complicated moral and psychological state for many Southerners. Societal changes occasionally spurred an enlightenment among Southern adults, especially in relation to the presence of African Americans in the region. Eventually, this new way of thinking made its way into works of literature—words of contrition frozen in time.

Smith is only one of the Southern writers included in a new work by Fred Hobson, professor of English. In a series of what he terms “racial conversion narratives,” Hobson highlights how some writers’ change in perspective greatly influenced their works.

Hobson says the book focuses on “Southerners who grew up white and racist, or at least part of the racist society; they were converted from racial sinners to at least reasonably enlightened people.” This conversion—and the term “conversion narrative”—parallels in some respects the language and practice of seventeenth-century Puritans.

“It applies itself to race in the case of these writers, in that they see the error of their ways; they ‘see the light,’ which is a term they almost all use,” Hobson says. “It is a term from the rhetoric of religious conversion of the Puritan days in the seventeenth century but can be applied to this secular realm of race.”

The project, an extension of an earlier study by Hobson which produced Tell About the South: The Southern Rage to Explain, came as a result of Hobson’s invitation to conduct the Walter Fleming Lectures on Southern history at Louisiana State University. Hobson chose the topic of conversion narratives in Southern literature and presented a sampling of the material from the new book during the long-running and prestigious lecture series in April 1998.

Almost all the works referenced by Hobson are autobiographies or memoirs. Included are celebrated writers such as Pulitzer prize-winning New York Times reporter Rick Bragg; Pat Watters, a veteran reporter of the Civil Rights Movement; and Larry L. King, author of The Best Little Whorehouse in Texas and Confessions of a White Racist. Hobson noted that many autobiographies written in recent years still have this theme of racial conversion, and he doesn’t see it tapering off. One change, however, is that class has become as important as race in many narratives written in the past two decades.

Hobson, who grew up in rural Yadkin County, North Carolina, attended Carolina as an undergraduate in the 1960s. It was during this period, when the Civil Rights Movement had nearly run its course, that Hobson discovered a personal passion for Southern history and racial issues. He summarizes his latest book in the concluding paragraph of the introduction:

“The manner in which the regrets, fears, and desires of these committed white Southerners—the newly converted, with a rage to tell their stories—would play themselves out at mid-century and beyond is the story I wish to tell. If the nineteenth-century white South, as (Bertram) Wyatt-Brown correctly maintains, was predominantly a culture of honor and shame, the mid-twentieth-century white South … was becoming increasingly a culture of racial guilt and repentance.”

Fred Hobson is co-editor of the Southern Literary Journal. His past works include Serpent in Eden: H.L. Mencken and the South, Mencken: A Life, and Tell about the South: The Southern Rage to Explain.

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