Wilder Adventures

(written for the Ann and Emanuel Rudolph Student Book Collecting Award)

Twain and Faulkner wrote of Memphis. Ida B. Wells published there, until she was run out of town by a mob. Rich from songs cheaply bought from poor black musicians, Elvis built his extravagant home there. And it was in Memphis that Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated – a bitter contrast to his non-violent commitment to justice for all.

This is the city where I grew up, in an interracial family, raised most of my childhood by a black stepfather. Memphis, and its complex history of racial tension, which lies at the heart of American history, shapes who I am, what I study, and even the books I collect.

I got my bachelor’s degree from Oberlin, a college committed to social justice as much as to academic excellence. It was at Oberlin that I discovered I was a bibliophile. I found that I couldn’t bring myself to sell my books back at the end of the semester. As I majored in American History, courses such as “The American Revolution,” “The Idea of Folk in American Culture,” “The US and Latin America,” “Community in African-American Urban South,” “American Sexualities,” and “Museums & the Shaping of Knowledge” swelled my shelves with tomes about various facets of American culture. Because my love of reading had satisfied all the requirements anyway, I added a double major in English with a concentration in creative writing during my senior year. The classic literature section of my collection filled out for courses such as “English Poetry,” “British Theater,” “Transcendentalism,” “Reading and Writing Poetry,” “Modern Drama,” and “Contemporary Literary Theory In American Culture,” while four different creative workshops added contemporary readings to my shelves. My heart ached as I left Oberlin and the great times I had there; my back ached from the boxes of books I carried away with me.

I moved to North Carolina. My day job didn’t pay enough, so I took a second at Border’s bookstore. Unfortunately my employee discount led me to spend the majority of my paycheck on new books, so I had to leave after a year. Two more years working on the east side of Durham reminded me of the culture I had grown up with in Memphis. As I returned to academia to pursue a master’s degree, I was aware of my privileged position and understood that I had the opportunity, or perhaps the responsibility, to investigate subjects that actually affected the lives and experiences of every day Americans.

At North Carolina State University my book collection continued to grow, but more importantly it took on a definitive shape. Prompted in part by a discussion of Leslie Fiedler’s famous essay about Huckleberry Finn, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey,” my academic interests congealed around the issues of race and masculinity, and their relation to the legacy of lynching. I would eventually write a master’s thesis on Twain, Faulkner, and James Baldwin entitled, “Manhood Matters: Lynching and the Politics of Constructed Masculinities.” The ongoing research for this project has led me to present at more than a dozen conferences. These travels to new places have led me to new ideas, new authors, and new books. It was in used book store tucked away in a side alley in Charlottesville, Virginia that I acquired Leon Forrest’s Divine Days, an out-of-print book that I had read at NCSU, a handsomely bound set of Faulkner’s Snopes Trilogy from Random House, and a copy of the Encyclopedia of Southern Culture edited by Bill Ferris, a Southern Studies heavyweight who had been a fixture for years at Ole Miss just south of Memphis before moving on to UNC in Chapel Hill. Twice I’ve attended Penn State’s excellently managed conference on African American Literature, where I’ve had the opportunity to get works signed by E. Patrick Johnson, Trudier Harris, Alice Randall, Mat Johnson, and Randall Kenan (who also came to OSU to read last November). The works of all these authors deal with race, gender, the South, and America. Mat Johnson’s Incognegro interrogates race and visuality through the graphic novel format, and The Great Negro plot presents a little known account of an early eighteenth century racial massacre. Randall, famous for The Wind Done Gone, her retelling of Margaret Mitchell’s classic work, also takes on race and the neo-conservative movement in Rebel Yell. Kenan presents an insightful look into race and sexuality in small town life in North Carolina through the veneer of fiction in A Visitation of Spirits and Let the Dead Bury the Dead. E. Patrick Johnson’s Sweet Tea: Black Gay Men of the South presents an oral history of a rarely acknowledged population of the American South. Harris, who is one of the pioneers in lynching studies and a preeminent critic of Southern and African American literature, explores the formative events of her life in the essays of Summer Snow: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South. These books are some of the most treasured items in my collection because they present actual experiences and real world issues through captivating writing. But more than their internal worth they are meaningful to me because they provide me with a model for the kind of work I want to do and because of how I acquired them along the path to that goal. They are part of the process, part of me.

My collection has grown out my desire to understand myself and where I come from. What does it mean to be an upwardly mobile white man in an America where a legacy of racism is swept under the label of “post-racial”? What traces of old tensions are embedded in the social fabric of the places where we come from? How do the stories we tell reveal who we are and where we come from when we can’t even put the answers to those questions into words ourselves? These issues are what make me appreciate a book like September, September, a meticulously researched novel set in Memphis in the social upheaval of 1957, by Shelby Foote, the historian responsible for The Civil War: A Narrative, or a book like Arc of Justice by OSU history professor Kevin Boyle, which dresses a captivating history in novel clothes.

New books are food for the mind, and I am hungry to add to my collection. There’s always room for more Twain or Faulkner, and I wait eagerly for the new Toni Morrison to complement not just her novels but Playing in the Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination on my theory shelf. But I would also want to add the fiction of John Wideman and Perceval Everett; the plays of August Wilson and Angelina Grimké; and poetry of Martha Collins, Jake Adam York, and Evie Shockley. There are numerous scholarly additions that would benefit my research on the legacy of lynching: Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 1896-1920 by Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, At the Hands of Persons Unknown: The Lynching of Black America by Philip Dray, The Invention of Race: Black Culture and the Politics of Representation by Tommy Lott, and Lynching in America: A History in Documents edited by Christopher Waldrep. But if I truly had the resources I would explore more idiosyncratic interests as well, such as Memphis Afternoons, a 1993 memoir by James Conway, which according to my research includes some reference to a literary scene in Memphis and an author named Kenneth Lawrence Beaudoin who I’ve never read before. Or perhaps I would add a book like Literary Memphis: A Survey of Its Writers and Writings, which although it was published in 1942 might illuminate some literary connections to the social life of Memphis that I am unaware of. It might even inspire me to one day produce an updated version of how the stories of Memphis shape who we are.