One of the most important questions for Southern writers who write historical fiction to answer is how to handle issues between the races. The truth is, creating sympathetic characters who treat black Americans as people in 1919, the setting for Her Life as She Knew It, routinely did would be impossible because the average person's view of what's acceptable has changed so dramatically.
Walter Cronkite, the journalist, tells a story about his first encounter with racial prejudice in the South. He and his family moved to Houston, TX in 1927 so that his father could join a wealthy dentist in his practice. The second night they were in town, they sat on the dentist's front porch waiting for a delivery boy to bring ice cream from the drugstore. When the boy, who was black, arrived on his motorcycle, he couldn't figure out how to get to the back door, so he walked to the front porch, where the family sat with Cronkite's family. As soon as the boy's foot hit the front step, the dentist flew up and hit the boy in the face, knocking him to the ground and saying, "That'll teach you n----- to put your foot on a white man's porch." (Here's link to see Cronkite tell the whole story: http://www.emmytvlegends.org/interviews/people/walter-cronkite.)
Obviously, a writer today can't have a character treat anyone like that, black or white, and remain sympathetic. Many writers have gone 180 degrees in the other direction and made the white protagonist treat black Southerners as equals in ways that wouldn't have happened. In The Secret Life of Bees, which sold a couple of million copies as I recall, the white Southern father is abusive and the daughter finds solace with a family of black women. Except for the stereotype of the father, I liked the book but didn't buy the scenario.
Other authors have protagonists as far back as the 1940s, when Jim Crow laws dominated the South, accept maids and other black Southerners as equals. I appreciate what the authors are trying to do, but I just can't buy it.
In Her Life, I tried to walk a fine line in which Caroline is realistic, which means a woman who is shaped by her time, while still sympathetic. Her relationship with Rose was one of the most difficult to develop. She wasn't brave enough to be Rose's friend in public. Caroline had already suffered being ostracized, so she certainly wouldn't risk being further alienated from her community. Yet she did buy Rose a gift, a book by F. Douglas, and she did learn to sympathize with Rose.
How interesting. I like Caroline because I'm a realist. She's from the early 1900's, so her attitudes are not "bad," they're standard. Many good people couldn't see the other side of the story back then and thought their social norms were good norms. Her not wanting to be seen with Rose wasn't bad, it was ingrained. I see her more as a real person, damaged with judgmental thinking by her mother, but having a conscience that is able to go beyond that when the truth pricks at her.
ReplyDeleteIt didn't occur to me before, but people not from the south might have a harder time understanding her and understanding pre-1960's attitudes. Hopefully they'll see her bad points as an extension of her shallow mother, like I do, and not a part of her core.
Deanna by email
Also, one of my friends is from what was the wealthiest area of Alabama. She said that there were more mothers with anorexia than students. That says so much about how mothers feel the pressure of social norms more than children/teens. In addition, I remember my first year of teaching high school. I had expected "adult" camaraderie with the other teachers, but was very surprised when a small number of them seemed to be "making up" for a bad high school experience. It was as if they could go back to high school as adults and erase some of those outcast years they experienced as students. Adults are weird sometimes!
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