Poverty Politics

Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing

Sarah Robertson

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781496824349
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Representations of southern poor whites have long shifted between romanticization and demonization. At worst, poor southern whites are aligned with racism, bigotry, and right-wing extremism, and, at best, regarded as the passive victims of wider, socioeconomic policies. In Poverty Politics: Poor Whites in Contemporary Southern Writing, author Sarah Robertson pushes beyond these stereotypes and explores the impact of neoliberalism and welfare reform on depictions of poverty. Robertson examines representations of southern poor whites across various types of literature, including travel writing, photo-narratives, life-writing, and eco-literature, and reveals a common interest in communitarianism that crosses the boundaries of the US South and regionalism, moving past ideas about the culture of poverty to examine the economics of poverty. Included are critical examinations of the writings of southern writers such as Dorothy Allison, Rick Bragg, Barbara Kingsolver, Tim McLaurin, Toni Morrison, and Ann Pancake. Poverty Politics includes critical engagement with identity politics as well as reflections on issues including Hurricane Katrina, the 2008 financial crisis, and mountaintop removal. Robertson interrogates the presumed opposition between the Global North and the Global South and engages with microregions through case studies on Appalachian photo-narratives and eco-literature. Importantly, she focuses not merely on representations of southern poor whites, but also on writing that calls for alternative ways of reconceptualizing not just the poor, but societal measures of time, value, and worth.

CHAPTER ONE

Locating Poor Whites in Contemporary Travel Narratives

If the United States proves fertile ground for travel writers, then the South is a particularly abundant region that continues to propagate the pages of travelogues. From colonial days to the present, there is a long history of travelers surveying, sashaying, and sauntering throughout the US South. The contemporary travel books of Brits abroad Jonathan Raban, Old Glory (1981) and Hunting Mister Heartbreak (1990), and Martin Fletcher, Almost Heaven: Travels through the Backwoods of America (1998), are prime examples of the peculiar fascination travelers have with the South. Although Fletcher’s narrative begins and ends outside the region, he devotes over half his chapters to southern states, rendering the South decidedly more boondockish than anywhere else.

So while Terry Caesar argues that Latin American countries “make possible strange, distinctive experiences of squalor, dissoluteness, and dissimulation” (151), travel writers often do not find it necessary to traverse the borders of the United States to validate their conceptions of strangeness. Indeed, for British academic Nick Middleton in Ice Tea and Elvis: A Saunter through the Southern States (1999), the South is “the Heart of Darkness in the USA” (5), a sentiment echoed in Fletcher’s consideration of Appalachia as a place “where all manner of dark and peculiar things still go on” (23). In Pamela Petro’s Sitting Up with the Dead (2001), northern friends remind her to “[b]e careful down there” in a region where they assume “it’s still pretty rural” and “[a]ll kinds of things go on” (xvii). “Down there” implies the descent into a hellish place, what Middleton terms a “Heart of Darkness” and Petro refers to as an “Otherworld” (xix). While these horror-filled ideas of the South stem in part from its violent history of slavery and segregation, they also emerge out of earlier cultural narratives including travelogues and movies, perhaps none more so than John Boorman’s 1972 adaptation of James Dickey’s Deliverance, which looms large in the popular imaginary.¹

If the US South is horror show, it is also a place that evokes varying degrees of nostalgia. Nostalgia is a commonly recognized thread running through contemporary travel writing, as, in the face of a world saturated with the banality of globalization, the past becomes a site of “discovery” where “real” or “authentic” values are resurrected to give meaning to contemporary lives rendered vacuous by the onslaught of capitalism.² Discovery was obviously a key preoccupation of the genre during the height of empire, when there was still a sense that the world was not yet fully knowable. Today, however, satellite technology and apps such as Google Maps suggest that the world is not only knowable but an easily charted, consumable entity. To counter this prevailing sense of knowability and uniformity, there has been a marked turn in recent years to the promotion of localized traditions and practices that make discovery possible once again.

Under the auspices of localism, the US South remains a place of interest, with travel writers continuing to seek out encounters with “distinctive” or “authentic” figures, thereby underlining the genre’s continued desire “to venture into the world of others” (Islam 121). In particular, they reveal peculiar preoccupations with the region’s poor whites, who are regarded as tantalizing others.³ As Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs suggest, such searches for primitive or untouched spaces and peoples emerged during the eighteenth century when many travelers “under the sway of Rousseau and Romanticism, were in search of various forms of ‘the primitive’” (6). Even today, as Dean MacCannell outlines, “primitive and peasant peoples” are “among the most popular types of tourist attractions” (xix). So travel writers are still searching for “real” and “authentic” experiences, to become, in V. S. Naipaul’s words, discoverers of a world “beyond the uniformity of highway[s] and chain hotel[s]” (222). To this end, romantic traces still abound: Naipaul celebrates his romantic view of the region, outlining as he does “the great pleasure I had taken in travelling in the South. Romance, a glow of hopefulness and freedom, had already begun to touch the earlier stages of the journey” (221). In a similar vein, Petro claims: “I went there as a Romantic, looking for a relationship between soil and history and stories” (391). Their romantic outlooks determine both what they expect and what they want to find in the South.

In their accounts of the region, both Petro and Naipaul promote the idea of a distinctive, or what Smith and Cohn define as an essentialist South in Look Away!—their important contribution to new southern studies. Naipaul’s idea of the South, they write, “is precisely the vision we wish … to avoid” (11). While new southern studies saliently rejects Naipaul’s South, outside the academy his books are commonly found on coffee tables, in coffeehouses, and on reading group lists.⁴ The popularization of the genre and the mass readership of his work mean that his ideas about the US South carry cultural capital and ensure the proliferation of stereotypes.

The distinctive South that Petro, Naipaul, and others describe emerges more from preconceived ideas than the South they actually encounter. In his assessment of Tony Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic (1998), Scott Romine argues that Horwitz “wants the South that the South wants, not the South that it actually is” (The Real South 80). However, it may not simply be the South that the South wants, since ideas of the Old South were developed in part by northern travelers during the years after the Civil War, making it more widely a South that the rest of the nation also wants. Yet, as Romine suggests, travel writers often see the South they desire, and poor whites are central to those ideas of the region.

Throughout history, travelers have been fascinated by poor southern whites, either in the mountains of Appalachia or in the agricultural lowlands, as exemplified by William Byrd’s accounts of the “Indolent Wretches” he encountered when surveying the boundary line between Virginia and North Carolina in 1728 (54). Since Byrd’s venture, travelers and their readers have demonstrated an insatiable curiosity about the region’s poor whites.⁵ Yet to this end, travel writers do not simply “venture into the world of others.” As Debbie Lisle explains: “Travel writers still need other places and people to visit and write about—which means that travel writers must always engage in the production of difference” (24). The idea that travel writing is complicit in the perpetuation of otherness forms part of the following discussion, which examines the representation of poor whites across a number of contemporary travelogues.

For Lisle, the “production of difference” lies at the heart of both neocolonial and cosmopolitan approaches.⁶ She argues that while neocolonial perspectives overtly impose a sense of cultural superiority over places and people, cosmopolitan perspectives are also flawed, with cosmopolitan writers “smuggl[ing] in equally judgemental accounts of otherness under the guise of equality, tolerance and respect for difference” (10). Lisle proposes that it is difficult for contemporary travel writers to escape or write against a tradition of othering because “contemporary travel-writing operates in a contested, antagonistic and uncertain political terrain that is haunted by the logic of Empire” (16). In the case of many contemporary travel narratives that depict the US South and its poor whites, the “logic of Empire” is laden with the logic of capital. On one hand poor whites, for whom the designations of “lazy” and “shiftless” abound, are regarded as living unfit lives antithetical to processes of modern capitalist exchange. Conversely, their lives on the economic fringes of society are hailed as a last stalwart against the increasing pressures of capital, which continues to erode free will. These competing narratives mark this group as both frightfully other and preciously authentic, and they have a long history emerging out of the antebellum period.⁷ In the years before the Civil War, travelers typically presented poor whites as degenerate, but with the surge of northern travel to southern states in the post–Civil War era, when northerners sought escape from their hectic urban lives, the South and its mountains were presented as havens, and the once degenerate poor whites were now considered homely and quaint. As Rebecca Cawood McIntyre summarizes, northern traveler Charles Lanman, “[t]he man who had written about miserable drunkards and haggard women living in wretched hovels in 1848[,] was twenty years later claiming his affection for the simple-hearted people who lived amid the grand scenery of the southern mountains” (45). Poor whites rarely escape the imposition of these preconceived narratives that represent them as either violent threats to the social order or as the last link back to a way of life free from the restraints of a late-capitalist world. So, while Middleton worries about being out in the swampy Attoyac River in East Texas as darkness approaches, since he finds it “easy to imagine unpleasant situations involving depraved rednecks, like in a Hollywood movie” (240), in A Turn in the South (1989), Naipaul regards the rednecks that he happens upon near Jackson, Mississippi, as “a threatened species” (213). Threatening and under threat, violent and passive: these oppositional readings of poor whites have a long history in travel narratives.

These dominant if shifting ideas about poor whites clearly continue to influence contemporary travelers who carry with them a preestablished set of ideas about the US South and its people. It is common, as Harvey explains, that reading about a place “will likely affect how we experience that place when we travel there even if we experience considerable cognitive dissonance between expectations generated by the written word and how it actually feels upon the ground” (Spaces of Global 131). While the intertextuality of daily life renders it almost impossible to see and experience a place without the weight of previous narratives, Harvey’s point about the discrepancy that emerges between preconceptions and the actual place, “on the ground,” is pertinent to my consideration of the ways that certain travel writers struggle to move beyond embedded ideas of both the South and poor whites. Complex layers of preconceived place-knowledge are certainly apparent in Petro’s Sitting Up with the Dead, which is aptly subtitled A Storied Journey through the American South. In her prologue, Petro cites fellow travel writer Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic as well as native Mississippian Willie Morris’s memoir North toward Home (1967), meaning that she not only looks for stories in the South: her very idea of the place emerges out of a heavily narrativized notion of the region. In a similar vein, Paul Theroux, in his recent Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads (2015), comments at length on how he first came to understand the South through literature, referring to both previous travelogues and the impact of writers such as Faulkner, to whom he dedicates an entire chapter. Even before “Interlude: The Paradoxes of Faulkner,” the influence of Faulkner’s ideas about the southern landscape seep into Theroux’s writing. In his reflections on the Mississippi Delta, Theroux writes about “the alluvial sprawl that stretches northward” (109), and just a few pages later he quotes the first line from Faulkner’s “Delta Autumn”: “The last hill, at the foot of which the rich unbroken alluvial flatness began …” (113; my emphases). Not only does Theroux employ Faulkner’s language, he even rereads Faulkner during one of his visits back to his family home on Cape Cod. In effect, the southern representations of travel writers such as Theroux and Petro are heavily mediated representations of representations.

So, before focusing specifically on the representation of poor whites, it is important to spend some time examining the ways that these travel writers present the US South. To greater and lesser extents, contemporary travel narratives about the region engage with ideas about the Old and New Souths. Particularly interesting is their negotiation of Atlanta. In Martin Fletcher’s narrative, Atlanta seemingly operates as absence as he travails Georgia in pursuit of its backwoods. Of course, cities are not part of his remit, yet they form the center against which Fletcher reads the backwoods. He drives through southern Georgia to Plains, Jimmy Carter’s hometown, a small town no longer inundated with the tourists who flocked there during Carter’s presidency, and now a place where Fletcher “spent a delightfully tranquil two hours wandering around in the late afternoon sun” (89). The only reference to Atlanta in the Georgia chapter comes at the mention of Carter’s continued good works, including “building low-cost housing for Atlanta’s poor.” Yet the harsh realities of urban poverty don’t hold much sway for Fletcher, who prefers to attend Carter’s “adult Sunday school class” (91).

For those writers who venture into Atlanta, readers encounter familiar histrionics: Atlanta is depicted as the hellish embodiment of the New South. Horwitz describes it as “the anti-South: a crass, brash city built in the image of the Chamber of Commerce and overrun by carpetbaggers, corporate climbers and conventioneers” (283), and Middleton situates his experiences of Atlanta in a chapter entitled “Going Global,” writing of a place that “didn’t look particularly Southern. With its tall glass buildings, concrete expressways, corporate headquarters and suited executives, it just looked like big cities look anywhere in the US” (189). Atlanta is encountered as sameness, as a horrifically recognizable locale replete with the signs of global capital.⁸

Petro defines her own New England home as “the heartland of the American communications industry that daily beams a facsimile of itself to the world” (xvii), so when she arrives in Atlanta it does not provide a sense of southern distinctiveness; it is, instead, a place “saturated with signs of familiarity” (Islam 133). Petro regards Atlanta as a commercial hub, defining it as a “work-ethic driven, live-and-die-by-the-dollar, Northern kind of city, noisy and fast and flush with money” (5). In a temporal sense, as the embodiment of “now,” Atlanta does not offer writers the sense of difference that is so fundamental to the genre: readers, they surmise, will find nothing new in Atlanta, and if Atlanta, as a hub of global capital, cannot produce the new but only the same, then newness and/or difference must be found elsewhere, most notably in the past.

At the outset of Petro’s journey, she leaves these nightmarish New South areas of Atlanta to attend a performance in Abernathy, a neighborhood she describes as a “conduit,” a window into an area that is “a little ramshackle, but pleasantly quiet”—an area that she classifies as “the Atlanta anomaly, more Old South than New, where time was to be had in greater quantities than money” (6–7). Petro’s desire to uncover a “real” “Old” South follows the common pattern found in the narratives of “travel writers [who] use strategies of temporalisation to perpetuate the myth that certain places are ‘stuck’ in the past and untouched by modernity” (Lisle 209). Petro’s alignment of the New South with money and the Old South with time completely erodes the inherent connectivity between the South’s cotton economy and modern capitalism.⁹ She reads the Old South as premodern and pastoral and imagines that poverty offers a “real” route back to that past. When she later drives through the countryside in South Carolina, she encounters a “deep” level of poverty that “wrenched modernity right out of the air,” leading her to make “comparisons” with “the Depression, and … past centuries” (146–47). Petro’s comparisons highlight her attraction to poverty as an escape from modernity, and her dependency on understanding the poor via earlier narratives, such as Depression-era photography or photo-essays such as James Agee and Walker Evans’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941).

Indeed, such dependency also appears in Horwitz’s Confederates in the Attic, when he spends time toward the end of his journey visiting the only living Confederate widow at the time, Alberta. Alberta’s son Willie drives him around to visit her relatives and her house. Out on the road, he writes:

We wound back to Elba, pausing by the crossroads where Alberta was born and raised…. The landscape looked straight out of a Walker Evans photograph of Depression Alabama. I realized, too, that Alberta or Lera might easily have served as models for one of Evans’s most famous portraits: a sharecropper’s wife in a plain cotton dress, her prematurely worn features starkly framed against the rough wood siding of a tenant’s shack. (348)

In a manner oddly reminiscent of Joseph Jastrow’s duck-rabbit, Horwitz cannot look at Alberta in the present without imagining her as a figure from the past. Similarly, Douglas Kennedy in In God’s Country (1989) struggles to see present-day Nashville without the distortive lens of Farm Security Administration (FSA) images. Kennedy writes: “Looking at the gaunt, unshaven drifters who loitered here—all possessing that haunted aura of men who ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Abbreviations
• Chapter One: Locating Poor Whites in Contemporary Travel Narratives
• Chapter Two: Photo-Narratives and the Poor White Self since the FSA
• Chapter Three: “What I Am Here for Is to Claim My Life”: Life-Writing and Reclaiming the Poor White Self
• Chapter Four: “A Whitegirl Helped Me”: Locating Poor Whites in Literature
• Chapter Five: “Culture Springs from the Actions of People in a Landscape”: Poor Whites and Environmentalism
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Works Cited
• About the Author