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the place I grew up
12019-07-12T12:46:10+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed9677214112Cohen page 12plain2022-08-09T14:39:00+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141This is a letter that comes more or less from the place where I grew up. The Tennessee River, where John Newton Johnson was raised on a plantation in Alabama, winds through the upper South to the Jackson Purchase of west Tennessee and Kentucky, where I was a child. Many of my childhood friends and their relatives echoed the same kinds of beliefs, a century later, that are expressed in Johnson’s letter to Whitman, projected those beliefs onto their eight-month-old children and onto their companions like me. But if Johnson’s letter plays on ideas about literacy common in Whitman’s era, in a way it continues to do so today. The daily life of rural Southerners—the web of values, prejudices, loves, hatreds, jealousies that they experienced—is not a recovery priority for much of American literary studies. We need not sanction rural Southern racism, but we must also acknowledge that the pathways to transforming those attitudes aren’t really laid at this point. Many are the literacies of the rural South, obscure not just to scholars but everyday Americans across the United States. Marvelous parallel acts of cultural preservation, in the Great Hole of History: rural southern attitudes about race; the rest of the country’s attitudes about rural southerners. Like one of Parks’s echoes, Johnson’s “oo mus’ gib…love to ittle secesh mans” confronts not just Whitman across political bounds in his time, but us as readers today across the threshold of time.
This page has paths:
12019-07-11T16:28:05+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141Commentary: Essay and PodcastJoelle Thomas13Cohen 1plain1102021-01-15T17:36:15+00:00Joelle Thomas0feb3b2b7a8befeee2c7d2d710d303ed96772141