Acknowledgments
The editors of this volume would like to thank Oxford University Press for its support of this project. In particular, we wish to extend our gratitude to Brendan O’Neill. It was he who realized several years ago that an Oxford Handbook of the Literature of the U.S. South would be a valuable addition to the series and to American literary studies and asked us to coedit. Throughout the process, he has been a tireless advocate and advisor. We are grateful, as well, to the anonymous readers, whose comments and suggestions were especially helpful. In addition, we thank Stephen Bradley, assistant editor, who helped us negotiate a number of complex matters as we prepared the manuscript for publication. And we have benefitted immensely from the expertise of Eswari Maruthu, project manager at Newgen Knowledge Works, and Kristen Holt-Browning, who copyedited the volume. Fred Hobson thanks Tara Cowan, Eric Meckley, and Barbara Bennett for invaluable technical assistance.
Finally, we are grateful to our contributors who have given us twenty-seven superb chapters representing the very best work in the field at what we believe to be a watershed moment in southern literary and cultural studies. It has been an honor to work with them.
Contributors
Eric Gary Anderson is Associate Professor of English at George Mason University. His publications include American Indian Literature and the Southwest: Contexts and Dispositions (University of Texas Press, 1999) and the coedited volume Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
Michael P. Bibler is Associate Professor of Southern Studies at Louisiana State University and author of Cotton’s Queer Relations: Same-Sex Intimacy and the Literature of the Southern Plantation, 1936–1968 (University of Virginia Press, 2009).
Martyn Bone is Associate Professor of American literature at the University of Copenhagen, where he also coordinates the Center for Transnational American Studies. He is the author of The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction (Louisiana State University Press, 2005) and, most recently, coeditor of Creating and Consuming the American South (University Press of Florida, 2015).
Leslie Bow is Mark and Elisabeth Eccles Professor of English and Asian American Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. She is the author of the award-winning “Partly Colored”: Asian Americans and Racial Anomaly in the Segregated South (New York University Press, 2010) and editor of the four-volume Asian American Feminisms (Routledge, 2012).
Will Brantley is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University, where he teaches southern literature, modern American literature, and film studies. His published work has focused on women writers of the American South and includes Feminine Sense in Southern Memoir: Smith, Glasgow, Welty, Hellman, Porter, and Hurston (University Press of Mississippi, 1993), which received the Eudora Welty Prize for an interpretive work in modern letters.
Robert H. Brinkmeyer, Jr., is Director of the Institute for Southern Studies and Emily Brown Jefferies Professor of English at the University of South Carolina. His most recent book is the award-winning The Fourth Ghost: White Southern Writers and European Fascism, 1930–1950 (Louisiana State University Press, 2009).
W. Fitzhugh Brundage is the William B. Umstead Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He has written on lynching, utopian socialism, and African Americans and popular culture. His most recent book is The Southern Past: A
Clash of Race and Memory (Harvard University Press, 2005). He is currently completing a history of torture in the United States from De Soto to George W. Bush.
Keith Cartwright is Professor of English at the University of North Florida. He is the author of Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways: Travels in Deep Southern Time, Circum-Caribbean Space, Afro-creole Authority (University of Georgia Press, 2013).
James W. Coleman is Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. His most recent book is Writing Blackness: John Edgar Wideman’s Art and Experimentation (Louisiana State University Press, 2010).
María DeGuzmán is Professor of English & Comparative Literature and founding director of Latina/o Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of Spain’s Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (Minnesota, 2005) and Buenas Noches, American Culture: Latina/o Aesthetics of Night (Indiana University Press, 2012).
Leigh Anne Duck is Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi, where she edits the journal The Global South. Her book The Nation’s Region: Southern Modernism, Segregation, and U.S. Nationalism was published by the University of Georgia Press in 2006.
Minrose Gwin is Kenan Eminent Professor of English at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the author of four scholarly books, a novel, and a memoir; editor of two books; coeditor of Literature of the American South, a Norton anthology; and former coeditor of the Southern Literary Journal.
Katherine Henninger is Associate Professor of American Literature at Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge, where she specializes in southern literature, visual culture, and gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Ordering the Façade: Photography and Contemporary Southern Women’s Writing (University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
Ruth Hill is Professor of Spanish and Andrew W. Mellon Chair in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches courses in critical race studies from the early modern period to the present. She is the author of Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America (Vanderbilt University Press, 2006).
Fred Hobson is Lineberger Professor of Humanities Emeritus at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is author of a number of works in American literary studies, including Mencken: A Life (Random House, 1994), But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative (Louisiana State University Press, 1999), and The Silencing of Emily Mullen and Other Essays (Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
Suzanne W. Jones is Professor of English and Tucker-Boatwright Professor of Humanities at the University of Richmond. The author of Race Mixing: Southern Fiction since the Sixties (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), she has published numerous articles and edited several collections about southern literature.
Stephen Knadler is Professor of English at Spelman College. He is the author of The Fugitive Race: Minority Writers Resisting Whiteness (University Press of Mississippi, 2002) and Remapping Citizenship and the Nation in African American Literature (Routledge, 2009).
Michael Kreyling is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor of English at Vanderbilt. His most recent book is A Late Encounter with the Civil War (The Lamar Lectures at Mercer University, 2012), published by University of Georgia Press.
Barbara Ladd is Professor of English at Emory University. Her latest book is Resisting History: Gender, Modernity, and Authorship in William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Eudora Welty (Louisiana State University Press, 2007).
John Lang is Professor of English Emeritus at Emory & Henry College, Emory, Virginia. He is the author of Understanding Ron Rash (University of South Carolina Press, 2014).
John W. Lowe is Barbara Methvin Professor of English and Latin American and Caribbean Studies at the University of Georgia. A specialist in southern, African American, Caribbean, and multiethnic literature, he is the author or editor of seven books, including Louisiana Culture from the Colonial Era to Katrina (Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
Lloyd Pratt is University Lecturer in American Literature and Associate Professor of English at the University of Oxford. He is the author of Archives of American Time: Literature and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010).
Gary Richards is Associate Professor of English and Chair of the Department of English, Linguistics, and Communication at the University of Mary Washington. He is the author of Lovers and Beloveds: Sexual Otherness in Southern Fiction, 1936–1961 (Louisiana State University Press, 2005).
Owen Robinson is Senior Lecturer in U.S. Literature at the University of Essex, specializing in the literature of the South, New Orleans, and William Faulkner. His most recent book is the coedited collection Surveying the American Tropics: A Literary Geography from New York to Rio (Liverpool University Press, 2013).
Scott Romine is Professor of English and Department Head at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He is the author of The Real South: Southern Narrative in the Age of Cultural Reproduction (Louisiana State University Press, 2008).
Thomas Ruys Smith is Senior Lecturer in American Literature and Culture at the University of East Anglia in the U.K. Most recently, he is the author of Southern Queen: New Orleans in the Nineteenth Century (Continuum, 2011), and the coeditor of Must Read: Rediscovering American Bestsellers (Bloomsbury, 2012).
Harilaos Stecopoulos is Associate Professor of English at the University of Iowa, and the editor of The Iowa Review. He has published Reconstructing the World: Southern Fictions and U.S. Imperialisms, 1898–1976 (Cornell University Press, 2008).
Daniel Cross Turner is Associate Professor of English at Coastal Carolina University. He is the author of Southern Crossings: Poetry, Memory, and the Transcultural South (University of Tennessee Press, 2012) and coeditor of Undead Souths: The Gothic and Beyond in Southern Literature and Culture (Louisiana State University Press, 2015).
Anthony Wilson is Associate Professor of English at LaGrange College. He is the author of Shadow and Shelter: The Swamp in Southern Culture, published in 2005 by the University Press of Mississippi.
The Oxford Handbook of
Introduction
Fred Hobson and Barbara Ladd
Fifty years ago we thought we knew “the American South”—its geographical reach, the span of its history, its political and religious idioscapes, its social order and traditional hierarchies of class, race, and gender—and we were reasonably confident in what we expected from southern literature. In his definitive essay “The Southern Temper,” published in Southern Renascence in 1953, Robert Heilman found in southern literature “a sense of the concrete, a sense of the elemental, a sense of the ornamental, a sense of the representative, and a sense of totality” (3). Other scholars at mid-century and just beyond would have added a tragic sense, a sense of place, and a sense of the past in the present. Although challenged on occasion, this description remained powerfully influential into the late twentieth century. The “South,” as it was envisioned then, was almost always rural, and it was nearly always seen in relation to “the North” (which meant, to most southerners, any part of the United States that was not the South). When one spoke of “the South,” there seemed to be no need for modifiers such as “American” or “U.S.”; the South was, and that sufficed. Moreover, “southern literature” was understood as predominantly the work of white men and—less frequently—women, its authors unquestionably “of” the culturally conservative white South, if not always comfortable with its traditions.
We begin to see the fracturing of this consensus in 1985 in The History of Southern Literature, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., who, more than any other scholar, brought about southern literature as a separate field of academic study at mid-century. That History included an African American scholar, Blyden Jackson, among its senior editors, and a handful of essays on—and by—African American and women writers, but that was more or less the extent of the diversity to be found in The History of Southern Literature, and one would have looked hard to find anything comparable in other anthologies and histories of that time. Native American, Asian American, Latino, and Gay and Lesbian Studies were in their infancy, at least in the southern academy, and the age of globalization had not then quite dawned in American literary and cultural studies. Still, a question often posed into the 1980s was whether the South’s conservative
traditions in literature and intellectual history were disappearing, and along with them the South itself.
Since the late twentieth century, the field of southern literature has changed considerably. Today, not only is the study of southern writers of African descent central to the field, the black/white binary has given way to a southern multiculturalism that recognizes Hispanic and Latino, Asian, and contemporary as well as historical African and Native presences in the South. The age of southern exceptionalism is past: one finds, beyond the borders of the traditional South, an increased recognition that the U.S. South hardly stands alone, and that its literature shares much, historically, socially, economically, with other regions, other cultures (what it has in common with the Caribbean and Latin cultures to its south has been of particular interest over the past twenty years) and that any study of “the South” must begin with a recognition of those commonalities. The literature of the South, and our understanding of it, has been altered in a number of other ways, many of them reflecting new directions in American literature and in literary and cultural studies in a more general sense. A heightened environmental consciousness has given rise to ecocriticism. Feminisms, postfeminisms, and queer studies have not only changed the way we understand gender but have changed literary history itself. One also finds a resurgence of interest in the writing and cultures of the Appalachians, the cities, the coastal areas, the border states, and in “southern” writing beyond the stipulated borders of the U.S. South.
With these changes—and in many cases preceding these changes—have come different ways of perceiving the South: no longer (at least not exclusively) the poor, defeated, benighted, violent, tragic, and guilt-ridden region of Faulkner and O’Connor and Wright but, by the 1970s and 1980s, a post-segregation, air-conditioned, increasingly optimistic and prosperous, tourism-driven, and post-guilt South which touted itself as something of a model for the rest of the nation (an image that captured its total reality no more successfully than the earlier image had). Traditional conceptions of southern culture have been problematized in studies of the “Sun Belt” writing of these decades, in explorations of “postsouthern” forms of writing in the eighties and beyond, and into the present age of globalization, in studies of popular culture, oral history, autobiography and memoir. Before his death in 1981, C. Hugh Holman titled an essay “No More Monoliths, Please”: and today we are less likely to speak of “southern culture” than of “southern cultures.” And we are much more likely to be interdisciplinary, to draw on sociology, anthropology, and other disciplines as much as or more than previous literary scholarship.
Revitalized in the wake of the civil rights and women’s movements, currently experiencing the challenges of multiculturalism, and responding in complex ways to globalization, to immigration on a scale not seen in the South for well over a century, and to the emergence of postnational cultural paradigms (among them hemispheric, New World, and transatlantic studies) associated with globalization, the study of southern literature and culture has become one of the most exciting projects in American literary studies.
This resurgence has been marked by the appearance of two major anthologies, both reflecting the changing racial and ethnic landscape of southern literature. The Literature of the American South: A Norton Anthology (ed. William Andrews, Minrose Gwin, Trudier Harris, and Fred Hobson) and The Oxford Book of the American South: Testimony, Memory, and Fiction (ed. Edward L. Ayers and Bradley C. Mittendorf) appeared in 1997. The editors of the former described southern literature as “an ongoing dialogue and/or debate among various ethnic, racial, social, and economic perspectives on what the South was, is, and ought to be and on the character, culture, and communities of its people” (xix), and this sense of the field is now widely accepted. There have also been a handful of “companions,” “guides,” and “encyclopedias,” numerous collections of essays, as well as coverage of southern literature and cultural studies in major journals. As an addition to this body of work, this volume is significantly different. Its scope is broad. It is, we hope, more representative of the range of activity in the field at present and includes exciting new work in southern literature from the contact period through the nineteenth century as well as coverage of twentieth- and twenty-first-century writing. We hope that it will contribute significantly to the reevaluation of southern literature for a broad audience of readers including specialists in the field, scholars and critics of American literature more broadly, graduate students, advanced undergraduates, and others with interests in Anglophone literature and culture.
Contact to the Civil War
If it was once thought that the literature of the modern South begins with the Southern Renaissance, today’s students place its origins at a much earlier stage of American history. Over the past generation, a resurgence of work in the earlier periods in southern studies (fueled by contemporary interest in New World, hemispheric, transnational, and global studies) has demonstrated the significance of this early expression, not only in its own right, but also for its surprising and as yet not fully understood legacies. In the essays with which we begin this collection, we witness a new “backward glance,” as Allen Tate phrased it (272), at the complex and contested spaces of the early South, a growing sense that it is in this writing, in these contact zones, where we might find the most telling legacies and contexts for contemporary southern writing.
We begin with Eric Gary Anderson’s “Literary and Textual Histories of the Native South.” Here, Anderson reads the “expressive” land, the “graphic landscape” in an effort to begin to “reassemble [the] long history of the many indigenous cultures, artistic traditions, and textual forms” that preceded the arrival of Europeans in what is today termed the “Southeast.” He attends, in particular, to questions of textualities and literacies, looking closely at the record of a conversation between the English surveyor John Lawson and a Saponi king and tracing the legacies of Native textualities in contemporary Native American writing. Anderson’s South is “vastly older, vastly different in its
ways of inhabiting both space and time” than the South of modern history. Ruth Hill, in “Before Hypodescent: Whitening Equations in South America and the American South,” undertakes a reexamination of racial classification in the long eighteenth century. Taking issue with Werner Sollors’s elision of folkbiologies and natural history as a mere “animal story” in his glossing of an 1815 letter from Thomas Jefferson to Francis Gray on the subject of racial intermixture, Hill takes Jefferson’s remarks and the legal precedents underlying his remarks more seriously, reading them in the context of the “conjoined histories of husbandry and animal husbandry,” with attention to the influential work of William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, and the many farmers’ manuals that made up the reading matter of the American farmer during Jefferson’s era. Her recontextualization of this discourse of “whitening” underscores the transience and malleability of whiteness.
Thomas Ruys Smith, in “The Dying Confession of Joseph Hare: Transatlantic Highwaymen and Southern Outlaws in the Antebellum South,” investigates the transatlantic literary contexts for Hare’s widely circulated autobiography, exploring the ways that the figures of the English highwayman, pirate, and robber made their way, via Sir Walter Scott and others, to the American South and were transformed there, influencing publishing and reading habits as well as ideas of crime and criminality in a South defined by class tensions, slavery, and religious revivals. By the time of the Civil War, Smith writes, the “southern outlaw-hero” had “found a secure ideological home in the South” and “emerged in the depictions of various Confederate figures, most particularly the partisan cavalry regiments commanded by the likes of John Mosby and Harry Gilmor,” and later in the figure of Jesse James.
Continuing the emphasis on contact zones and on spaces and localities, Keith Cartwright, in “Jackson’s Villes, Squares, and Frontiers of Democracy,” looks at “the frontiers of our deepest Souths” and locates in what he calls “Jax Space,” i.e., the many places named in honor of Andrew Jackson, a “blood-consecrated” South where one finds “unsettling characteristics of poverty and a proneness to disease and violence.” And, importantly, in the work of writers and artists from Poe and Alexander Meek through Joel Chandler Harris, Martin Van Buren Ingram, Earnest Gouge, and Zora Neale Hurston to Sun Ra, Louis Armstrong, Michael Jackson, and others, Cartwright uncovers the traces, whispers, songs, and shouts that challenge the “silences beneath Jacksonian democracy” in “a literature of redress to the generalized state of psychic homicide we inhabit.”
Lloyd Pratt’s “Locality and the Serial South” takes up the “aesthetic of locality” in southern literature and cultural studies: “Whether it gets figured as the nation’s region, or our south, or the real south, this thing they call southern locality just will not go away,” he writes. Focusing on the genre of southwestern humor and its legacies in the popular Civil Rights–era television program The Beverly Hillbillies, Pratt substitutes “this locality” as a way into his examination of the distinction between “the serial narrative,” with its developmental and progressive storylines, and the “series,” very different. Here he argues that the predominance of the series over the serial narrative in representations of southern culture can be traced to the nineteenth-century periodical culture
that produced southwestern humor, and that the emphasis in southwestern humor on the “series” has popularized a “static South,” still salient in the twenty-first century: “The South will always be new, which is to say old, and Simon [Suggs] will always be shifty, which is to say static, because that is life in the South as series.”
W. Fitzhugh Brundage, in “The Long Shadow of Torture in the American South,” draws on his current research to probe the debate over pain and punishment in the aftermath of the discovery, in 1834, of the tortures practiced by Madame Lalaurie in her New Orleans mansion. This discovery, Brundage argues, became a “flash point in the intensifying national debate over slavery” and, more broadly, the place of corporal punishment in a civilized nation. He pays particular attention to the affective dimensions of the debate between outraged abolitionists and proslavery writers for whom “the intimate violence of slavery was the mark of civilization, not of its absence,” examines George W. Cable’s return to the Lalaurie story in “The Haunted House in Royal Street,” from Strange True Stories of Louisiana, and notes the continuing presence of the legend of Mme. Lalaurie in American literature and popular culture.
In the final essay in this section, “Masculine Sentiment, Racial Fetishism, and Same-Sex Desire in Antebellum Southern Literature,” Michael P. Bibler takes issue with the widespread assumption that white men in the plantation economy were careful to avoid “romantic friendships” with other men, lest they call into question their own heterosexuality. Instead, he argues that homoeroticism—that is, “acts of physical or emotional intimacy” among men—were not necessarily indicative of what we might identify as homosexuality and were not necessarily a threat to status provided the men involved “still met the expectations of honor, family, and mastery.” From this position, he goes on to discuss “narratives of sympathy, friendship, courtship, mastery, and sexual exploitation” in the work of eight writers—Nathaniel Beverley Tucker, William Gilmore Simms, Frederick Douglass, Augusta Jane Evans, Harriet Jacobs, Caroline Lee Hentz, E.D.E.N. Southworth, and Baron Ludwig von Reizenstein—arguing that accounts of romantic friendships among men “were actually integral to the construction of white (and sometimes black) masculinity.”
The Civil War and Beyond
Emancipation changed the landscape of southern writing. In this second section of the volume, “The Civil War and Beyond,” essayists take up questions arising from the return of the South to the nation, questions having to do with representations of the southern landscape in national discourse, the legacies of slavery, and new and old visions of citizenship and belonging. In the opening essay in this section, “Southern Affects: Field and Feeling in a Skeptical Age,” Scott Romine deals with the writing of an older, more traditional “South” from a postmodern perspective. Reflecting on the tendency of southerners to wish themselves back into a place they no longer inhabit, if they ever did (what else are all those southern melodies from “My Old Kentucky Home” and “Old Folks
at Home” to “Sweet Home, Alabama” and “Carolina in My Mind”—and what else is “Dixie” itself?), he examines the role of affect in producing “ ‘the South’ as singular, totalizing, and authoritative—an object of belief that, to contemporary eyes, tends to appear as an object of skepticism.” What else, he asks, was the South of Henry Timrod, James Shepherd Pike, Thomas Dixon, and others but feeling, a land of longing and remembrance, “a field of affect organized through cultural practice (literary representation, political speech, public monuments, and so forth) and an object of affect delineating that field”?
Next, John W. Lowe, in “Not-So-Still Waters: Travelers to Florida and the Tropical Sublime,” looks beyond the “urban grid” that is contemporary Florida into its past, exploring the “tropical sublime” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century travelers’ narratives set in and around the Oklawaha and St. Johns rivers. Treating writers from the Bartrams through Harriet Beecher Stowe, Thomas Bangs Thorpe, Edward King, Lafcadio Hearn, and Constance Fenimore Woolson, among others, Lowe argues that these accounts of the tropical landscape of Florida, particularly of its rivers and swamps, constitute an important site of memory for the contemporary moment and continue to “offer a compelling vision of both pleasure and danger.”
In “Indian Knives and Color Lines: Mark Twain from Hannibal to the Jim Crow Raj,” Harilaos Stecopoulos looks at the ways that Mark Twain made use of Anglo-Saxon imperialism in India to address questions of whiteness closer to home, and argues that “slavery and empire … undercut” ideas of whiteness. In both The Tragedy of Pudd’nhead Wilson and Following the Equator, Mark Twain’s complex attitudes toward the U.S. South, the history of slavery, and his own whiteness are mediated by the understanding “that the British and the Americans were kin in imperial sin.” He was, in short, deeply interested in “the local and global struggles against the Anglo-Saxon empire.”
Two essays take us into the beginning of the twentieth century. Anthony Wilson’s “Narrative and Counternarrative in The Leopard’s Spots and The Marrow of Tradition” puts Thomas Dixon and Charles Chesnutt—both dealing with the Wilmington race riot of 1898—in telling proximity. Here, he illuminates the profound differences in their understanding of the causes and meaning of that event, the meaning of race, the nature of the South past and present, authenticity and privilege in speech, and the relationship of language to “truth,” delineating some of the issues that would remain so powerful, and so divisive, in southern writing into the twentieth century.
Stephen Knadler’s “The Bright Side: African American Women and the Affective Archive of Southern Racial Uplift,” undertakes a rethinking of the ideology of optimism—what he calls, following Mary Church Terrell, “Bright Side” optimism, in the writing of African American women in the South in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Taking Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s work—both her essays and Iola Leroy (1892)—as the focus of his inquiry, he argues that “Bright Side” optimism was hardly escapist, that Harper and other writers of her era used “Bright Side” optimism to promote an “activist citizenship” central to the progress of African Americans in the United States.
Southern Modernisms
For several decades—at least since the publication of Louis D. Rubin’s Southern Renascence: The Literature of the Modern South in 1953—southern literature of the 1920s, 1930s, and (arguably) 1940s was seen as the supreme epoch of southern expression, that writing to which all that had come before had led and by which all that came later was judged. And, indeed, that period of southern writing—featuring the fiction of William Faulkner, Thomas Wolfe, Robert Penn Warren, and Eudora Welty, and the poetry and criticism of John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, and Warren—was remarkable. But the idea of the Southern Renaissance, as it was characterized by the Southern Agrarians and many of those who read and echoed them well into the latter half of the twentieth century, was a limited one. The Agrarian agenda was essentially conservative, one that valorized southern community and constructed a case for southern distinctiveness, not to say exceptionalism, on the southerner’s sense of place, his (almost always his) sense of the concrete, his religious sense, and his greater awareness of the past in the present. And that earlier Renaissance was for whites only: African American writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Jean Toomer (in Cane, more authentically an agrarian work than anything the uppercase Agrarians produced), Richard Wright, and Zora Neale Hurston, needed not apply. Certain southern white women—Welty, Katherine Anne Porter, Caroline Gordon, Flannery O’Connor—were included, but in most cases they conformed to the conservative Agrarian position. Women such as Elizabeth Madox Roberts, Evelyn Scott, Frances Newman, and Lillian Smith—whose approach to literature and sometimes life was usually deemed experimental if not radical—were never considered part of the Renaissance. Neither were those writers—W. J. Cash, James Agee, and others—who, at least compared to their southern contemporaries, leaned left and wrote principally nonfiction. The prevailing idea of the canon—fiction, poetry, drama— was about as conservative as the Agrarians’ idea of the South.
One writer whose transregional significance was recognized both by the Agrarians/ New Critics and by contemporary scholars whose critical approaches have gone far beyond the New Criticism is William Faulkner, and the reason, in some measure, is—as Owen Robinson writes in his essay on “the South and the World” in Faulkner’s fiction—that Faulkner’s writing “anticipates the various critical approaches that have been applied to it, and serves to demonstrate that intensive study of a particular region … need not be at odds with more recent transnational and postsouthern critical directions.” Indeed, Faulkner’s work is “applicable to and readable through every critical approach that is thrown at it,” from the “rich but ultimately comparatively narrow” approach of the New Critics “through the more open scholarship informed by theories of race, class, and gender that followed, and onwards into postmodern and postcolonial work in the later stages of the last century and into the present one.”
Robinson’s essay in this volume focuses on the manner in which Faulkner’s most significant work, though set largely in his fictional county in northern Mississippi, is
“continually imbued” with the larger world, a world (Europe, the non-southern United States, and particularly the Caribbean and points south) that impinges on and shapes life in Yoknapatawpha. After noting the importance of figures who move between Yoknapatawpha and the greater world (Quentin Compson, who famously leaves the South but never escapes it, as well as his sister Caddy; earlier characters such as “young” Bayard Sartoris, shaped by his experience—including the death of his brother—in World War I; and any number of other wanderers who roam both from and into Yoknapatawpha), Robinson turns, in Absalom, Absalom!, to the interaction between the richer, more exotic, non-Protestant lowland South (especially New Orleans, as well as areas south of the U.S. South)—embodied particularly in Charles Bon—and the insular, “puritanical” upcountry. It is not surprising, as Robinson notes, that discussion of Faulkner’s work, including but not confined to Absalom!, has been involved in “the very earliest stages of the transnational move in Southern Studies.”
If the essayists in this collection acknowledge the contributions not only of Faulkner but also of other major figures of the Southern Renaissance, they also turn to lesser-known southern writers of the early and mid-twentieth century who were concerned, as Faulkner was, with a transnational South. In “Richard Weaver, Lillian Smith, the South, and the World,” Robert Brinkmeyer, Jr., while acknowledging the interaction between U.S. southern thought and European thought, also addresses what today might be called the southern culture wars of the 1930s and 1940s. Weaver was a Southern Agrarian, if a latter-day one, and by focusing on the neo-Agrarian Weaver and on Smith, the most notable white liberal southern polemicist of her day (as well as bringing W. J. Cash into the discussion), Brinkmeyer gives us the whole debate between southern traditionalists and modernists in the 1930s and 1940s—a sequel in many ways to the same debate between the Agrarians and southern Regionalists in the 1920s and early 1930s. But Weaver was also, in certain respects, independent of the earlier Agrarians, and, here, Brinkmeyer distinguishes between his thought and that of Ransom, Tate, and Donald Davidson.
In her essay “Arts of Abjection in James Agee, Walker Evans, and Luis Buñuel,” Leigh Anne Duck turns to another southerner neglected in his own time, James Agee; the work she discusses, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, was almost completely ignored upon its appearance in 1941. Duck places Agee’s story of three Alabama tenant families in an international context, seeing it in relation to Luis Buñuel’s film Land Without Bread (Las Hurdes), which focuses on Buñuel’s native region of Spain. Setting out to offer a brief case study in “how we can augment our understanding of southern representations by situating them amid broader geographic and aesthetic frameworks,” Duck finds parallels between the two works, primarily a certain questioning of art and a flaunting of convention, as well as the use of a narrator whose role and whose voice (by turns challenging, shocking, at times aggressive, even insulting to the reader/viewer) is similar in many respects. As well as the international perspective, the essay moves into a discussion of U.S. documentary of the 1930s, bringing in such figures as Erskine Caldwell, Margaret Bourke-White, Dorothea Lange, and Richard Wright, and offers a reflection on the role and the strategies of documentary in a broader sense.
Gary Richards’s “Tennessee Williams and the Burden of Southern Sexuality Studies” maintains that, despite the several valuable recent works in the area, southern sexuality
studies remain “limited in scope and influence,” and observes that much of the work in that area has been devoted to Williams. Although Richards embraces much of that scholarship, he calls for scholarly work that will pay as much attention to Williams’s fiction as to his plays, and further envisions southern sexuality studies that “will move beyond Williams—and Faulkner and Capote and McCullers and Allison—to explore the sexual diversity of the expansive, transhistorical array of southern texts.”
James W. Coleman’s “Reimagining the South of Richard Wright: The Anti-Protest Writing of Albert Murray, Raymond Andrews, and Ernest Gaines” looks at a generation of younger African American writers who generally resisted Wright and his literature of protest. This is not to say, Coleman contends, that there is an absence of the racial tension and violence that we find in Wright; rather what is different is a voice that incorporates a humor and irony largely missing in Wright, as well as an interest in the richness and fullness of black communal life—an interest generally attributed to black women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, but, Coleman argues, present in the work of men as well. That this interest was also demonstrated in the work of Ralph Ellison suggests that the author of Invisible Man, and not Wright, was the forefather by whom Murray, Andrews, and Gaines seem to have been more greatly influenced.
Like Coleman, Will Brantley concerns himself with canonical and near-canonical writers, but his interest is not so much in literary texts as in personal and professional correspondence, writings that provide “glimpses of the ego that produces the creative work.” In “Letter-Writing, Authorship, and Southern Women Modernists,” he demonstrates what would indeed seem to be the case to those of us who have read collections of literary correspondence either in archives or in published form: that letter-writing is virtually a literary subgenre, sometimes a spontaneous expression with an unguarded quality—writing as process rather than product of thought—but at other times not so much spontaneous as carefully crafted expression, a calculated form of communication, which sets out to create a persona, particularly in those cases in which writers know their letters will wind up in published volumes. Brantley discusses such matters in his examination of published volumes of letters of Flannery O’Connor, Katherine Anne Porter, Zora Neale Hurston, and Lillian Smith, making a compelling case for such volumes as “indispensable components of a writer’s literary output.”
Today we no longer study southern literature but southern literatures, no longer southern culture but southern cultures, indeed, no longer the South but many Souths, both within and beyond that entity once, but no longer, known as “the South.” What had been generally referred to in historical and literary scholarship as “the South” began in the early 1980s to be “the American South” (in, e.g., the work of Michael O’Brien and
Richard Gray, both Englishmen who knew there were other Souths), and by the late 1990s we began to hear of the “U.S. South,” to signal a focus on the South in and as part of the nation, suggesting that, even within the Western Hemisphere, there were regions south of South, including the Caribbean and Central and South America, and extending as far as Brazil—regions which had a great deal in common with the U.S. South, at least in its lower regions: tropical and semi-tropical climate, a plantation economy, a legacy of slavery, a colonial past. Beyond the Western Hemisphere there were still other nations and regions—in Africa, Europe, and Asia—with which the U.S. South had a great deal in common.
In the first essay in this section, John Lang turns his attention to Appalachia. In “Nature and Spirituality in Contemporary Appalachian Poetry,” he examines five contemporary southern poets—Fred Chappell, Robert Morgan, Charles Wright, Kathryn Stripling Byer, and Lynn Powell—and the resistance in their poetry to “the excessively otherworldly emphasis of the religious denominations in which they were raised.” Rather, these poets and other of their contemporaries “tend to make the natural world the principal locus of the transcendent (as do Chappell and Morgan and Byer) or they abandon religious belief in favor of immersion in nature (as Powell decisively does and Wright struggles to do).” Instead of affirming order and meaning in “the constructs of the human imagination” in the manner of modernist poets such as Frost and Stevens, they find this affirmation in nature. In “Southern Religion’s Sexual Charge and the National Imagination,” Katherine Henninger also concerns herself with religion, through its ties to sexuality rather than to nature. The South, she notes, is seen as the most religious part of the United States and also the most sexually diseased, a land of excess evidenced in both religion and sexual behavior. She is hardly alone in that supposition: writers from the abolitionists to H. L. Mencken said essentially the same thing—in Mencken’s case, seeing links between revivals, lynchings, and sexual frenzy. But Henninger takes the contention a step further, applying what she calls the “race-sex-sin-spiral” to the work of two gay writers, Randall Kenan and Dorothy Allison, and finding “something kinky about … this deadly queer combination of sex and God and southernness that has led to lynching, incest, miscegenation, and the standard line that the rural South is ‘a living hell for gay men and lesbians.’ ”
Of the elements in Henninger’s “spiral,” both race and sex capture Suzanne W. Jones’s attention in “Their Confederate Kinfolk: African Americans’ Interracial Family Histories.” Mixed-race memoirs—often, literally, by slaves in the family—have become a veritable subgenre in recent years, but Jones adds a new dimension in her treatment of three books all written by self-identified African American descendants, three or four generations later, of white masters. The difference between these memoirs and others in their tradition is that these authors discover that the white master–black slave relationships from which their ancestors, and thus they themselves, sprang seem to have been loving or at least affectionate ones. This is not to deny that the white planter was in a position of dominance, but it is to affirm, or at least to strongly suggest, that certain white masters were something other than the demons (one thinks of Faulkner’s Thomas Sutpen) which such white masters are generally thought to have been. As Jones writes
in her treatment of one of her subjects, any such relationship “complicates southern history as it is generally known,” and underscores the reality of “a more complex truth” than we have yet been willing to acknowledge.
Michael Kreyling’s “Mourning, Mockery, and the Post-South” is another reflection on race, sex, and the antebellum South. Before focusing on Lars von Trier’s film Manderlay (2005) and Geraldine Brooks’s novel March (2006), Kreyling addresses “the loss of the distinctive South,” a loss that “comes with Arnoldian cultural mourning”: “Our being is ‘here,’ in a postmodern South characterized by a radically different concept of presence, and a predominance of absence.” In turning to Manderlay and March, he examines two works from the early twenty-first century that depict a nineteenthcentury South, and what he finds in Manderlay, a plantation-liberating Reconstruction fantasy doubling as an allegory of twentieth- and twenty-first-century U.S. nationbuilding, is “a southern politics of mourning curdled to mockery.” March, which spins off Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to tell Brooks’s own story of the little women’s father, John March—his erotic desire for a female slave compromising his New England high-mindedness—presents the South as “a geography of melancholic fantasy” as well as a cesspool of unbridled sexuality. The nineteenth-century abolitionists would have agreed.
Daniel Cross Turner’s “Made Things: Structuring Modernity in Southern Poetry” offers an alternative perspective on contemporary poetry to that which informs John Lang’s earlier essay on nature and spirituality. While acknowledging the centrality of poets such as Fred Chappell, Dave Smith, Robert Morgan, and bell hooks, all of whom are concerned with the rural (although not always pastoral) South, Turner chooses to focus on “a spectrum of poems that construct built environs and made things”—such as cities, factories, and suburbs—“along a cross-section of subregional spaces traversing upper, middle, and deep Souths.” In the process, he looks at work by Brenda Marie Osbey, Ron Rash, Allison Hedge Coke, Charles Wright, and Dan Albergotti. Turner points to Osbey’s New Orleans cityscapes (both pre- and post-Katrina), Rash’s piedmont mill villages and Hedge Coke’s factories, and Wright’s “yardscapes,” shopping center capitalism, and “the white noise of southern suburbia” as subjects for a poetry vastly different from that which had long filled southern anthologies.
In our final few essays we explore another territory, the multicultural South, hardly encountered in southern literary study until the past couple of decades. In her treatment of four contemporary Latina/o writers who “ghost the U.S. South,” María DeGuzmán first reminds us that that the Hispanic presence in the southeastern United States is not, as it is often depicted, a recent phenomenon, but rather reaches back five hundred years, “as old as Spanish colonial history in the Americas.” She remarks on the invisibility and dislocation which Latina/os experience in the United States, “but especially in the South where the black/white binary of race relations has reigned supreme and where the disconnection between past and contemporary Hispanic presence has reduced half-remembered legends into ghosts and has ghosted living immigrants into less than full-bodied persons of the body politic.” Drawing on critics who use ghosting as a means of recovering aspects of a “partially erased cultural history” or remarking on
events that seem removed in time or space, she discusses the work of writers—Judith Ortiz-Cofer, Achy Obejas, Lorraine López, and Blas Falconer—who turn “ ‘ghost’ into a culture-altering verb.”
Martyn Bone reflects on immigration and contemporary southern fiction in his essay, “You Don’t Have to Be Born There,” a refutation of Quentin Compson’s famous claim in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! that to understand the South “you would have to be born there.” Such, at least, is not the case with increasing numbers of Latino, Asian, and African immigrants, born abroad but resident in the southern states. In his treatment of the fiction of Susan Choi, Ha Jin, and Lan Cao, among other novelists, he deals with writers who have no real engagement with “the South” at all in the way of all previous writers, black and white, who have “told” about the South. Nor should they be expected to have, nor should teachers and scholars make what is often a contrived effort to find ways in which these writers deal with traditional “southern” themes. Which is to say, when most immigrants write, they are not thinking they are “southern writers,” that they are fitting into what others have called “southern literature,” and they should not. They happen to find themselves located in a place others have called the South, but they have no impulse, and no need, to engage with that South, its history, and its burden. They have their own stories to tell, stories that are fully as rich and varied as those of more traditional “southern” tellers.
In her essay “Asian Americans, Racial Latency, Southern Traces,” Leslie Bow begins with the cases of two prominent Indian American governors, Bobby Jindal and Nikki Haley, who were born here, and then moves to a discussion of two documentary films and a novel dealing with “racial in-betweenness,” the cases of Asians neither white nor black. Bow is much more concerned than Bone with the manner in which her subjects attempt to fit into the traditional South and navigate its peculiar institutions. Daniel Friedman and Sharon Grimberg’s Miss India Georgia (1998) profiles a competition in which four Indian American contestants in a small Georgia town seek, to various extents, to find a balance between Indian “cultural fidelity” and Americanness/southernness (and which southernness: white or black?). Gail Dolgin and Vincente Franco’s Daughter from Danang, the story of a Vietnamese American child fathered by a U.S. soldier and adopted by small-town white southerners, also offers “a reconsideration of southern race relations.” Monique Truong’s novel Bitter in the Mouth is similarly a work that cannot escape its U.S. southern setting: inspired by Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, Truong’s novel “pays obeisance to the literary conventions” of southern Gothic. In reference to Asian Americans in the South, Bow asks, “how do racially anomalous individuals ‘make themselves’ within contemporary southern settings saturated with the residues of segregation’s legacy?”
We end this collection of essays with Minrose Gwin’s “The Woundedness of Southern Literature, Looking Away.” At once both a rumination on the persistence of narratives of wounding in the literatures of the American South (and in southern literary and cultural studies) and a reminder that the recent turn toward a globalized southern studies is itself constructed on the sense of a shared history of trauma, she asks what we can “learn about the world of southern literature and the world in general not just by
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— No ihan aina!
— Silloin ei minua mikään murhe paina!
— Ei minuakaan. Sinä olet minun tumma ritarini!
— Ja sinä minun satuimpeni!
— Mutta herranen aika, kun niittymiehet odottavat ruokaa, virkkoi satutyttö ja ponnahti korineen juoksuun. Tumma ritari lähti koikkimaan perästä, hokien.
— Älä jätä, älä jätä, kultaseni.
Maija pysähtyi ja käveltiin rinnan kapeata metsätietä. Kerä kantoi piimähinkkiä kepissä olallaan.
— Me olemme nyt niin kuin ukko ja akka menossa metsään, sanoi hän.
— Hyi sinua! Minusta ei tule akkaa milloinkaan.
— Tulee rouva, virkkoi piimähinkin kantaja.
— Maija käänsi häneen kiitollisen katseensa. Hetkisen perästä virkkoi Maija nauraen.
— Mutta minähän en tiedä sinun nimeäsikään, poika parka.
— Todellakin. Hugo Verner Ansgarius, ilmoitti asianomainen.
— Niin monta nimeä ja kaikki niin kauniita Minulla ei ole muuta nimeä kuin Maija. Äiti kertoi aikovansa panna lisää Kustaavan, vaan
isä oli julmistunut, ja tuli vain paljas Maija.
— Se on kaunis nimi.
— Sinullahan on sievä sukunimikin, virkkoi Maija. Se on oikein hieno.
— Minä muutin sukunimeni, kertoi asianomainen. Entinen oli niin kömpelö.
— Mikä se oli?
— Törrönen.
Maija nauroi, niin että hampaat välähtelivät.
Mutta entisen Törrösen saappaan kärki oli tarttunut puun runkoon, ja hän lensi suulleen kivikkoon ja piimä hinkin sisällys valahti hänen niskaansa.
— Auta armahainen, siunaili tyttö.
— Nyt tuli perhanat, mutisi synkästi äsken niin reipas hinkin kantaja,
— Mene sinä viemään niitylle eväät. Minä jään tähän siivoomaan itseäni.
Maija nauroi ja meni.
Isäntä oli palannut kirkonkylästä ja murahteli tyytymättömänä, kun kuuli, että on ollut kaksi henkivakuutusherraa yötä talossa.
— Niitä herran koipeliinia kuhiseekin Kuivalan kyläkunta täynnä.
— Nämä ovat hyvin siistiä herroja, kehui emäntä. Sillä, joka Maijan kanssa meni niitylle, kuuluu olevan neljän tuhannen vuosipalkka, kertoi emäntä merkitsevästi. Hän oli jo huomannut Kerän mieltymyksen tyttäreensä.
Isäntä meni murahdellen pihamaalle ja painui pitkäkseen päiväpaisteeseen.
Keräkin palaili niityltä Maijan kanssa käsi kädessä. Huomattuaan isänsä pihamaalla säikähti Maija ja juoksi kamariin, kuiskaten mennessään mielitietylleen.
— Älä välitä siitä ukosta mitään. Se on semmoinen pökkelö. Ole vain kärsivällinen, niin hyvä tulee.
Kerä meni puhuttelemaan isäntää.
— Päivää, virkkoi.
Ei äännähdystä, ei liikahdusta isännän puolelta.
— Nyt on mainio heinäilma, jatkoi vävypojan kokelas.
— On, murahti isäntä, mutta ei nostanut päätään.
— Siellä olivatkin niittymiehet ahkerassa puuhassa, koetti Kerä verrytellä ukkoa.
— Vai olivat
— Teillä on tässä näköjään iso talo,
— Taitaa olla, kuului hetken perästä murahdus.
Maija oli tullut tuvan portaille ja antoi merkkiä sulhaselleen.
Tämä tuli lähemmäksi.
— En muistanut sanoa, että sille ei saa puhua vakuutuksista, kuiskasi Maija. Se suuttuu mielettömäksi.
Kerä meni takaisin ja istui pihamaalle. Hän päätti vähän jutkauttaa isäntää. Tehden äänensä tavalliseksi virkkoi hän.
— No aikooko se isäntä myydä tukkimetsää?
Mutta ukko luuli, että kysyjä tahtoi jo sekaantua hänen puukauppoihinsa, koskapa kuului tytärtä katselevan, ja murahti.
— Mitäs sinä sillä tiedolla teet.
— Olisin tehnyt hintatarjouksen, jatkoi Kerä levollisesti.
Ukko nosti päätänsä ja katsoi pitkään vieraaseen ja kysyi.
— Mitäs miehiä sitä sitten ollaan?
— Rengas yhtiön kasöörinä minä olen ollut, ilmoitti Kerä.
Ukko nousi istumaan, tervehti vierasta ja naurahti.
— No kun eukko horasi, että molemmat ovat henkivakuutusmiehiä. Sen verran se akkaväki tietää.
Ja ukko nauraa hörähteli mielissään.
— Mennään tuonne kamariin istumaan on siellä vähän viileämpikin, toimitti ukko Kerälle, jonka sydäntä hiveli appensa muuttuneet tunteet häntä kohtaan. Täytyi vaan kiirehtiä Maijalle selittämään, joka sai taas vuorostaan valmistaa emännän.
— Hyvinkö niitä metsiä ostetaan? kyseli ukko silmäillen kunnioittavasti Kerän persoonaa.
— Onhan niitä vähin. — Päätin minäkin lähteä huvikseni katselemaan.
— Taidatte sitten ollakin yhtiön päämiehiä? kysyi ukko kunnioittavasti.
— Niinhän minä olen.
— Ja minä tässä satuin vähän olemaan huonolla tuulella. Saahan niitä katsella metsiä ja olla talossa niin kuin kotonaan. Maija hoi. Mihinkä se Maija meni? Tule viemään vierasta istumaan. Minun täytyy tästä niitylle, puheli ukko mennessään.
Kevättoivokin vetäysi pihamaalle eikä ollut Kerää näkevinäänkään. Veti savukettaan, niin että pihisi.
— Kuulehan veli, virkkoi Kerä siirtyen lähemmäksi. Minä vähän jutkautin ukkoa. Hän kuului olevan hirmuinen vakuutusmiehille.
Minuunkin hän jo iski murhaavia silmäyksiä, vaan kun sanoin olevani tukkiyhtiön mies, tuli ukosta kuin voissa paistettu.
— Mutta minäpä sanonkin, että vedit häntä nenästä, uhkasi Kevättoivo.
‒ Silloin sinut siinä paikassa perii hiisi. Sinä et nähtävästi muista, että minä olen sinun esimiehesi.
Kevättoivo vaikeni hammasta purren ja mietti, mikä keino häntä parhaiten auttaisi.
Ystävämme Böljengögel on Kanteleen ja Keikauksen kanssa AlaKämpissä viettämiensä illallisten jälkeen saanut olla monessa seikkailussa, joista hän kuitenkin yleensä on selviytynyt hyvin käyttäen apunaan tunnettua kylmäverisyyttään. Yksi tapaus on vain hänen persoonaansa jättänyt näkyviä jälkiä, ja niiden takia hän on saanut makailla Kuivalan sairashuoneella kokonaista kaksi viikkoa.
Hänen virkaveljensä olivat aikoneet häntä varoittaa lähestymästä Mikkolan isäntää vakuutusmiehenä, mutta se oli heiltä jäänyt tekemättä, ja niinpä Böljengögel meni kuin menikin muutamana sunnuntaipäivänä mitään pahaa aavistamatta Mikkolaan, jossa isäntä oli tapansa mukaan sanaa tutkimassa. Böljengögel selitteli vakuutuksen erinomaisia etuja ja sai ensimäisen, hillityn varoituksen isännältä, mutta tästä huolimatta jatkoi hän kuvailuaan niistä onnettomista, jotka olivat jättäytyneet pois vakuutettujen joukosta. Isännällä sattui olemaan tällä kertaa lukukirjana teräskantinen raamattu, ja kiivastuneena ylenmääräisestä kiusaamisesta tempasi hän kirjan käteensä ja iski sillä Böljengögeliä päähän.
Asianomainen kykeni tuskin omin voimin poistumaan naapuritaloon, jossa pää pantiin kääreisiin ja mies vietiin
sairashuoneelle.
Mikkolan isäntä oli nyt saanut haasteen tuleviin Kuivalan käräjiin pahoinpitelystä, ja mies jatkoi, sairashuoneelta päästyään toimintaansa entistä innostuneemmin.
Tällä kertaa oli hän sattunut Möttösen taloon, jossa asukkaat olivat hieman takapajulla Kuivalan edistysmielisestä väestöstä… Niinpä isäntäkään ei vielä tietänyt, mitä on henkivakuutus. Böljengögel koetti sitä hänelle hiki päässä selittää toivoen tämmöisessä alkuperäisessä asukkaassa saavansa heräämään tavallista suuremman harrastuksen vakuutusaatteeseen.
— No miten siinä kävisi, jos nuo vakuutetut sattuisivat kuolemaan kaikki yht'aikaa? tiedusteli ukko tutkaillen asiaa siltäkin puolelta.
— Ne eivät voi mitenkään kuolla kaikki yht’aikaa, selitti Böljengögel.
Toisia kuolee vakuutetuista mutta toisia tulee sijaan.
— Mutta jos sattuisi kuolemaan, tikasi ukko. Silloin siinä tulisi hätä käteen herroille.
Böljengögel pyyhki hikeä otsaltaan ja selitti.
Ukko mietti hetken ja kysyi taas katsellen kenkäinsä kärkiä.
— Mutta jospa ne yhtiöt yhden kerran tekevät konkurssin. Mitenkäs silloin?
— Ne eivät uskalla,
— Kyllä ne herrat semmoista uskaltavat, väitti ukko. Kun saavat kokoon mieleisensä summan, niin silloin kintaat pöytään.
Ja isäntä näytti havainnollisesti kädellään, miten se tapahtuu.
— No jo on ihme, kun mies ei usko, vaikka kuinka selittäisi, vaikeroi
Böljengögel harmistuen.
— En usko enkä vakuuta, vaikk'olis rahaa kuin roskaa, päätti ukko ja sylkäsi asialle pisteeksi vahvan tupakkisyljen, joka sattui vieraan saappaan kärjelle.
Emäntäkin oli istunut penkille kuuntelemaan keskustelua ja tiesi kertoa, että Tiehaaran talossa olivat palvelijat vakuuttaneet itsensä ja nyt kuuluvat jättävän koko puuhan sikseen.
— Niin kävi, että rahat jäi sinne. Eivät kuulu saavan takaisin itkemälläkään. Semmoisia ne on ne vakuutukset, päätteli emäntä ja kysyi hetken perästä.
— Mikä se tämä herra on sukujaan.
Asianomainen mainitsi niinensä.
— Vai kökel, no sekö Pöljänkökel, joka kuuluu täällä Kuivalan puolella liikkuneen?
— En minä mikään pöljä ole enkä kökel, teki vastalauseen emännälle harmistunut vieras. Te moukat, ette osaa lausua edes ihmisten nimeä. Tämä Moukkalan kyläkunta onkin niitä maan mainittavia, jossa ihmiset on kuin alkuasukkaita.
— Mitäs tänne tulette, moukkien sekaan kökelit ja pökelit, kiivastui emäntä. Ei me teitä täällä tarvita. Täällä ei jaetakaan rahoja herrojen taskuihin. Ja eikä tänne tarvitse tulla vakuuttamaan, ja eikä täällä passata semmoisia herroja niinkuin Kuivalan kylällä, ja eikä…
Rajuilma oli nähtävästi nousemassa ja Böljengögel katsoi parhaaksi korjata olemuksensa rauhallisemmille seuduille. Kysyttyään tietä isännältä Tiehaaran taloon sanoi vieras hyvästit ja kiitteli kohteliasta talonväkeä. Isäntäkin tunsi tarvetta tehdä tunnetuksi mielialansa vieraalle ja huusi pihamaalla vieraan jälkeen.
— Niin… ei täällä semmoisia herroja tarvita. Menkää vain hiiteen.
* * * * *
Djefvulsundyhtiö oli alkanut horjua, ja huhu kertoi jo Kuivalankin kylässä, että yhtiö tekee tuossa tuokiossa vararikon. Herrat Pörjönen ja Haukkunen olivat jo sattuneet asian aiheuttamaan myrskyyn ja henkisesti ja osaksi ruumiillisesti runneltuina väistyneet rauhaisemmille laitumille. Puheenaolevat henkilöt, olivat sattuneet menemään Möttösen taloon, jossa he vuosi takaperin olivat vakuuttaneet talon miehet ja palvelijat. Nyt parhaiksi oli täällä saatu tieto Djefvulsund'in häviön oireista, kun asianomaiset herrat tulivat taloon. Herroille tehtiin heti tuima välikysymys ja, kun siihen ei saatu kylliksi pian tyydyttävää vastausta, tarttuivat miehet herrojen housunkauluksiin ja päättivät antaa hieman ilmaista hierontaa
Djefvulsund'in kenraaleille. Ja kun talossa ei sattunut olemaan vierasta väkeä tapahtuman todistajana, saivat nämä pitää kestityksen hyvänään ja hivellen kipeiltä tuntuvia paikkoja lähteä hammasta purren toisille paikkakunnille.
* * * * *
Tiehaaran talossa oltiin päivällisellä kun Böljengögel meni tupaan.
Tervehdykseen vastattiin ystävällisesti, ja isäntä tuli syöntinsä lopetettuaan puhuttelemaan vierasta. Tuli siinä vähitellen tiedoksi isännälle ja talonväelle, että vieras oli vakuutusmiehiä. Isäntä lopetti heti keskustelun ja kiipesi uunin päälle vetelemään ruokaunia, siellä kun eivät hänen lepoaan kärpäset häirinneet. Tiehaaran pojat Jussi ja Aatami kyyräilivät kulmiensa alta vierasta pahaenteisesti.
Böljengögel aavisti pahaa poikien synkistä katseista. — Jokohan nuo riiviöt ovat samallaista väkeä kuin Möttösessäkin, ajatteli hän.
Oli tuhoa ennustava hiljaisuus. Pojat kaivelivat vain hampaitaan ja kopistelivat piippujaan kuin uhitellen.
— No se Djefvulsund kuuluu menevän nurin ja sinne ne nyt menee meidänkin vakuutuksista maksetut rahat.
— Niin menee. Saivat minultakin jo viisikymmentä markkaa, virkkaa renki-Jooseppi pahasti mulkoillen vieraaseen.
— Saisitte nyt pulittaa meille ne rahat, jotka saitte sinne keinotelleeksi, sanoo Aatami, hyvin villin näköinen mies, Böljengögelille.
— Kyllä ne olisi takaisin maksettava, säestää Jussi.
— Mitä hemmettiä ne minuun kuuluu. Ottakaa rahanne sieltä mihin olette antaneet. Olenko minä teitä vakuuttanut
Djefvulsund'issa? kivahti Böljengögel.
— Vai semmoinen se nyt onkin ääni kellossa, alkoivat pojat meluta.
— Pulittakaa vain joka ainoa penni takaisin uhkaili Jooseppi.
— Niinpä sitä silloin sanottiin, kun vakuutusta tehtiin, että rahat saa takaisin silloin, kun vaan tahtoo. Nyt ne tuntuukin olevan jo lujassa.
— Mutta enhän minä ole teille vakuutuksia tehnyt, ettekö ymmärrä senkin aasit Minä olen Honkayhtiön mies ja teiltä on vakuutukset tehnyt tietysti Pörjönen tahi Naukkunen Djefvulsundyhtiössä. Ymmärrättekö, sen vietävät.
— Se haukkuu jo.
— Minkä Honkayhtiön. Ei sitä semmoista yhtiötä olekkaan. Se valehtelee, tenäsi Aatami. Annetaan sille pampusta, että tietää Tiehaarassa käyneensä.
Böljengögel nousi lähteäkseen, koska huomasi tilansa erittäin vaaralliseksi, mutta pojatkin nousivat uhkaavan näköisinä.
Annetaanko sille selän pehmitystä, virkkoi Jooseppi.
— Kyllä sille pitäisi antaa, murahti Jussi.
Böljengögel koetti lähennellä ovea, vaan hänen ahdistajansa lähenivät myöskin häntä ja jankutus jatkui, kunnes Böljengögel vihdoin potkaistiin ovesta ulos kolmella hyvin tähdätyllä anturan iskulla asianomaisen takapuoleen.
Böljengögel lasketteli pihalle päästyään kaiken voimasanavarastansa ilmoille mielialansa ilmaisuksi ja tunnusteli takapuolaan jatkaessaan matkaansa. Samalla hän päätti jättää ikuiset hyvästit Moukkalan kylälle.
Lähellä Kana-ahon majataloa tuli Böljengögeliä vastaan Tuhkanen taluttaen pyöräänsä.
Virkaveljet laskivat heponsa puhelinpylvästä vasten ja istuivat tien viereen lepäämään.
— Mistä sinä tulet? kysyi Tuhkanen alakuloisesti.
— Sanoisinpa melkein, että helvetistä, murahti Böljengögel.
Asia alkoi valjeta Tuhkaselle lähemmittä selvityksittä hänen tarkatessaan Böljengögelin vääristynyttä naamaa.
— Arvaan, hyvä veli, että sinulle on käynyt samoin kuin minullekin, sanoi Tuhkanen.
Sinun persoonasi on varmaankin ollut samanlaisessa muokissa kuin minunkin. Menin tänä aamuna Mutkan taloon, ja heti kävivät kimppuuni Djefvulsundin vakuutuksista, joita heillä poloisilla kuului olevan. Koetin heidän visaisiin kalloihinsa iskeä, etten ole tuon kuuluisuuden miehiä enkä siis syyllinen heidän onnettomuuteensa.
Vaan tästäkös ne välittivät. Ne raakalaiset tarttuivat minuun kiinni, ja nyt on selänpää hyvin kipeä. Koetin ajaa pyörälläkin, mutta eihän se luonnistanut.
— Kuuluu kyllä, että silläkin kulmakunnalla ovat asukkaat ihmissyöjien sukua, virkkoi Böljengögel. Ja kun minäkin aijoin mennä Mutkan taloon.
— Älä hyvä ihminen mene, jos et aio lisätä ruumiillisia kipujasi. Olipa hyvä, että ehdin varoittamaan sinua. Miten käynee muille vakuutusmiehille, jos tuohon kirottuun pesään sattuvat.
XVII
Olipa taaskin helteinen heinäkuun päivä, ja Kerä oli matkalla
Seppälään, armaansa luokse. Hän oli päättänyt pariksi päiväksi jättää hartiavoimaisan hankintatyön, — johon oli käynyt käsiksi uusin voimin, saatuaan omakseen Seppälän pyöreäposkisen tyttären — ja viettää muutamia unohtumattomia hetkiä morsiamensa kanssa
Seppälän pihan pääkamarissa ja pellonpientareilla.
Sankka pöly nousi maantiestä hänen ajaessaan, niin että hampaat karskuivat hiekasta, ja vaatteilla oli vahva pölykerros, vaan siitä ei ystävämme välittänyt. Ajatteli vain, että pöly haihtuu ruumiista
Seppälän lahden laineisiin ja suusta sen taas huuhtelee alas Maijan makeat ruuat.
Kerä seisotti ratsunsa Seppälän pihassa ja hypähti alas. Maija sattui olemaan pihamaalla, menossa maitohuoneeseen kantaen viilipyttyä. Huomatessaan tulijan punehtui Maija, ja viilipytty putosi hänen käsistään pihamaalle.
— Mistä ihmeestä sinä…?
— Sieltä vain maailman kyliltä. Oliko tuo viili minulle aiottu?
— Oli, mutta mitäpä siitä… Kun en osannut odottaakaan… Tule nyt levähtämään. Sinä olet varmaankin väsynyt? lipatteli Maija, ohjatessaan vierastaan kamariin.
Kerä oli pelkkänä päivänpaisteena.
— Onko isäsi kotona? kysyi hän kumminkin varovaisuuden vuoksi.
— Ei ole. Tulee ehken vasta huomenna kotiin, ilmoitti Maija.
— No voi herran pieksut. Silloinhan meidän sopii, iloitsi Kerä, hän kun pelkäsi joten kuten tulevan ilmi kepposestaan. — Mutta minä olen niin likainen, etten kehtaa sinuunkaan kajota. Minä menen nyt heti paikalla järveen.
Maija säikähti pahanpäiväisesti. Hän luuli sulhasensa suuressa onnessaan kadottaneen järkensä.
— Mitä sinä oikein puhut?
— Niin, niin, uimaan… Antaisit vain pyyhkeen.
— Kun minä luulin, että sinä… minä haen heti paikalla.
Kerä oli saanut maallisen olemuksensa mielestään tyydyttävään kuntoon ja palasi pihaan, jossa Maija odotti jo häntä.
— Tule nyt syömään hyvä… rakas… minä en oikein tiedä miten minä sanoisin. Sinulla on varmaan kauhea nälkä.
— Sinäpä sen sanoit. Olen melkein vuorokauden ollut syömättä.
Olin Heinäjärven kylällä ja siellä sain maata erään talon aitassa melkein vuorokauden.
— Voi sinua poloista… Miten se niin kävi?
— Isäntä oli ottanut avaimen ovelta muistamatta, että siellä nukkui vieras, ja pistänyt avaimen taskuunsa kylälle lähtiessään ja lukkoa oli mahdoton sisältä päin avata. Emäntä hätäili ulkopuolella ja minä potkin ovea sisäpuolelta, mutta se pysyi itsepintaisesti kiinni, kunnes isäntä palasi kotiin. Mutta mitäpä siitä. Tässä on poikasi taas yhtä reippaana ja iloisena kuin ennenkin. Yksi seikka minua vain peloittaa.
— Ja mikä se on? kysyi Maija.
— Tietysti se, että isäsi voi minä hetkenä tahansa tulla tietämään, että minä olen kuin olenkin vakuutusmies. Ja silloin voi nousta ukonilma.
— No mitä siitä. Täytyyhän sen tervaskannon vihdoinkin suostua, sanoi
Maija ja lähetteli sulholleen lämpimiä silmäyksiä.
Seppälän isäntä ei viipynytkään huomiseen, vaan palasi jo iltapäivällä kotiin mukanaan Naukkunen, joka kirkonkylässä oli pyrkinyt hänen rattailleen. Naukkunen oli vanha tuttava isännälle niiltä ajoilta, jolloin hän oli ollut Metsäyhtiön miehiä, ja mielihyvällä toikin Seppälän isäntä hänet rattaillaan kotiinsa pyydellen jäämään yöksi taloon. Tähän isännän hyväntahtoiseen tarjoukseen suostuikin Naukkunen ilolla ja asteli reippaasti tupaan, jossa Kerä loikoi penkillä ja katseli Maijan ketterätä liikuntaa talouspuuhissa.
— Täällähän sinäkin makailet, ilostui Naukkunen. Olipa se nyt mukava sattuma.
Kerä murti suuta ja väänsi päätä nähdessään Naukkusen rehevän persoonan rauhaansa häiritsemässä. Hänestä ei toisen ylistämä sattuma ollut lainkaan toivottava siihen nähden, että isäntä saattaisi Naukkusen kautta tulla tietämään hänen oikean toimensa ennen aikojaan.
Isäntäkin tuli tupaan ja ilostui nähdessään Rengasyhtiön kasöörin talossa.
— Päivää. Mistä päin nyt on matka? Onpas ne puulaakin herrat nyt ahkeraan liikkeellä, puheli hän nähtävästi reipastuen. Hänkin oli tullut samaan mielipiteeseen kuin emäntä, että Maija oli tehnyt valintansa erittäin onnistuneesti.
Kerä koetti hymyillä isännälle, samalla tuntien kovin tukalaksi olonsa.
Hän viittasi Naukkusta seuraamaan mukanaan ulos ja pihamaalle päästyään selitti tälle vaikean asemansa, pyytäen veljellistä vaiteliaisuutta Naukkuselta.
— Ukko on sitten nähtävästi minunkin suhteeni erehtynyt. Tein hänen kanssaan kerran metsäkauppoja, ja hän luulee minun vielä liikkuvan samoilla asioilla. Olkoon menneeksi. Ollaan sitten tukkiherroja. Paremman kestityksen laittaa ukko meille.
Herrat menivät tupaan ja jatkoivat isännän kanssa keskeytynyttä keskustelua.
Kerä oli luullut saavansa ainakin vähän aikaa rauhassa nauttia
Seppälän vierasvaraisuutta, mutta siinä hän auttamattomasti erehtyi. Kuivalan kylälle oli Kerä leiponut kokonaista kolme kappaletta Näreen asiamiehiä, aavistamatta, että nämä kerran tulisivat aiheuttamaan hänelle hyvin vakavia selkkauksia. Yksi asiamies oli räätäli Kinnunen, toinen suutari Horttanainen ja kolmas Rämekorvan nuori isäntä Huttunen. Kuultuaan, että Kerä oli saapunut Seppälään, päättivät nämä asiamiehet lähteä miehissä tervehtimään päällikköään. Heissä oli herännyt tyytymättömyys Näreyhtiöön monistakin syistä ja varsinkin siitä, että heille luvattiin suuria palkkioita, vaan niiden suorittaminen viipyi ihmeteltävästi.
Kun herrat juttelivat tuvassa isännän kanssa astuivat Kinnunen, Horttanainen ja Huttunen tupaan. Kerän hiukset nousivat pystyyn ja hän istui kuin ukkosen lyömänä. Hänen onneton hetkensä oli nyt varmasti ja peruuttamattomasti tullut. Vaikka tilanne näyttikin toivottomalta, koetti hän siitä suoriutua mahdollisimman vähällä aikoen mennä ulos ja suoriutumalla tielle välttää ainakin kohtauksen tulevan appensa kanssa. Räätäli Kinnunen huomasi ensiksi tämän päällikkönsä pakosuunnitelman.
— Meillä olisi vähän tarkastajalle asiaa. Istukaahan paikoillanne, virkkoi hän. Kun te saitte minut ja nämä toisetkin miehet asiamieheksi Näreeseen, niin lupasitte yhdeksät hyvät, kahdeksat kauniit. Mutta nyt olemme hetken työtä tehneet, emmekä mitään saaneet. Ja sen lisäksi tulee meille pääkonttorista alituiseen muistutuksia huonosta hankinnasta ja kehoituksia reippaampaan työhön. Mutta minä annan perhanat koko Näreyhtiölle, enkä pane tikkua ristiin tästä päivästä lähtien sen yhtiön edesauttamiseksi.
Suutari Horttanaisen piikkiparta oli liikahdellut vihaisesti räätäli Kinnusen puheen tahdissa ja nyt avasi hänkin suunsa ja sanoi.
— Niin en myös minäkään juokse Näreen pikanttina tästä lähtien.
Nyt sanotaan jo vasten naamaa, jos menee tarjoamaan Näreen vakuutusta, että kuka kurja siinä semmoisessa yhtiössä vakuuttaa, joka varmasti tekee kuperkeikan. Nyt näkyy jo Jehvelsunt oikovan koipiaan ja saman se tekee vielä Närekin.
Tuli Huttusen vuoro.
— Tässä olisi herralle nämä paperit itselleen, virkkoi hän tarjoten asioimistopaperinsa Kerälle. Ja ehkenpä herra maksaa nyt meidän vaivamme lupauksensa mukaan.
Kerä toivoi tällä kertaa, että maa olisi auennut ja niellyt Näreen asiamiehet. Mutta nämä istuivat penkillä nauliten hänet katseillaan, joista ei voinut sanoa erikoisesti lempeyden loistavan. Suutari Horttanaisen piikkiparta liikkui hiljaa. Räätäli Kinnunen siirtyi lähemmäksi Kerää, saadakseen hänet paremmin naulita katseillaan.
Isäntä katseli vuoroin herroja ja vuoroin asiamiehiä. Vähitellen näytti asia hänellekin selviävän huomatessaan Kerän vääristyneen naaman.
— No henkivakuutusherrako se tämä sitten onkin? kuului uhkaavasti, ja hänen muotonsa musteni.
— Pitäisikö tämän vielä muutakin olla virkkoi Horttanainen.
— No Rengasyhtiön miehenä tämä on tässä meillä oleksinut.
Ja isäntä naulasi nyt vuorostaan katseellaan Kerän, joka ei näyttänyt kykenevän hänelle selitystä antamaan.
— Vai on tämä puulaakin mieskin, naurahti Kinnunen. Taitaa olla miestä joka lähtöön.
Naukkunen katsoi parhaaksi jo ennakolta lähteä kävelemään, ja ovessa mennessään hän virkkoi ilkamoiden Kerälle.
— Tulehan sitten kun selviät.
Kerä oli hieman tointunut ja naurahteli hermostuneesti, koettaen selitellä asemaansa, mutta isäntä oli noussut jo seisomaan ja hänen partaisesta naamastaan kuului karjahdus.
— Korjaa nyt heti luusi siitä, jos aiot ne viedä ehjinä tästä talosta.
Kerä nousi, mutisten mennessään.
— Vielä minä kerran tulen, ja silloin meistä tuleen oikein hyvät ystävät.
