Ecologies of Fear and Violence
In his 2024 travel narrative, A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road, chronicling his 2018 and 1997 journeys through the South, Pete Candler keeps circling back to the horrific torture and lynching of Sam Hoss (Hose) and his family’s complicity in it as well as in the suppression of Blacks through violence and fear. A member of the prestigious Candler family of Georgia, Pete counts military figures, a state governor, a judge, a mayor, and a Coca Cola tycoon, as well as wealthy slave owners among his family. As Candler’s narrative spirals through instances of violence, it creates a helix as it pulls in issues of memory and forgetting marked by the emergence and disappearance of physical memorials, statues, and signs. Exposing the amnesia that erased the ways a pervasive white supremacism used violence to oppress the Black population, Candler takes readers with him on a journey of discovery, of uncovering a past that even this very well-educated white man did not know. Touring the South, he learns of a history of violence that has long been unspoken, forgotten, glossed over by the romantic, self-serving rhetoric of the Lost Cause. He also learns that the memorials and flags he had not attached much meaning to as a privileged white youth speak to African Americans as reminders of that violence and oppression.
The major thread that ties the travel narrative together is the lynching in 1899 of a Black man, Sam Hose/Hoss, and Candler family’s involvement in it. Candler relates W. E. B. DuBois’s reaction to seeing Hose’s knuckles on display in an Atlanta grocery store and how the sight changed his life (30). DuBois’s biographer, David Levering Lewis, summarizes the incident and its effect on him: “In the autobiographical writings, Du Bois underscores a ghastly incident that shook him to his core . . . . the lynching of Sam Hose in April 1899. Hose was a farmer in Palmetto, Georgia, a few miles outside Atlanta, who had shot and killed a white farmer after an argument over a debt. Accounts differ as to whether he raped the wife as her dead husband lay nearby on the kitchen floor. Justice was summary, ghoulish. After lynching and burning Hose to death, the white mob of two thousand men, women, and children had fought over pieces of his flesh for souvenirs.” On an errand to see Joel Chandler Harris, editor of the Atlanta Constitution, “Du Bois was unaware that Hose had been barbequed and that his blackened knuckles were on display in a white store-owner’s window . . . on Mitchell Street. . . . From that moment forward, he recognized that ‘one could not be a calm, cool, and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered, and starved’” (Lewis 162-63).
Candler confesses that he knew nothing about Sam Hose in 1997 when he and his friend made the first of many excursions through the South. As he says, “It would be twenty years before I learned about him” when another friend handed him a book, At the Altar of Lynching by Donald G. Matthews, and said to Pete, “’I think it will interest you. . . . It concerns your family’” (31). His relative Allen Candler, governor of Georgia at the time of the lynching, instead of doing anything to stop the lynching and brutality, put the onus of responsibility on African Americans, saying “’that in order to merit and receive the protection of the community, they must show a willingness to at least aid in protecting the community against the lawless element of their own race’” (33). As Pete reflects, Allen Candler had been “governor during the most notorious lynching in the state’s history. He had done nothing to prevent it and blamed the incident on Black people” (343). Thus begins Pete Candler’s journey to discovering a family history that no one talked about that included the vast slaveholdings of Samuel Candler before the Civil War, efforts to get African Americans removed from the Georgia Senate in 1868, signing a bill to create separate, segregated Pullman cars in 1899, and associations with the United Daughters of the Confederacy and the Ku Klux Klan: “. . . if Milt [Candler] wasn’t a Klansman, he certainly hung out with people who were” (60).
The book then follows Pete through the South, beginning in Georgia, recounting as it does some of the violence that mars the Southern Road. The five Black men lynched in the 1890s and the murder of Timothy Coggins in 1983, purportedly for “’socializing with a white female’” in Griffin, Georgia (38). The horrors of Andersonville, the prison for Union troops during the Civil War (50-51). The shooting of Charlie Ware in 1963 by an Albany, Georgia sheriff (56-57). The deaths of ten or more African Americans and thirty wounded when a group of newly enfranchised Blacks marched from Albany to Camilla in 1868 (58-59). The racial cleansing of Forsyth County in 1912 by the Night Riders after the lynching of three Black men accused of raping two white women and supposedly under the added protection of the Candler Horse Guards led by Pete’s great-grandfather, the same unit that had earlier been called to Palmetto and Newnan during the Sam Hose lynching (335). These events and others punctuate the narrative and Pete’s education in the history of the South and his family’s involvement in it.
He follows similar trajectories in the other Southern states he revisited—the Hamburg and Ellenton, South Carolina massacres of 1876 (115-21), the recent Murdaugh family crimes (131-32), the retaliation by whites to the Denmark Vesey uprising in 1822, the 1955 murder of Emmett Till and violent brutalization of his body in Money, Mississippi (237-257). He stops in Selma, Montgomery, Memphis, and Charleston, cities whose very names are laden with histories of violence, the tensions between remembering and forgetting, and the monuments to the Confederacy that mark and erase violence.
Candler ends his narrative by contemplating what he has learned about memory and story. Thinking about the ways he had watched the popular television show The Dukes of Hazzard, its signature car, the General Lee, emblazoned with the rebel flag, and the Laser show at Stone Mountain which featured images of Robert E. Lee, Jefferson Davis, and Stonewall Jackson riding their horses into the ephemeral night, he understands “just how immune my generation of privileged white kids had become to the language and mythology of the Confederacy” (334). He also understands that while his family’s apparent amnesia about their role in the oppression of Black people, and “the special kind of amnesia that official, legislated memory intends to induce” (90), African Americans remember the stories of “white brutality” as a matter of survival (342).
This is something that as a Southern Black man in the 1920-30s, during a resurgence of violence against Blacks, Richard Wright and his characters in Uncle Tom’s Children (1938) knew only too well. One of the stories in the volume, “Big Boy Leaves Home,” illustrates how the arbitrary violence of the unexpected, the fear that any moment can turn violent as a way of oppression, keeps Blacks powerless and Whites under the thrall of violence. This story and others in the collection illustrate the ways that violence supports social geometries of power, place, and mobility in terms of who gets to go where.
Wright brings readers into the minds and emotions of characters caught in untenable positions of danger to witness and vicariously feel the panic, fear, confusion, and determination of people caught in the most difficult of situations. Moving the story to its end at a pace that imitates the suddenness of violence even in idyllic retreats, Wright demonstrates how a seemingly innocent moment can quickly turn deadly. The Black community’s inability to escape violence and the psychic harm it brings are iterated and mirrored in the multiple retellings of the brutal scene that initiates the action of the story.
The story begins with Big Boy and his three friends, Lester, Bobo, and Buck, adolescent boys who have skipped school for a day in the woods, playing a game of dozens, taunting and teasing each other as they show off their verbal prowess. They begin a ditty about someone’s mama and then search for a word that rhymes with hall, suggesting “call,” “fall,” “wall,” and “quall”
“Yo mama don wear no drawers,
Ah seena when she pulled em off,
N she washed em in alcohol,
N she hung ‘em out in the hall”
This careless moment of boyhood, suggested by the warmth of the sun, the sound of the train headed north with corresponding dreams of a future where Blacks “got ekual rights” and their boyish wrestling is disrupted when they decide to go into “ol man” Harvey’s swimming hole (28).
They know the potential for danger, that Harvey does not allow Blacks to swim in this hole, that it is marked with a “no trespassing” sign, and that the previous year Harvey shot at Bob for swimming in it. But like reckless adolescent boys or because violence and its threats are so woven into their understanding of life as a southern Black, they decide to take a chance. At first all seems fine like the landscape that Wright paints, that is alive with a hovering butterfly, a droning bee, the sweet smell of honeysuckles, sparrows twittering, and the warmth of the sunshine. This moment of innocence, of careless enjoyment of youth and nature, is disrupted when the naked boys see a white woman.
Instantly they know the danger they are in and try to run to their clothes. Instead of seeing the peculiar predicament the boys are in, instead of allowing them to get their clothes and leave, the woman panics and screams for Jim, Mr. Harvey’s son who has returned from the army with plans to marry her. And instead of warning the boys that they were trespassing or allowing them to gather their clothes and leave, Jim shoots: “CRACK! Lester grunted, stiffened, and pitched forward” (30-31). In an instant, a boy is dead and then another, “CRACK! Buck stopped . . . his head jerked backward, his body arched stiffly to one side; he toppled headlong . . .” (30-31). Just like that, two boys are dead, and the two remaining boys, Bobo and Big Boy, must get out of this situation. Trading violence for violence, they jump the white man. In the melee, Big Boy gets ahold of the rifle and the unthinkable happens: “CRACK!” He shoots and kills the white man.
Not only have the boys transgressed by skipping school and swimming in a creek forbidden to them, but their naked bodies have been perceived by the white woman as a threat at a time when looking askance at a white woman or speaking familiarly to her could get a Black man or boy in extreme danger. On top of this, they have assaulted and killed a white man. The boys know the danger they are in: “’They’s gonna lynch us,’” Bobo sobs over and over as they run for home (33).
In the space of three pages, three people are dead, so quickly that the casual reader blinks, astounded, and must go back over the passage to understand what happened. Wright’s pacing in this scene suggests the arbitrariness of violence, how a simple moment can suddenly turn dangerous. The repeated, capitalized “CRACK!” loudly punctuates the suddenness of the violence and the inability, unwillingness for Black and White to communicate with each other, falling back instead on what both groups have been taught-- fear, panic, and violence.
When Big Boy makes it home, he tells his mother what has happened; she reacts by saying, “Lawd Gawd in Heaven, have mercy on us all! This is mo trouble, mo trouble” (36). She knows that not only is her son in danger, but that the larger group, “us all,” is susceptible to the vengeful violence sure to come. Wright has Big Boy retell the story to his father, who sends word out to the leaders of the Black community to gather at his home and tells them the story of what happened at the creek. More than mere repetition of what the reader already knows, this retelling illustrates that the fear of violence is individual (to Big Boy), to the family (whose house will be burned), and to the community that is likely to be swept up in a flood of violence. Threatened together, they cooperatively work to secret Big Boy out of the region in a truck that Sanders’ son will drive to Chicago for the Magnolia Express Company in the morning. All of this occurs within an hour of Big Boy’s running home.
The fears multiply in this story when Big Boy runs to hide in one of the kilns dug into the side of the hill overlooking the train tracks where he and his friends had played. As he runs, he imagines the bloodhounds of an earlier day after him. A “sharp sense of danger” keeps him running: “He ran faster, gripped in terror” of the mob surely behind him (46). When he finds the kiln that will suit him, a six-foot rattlesnake slithers out. Faced with a new danger and threat to his survival, Big Boy clenches his teeth, beating and pounding the snake until it lay still. Once safely inside the hole, the dusk rising, a bird floating, a wasp droning as he chewed a blade of grass (48), Big Boy reviews the incident, blaming himself for skipping school and imagining other possible outcomes and reactions. Why didn’t Jim just curse them out and let them go? He also imagines himself with a gun, making a last desperate, heroic stand against the white mob, taking control imaginatively of his own death (50-51).
As he hides, curled up inside the kiln, he overhears the viciousness of the mob, “We oughta kill ever black bastard in this country!” and how they drove his parents out of their shack and set it on fire. He hears white fears about Black sexual transgressions, “Ef they git erway notta woman in this town would be safe.” And then he hears them gathering supplies to tar and feather and then set afire his friend Bobo, as if violence were a game. Big Boy and the reader hear and witness the cruelty and inhumanity of the lynching, the hard laughter, the way torture is a spectator sport as whites jockey for view and a hand in the lynching, as men and women sing, “We’ll hang ever nigger t a sour apple tree,” and the mob rushes to grab for “SOURVINEERS”—a finger, the ears. And then Bobo’s screams and the sight of his “writhing white mass gradually growing black” (56-57). As the events unfold, Big Boy goes from a visceral fear with clamped teeth, sweaty forehead and dry throat to numbness: “He had no feelings now, no fears. He was numb, empty. . .” (57). After all this horror, narrated by the voices of the mob and witnessed by Big Boy, a dog comes sniffing around his hiding place. And in one last episode of violence, Big Boy wrestles and smothers the dog. The shooting by the creek, the torture and lynching, all happened within a matter of hours.
Though Big Boy uses violence against others as a matter of survival, against Jim, the snake, and the dog, he remains caught in a cycle of viciousness and fear learned from the whites and from the oppressive situation of the South. Turning to violence as a first response, the communities in this story are oppressed and strangled by a status quo of power that prevents emotional and civil progress toward cooperation and respect. It is a learned violence driven by fear of lynchings or of incursions into what the hegemony claims, symbolized by white women’s bodies. It dehumanizes the whites as they brutalize the Blacks; neither the Blacks nor the white lower classes are free from exploitation, as Wright’s communism would teach him. Although the story ends with Big Boy safely ensconced in the truck, headed north, asleep finally, neither the reader nor Wright can imagine that he will be treated as an equal in the north or that he will be able to escape the cycle of violence.
Although Wright might have written Uncle Tom’s Children as a form of protest fiction (as Harriet Beecher Stowe’s seminal Uncle Tom’s Cabin was meant to be) to highlight the oppression and violence faced by Blacks in the South, his is not the only or the first text to do so. Racial violence has long been a theme and deep, underlying current in Southern literature, from the beginning of slavery to the present day. Seeking to understand what it means to be an American, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur recounts his 18th-century travels and observations of the emerging nation. Traveling south to Charleston, he encounters “a Negro, suspended in [a] cage,” his eyes picked out by birds and his body covered with wounds caused by the birds and insects come to feast on the dying man (323). This is one of the most horrifying, haunting scenes of violence against enslaved Black people in literature, leaving Crèvecoeur “suddenly arrested by the power of affright and terror; [his] nerves . . . convulsed” (324). Unfortunately, it is not the only scene of violence against Blacks. Slave narratives of the 19th century, written to protest slavery and advocate for its abolition, often depicted scenes of violence to convince their Northern readers that slavery was indeed horrific and not the idyll of contented servants in a paternalistic society. One of these narratives, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, illustrates the persistent violence against women, scenes of beatings and torture, and a rampaging white community stirred by fear of a Black uprising after Nat Turner’s insurrection. In it she claims, “I was subjected to such insults as no pen can describe. . . . Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more terrible for women” (77) because of the sexual abuse and rapes that women endured. The willful viciousness against his Aunt Hester became Frederick Douglass’s introduction to the realities of life as an enslaved person. He relates that watching as a young boy his half-naked Aunt Hester being beaten, whipped, “the first of a long series of such outrages,” was “the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass” (28). The themes of physical, sexual, and mental aggression and brutality that bind slave narratives unfold in mid-twentieth-century fiction that depicts life in the Jim Crow South as Richard Wright relates in Uncle Tom’s Children and William Faulkner does in Light in August, which braids stories of violence against Blacks and women in his telling of the Southern story.
Despite the calm placidity of the frame of the novel as Lena Grove enters and later leaves Jefferson and the kindness of Byron Bunch, William Faulkner’s Light in August is rife with violence. Marked by physical and psychological force against women, children, and African Americans, the novel exposes the brutality inherent in a Christianity for which the crucifixion is a key symbol and the ferocity of a remembered past manifested by “galloping cavalry” (53) and “the old spilled blood and the old horror and anger and fear” (41). In Investigating Desire, Violence and Divinity in Modern Southern Fiction Gary M. Ciuba, following René Girard, argues that “imitative desire, bloodshed, and religion have long been intertwined in the South” (4). As Light in August illustrates, “Violence and religion have supported each other in the South” because “it never completely renounced the divine wrath” of God and the “religion of the Lost Cause” (Ciuba 34, 43). Because of these dual heritages, an ecology of cyclical desire and violence, of sacrifice, keeps repeating itself in the brutalities of slavery, the Civil War, post-Reconstruction violence, and the lynchings of the Jim Crow 20th century.
Christianity and violence mix in the fanatical preaching of the Reverend Gail Hightower, the ravings of Doc Hines, and the discipline of Mr. McEachern, and in the modern crucifixions, lynchings, and intimidations against perceived transgression the novel exposes. Hightower, who “couldn’t get religion and that galloping cavalry and his dead grandfather shot from the galloping horse untangled from each other” (53), reenacts the viciousness of war in his dealings with his wife, squaring off against the needs of her soul and body, and toward the church that rejected him. The “carelessly masked men” from his church who went to his house and ordered him to fire the Negro woman who continued to cook for him after his wife committed suicide and then to demand he fire the Negro man who took over the cooking chores, reenact cycles of perceived transgressions of gender and race and the vicious repercussions from the community. Not content with these warnings, the men of the K.K.K. tied Hightower to a tree and beat him unconscious in an unholy reenactment of the crucifixion (62). Later, listening at his window to the “sonorous tones” of the church organ, the “Protestant music,” in the wake of the murder of Joanna Burden and the pending lynching of Joe Christmas, Hightower muses on his own history, “his own environed blood” and the inescapable joining of religion and violence, of the impulse to crucify: “Pleasure, ecstasy, they cannot seem to bear: their escape from it is in violence, in drinking and fighting and praying; catastrophe too, the violence identical and apparently inescapable. . . . in whose crucifixion they too will raise a cross” (322).
Old Doc Hines, Joe’s fanatical grandfather, preached lynching on the street corner, “telling the people how he had grandfathered the devil’s spawn” (392), joined in his crazed mind the fight against the devil with his fight against his family, the transgressive daughter who bore the child, the circus man, either Mexican or Negro, who fathered it, and Joe, who would murder his lover, as if Hines were somehow responsible for the violence Joe committed. Expiating his own guilt, he beats the captive Joe with his stick, shouting, “’Kill the bastard! . . . Kill him. Kill him’” (302). Even when he preached in Negro churches around the county, interrupting their services, Hines wore about him “that quality of outworn violence like a scent, and odor; that fanaticism like a fading and almost extinct ember, of some kind of twofisted evangelism which had been one quarter violent conviction and three quarters physical hardihood” (301).
And the sternly righteous McEachern, Joe’s adoptive father, mixed violence with religion as he brutally tried to shape the growing boy. On the Sunday that Joe remembered as the day he became a man, McEachern demanded that the eight-year-old learn the Presbyterian catechism. When he does not, McEachern uses repeated beatings with a harness strap to control the stubborn boy: “Carefully and deliberately McEachern laid the book upon the ledge and took up the strap. He struck ten times,” continuing this routine for the rest of the day (132). Other beatings during his youth, carried out deliberately, with deliberation, continued until Joe’s body became like wood or stone or a cage (139, 144). What Joe learns is not religion or righteousness or truth telling but the uses of violence in dealings with others. In his last confrontation with his adopted father, Joe kills McEachern with a chair brought down on the head of the older man (178).
Not knowing other ways of dealing with his anger and confusions, Joe turns on others. Confused about sex and women’s bodies, when it was his turn with the Negro girl who had been gangbanged by the other boys, Joe “kicked her hard, kicking into and through a choked wail of surprise and fear. . . . none of them knew why he had fought. And he could not have told them” (137-38). And when Bobbie, the waitress he was interested in, can’t explain the “sickness” that prevented her from having sex with him, he strikes her in his embarrassment of not knowing what she meant (164). The next Monday, when he meets her again, Joe “half carried and half dragged” Bobbie into the woods (165). Thereafter, their relationship is punctuated by violence. In one episode when he suspects she is seeing another man, “He struck her, without warning, feeling her flesh. . . He struck her again” and again, crying, “cursing her, striking her” (173), not understanding his own emotions and the reality of Bobbie’s trysts.
The other relationships in the novel fare no better, governed as they are by men suspicious and afraid of women’s sexuality and agency: Mrs. McEachern is cowed by a husband who commands, “Kneel down. Kneel down. KNEEL DOWN, WOMAN”; Mrs. Hightower committed suicide in a Memphis hotel; and Mrs. Hines lived with the brutally fanatic man who shot dead their daughter’s lover, allowed their daughter to die in childbirth, and secreted the baby away (332). Most troubling is the relationship between Joe and Joanna, one marked by sex games and control, until finally Joanna loses control over time, becoming an old woman bent on rescuing the Black Joe. When Miss Burden proposes the Black college to Joe, he feels insulted and exchanged blows with her: “She struck him, at once, with her flat hand . . . He struck with his fist” (242). Understanding the impasse of time and wills, Joanna says, “Maybe it would be better if we both were dead’” (243), joining in their deaths the history of “the old spilled blood” (41). In their last encounter, they meet, each with their weapon of choice, the old gun for Joanna and the razor for Joe: “He stood over the bed. He held the razor in his hand.” She held “an old style, single action, cap-and-ball revolver almost as long and heavier than a rifle” (246-47; 250).
After the town finds her house on fire and Joanna Burden “’ lying on the floor. Her head had been cut pretty near off’” (79), suspicion and blame turn on race. Even before they had an actual suspect, the townspeople believed that “it was an anonymous negro crime committed not by a negro but by Negro” and began “to canvass about for someone to crucify” (251-252), for a scapegoat to pay for the crime. After Brown/Lucas Burch, Joe’s accomplice in bootlegging, is arrested, he solidifies that suspicion when he complains, “’Accuse the white man and let the nigger go free.’” Now the town has the rationale they need to crucify Joe, bolstered by the belief in some depravity inherent in Black blood. In the end, Joe is arrested and then killed by the mob led by Percy Grimm: “’That nigger, Christmas. They killed him’” (387). In the showdown at Hightower’s home, “It was as though he [Christmas] had set out and made his plans to passively commit suicide” (388); “He crouched behind that overturned table and let them shoot him to death, with that loaded and unfired pistol in his hand” (394). Not content with the murder of Joe, Grimm castrates him: “Then Grimm too sprang back, flinging behind him the bloody butcher knife. ‘Now you’ll let white women alone, even in hell’” (407). Using the supposed violence against white women, emblems of the Lost Cause that men both protected and violated, Grimm and the mob find a justification for reenacting the violence of history, of the “galloping cavalry” (53).
As he lies a bloody mess on the floor, his dying look “soaring into their memories forever and ever” (407), a victim and perpetrator of violence and a sacrifice to a culture of violence, as his name J. Christ(mas) suggests, Joe is a scapegoat for memory and the cycle that is not expiated but rather repeated through time. Indeed, he has been a scapegoat all along for the guilt and sins of others, his supposed Black blood enough to blame him and release the white community from their crimes. The dashing soldier of the Civil War that Hightower imagines is replaced by the inconsequent Percy hoping to make his name by mutilating a Black man. The violence against women that is somehow justified by calling them whores continues an age-old tactic of patriarchal power over women. The violence against the “other” in the ancient rites of sacrifice that Girard relates takes on new meaning in the Jim Crow South as power relations in the novel are sustained, not atoned, by an ecology of violence and brutality.
From Crèvecoeur through Harriet Jacobs and William Faulkner to Pete Candler, violence snakes its way into and wraps itself around the stories and narratives of the South. Most starkly and unrelentingly the story of the South’s violence against the bodies and souls of Black men and Black women is wound into the literature of the South and continues to be recounted in a current reimagining by contemporary author Jesmyn Ward. Her novel, Let Us Descend, a story of enslaved women’s strength, resilience, and community, a story of women warriors, pits the protagonist, Annis, against the violence and dehumanization of a Southern version of Dante’s hell. The novel conveys the violence that seeks to undo her and the other women in the novel: the rapes that “stalked and violated” her mother and threatened Annis (11); the physical hardships of labor--“the work wrings me to ropes. The walking, lifting, throwing, washing, clearing, and trudging pare my face. I am less” (240); the starvation that “hollows” her (240); “the horrors of the long walk” (115) to the slave markets of New Orleans; the hard-heartedness that leaves her starved for kindness and separates generations of children from their mothers; and the punishments that include being buried in the hole, “a wedged coffin” lined with wooden stakes in the dark, dank Louisiana soil (158).
Despite all the hardships and violence that contrive to undo her, Annis ascends from the hole of enslavement and escapes on a raft of branches to a refuge in the natural world where she can grow the seed within her and imaginatively hear the singing of her mother and grandmother on the ship of the heavens (299). Sustained and prodded by the spirit of Mama Aza who wraps Annis in her fogs and winds, by the memories of her mother and her mother’s mother, Annis escapes the violence and loneliness of enslavement to find a place for herself, a place where she can be herself. Despite the brutalities of slavery, Ward’s novel is, finally, an eco-feminist novel. Celebrating a sensual ecology that joins the environment, love, and spirit against the hard systems of patriarchy and capitalism, Let Us Descend is in many ways the quintessential Southern novel. Capturing the tensions between a lush land and the desire for power and profit that turns it and the people who inhabit it into objects, this novel reminds us of ongoing violences and the brave efforts to resist and rise above them.
Works Cited
Candler, Pete. A Deeper South: The Beauty, Mystery, and Sorrow of the Southern Road. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2024.
Ciuba, Gary M. Desire, Violence, and Divinity in Modern Southern Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.
Crèvecoeur, J. Hector St. John, Letters from an American Farmer. In The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter Seventh Edition, edited by Nina Baym, et. al. New York: W. W. Norton, 2008, pp. 310-324.
Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of an American Slave Written by Himself (1845). Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960.
Faulkner, William. Light in August. New York: The Modern Library, 1932.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987.
Lewis, David Levering. W. E. B. DuBois: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2009.
Ward, Jesmyn. Let Us Descend. New York: Scribner, 2023.
Wright, Richard. “Big Boy Leaves Home.” In Uncle Tom’s Children (1940). New York: Harper Perennial, 1993.