SUMMER SNOW:
Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South
by
Trudier Harris

Trudier Harris will tell you that African Americans who consider them selves Southern are about as rare as summer snow. But Harris, a widely respected critic of African-American literature and a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, has always embraced the South.

Now, in a collection of essays entitled SUMMER SNOW: Reflections from a Black Daughter of the South, Harris celebrates the southern black culture that shaped her and explores what it means to be a black "Southerner;" to abhor the South's history of violent racism while embracing the place where her family has lived, loved, and prospered. "The South is not paradise," she muses, "but it's not the devil's home base either."

From stories about her mother's fishing and snake-killing exploits to a stinging examination of the daily racism she experiences as a college professor at a predominantly white university, Harris weaves personal narrative through an exploration of social issues. She brings alive the black culture that had such a profound impact on forming her: the local school where vigilant black teachers demanded high performance; the neighborhood busy body who kept her eye on everyone's children; the front porches where the gossip of the day provided constant entertainment; and the small Baptist church, where, Harris notes, "some people sang and everyone else hollered."

She remembers, too, the "cotton-pickin' authority" claimed by the community's elders who measured all complaints from children against the hardship of picking cotton, which was, writes Harris, a "touchstone, an ever-ready reference point to delineate the distinctions between then and now, between mind-numbing labor and the possibility of moving to a different level of existence."

Throughout the essays in SUMMER SNOW, Harris offers a penetrating analysis of race and class from the perspective of someone who has traveled the bumpy road from working class descendent of cotton pickers to college professor. She writes of the emotional challenges of her first nonblack educational environment and of the alienation inherent in being a "black nerd," of how the "pigmentocracy" of her high school in the 1960's favored light-skinned blacks in everything from school performances to college admissions, and how married black male professors at historic black colleges routinely had affairs with poor female students in exchange for financial rewards. "Was this any different," she asks, "from the prostitution that white men wanted from us?"

Harris also analyses the overt and subtle forms of racism she's experienced, both as a child in the segregated South and as an adult working at a southern university. She discusses, for instance, the countless small but powerful manifestations of racism in her daily life, from the colleagues who only acknowledge her in "legitimate" gatherings to the exaggerated gratitude she is sure to get from one or two white people when she attends a college reception or lecture. "The subtext," she writes, "is always, 'This is our gathering. Be thankful that we let you in.'"

Ultimately, though, Harris claims her identity as a "Southerner." Making this claim, says Harris, does not mean embracing racism and the flying of the Confederate flag. It does mean, she writes, that she defends the South as a good place to live; the place where her barely educated father was able to buy a farm and hold onto it; the place where she managed to become well-educated, where her family has moved from working class to middle class, from driving horses and wagons to driving Mercedes and Lexuses. Of the South, she muses, "you just keep thinking that if you nurture it enough, tinker with it enough, the results will, one day, be absolutely stunning."

About the Author
Trudier Harris is the author of numerous books, including Saints, Sinners, Saviors: Strong Black Women in African American Literature and Fiction and Folklore: The Novels of Toni Morrison. She is currently a professor of English at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

April 24, 2003 $24.00 cloth

0-8070-7254-0