Spencer’s generation of Southern writers, born in the 1920s after the fact of William Faulkner and the Agrarians, have one way or another put down their pens: Ellen Douglas, Truman Capote, James Dickey, William Styron, and the two ladies who are still with us, Shirley Ann Grau and Harper Lee. If Flannery O’Connor were still alive today she would be 88, younger than Elizabeth Spencer. When Spencer reports in her memoir that their housekeeper declined to do laundry for a white woman and then was beaten with a board with nails in it by the woman’s husband for “sassing” his wife, or when Spencer imagines a bothersome white girl tagging behind a black sharecropper in her 1957 story “The Little Brown Girl,” a man yoked to the plow behind two mules, these are not hand-me-down folk memories but things she herself witnessed in post–World War I Mississippi. Spencer has written that, even for her generation, the end of the Civil War constituted “A.D.” Aside from the occasional secessionist crank, who in this generation—150 years on from Appomattox—really feels that?
Posted on: Tue, 04 Feb 2014 04:26:53 +0000
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