But Now I See: The White Southern Racial Conversion Narrative

Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History

by Fred Hobson

The term “conversion narrative” usually refers to a particular form of expression that arose in Puritan New England in the seventeenth century. In that sense―the purely religious―the conversion narrative belongs to a rather remote history. But in this lucid, pathbreaking work, Fred Hobson uses the expression in another sense―in the realm of the secular―to describe a much more recent phenomenon, one originating in the American South and marking a new mode of southern self-expression not seen until the 1940s.


Hobson applies the term “racial conversion narrative” to several autobiographies or works of highly personal social commentary by Lillian Smith, James McBride Dabbs, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, Sarah Patton Boyle, Will Campbell, Larry L. King, Willie Morris, Pat Watters, and other southerners, books written between the mid-1940s and the late 1970s in which the authors―all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society―confess racial wrongdoings and are “converted,” in varying degrees, from racism to something approaching racial enlightenment. Indeed, the language of many of these works is, Hobson points out, the language of religious conversion―“sin,” “guilt,” “blindness,” “seeing the light,” “repentance,” “redemption,” and so forth. Hobson also looks at recent autobiographical volumes by Ellen Douglas, Elizabeth Spencer, and Rick Bragg to show how the medium persists, if in a somewhat different form, even at the very end of the twentieth century.


But Now I See is a study both of this particular variety of the southern impulse to self-examination and of those who seem to have retained the habit of seeking redemption, even if of a secular variety. Departing from the old vertical southern religion―salvation-centered with heaven as its goal―these racial converts embrace a horizontal religion which holds that getting right with man is at least as important as getting right with God.


A refreshingly original treatment of racial change in the South, Hobson’s provocative work introduces a new subgenre in the field of southern literature. Anyone interested in the history and literature of the American South will be fascinated by this searching volume.

176 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

About the author

Dr. Fred Colby Hobson Jr. is an English scholar whose wor focused on the U.S. South. He is a retired Professor of English, most recently at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill.

Hobson received his A.B. in English from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, his M.A. in History from Duke University, and his Ph.D. English from the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill in 1972. Before joining UNC in 1989, Hobson taught at the University of Alabama and Louisiana State University.

Hobson's work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, the Times Literary Supplement, and the Los Angeles Times Book Review. He has written numerous books on American literature and intellectual history.

Reviews

[Leon Gray · Rating 5 out of 5]

SS5H2 The student will analyze the effects of Reconstruction on American life.
Explain how slavery was replaced by sharecropping and how African-Americans were prevented from exercising their newly won rights; include a discussion of Jim Crow laws and customs.

SS5H8 The student will describe the importance of key people, events, and developments between 1950-1975.

Explain the key events and people of the Civil Rights movement; include Brown v. Board of Education (1954), the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the March on Washington, Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and civil rights activities of Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King, Jr.But Now I See gives the reader the opportunity to take a walk with white southern authors down the road of their racial wrongdoing to the moment of awakening.

Fred Hobson’s book contains four (4) well written and organized chapters of white southern racial conversion narratives. Hobson uses the titles in the chapter to symbolize and give a chronological representation of the South’s process of “conversion”, while taking the reader into the experience of “white southern culture” and the transformation of the “Southern” ideology. But Hobson’s brilliance is how he embeds the evolution of the racial conversion narrative.

This would be great for student's to use to write about the southern white perspective regarding slavery, segregation and inequality. Students can explain what caused certain authors road to enlightenment. Students can explain and support the causes of religion, its impact and the different relationships with God? (Horizontal and Vertical)Also students can write creative pieces regarding the treatment of whites who supported the civil rights movement.

Connections: Fred Hobson explores the white southern male psyche with confession narratives from Lilian Smith, James Mcbride Dabbs, Willie Morris, Larry L. King, William Styron and Will Campbell. These narrations give perspectives of the white southern male relationship of religion and redemption. Also gives interpretation of the preservation of “whiteness” and the white male’s duty to protect the white woman. In these confessions the readers has the privilege to see how white southerner males viewed religion, their position and how their ideologies transitioned their relationship to society to enlightenment.

Notable Quote: God intended for the South to be a “pilot project” in human brotherhood”(58)

[Diann Blakely]

Students of Southern culture, pre- and postmodern, might prefer to assemble a year's worth of dulce et utile reading from LSU Press' excellent Southern Literary Studies series, edited by Fred Hobson. His own contribution, BUT NOW I SEE: THE WHITE SOUTHERN RACIAL CONVERSION NARRATIVE, draws some brilliant parallels between the writings of Willie Morris and Lillian Smith, to name two of Hobson's subjects, and those of 17th-century New England Puritans like Cotton Mather and Jonathan Edwards. Last year saw the publication of two more books in the series: THE LEGACY OF ROBERT PENN WARREN, a collection of variously authored essays edited by David Madden, and SEWANEE WRITERS ON WRITING, edited by Wyatt Prunty.














(originally published in the NASHVILLE SCENE)