Performative “Southern Ladyhood” in “The Steps We Take” https://ift.tt/rQlwzfk
The Steps We Take: A Memoir of Southern Reckoning is the first book from seasoned journalist Ellen Ann Fentress. Gathering her experiences of being inculcated into acquiescent ladyhood (which backfired in part due to voracious reading) and of being enrolled in a segregation academy in Mississippi and her dawning awareness of structural racism and sexism became The Steps We Take, detailing her experience of southern ladyhood and the structures that uphold it.
Fentress founded the Academy Stories in 2019 to document the testimonies of graduates of private schools founded in response to desegregation; these schools became known as “segregation academies” and enforced a gulf between white and Black school children that remains to this day. In her book she writes: “We were conscientiously and misguidedly furnished an unbending white universe…The point of our rigid academy schooling and parallel existence was to keep us blind to all beyond it.” Now called “Admissions: Racism and the Possible for Southern Schools,” Fentress has sparked a desperately needed conversation that will inform the public about the past in hopes that it will no longer be repeated.
Chosen as the Great Read for Mississippi at the 2024 National Book Festival in Washington, D.C., The Steps We Take intertwines two of her obsessions: how both the concept of “Southern ladyhood” and racial injustice are systematic structures that have forever shaped the South and are still upheld to this day.
Some of the answers have been edited for clarity.
Your memories are so vividly detailed. How did you summon them when writing your essays? I’m particularly impressed by the entire engaging conversations that you remember from your childhood.
For me memory is like that saying, “Every journey starts with one step.” When you start thinking about an event or a place, it’s only after you start thinking that more floods back. So you have to start, and then you’re going to be surprised. It’s fascinating how much you remember after you get below that first layer. Also, for early chapters of the book, I went back to people who lived the experiences along with me, like people who had gone to the Soup and Salvation homeless shelter in Jackson, or friends who had delivered Meals On Wheels while I smiled and unraveled. [Chuckles.] When I could, I went back to the physical place, my hometown of Greenwood, where I went looking for I-don’t-know-what when I was knocking on doors for March of Dimes. Another way that I rounded up physical details for the book was by checking Newspaper.com for articles and photos of the places. I think the more that you can cement an image that you want to write about, the more memories will come back to you.
Segregation academies are discussed at length in your book, and you launched a website to raise awareness about this form of institutionalized white supremacy in education.One of my relatives co-founded one of these academies in a Birmingham suburb in the early 1970s, and just like you, I never understood the origin of these schools (nor even heard of Emmett Till) until attending college. Can you please explain the origin of the academies for those who may be unfamiliar?
Brown vs. Board of Education was in 1954, and so many schools in Mississippi and throughout the South kicked the can for fifteen years. “With all deliberate speed” meant “never” for so many communities in the South. It all came to a head when thirty-three cases were consolidated and heard before the U.S. Supreme Court in 1969 as Alexander vs. Holmes County Board of Education. That is the case that sealed the deal and said, “You will integrate right now.” That is what led to the academies. People still talk about the “chaos,” at the time. Well, why was it chaotic? [Desegregating Southern schools] was only chaotic because it had been purposefully delayed for fifteen years. There were plenty of success stories of school districts all over the South that complied voluntarily after 1954, such as in Washington, D.C., and even in Meridian, Mississippi. But elsewhere there was an underlying current of “We do not want to desegregate, we are going to justify these academies and having these white spaces.”
How did your personal experience in one of these academies and The Admissions Project impact your writing career?
My work on the academies started in 2019, and [they are] a living, breathing example of Southern history that is very [present]. When people are reluctant to write their stories, most of the time it’s because their parents were active in these schools and it’s hard to write about. It’s one thing to write about the Civil War or Reconstruction, or the neo-confederate monuments at the turn of the twentieth century, but when you’re writing about your family putting you in one of these schools, it’s different.
I was in eighth grade when I was enrolled in a segregation academy. By eighth grade you usually know what’s going on…. There’s a systemic erasure of history, and to me that’s why the Admissions Project is crucial. The stories need to told and be part of history because the people at the academies [that are still operating] are certainly not telling the whole story.
It’s absolutely fascinating to talk to people about how quickly these schools were formed in the 1960s and ‘70s, and within ten years the students and graduates [were unaware of the reason] these schools were formed — the history was erased. Look at the websites of the academies [that are still open] and none of the websites mention that they were founded in reaction to de-segregation. The websites will say something like, “At the time our founders saw a need for a prep school.”
I would love to see some economic studies of the towns where [primarily white private schools] have kept a town polarized. I’ve had people tell me anecdotally they can’t get new industries or new businesses to come to their town because what is the appeal of going to a town where the public schools are not supported by all and there is no diversity, and I can still see that in Mississippi — the towns that are diverse with public schools that reflect that diversity are the towns that are growing. I think that if you can solve Mississippi, you can solve America.
A leitmotif throughout your book is how much volunteering you have done all your life, and how this is a moral and social responsibility that is expected of Southern women far more than to men. How did you come up with the idea of using volunteering as a framing device for your book?
There were several reasons for that, but one of the reasons is that it’s a space for Southern women. [In The Steps We Take,] volunteering shows where I was at various points in my life and the interesting ways that I was trying to push at the system, and also shows what the system thought was an appropriate activity for a Southern woman. We’re not saints. I wasn’t a saint. Yes, we were trying to do volunteer work and hopefully I did no harm, but, at the same time, if this was the space I was in, I wonder now “What was my coinciding ulterior motive? What was I getting out of this?”
Volunteering as a teenager, knocking on doors, I was trying to find a wider world. Looking for romance and looking for a guy when I volunteered at a homeless shelter probably was not the best thing to do. [Laughs.] As wonderful as it is to deliver for Meals on Wheels, I remember thinking, “Why is it that women are charged with it, when it’s something that everyone should be doing?” At the end of the book all my questions add up to, “You know what, instead of getting the best behavior gold star for what society wants me to do, I’m going to pick the project that I think I need to do, and that [became] the Admissions Project.
Another running motif in your book seems to be how much the idea of the “Southern lady” —hospitable, sacrificial, moral — is performative. In The Steps We Take you describe an unforgettable example of this hypocrisy when you describe the behavior of demure Southern ladies at a funeral you once attended. Can you elaborate more on how your dawning awareness of how Southern culture puts tremendous pressure on women to look and behave a certain way?
There’s probably no one in this world that hasn’t been born into a “script,” whatever it is. It’s something that is so easy to see in the South — the script that is handed to a middle-class Southern woman, that tells them how to behave, what is valued and what is not… I’ve heard this statement that a lady never lets a silence fall in a conversation. Wow. I think that’s metaphorical for life, about all the ways that women are supposed to make things look better than they are. It’s good to be upbeat and look for the positive, but not always. I think so much of this idea of the Southern lady is how [we’re supposed to] follow a script.
I’m unsure that I have read a book before yours that subtly and perfectly describes how exhausting to perform “Southern ladyhood,” and also how it prevents critical thinking.Where does the script for Southern ladyhood end and where do you [the reader] begin?
I recently learned that there is an acronym that some therapists use when someone says “I’m fine.” F.I.N.E. You can use “freaked out” except that first letter is something else. [Chuckles.] The “I” is insecure. The “N” is neurotic, and the “E” is emotional. When people come in and say they’re fine the therapist knows they’ve got a live wire on their hands. And doesn’t a Southern woman always say that she’s “fine”? Why isn’t [Southern ladyhood] a diagnosis in the DSM?
I now have to read Mary Ruefle’s Madness, Rack, and Honey after you quoted her lecture about how Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, and Anne Frank had no experience of the world, yet still had “passion for it.” You write about having a similar, extremely sheltered upbringing, and a fierce desire to investigate the world beyond your white, middle-class Mississippi. How do you believe it affected you as an aspiring writer? Did it delay your awareness of racial injustice?
I think it certainly led to my being a writer. I was an only child, often by myself, and the house was full of books and newspapers and to add to that, it was my nature as an introvert to live in my head — all that started me on my way. Reading was my friend and my companion.
My delayed awareness of racial injustice was also from living in a very white world, and now I know the status quo benefited from my not seeing everything around me. One of the things [I write about] in my book and still think about is how the system [of institutionalized racism] benefits from people remaining in their white world and not being aware of the advantages they have.
Here I was in my hometown, mere miles away from where the murder of Emmett Till happened in the ‘50s; it was the birthplace of the man who murdered Medgar Evers, and I never heard mention of it either. I had to be an adult and a reporter in Gulfport till I learned about Till, so that’s an example of [how the system works]: erasure of things that white Southerners don’t want to think about and talk about.
0 Commentaires