From Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir:

Although I did not set out to write a book that might allow me to experience a catharsis similar to that which might have been the result of creating a novel, I have discovered that in the process of writing about the South of my youth as well as the older, more traditional South, much has been revealed to me about myself. Though this book began as an effort to present one Southern family in as much of its complexity as I could manage, it has become, in a quite real sense, an effort to understand the South—the land that formed me—and to understand myself.

In some sense, this is a book about home (or homes): that is, it is about the inevitable love of the places and the people that exercised formative influences upon my developing sense of who I was during the growing-up years. Yet it is also about estrangement from that home and a recognition of the profound truth of the assertion of the Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe that "you can't go home again."

Thus I end with an affirmation: Any inclination I have to highlight the negative aspects of my Southern upbringing is inevitably balanced by memories of gentleness, kindness, and a generosity of spirit revealed by countless individuals, both black and white, whose lives intersected with mine during my formative years. Many of those individuals contributed greatly to the self I became and, for good or for ill, that self cannot imagine describing itself as anything but Southern.

*   *   * 

Additional excerpts from the book:

I remember fights with Charlie and the occasion when, at Anne Wingfield Elementary School, I boasted that I regularly "beat up" my older brother. Eager to create a little excitement, the boys in my class immediately produced Charlie, formed a circle with the two of us in the center, and began to shout encouragement to one or the other of us. This bout was rather like the 1937 Joe Lewis-Max Schmelling rematch: It ended in the first round. It ended, in fact, in the first ten seconds. Charlie landed a blow to the head that knocked me cold.

I don't believe that I was prone to rambles about the property in the middle of the night. My nocturnal adventures were limited to a recurring dream that terrified me for years. In this dream I would find myself walking along a lane with towering hedges on either side and a gaping maw, belching huge flames, waiting for me straight ahead. I had to keep walking until I was within feet of this fiery furnace. I always awoke before taking the final steps, but this horrifying experience haunted my dream life night after night.

At the University of Illinois at Chicago, where I taught American literature for more than thirty years, I often told my students in courses on Southern authors that though the town in which I had grown up, Culpeper, Virginia, was about as far as one could get from Oxford, Mississippi, and still be in the South, when I opened a novel by William Faulkner I knew I was home. Located some sixty miles from Washington DC, which was still, in the thirties, the decade of my childhood, a sleepy Southern city, Culpeper was quintessentially Southern. As any Southerner raised in that period might tell you, the three most prominent, most readily observed, features of life in that region were race, religion, and class.

Perhaps the ultimate humiliation for black men-and this one was brutal-was the free-for-all. In Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison provides a chilling dramatization of this degrading spectacle, which was ubiquitous in the South during my early years. A group of young black men, perhaps seven or eight, were paid to enter a boxing ring blindfolded; they then proceeded to flail at anyone they encountered as they wandered about the ring. The white audience would scream encouragements to one or another of the fighters, who often came out of this wild melee with broken bones and bloody lips or ears. Apparently the town's most upstanding white citizens found nothing amiss with such entertainment.

According to Charlie, during Prohibition our Dad and Roger would drive to Rappahannock Count periodically to replenish their store of moonshine. Being the county's commonwealth attorney, Roger considered it a bit unseemly for him to purchase bootleg liquor in Culpeper; moreover, our Dad claimed to know every hollow in Rappahannock and hence to be familiar with the best of the moonshiners in the county. Charlie remembers our father always having a wooden keg of Rappahannock whiskey in the attic, from which he siphoned off the brew into pint or quart bottles using an old enema tube.

I always truly liked Mr. Jenkins, the foreman on our father's farm. I expect that as a child I looked upon him as an "alternative" adult male model, alternative to my father and other men of our social class who professed good middle-class values, expressed, among other ways, through dedication to getting on in the world, rising in their chosen profession, and watching, often obsessively, the rise and fall of the stock market and the inching up of their bank balance. I don't think Willie Jenkins lost one minute of sleep in his eighty-plus years on this earth worrying about such things. He and his wife, Callie, it seemed to me, were like the lilies of the field in the parable of Jesus, totally at home in the world and at peace with their station in life.

Lillian Smith understood traditional Southern society as being grounded in a fundamental culture of alienation. In elevating the Southern lady to an ethereal realm beyond such indelicate and uncontrollable things as sexual passion, Southern men found themselves starved for sensual pleasure and often turned to black women to supply that need (a form of "incest," Smith implied, for it was really the foster mother, the mammy, for whom they longed). For white women, the consequences of this arrangement were equally devastating, as King notes: "White women acquiesced in their progressive desexualization and turned away from their men and their own bodies."

Thus, in a hyperpatriarchal society such as the South where skin color played a central role in assigning personal worth and value, any threat to the purity of blood lines became a threat to the society as a whole. Miscegenation, then, was doubly abhorrent in that it seemed to challenge both the sanctity of the Southern lady and the white South's very image of itself.

*   *   * 

From the author:

Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir is a memoir with a difference. As the title indicates, the major focus of this volume is not an account of my growing up in a small town in rural Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s, but, rather, descriptions of various members of the extended family and of the social dynamics of this very Southern community.

I do, of course, write about my own experiences in the Browning family and in the Culpeper, Virginia community. But the core of the book is a gathering of more than twenty sketches of relatives I knew as a child and adolescent, some exceedingly eccentric, and the Southern ambience which, in a very true sense, created them—and me.

In order to provide a context for my descriptions of cousins, great aunts, grandparents, etc., I have written about the three features of Southern society which, in my judgment, were most distinctive of life in that region of the country during the decades of my youth—race, religion, and class.

My intention has been to offer the reader intimations of how being Southern contributed to the peculiarities of the family members about whom I write, including my parents, and about how class differences, for example, featured in the dynamics of my immediate family, as well as in the lives of several members of the extended family.

Because my maternal grandmother, Cornelia Cabell Stephenson, was descended from two relatively distinguished Virginia families—the Cocke and Cabell families—and because a good deal of primary and secondary material dealing with these families exists at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, several of the sketches are about members of those families. However, because my discussion of my great-great-great-grandfather, General John Hartwell Cocke, and his second wife, Louisa, are of considerable length and are heavily dependent upon secondary sources, these pieces might more accurately be described as essays.

In reflecting upon the ways my own life was shaped by the society in which I was raised, I have stressed four factors:

1) The influence of an often harsh and repressive Calvinist religious milieu characteristic of the entire South, which, while it did not impact me directly (we were Episcopalians and hence less subject to the preaching about sin and damnation which our Baptist neighbors regularly endured), nevertheless had, I believe, a deleterious influence upon my developing sense of self. This was particularly true with respect to my confused feelings about my body and adolescent sexual urges.

2) The major influence of the natural world on my developing sensibilities and ethical values. Living in the country and spending my summers working on my father's farm created in me a deep love of Nature and was profoundly instrumental in shaping the person I became, one passionately committed to the preservation of the Earth and its beauties.

3) The role of my parents' example in their respectful treatment of black people in their employ in shaping my attitudes toward race. The "estrangement" I indicate in the title of this volume grew, in part, out of my difficulty in reconciling my Christian ethical values with racial attitudes and practices in the Jim Crow South of the thirties, forties, and fifties.

4) The presence in the South of my youth of distinctive social classes and the conflicts within my family occasioned by the class differences.