Sherry Chandler

On the question of racism

Conservative friends in Texas are offended by the charges of racism in Katrina relief efforts. They feel that Americans in general and Texans in particular have reached out very generously in a color-blind way. And I think we/they have done so. I feel pretty sure that both Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Rita have disrupted Texas society in ways that we can only guess at here in Kentucky, where most of us are virtually untouched by these tragedies.

Few in America would turn away from suffering such as we saw in New Orleans, but that does not absolve us from the charge of racism. I think the nation still struggles with racial prejudice, especially against African-Americans where perhaps our greater guilt plays a role. I know it’s still a struggle for me.

Because Kentucky’s troubled racial history has been a theme of this blog, this seems a good time to bring out a quotation from Robert Penn Warren that I’ve been saving for an appropriate occasion. It’s from his interview in The Paris Review. Note that this was 1957, well before the cataclysmic events of the 1960s.

My essay in I’ll Take My Stand was about the Negro in the South, and it was a defense of segregation. I haven’t read that piece, as far as I can remember, since 1930, and I’m not sure exactly how things are put there. But I do recall very distinctly the circumstances of writing it. I wrote it at Oxford at about the same time I began writing fiction. The two things were tied together — the look back home from a long distance. I remember the jangle and wrangle of writing the essay and some kind of discomfort in it, some sense of evasion, I guess, in writing it, in contrast with the free feeling of writing the novelette Prime Leaf [Ed. Note: the story that formed the core of Night Rider], the sense of seeing something fresh, the holiday sense plus some stirring up of something inside yourself. In the essay, I reckon, I was trying to prove something, and in the novelette trying to find out something, see something, feel something — exist. … Well, it wasn’t being outside the South that made me change my mind. It was coming back home. In a little while I realized I simply couldn’t have written that essay again. I guess trying to write fiction made me realize that. If you are seriously trying to write fiction you can’t allow yourself as much evasion as in trying to write essays.
–from The Art of Fiction No. 18

Interviewed by Eugene Walter
The Paris Review
Issue 16, Spring-Summer 1957

[Addendum: I'll Take My Stand is a collection of essays written by some of those poets and thinkers who made up The Fugitives. The group called themselves The Agrarians, and the collection is a defense of southern agrarianism, but as this Warren quote indicates, the worm at the heart of the rose is slavery and segregation.

It was The Agrarians that Jesse Stuart hoped to join when he went to Vanderbilt in 1931. Hindsight says this may well have been a fortunate fall for Jesse. ]

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Five Years. Racism

A question–

The nature of the short story revisited

On the Question of our Ports

New Growth

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