In the final chapter of Sisters and Rebels, Jacquelyn Dowd Hall quotes directly from a 1974 diary entry penned by Grace Lumpkin, one of the book’s protagonists:
“A Jacquelyn Hall [had written] from Chapel Hill, N.C., asking if I would let her come & interview me for a job she is doing on ‘Southern Oral History’ whatever that is.” (483)
From there, Dowd Hall’s own recollections of her visit to speak with Lumpkin, the content of their interviews, as well as Lumpkin’s diary entries and correspondence to family members, is woven together to paint a portrait of the last decade of Lumpkin’s life. That tapestry of sources is what made Sisters and Rebels so compelling to me — even if at times, overwhelming– and set it apart from other texts that utilize oral histories that I have encountered thus far.
Sisters and Rebels chronicles the life of Grace and her two sisters Elizabeth and Katherine, all of whom were raised in Columbia, South Carolina at the turn of the century by a family steeped in a deep allegiance to the Old South. William Lumpkin, the girls’ father, was himself raised in Georgia in a family that held hundreds of enslaved people in bondage over generations. The onset of the Civil War and Reconstruction completely unmoored and engendered an undying resentment within William, who fell into financial precarity shortly after the war’s end. While Lumpkin never found financial success in his adult life, he did relocate his family to Columbia where he remade his own image as a Confederate veteran, a Lost Cause champion, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan. Dowd Hall focuses on William’s three daughters because of their divergent paths in adulthood and how they would come to understand their own Southern identity in remarkably different ways. While the oldest, Elizabeth, maintained her allegiance to the Lost Cause narrative and became a teacher and later attorney who remained in the South, Grace and Katherine would move to the Northeast after college, develop a robust critique of their Southern roots, and become deeply engaged in labor organizing and interracial coalitions. Perhaps most fascinatingly however is that while Katherine, an academic, remained consistent in her leftist politics until her death, Grace completely retreated by the 1950s. Amidst the rise of McCarthyism, Grace eschewed her ties to the Communist Party, found a new home amongst conservative Christian organizations, and veered to the far right, ultimately returning to the South.
As a graduate student, Dowd Hall encountered the story of the Lumpkin sisters when she stumbled upon Katharine’s 1946 autobiography The Making of A Southerner, where Lumpkin recounts her childhood, her father’s membership in the Ku Klux Klan, and critiques white supremacy and Southern antebellum nostalgia. Dowd Hall’s interest in the Lumpkin sisters endured into the early 1970s when she was helping to establish UNC Chapel Hill’s Southern Oral History Program. By the time she reached out to interview the sisters, Elizabeth had already passed away, and as such, the bulk of the text focuses on Grace and Katherine. That focus is also bolstered however, by the fact that Grace and Katherine were writers themselves whose works provides a wellspring of information about not just the facts of their lives but how their perception of those facts shifted over time and were heavily inflected by the politics of the moment and the nature of memory.
In addition to The Making of a Southerner, Grace also penned 4 novels and a screenplay, all of which were fiction but heavily based on her personal life, almost all of them having characters with direct corollaries to individuals in her own social world. These sources add so much to the story that Dowd is telling in that they are able to round out the interviews she captured in a number of ways. For Grace, who by the time she sat down with Dowd Hall had already come to dismiss a significant portion of her life (ie, those decades where she was deeply engaged with leftist organizing) these writings shed light on what her interior world looked like at that time. For Katherine, such written sources– particularly articles she penned while an undergraduate student at Brenau College– shed light on her sexual identity. This, in particular, was an aspect of her life that was in some ways open, as she lived with female romantic partners well into her final years, and yet was not one that she spoke to Dowd Hall about candidly. “For her, as with Grace,” Dowd Hall writes, “the anticommunism and homophobia of the 1950s had dropped a curtain between then and now.”
The sheer length of these women’s lives (Grace passed away at age 89; Katherine at age 90) as well as their complexity, make it such that the oral histories collected by Dowd Hall are at once invaluable and incredibly incomplete. Hall’s acknowledgement of that early on is really grounding and admirable, and it also bestows her with an odd (and I would imagine burdensome) authority around how those blanks are filled in. Writing about Grace in particular, Hall says: “Although I was grateful to have met her, I saw the impossibility, even treachery, of basing my vision of her life on this encounter in her later years….At the same time, I try to save her from herself by documenting the convictions and creativity of her earlier years.” (5) The idea that one dimension of Grace needs saving from another only reminds me of how much we change over the course of a life and how the oral histories we capture are far less of a complete portrait of a life and more of a simple snapshot. That snapshot may reveal far less about the life story collected than the moment in which it is captured.