Living with Jim Crow. By Anne Valk and Leslie Brown, eds. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. 176 pp. + xiii, appendices, notes, index.

Those who enjoyed Kathryn Stockett’s novel The Help can supplement it with real-life stories mined from Duke University’s Beyond the Veil oral-history collection. The book’s subtitle reveals what we get: African American Women and Memories of the Segregated South.

Scholars have long realized that Henry Grady’s 1877 “New South” speech was one of history’s cruelest linguistic hoaxes when applied to race relations; the only thing “new” in the South were the ways whites devised to terrorize, disenfranchise, and impoverish newly freed black men and women. Another of history’s deceptions involves its reporting of “landmark” civil-rights laws. As the women in Living with Jim Crow reveal, life often went on as if Brown v. the Board of Education or the 1964 Civil Rights Act never happened. Theirs is a portrait of coping, surviving, and (occasionally) thriving, despite all the racist obstacles in their way. Not to mention the sexist obstacles; the subjects of this book speak knowingly (and often naturally) of the “double burden” of being black and female. Male patriarchy, it would seem, was about the only thing in the Deep South that was truly color-blind.

Valk and Brown divide the interviews into five categories: being a child in the Jim Crow South, gender role expectations and sexuality, work, black cultural and institutional life, and the battle for social change. Of these, the section on black culture is the strongest, as we see women more as actors than as victims. We also see a very different kind of duality than the one posed by gender: the existence of a parallel universe inside the South in which black churches, beauty parlors, clubs, stores, and neighborhoods appear as “protective public places” (113) beyond the considerably long reach of white power.

This book would make a fine companion in an undergraduate history or literature survey. Its revelatory power for scholars is considerably weaker, however. The interviews contained in this book were collected more than two decades ago. In fact, Valk, now an associate director of Brown University’s Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage, and Brown, an associate professor of history at Williams College, worked on the Beyond the Veil project when they were graduate students at Duke. Like so many oral histories, these lingered in archives for many years. In the interim, many new books and articles appeared to further illumine the Jim Crow South. Extensive editing and interspersed remarks drawing upon critical race and gender theory notwithstanding, there isn’t much here that will surprise academics. Nor is there much Valk or Brown can do to “spice up” the material recorded by laissez-faire collectors who chose not to direct their subjects toward particular subjects. We can appreciate the mundane details of country living, for instance, but stripped of a directed focus on race, it sounds quite similar to narratives collected from white rural dwellers recalling the “old days.” (Oddly enough, this is particularly the case in the chapter dealing with gender.)

That said, there’s not a thing wrong with producing a volume more suitable for undergraduates than scholars. Oral histories are what they are—slices of memory and life that personalize the bigger narratives that historians seek to explain. They seldom tell the whole story and they occasionally leave interpretive holes that historians must fill. Undergraduates, on the other hand, generally appreciate putting human names and faces to historical periods and forces. Earlier I evoked The Help, and with reason. It would be a wonderful teaching activity to pair a popular novel (or film) with the Valk and Brown volume to see where fact and fiction intersect and depart.

Robert E. Weir, Ph.D.

University of Massachusetts-Amherst