To Hell and Back

Race and Betrayal in the Southern Novel

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by Jeff Abernathy

University of Georgia Press

Due/Published December 2003, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0820325783

This study of the construction of race in American culture takes its title from a central story thread in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck, who resolves to "go to hell" rather than turn over the runaway slave Jim, in time betrays his companion.

Jeff Abernathy assesses cross-racial pairings in American literature following Huckleberry Finn to show that this pattern of engagement and betrayal appears repeatedly in our fiction--notably southern fiction--just as it appears throughout American history and culture. He contends that such stories of companionship and rejection simultaneously express opposing tenets of American culture: a persistent vision of democracy and the racial hierarchy that undermines it.

Abernathy traces this pattern through works by William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, Harper Lee, Kaye Gibbons, Sara Flanigan, Elizabeth Spencer, Padgett Powell, Ellen Douglas, and Glasgow Phillips. In contrast, African American writers pointedly contest the pattern. Abernathy looks at Ralph Ellison, Alice Walker, and Richard Wright as exemplars whose works "portray autonomous black characters and white characters who must earn their own salvation, or gain it not at all."

Looking at the "hell and back" pattern within a broader cultural context, Abernathy argues that it signifies our willingness to engage repeatedly in the fiction of racial parity. Just as American readers return to Huckleberry Finn, our authors rewrite and revise it in an ongoing conversation about white America's inability to confront the cultural incongruities that deny "the place of black identity in the formation of the American self." To Hell and Back makes a strong case for a distinct literary tradition that unites writers across boundaries of race, period, and region.