| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 109.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Nell Irvin Painter. Southern History Across the Color Line. (Gender & American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2002. Pp. 247. Cloth $37.50, paper $17.95.
This book is a collection of challenging essays Nell Irvin Painter published in the 1980s and 1990s. The strengths of the essays emerge from Painter's efforts to understand the nature, human costs, and experiences of racism among white southerners, from the antebellum period through the early twentieth century. The essays discuss the concept of soul murder under slavery, analyze what white North Carolinian Ella Gertrude Clanton Thomas wrote and did not write in her journal, offer a Freudian interpretation of writers Thomas, Sue Petrigru King, and Harriet Jacobs, deconstruct white supremacists' use of the concept of social equality, reflect on her work documenting the life of southern communist Hosea Hudson, and critique W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South (1941). From the beginning, Painter makes clear her emphases: power, the body, sexuality, and cultural meaning.	1
The first two essays, and the last one, seem especially important to the broad themes of the book. By applying the concept of soul murder to antebellum slavery, Painter considers topics such as child abuse, sexual abuse and harassment, and family separation to stress the psychological as well as the physical brutality of slavery. Certain not to go in the direction of Stanley Elkins's Slavery: A Problem in American Instititional and Intellectual Life (1976), Painter paints slave owners as engaging in practices that damaged both slaves and their owners, without arguing that slaves' souls were in fact murdered.	. . .

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