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H-NET BOOK REVIEW
Published by H-SAWH@h-net.msu.edu (July 2008)
Tammy Evans. _The Silencing of Ruby McCollum: Race, Class, and Gender in the
South_. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. xv + 173 pp.
Illustrations, bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-8130-2973-2.
Reviewed for H-SAWH by Elizabeth B. Boyd, Department of Sociology, Emory and
Henry College
Disquiet
Silence is golden, the adage goes. But the silences that pervaded the
segregated South were more valuable by far than any precious metal. In the Jim
Crow South, it was silences that first constructed and then protected the
central myths of white supremacy, those intertwined fictions of natural race
hierarchy and endangered white womanhood that formed the shaky foundation for
an entire "way of life." In a creative and convincing new book, Tammy Evans
examines the rhetorical power of southern silences in the production of public
memory. Evans tells the story of Ruby McCollum, an African American housewife
in the segregated small town of Live Oak, Florida, who on August 3, 1952, drove
with her two young children to the local office of prominent white physician
and politician Doctor C. LeRoy Adams and gunned him down. The starkness of the
crime was matched only by the evasiveness that characterized its aftermath, and
it is this prevarication--this collective dissembling on the part of Live Oak
folk, white and black--that is the true subject of the book.
Notes and letters written by McCollum allege years of mental and physical abuse
at the hands of Adams (including the claim that she was pregnant with his child
at the time of the shooting and had previously given birth to another of his
children). And, according to McCollum, Adams was involved in her husband Sam's
illegal gambling operation, a charge substantiated by an employee who more than
once witnessed the doctor accepting large deliveries of cash in examination
rooms. The charismatic, well-loved doctor had a sinister side, too; cruelty and
a sharp lust for power were known to reside just below the sympathetic surface.
Yet, faced with such an audacious murder--a well-known and well-liked white
professional "gentleman" shot in cold blood on a Sunday morning in the heart of
downtown by a black female patient with whom he was rumored to be sexually
entangled--the white citizenry of Live Oak quickly closed ranks. They promptly
produced a coherent story about Adams and his death, one that was suitable for
public consumption and that omitted any troubling complexities associated with
him. The narrative that emerged was clear and unyielding: Adams, revered by
black and white alike for his generosity and friendly nature, was murdered by
McCollum (a crime to which she readily confessed) over a dispute over a medical
bill.
The legal response was similarly swift and suppressive. After being whisked
away to a state prison fifty miles distant under armed guard, McCollum was
found guilty of murder in the first degree in a speedy trial and then sentenced
to death by electrocution. The trial was highly scripted and marked by
silences, especially the repeated refusal of the court to admit key
testimony--McCollum's biracial child and stories of Adams's previous
abuse--into evidence. In the end, McCollum was more or less rendered
permanently mute; declared insane two years after the trial, she spent her
remaining years in the state mental institution.
The story of McCollum was sensational at the time and continues to intrigue, if
for different reasons. The murder and trial received extensive contemporary
coverage in newspapers and magazines--Zora Neale Hurston showed up to cover the
trial for the _Pittsburgh Courier_, only to find Live Oak "a smothering blanket
of silence" (p. 6). The case also attracted the attention of William Bradford
Huie, whose 1956 account _Ruby McCollum: Woman in the Suwannee Jail_ would
become a bestseller. The sheer presence of Hurston and Huie in the text will
attract a certain segment of scholars, but Evans is interested in them only
insofar as they illuminate her central concern: "the role of acts of silence in
the preservation of a specific public memory in Live Oak and the South at
large" (p. xxi). Evans uses the story of McCollum to explore a much larger one,
"a longtime southern mythology dominated by acts of silence and often enforced
by fear" (p. 3).
Evans argues that silence functions as a transformative speech act in the
South, "the catalyst by which southern myths over time come to be accepted as
'facts' and, more important, why acts of violence committed in the name of
protecting these myths often go unpunished" (pp. 34-35). The South itself,
writes Evans, is textual in nature, the product of discourse laced through with
silence. Silence, writes Evans, "constructed southern loveliness ... [and]
silence worked to prevent exposure of the ugly underside of southern
loveliness" (p. xxv). And, so when the actions of one black woman threatened to
expose the myths of white supremacy as fiction, the townspeople of Live Oak
promptly went mute, training unwanted media attention on the supposedly
contentious issue of a medical bill. Entertaining the notion that Adams, a
white man, might be imperfect was dangerous--equivalent to admitting the flawed
logic of white male supremacy and the many structures of privilege it
supported.
"Acts of silence are not accidental or arbitrary; they are carefully taught,"
writes Evans, echoing Lillian Smith's contention that ideological formations go
undetected in the South, because they are taught in childhood and because white
southerners "learn by necessity to reconcile an existence dominated by
contradiction" (p. 31). Evans should know. A daughter of Live Oak, she, with
this book, attempts to be "what Adrienne Rich describes as '_consciously_
historical--that is, a person who tries for memory and connectedness against
amnesia and nostalgia'" (p. xxxii). Evans recalls her own adolescent education
in the silence required by white womanhood, when to step out of "a complex
tapestry of polite conversation tightly woven about topics of church, home, and
children ... to speak of other less pleasant things" was to risk "jeopardizing
the validity of an entire community's performance" (pp. xxvii, 27).
The same white male-imposed codes of silence that simultaneously disciplined
and privileged white women, writes Evans, negated the stories of African
American southerners and placed in the foreground regional myths that
advantaged persons already in positions of power. Drawing on the work of
Patricia Yaeger, Anne Goodwyn Jones, and Susan Tucker, Evans considers the
ideological work of a "complex system of surveillance" in place in Live Oak and
the larger South, one heavily invested in the perpetuation of existing power
relations (p. 35). Using the tragic case of McCollum as illustration, Evans
successfully magnifies and amplifies the southern silences that are "always
there, yet impervious to close inspection" (p. 5).
The field of memory studies has flourished in the past decade, successfully
cutting across disciplines, time periods, and geographies in a way claimed by
many proponents of interdisciplinarity but accomplished by few. This work
proliferates with nuanced analyses of the constructions, performances,
utterances, programs, and institutions designed to dictate or at least
influence public memory.[1] But Evans takes a new tack. Listening to the
silences and looking for the ellipses, Evans reveals the powerful memory work
accomplished by southerners' reticence or refusal to speak--by their reluctance
to broach those volatile, off-limits subjects understood to be simply not
discussed. In _The Silencing of Ruby McCollum_, Evans demonstrates the
rhetorical value of muteness and the scholarly value of looking at public
memory as a product not only of stuff but also of absence. Evans shouts at and
outs silence for the potent speech act it is. Memory studies scholars would do
well to listen up, as this innovative argument offers new possibilities for the
field.
Note
[1]. An inclusive bibliography of the field is not feasible here, but examples
of this varied scholarship include David Blight, _Race and Reunion: The Civil
War in American Memory_ (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001); W.
Fitzhugh Brundage, _The Southern Past: A Clash of Race and Memory_ (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005); Jennifer Eichstedt and Stephen Small,
_Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums_
(Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002); Kristin Ann Hass, _Carried
to the Wall: American Memory and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial_ (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1998); Andrea O'Reilly Herrera, _ReMembering
Cuba: Legacy of a Diaspora_ (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2001); Tony
Horwitz, _Confederates in the Attic: Dispatches from the Unfinished Civil War_
(New York: Vintage, 1998); Edward Linenthal, _The Unfinished Bombing: Oklahoma
City in American Memory_ (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Tara
McPherson, _Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender, and Nostalgia in the Imagined
South_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); Daniel Marcus, _Happy Days and
Wonder Years: The Fifties and Sixties in Contemporary Cultural Politics_ (New
Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2004); Renee C. Romano and Leigh Raiford,
eds., _The Civil Rights Movement in American Memory_ (Athens: University of
Georgia Press, 2006); Diana Taylor, _The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing
Cultural Memory in the Americas_ (Durham: Duke University Press, 2003); and Jim
Weeks, _Gettysburg: Memory, Market, and an American Shrine_ (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2003).
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educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the
author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and
H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For other uses
contact the Reviews editorial staff: hbooks@mail.h-net.msu.edu.
Antoinette G. van Zelm
Historian
Tennessee Civil War National Heritage Area
Center for Historic Preservation
MTSU
Box 80
Murfreesboro, TN 37132
(615) 217-8013
Fax: (615) 898-5614
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