Affection and Estrangement: A Southern Family Memoir

Affection and Estrangement; A Southern Family Memoir is a memoir with a difference. As the title indicates, the major focus of this volume is not an account of my growing up in a small town in rural Virginia in the 1930s and 1940s, but, rather, descriptions of various members of the extended family and of the social dynamics of this very Southern community. I do, of course, write about my own experiences in the Browning family and in the Culpeper, Virginia community. But the core of the book is a gathering of more than twenty sketches of relatives I knew as a child and adolescent, some exceedingly eccen- tric, and the Southern ambience which, in a very true sense, created them—and me. In order to provide a context for my descriptions of cousins, great aunts, grandparents, etc., I have written about the three features of Southern society which, in my judgment, were most distinctive of life in that region of the country during the decades of my youth—race, religion, and class. My intention has been to offer the reader intimations of how being Southern contributed to the peculiarities of the family members about whom I write, including my parents, and about how class differences, for example, featured in the dynamics of my immediate family, as well as in the lives of several members of the extended family. Because my maternal grandmother, Cornelia Cabell Stephenson, was descended from two relatively distinguished Virginia families—the Cocke and Cabell families—and because a good deal of primary and secondary material dealing with these families exists at the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia, several of the sketches are about members of those families. However, because my discussion of my great-great-great- grandfather, General John Hartwell Cocke, and his second wife, Louisa, are of considerable length and are heavily dependent upon secondary sources, these pieces might more accurately be described as essays. In reflecting upon the ways my own life was shaped by the society in which I was raised, I have stressed four factors: 1) The influence of an often harsh and repressive Calvinist religious milieu characteristic of the entire South, which, while it did not impact me directly (we were Episcopalians and hence less subject to the preaching about sin and damnation which our Baptist neighbors regularly endured), nevertheless had, I believe, a deleterious influence upon my developing sense of self. This was particularly true with respect to my confused feelings about my body and adolescent sexual urges. 2) The major influence of the natural world on my developing sensibilities and ethical values. Living in the country and spending my summers working on my father’s farm created in me a deep love of Nature and was profoundly instrumental in shaping the person I became, one passionately committed to the preservation of the Earth and its beauties. 3) The role of my parents’ example in their respectful treatment of black people in their employ in shaping my attitudes toward race. The “estrangement” I indicate in the title of this volume grew, in part, out of my difficulty in reconciling my Christian ethical values with racial attitudes and practices in the Jim Crow South of the thirties, forties, and fifties. 4) The presence in the South of my youth of distinctive social classes and the conflicts within my family occasioned by the class differences.