What struck me—clearly it struck Allen too—was the demeanor of the observers, and the notion that in the cultural landscape of the period lynching seemed normal enough that many whites were unconcerned about appearing in the reproductions—in many cases, were eager to. They did not worry, as the writers of the family postcards shown in the prologue did, whether their appearance seemed "natchel" or unnatural. ("This is the barbecue we had last night," read he message on a card featuring one particularly gruesome burning, "my picture is to the left with a cross over it your son Joe"). Reproducing the photos as postcards, buying and sending them: these were all acts of definition: definition of others and definition of self. That was what interested and unsettled me.
In constructing a narrative, then, I wanted the first approach to be from the skewed perspective that I suspected many readers shared with me, where it took only a slow drift around a bend in the Canadian River to transform picturesque nostalgia into much more troubling markers of identity. James Baldwin's aphorism came to mind. "If I am not who you say I am, then you are not who you think you are." Baldwin's actual words were more explicit than the paraphrase regularly attributed to him. He spoke to teachers in 1963 on the subject of "The Negro Child—His Self-Image." "So where we are now," he concluded, "is that a whole country of people believe I'm a 'nigger,' and I don't, and the battle's on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis." At the end of the nineteenth century, as much as in Baldwin's twentieth, African Americans and whites were defining their relations with one another in starkly different ways. As was so often the case in American history, race seemed to be at the center of the cultural misperceptions.
In constructing a narrative, then, I wanted the first approach to be from the skewed perspective that I suspected many readers shared with me, where it took only a slow drift around a bend in the Canadian River to transform picturesque nostalgia into much more troubling markers of identity. James Baldwin's aphorism came to mind. "If I am not who you say I am, then you are not who you think you are." Baldwin's actual words were more explicit than the paraphrase regularly attributed to him. He spoke to teachers in 1963 on the subject of "The Negro Child—His Self-Image." "So where we are now," he concluded, "is that a whole country of people believe I'm a 'nigger,' and I don't, and the battle's on! Because if I am not what I've been told I am, then it means that you're not what you thought you were either! And that is the crisis." At the end of the nineteenth century, as much as in Baldwin's twentieth, African Americans and whites were defining their relations with one another in starkly different ways. As was so often the case in American history, race seemed to be at the center of the cultural misperceptions.