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IN AMERICAN LETTERs, THE TERM "CONVERSION NARRATIVE" usually refers to a form of expression that arose in New England in the seventeenth century-either such written works as Cotton Mather's lengthy Paterna and Jonathan Edwards's much briefer "Personal Narrative" or, more narrowly defined, the oral confession of sins by ordinary men and women, usually before a congregation, a confession heard and recorded by a minister and, if the candidate was judged worthy, resulting in "conversion" and church membership. In that sense-the purely religious-the conversion narrative belongs to a rather remote history. In quite another sense, however-in the secular realm-the term might be used, particularly in the South, to describe a more recent phenomenon, a form of southern self-expression not seen until the 1940s. I have in mind certain autobiographies or works of highly personal social commentary by Lillian Smith, Katharine Du Pre Lumpkin, James McBride Dabbs, Sarah Patton Boyle, Will Campbell, Willie Morris, and other white southerners, works written between the mid-'40s and the mid-'70s, which qualify as racial conversion narratives-that is, texts in which the authors, all products of and willing participants in a harsh, segregated society, confess wrongdoing and are "converted," in varying degrees, from prejudice to something approaching racial enlightenment. Many of these white southerners adopt, indeed, the language of religious rapture"sin," "guilt," "blindness," "seeing the light," "repentance," "redemption," and so forth. Such an occurrence is hardly surprising when one considers that conversion-in its churchly sense-has been so much a part of the life of the Calvinist South and that nearly all the writers mentioned above came out of a strong religious tradition. Most of them, at the time they wrote, had left the church-at least the church of their fathers-but all seemed to have retained the habit of seeking redemption, even if of a secular variety. Departing from the old vertical southern doctrine-with salvation at its center and with heaven as its goal-they embraced a horizontal version that held that getting right with man was as important as getting right with God.
The earliest practitioners of the white southern narrative of racial confession and conversion-which has become, I believe, a virtual subgenre of the region's literature in the last half-century-were two women, Smith and Lumpkin, whose memoirs, Killers of the Dream (1949)...