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Review by Rosalind Smith
John Bentley Mays is clear about what his memoir is not: "Power in the Blood" presents little Old South nostalgia, New South strategies or "Dixie spiritual remedies for what's ailing the Greater Republic." Rather, it is a deeply personal examination of Mays' own family history and his struggle to find his own place within it.
After years of fitfully embracing his Southern heritage, Mays abandoned the South altogether and made a home with his wife and daughter in Toronto, where he is art critic for "The Toronto Globe & Mail."
His recent journey into his family's past was spurred by the 1980 death of his elderly Aunt Vandalia at her home in Greenwood, Louisiana. Mays recalls having seen a telling change in Vandalia's appearance the year before: "a clouding of the pale, translucent skin prized by Southern ladies of her era." Generations of Southern women, Mays writes, thought skin and character to be inseparable. He recalls Vandalia's abhorrence in the '50s at young women's failure to cherish their pale complexions -- wantonly "tanning their hides under the pitiless Southern sun."
These revelations and insights about Mays' family are the jewels of "Power in the Blood." A great anecdote from before Mays' time involves one of his kinsmen, Major Joseph Abney, whose dream after the Civil War was to lead thousands into the jungles of Brazil and re-create the Old South there. The plan was successful: thousands of these self-exiled Southerners thrive there today. Unfortunately, when Mays strays from family stories, the passages -- though eloquent -- veer dangerously toward tedium. Many respectably educated readers will get lost in the extensive references to everyone from Susan Sontag to Heraclitus.
However, what Mays has embarked upon is nothing less than unraveling his longtime emotional conflicts about Southern culture and history, which -- coupled with his father's mysterious death when he was still a child -- drove Mays to a nervous breakdown in his late 20s. (One longs for elaboration on that subject, but Mays has saved that for his next book -- "a memoir of depression," to be published in America next year.)
Mays speaks candidly about the fading of Southern culture itself -- the advent of air conditioning and television bringing families inside from the verandah on summer evenings, smaller towns becoming mere suburbs of the larger ones, and, most insightfully, "the recent distillation of Southern memories into an academic discipline."
One of the greatest victories Mays makes in writing this book is coming to understand the plurality of Southern truth: "'We do not notice how opposing forces agree,'" he quotes from Greek thinker Heraclitus. "'Look at the bow and the lyre.' "From this it follows that the only worthwhile way of knowledge is knowing, as one knows another person, not prying and studying, but joining in the endless mirror-play of options and opposites and changes that constitutes the truth of any lover, friend, or enemy, and that surely constitutes whatever reality we'll ever know."
Mays' personal journey is at times esoteric, but looking for the 'truth' in one's own history is a universal struggle. Mays, eloquently, comes up with as satisfying an answer as any.
Rosalind Smith is a staff writer for "Birmingham" magazine in Birmingham, Alabama.
©1997, ProMotion, inc.