Word: shaw
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People are supposed to have wide-ranging and specific memories of their entire lives in the time just before they die--Nate Shaw died shortly after Rosengarten finished his tapings--but even given that, Shaw's ability to remember everything that happened to him is extraordinary. He tells, often supplying exact dates, about everything from how many bales of cotton he raised in his first year of tenant farming, to how he felt when his wife died, to the relative merits of the myriad mules he plowed behind...
...Nate Shaw's day-to-day experiences were not extraordinary. But the man was a genius, an absolute genius. The book is his history of Southern life. We have to allow for the possibility that genusises or brilliant people lives out their lives as illiterates, walking behind a plow...
Rosengarten is operating on some tricky assumptions in his book: if Nate Shaw is a typical black Southerner, only with an unusual mind, then in telling his own story he is also telling the story of all other black Southerners as well. His smallest action, if seen as typical of an entire race and class, immediately becomes universal in its importance and profundity. If Nate Shaw buys a mule, say, it may make an interesting story in itself; but if it's actually all struggling black tenant farmers acting, with Nate as a distillation of all their experiences, whatever...
Looking at Nate Shaw as a spokesman for all Southern blacks is dangerous, however. It diverts attention from the real merits of All God's Dangers and becomes an excuse for judging it uncritically. White liberal critics have heaped an avalanche of unstinting praise on All God's Dangers, calling Nate Shaw "a black Homer." They seem to be saying, with great relief: See, black people can be as profound as white people, they just haven't had the chance to tell their story until Rosengarten tape-recorded Nate Shaw. But saying Nate Shaw's story is the story...
TAKEN JUST IN itself, Nate Shaw's account of his life does lag at times, as would any account of any life. Shaw often goes through entire paragraphs explaining how he is distantly related to people who come up only peripherally in his story. The hundreds of interrelated names in the book are impossible to keep track of and only give a general impression that Shaw lived in a tightly circumscribed community. Only twice--in passing references to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt--does Shaw mention anyone outside his native county in Alabama...