Sally Greene

Elizabeth Spencer's novel The Voice at the Back Door, published to critical acclaim in 1956, takes place during primary season in a small Mississippi town in 1952, when the issue of race was about to shift from regional problem to national crisis. At the heart of the novel, complicating the present, lies an event from years long past: a dozen black men gunned down in the county courthouse. The town in the novel resembles Spencer's home town of Carrollton, Mississippi. Such an event actually happened; only, in the way of southern memory, she had not been given to understand anything but the barest outline of the facts. Not until the 1990s, when she was writing her memoir, was she able to learn more about the Carrollton Massacre of 1886, and even then, all she had was a footnote. In "Spencer's Voice at the Back Door and the Legacy of Reconstruction," Sally Greene discovers the untold story, exploring what survives of the historical record and comparing it with Spencer's fictional treatment, concluding that even had she been armed with the facts in their bloody detail, she could scarcely have written a novel that more vividly reveals the fault lines of racial politics in small-town Mississippi as they persisted from Reconstruction to the eve of the Civil Rights Movement.

Greene is a lawyer and an adjunct professor in the UNC School of Law, where she teaches a seminar in the law and rhetoric of the Civil Rights Movement. She holds a Ph.D. in English from UNC-Chapel Hill and a J.D. from the George Washington University. She has taught in the English departments and law schools at both the University of North Carolina and the University of Virginia; she has published widely on literary and historical topics. Her edited collection of essays Virginia Woolf: Reading the Renaissance was published by Ohio University Press in 1999. Her talk is based on an article forthcoming in Mississippi Quarterly.