
          Mary, Wayfarer, An Autobiography, by Mary
E. Mebane. New York: Viking Press. 1983.
          By Painter, Nell IrvinNell Irvin Painter
          Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 13-14
          
          In the second volume of her autobiography, Mary Mebane again talks
of desegregation and takes aim at the black bourgeoisie--or more
exactly, the brown bourgeoisie. Early in Mary,
Wayfarer, she fires a telling shot:
          
            One of the ironies of life in the South is the fact that the
black professional class, thinking that under integration it would
entrench its position vis-a-vis black folk, instead found itself in
many 

cases as discomfited by the changes as the whites
were.
          
          But the people with whom Mebane identifies herself, poor,
dark-skinned blacks, "could not have cared less; any change at all was
a decided improvement for them."
          Perhaps Mebane is too sharp. In Mary, Wayfarer, as
in Mary, she reserves her bitterness for blacks of the
better class, particularly those in her home town of Durham. But for
all her social myopia, she has exposed a little-discussed aspect of
desegregation: a sort of equalizing of educated blacks, regardless of
skin shade or economic background. At the University of North Carolina
at Chapel Hill, where Mebane spent twelve years, she says that some
people "respected my gifts, and that was a first for me"--even though
all her previous schooling and teaching had been in black
institutions.
          Better-class black Durham's presence in Mebane's life is devilish
but significant, if the number of pages she spends denouncing its
prejudices, weaknesses and hypocrisies supplies a fair measure of her
fixation. She teaches a lesson that most sensitive Americans already
know about black life: Light skin carries connotations of beauty and
wealth, and beauty and wealth attract people, especially men. The
revelation is not new, although Mebane delivers it with unusual
intensity.
          New here is her gleeful exposure of what her betters lost through
integration. She tells of a light-skinned woman, a fellow student at
Carolina, who was pained when a white woman confused her with poor
blacks. Mebane also reports hostility from black, better-class
colleagues at North Carolina Central University, when she was well
received at the University of North Carolina.
          Mebane says the cream of the cream of black society at NCCU in the
1960's saw the university as an enemy disturbing their social
order. "By opening its doors to all blacks, and not limiting its
admissions to blacks of a certain class or color," Mebane says the
university inadvertently broke one of black society's unwritten
rules--that only the elite were to garner such rewards.
          As a dark-skinned non-Southerner who was (mercifully) brought up in
the West, I nonetheless felt a certain satisfaction in watching Mebane
prick the bourgeoisie. But the pain in this woman's life diminished my
relish. This is an angry book, although the emotions are muted in
comparison with the first volume, Mary.
          Even so, I found myself drawn into Mebane's autobiography The
material on black Durham is most fascinating But I also learned from
her descriptions of the civil-rights years in Durham and Chapel
Hill. I made a mental note, too, that Mebane is one of a growing list
I am keeping of black women who find that they cannot keep their
sanity and continue to teach in some white, male-dominated
situations. (My list now numbers six women--and I am on it--who left
white departments to preserve their mental health.) Here again, Mary
Mebane's autobiographies are enlightening.
          But Mebane also provokes pity and annoyance. Reading her painful
descriptions of her unloving and drunken family--whom she was not able
to leave until she was in her mid-30's--and of her frustrating
encounters with men, her school-girl ideals about elegance in love
compared with her squalid encounters, I sympathized with this woman
who never felt valuable until she came to Chapel Hill. Her feelings of
worthlessness are raw and exposed, and I wonder to what extent she
succeeds in convincing other readers that her experiences may be taken
as typical. For my part, she represents an unusually sad case, and
this impression carries over from the first volume to the second,
although the second is more smoothly written, its emotions less
aroused.
          Both Mary and Mary, Wayfarer suffer
from the author's lack of distance from her tormentors--her mother,
her family and Durham's black bourgeoisie. Years of therapy have
finally allowed her to see her mother as a victim of poverty and
segregation. But leaving the South--she now teaches at the University
of Wisconsin at Milwaukee--has given her little insight into social
dynamics. She cannot see that the pretensions she deplored in Durham
and the snobbery she attaches to North Carolina Central University
occur elsewhere among other groups of people. Pretension and snobbery
remain the monopoly of better-class black Durham, and Mary Mebane's
anger at them remains unabated.
          While Mary, Wayfarer and Mary lack
the warmth and humane vision of Maya Angelou's I Know Why the
Caged Bird Sings or Pauli Murray's Proud Shoes
(much of the latter set in Durham), the narrowness and bitterness of
the Mebane books point to the anger that those at the very bottom of
the black hierarchy can harbor against other blacks. Mary Mebane tells
awkward truths about class, color pnd sex, but her truths are true
anyway.
          
            Nell Irvin Painter teaches history at the University of
North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She grew up in northern California and
is the author of The Narrative of Hosea Hudson: His Life as a
Negro Communist in the South. This review first appeared in
the North Carolina Independent.
          
        