THE TRAVELER AS COUNTER-STORYTELLER

Even as Rowan is forming his idea about a trip and story to examine conditions for African Americans in the South, he is concerned about identity politics and how his race might impact the effects of the story. He notes that Minneapolis Tribune executive editor Gideon Seymour had promised him that he would never be asked to report on race issues for the paper – that he would “not be a specialist in so-called Negro news.” The idea for the story and journey that result in South of Freedom is Rowan's alone, however, and both he and Seymour recognize the importance of the story and how it might educate white Americans such as Rowan's US Navy colleague Noah Brannon, for whom he has promised to document the experience of being an African American in the South. In some ways, Rowan's project, particularly as it assumes an explanation of black life for a white reader, could be viewed in terms of what Frantz Fanon describes as trying to “rationalize the world and to show the white man that he was mistaken.”Footnote ¹⁷ Rowan's approach also corroborates Alain Locke's observation in 1950 that black writers “are still in the throes of counter-stereotypes,” although Rowan's resulting narrative might also be viewed as a step toward Locke's anticipation of “an era of fuller and more objective presentation by Negro authors of their versions of contemporary living in general and Negro life and experience in particular.”Footnote ¹⁸ Zora Neale Hurston expressed a related sentiment in the April 1950 Negro Digest, when she suggested that “the average, struggling, nonmorbid Negro is the best-kept secret in America,” and “[w]ith only the fractional ‘exceptional’ and the ‘quaint’ portrayed, a true picture of Negro life in America cannot be.”Footnote ¹⁹ Of course, Hurston and Locke were famously at odds over the aims of African American writing and whether the portrayal of folk culture or the professional class, respectively, better represented the way forward for African American letters. Yet both in their way call for a “fuller” or more “true picture” of African American experience, and Rowan's story and journey respond to this call. As his trip becomes a reality, he remarks how significant it is that “for the first time a daily metropolitan newspaper was going to print a Negro's account of Negro life in the kingdom of Jim Crow” (SF 13)

Richard Delgado's ideas about the importance of counter-storytelling in critical race theory highlight the significance of Rowan's firsthand account of his travels through the Jim Crow South. As Rowan's writing in and after South of Freedom reveals, and as Delgado argues of counter-storytelling, narratives focussing on individual experience have wider implications, and the storytellings of in-groups and out-groups have differing effects. For out-groups, Delgado argues that “stories create their own bonds, represent cohesion, shared understandings, and meaning.” Stories told by the in-group “remind it of its identity in relation to outgroups, and provide it with a form of shared reality in which its own superior position is seen as natural.”Footnote ²⁰ Out-group stories seek to “subvert that ingroup reality,” and Delgado contends that this is possible because narratives are “powerful means for destroying mindset[s]” and “can shatter complacency and challenge the status quo.” Delgado explains that the out-group's “counter-storytelling,” like most instances in which narratives are shared, builds community, consensus, “a common culture of shared understandings, and deeper, more vital ethics,” and “can open new windows into reality, showing us that there are possibilities for life other than the ones we live.”Footnote ²¹ Further noting the ways in which counter-storytelling can move beyond individual experience or influence and have community-wide effects, Delgado insists that such stories can also “quicken and engage conscience,” as well as serve an “important destructive function” by presenting what is “self-serving, or cruel,” showing the “way out of the trap of unjustified exclusion,” and helping us recognize “when it is time to reallocate power.” In relation to this last point, as I discuss below, Rowan's writing about such reallocation of power sometimes seems to complicate his counter-storytelling, but it is no less interesting for its complications, especially in the context of the burgeoning civil rights movement in the decade or so after the publication of South of Freedom.

Significantly, in order for stories to challenge institutional power, they “must be or must appear to be noncoercive,” inviting listeners and readers “to suspend judgment, listen for their point or message, and then decide what measure of truth they contain.”Footnote ²² The effects of noncoercive storytelling that Delgado describes here are powerful and reach well beyond the individual, coinciding with the kind of effects and idea that we might expect to challenge institutionalized racism. Beyond addressing individual race prejudice, individual actions can influence ideology, changing individual and group perspectives and understandings of community systems and dynamics, which in turn can undermine the power of racism as it is institutionalized and sustained in society. The kind of stories that Locke and Hurston envision aim for similar goals of changing perspectives, and imply that members of out-groups can use stories as a means of both “psychic self-preservation” and “lessening their own subordination,”Footnote ²³ signaling relief from not only the mental tiredness that Rowan experiences as he attempts to physically and psychologically navigate the South but also the oppression he experiences there.

The positive effect of such stories on the oppressor are also significant, according to Delgado. No racial reform is possible without the majority race that “controls the reins of power,” and the out-group's counterstories combat the complacency and “comforting stories” of the oppressors. Such stories also “enrich” the “reality” of the in-group and allow that group to adjust to further stories. Ultimately, these stories “humanize us,” Delgado insists, “invite the listener to suspend judgment, listen for the story's point, and test it against his or her own version of reality.” Any movement for change requires the support of the dominant white group, and the telling of counterstories serves these crucial aims.Footnote ²⁴

SKEPTICISM, SELF-PRESERVATION, AND COUNTER-STORYTELLING

Rowan undertakes a project of counter-storytelling in his travel narrative, but with some important modifications, including his use of skepticism as a tactic to motivate reform and moments in which he might seem to contradict the aims of counter-storytelling. As a firsthand account of a journey through the US South, Rowan's travels and resulting narrative are understandably personal and include his return to places he lived in and remembered from childhood, as well as accounts of his individual acts of resistance during the trip. Yet his is no sentimental journey. In ways reminiscent of Jessie Redmon Fauset's approach to sentiment and nostalgia in her mid-1920s travel essays in The Crisis, Rowan's narrative likewise eschews a romanticized perspective on travel. In her essays about travel to France, for example, Fauset refers to previous trips to underscore her focus on current social issues rather than dwell on her memories. Her generally unsentimental approach to the idea of nostalgia is well reflected in her 1921 Crisis essay “Nostalgia,” where she writes of a young African American serviceman who is homesick for France and the equal treatment he received there, challenging definitions of “home” and one's nostalgia for it.Footnote ²⁵ Rowan, too, reimagines the meanings of home and the South and considers his ability to navigate its racial realities during the course of his journey.

Any nostalgia in Rowan's trip is tempered by his efforts to resist racism and the toll it takes on him, however. Like Fauset, he remembers previous experiences in these places that he revisits, but, rather than cast a nostalgic glow over the current trip, the memories highlight the problematic racial conditions still existing in the South and, indeed, provide the justification for Rowan's skepticism. For example, he remembers a road trip from Nashville to McMinnville with four GI college students, just after he was released from active duty. Out of Nashville, they were pulled over by two highway patrolmen. The five black men knew that they would need to submit to the harassment and humiliation of the patrolmen in order to survive the traffic stop. Rowan observes that the experience prepared him for a possible similar incident in the future: “I would be prepared to answer if addressed as ‘boy,’ to smile if a white man insulted me under circumstances where he obviously was in power, and even to dance a little jig should I encounter two armed patrolmen bent on having some fun” (SF 18). He also remembers swimming in the Barren Forks river with his friends as a young man and jumping off a nearby bridge, looking longingly from the shore near the bridge at the public swimming pool, where they were not allowed to swim. As some of the girls from the swimming pool ran toward the bridge to watch Rowan and his friends execute their daring dives, the young black men attempted to “rationaliz[e] away any bitterness at discrimination in recreational opportunity” (SF 21). Yet, similar to Fanon's recognition of being “up against something unreasoned” in his encounters with racism, Rowan too seems to find that for someone “whose only weapon is reason there is nothing more neurotic than contact with unreason.”Footnote ²⁶ His memories of such moments of discrimination teach him that “because few statutes exist that are favorable to the Negro, the white man's mood and spoken word become law.” This, along with his uncertainty about where he might be able to buy gas or food or use the toilet during his travels, throws him into a state of “doubt, of uncertainty as to what the reception will be, even from one building to another.” He knows that in his trip South, “For my own safety I would have to erase some of this doubt” (SF 16). Rowan's emphasis on the precarious nature of his travels challenges readers’ complacency toward or diminishment of the real dangers of black travel in the South.

Rowan's discussion of his doubt as a feature of his counter-storytelling allows readers to share his skepticism and concern and serves as a noncoercive means for Rowan to encourage readers’ sympathies. He offers a number of examples from his trip to demonstrate how and why he harbors such doubts about racial progress. For example, he calls ahead to book train tickets in first class or sleeping cars or rooms in hotels, and then when he arrives in person and the porters, ticket agents, or hotel clerks learn that he is black, he finds that he may or may not, often and seemingly according to the whim of the agent or clerk, receive the services he was promised over the phone. On his way to Charleston, South Carolina, he learns of the “race codes” that ticket sellers use to indicate to one another that an African American has reserved a sleeping berth and to put another African American traveler with them if possible. Rowan discusses the complicated segregation practices of train travel: “segregation was illegal only in interstate travel, and … Jim Crow still was the rule on unreserved coach-trains”; Pullman cars were not segregated, if one could acquire a ticket. A porter tells Rowan that the railroads still “had their way of segregating” using various race codes (SF85). Indeed, Rowan earlier overhears himself being referred to as a “pile of coal in somebody's basement” (SF 84) when reserving a Pullman car. He finds himself similarly and subtly “Jim Crowed” when he walks into a restaurant near the end of his journey in Kansas City, where, he has been told, “they'll Jim Crow you graciously if you allow it” (SF 255). He understands that he is being led by the hostess to the back of the restaurant to the designated “colored” table, so instead he sits at the counter. The hostess snubs him and does not offer him a menu, but his server is pleasant, and he concludes that only he and the hostess are aware “that another small battle was being fought in a sort of cold war of the races.” However, later in St. Louis, he loses another small battle as he tries to hail a cab for almost an hour before a black cab driver picks him up (SF 256). These micro-aggressions cumulatively represent real and present threats to Rowan's physical and psychological well-being.

Rowan endures many such encounters throughout his travels, and these experiences sustain his skepticism about improvements in race relations while offering moments for him and readers – especially the white readers, the Noah Brannons he wants to reach – to reflect on the difficulties and possibilities of racial progress. He would continue to document such experiences, and in a similar tone, in later writings. A compelling example is found in his 1966 Ebony article “Problems of the New Negro Elite.” We can see in this article the beginnings of what Carolyn F. Gerald would describe a decade later as the black writers’ efforts to “reverse the symbolism,” or Larry Neal's call in 1968 for a “new synthesis” in black writing that would “destroy … double-consciousness.”Footnote ²⁷ Rowan opens the article with an anecdote about his position as deputy assistant secretary of state. Driving to the White House in February 1962, Rowan approaches what he refers to as the “executive entrance to the White House grounds.” He is stopped by the guard, who tries to direct him to a back entrance to the mansion, seemingly reserved for chauffeurs, before Rowan shows his identification.Footnote ²⁸ He shares a number of other experiences in top-level meetings and social situations in which he has to exert his right to participate. He argues that the existence of a “Negro elite,” to which he belongs, is crucial in “beating down the social, cultural and economic barriers that still block [African Americans’] way to first class citizenship” because many of the most important discussions in US society are made at “dinner parties, at clubs and on golf courses where the Negro only recently got his foot in the door.” He believes that African American progress will depend on the “aggressiveness, the shrewdness, the integrity of this first little army of Negroes who have begun to hobnob with the real power structure in America.” Yet he also acknowledges the distance between this elite and other classes of African Americans. For example, he notes that the plight of the black teenager seeking work is worse today than it was twenty years ago.Footnote ²⁹ He observes that

Rowan begins the article by demonstrating the ways in which, even in a top government post, he is still “Jim Crowed” and emphasizes throughout his discussion how the important work he is doing as a top government official, with access to the seat of power, contributes to the dismantling of institutionalized racism. Granted, he has not moved completely away from the “frustration” that Gerald argues “giv[es] way before a sense of power” in the mid-1970s, but the stirrings of what Gerald refers to as “a mythic consciousness based on a people's positive view of themselves and their destiny”Footnote ³¹ emerges as Rowan offers himself as a personal example of how African American progress and access to cultural and civic power can confront such racism, suggesting that the actions of an individual, such as himself, can effect institutional change.

However, such work takes its toll in South of Freedom, and halfway through his journey in Milledgeville, Georgia, Rowan is ready to give up. Rowan's weariness contrasts with the kind of psychic self-preservation that Delgado identifies as an effect of counter-storytelling, and, indeed, Rowan's skepticism seems to have bested him at this point in the narrative. After accompanying a doctor on his rounds to rural blacks, and reflecting on the many barriers that keep African Americans from receiving proper medical care, Rowan notes that “[a] great weariness had fallen over me, and I wanted to end my journey. I longed for an escape from reporting; from worrying about tiny variations in the Jim Crow structure; from trying to analyze segregation and its effects upon the lives of the people involved.” He observes that he began his journey with the mistaken idea that he would not be affected by racial conditions in the South, that he “could live a black life and write about it as a black man, and then wipe away the effects with a smug shake of the head” (SF 139). In Milledgeville he experiences the real psychological effects of institutionalized racism, and it is impossible to shake off these effects, he finds, because

To protect himself from further insult and psychic anguish, he decides that he will simply restrict contact with whites, “get away from being a reporter,” and remember that before long, he would be out of the South (SF 140). Of course, he does not escape from whites or the South at this point since his journey and narrative continue. However, his fatigue emphasizes the difficult cultural work in which he is engaged and also suggests a sort of mental stasis that sets in even as he continues to travel.

Rowan's weariness with the constant battle for his rights is even more pronounced near the end of the narrative. He sometimes admits that the situations he encounters seem to him as if they are “a joke,” and he often finds himself at his “facetious best” trying to manage absurd situations (SF 119). In Oklahoma City, the joke gives way to psychological weariness, and he again experiences “a sort of mental tiredness, a fatigue of the soul that came from probing into the mores of the South for more than a month” (SF 245). In probing into such mores, he analyzes the complicated processes and effects of racialization at this particular historical moment. Disembarking from a train in Kansas City, he thinks about the differences of traveling north versus south over the Mason–Dixon Line in the early 1950s. As he disembarks in the North, he considers the difference that crossing this border makes “in the mind and spirit and nerves. It is the dissolving of tension” (SF 255). He reflects on racism as a “virus prejudice … in the national bloodstream” (SF256–57) and finds that the only hope to counter this is some of the “chinks in old racial armor” that he witnesses developing in the South. Despite his hope that these “chinks” are making some difference, his skepticism seems largely confirmed, and he concludes that he has not found a “New South” because there are “too few new ideas in the minds of the South.” As he returns to the North, he expresses with resignation but also relief that he is “leaving the South, land of my birth and childhood, never to return” (SF 257). Clearly, he believes that the North holds a more positive future for him (SF 258), but he is under no illusions about the racism that also exists in the North. Indeed, Rowan views his navy colleague Noah Brannon as a symbol “of Americans everywhere whose tainted souls and thoughts and acts put our whole nation south of freedom” (SF 263).Footnote ³²

In addition to his own efforts to confront racism, Rowan meets various individuals during his travels, such as Judge Julius Waties Waring in South Carolina, white southerners who are also engaged in individual acts of resistance against racism and prejudice. As Delgado notes, racial reform is bolstered by the participation of the majority race. Waring and his wife, Elizabeth Avery Hoffman Waring, are ostracized because, among other reasons, the judge was instrumental in securing voting rights for African Americans in South Carolina. The Warings continued to rail against racism in public addresses, and when a petition was circulated to impeach the judge, no basis for impeachment was found, so the Warings remained in the state as “pariahs” (SF 90) and, Rowan remarks, likely “the loneliest people in America” (SF 88). After Mrs. Waring delivers an address at the Negro YWCA's annual meeting, noting that “white-supremacists are mentally ill,” the Ku Klux Klan burns a cross on their lawn (SF 91). On other occasions, bricks are thrown through their windows and shots are fired on their lawn (SF 92). Social acquaintances of many years shun them, and they are not welcome in many of their former circles. Like Rowan, resistance by people such as the Warings affects their mobility and limits the places in which they are welcome or can move freely. But Rowan concludes that the Warings’ efforts are making a difference. In language both hopeful and overembellished, he concludes his discussion of the Warings by reminiscing about his time on the USS Chemung during World War II as it “limped toward Charleston harbor with a banged-up turbine.” On that occasion, “an ‘old salt,’ wise in the ways of the sea, pointed out the lighthouse that was the ‘real McCoy’” that would guide them into port. Rowan concludes that Judge Waring is also the “real McCoy” who “had fashioned a glimmering of hope that the ship of freedom also might find its way into Dixie's antebellum ports” (SF 100). The worn metaphor notwithstanding, Rowan is determined to locate a space for hopefulness in the Deep South.

INDIVIDUAL ACTION, INSTITUTIONAL CHANGE, AND STRATEGIES OF RESISTANCE

Even as Rowan identifies a “glimmering of hope” that seems to be the effect of some of these resistance efforts by the Warings and others, readers are left with a more lasting impression, underscored by Rowan's skepticism, of how these experiences also carry negative personal psychological and social consequences. Indeed, Rowan returns repeatedly to the notion that racism's effects on mobility, and particularly African American mobility, are individual, discrete, and personal. Although Rowan touches on the larger institutionalized racism that inheres in the social, legal, and cultural systems of the South, he often theorizes mobility and its relation to resisting racism as an issue that requires individual rather than collective response. Even as he ends his journey, he suggests that the undermining of racism will only occur through individuals’ actions:

This statement, which dwells on notions of individual prejudice while eliding racism as it is built into cultural systems and institutions, might imply that Rowan misunderstands or ignores the operations of institutionalized racism. His insistence that US racism must be tackled by individuals could suggest to readers that he cannot narrate himself beyond some of the deeply personal issues that surface as he journeys through the racist terrain of his youth.

Yet to conclude that Rowan ignores institutionalized racism is to ignore how readership and purpose are key to his framing of the narrative as a personal response to his acquaintance Noah Brannon while imagining a broader readership and purpose: to help “America's Noah Brannons” (SF 99) understand what it is like to live and move as an African American in the American South. On one hand, the narrative is not clearly aligned with an activist agenda to challenge institutionalized racism and agitate for better conditions but rather seems focussed on documenting the South as it is, looking (and hoping) for what Rowan describes at several points throughout the narrative as a “New South,” which ultimately is overshadowed by the Old South attitudes and conditions that persist. Thus his perspective is somewhat at odds with that of contemporaries such as Ralph Ellison, LeRoi Jones, or Richard Wright, who argue more proactively for specific social change. On the other hand, as a text purporting to describe to a white readership what it is like to be an African American in the US South, and first published as a series of stories in a northern newspaper, Rowan also assumes the responsibility to speak on behalf of wider issues and draw conclusions intended to reach beyond an explanation of his individual life and experience for a navy friend. Of course, this means that his narrative also participates in the tension that critical race theory identifies between an antiessentialist stance and the need to allow space for the articulation of a “unique voice of color.”Footnote ³³ Such tension reveals not only the intersectionality informing Rowan's experiences with racism but also that this is his own personal story, an approach that coincides with the fuller and “truer” portrayal of black life called for by some of Rowan's peer writers.

There are a number of moments in the narrative when Rowan comments on conditions in such a way as to emphasize the operations of institutionalized racism. For example, while in Birmingham, he observes the following about voting rights:

In his familiar tone of skepticism and criticism, Rowan concludes that black political disenfranchisement occurs because of the corruption of election officials and the apathy of African Americans. Institutionalized racism as it affects the political power of African Americans is the crux of the problem, Rowan argues, rather than the self-defeating actions of illiterate African Americans or the self-serving actions of wealthy African Americans (although these too elicit his condemnation). His skepticism here is due to his uncertainty about how much racial progress can occur given the larger institutionalized inequities that limit blacks’ political power.

This tone and approach to the voting issue persist in a 1956 article in Look magazine in which Rowan continues to promote African American voting rights. The subject of the article is African Americans’ reluctance to vote for the Democratic Party given its stance on segregation. Rowan begins and ends the piece with a vignette of African American men enjoying a poker game. The men pause to watch a political candidate espouse his support of all Americans regardless of race. One of the men, a social worker, asks if they can get back to the game, observing, “That political double talk is for the white folks. Can't you guys see that both parties have forgotten that you exist?” At the end of the article, Rowan asks, “How many Negroes will embrace cynicism, will resolve their dilemma the way the social worker resolved it for his poker partners?”Footnote ³⁴ Rowan again focusses on the actions and attitudes of individual African Americans, but he does not suggest that the social worker's cynicism holds back racial progress. The lack of blacks’ political power accounts for the man's skepticism and highlights the tension between individual responses to racism and the larger institutional forces at work in US culture.

We see this tension again when Rowan appears to conflate individual race prejudice (of a railroad agent, a restaurant owner, or an acquaintance such as Noah Brannon, for example) and the institutionalized racism that curtails his mobility, opportunities, and comfort. However, such conflation ultimately serves his larger goal to attack institutionalized racism. For example, Rowan focusses on his own experiences of race prejudice (from both blacks and whites) in his dress and demeanor in many of the towns to which he travels. He attempts to ascertain how he should dress (up or down) and whether or not he should display his camera and role as a journalist. On a bus from Nashville to McMinnville, he notes that it would be better for him to wear a tie, for in that area of Tennessee, “a Negro fares better if he looks educated and willing to demand the few rights he possesses.” But he knows he will “have to remember not to wear a tie in several small towns in Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina, Louisiana, or anywhere in the Deep South,” where an African American can be killed for “dressing and acting like white folks” (SF 17). In Columbia, Tennessee, site of a 1946 race riot, he again decides to dress up so that people will take him seriously, but he parks his rental car far enough away from the sections of town he plans to visit that it will not attract the interest of police, who, he knows, “often become suspicious of a strange Negro in a new car, and stop him” (SF 39). Also in Columbia, his camera attracts some attention, and, as in other moments in the narrative, he finds that he needs to make decisions about whether or not to display his camera and give away his identity as a journalist.

As he attempts to gain information about the race riot, he plays various roles, and in doing so, he jeopardizes his ability to engage in the ethical and conscience-raising imperatives of counter-storytelling. In a barbershop, he declares to the clientele that he is “just a guy who likes cameras” (SF 41), but to the barber he identifies himself as a writer for Look magazine pursuing a story on the town five years after the riot (SF 42). Some of his role-playing becomes exploitive, such as when he is in a Washington, DC slum taking pictures of the deplorable conditions. He is aware that the residents might “resent my coming there ‘all dressed up’ to take pictures of them in their pathetic circumstances” (SF 69), but at the same time he feigns friendliness with one of the residents to gain better visual access to his rundown shack. Each time the man turns his head, Rowan “tap[s] the door with [his] foot to open it wider and let some light in” (SF 70). At other times, Rowan is warned away by others from taking a photograph, such as in Birmingham when a woman tells him to not let nearby policemen catch him taking a photo of a Jim Crow restaurant. The woman's fear affects Rowan, too, for he later discovers that he had forgotten to remove his camera lens cap (SF 162).

On a bus headed out of Milledgeville, Georgia, Rowan again considers his physical appearance, reflecting that, not far away, four African Americans were lynched in 1946. He has pushed his camera into his topcoat sleeve, covered his typewriter with his topcoat, and is dressed down; “Wearing trousers that needed pressing” and no tie, he feels he is in no danger of being accused of “acting ‘biggity – like white folks’” (SF 144). Rowan notices stereotypical statues of African Americans in the yards that he passes, and on the bus he finds that an African American mother and her child fulfill these stereotypes in real life, writing that the “bandanna-clad woman” next to him “was sickening enough to give some basis to the Aunt Jemima legend.” As the white passengers laugh at the woman's outrageous comments to her unruly child, one person comments, “Ain't these colored folks a mess?” When the woman becomes indignant and tries to commiserate with Rowan, he replies in an “overdone” dialect, “this cullud boy ain't gonna open his mouf ’n’ say nuthin’ to lead ’em t’ be'lieve they's right” (SF 145). As he feigns sleep, he recalls Judge Waring's remarks that “dignified, competent” African Americans are considered “freaks” by the “white-supremacists” (SF 146). Rowan's disdain here is for both the woman and the white bus passengers, all of whom participate in perpetuating a norm in which blacks are undignified and incompetent. As a moment in which Rowan situates his own mobility against a sort of stasis both physically (feigning sleep) and symbolically (representing himself as less educated or culturally aware to avoid a confrontation), he too perpetuates such norms. His choice to educate the woman about the inappropriateness of her actions through his response stresses both his important and unique “voice of color” and his individual effort to challenge racist stereotypes. However, that he does so while performing an act of class passing, and that he is afraid that the woman might spit in his face, emphasize his complex relationship with race and class. He is skeptical, as always, about the possibility of racial progress, suggesting that the woman through her actions thwarts such progress; indeed, he adopts an elitist position, assuming that it will be difficult for individuals such as this woman to change. Yet, as we see in a later 1967 article in Reader's Digest, Rowan also believed that much racial strife was a result of class conflict, “with Negroes at the bottom of the social ladder working against Negroes at the upper end as vigorously as they work against whites.”Footnote ³⁵ His complicated position on class issues is an effect of his own educational and socioeconomic privilege and, thus, his access to some degree of institutional power.

Furthermore, as we see in his exchange with the woman on the bus, Rowan does not always seem fully aware of the problems associated with his choices to play certain roles. In Laurel, Mississippi, he seeks to learn more about the case of death row inmate Willie McGee, accused of raping a white woman. He dresses up as a “respectable” Negro and shows his NAACP card to gain access to the opinions of teachers and others (SF 178). Similarly, he will show his naval reserve card (SF 208, 249) and suggest that he is “not at liberty to disclose” (SF 208) what he does for a living in order to put people off their guard to acquire a sleeping compartment or remain in a nonsegregated train car. But in Laurel, later in the day, he dresses as a “jobless scalawag” to find out what the town's “nobodies” think about the McGee case (SF 181). He is disgusted when it becomes apparent that no one is providing their real names in a bar (although he too is in “disguise”). He puts his tie back on and leaves for New Orleans, disappointed by the townspeople's refusal to talk openly and his own inability to glean enough information for a story: “I had turned up too little known truth to write a newspaper article: nobody would be quoted, for nobody wanted to get his fingers burned. Even I took the cowardly way out by sheltering my own fingers and proceeding to forget that I ever visited Laurel” (SF 186–87, original emphasis). He is impatient with the disingenuous townspeople but also concedes that he too has been complicit in the type of subterfuge that he criticizes in others. He suggests that his and the Laurel citizens’ behavior stems from the ways in which institutions and public opinion exert power over African Americans.

Rowan's relation to the McGee case is also complicated by his attitude toward what he refers to as the “Red Vampire” of Communism. He understands that the Communist press has benefited from the McGee story: from the “misty half-truths of the Willie McGee case, one thing emerged crystal clear: the Communists were reaping a propaganda bonanza and American democracy was suffering in the court of world opinion” (SF 187). Inevitably, McGee is put to death, and Rowan notes that the story's lesson lies beyond “Communist exploitation.” The Communists pursued the issue, Rowan argues, “because a onesided application of the law gave them an issue to magnify … Had Willie McGee been given a ‘white man's sentence,’ the case might have died in the same obscurity that once engulfed McGee.” Rowan bemoans the fact that “Americans fight over who ‘uses’ these McGees rather than fight to make the McGees hard to find” (SF 192). Rowan criticizes institutionalized racism here, and his approach to the issue is linked to his own discontent with African American Communists. Later, in an in-depth 1957 Ebony article on Paul Robeson's ostracization due to his alleged Communism, Rowan offers a mostly sympathetic account of Robeson's plight. He presents an interesting description of the dialogical give and take of his conversation with Robeson, casting himself as the second-person narrative voice in dialogue with the singer:

Rowan concludes that, for Robeson, his support for Communism stems from his belief that it offers the surest avenue for the dismantling of institutionalized racism through black solidarity and the assertion of black power. Rowan is skeptical about the positive impact of either and expresses concern about the approach taken by Robeson and others rather than about the ideology specifically.

Rowan's sidestepping of thorny political questions related to Robeson belies a reluctance to engage with the ideological imperatives of black power. Rowan argues that his skepticism about the effectiveness of black power is due to what he views as the inability of black power activism to positively impact racial progress. In a 1966 Ebony article on civil rights leadership, specifically critical of Stokely Carmichael's activism, Rowan claims to understand the position of black power advocates (although he also refers to black power as a “phony cry” and a “hoax”) but does not support the sometimes violent and at the very least disruptive tactics (in his mind) of Carmichael and others, whom he views as seeking the limelight and being unnecessarily provocative and polarizing. Of course, African American responses to black power were not monolithic. Neal argued in 1968 that black power “is a synthesis of all of the nationalistic ideas embedded within the double-consciousness of Black America. But it has no one specific meaning. It is rather a kind of feeling – a kind of emotional response to one's history.” At the same time, Neal also concludes that black power can “be defined only in action – in movement,”Footnote ³⁷ and the destruction of double consciousness seems to be the kind of action that Neal seeks.

Rowan's ideas of useful action differ somewhat from Neal's. Indeed, he shares the position of the NAACP and The Crisis, who also criticize black power strategies.Footnote ³⁸ Rowan encourages patience and believes there is no room for cynicism and strife in the slow and steady march toward civil rights. He also believes that criticism of long-serving leaders of the civil rights movement destroys the “pride” and “self-esteem” of African Americans.Footnote ³⁹ Rowan characterizes the actions of black power advocates as counter to the dismantling of institutionalized racism when he describes how the isolationism promoted by Carmichael and others would cut off African Americans from the kind of institutionalized power necessary to advance politically, economically, and educationally. He argues that the African American needs “the sympathy, the help, of Negroes everywhere, most of all that much-abused Negro middle class that has some money … the help of the courts … the power of the Justice Department and the prestige of the White House and the pocketbook of the federal treasury.”Footnote ⁴⁰ As he concludes the section of South of Freedom on McGee, he similarly acknowledges and criticizes the larger systemic problems underlying the case. His own efforts to tell this counterstory, even if he has to resort to disguise and half-truths to do so, result in his emphasizing the “deeper and ultimately more important lesson” that the racist system, not the Communists, failed McGee (SF 192).

Rowan's rhetorical and reportorial strategies are significant to our understanding of his theorizing. He makes decisions about his dress, speech, and actions based on his reading of, and the reactions he elicits from, individuals he meets. From these reactions, he draws conclusions about the general racial attitude of the town or state. His generalizations are, of course, sometimes problematic, but they also draw readers’ attention to the fraught terrain through which Rowan travels and the complicated work of identifying and dismantling institutionalized racism through acts of counter-storytelling. Rowan emphasizes that travel writers must engage their mobility as a means to racial reform while remaining skeptical of the results. In contrast to black travel writers before him who articulate clearly opposing forms of cultural work, his travel narrative does not take on the activist tone that we find in Ida B. Wells's columns for the Chicago Inter-Ocean, “Ida B. Wells Abroad,” in which she decries lynching during her 1893–94 UK anti-lynching speaking tours, nor does he adopt the more complacent approach to US racial issues that we find in Booker T. Washington's insistence in The Man Farthest Down (1912), a record of his 1911–12 trip to Europe and Russia, that African Americans in the South are better off than the working poor in Europe.Footnote ⁴¹ Furthermore, his stance differs from that of African American travelers writing after him, such as Richard Wright, who turns his attention to global concerns about emancipation from colonialism and religious and gender oppression.Footnote ⁴² Rowan's skepticism yields a unique perspective that allows him to navigate a noncoercive middle road between such positions but also problematizes the power of his counter-storytelling.

COUNTER-STORYTELLING AND CULTURAL CHANGE

While sometimes complicated by Rowan's uneasy relation to developments in black political and cultural power movements, his acts of counter-storytelling nonetheless enable him to fulfill a number of the goals of antiracist work and underscore additional ways to think about the power and impact of these stories. Delgado notes that the members of out-groups can use counter-storytelling as a form of “psychic self-preservation” and also to lessen subordination and oppression. Rowan's skepticism is a form of self-preservation in that it allows him to not become too hopeful and, thus, avoid additional disappointment. He engages the reader's conscience and demonstrates what is unjust, self-serving, or cruel, and he usually does so through stories of injustice unleashed upon himself or others, such as the rural blacks without proper access to health care, or Willie McGee. Language such as “I only hope the Noah Brannons really care” (SF 270) at the conclusion of South of Freedom enacts a rhetorical gesture of cautious hopefulness while also promoting action. Such language might also allow white readers, especially resistant ones, to suspend judgment and recognize the truth of Rowan's point – to, as Delgado describes the effects of counterstories, challenge complacency, allow those in power to experience and understand different realities beyond their own, become prepared for additional stories, and humanize the Other. Rowan's approach is subtle and noncoercive, and his narrative exemplifies his own personal back-and-forth on these issues, his ambivalence and uncertainty, which also invites readers to sympathize with his plight. Thus even his uncertainty here could be seen as useful to his counter-storytelling.

Perhaps we can best understand Rowan's theoretical stance on mobility in terms of his interrogation of “freedom” as both a physical and a mental state. Rowan writes not only in support of his own, Willie McGee's, or others’ freedom, but also to call attention to the ways in which all Americans are “south of freedom” due to the oppressive power of Jim Crow laws and racial biases. He also is not immune to the influence of racial bias, noting that when he first left the South, he had to remind himself on several occasions that “a white man wasn't necessarily anti-Negro because he was a native of the South” (SF 217). As emphasized at the end of the narrative, he enlists and relies on the participation of such white readers to realize racial reform. He concludes with a passage from the Jackson, Mississippi Daily News describing African American progress: “The new Negro has more education. He has better health. He has better clothes. He reads more newspapers. He is adopting the white man's customs, the white man's speech, the white man's standards and the white man's shibboleths” (SF 269, original emphasis). It is unreasonable, according to the editorial, to assume that such persons will be willing “to be content in the cabin of his slave grandfather. He is going to have a car and drive it. He is going to buy a home and live in it. He is going to step into citizenship and exercise its rights and demand its privileges” (SF 269–70, original emphasis). The combination of accommodationist and progressive rhetoric here is curious, and Rowan does not comment on the article's problematic assertions that African Americans are becoming more “white,” to their supposed betterment, instead focussing on the idea of racial progress as a feature of contemporary black life. Ultimately, the article suggests, the use of the future tense here is a tactic to motivate readers, to “gentle the recalcitrant of our readers to the fact that the new Negro is doing these things. The new negro is not a man of tomorrow. He is a man of today” (SF 270, original emphasis). This message is what Rowan emphasizes as he refers to these

Pivoting to the larger purposes of his journey, Rowan emphasizes that it is not only the South that has had racial turmoil and suffered because of it, losing a “hundred years” of progress. “We all race to catch up,” he says, and he hopes that through the turmoil “America's Noah Brannons – the people who ‘did not know’ – can see what it means to be an American. In our common hour of tribulation, as we stumble to a common destiny, I only hope the Noah Brannons really care” (SF 270). The skepticism in his concluding remarks is significant as a strategy that suggests some progress (given his moments of hopefulness throughout the narrative and the hopeful tone of the Daily News excerpt), but also relies on his expression of doubt to motivate whites to action.

In his writing after this experience, Rowan continued to express a form of hopefulness, not in relation to the actual physical mobility of travel per se but to the metaphorical upward mobility of racial progress. He also challenged white supremacy more assertively. For example, in his Ebony article on civil rights leadership, he observes the following, even while criticizing Carmichael's calls for the exercising of black power:

Rowan condemns hopelessness and, in a move that seems to extend beyond the skepticism of South of Freedom, suggests for African Americans a path, through high aspirations, to a state of “undoubting knowledge” of one's identity. From South of Freedom onward, Rowan allows us, as Delgado insists successful counter-storytelling should, to consider how to reallocate power through his own examples of resistance and standing up for himself. The mass demonstrations promoted by Carmichael and others are too much for Rowan to endorse, so he takes a different approach, suggesting that one person can engage in productive and bold dissent and make a difference on a train, at a lunch counter, or in a top government job. This ability to make a difference calls blacks to action while Rowan's skepticism allows him to be both noncoercive (of white readers) and self-preserving (of himself and other African Americans). His descriptions of his own and others’ resistance to oppression invite blacks and whites to contribute in thoughtful yet deliberate ways to the crucial work of racial progress.