My name is Julie L. Lester. I am an Assistant Professor of African American Literature and Composition at Southwest Tennessee Community College in Memphis, Tennessee. My dissertation engaged the work of Zora Neale Hurston and its influence on Caribbean writers of Speculative and Science Fiction, the inimitable Nalo Hopkinson, and Erna Brodber. I graduated with my Ph.D. in African American Literature from the University of Memphis in 2011 under the sage guidance of Dr. Reginald Martin, Ph.D.
Being very evidently Caucasian, one of the first, and (obviously) unavoidable questions my students ask me is why I chose African American Literature as my specialty. My response is that I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My parents, John and Willene Lester, both educators in their own rights, grew up in Neshoba County, Mississippi.
As a young person, I grew up relishing the aroma of fresh cornbread and turnip greens, fried chicken, pole beans, boiled peanuts, collards, fresh corn, molasses, baked ham, and the lingering delight on the tongue of sweet iced tea. The lilting music of southern accents soothed me to sleep, as did the ticking of my grandfather's steady--if monotonous--mantle clock. But race relations were seldom spoken of. Why the 'nigras' dwelled on the far side of town and seldom interfered with the whites was never a subject to be broached. The shocking, often mortifying events of a recent past in Neshoba were dismissed as ancient history. It never puzzled me until I was grown.
Then I picked up a copy of Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston. The folk of Eatonville--a demographic with whom I'd never had a personal acquaintance--seemed remarkably like my own family. I felt an immediate, and intimate connection. It was an instant and all-encompassing love and I was hooked. It occurred to me that regardless of the apparent superficiality of 'color', we--the black, and the white community of the South--shared a cultural heritage, and we were very much the same...'folk.'
Those who know their regional history, know that Memphis and Neshoba County are two significant and historically charged sites of interest on the historical timeline of racial relations. As a child, I was immediately aware--even in the seventies--of the lingering racial tension that existed in the South, and that atmosphere excited my curiosity. Though African American and Anglo American Southerners, in some ways, share a mutually exclusive set of histories, I maintain that those histories are intertwined in culturally and socially meaningful ways. We are part of each others' histories, and hence, part of each other. Balkanizing histories, I contend, is an antiquated and obsolescent thing of the past, and further, a function that inhibits the progression of human understanding.
So, as part of a personal odyssey to uncover and decode the South of my youth, I chose to devote my life to a literary canon that has served to enrich my life, to make my life make sense, and to answer the long unanswered questions of a child who grew up oblivious to, or confounded by the racial conflicts of the past--and in some small way, to mend them.
Though it may appear at once to be incongruous that a terminally 'white' female such as myself should find such reassurance, joy, inspiration, and hope in the works of African American writers, it is at once, a fact, a life's work, and in fact, a lifelong romance.
JL
