Born in the Delta

Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility is a 1991 memoir by acclaimed Arkansan author and academic Margaret Jones Bolsterli. Though it was originally published by the University of Tennessee Press, the University of Arkansas Press published the second edition in 2000. In the book, Bolsterli records her early life on an Arkansas cotton farm during the 1930s and 1940s and shows how these experiences continued to influence her life, even after she moved north to pursue higher education. Born in the Delta was praised for its graceful and accurate depiction of life in the South and its appeal to scholars and general readers alike.

Bolsterli does not recount her childhood chronologically in the form of a single narrative. Instead, ten brief chapters center on particular topics she sees as essential for understanding the culture of the Arkansas Delta: “The Delta,” “The Household,” “Talk,” “Violence,” “White and Black,” “Friends and Neighbors,” “Moderate Brimstone,” “Books and Learning,” “The Table,” and “The Afterglow of the Confederacy.” In the acknowledgments, Bolsterli states that one of her motivations for writing Born in the Delta was to explain to others who might not know, “how the [white] southern consciousness differed from others.”

What follows is the story of a sensitive, bookish girl who used literature to cope with a “world suspended on a slender thread over chaos.” Bolsterli found the Arkansas Delta an oppressive society even for her as a white child. Not only was she skeptical of the overt religious messaging she encountered, but she also saw the hypocrisy of dividing people, separating the whites from African Americans, the haves from the have-nots, and the men from the women. For example, in Bolsterli’s recollections of Victoria, the Joneses’ Black housemaid, she writes that “while the men and the boys in the family were agreeing with all white society except my mother that I could not do whatever I wanted to do because I was a girl, Victoria was agreeing with me that, yes, indeed, I was going to do and be whatever.” Notably, Bolsterli is pleased enough to pause her steady, generally detached narration to triumphantly tell her readers that she and Victoria “turned out to be right and the men wrong,” remarking that by 1991, she had done most of what she dreamed of doing “with the minor difference that I took a Ph.D. rather than an M.D. and have not graced the operatic stage. Yet.”

Bolsterli ends Born in the Delta with a sense of hope. She needed to leave home so that she could experience life outside of the Arkansas Delta and find her voice, and yet she acknowledges that “the Delta was always in my head.” Much like William Faulkner’s Shreve from Absalom, Absalom! (1936), whom she quotes in her epigraph, Bolsterli, as many other educated Southerners do, seems to simultaneously love and hate her culture. This internal conflict explains why, though she felt driven to escape it, she could also be glad that during her absence, the Delta had gradually become more tolerant and progressive because of the civil rights movement, which meant that she “could finally come back to live within three hundred miles of it.”

For additional information:
Abbott, Shirley. “Review of Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 50 (Winter 1991): 390–391.

Bolsterli, Margaret Jones. Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility. Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000.

Graham, Sally Hunter. “Review of Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility.” Journal of Southern History 58, no. 4 (1992): 741–741.

Matthews, John M. “Review of Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility.” Mississippi Quarterly 45, no. 4 (1992): 492–494.

Neth, Mary. “Review of Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility.” Georgia Historical Quarterly 76, no. 2 (1992): 525–526.

Rogers, William Warren. “Review of Born in the Delta: Reflections on the Making of a Southern White Sensibility.” Florida Historical Quarterly 72, no. 1 (1993): 104–106.

Kerri L. Bennett
Arkansas State University