COME ON DOWN TO SEE FOR YOURSELF : SOUTHERN RAILROAD TRACKS AS RACIAL SEGREGATORS--THE CASE OF GREENVILLE, NORTH CAROLINA

Abstract

Throughout American culture and through varying mediums, railroad tracks have been depicted as tropes of socioeconomic repression, technological development, and even bountiful migration. For instance, Joseph's Millichap, in Dixie Limited (2002), details the symbolic use of the railroad in Southern literature and culture; he details the work of various writers such as Faulkner, O'Connor, Wolfe, Ellison, and Welty. Darcy Zabel, in The (Underground) Railroad in African American Literature (2004), also focuses on the symbolic use and meaning of railroads in literature but specifically to literature garnered by black American writers. There has also been discourse on the broad concept of the "railroad track syndrome." They are usually in the form of nonfiction narratives. In them, the "syndrome" may also be referred to as and/or correlated to the concept of "the other side of the tracks." The train tracks in West Greenville that intersect 5th Street (formerly Martin Luther King, Jr. Drive) serve as the focal point for this area-specific illustration of the railroad track syndrome and the other side of the tracks. The aim here is to exemplify, through a collection of creative nonfiction essays and photographs (all photographs can be viewed at www.latasharjones.com), the obvious divide demarcated by Greenville's train tracks, the implied and explicit impacts that the divide has had on the communities in question, and, finally, the personal connections that I have drawn from it all.