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Aiming neither at a personal history nor a sociological study, the author writes intimately of her life in the Deep South, about relations between whites and Negroes, and about what takes place in the mind of the white man under the conditions of racial relationship in the South. It is a psychological study in the best sense and the author uses the tool of dynamic psychology with unusual facility.
The Dreamers (Part I) is the child's-eye-view of the South: segregation, white supremacy cannot be reconciled with religious teachings; a basic conflict is established.
The White Man's Burden Is His Own Childhood (Part II) tells more about segregation: 'By the time we were five years old we had learned, without hearing the words, that masturbation is wrong and segregation is right… Therefore, when we … crept over the race line … we felt the same dread fear of consequences, the same overwhelming guilt that was ours when we crept over the sex line and played with our own body …' (p. 78). Three Ghost Stories analyzes three traumatic relationships which occur frequently in the South. First, the slaveholders 'mated with these dark women whom they had dehumanized in their minds'. The more frequent the visits to back-yard cabins, 'the higher he raised his white wife on her pedestal [and] the less he enjoyed her' (p. 116). A 'terrifying complex of guilt, anxiety, sex jealousy, and loneliness' developed, characterized by fantasies of the white woman's infidelity with a Negro. Thus the Ku Klux Klan presents a return of the repressed in its '… killings of a black male … who has "raped" a "sacred" white woman. It is a complete acting out of the white man's internal guilt and his hatred of colored man and white woman'