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Title: The Negro in American Fiction
Author: Sterling Allen Brown
Contributor: Alain LeRoy Locke
Release Date: July 12, 2023 [eBook #71171]
Language: English
Credits: Alan, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net (This book was produced from images
made available by the HathiTrust Digital Library.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN
FICTION ***
THE NEGRO
IN AMERICAN FICTION
_by_
STERLING BROWN
KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y.
KENNIKAT PRESS SERIES IN NEGRO CULTURE AND HISTORY
THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN FICTION
Copyright 1937 by Associates in Negro Folk Education
Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 68-25492
Manufactured in the United States of America
EDITORIAL FOREWORD
This Bronze Booklet aims at a survey of the Negro in American fiction,
both as character and author. It is the first full-length presentation
of this subject, but differs from the usual academic survey by giving
a penetrating analysis of the social factors and attitudes behind
the various schools and periods considered. Sterling A. Brown, now
associate professor of English at Howard University, born and educated
in Washington, D. C., was graduated from Williams College in 1922 with
Phi Beta Kappa honors and the Clark Fellowship to Harvard, received his
master’s degree at Harvard in 1923, and has since pursued graduate work
in English literature at Harvard University. He has had wide experience
teaching at Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, Va., 1923-26,
at Lincoln University, Mo., 1926-28, Fisk University, 1928-29, and at
Howard University from 1929 to date. His volume of verse, _Southern
Road_, published in 1932, put him in the advance-guard of younger
Negro poets, and, as well, the then new school of American regionalist
literature. In 1937, Professor Brown was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship for creative writing and among other things, will complete
for publication his second volume of verse, “_No Hiding Place_.” Since
1936, he has been directing editor on Negro materials of the _Federal
Writers’ Project_ at Washington headquarters. For the last five years,
his literary book review comments in _Opportunity_ under the caption:
“_The Literary Scene_,” have revealed a critical talent of sane but
progressive and unacademic tendencies,--a point of view that the reader
will find characteristically carried through in this provocative and
masterly study.
ALAIN LOCKE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction 1
I. EARLY APPEARANCES 5
II. THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY
FICTION 17
III. ANTISLAVERY FICTION 31
IV. RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS
SOUTH 49
V. RECONSTRUCTION: THE NOT SO GLORIOUS
SOUTH 64
VI. OLD PATHS 84
VII. COUNTER-PROPAGANDA--BEGINNING
REALISM 100
VIII. REALISM AND THE FOLK 115
IX. THE URBAN SCENE 131
X. SOUTHERN REALISM 151
XI. NEW ROADS 169
XII. HISTORICAL FICTION 189
INTRODUCTION
The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his
treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice.
Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been
interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters.
I swear their nature is beyond my comprehension. A strange
people!--merry ’mid their misery--laughing through their tears, like
the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they!
They tread life’s path as if ’twere strewn with roses devoid of
thorns, and make the most of life with natures of sunshine and song.
Most American readers would take this to refer to the Negro, but
it was spoken of the Irish, in a play dealing with one of the most
desperate periods of Ireland’s tragic history. The Jew has been treated
similarly by his persecutors. The African, and especially the South
African native, is now receiving substantially the same treatment
as the American Negro. Literature dealing with the peasant and the
working-class has, until recently, conformed to a similar pattern.
The blind men gathered about the elephant. Each one felt the part of
the elephant’s anatomy closest to him, the trunk, tusk, eyes, ear,
hoof, hide and tail. Then each became an authority on the elephant.
The elephant was all trunk, or all hoof or all hide, or all tail. So
ran their separate truths. The single truth was that all were blind.
This fable, pertinent to our study, might be continued to tell how some
of the blind men returned to their kingdoms of the blind where it was
advantageous to believe that the elephant was all trunk or tusk.
We shall see in this study how stereotypes--that the Negro is _all_
this, that, or the other--have evolved at the dictates of social
policy. When slavery was being attacked, for instance, southern authors
countered with the contented slave; when cruelties were mentioned,
they dragged forward the comical and happy-hearted Negro. Admittedly
wrong for white people, slavery was represented as a boon for Negroes,
on theological, biological, psychological warrant. Since Negroes
were of “peculiar endowment,” slavery could not hurt them, although,
inconsistently, it was their punishment, since they were cursed of
God. A corollary was the wretched freedman, a fish out of water. In
Reconstruction, when threatened with such dire fate as Negroes’ voting,
going to school, and working for themselves (i.e., Negro domination),
southern authors added the stereotype of the brute Negro. Even today
much social policy demands that slavery be shown as blessed and
fitting, and the Negro as ludicrously ignorant of his own best good.
Many authors who are not hostile to the Negro and some who profess
friendship still stress a “peculiar endowment” at the expense of the
Negro’s basic humanity. Some antislavery authors seemed to believe that
submissiveness was a mystical African quality, and chose mulattoes
for their rebellious heroes, attributing militancy and intelligence
to a white heritage. Many contemporary authors exploit the Negro’s
quaintness, his “racial qualities.” Whether they do this for an escape
from drab, standardized life or out of genuine artistic interest or, in
the case of Negro authors, out of race pride, their work suffers from
the narrowness of allegory. It must be added that these authors play
into the hands of reactionaries, who, once a difference is established,
use it to justify peculiar position and peculiar treatment.
Whether the Negro was human was one of the problems that racked the
brains of the cultured Old South. The finally begrudged admission that
perhaps he was, has remained largely nominal in letters as in life.
Complete, complex humanity has been denied to him. He is too often
like characters in the medieval allegories: now Loyalty, or Mirth, or
Servility, or Quaintness, or Exuberance, or Brutishness, or Lust. Only
seldom is he shown as Labor or Persecution, although he was brought
here to supply the first, and as payment received the second.
Since there is no stereotype without some basis in actuality, it goes
without saying that individuals could be found resembling Page’s loyal
Uncle Billy or Stark Young’s William Veal, or Dixon’s brutal Gus, or
Scarlet Sister Mary or Van Vechten’s Lasca, or even Uncle Tom and
Florian Slappey. But when, as is frequent, generalizations are drawn
from these about a race or a section, the author oversteps his bounds
as novelist, and becomes an amateur social scientist whose guesses are
valueless, and even dangerous. Fiction, especially on so controversial
a subject as the American Negro, is still subjective, and novelists
would do well to recognize that they are recording a few characters in
a confined social segment, often from a prejudiced point of view. They
cannot, like Bacon, take all for their province.
Fortunately for American fiction, however, there have been authors,
even from the outset, who heard the Negro speak as Shakespeare heard
Shylock:
He hath disgraced me ... laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains,
scorned my nation ... cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and
what’s his reason? I am a Jew.... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and
if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest,
we will resemble you in that.
We shall see in the nineteenth century many writers, from Melville to
Cable, who have shown sympathy and comprehension. Nevertheless it is
to present-day realists, a large number of them southerners, that one
must look for the greatest justice to Negro life and character. They
have been less concerned with race than with environment; they have
sought to get at social causes rather than to prop a social order.
In spite of the publishers’ dicta that certain authors know _the_ Negro
better than Negroes themselves; in spite of certain authors who believe
that slave-holding ancestry is necessary in order truly to know Negroes
(on the theory that only the owner, or his descendants, can know the
owned); in spite of the science of Negro mind-reading, flourishing
below the Mason-Dixon line, it is likely that Negro authors will, after
the apprentice years, write most fully and most deeply about their own
people. As we go to the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the French for
the truth about their people; as we go to the workers and not to the
stockholders, to the tenants and croppers and not to the landlords, for
the truth about the lives of tenants and croppers, so it seems that we
should expect the truth of Negro life from Negroes. The Negro artist
has a fine task ahead of him to render this truth in enduring fiction.
So far, much of what seems truthful has been the work of sympathetic
white authors. In all probability white authors will continue to
write about the Negro. Sometimes similarly conditioned in America’s
class structure, sometimes extremely sensitive and understanding,
they will get at valuable truth. But Negro novelists must accept the
responsibility of being the ultimate portrayers of their own.
CHAPTER I
EARLY APPEARANCES
_Early Fiction._ When Americans started to write novels, at the end
of the eighteenth century, the Negro was definitely part and parcel
of American life. Colonial authors from Cotton Mather and Samuel
Sewall to Benjamin Franklin, Crèvecour and John Woolman had protested
his enslavement. He was the rock upon which the constitution nearly
split. In the North, there were still a few slaves and a growing body
of freedmen, some of whom, like Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker,
Richard Allen, and Crispus Attucks, were more than locally known. The
vast hordes of slaves, together with a good number of free Negroes,
were a more integral part of southern society. They had cleared the
forests and laid the roads, had built the fine houses and wrought
the beautiful iron-work; had labored on the tobacco, rice, indigo
and cotton plantations so that their masters could buy more slaves.
Cotton was not yet king, the cotton-gin was not invented; but the
broad backs of the slaves were still supporting a heavy load. Whether
as house-servant grateful for easy favors, and contributing to the
master’s feeling of safety, or field-hand, or fugitive stealing away to
the North, or intractable revolter, throwing both northern and southern
communities into consternation, the Negro was recognizably part of the
American scene.
But the first groping American novels were still tied to Mother
England’s leading strings. For all of their patriotism, the novelists
were little concerned with American actualities. When the Negro
character was included, he was a shadowy figure in the background, an
element of romantic side interest, closer to Aphra Behn’s _Oroonoko_
and Defoe’s fiction than to what the novelists could have seen about
them.
The earliest novels, William Hill Brown’s _The Power of Sympathy_
(1789) and Mrs. Susannah Rowson’s _The Inquisitor_ (1794), true to
their sentimental models, have antislavery feeling. Hugh Brackenridge’s
_Modern Chivalry_ (1792 to 1815) contains a good ironic attack upon the
slave-trade, and a less successful character Cuff, whose jargon seems
plucked out of Defoe:
Now, shentiman, I say, dat de first man was da black a-man, an’ de
first woman was de black a-woman: get two-tree children; de rain vasha
dese, an’ de snow pleach, an’ de coula came brown, yella, coppa coula,
and at de last quite fite....
Royal Tyler’s _The Algerine Captive_ (1797) deplores the “middle
passage” horrors of the slave-trade in the sentimental mode: “I thought
of my native land and blushed.” Charles Brockden Brown’s novels contain
Negro characters only incidentally. There were no English models to
make these early novelists aware that servitude and struggle could be
subjects for fiction.
_Irving._ In the nineteenth century, interest in the Negro increased.
In _Salmagundi_ (1807) Washington Irving, a brisk young man-about-town,
records the Negro curiosities he finds, such as the “Negro wench,
principal musician at a ball.” He describes a dance in Haiti with
unctuous ridicule:
In the middle of the rout, when all was buzz, slip-slop, clack and
perfume, who should enter but Tucky Squash! The yellow beauties
blushed blue and the black ones blushed as red as they could ... for
he was the pride of the court, the pick of all the sable fair ones of
Hayti. Such breadth of nose, such exuberance of lip! his shins had the
true cucumber curve; his face in dancing shone like a kettle.... When
he laughed, there appeared from ear to ear a _chevaux de-frize_ of
teeth that rivaled the shark’s in whiteness.... No Long Island Negro
could shuffle you “double-trouble” or “hoe corn and dig potatoes” more
scientifically.
Here we have the first comic Negro in American fiction, assured of long
employment from Irving to Octavus Roy Cohen. _Salmagundi_ likewise
includes Caesar, a “weatherbeaten wiseacre of a Negro,” who henpecks
his masters, tell stories of ghosts, goblins and witches, and, like a
good man Friday, accompanies his master to his sparking and dancing.
Caesar is repeated in _The Knickerbocker History of New York_ (1809) as
an old crone who would croak:
a string of incredible stories about New England witches--grisly ghost
horses without heads,--and hairbreadth escapes, and bloody encounters
among the Indians.
“Adventures of the Black Fisherman” in _Tales of A Traveler_ (1824)
tells us only that Black Sam or Mud Sam was “supposed to know all the
fish in the river by their christian names,” and that he had a “great
relish for the horrible,” such as executions, and that all of the
urchins felt free to play tricks upon him. Irving does not attempt to
give his speech, much less his character.
_Cooper._ The first American novelist to aim at fullness in his
presentation of American life, James Fenimore Cooper naturally included
the Negro. Although limited in information and skill, he expanded and
improved upon the slight sketches of his forerunners. He presents
Negroes of many types. First of all, there is Caesar Thompson, the
loyal retainer in _The Spy_ (1821). True to the prevailing literary
attitude of the gentry towards underlings, Cooper burlesques his
appearance with what passed for humor in those days:
But it was in his legs that nature had indulged her most capricious
humor. There was an abundance of material injudiciously used. The
calves were neither before nor behind, but rather on the outer side of
the limb, inclining forward.... The leg was placed so near the center
as to make it sometimes a matter of dispute whether he was not walking
backward.
Nevertheless Caesar is shown as crafty, and courageous in the
service of his family. Cooper’s interest in Negroes is continued in
_The Pioneers_ (1823) in Agamemnon, not a slave but a legal ward, a
man-of-all work whose deference does not keep him from mirth at his
master’s expense, and Abraham, a free black who shares in the rough
frontier life.
A different type is the free Sailor, Scipio Africa, one of the heroes
of _The Red Rover_ (1827). In physique, seamanship, self-control, and
intelligence he is superior to his sailing mates, but this does not
shield him from their petty insults. There is pathos in the scene of
his death:
If he is not (a Christian) I don’t know who the devil is. A man who
serves his country, is true to his messmate, and has no sulk about
him, I call a saint, so far as mere religion goes. I say, Guinea, my
hearty, give the chaplain a grip of the fist.... A Spanish windlass
would not give a stronger screw than the knuckle of that nigger an
hour ago; and now, you see to what a giant may be brought!
In _The Last of The Mohicans_ (1826), Cora Munro, the offspring of a
mixed marriage, is shown to be resourceful and strong, above the usual
run of Cooper’s “females.” It is worthy of note, since she is the first
of a long line of “octoroons,” that her end is tragic.
Cooper thus anticipates later creators of Negro characters, presenting
the faithful house servant, the courageous man of action, and the
octoroon doomed to tragedy. Though crudely recorded, his dialect
rises above the usually impossible Negro speech in early novels. No
abolitionist, Cooper still did not favor slavery, and honest observer
that he was, he refuses to see the Negro, even when grotesquely
described, as subhuman.
_Simms._ William Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, differed from
Cooper, his northern model, in that he defended slavery ardently.
In his fiction, however, Negroes are presented without excessive
argument. They range from the obsequious house-servant to the
brave freeman. Hector, in _The Yemassee_ (1832) is a heroic slave,
participating gallantly in the Indian warfare, volunteering for
perilous service, warning blockhouses, and rescuing his master. He is
extremely loyal and refuses to be freed.
I d--n to h---, maussa, if I gwine to be free.... ’Tis onpossible,
maussa.... Enty I know wha’ kind of ting freedom is wid black man? Ha!
you make Hector free, he turn wuss more nor poor buckrah--he tief out
of de shop--he git drunk and lie in de ditch....
This passage is the first and most influential example of a scene soon
to be hackneyed. Caesar in _Guy Rivers_ (1834) is subservient, but
cunning and philosophical. _The Partisan_ (1835) gains in interest
because of the presence of Tom, who is such a good cook that Porgy, his
gourmet master, will not brook his being abused. Tom repays by keeping
his master fat and happy “so long as dere’s coon and possum, squirrel,
patridges and dub, duck in de ribber, and fish in de pond.”
Simms’ _Richard Hurdis_ (1838) shows slaves accompanying their masters
on the move to the Alabama frontier, dancing, singing, sometimes
listening to a fellow slave’s impromptu verses:
In them he satirized his companions without mercy ... and did not
spare his own master, whom he compared to a squirrel that had lived
upon good corn so long that he now hungered for bad in his desire for
change.
In _The Forayers_ (1855) Cato is a slave-driver, courageous and devoted
to his family, and Benny Bowlegs, another driver, is
a moral steam engine. He pushed his master as well as his brother
slaves.... Push at the beginning, push in the middle, push at the end,
and Ben’s pushing made crops.
_The Wigwam and The Cabin_ (1845) a collection of stories, is unusual
in showing Negroes at the center of the picture. “The Loves of The
Driver” casts side-lights upon plantation customs, and the “Lazy Crow”
is the first to portray Negro superstition and folkways.
In numbers, and a certain rudimentary realism, the Negro characters
in Simms’ many novels go beyond those of any other early nineteenth
century novelist. Simms bungles when he tries to record the Gullah
dialect, but the effort is worthy of comment. Striving to be accepted
as a southern gentleman, Simms shows his slaves, generally, to be
well cared for and contented. Nevertheless, his urge to realism
kept him from showing slavery to be an endless picnic. Masters held
forth freedom as a reward for service; they knew, if the contented
slaves did not. All in all, however, Simms is noteworthy more for
the extensiveness of his gallery of Negroes than for any depth of
characterization.
As Simms showed Negroes participating in the backwoods life and
warfare of the South, so earlier writers of the westward movement
included sketches of Negroes. Paulding’s _Westward Ho_ (1832) deals
with southerners leaving what romancers were to consider Arcadia for
a better land. In this novel, Pompey, like Simms’ Hector, refuses
freedom. _Nick of The Woods_ (1837) a melodrama of bloody Kentucky
by Robert Bird, includes several Negroes. Emperor is most fully
characterized: like Cooper’s Caesar he is loyal, worshipful of quality,
and, grotesque. Although his “natural” cowardice is insisted upon, his
actions belie this, as he fights for his “little missie” and dies the
death of a hero, “gored by numberless wounds, and trampled by the feet
of his slayers.”
_The Virginians._ Virginia is the setting for such novelists as W. A.
Carruthers, Beverley and George Tucker, and John Esten Cooke. Their
novels describe the gentry and their complaisant slaves who enter the
books as unobtrusively as they entered the grand dining rooms to bring
in sweet missives or decanters of old port. These mammies and butlers
and coachmen are interchangeable, appearing in different books under
different classical names, but always the same.
Toby in Poe’s “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840) is “as ugly an
old gentleman as ever spoke, having ... swollen lips, large white
protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and
bow-legs.” He is another of Poe’s sad attempts at humor. Jupiter, in
“The Gold-Bug” (1843), traditionally refuses to leave his master, but
threatens in all seriousness to beat him, a hot-blooded cavalier, with
a big stick. His dialect, an attempt at Gullah, is language belonging
with Poe’s masterpieces, “out of space and out of time.” Poe revealed
that his southern upbringing had borne fruit, however, when, defending
slavery from “the fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists” he writes
that it is the will of God that the Negro should have a “peculiar
nature,” of which one characteristic is his tremendous loyalty to his
master, “to which the white man’s heart is a stranger.” The master has
a “reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent”:
he who is taught to call the little negro his in this sense and
_because he loves him_, shall love him _because he is his_.
_Melville._ A greater writer than Poe in his grasp of character, Herman
Melville was above this sophistry in dealing with human beings. A
northerner, Melville did not know slavery at first hand; but a mariner,
he did know Negro seamen. _Moby Dick_ (1851) reveals this knowledge.
[Daggoo] a gigantic coal-black negro ... retained all his barbaric
virtues and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp
of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in
looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white
flag come to beg truce from a fortress.
If Daggoo is the “noble savage,” Pip, as sympathetically created, is
of another breed. Pip’s cowardice is not considered racial but is
naturally human.
Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle ye shall see him,
beating his tambourine, prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for
to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels
and beat his tambourine in glory: called a coward here, hailed a hero
there!
Negro sailors, generally courageous and praiseworthy, occur in
Melville’s other romances of the sea.
_Benito Cereno_ (1855) is a masterpiece of mystery, suspense and
terror. Captain Delano of the _Bachelor’s Delight_, discovering a
vessel in distress along the uninhabited coast of Chile, boards her
to render aid. He is interested in the many Negroes he finds on the
decks: “like most men of a good blithe heart he took to Negroes not
philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland
dogs.” He is mystified, however, when the gamesome Negroes flare up
in momentary rage, and especially by their continual clashing their
hatchets together. Only when Don Benito, in desperation, escapes to
Delano’s ship, does the real truth dawn.
There had been a revolt on board the _San Dominick_; the Negro sailors
and the slaves had killed many of the whites, and had kept the others
alive only for their skill as navigators in order to reach a Negro
country. The mutineers and revolters are overcome in a bloody battle,
carried to Lima, and executed. The contrast between the reputed
gentleness of Negroes “that makes them the best body-servants in
the world,” and the fierceness with which they fight for freedom is
forcibly driven home. Certain Negroes stand out: Babo who, resembling a
“begging friar,” engineered the revolt with great skill and is almost
fiendish in his manner of breaking down Cereno’s morale; Francesco,
the mulatto barber; Don José, personal servant of a Spanish Don;
and Atulfa, an untamed African chieftain, all filled with hatred for
whites. Melville graphically pictures the slave mothers, “equally
ready to die for their infants or fight for them”; the four old men
monotonously polishing their hatchets; and the murderous Ashantees. All
bear witness to what Melville recognized as a spirit that it would take
years of slavery to break.
Although opposed to slavery, Melville does not make _Benito Cereno_
into an abolitionist tract; he is more concerned with a thrilling
narrative and character portrayal. But although the mutineers are
blood-thirsty and cruel, Melville does not make them into villains;
they revolt as mankind has always revolted. Because Melville was
unwilling to look upon men as “Isolatoes,” wishing instead of discover
the “common continent of man,” he comes nearer the truth in his
scattered pictures of a few unusual Negroes than do the other authors
of this period.
_Frontier Humor._ The southern humorists, thriving from the thirties
to the sixties, introduce the Negro only incidentally in their
picture of horse-swapping, gander-pulling, camp meetings, fights, and
political brawls. Because they were realistic, the “plantations” they
show are most often backwood farms. The hard-fisted frontier squires,
with a love of horse-play, and a callousness necessary for survival,
treat their slaves as one would expect: they are neither Legrees nor
American versions of Sir Roger de Coverly. In _Georgia Scenes_ (1835),
Longstreet non-committally shows a Southern backwoods “lady” knocking
her servant around from mere habit. In _Adventures of Simon Suggs_
(1846) Johnson Hooper gives good pictures of southern camp-meetings,
at which Negroes and whites vie in religious hysteria, mingling
indiscriminately in the hollow square, plunging and pitching about in
the “jerks” and screaming “glory” in unsegregated chorus.
George Harris in _Sut Lovingood Yarns_ (1867) tells of a rowdy whose
antics include poking a hornet’s nest into a Negro camp meeting. At
another time, Sut removes a corpse and lays a snoring, drunken Negro in
the coffin. When the slave preacher Simon comes to the coffin he yells:
“Oh Goramighty massy on dis soul; de debil hesef on top of brudder
Seize!...” Jis then I moaned out in a orful doleful vise, “Hiperkrit,
cum tu hell, I has a claim ontu you fu holdin the bag while Seize
stole co’n.” He jes rar’d backwards, an’ fell outen the door wif his
hans locked, an’ sed he in a weak ... sort of vise, “Please marster”
an’ jis fainted, he soon cum to a-runnin’, fer I hearn the co’n
crashin thru the big field like a in-gine were runnin’ express thru
hit. I hain’t seen Simon ter this day.
Other humorists tell of frontier surgery upon slaves; if they were not
ill before, they were near death’s door after the barbarous operations.
The tone of the humorists is burlesque, which often sinks to the
level of present-day “darky” jokes. Nevertheless, southern humor is
significant. The assumption that Negroes are especially designed as
butts for rough practical jokes is probably closer to the reality of
the antebellum South than the sentimentality of more ambitious works.
True to the manner of cracker-box philosophers, Artemus Ward attacks
the sentimentalized and the unconventional, and delivers many of the
“common-man’s” jibes at abolitionists and Negroes. “The Octoroon” is,
at least, a refreshing departure from the shopworn tragic mode.
“Hush--shese a Octoroon!”
“No! sez I ... yu don’t say so! How long she bin that way?”
“From her arliest infuncy,” sed he.
“Wall, what upon arth duz she do it fur?” I inquired.
“She kan’t help it.... It’s the brand of Kane.”
Oberlin College is lampooned for being rather “too strong on
Ethiopians.” Though a good Unionist in the war, Artemus Ward, unlike
his successor Nasby, does not reveal any sympathy for the Negro.
_Summary._ Irving’s tellers of mysterious legends, Cooper’s
house-servants, Melville’s mates in the foc’sle, and the obsequious
servants of the Virginia cavaliers reflect their authors’ interests
and experience more than they interpret Negro life. Simms’ blood and
thunder melodramas and the farces of the frontier humorists give more
varied types and experiences, with some crude realism. Melville’s
_Benito Cereno_ goes more deeply into character. In the main, however,
these subsidiary characters are not very convincing. They speak a
pidgin English, closer to the speech of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday than
to that of nineteenth century Negroes. Cooper and Simms tried to record
dialects; Simms is probably better since Gullah is nearer to pidgin
English, but he is still inaccurate. Some authors presented the Negro
with dignity and sympathy, but serious realism was still far off. It
is worthy of note, however, that such favorite Negro characters as the
fabler, the loyal servant, the buffoon, the tragic octoroon, the noble
savage, and the revolter, appear in these early books.
Although in a few cases propaganda for or against slavery raises its
head, these subsidiary characters are not made into walking arguments.
Toward the end of this period, however, the slavery debate broke out,
and, in the words of one critic, “the world of nature was lost in the
world of controversy.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why were early American novels “tied to Mother England’s leading
strings?”
2. What tradition of English literature might account for Irving’s and
Cooper’s humorous treatment of the Negro?
3. Since Simms was proslavery, what is inconsistent about his showing
Negroes being set free as reward for heroic services?
4. What historical incidents could have suggested Melville’s _Benito
Cereno_?
5. What in Poe’s life might have occasioned his attitude toward the
Negro?
6. In which of the works mentioned is the Negro character a foreground
character?
CHAPTER II
THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY FICTION
_The Plantation Tradition._ The growth and accuracy of the plantation
tradition have been excellently studied in _The Southern Plantation_
(1925) by Francis Pendleton Gaines. Gaines attributes the tradition’s
hold on America to a love of feudalism,(in spite of our profession of
democracy), the charm of the Negro characters as “native” literary
material, and a romantic wish for an Arcadian past. He proves that
“the tradition omits much plantation truth and exaggerates freely
certain attractive features of the old life.” But the tradition goes on
unabashed; over a century old, it still guarantees best selling fame.
The setting is familiar:
The old plantation; a great mansion; exquisitely gowned ladies and
courtly gentlemen moving with easy grace upon the broad veranda behind
stalwart columns; surrounding the yard an almost illimitable stretch
of white cotton; darkies singingly at work in the fields, Negro
quarters, off on one side, around which little pickaninnies tumbled in
gay frolic.
It is used in advertisements for coffee, pancake flour, phonograph
records, and whiskey. It is a favorite American dream. The characters
are as constant as the cotton bolls: the courtly planter, the one
hundred per-cent southern belle, the duelling cavalier, the mammy or
cook, “broadbosomed ... with vari-colored turban, spotless apron, and
beaming face,” the plantation uncle, black counterpart “of the master
so loyally served and imitated,” and the banjo-plunking minstrel of the
quarters.
Since the plantation tradition tells of a glory that must have no
blemish, slavery is explained away as a benevolent guardianship,
necessary for a childish people’s transition from heathendom
to Christianity. By stressing festivities such as harvesting,
corn-shucking, hunting, fishing, balls, weddings and holiday seasons,
slavery was presented as “an unbroken Mardi Gras.” Since southerners,
merely because they are born in the South, are a kindlier, gentler
breed than other mortals, the possible abuses of slavery existed only
in the minds of fanatical Yankees.
Plantation tradition fiction, reenforcing proslavery thought, was
in turn reenforced by it. Occasionally southern economists admitted
that slavery was the basis of southern commerce and civilization.
But these dismal scientists were too outspoken for the sentimental
romancers. Southern physiologists who proved that “by an unknown law
of nature none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical
sun,” justified the sippers of juleps on shaded verandahs. Theologians
defended slavery as having Biblical support since Ham was cursed
by God. In the main, however, the plantation tradition advanced
less unfeeling arguments: the grown-up slaves were contented, the
pickaninnies were frolicking, the steamboat was hooting around the
bend, God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.
_The Tradition Begins._ _Swallow Barn_, the first example of the
plantation tradition, appeared in 1832. J. P. Kennedy, the author, was
skillful, but his picture relies upon Addison, Goldsmith, Walter Scott,
and proslavery thought more than upon observation and understanding.
His mouthpiece in these sketches is Littleton, a northerner (Kennedy
himself was a Marylander, southern in upbringing), who comes South with
an “inky intent” to see the worst of slavery, but remains to worship
it. The southern aristocrats are not in love with the institution of
slavery, but realize that it is necessary for the Negro who is
essentially parasitical, dependent upon guidance for his most
indispensable necessaries, without foresight or thrift of any kind....
I am quite sure they never could become a happier people than I find
them here.... No tribe of people have ever passed from barbarism to
civilization whose progress has been more secure from harm, more
genial to their character, or better supplied with mild and beneficent
guardianship adapted to the actual state of their intellectual
feebleness, than the negroes of Swallow Barn.
In accordance with this ideal coloring, Negro children are shown
“basking on the sunny sides of cabins [like] terrapins luxuriating on
the logs of a mill-pond.” Slaves seem to be kept busiest tending their
own garden patches, of which they sell the produce. “I never meet a
Negro man--unless he is quite old--that he is not whistling; and the
women sing from morning to night.” Negroes are shown as ludicrous:
And when to these are added a few, reverend, wrinkled decrepit old
men, with faces shortened as if with drawing strings, noses that
seemed to have run all to nostril, and with feet of the configuration
of a mattock, my readers will have a tolerably correct idea of the
negro-quarter.
Hardships come chiefly from meddling abolitionists: “We alone are
able to deal properly with the subject.” Kennedy shows how he can add
sweetening to the bitter by explaining the breaking up of families
(Tidewater fortunes were frequently based upon domestic slave-trading)
as follows:
All before Abe had been successively _dismissed_ from Lucy’s cabin,
as they reached the age fit to render them serviceable, with that
satisfied concern that belongs to a negro mother who trusts to the
kindness of her master. [Italics mine.]
Kennedy admits that the recording of dialect was beyond him. A great
deal more was beyond him, but that does not keep _Swallow Barn_ from
being influential upon literature about Negro life and character.
In his plays, especially _The Gladiator_ (1831), Robert Montgomery
Bird took an antislavery stand, but his satirical novel _Sheppard
Lee_ (1836) was proslavery. Part of the book deals with a Quaker
philanthropist, confused and futile, who goes to the South to work
for abolition. The slaves on the plantation are shown living happily
under an indulgent master until an antislavery tract changes them into
burners, ravagers and murderers.
_Proslavery Humorists._ Although, for the sake of the record, Sam
Slick, the comic character of T. H. Haliburton’s _Yankee Stories_
(1836) announces that he dislikes slavery, most of his comments
justify it. He objects to enslaving white men for debt, but “those
thick-skulled, crooked-shanked, flat-footed, long heeled, woolly headed
gentlemen don’t seem fit for much else but slavery ... they ain’t fit
to contrive for themselves.” He ridicules the talk of
broken hearted slaves killin’ themselves in despair--task-master’s
whip acuttin’ into their flesh--burnin’ suns,--day o’ toil--nights
o’ grief--pestilential rice grounds--chains--starvation--misery and
death,--grand figurs them for oratory.
He is unwilling that abolitionists should be lynched, but they should
learn how the cowskin feels. To prove slavery no hardship, he reasons
that a married woman is a slave, and if she happens to get the upper
hand, the husband is a slave, and leads a worse life than any Negro.
Sam’s brother, a lawyer in Charleston, S. C., forces an old white
swindler to buy a Negro back into slavery, for the good of the Negro.
These stories do not belong to the plantation tradition, for some
mention “nigger-jockies,” i.e., “gentlemen who trade in nigger flesh,”
and a planter who has “one white wife and fourteen black concubines.”
But they are proslavery in sympathy. Sam Slick is significant in that
he represents a large number of northerners who were never too fond of
Negroes and strongly opposed abolition. Some of these became catchers
of runaway slaves, and many expressed their hatred of the Civil War in
the Draft Riots.
When William H. Thompson, Georgia humorist, sent Major Jones on his
travels in the forties, he was able to get in many proslavery thrusts.
Mary Jones wants to take along her slave Prissy, since she is unwilling
to have white servants:
I could never bear to see a white gall toatin’ my child about, waiting
on me like a nigger. It would hurt my conscience to keep anybody
’bout me in that condition, who was as white and as good as me.... A
servant, to be any account as a servant, is got to have a different
kind of spirit from other people; and anybody that would make a
nigger of a white child, because it was pore, hain’t got no Christian
principle in ’em.
Uncle Ned believes that abolitionists have horns like billy-goats, eyes
like balls of fire, and great forked tails like sea serpents. “Ugh,
chile, dey wusser’n collery-morbus.” When these fierce creatures get
hold of Negroes, ruin is come; here is Major Jones describing the free
Negroes of the North:
Pore, miserable, sickly-lookin’ creaters! it was enuff to make a
abolitionist’s hart ake to see ’em crawlin’ out of the damp straw
of the cellars, to sun themselves on the cellar-dores till they got
able to start out to by or to steal sumthing to eat ... many of ’em
was diseased and bloated up like frogs, and lay sprawlin’ about like
so many cooters in a mud-hole ... like lizards in a pile of rotten
logs.... This, thinks I, is nigger freedom: this is the condition to
which the philanthropists of the North wants to bring the happy black
people of the South!
_First Answers to Mrs. Stowe._ In the three years following the
appearance of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ (1852), there were at least fourteen
proslavery novels published, besides numerous pamphlets, articles, and
a long poem. W. L. G. Smith’s _Life At The South_, or _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin As It Is_ (1852) was struck off while the iron was hot, borrowing
illustrations from _Swallow Barn_ and passages from _The Yemassee_.
Uncle Tom, irked at being outdone in the fields by the younger,
stronger Hector, and jealous of his master’s favoritism, moodily
listens to an abolitionist, and runs away. In Canada he finds real
slavery; in Buffalo he sees the freedmen in wretchedness, discovering
one frozen to death in a snow storm. Finally he begs his master to
return him to the South, which that gentleman does out of Christian
consideration and forgivingness. The following passage shows Dinah
refusing to join Tom in seeking freedom:
Dinah: “... An’ den wha’ would be de feelin’s of your own Dinah. She
would curse de hour when she was born. No, no! I cannot consent to be
a party to sich an arrangement.”
Tom: “How silly you talk. You will do noffin yourself, an’ you will
let no one help. I begin to think, you hab revoked your decision....
Dere you hab it; you now know’d my feelin’s.”
Dinah did not know what to say in reply ... “there is something in
this idea of being free that I cannot comprehend,” she thought to
herself.
This passed for Negro speech and psychology in proslavery novels.
Hector likewise refuses to be free in a speech stolen from the Hector
of Simms’ _Yemassee_. Allgood, a hypocritical philanthropist, and
Bates, an abolitionist busybody, are types that later novels were to
repeat.
In the same year, Caroline E. Rush sent forth her little book, _North
and South_, or _Slavery and Its Contrasts_, to teach the Northern
reader “boundless, illimitable love,” that would make him “regret the
necessary evils of the Slavery of the South, without bitter feelings
towards those who are born amid the peculiar rights and duties of the
slaveholders.” The thousands of free Negroes in Philadelphia pain Mrs.
Rush because of their lack of an “elegant degree of refinement and
cultivation”; their poverty is racial debauchery, while the poverty of
the whites is victimization. What are the abuses suffered by slaves
to the real, bitter, oppression that in our own midst sweeps its
thousands out of a life of penury into premature graves?
Tears should not be shed for Uncle Tom--“a hardy, strong and
powerful Negro”--but should be reserved for helpless, defenseless,
children--“of the same color as yourself.” Writing of plantation
Negroes she wishes that she too had “taken lessons of a colored
professor, and was conversant enough with Negro dialect, to launch
out boldly into their sea of beauties,” but she is forced to leave
the speech to her readers’ imagination. Little is left to their
imagination, however, when she describes the cabins of the field-hands,
embowered in Cherokee roses. At this point, the book’s illustration
resembles a suburban paradise adjoining the White House. When the
slave-mistress gently patted a quadroon’s head, she “intimated a
freedom which is not often shown to the servants in the North.” Mrs.
Rush is correct here; there was a great deal of such freedom.
Mrs. Eastman’s _Aunt Phyllis’ Cabin_ likewise appeared in 1852.
This popular novel glorified slavery and denounced abolitionists,
particularly Mrs. Stowe, but it did attempt to describe slave life.
Bacchus prays hard and drinks harder; many of his antics--his love
for cast-off finery, the banjo, and big words--could grace a minstrel
show. Aunt Phyllis is one of the first to appear of the mighty race of
“mammies.” The title character of John W. Page’s _Uncle Robin in His
Cabin_ (1853) puts the author’s beliefs into dialect: he does not want
freedom for himself, and the Negro who is dissatisfied should go back
where he came from:
“Dis, sir, is no country for free black men: Africa de only place
[for] he, sir....”
_Sentimentality of The Old South._ Mrs. Caroline Lee Hentz, a
northerner married to a southern gentleman, turned out a number of
blood-and-tears romances. In _Marcus Warland_ (1852) and in _Linda_
(1857) she celebrates the mammy:
Aunt Judy’s African blood had not been corrupted by the base mingling
of a paler strain. Black as ebony was her smooth and shining skin, on
which the dazzling ivory of her teeth threw gleams bright as the moon
at midnight. Judy had loved--adored, reverenced her, as being of a
superior, holier race than her own.
_The Planter’s Northern Bride_ (1854) by Mrs. Hentz shows the typically
converted northern girl. After her appearance on the plantation has
elicited rapturous cries of adoration from the slaves, she is won
over to the peculiar institution. “Oh! my husband! I never dreamed
that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate!” The
husband, though a perfect master, modestly says that he is “not as
good as the majority of masters.” His slaves are fat, sleek and good
natured; on Sunday, at church, they are “fashionably attired” and there
is “the rustle of tissues, the fluttering of muslin and laces, the
waving of feathery fans, the glitter of jewelry.” The planter proves
that the Negro was divinely ordained for slavery since
his skull has a hardness and thickness greater than our own, which
defy the arrowy sunbeams ... and his skin secretes a far greater
quantity of moisture and throws back the heat absorbed by us.
Crissy, misled by an abolitionist, crosses the Ohio and finds freedom
too much for her--“the only slavery she had ever known.” An incipient
revolt is nipped by Moreland, who, appalled by “the intolerable burden
of the slaves’ treachery and ingratitude” says:
I would rather, ten thousand times, cultivate these broad fields
myself, than be served by faithless hand and false, hollow hearts.
I have hands that can work. I would do it cheerfully; if labor was
the portion God had assigned to me in the world. Better, far better,
the toiling limbs than the aching heart! He paused a moment in
indescribable emotion.
The slaves, naturally, break down and weep. All are forgiven, except
Vulcan, who had lifted his “rebel arm” against Moreland: “You must
never more wield the hammer or strike the anvil for me.... Go--you are
free!” Poor Vulcan....
Mrs. M. J. McIntosh in _The Lofty and The Lowly, or Good in All and
None All-good_ (1854), hopes for the solution of the most difficult
problem: “how the slave may be elevated to the condition of an
intelligent, accountable being, without detriment to the master’s
interest.” Mrs. McIntosh is sure that the solution cannot come from
the fanatical North; she hopes that the South “with its greater
sympathy, love and understanding will awaken to its responsibilities.”
Daddy Cato, who has grown gray in faithful service at Montrose Hall,
Savannah, is set free and given a little homeplace. He is not proud of
his freedom; he will be proud only when he can read the Bible and is
free of sin. Following his beloved family to the North, he is highly
insulted when he is approached by Boston abolitionists.
Make me free! how can I free any more? Dem da nonsense people, and
what dem want take me from Miss Alice for?... I wonder if I been sick
and couldn’t do any ting, ef dem would nuss me and take care o’ me
liken Miss Alice.... I tink dem crazy ’bout free. Free bery good ting,
but free ent all; when you sick, free won’t make you well, free won’t
gib you clo’s, no hom’ny, let ’lone meat.
Needless to say, the other slaves at Montrose, away from these crazy
people talking about “free,” live their childish lives in happiness.
_The Lofty and The Lowly_ is full of piety toward southern divinity.
_The Defense Sums Up Its Case._ Mrs. Henry R. Schoolcraft’s _The Black
Gauntlet_ (1860) is likewise a compendium of proslavery arguments. The
comfortable, well-ventilated slave homes “with sitting and sleeping
room” and a loft for storing provisions are compared with the dens,
holes, cellars and tenements of poor whites in northern cities. Food is
good and abundant, with game and fish caught in the slave’s plentiful
off time. Slaves were given an acre of ground for their own use and
allowed to raise hogs and poultry, of which the produce was sold at
full market price. That slaves were ever knocked senseless is “purest
fiction,” since “their skulls are so thick that it is doubtful whether
any white man’s strength could consummate such a feat.”
I am so satisfied that slavery is the school God has established for
the conversion of barbarous nations, that were I an absolute Queen
of these United States, my first missionary enterprise would be to
send to Africa, to bring the heathen as slaves to this Christian
land, and keep them in bondage until compulsory labor had tamed their
beastliness....
Mrs. Schoolcraft was a bit late, however; for over two centuries
countless ships had been sent, and millions of Africans had been
brought “to school” in Christian lands.
Since “not a living man can swear that he has ever heard antislavery
sentiment from a slave in the South,” the suffering of the Negro, to
Mrs. Schoolcraft, is a lie whipped up by northern politicians. Runaway
slaves are always the good-for-nothing rowdies, who flee to escape
work and discipline. The separation of slave husbands and wives is no
tragedy, since all are polygamists as in Africa.
It is not believed by the author that such a monstrosity (babies sold
from mothers) has ever occurred in South Carolina, as a mistress there
usually takes more care of her little Negro property than a black
mother ever does of her children.
Poetic justice is in the book: the poor dupe of abolitionists is
betrayed into crimes that “destroyed and grieved her conscience,” but
the faithful mammy is well rewarded. _The Black Gauntlet_ is an extreme
case of special pleading, where vilification of the accursed Negro
alternates with praise of his blessedness in slavery. It is noteworthy,
however, that Mrs. Schoolcraft’s use of Negro dialect, in this case the
Gullah of the low country, is as good as that of any preceding writer.
Suggested by “a popular work of fiction, abusive of southern slavery,”
_The Yankee Slave Dealer_ by a Texan (1860) has for its subtitle _An
Abolitionist Down South_. The theme is hackneyed: a northerner attempts
in vain to aid slaves to freedom, is won over to the proslavery cause,
and winds up by becoming a confirmed slave dealer, inhumane because
he was born on the wrong side of the Ohio River. Justus, the Yankee,
tries to lure three Negroes to freedom. Moses, the first, is a walking
edition of _The Bible Defense of Slavery_:
Well, heah’s sump’n else, mastuh: we read in the book of Leviticus dat
de childin of Isr’l was told dey should buy slaves. I marked de place,
and I’ll jes read it to you; doe I s’pose you’s seed it many a time.
It’s in de twenty-fif’ chapter, de forty-fif’ and sixt’ verse.
Truly religious, Moses says that he submits because the Bible tells
him that such is his duty. Justus approaches the second Negro with
ludicrous pomp: “Let an ardent desire to alleviate the woes of the
suffering plead my excuse for the breach of decorum.” To this the Negro
responds: “What for massah make fun of puoh nigger dis way!” The third
specimen, farthest down in the physical and mental scale, runs away
with Justus, only to steal his horse and saddle-bags and return to his
master. Justus soon learns the proslavery creed that freeing the Negro
will merely “people the penitentiary or feed the gibbet.”
Nature, by their inferior capacity and cheerful submission to their
lot, has so well fitted them for this position.... The lot of the
serving classes in all countries imposes a burden.
Grief is expressed for the white working class of the North; the female
slave finds no parallel to the degradation of northern prostitutes.
Abounding in such arguments, _The Yankee Slave Dealer_, though poor in
characterization and plot, was the type of novel that the South wanted.
_Summary._ Less novels than fictional arguments, the first books of the
plantation tradition are strikingly similar. Frightened by the success
of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, southern authors rushed counter-propaganda
to the presses. To testify to their culture, they produced crude,
ungainly works. They called Mrs. Stowe “a moral scavenger” and worse
names; since she was a Yankee woman, the rules of chivalry could be
suspended. The pattern seldom varied: scenes of bliss on the plantation
alternated with scenes of squalor in the free North. The contented
slave, the clown and the wretched freedman are the Negro stereotypes,
who put into dialect the creeds of Chancellor Harper and Professor
Dew in the _Pro-Slavery Argument_, and of the Reverend Priest in _The
Bible Defense of Slavery_. A plantation with a kindly master was basis
for generalizing about all plantations, of whatever type, in whatever
sections. A pampered house-servant, who refuses uncertain freedom for a
comparatively easy place, becomes _the_ Negro slave; a poor unemployed
wretch becomes _the_ freedman.
The intractable, the ironic, the abused Negro is nowhere on these
plantations. Congressmen might deplore in legislative halls the
injuries done the South by the Underground Railroad, and southern
newspapers might be filled with descriptions of runaways, some second
offenders with branded scars on their faces. But runaways in these
books are generally flighty creatures and half-wits, and even they
finally steal back to the South. Judicial records might be full of
instances of brutality, but the occasional whippings are shown to be
for due cause such as stealing a ham from a poor woman who could not
spare it. Miscegenation is missing in spite of the proofs walking about
in the great houses or in the fields or the slave-pens. Slavery is
shown as a beneficent guardianship, never as a system of cheap and
abundant labor that furnished the basis of a few large fortunes (and
assured an impoverished, disfranchised class of poor whites).
In spite of the exaggerations and omissions, however, certain damning
evidence creeps in. Though too kind to maltreat Negroes, the cavaliers
are adept at tarring-and-feathering, riding on rails, and lynching
abolitionist villains, probably out of consideration for the Negro’s
welfare. Slavery is sometimes considered as not the Negro’s final
state; at some indefinite time (probably after the planters had all
become wealthy) he would be returned to Africa to bear witness to the
civilization and Christianity he had seen in America. And lastly, the
arguers are betrayed by their argumentative tactics: It isn’t true;
but since it is, you are worse. Thus: it isn’t true that slavery is a
bad system, it is really a fine thing--no worse than the northern and
English system of wage-slavery, which is terrible. Proslavery authors
were justified in protesting the exploitation of northern factory
workers, but to argue that therefore slavery was blessed, is to prove
that a man’s broken leg is not painful since another man has a broken
arm.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Describe examples of the plantation tradition found in modern
advertising.
2. List examples of the plantation tradition in popular songs.
3. Granting that _Swallow Barn_ was the truthful picture of a Virginia
plantation, why is its influence on literature dangerous?
4. What is damaging in Kennedy’s admission that he could not record
Negro speech?
5. List examples of what you consider the greatest exaggerations in the
pictures of slavery given by these books, and state your reasons for so
considering them.
6. List the similar situations and arguments of these books.
7. Which novelists defend slavery because of the physical traits of
Negroes?
CHAPTER III
ANTISLAVERY FICTION
_Growth of the Attitude._ The opposition to slavery, which began
almost as soon as the first slaves were brought here, found literary
expression in colonial times and especially in the eighteenth century,
when honorable voices denounced slavery as “the most unremitting
despotism on the one hand, and degrading submissiveness on the other.”
It was not until the eighteen thirties, however, that the antislavery
crusade took on full force, moving “from resistance to the slave power
... to death to slavery.” In 1831, the year of Nat Turner’s famous
revolt, the Antislavery Society was established, and William Lloyd
Garrison published the first number of his _Liberator_.
In addition to the pamphlets strewn on “the wayside, the parlor,
the stage coach, the rail car and the boat deck,” slave narratives
became a literary weapon. The experiences of fugitive slaves intrigued
abolitionists who took down their stories, sometimes for newspaper
sketches such as Isaac Hopper’s _Tales of Oppression_, and sometimes
for fictionalized biographies such as _A Narrative of the Life and
Adventures of Charles Ball, A Black Man_ (1838), _Recollections of
Slavery_ (attributed to a runaway slave, 1838) and _The Narrative of
James Williams_ (1838). In 1839 Theodore Weld, as important in the
antislavery crusade as Garrison, produced _Slavery As It Is_, a book of
facts “authenticated by the slave-holders themselves [yet containing]
but a tiny fraction of the nameless atrocities gathered from the papers
examined.” Written to combat “the old falsehood that the slave is
kindly treated that has lullabied to sleep four-fifths of the free
North and West,” this was the most popular antislavery publication
before _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.
When antislavery fiction appeared, therefore, it found an audience
prepared, and the arguments, the characters and a literary form set up.
_Before Uncle Tom’s Cabin._ The first antislavery novel was published
anonymously in 1836 as _The Slave_, or _Memoirs of Archy Moore_.
Enlarged in 1852, it was renamed _The White Slave_, and claimed by
Richard Hildreth, the historian. Archy Moore, son of his master,
Colonel Moore, marries an octoroon, Cassy. Forced to run away, since
the colonel desires Cassy for himself, they are captured and sold to
different masters. Archy is sold and resold, until in South Carolina
he and Tom, an embittered rebel, take to the swamps, finding a colony
of outlawed slaves. Ferreted out of there, Archy, because of his light
color, manages to escape to the North; Tom becomes the wild scourge
of the region. Archy goes to Europe, attains some education and
wealth, and redeems his wife from slavery. Though written in highflown
language, and not so dramatic as _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, _The White
Slave_ is still vigorous. Certain characters--the white slave, the
octoroon girl, the insurrectionist, the unfeeling Yankee overseer, and
the lustful planter--are to reappear in later novels. The arguments,
though slowing up the action, are cogent and informed. Hildreth
obviously studied the slaves in his sojourn: his delineation includes
hypocritical humility, sullenness, vindictiveness, intractability,
cunning, courage, the contempt of house-servants for field hands, and
of mulattoes for darker Negroes. The loyalty of some slaves to their
masters, and their treachery to their fellows, are explained largely
as policy for gain. Although occasionally heightened and unfair, _The
White Slave_ is one of the most important novels of this controversial
period.
Herman Melville’s allegory _Mardi_ (1849) has bitter antislavery
protest and wise prophecy in the sections that describe Vivenza (the
United States). A slave with red marks of stripes upon his back is
observed hoisting a standard, correspondingly striped, over the
Capitol, the temple dedicated to Liberty. Hieroglyphics read “All men
are born free and equal;” minute hieroglyphics add “Except the tribe of
Hamo.” In the south of Vivenza, the strangers see
Under a burning sun, hundreds of collared men ... toiling in
trenches.... Standing grimly over these, were men unlike them; armed
with long thongs, which descended upon the toilers.
After close scrutiny the strangers, in amazement, swear that the
slaves are men. For this they are branded as “firebrands, come to
light the flame of revolt.” The southern spokesman exclaims: “The
first blow struck for them dissolves the Union of Vivenza’s vales.
The northern tribes well know it.” Melville warns northerners not to
feel self-righteous, and does not malign southerners, since “the soil
decides the man,” and they have grown up with slavery. Some slaves even
seem happy, but Melville adds significantly “not as men.” Melville is
perplexed about the solution, and fatalistically concludes that “Time
must befriend these thralls,” but he is certain that slavery is “a
blot, foul as the crater-pool of hell.”
The first woman to turn the novel to antislavery uses was Emily
Catherine Pierson, who felt that too few readers knew of the thousands
of runaways who had gained freedom. _Jamie, The Fugitive_ (1851)
introduces the hero in a newspaper advertisement of a runaway, and
takes leave of him in an invoice as one of “Ten Bales of Humanity,
in a thriving condition, late from three plantations in Virginia.”
In between we get descriptions of life in the cabins and fields, of
“nigger-buyers,” slave sales, slave-pens and caravans, and of the
hazards of the fugitive stealthily pursuing his way under the “eaves
of the Alleghanies,” befriended only by the North Star. Mrs. Pierson’s
book is pious and sentimental, but her characters, though slightly
sketched, are believable human beings.
The same author writes in _Cousin Franck’s Household_ (1852):
Were we content to be an humble imitator, we know of no one whom we
should be prouder to follow than the noble author of that wonderful
work “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” But we owe it to ourselves to say that our
little book was projected before the publication of the latter; and
our Jamie Parker, we think, had only one predecessor--and that we had
not seen--in this species of literature.
Written as the letters of a northern woman visiting Virginia, _Cousin
Franck’s Household_, or _Scenes In The Old Dominion_ is _Swallow
Barn_ in reverse. Slave-traders and fugitives are again described.
In addition we have close observations of domestic life. Some of the
slaves, with good right, resemble the master too much for his wife’s
comfort and she begs him to sell them or send them off to his Alabama
plantation. A slave drover remarks:
Fact is, I’ve got a specimen lot ... of Anglo-Saxon blood, I reckon
they calls it; at any rate, I’m takin’ ter market some of the best
blood in the “Old Dominion”.... Ingenus, ain’t it now, for a body to
tarn a body’s own blood to sich account.
A Yankee overseer, who “calculates what a nigger is wuth, and how
long he’ll last on the hard drive plan;” a beautiful octoroon and her
mother, crazy Millie, deranged by the tragedy of slavery, are types
that will frequently be met with in later fiction. Although apologetic
to “fastidious readers” who might object to her recording “dialectal
peculiarities,” Mrs. Pierson kept voluminous notebooks “to secure
accuracy in the nondescript vernacular of the cabin and the hut.” She
sees the social setting, likewise, with accuracy; she records what
southern novelists preferred not to show: the poor whites, not an
accident but a logical result of slavery; and the worn-out, profitless
land, which brought it about that Virginia’s best crop was the crop of
slave children in the quarters.
_Harriet Beecher Stowe._ In 1851, a little woman in Cincinnati sent the
first chapter of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin or The Man that Was a Thing_ to the
_National Era_. The daughter of a famed preacher, and the sister of
another more famous for his antislavery sermons, Harriet Beecher Stowe
had grown up in religious, humanitarian surroundings. Cincinnati, a
border city, was a battleground for antislavery and proslavery forces;
Dr. Bailey, abolitionist editor of the _National Era_ was mobbed there,
and Quakers spread the antislavery gospel in “sewing societies.” Mrs.
Stowe, whose home was at times a shelter for fugitives, had listened
to pathetic or hair-raising stories of the South, and had written two
antislavery sketches, “Immediate Emancipator” (1848) and “The Freeman’s
Dream” (1850). Her anger at the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law made
her dissatisfied with such weak parables, and she set out to write a
passionate protest. In preparation she read books like Weld’s _Slavery
As It Is_, and the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass, of Lewis
Clark, who suggested George Harris, and of Josiah Henson, who suggested
Uncle Tom.
In 1852 when the completed serial was published in book form as _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin, or Life Among The Lowly_, its success was instantaneous.
Over three hundred thousand copies were sold in America in the first
year; in a very short time there were forty editions in England, and
over a million and a half copies sold in the Empire. It was translated
in many foreign languages, including Bohemian, Welsh and Siamese. It
was acclaimed by George Sand, Dickens and Kingsley, who naturally
were not annoyed by the sentimentality and melodrama; it set Heinrich
Heine to reading the Bible; to Macaulay it was the greatest American
literary achievement. Whittier rejoiced in the Fugitive Slave Law,
since it gave occasion for the book. Lincoln later said to Mrs. Stowe,
“So you are the little woman who brought on the great war.” If this
is overstatement, it is true that many of the voters who elected
Lincoln in 1860 were greatly influenced by the household favorite.
Tolstoy grouped it with the few masterpieces of the world, and Howells
considered it the only great American novel produced before the Civil
War. Detractors have for a long time been undermining its prestige,
but it has probably been more widely read than any other novel in the
world, and it is still popular.
In characterizing the Negroes in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, Mrs. Stowe faced
the dilemma of the propagandist. If she showed them as brutalized by
slavery, she would have alienated her readers, whose preferences were
for idealized heroes. If on the other hand, she made her characters too
noble, her case against slavery would be weakened. She did this with
Uncle Tom, and critics have stated: If slavery produced a Christian
hero so far superior to free whites, then slavery is excellent. This
dilemma was hardly recognized by Mrs. Stowe, however, as all of her
training and inclinations were toward sentimental idealism. Eliza and
George, if not models of Christian forgivingness, are still virtue
in distress, to be saved by poetic justice. Eva’s ethereal goodness,
and Legree’s cruelty are examples among the white characters of the
same idealization. But Topsy must not be overlooked; although minstrel
shows have made her into a Puck in blackface, Mrs. Stowe intended
to show her as a pathetic victim of slave-trading as well. Sambo
and Quimbo, the slave-drivers, had been dehumanized by the system;
Cassy is the octoroon whose beauty has crushed her; and Chloe, while
traditional, is made realistic by the little touches of a woman well
acquainted with kitchen-lore. Mrs. Stowe has a wide range of Negro
characters, and one southern critic finds in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ just
about all of the traits he is willing to grant the Negro. High spirits
are shown on Shelby’s Kentucky plantation, but tragedy lurks in the
background. Mrs. Stowe handles the tragedy with the bold melodramatic
strokes of Dickens; but she artfully blends the shocking with humor
and pathos, with mystery and suspense; familiar domestic scenes with
cotton-planting, steamboating on the river and gambling in New Orleans;
pious moralizing with fascinating wickedness--all in all a successful
recipe.
When Mrs. Stowe rattled the bones of the skeletons in southern closets,
howls arose from the manors. A South Carolinian recorded the rumor:
That the whole “nigger kingdom” of the South had been killed,
smothered, torn to pieces by bloodhounds, ground up for bone manure;
children dragged from mothers’ breasts, and the whole plantations
turned into slaughter-houses, we fully expected; and yet nobody had
read it.
It is needless to say that no such pictures occurred in _Uncle Tom’s
Cabin_, yet Mrs. Stowe was called a defamer, a hypocrite, “snuffling
for pollution with a pious air,” a plain liar.
A moralist and debater, Mrs. Stowe returned the lie. She published _A
Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, a book as long as the novel, giving sources
for all of her charges. The _Key_, largely unread by the critics,
remains unanswerable. Granting that such feats as Eliza’s crossing
the ice are sensational, although vouched for, in what did the lying
in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ consist? Joel Chandler Harris goes too far in
calling it a defense of American slavery as Mrs. Stowe found it in
Kentucky, but his comment has point. Shelby and St. Clair are kindly
owners, in the plantation tradition, whose humanity was overpowered
by the system. The two Yankees,--the vicious Legree and the priggish,
unsympathetic Miss Ophelia are certainly in line with southern gospel.
It is no lie that there were slave auctions, slave cellars such as the
ones where the flies “got to old Prue,” public whipping posts, mothers
separated from their children, and slaves like Cassy whose beauty was
their doom. With allowances for sentimentality and melodrama, essential
truth is in _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_. To argue against its artistic faults
and to consider it incomplete representation are possible. The charge
of lying, however, is confusing. Mrs. Stowe showed that slavery was
a great wrong, and that Negroes are human. Is it here that critics
believe that she lies?
Mrs. Stowe’s second antislavery novel, _Dred, A Tale of the Dismal
Swamp_ (1856) later published as _Nina Gordon_, was obscured by the
lasting fame of _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, although many critics have
preferred it. It lacks the pathos and sweep of the earlier work, but it
adds pictures of the “poor whites” and of Negro outlaws in the Dismal
Swamp. Harry Gordon is a fuller portrait of George Harris; another
“white slave,” he is the successful manager of a plantation while
his white half-brother is a wastrel and carouser. His character is
analyzed in conventional terms: “the rules about Ham do not pertain” to
him, and at times he plaintively wishes to be “a good, honest, black
nigger, like Uncle Pomp.” Lizette, his quadroon wife, is similar to
Eliza. Traditional Negroes are Old Hundred, the coachman, and Tiff,
who in his love for his little white charges is like Uncle Tom. Dred,
a fanatical fugitive, the son of Denmark Vesey, is created somewhat
after the model of Nat Turner. A new figure for Mrs. Stowe, she does
not portray him very successfully. Devoted to the creed of “turning
the other cheek,” she shows Dred doing little other than rescuing the
virtuous, or urging slaves to escape. He is less an insurrectionist
than a Negro Robin Hood. His supernatural appearances recall Scott’s
novels, and his longwinded chants are more those of a Hebrew prophet.
Other fugitives are more real: Hark, sullen and inflexible, and Jim,
the clownish house-servant, pampered but wanting to be free, especially
so that he can have a wife all his own. There is local color in scenes
like the camp-meeting, but the book is written with a reformer’s zeal,
more concerned with urging emancipation and denouncing “the great
Christianizing institution” than with re-creating social reality.
Antislavery feeling is likewise in _The Minister’s Wooing_ (1859),
a tale of New England. Candace, “a powerfully built, majestic black
woman, corpulent, heavy,” is traditional in her loyalty to her family,
but she is proudly and volubly free: “I ain’t a critter. I’s neider
huff nor horns. I’s a reasonable being....”
_Negro Novelists._ Very shortly after _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ the first
novel by an American Negro appeared. This was _Clotel, or The
President’s Daughter_ (1853) by William Wells Brown, an antislavery
agent. The book was popular enough for three editions; in the second
and third, the heroine is changed to the daughter of “a great
statesman.” _Clotel_ is not well written or well constructed, but these
failings are common to its type. Scattered throughout the book are
intimate glimpses that only one who had been a slave could get: a few
dialect rhymes, certainly among the first in American literature, a few
comic interludes, and some Negro jokes on the master. But such things
are all too scarce. The story is melodrama, and the chief characters,
though vouched for by the author, are hardly distinguishable in
gentility from the heroines of “blood and tears” romances. Clotel’s
mother jumps into the Potomac, committing suicide to elude the slave
hunters. Her aunt, after marriage with a white Vermont doctor, who
neglects to file papers of manumission, is sold with her beautiful
daughters on the block, and dies of the shame. The surpassingly
beautiful Clotel is luckier. Sold from one place to another, she
finally becomes maidservant for an angelic girl, and falls in love with
a handsome black slave. Helping him to escape execution for resisting
a white man, she disguises him in her clothes, and remains undetected
in the cell. (She is nearly white, and he is black.) She is flogged for
this and sold to New Orleans, where an enraptured Frenchman steals her
away. After his death, providential for the plot, she meets her former
lover in Europe. Back in America, he dies leading a charge in the Civil
War, and she becomes an Angel of Mercy to the Federal troops. The
novel wanders far afield, and incidents that might have been impelling
arguments are told too casually.
Two other Negro novelists took up the novel as their weapon. Frank
J. Webb’s _The Garies and Their Friends_ (1857) takes place chiefly
in Philadelphia. It has a new setting and problem, but is badly
overwritten. Mr. Garie, a white man, has married a wife only partly
white, and race prejudice makes the whole family suffer for it. In
contrast, a Negro family lives a happier life in spite of hardships.
Martin Delany, a versatile free Negro, began in 1859 a novel _Blake,
or the Huts of America_ in the _Anglo-African_, but the work was not
completed. With a hero and heroine modelled upon George Harris and
Eliza, and a number of horrors, _Blake_ is an imitation of _Uncle
Tom’s Cabin_, best in the pictures of the Southwest which Delany had
visited. In 1859 Frances Harper’s “The Two Offers” appeared, telling of
a white heroine who devotes her life to the antislavery cause. This is
the first short story by a Negro author, but otherwise unimportant.
_Other Successors._ _The Planter’s Victim_ (1855) by W. W. Smith,
republished five years later as the _Yankee Slave Driver_, is the
most gruesome antislavery novel. Richard Dudley, wishing his octoroon
half sister for mistress, is infuriated when she marries a nearly
white slave, George. He has Caroline flogged with one hundred and
fifty lashes and George with four hundred. On such a scale are all the
barbarities inflicted. Dudley smashes the skull of Caroline’s baby
and, when Caroline dies heartbroken, he insults her corpse. For many
years he torments George, and finally after starving him in a New
Orleans dungeon, stabs him. The slaves are extreme specimens, George
being a “youthful and majestic Apollo in the full glow of masculine
beauty and splendor,” and Caroline being magnificently beautiful. Both
speak highflown drivel. With all of his supposed manliness, George
equals Uncle Tom in saintliness. The book hardly serves its purpose:
the villains are too monstrous for belief, the hero too submissive for
respect, and the incidents too uniformly gruesome for anything except a
collection of horrors.
Among the antislavery authors who, like Mrs. Stowe, advocated
colonization is H. L. Hosmer, author of _Adela, The Octoroon_ (1860).
Adela, a slave-mistress, though disliking abolitionist books which
“merely ransack lawsbooks and newspapers for narratives of torture,”
condemns slavery as a fraud and curse. The misery of slaves on
Mississippi plantations is pictured only a shade darker than the
squalor of fugitives in the North. The happy opportunities of life
in Liberia are set in contrast, but without conviction. One of the
full length characters is Tidbald, distinguished champion of southern
rights, but seducer of his own slave daughter. A mysterious worker of
the underground, “broadbrim” Quakers, and an octoroon who preferred to
be a kept woman in New Orleans instead of a plantation drudge, could
well have been further developed at the expense of the argumentation.
Mention is made of the melodies of the slaves and the rhythm of their
dancing, but other local color is missing and the dialect is false.
Many of the Negroes are true steel, game to the core. At the end Adela
is proved to be herself an octoroon. To save her, a loyal body-servant,
Captain Jack, heads an insurrection and kills her would-be ravisher.
Although disgruntled at slavery, courageous, and intelligent, Jack
rebels only when his mistress is in danger. _Adela, The Octoroon_ is
confused, incredible, and tedious, with only occasional originality.
More popular among the Union soldiers, according to report, than even
_Uncle Tom’s Cabin_, was a novel published in the Beadle Dime Novel
Series, _Maum Guineas’ Children_, by Mrs. M. V. Victor (1861). The
author disclaims any political purpose, but her stress is antislavery.
While planters and their families are shown in a sympathetic light,
the abuses of slavery are told of in fuller measure. Maum Guinea,
mysterious and embittered, has been deprived of her children and
husband. She contrives the escape of Hyperion and Rose, a beautiful
slave who has been sold by the “kindly” master to a libertine. The
novel deals with the Christmas week in the lives of the slaves.
Barbecuing, dancing, singing, and hunting are described to show the
brighter side, but the stories told around the fire are grim and
rebellious. One slave’s husband had been in the Nat Turner uprising;
another had attempted to kill his mistress, because she had jealously
hounded his mother to death. The novel is simply written and evidently
based upon intimate knowledge. Mrs. Victor seems to look upon the pure
African type as happy-go-lucky, and finds rebels only among the mixed
bloods, and the happy ending is forced. Even with these failings,
however, the novel belongs with the most readable and convincing of
antislavery novels.
Written to enforce the antagonism of many northerners to the Fugitive
Slave Law, since “a human critter’s of more account than all the
laws in Christendom,” J. T. Trowbridge’s _Neighbor Jackwood_ (1856)
is far more convincing in its pictures of Vermont than of the deep
South. Camille, the daughter of a Frenchman and an octoroon _placée_,
is “jest dark enough to be ra’al purty.” Enslaved after her father’s
death, untimely as in so many abolitionist novels, she is sold and is
subjected to her master’s advances. Robert Greenwood, a northerner,
enamored of her, helps her escape to the North; but unwilling to become
his mistress, she runs away from him. In Vermont she finds honest love
in Hector, who marries her, and goes South to buy her freedom. Left
in Vermont, she is hidden away by Neighbor Jackwood, until Robert,
now a full-fledged scoundrel, tells the kidnappers where she is. She
is rescued in the nick of time by Hector, who brings her papers of
freedom. There is a great deal of mystery and suspense, Camille’s
hiding away in a haystack on a stormy night being vividly described.
But the book is more sensational than revelatory of Negro life; and the
southern scenes are hastily passed over and conventional.
The same author’s _Cudjo’s Cave_ (1863), a stirring boys’ book, tells
of the conflicts between Unionists and Confederates in Eastern
Tennessee in the first year of the war. Three Negro characters are
prominent: Toby, the faithful servant; Cudjo, ape-like in appearance,
but cunning, powerful, and vindictive, the unbroken African; and Pomp,
“magnificently proportioned, straight as a pillar, and black as ebony,
of noble features.” Pomp has been educated abroad by an indulgent
master. As usual in these novels, the benefactor dies, and the new
master is tyrannical. Pomp escapes to the ravines of the Cumberland
Mountains, and there meets Cudjo, whose scarred back was “the most
powerful of antislavery documents.” They eke out an existence in the
cave, with the connivance of slaves who keep them posted; in their
turn they help runaways, succor abolitionists is distress, and finally
aid in overthrowing the Confederate guerrillas. The Negroes and the
Unionists are too good, and the Rebels too villainous, but the novel
has the suspense of escape and capture, and throws light upon an
interesting chapter of history.
In spite of its unwieldy plot, Epes Sargent’s _Peculiar_ (1863) is
one of the most rewarding of antislavery novels. It is not a mere
recounting of horrors. “It ain’t de whippins ... dat make de wrong
of slavery. De mos’ kindest thing dey could do de slave would be ter
treat him so he wouldn’t stay a slave nohow,” says one character.
Another insists that if slaves were so brutalized as to be contented,
slavery would be doubly cursed, and rejoices that “there is manhood
in them to make them at least unhappy.” The slave Peek, named for the
“Peculiar Institution,” has full share of this manhood, and is defiant,
provident, intelligent, and, strangely for the antislavery gallery,
skeptical of religion. Vance, the white hero, disguises himself as
Gashface, a mulatto underground agent, out of hatred for the system
that had killed his octoroon wife. He and Peek, as climax to their
safeguarding the virtuous, and confounding wrong-doers, discover a
beautiful white girl who had been sold into slavery, and rescue her
from the lust of her master. The story is sensational, but Sargent
shows an understanding of such historic matters as the kidnapping
from northern States, the workings of the underground, and the easy
acceptance of concubinage by southern society. He shows the slaves
to be secretive, relying on their “grapevine telegraph” for mutual
protection; slyly humorous, waging their own guerrilla warfare against
a stronger enemy. Sargent goes below the surface and gets at social
causes, and because of this his book is frequently persuasive.
_Summary._ Antislavery fiction naturally concentrated upon the abuses
that proslavery fiction left unmentioned: slave-sales, the breaking
up of families, shameful practises at the slave-mart, slave jails and
coffles, whippings, overwork and concubinage. Slave discontent was
stressed. Negro insurrectionists, outlaws, fugitives and underground
agents are favorite characters, and since they existed in large
numbers, antislavery fiction makes a contribution here to realism.
Unfortunately the rebellious and militant are generally shown to be of
mixed blood, like George Harris, whereas the more African type is shown
as docile, like Uncle Tom. Some novelists depart from this pattern, but
the pattern persists and has remained wrongly influential. Moreover,
the heroine is frequently a quadroon or octoroon, a concession,
unconscious perhaps, to race snobbishness even among abolitionists. As
one critic says:
This was an indirect admission that a white man in chains was more
pitiful to behold than the African similarly placed. Their most
impassioned plea was in behalf of a person little resembling their
swarthy protégés....
The plots are strained and melodramatic. Too often the kindly disposed
master dies suddenly, without having chance to fulfill his promises of
freedom. Too often, on the other hand, the slave’s problems are solved
by breaks of good luck at the book’s end.
Antislavery fiction set up the stereotypes of “the victim”, “the noble
savage” sometimes “the perfect Christian,” and the “tragic octoroon.”
The items of its denunciation are true enough to history, but they
do not represent the real gamut of Negro life and character. The
large plantation, where the abuses incidental to absentee ownership
throve, is still the chief setting, and the smaller, more typical farm
is neglected. The workaday life of the average slave, who, through
fear, ignorance, loyalty or habit did not revolt or run away, and who
learned to accommodate himself so that the whippings and penalties
would be less, is missing. Often, too, antislavery fiction, by
stressing physical punishments, underemphasizes the greater wrongs,
the destruction of manhood, and the ugly code of morality that slavery
fostered. Certain articles of the southern creed were accepted too
easily, such as the belief that the slave-trader was a low boor,
unaccepted socially by the aristocrats. Modern scholars, such as
Frederic Bancroft in _Slave Trading in the Old South_, have shown how
some of the “finest” southern families built up their wealth from slave
dealing.
It might be expected in the “battle of the books” that proslavery
authors would have an advantage in being on the scene. But full or
even partial use was not made of this advantage, the dialect and
local color of the proslavery authors being very little better than
and frequently not so good as those of the abolitionists. Except for
Mrs. Schoolcraft, Harriet Beecher Stowe writes better dialect than
proslavery authors. Hildreth and Mrs. Victor obviously knew southern
life. In their total presentation of social setting, the abolitionists
have not been so one-sided as their detractors have made out. Many show
good masters as well as bad, attacking a system rather than the people.
For comic relief, or for honest realism, many present happier scenes,
but wisely present these as holidays, not as the reality of slavery.
Most important, however, is the difference in characterization. Lowell
said that Mrs. Stowe’s genius “instinctively goes right to the organic
elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or black;” and
at their best the other antislavery authors do like wise. When a
mother is separated from her child, they show the grief of a bereft
mother, not a mother of peculiar racial endowments who cannot love
her children because she and they happen to be black. If she is not
grief-stricken, they lay the blame upon the brutalizing of slavery, not
on a racial characteristic that it soothed slave-holders to believe
in. The antislavery authors may not ever have owned Negroes, but they
started from the premise that Negroes were human. Finally, it must be
said that although both sides went in for melodrama and idealizing, the
antislavery case was much more credible. Facts, even in spite of _Gone
With the Wind_, are abolitionist.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What noted Americans outside of the novelists, were antislavery in
sympathy?
2. What are probable reasons for the private first printing of _Memoirs
of Archy Moore_ and its later reissue and enlargement?
3. What might explain the fact that the first publisher approached
turned down _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_?
4. List the books that make use of the hero and heroine of mixed blood.
5. How did the use of these characters strengthen the antislavery
argument? How did it weaken?
6. List the books making use of the pure African type as hero.
7. What, according to Melville, would cause Civil War in Vivenza?
CHAPTER IV
RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS SOUTH
_The Triumph of The Tradition._ If _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_ triumphed in
the antebellum “battle of the books,” being widely remembered while
its opponents are forgotten, the plantation tradition was to score a
signal victory in the Reconstruction. Although no longer needed to
defend a tottering institution, it was now needed to prove that Negroes
were happy as slaves and hopelessly unequipped for freedom, so that
slavery could be resurrected in practise though not in name. Ancestor
worshippers, the sons of a fighting generation, remembering bitterly
the deaths of their fathers, uncles, or brothers, the sufferings of
their families and themselves, brought the passion of the defeated
to their descriptions. Many, politically astute, used the plantation
tradition to further their ambitions.
The authors of the reconstruction were better writers than their
antebellum predecessors. Moreover, they were farther from slavery, and
since their memories were often those of childhood, they idealized to
a much greater degree. Some proslavery authors, like William Thompson,
had admitted, for instance, that many slaves had the harshest kind
of masters; others unconsciously allowed facts to enter that their
descendants considered too uncouth for mention. Nostalgic yearning
brought it about that, according to Gaines:
Slavery was softened until whatever may have been evil was regarded
as accidental.... The scale of life was steadily enlarged, the colors
were made increasingly vivid. Estates swelled in size and mansions
grew proportionately great. Gentlemen were perfected in courtly grace,
gay girls in loveliness, slaves in immeasurable devotion.
With the seductiveness of any past seen through “the golden haze of
retrospect,” with realism to the surface of Negro life, disarmingly
affectionate references to Negroes of the old school, and a mastery of
the tricks of fiction, the plantation tradition came into its own. The
Negro was established as contented slave, entertaining child and docile
ward, until misled by “radical” agitators, when he became a dangerous
beast.
_Local Color._ Following Bret Harte’s discovery of the picturesque and
quaint in California’s past, local colorists sprang up all over the
nation. Many southern regions were staked out as claims worth mining.
Charles Egbert Craddock in the Tennessee mountains, Mark Twain in the
Mississippi valley, George Washington Cable in fabulous New Orleans
brought the wealth of their discoveries to a literature that had fallen
on lean years. Coincidentally with the rise of the local colorists, a
new interest in the South, the scene of America’s greatest war, was
awakening. Magazines, especially _Scribner’s_, attempted to slake
this curiosity. A great outburst of dialect stories resulted. Among
the first of the writers to realize the picturesque interest of the
southern Negro was Sherwood Bonner (Mrs. Katherine McDowell), a pioneer
in local color fiction as Russell was in poetry (she had even written
dialect poetry of the Negro before Russell’s book appeared). Many of
her _Dialect Tales_ (1878) and _Suwanee River Tales_ (1884) are about
Negroes. They are interesting as first attempts, but they illustrate
the chief weaknesses of local color: they reveal odd turns of speech
and customs but the characterization is superficial and condescending.
Southern local colorists were soon to sweep the North with a different
formula; fidelity to speech and manners was to be combined with regret
“for the dear dead days beyond recall.”
_Thomas Nelson Page._ Most elegiac of these authors, and probably
most persuasive in casting a golden glow over the antebellum South is
Thomas Nelson Page. With a mastery of pathos and stirring melodrama,
his _In Ole Virginia_ (1887) sets a pattern that time has not been able
to wear out. The three best known stories of this volume are “Marse
Chan,” “Meh Lady,” and “Unc’ Edinburg’s Drownin’.” They are told in the
dialect of eastern Virginia, accurately recorded. The literary device
used in all three stories is quite simple: an old Negro, garrulous in
praise of the old days, tells a tale of handsome cavaliers and lovely
ladies, with stress upon the love between master and slave. Marse Chan
saves a slave’s life at the cost of his own sight; Uncle Edinburg is
saved by his young master from a raging torrent; Uncle Billy defends
his charges from marauding Yankee soldiers, and supports them after
the war. The stories end in lovers’ meetings; as in Shakespeare, the
courtship of lord and lady is balanced by the comical courtship of the
servants. Page has his three ventriloquist’s dummies agreeing upon the
blessedness of slavery. Sam says:
Dem wuz good ole times, marster--de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in
fac’! Niggers didn’t hed nothing ’tall to do.... Dyar warn’ no trouble
nor nothin’.
Uncle Edinburg seconds the emotion:
Oh! nuttin’ warn’ too good for niggers dem times; an’ de little
niggers wuz runnin’ roun’ right ’stracted.... Dis nigger ain’ nuver
gwine forgit it.”
And Uncle Billy:
I wuz settin’ in de do’ wid meh pipe, an heah ’em settin’ dyah on de
front steps, dee voices soun’in low like bees, an’ de moon sort o’
mellow over de yard, an’ I sort o’ got to studyin’ an’ hit pear like
de plantation live once mo’, an’ de ain’ no mo’ scufflin’, an de ol
times done come back agin....
“No Haid Pawn,” a ghost story in the same volume, has a Negro character
who differed from other slaves in that he was without amiability or
docility, superstition or reverence. Page adds significantly, “He
was the most brutal negro I ever knew.” _The Negro: The Southerner’s
Problem_ states Page’s lavish praise for the “old time darky” and his
virulent disgust at the “new issue,” ruined by emancipation; _Red
Rock_ (1898) embodies this hatred in fiction. The docile mastiffs have
become mad dogs; the carriers of the rabies are Yankee soldiers and
schoolmarms, carpet-baggers, and scalawags. Mammy Krenda, Waverly,
Tarquin, and Jerry are sympathetically treated because they despise
the northern interlopers, and stand hand-in-hand before quality. Less
servile Negroes are called insolent swaggerers. Moses, a mulatto trick
doctor, is the worst of these. He orates: “I’m just as good as any
white man.... I’m goin’ to marry a white ’ooman and meck white folks
wait on me.” Within a few pages he is likened to “a hyena in a cage,”
“a reptile,” “a species of worm,” “a wild beast.” He attempts to
assault one of the heroines, the daughter of an abolitionist mother;
this Page considers a fit harvest for interference with the most
chivalrous of civilizations. Page thus anticipates such authors as
Thomas Dixon whose stock in trade is the brute Negro, and whose pat
response to any assertion of Negro rights is the cry of intermarriage
or rape.
Such a volume as _Pastime Stories_ (1894) deals less with the good
times than with Page’s own days. The Negro characters are petty thieves
and drunkards, but are dealt with jocularly. There is ridicule in Uncle
Jack’s “Views on Geography”:
You knows de way to de spring and de wood-pile, an’ de mill, an’
when you gits a little bigger I’s gwine to show you de way to de
hoe-handle, an’ de cawn-furrer, an’ dat’s all de geog-aphy a nigger’s
got to know.
One story shows approvingly how a mulatto office-seeker is thwarted
by a faithful Negro for the sake of his master’s political
advantage. _Bred in the Bone_ (1904) adds nothing to Page’s usual
characterizations, dealing largely with the antics of comic menials.
_Harris._ It was from the slave quarters that Joel Chandler Harris
started his trip to literary immortality. As a lonely boy, shy with
people of his own race, he turned for companionship to the cabins on
a Georgia plantation. There he met Uncle George Terrell, the original
of Uncle Remus; there he started his long study of Negro lore, and
there he learned something of the story-telling art and something
of his wisdom. For years the slaves had been telling fables of Brer
Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Terrapin, some of the stories having come
from Africa. But no one had dug in this mine before Harris. A true
artist, he recognized the value of what he found. He is more than a
reteller, however; he altered, adapted, polished and sharpened until
the products differ from folk tales. For all of the fascination of Brer
Rabbit and company, the fabler is stressed more than the characters.
Instead of being by the folk for the folk, Uncle Remus tells the
stories to entertain a white child. Harris lost something authentic
when he adopted this framework, but he gained Uncle Remus. And Uncle
Remus is worth gaining. By no means the typical product of slavery, as
Harris implies, he is still finely conceived: a venerable, pampered
Negro with a gift for quaint philosophizing and for poetic speech,
having (or allowed to have) only pleasant memories, fortunate above his
brothers--one of the best characters in American literature.
In folk-idiom, the tales are kept close to the people. No author before
Harris had recorded Negro speech with anything like his skill. Walter
Hines Page stated: “I have Mr. Harris’ word for it that he can _think_
in the Negro dialect. He could translate even Emerson, perhaps Bronson
Alcott in it....” Any random excerpt will reveal this ability:
Bimeby, one day, after Brer Fox bin doin’ all dat he could fer ter
ketch Brer Rabbit, en Brer Rabbit bin doin’ all he could fer to keep
’im fum it, Brer Fox say to hisse’f dat he’d put up a game on Brer
Rabbit, en he ain’t mo’n got de wuds out’n his mouf twel Brer Rabbit
come a lopin up de big road, lookin’ des ez plump en ez fat, en ez
sassy ez a Moggin hoss in a barley patch....
“All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m
monstus full er fleas dis mawnin’,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.
Strewn through the stories is much local color, well-observed and true.
Fine turns of speech reveal the slave’s mind. The use of Brer Rabbit
as the hero is noteworthy. Forced to pit his cunning against enemies
of greater physical strength, he was perhaps a symbol for people who
needed craft in order to survive. But whether victor over Brer Wolf,
or victim to the Tar-baby, he is a likeable scamp, who has come loping
lickety-split down the years.
Before finishing his long cycle of tales, Uncle Remus revealed himself
more thoroughly than any preceding Negro character. But Harris was a
journalist, as well as a writer of fiction, and he was called upon to
give his version of the critical times. It was here that his ability to
translate anything into Negro dialect was misused. He made Uncle Remus
the mouthpiece for defending orthodox southern attitudes. Needless to
say, Uncle Remus diminishes in stature; he becomes less a man, more
a walking delegate. The old man keeps his hat in his hand too much.
He defends the glory of the Old South, he admires his white folks, he
satirizes education for Negroes:
Hit’s de ruinashun er dis country.... Put a spellin’-book in a
nigger’s han’s, en right den en dar’ you loozes a plow-hand.... What’s
a nigger gwineter ’larn outen books? I kin take a bar’l stave an’
fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses
betwixt dis en de State er Midgigin.... Wid one bar’l stave I kin
fa’rly lif’ de vail er ignunce.
When Negroes migrated for better working conditions, or out of fear,
Uncle Remus almost frantically begs them to “stay off them kyars.” That
an old Negro, spoiled by his white-folks, and patronized by southern
journalists, might say what his hearers want to hear, and even believe
it, is quite probable. But as racial adviser, Uncle Remus forfeits our
trust in him; he is too fluently the mouthpiece of southern policy. He
did better telling how Brer Rabbit fooled Brer Fox by slick talk, or
when he said: “Watch out we’en you’er gittin’ all you want. Fattenin’
hogs ain’t in luck.”
Many of Harris’s other stories repeat usual characters in usual
situations. In “Aunt Fountain’s Prisoner” the old auntie saves a
Yankee’s life and presides over his successful courtship of a southern
girl. “Mingo” tells of a slave of “meritorious humility,” “a cut above”
the Negroes who accepted freedom. In “Baalam and His Master,” Baalam,
of a “fearlessness rare among slaves” fights alongside his roistering
master in tavern brawls and digs a hole in the wall of a jail to be
near him. Although Ananias is mean-looking, his sacrifice for his
master, ruined by the war, proves him to be an old familiar, merely
with a new face. Like the typical southern authors of his time, Harris
does not show the Negro who would fight or work or exercise his wits in
his own cause.
A few runaways and freed Negroes attracted his attention. Free Betsey
in _Sister Jane_ and Mink in _On the Plantation_ are as devoted to
their little missy and massa, however, as Uncle Remus. “Free Joe” is
the pathetic story of a freed Negro, feared by the whites and avoided,
but hardly envied, by the slaves. After his wife was sold by a master
well nicknamed Old Spite, and his faithful little dog was killed by
Old Spite’s hounds, he dies, heartbroken. Humane and intelligent,
Harris uses “Free Joe” to attack the popular notion that Negroes always
“grin at trouble.” The forces making a free Negro an outcast are
clearly indicated. But dyed-in-the-wool southerners could use Joe’s
shiftlessness to prove that a freed Negro could not stand alone, and
Harris’s picture of the laughing, singing slaves who despised Free Joe
might bear them out. Joe is certainly not a typical free Negro, but the
sympathy in his portrait is deeper than any of Harris’s contemporaries
dared show.
“Mom Bi” tells of an unusual mammy. In spite of her withered arm, Mom
Bi is a black Amazon, with eyes that “shone like those of a wild animal
not afraid of the hunter.” She was not religious:
Ef de Lawd call me in de chu’ch I gwine, ef he no call I no gwine,
enty? I no yerry him call dis long time....
Whoever crossed her--white or black, old or young--got a piece of
her mind. She outspokenly scorns the South Carolina “sandhillers” or
“tackies,” and laughs at them for going to war to “fight for rich
folks’ niggers.” In the Civil War she is a grim prophet of Yankee
victory, and therefore is considered a lunatic. Again, however, Harris
cannot shake off the heavy hand of tradition. Mom Bi forgives the sale
of her daughter Maria, but is grieved that her young master Gabriel was
killed in battle, fighting alongside of poor white folks. Emancipated,
she goes down to live with Maria, her daughter; when smallpox kills off
Maria and her children, she returns (as do most of the Negroes whom
Harris likes) to the old homeplace. “I done bin come back,” says she.
“I bin come back fer stay, but I free, dough!”
Like “Mom Bi,” “Blue Dave” promises much more than it gives. Dave,
an inky black powerfully built runaway, has become a legend before
the story opens for fearlessness and terrorism. In the story proper,
however, we merely get a Hercules devoted to a family because the young
master resembles a former Virginian owner. Dave has said over and over
again that slavery “ain’t no home for me,” but he is bought by the
family he has served, and lives happily ever after as a model slave.
“Where’s Duncan,” more than any other of Harris’s stories, touches upon
the sinister and repellent. A swarthy dark-bearded vagabond fiddler
tells mysteriously of a planter who sold his son to a trader. The last
scene, recalling Poe’s effects, shows an old mansion afire; in the
light of the flames, a mulatto woman cries out “Where’s Duncan?” and
stabs the white father of her son with a carving knife. Crooked-leg
Jake saw Duncan, the fiddler, sitting in a corner, seemingly enjoying
the spectacle.
The last story shows that Harris saw in slavery something more than a
perpetual Mardi Gras; he knew that there was hatred as well as mutual
affection, the ugly as well as the pleasant. Harris promised “scenes
such as have never been described in any of the books that profess to
tell about life in the South before the war.” But with all of his value
as a realist, Harris never came fully to grips with the reality of
the South or of Negro experience. He was a kindly man, and wished the
wounds of war bound up. He could give some praise to Negroes struggling
to achieve property and education. But he was a southerner, living in
vexatious times, and therefore his fiction almost always glorified the
faithful self-denying slave of the old South, for whom the old ways of
slavery were the best. He achieved a fine portrait in Uncle Remus, but
Uncle Remus had brothers and children of a different stamp, whom Harris
touched gingerly, if at all. Harris came a good distance down the road
toward fairness if compared with Thomas Nelson Page. But compared with
George Washington Cable and Mark Twain, he still lagged behind.
Harris recorded some of the folk-lore of the “saltwater” Negroes with
success, but it remained for Charles C. Jones to do the fuller job in
_Negro Myths from the Georgia Coast_ (1888). These tales are worthy
to stand by those of Uncle Remus and, lacking the editorializing, are
closer to the originals. They are told in the unique lingo of the
rice-field and sea-island Negroes. The first in the “untrodden field
of the swamp region of Georgia and the Carolinas,” Jones discovered
what later folk-lorists like Samuel Stoney, Gertrude Shelby and Ambrose
Gonzales have found attractive.
_Edwards._ Harry Stillwell Edwards belongs to the long line of
Georgians from Longstreet down to Erskine Caldwell who write of the
Old South with more realism and less worship. His Major Crawford
Worthington, for instance, is a portly, profane, self-willed sportsman
who considers the Negro an unfailing source of amusement. Worthington’s
slave Isam is an annual runaway, not because slavery is harsh, but
because he likes vacations. “The Two Runaways” tells of a vacation on
which master and slave, boon companions, live high on stolen corn and
melons. They enjoy seeing each other in difficulties. When a buck deer
and the fat major are wrestling, Isam, a safe, happy ringsider, cries
out:
Stick ter ’im Mass Craffud, stick ter ’im! Hit’s better fer one ter
die den bofe! Hole ’im Mass Craffud.... Wo’ deer! Stick ter ’im, Mass
Craffud, steddy!
Tables are turned in “The Woodhaven Goat” when a goat, maddened by
bees, butts and drags Isam all over the yard. From beneath the house,
the Major
looked out through tears with a sudden delight at the negro’s
predicament, sobbing and choking with emotion ... he frantically beat
the dry soil about him with his fist for some moments. “Better for one
to die than two.... Stick to him, Isam.... Whoa, goat!”
“Aeneas Africanus” (1920) humorously tells of a black Eneas, who
confused by the duplication of town-names, covered 3350 miles through
seven states, over a period of eight years, trying to get back to his
quality whitefolks. Like his Major, Edwards seemed to have studied the
Negro only on his amusing side. But he was willing to poke fun at some
of the absurdities of the Old South, and his robust horseplay is a
relief from sentimentality.
_F. Hopkinson Smith._ Few authors dealt with a rough-and-ready
friendship between a swearing master and a none-too-obsequious slave
in the manner of Edwards. More typical is the sentimental, genteel
treatment of mutual affection as in _Colonel Carter of Cartersville_
by F. Hopkinson Smith (1891), a portrait of a quixotic Virginia
gentleman and his devoted servant, Chad. Chad exists only to prepare
choice dishes of canvas-back duck and terrapin for his moneyless but
epicurean master, to support the colonel’s hospitality with his pitiful
stored earnings, to be a bulwark against the harsh Yankee world, and
to express his disdain for people who are “not quality.” With his
wife Henny, a similar model of loyalty, he furnishes comic relief and
glorifies the “good old days.” _Colonel Carter’s Christmas_ (1903) adds
little to the characterization of the sentimental pair.
_James Lane Allen._ Sentimentalist and idealist, James Lane Allen could
find little blemish in the antebellum South according to “Uncle Tom
At Home in Kentucky”, his refutation of Mrs. Stowe. “Two Gentlemen of
Kentucky” (1888) tells of the great affection between a sweet Kentucky
Colonel--so unworldly that when he runs a store he chivalrously gives
away the wares--and his faithful servant, Peter Cotton. Peter is
completely self-forgetful, but must be made ludicrous as well. His
blue-jeans coat, with very long and spacious tails, is embroidered with
scriptural texts, the word “Amen” being located just “over the end of
Peter’s spine.” The master’s death is followed in a year by Peter’s.
The world after the Civil War was no fit place for these two, which is
no great reflection, since too often they act like halfwits. In “King
Solomon of Kentucky” (1891) a free Negro woman, who has made some money
selling cakes and pies, buys a white vagabond on the block, because he
was a friend of her dead Virginia master. The vagabond is regenerated
and becomes the town hero in a cholera epidemic. The introduction
of the auction block is almost unmatched in plantation tradition
literature, but it is significant that a white man is the one sold from
it.
_Grace King and Kate Chopin._ In resentment at Cable’s attacks upon the
plantation tradition, discussed in the next chapter, many southerners
set up Grace King and Kate Chopin as more truthful observers of
Louisiana. Undoubtedly both are more traditional. Few troubles fret
the slaves in Grace King’s stories, except in the case of octoroons
who grieve that they are not white. “Monsieur Motte” tells of a Negro
woman, Marcelite, who supports in a fashionable school the daughter
of her dead mistress, pretending that money comes from a non-existent
uncle, Monsieur Motte. In _Balcony Stories_ (1893), Joe is likewise the
devoted servant, begging to be sold because his master’s widow is in
need of money. “A Crippled Hope” tells of a Negro girl, whose value as
a nurse for sick slaves in the auction mart keeps her from being sold
to “delicate ladies,” whom she would have loved to serve. When freedom
comes she does not want it; she only wants to succor the ailing.
“The Little Convent Girl” is about a sad-faced girl, who is suddenly
discovered to have a negro mother. The girl drowns, escaping her fate.
Even at the age of twelve, a tragic octoroon! Negroes not octoroons
have a merry time:
And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks, and
singing of Jim Crow Songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black
skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through
red lips, and laughing, and talking ... bewildering, entrancing!
Kate Chopin was a sensitive, skillful teller of tales. Her _Bayou
Folk_ (1894) is a collection laid in and around Natchitoches Parish
near Red River, of which she presents the local customs and patois
admirably. But the Negroes she portrays are still models of loyalty
and self-denial. In “A No Account Creole,” La Chatte, a broad black
mammy, is guardian over the love affairs of the white creoles. “In and
Out of Old Natchitoches” shows a fiery plantation owner who for a time
flouts the community taboo of consorting with mulattoes. “In Sabine”
depicts Uncle Mortimer protecting a white woman who is abused by her
hard drinking husband. “Beyond the Bayou” shows a gaunt, black woman
overcoming her extreme fear of the bayou to carry home a little white
child whom she loves. “The Benitou’s Slave” pictures extreme devotion.
“Desirée’s Baby”, probably Mrs. Chopin’s best known work, deals with
a young creole husband and wife to whom is born a child who gives
evidence of Negro blood. The outraged husband sends his wife away in
disgrace. He then, discovers, through an old letter, that the Negro
blood came from his own mother; she was thankful, she said, that her
son would never know.
Of the numerous short stories defending the Old South space forbids
more than mention of a selected few. Maurice Thompson in “Ben and
Judas” (1889) wrote a good story of a mutual affection between owner
and owned. In “The Balance of Power,” Thompson has a crafty Negro, who
walks on “bofe sides of de fence,” managing it so that the young man
wins the beautiful girl while her father is conceded the election.
The story is inconsequential, but it does show the colonel winning
political support by stating that his rival is supported by Negroes.
Of a different type is “An Incident” by Sarah Barnwell Elliott, which
dramatizes the terror at the “brute” Negro, and is concerned with “what
answer the future would have for this awful problem.”
_Summary._ Plantation tradition fiction of the Reconstruction added
realism of speech and custom, but with few exceptions, this realism was
subordinated to the purpose of showing the mutual affection between
the races which the North had partly destroyed in a foolish war.
Negro characters, at their best, are shown only in relationship with
kindly southern whites; at their worst, in relationship with predatory
Yankees. They are never shown in relationship to themselves. They are
confined to the two opposite grooves of loyalty or ingratitude. The
authors, remembering their childhood when it is likely that they had
Negro playmates as boon companions, made slavery a boyish romp. It was
flattering to believe that their fathers and mothers were objects of
universal love and worship. It was charming for a man accustomed to
deference and submission to believe these to be ordained in heaven.
It was uncomfortable to believe that irony, or shrewd appraisal could
lurk behind the bland smile, the pull on the forelock, the low curtsey.
Perish the thought! A kindly critic of the South paraphrases the legend:
Way down upon the Suwanee River the sun shines bright on my old
Kentucky home, where, bound for Louisiana, Little Eva has a banjo
on her knee, and Old Black Joe, Uncle Remus and Miss Sally’s little
boy listen to the mocking-bird and watch a sweet chariot swing low
one frosty mornin’. The gallant Pelham and his comrades bend forever
over the hands of adorable girls in crinoline; under the duelling oaks
Colonel Carter of Cartersville and Marse Chan blaze away at each other
with pistols by the light of the silvery moon on Mobile Bay ...
And we might add: the happy slaves are forever singing in the beautiful
fields of white cotton, and forever black mammies fondle their little
marses and missies and exude love for all the rich folks in Dixie, and
body servants rescue the perishing, care for the dying, serve their
beloved masters until death let them depart in peace, to serve in
heaven, forever and ever.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why was the earlier plantation tradition fiction less persuasive
than that written in Reconstruction?
2. What were reasons why the “brute” Negro was seldom mentioned in
antebellum fiction, and so frequently mentioned in Reconstruction?
3. What in the testimony of Page’s three Uncles supports the fact that
Virginia was a slave-breeding state?
4. Compare Harris and Page.
5. Why is Edwards closer to the “frontier humorists” than to Allen?
6. Since instances of mutual affection in slavery could undoubtedly
be found, why should not literature celebrating it be considered a
trustworthy guide to the Old South?
7. List the runaways and “bad Negroes” mentioned in this chapter, with
the authors’ characterizations of them.
8. Account for the absence of characters of mixed blood.
CHAPTER V
RECONSTRUCTION: THE NOT SO GLORIOUS SOUTH
_Cable._ Although he had served as an officer in the Confederate
Cavalry, George Washington Cable was aware of much that was wrong
in the old South and the new. His _The Silent South_ and _The Negro
Question_ are antidotes to Page’s dangerous drugs; against the convict
lease system, for instance, Cable wrote with startling pertinence even
for our own day. Cordially hated in the South, he took up residence in
Massachusetts, but though in “exile” he kept close to his heart the
best interests of his section.
Praised as the first southerner to include just and sympathetic
recognition of the Negro, Cable portrays Negroes or the background
of slavery in most of his novels. For our purposes _Old Creole Days_
(1879) and _The Grandissimes_ (1880) are most important. _Old Creole
Days_ re-creates, with vivid local color, early nineteenth century
Louisiana. In “Posson Jone”, a faithful servant outwits the sharpers
who were preying upon his master; if the situation is old, the details
are sharply observed. Less kindly pictures of slavery appear in “’Tite
Poulette” and “Madame Delphine”, stories of octoroons of a warm
seductive beauty, cultivated with care so that they may be “protected”
by some Louisiana grandee. This “protection” does not keep tragedy
from their lives, however. To these women, says Cable, “every white
man in this country is a pirate.” Therefore, both mothers in these
stories pretend that their daughters are not really theirs, in order
that the girls may get around the law that rigorously forbade marriage
of octoroons to “pure whites.” Bitterly acquainted with what faces
her lovely daughter, Delphine cries out against the law “to keep the
two races separate”: “A lie, Pere Jerome! Separate! No-o-o! They do
not want to keep us separated; no, no! But they _do_ want to keep us
despised!”
In _The Grandissimes_, a long novel of old Louisiana, we have
the background of slavery well worked in, and in the foreground,
individualized Negro characters, far more convincing than the
abolitionist victims. Outstanding is Honoré Grandissime, “free man of
color,” educated, successful in business but an ineffectual victim of
caste. Though true to New Orleans history, his type has been neglected
in fiction for the more fascinating octoroon heroine. Palmyre is one of
the best characterized octoroons in fiction.
This woman had stood all her life with dagger drawn, on the defensive
against what certainly was to her an unmerciful world.... And yet by
inexorable decree, she belonged to what we used to call “the happiest
people under the sun.” We ought to stop saying that.
Under domineering and insult, Palmyre is shown as silent; “and so,”
says Cable, “sometimes is fire in the wall.” Clemence, illiterate and
superstitious, has folk-shrewdness:
You mus’n b’lieve all dis-yeh nonsense ’bout insurrectionin’; all
fool-nigga talk. W’at we want to be insurrectionin’ faw? We de
happiest people in de God’s worl’! Yes, we is; you jis oughteh gimme
fawty an’ lemme go! Please gen’lemen!
Her cunning does not help, however, in this drastic case; she is told
to run, and is coolly shot, stone dead.
One of the most unusual figures is the gigantic Bras Coupé, captured
king of the Jaloffs, a legendary figure with counterpart in Louisiana
history. He is contemptuous of whites, and kills the Negro driver who
first tells him to work. Driven to the swamps for striking down his
master, he puts a curse on the plantation. When he is captured he is
“hamstrung”, in accordance with the _Code Noir_. When the name of his
worst enemy falls upon his ears, even though dying, he spits upon the
floor; when he is begged to forgive, he merely smiles. “God keep thy
enemy from such a smile”, says the author.
Cable’s fiction shows full acquaintance with folk-songs, speech, lore
and superstition, but unlike his contemporaries, Page and Harris,
he does not use the material to support old traditions. He makes
clear-eyed, telling observations on the South. A blow, punishable in a
white offender by a small fine or conviction, assured Bras Coupé the
death of a felon, by the old Code Noir.
(We have a Code Noir now, but the new one is a mental reservation,
not an enactment).... The guests stood for an instant as if frozen,
smitten stiff with the expectation of insurrection, conflagration and
rapine (just as we do today whenever some poor swaggering Pompey rolls
up his fist and gets a ball through his body)....
“It seems to be one of the self-punitive characteristics of tyranny,
whether the tyrant be a man, a community, or a caste, to have a
pusillanimous fear of its victims.” But Cable does not over-idealize
the Negro. He is sharp toward the mulatto caste--“the saddest slaves of
all.”
Your men, for a little property, and your women, for a little amorous
attention let themselves be shorn even of the virtue of discontent....
I would rather be a runaway in the swamp than content myself with such
a freedom.
Although Cable helped to establish the tragic mulatto stereotypes, his
portraits of this caste are drawn from a specific situation in the
past, more pronounced in New Orleans though widespread in the South.
The stereotype has fascinated later writers who have fallen under
Cable’s charm. But they are without his information and sympathy, and
are therefore less truthful. All in all, Cable is one of the finest
creators of Negro character in the nineteenth century.
_Twain._ Like Cable, Twain was of southern birth and upbringing, and
fought in the Confederate army (but for a short time only, in a spirit
of horseplay, learning only how to retreat). The two men lectured
together. Both had sympathies for the underdog and both attacked the
sham chivalry of the South. Mark Twain insisted that he was almost
completely without race prejudice and that the color brown was “the
most beautiful and satisfying of all the complexions vouchsafed to
man.” He loved the spirituals best among music. In his youth he grew up
with slave boys as playmates; in his manhood he paid a Negro student’s
way through Yale, as “part of the reparation due from every white to
every black man.”
Twain’s first treatment of Negroes in _The Gilded Age_ (1873), however,
is largely traditional, unlike “A True Story (Repeated Word For Word
As I Heard It)” which is a bitter memory of cruelty and separation,
contradicting Thomas Nelson Page’s formula stories.
In _Huckleberry Finn_ (1884) the callousness of the South to the Negro
is indicated briefly, without preaching, but impellingly. Huck informs
Aunt Sally that a steamboat blew out a cylinder head:
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky because sometimes people do get hurt....”
In this book Twain deepens the characterization of Jim, who, like Tom
and Huck and the rest of that fine company, was drawn from life. He
is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead
cats, doodle-bugs and signs of _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_. Running
away from old Miss Watson, who, though religious, “pecks on” him all
the time, treats him “pooty rough” and wants a trader’s eight hundred
dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the
Mississippi. His talks enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best
in detailing his experience with high finance--he once owned fourteen
dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s
Yes, en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself en I’s wuth
eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’.
But he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and
save money so he could buy his wife, and then they would both work to
buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them. Huck is
“frozen at such thoughts;” torn between what he had been taught was
moral and his friendliness for an underdog. Jim is the best example
in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the
tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet
clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is
completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchman should talk like
people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose
trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the
poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, “cain’t git no
situation.” He tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not
knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever:
... En all uv a sudden I says pow! jis’ as loud as I could yell. She
never budge! Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms,
en say, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Almighty forgive po’
ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!”
Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb--en I’d been
a-treatin’ her so!
From the great tenderness and truth of this portrait _Pudd’nhead
Wilson_ (1894), Twain’s last novel concerning Negroes, falls a great
way. In violent, ugly Dawson’s Landing a fantastic tale is set.
Roxana, only one-sixteenth Negro, a handsome earthy Amazon, is the
mother of a son, Valet de Chambre, fathered by a gentleman of the
F.F.V’s. This baby was born on the same day as her master’s son,
Thomas à Becket Driscoll, and looks exactly like him. In order to
save the baby from slavery, Roxy exchanges the two. The boys grow up
with their positions reversed; the false Valet is ruined by slavery,
and Tom, ruined by pampering, becomes a liar, coward, gambler, thief
and murderer. In desperate straits, he tricks his mother and sells
her down the river. Although Tom’s character could be attributed to a
rigid caste system that granted excessive power to petty people, Twain
leaves many readers believing that he agrees with Roxy who, astounded
by her son’s worthlessness, muttered: “Ain’t nigger enough in him to
show in his finger-nails, en dat takes mighty little, yit dey’s enough
to paint his soul.” Twain has little good to say for slavery in this
book. Roxy’s terror of being sold “down the river,” and her experiences
there under a vicious Yankee overseer are grimly realistic. Roxy is a
first-rate preliminary sketch. By no means faultless, a petty thief
and a liar, she is capable of sacrifice, and has intelligence, pride,
and courage. If Twain had spent more time in developing her portrait,
_Pudd’nhead Wilson_ would have been a better novel.
_Humorists._ One of those humorists whose misspellings and satiric
temper pleased Abraham Lincoln, Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke),
wrote _Nasby: Divers Views, Opinions and Prophecies_ (1866) and
_Ekkoes From Kentucky_ (1868), both showing post-war attitudes to the
Negro. Pretending to be a Copperhead postmaster, Nasby reveals himself
as an ignorant, besotted politician, forever dragging in the race
question for personal gain. Some of Nasby’s shafts could well be used
at southern rabble-rousers today. Nasby shows how the cry of Negro
domination and amalagmation rose whenever the slightest effort was made
for justice to the freedmen. Severely satirical of southern chivalry,
Nasby shows the white daughters of John Guttle, a gentleman of Mobile,
fighting against their Negro half-sisters over their father’s tomb, and
concludes that “there wuz some disadvantages attending the patriarkle
system.” To those who saw the Negro as unfit for freedom he wrote:
Three hundred niggers ... wuz wrencht from paternal care to starve,
which the most uv ’em are industriously doin’ at about $3 per day.
He advises the legislatures to forbid Negroes to leave their country,
and then to pass laws setting up a maximum wage for Negroes of five
dollars a month. Thousands of Negroes will then die by midwinter and
the rest will beg to be reenslaved.
We kin ... pint 2 their bodies and say in a sepulkered tone: ‘Wen
niggers wuz wuth $1500, they wuz not allowed to die thus--behold the
froots uv Ablishun philanthropy.’
For all of his burlesque, Nasby saw clearly and prophesied sanely. A
whole school of southern writers came along and did in dead earnest
what he had counselled in bitter jest.
_Samantha On The Race Problem_ by Marietta Holley counsels colonization
even so late as 1892, recounts the tragedies of a few superior
mulattoes, and most important, shows the Florida Ku Klux Klan at its
work of burning schools and terrorizing Negroes who were forging ahead.
_Northern Novelists._ John William DeForest’s realistic novels of the
South immediately after the Civil War, _Miss Ravenal’s Conversion From
Secession_ _to Loyalty_ (1867) and _Kate Beaumont_ (1872), contain
minor Negro characters, but these are generally typical. In 1867,
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote the dramatic, sympathetic _Waiting For The
Verdict_, the first novel to deal with the dilemma of the fair Negro
who attains a superior position without being suspected of having
Negro blood. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short stories of the South,
written in the eighties, have been praised for their sane balance. In
“Rodman The Keeper” she describes with sympathy the freedmen--bent,
dull-eyed and ignorant, singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” on their way
to the graves of Federal Soldiers “who had done something wonderful
for them and their children.” Generally, however, Miss Woolson is
irritated by the freedmen, reserving her liking for those who are
traditionally loyal to their white-folks, and seeing little in “the
glories of freedom” except the “freedom to die.” “King David” shows a
Northern educator who gives up in the face of “universal, irresponsible
ignorance.” Miss Woolson recognizes the shiftlessness and chauvinism
of the planter class, but keeps her sharpness for the “misguided and
untimely idealism” of northerners. She tries so hard to be just to the
fallen ex-planter that she is less than just to the rising ex-slaves.
In these grievous times, the second stood in the greater need of
justice.
_Tourgée._ Albion Tourgée differed from Miss Woolson sharply in his
discoveries. He had a good chance for observation. He was an officer
in the Union Army, and after the war remained in North Carolina as a
judge. If he is a typical example of a carpetbagger, then his class
has met with grave underestimation. He was thoughtful, considerate,
courageous and honest. Like Miss Woolson, he recognized the gravity of
the problem facing the South. Unlike her, however, he did not believe
that the problem existed only because the freedmen were irresponsible,
ignorant and unready for citizenship. He had seen too often what she
omitted from her picture: the mob violence of the Regulators and the
Ku Klux Klan, the determination to restore slavery, the ostracism
of the “misguided” school teachers, the burning of the schools. He
was a humane man, and he could not hold his peace. But he spoke on
the unpopular side, and today he is barely mentioned in histories of
American literature.
_A Fool’s Errand_, by “One of the Fools” (1879), is largely
autobiographical, and has been called “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of
Reconstruction.” Colonel Servosse, an officer of the Federal Army, took
up residence in the South, foolishly believing that, with the end of
the war, the North-South hostility would end. He soon learns better;
for lending aid to Negroes in need he is called a “nigger lover,” for
making a speech urging justice to Negroes he barely escapes being
horsewhipped. Yankee schoolmarms are insulted. When northern troops
are withdrawn, terrorization of Negroes quickly follows. A Union
League organizer is killed by the Klan, which is composed of prominent
southerners. Negroes are shown hard at work, struggling to make their
living, enthusiastically welcoming schools, lurking about the edges of
crowds at political meetings, listening intently to the speeches, or
organizing for protection. In a section hotly intent that there shall
be no “nigger witnesses, no nigger juries, no nigger voters,” all of
this is insolence and insult.
Jerry is the type of uncle not before met with in American fiction. He
is religious and devoted to Servosse, not out of loyalty of slave to
master, but out of gratitude that Servosse was helping his people to
true freedom. Jerry has his dignity; when whites ridicule his church
services he says:
An’ when you all laughs at us, we can’t help tinkin’ dat we mout a
done better ef we hadn’t been kep’ slaves all our lives by you uns.
But in one of his sermons, he tells too much about the Klan’s most
recent murder, and he is swung from a tree to prove that “It don’t
do fer niggers to know too much.” Another different Negro is the
blacksmith, Bob Martin, who makes such a good living that he becomes
a marked man for the night riders. He scornfully ridicules the
superstition that the Klan is ghostly, showing his scarred back as
proof of the Klan’s “humanity.” He tells a shocking story of his own
beating, the abuse of his wife and daughter, the death of his baby,
and the destroying of his home, all supposed to teach him to be more
respectful of white folks and less anxious to vote for radicals. Bob
is of the stuff of heroes, however; he was in the Union Army at Fort
Wagner, and he doggedly swears that “ef dere’s any mo’ Kluckers raidin’
roun’ Burke’s Corner, dar’ll be some funerals too.” Later editions
of _A Fool’s Errand_ included documentary evidence of the sinister
workings of the Klan, a key to the truth something like the _Key to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.
The title _A Fool’s Errand_ lays blame only on the folly of rash
hopes for improvement in the South, not on the effort to get justice.
_Bricks Without Straw_ (1880) is a more developed attempt to show the
desperate problem, to prove that without support from the rest of the
country, those few who were struggling were “making bricks without
straw.” Nimbus, the outstanding Negro character, is uneducated, but
he fought in the Civil War, and is a man of courage and good, hard
sense. Industrious and thrifty, he is disliked by the whites because
he has a good house, a tobacco barn, a fine crop and valuable stock,
and a church and schoolhouse on his place. He adds to these injuries
the insult of wanting pay for his wife’s services, and schools and the
vote for all of his people. When the Klansmen, among whom are many
aristocrats--“the freedmen’s best friends”--come after him, Nimbus,
aided by his wife Lugena, who fights with an axe, resists fiercely,
and finally gets away. Returning years later, broken in health but
not in spirit after experiencing riots, peonage and prison camps,
Nimbus will not stay, but leads an exodus to Kansas. Elijah Hill, the
schoolteacher, and Berry Lawson, good-natured avoider of trouble, but
wily and loyal to Nimbus, are interesting minor figures.
Tourgée’s other books on the Negro are not so valuable as these. _A
Royal Gentleman_ (1881), written earlier as _Toinette_, is pretentious,
with a crowded plot. Mabel, mother of Toinette, is crazed by her
unhappy life as the mistress of a white slave owner, and tries to
murder those who would inflict upon her daughter the same fate. But
Toinette, a refined olive-skinned beauty, is in love with, and beloved
by her owner. Since he is a “royal gentleman,” marriage cannot take
place, and tragedy follows. The characters are idealized, and the
incidents far-fetched. _Hot Plowshares_ (1883) is a historical novel
on the state of the nation preceding the Civil War. Great attention
is paid to the rise of antislavery sentiment and the Underground
Railroad. _Pactolus Prime_ (1890) shows the economic hardships faced
by Negroes in Washington, D. C. Pactolus is the father of a girl whom
he disclaims in order that she may live as white, may be lifted “from
shame to honor.” Upon her discovery of the real truth, she takes the
vows as Sister Pactola, and dedicates her life to her race. The story
is not completely convincing, but Tourgee again reveals himself as
well conversant with problems faced by Negroes. These novels have more
argument than characters in action, but the argument is what has been
too easily forgotten today.
_Hearn._ To Lafcadio Hearn the southern novel was “gushy-floriated
English--written in bad taste, wishy-washy trash.” With his sympathy
for the underdog, strengthened by his connection with the quadroon
Althea Foley, he admired Cable’s defense of the Negro. Nevertheless,
Hearn did not censure the South openly. He held stock beliefs such as
that the Negro would disappear in freedom--“dependent like the ivy, he
needs some strong oak-like friend to cling to”--and that it was only
the mulatto influence that made slaves unmanageable. Always attracted
by the unusual and picturesque, Hearn became an authority on Louisiana
lore, making friends with the _bonnes vielles negresses_, who sold
homemade sweetmeats in New Orleans, and the mysterious Voodoo Queen,
Marie Laveau. But the teeming levees come to life only in sketches
like “Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee” and “Banjo Jim’s Story” (1876). In
the West Indies Hearn was struck by the “appetizing golden bodies of
the Martinique Quadroons, sensuous but childlike,” gossiped with the
washerwomen and treasured their soft slurring talk; and watched
the _porteuses_ on their way to market in the early morning, huge
baskets of fruit and vegetables balanced on their heads, their skirts
tucked into a belt in front, showing the shapely muscled bronze of
their legs, as they walked with all the lithe feline grace of some
wild animal.
_Youma_, “La Giablesse” and “Un Ravenant” are good fiction of the
West Indies, but the wealth of Hearn’s sensitive observation appears
in his travel reporting. He was better in describing settings than in
presenting character.
_Howells._ The serious phase of Negro life that William Dean Howells
thought worthy of inclusion in his canvas of the American scene
was the age-worn tragedy of the octoroon. In _An Imperative Duty_
(1892), Rhoda, the beautiful daughter of a northern physician and an
accomplished octoroon, bore no evidence of Negro blood. On the eve of
her marriage, she is told her lineage by her duty-bound aunt. Later,
passing for an Italian and happily married to a man who is undisturbed
by her lineage, she is still wretched at her “disgrace.” The novel is
sympathetic, but there were graver, less romantic problems of Negro
life that a novelist of Howells’ scope and ability might have presented.
_Negro Novelists._ Two Negro authors who had given their best energies
to the antislavery struggle turned to fiction in the post-Civil War
years. William Wells Brown’s _My Southern Home_ (1880) included
sketches of southern Negro folklife, before the successes of Page and
Harris. Frances Harper, whose antislavery poetry was popular, now
defended her race in _Iola Leroy_ or _Shadows Uplifted_ (1892). Iola,
granddaughter of a Creole planter, has the experiences usual to fiction
of the beautiful “white slave.” She is kept ignorant of her race, and
educated in the North. When her white father’s marriage to her quadroon
mother is called illegal, she is sold as a slave. After indignities in
slavery, she is rescued, and serves as a nurse in a Civil War hospital.
She rejects the love of a white New England physician, who, though
knowing her race, wishes to marry her. With her brothers and long-lost
uncle, all of whom refuse to “pass for white,” she dedicates herself
to her people. The book is “uplifting” but is far from convincing in
incident, speech, and characterization. Iola is another of the octoroon
heroines too angelic for acceptance. Some of the minor characters are
better, but they cannot redeem the novel.
_Dunbar._ Dunbar has aptly described the typical setting for his
fiction:
Happy Hollow.... Wherever Negroes colonize in the cities or villages,
North or South, wherever the hod-carrier, the porter, and the waiter
are the society men of the town; wherever the picnic and the excursion
are the chief summer diversion, and the revival the winter-time of
repentance.... Wherever laughter and tears rub elbows by day, and the
spirit of labour and laziness shake hands, there--there--is Happy
Hollow.
_In Old Plantation Days_ (1903) repeats the Thomas Nelson Page formula.
Negro house servants comically ape the “quality,” or intervene in
lovers’ quarrels, or in duels between cavaliers. One slave deceives
his beloved master into believing that the good times of slavery
still prevail. The planters, highbred and chivalrous, and the slaves,
childish and devoted, rival each other in affection and sacrifice.
These anecdotes of slavery, but a step above minstrel jokes, are all
too happy for words, and too happy for truth.
The harshness of Reconstruction and of Dunbar’s own time is likewise
conventionally neglected in his other volumes of short stories: _Folks
From Dixie_ (1898), _The Strength of Gideon_ (1900), and _The Heart
of Happy Hollow_ (1904). Freedmen discover that after all their best
friends are their kindly ex-masters. In “Nels Hatton’s Revenge,” an
upstanding Negro gives his hard-earned money and best clothes to his
destitute master, who had abused him when a slave. The venality of
Reconstruction politicians, which certainly existed, is satirized; but
the gains of Reconstruction, which certainly exist, are understressed.
Probably with due cause, Dunbar feared the rising poor-whites;
therefore, like many Negro spokesmen of the period, he idealized the
ex-planter class, the “aristocrats,” _without_ due cause.
Dunbar’s fiction veers away from anything more serious than laughter
or gentle tears. “At Shaft 11” shows the difficulties of Negro
strikebreakers; but, afraid of organized labor, Dunbar idealized
owners, operators, and staunchly loyal Negro workers who get to be
foremen, thus carrying over the plantation tradition formula into the
industrial scene. “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope” faces the loose-living of
a “Happy Hollow,” and then is lost in sentimental compromise. Dunbar
wrote two stories of lynching, “The Lynching of Jule Benson” and the
unusually ironic “The Tragedy at Three Corners.” But Dunbar usually
places the hardships of Negro life in the city, as in “Jimsella,” with
pastoral distrust of the city and faith in rural virtue. Fast livers,
quacks, politicians and hypocritical race leaders are occasionally
attacked.
_The Sport of the Gods_ (1902), Dunbar’s most ambitious novel, is
the only one that is chiefly about Negroes. The first of the book is
trite, but the latter section, though confused and melodramatic, has
a grimness that Dunbar seldom showed. Berry, the innocent victim of a
degenerate white man’s crime in the South, and his family, the victim
of hostile New York, are treated somewhat in the manner of Hardy’s
tragic laughing-stocks. The book has serious weaknesses, but it gives
promise that Dunbar, but for his untimely death, might have become a
prose writer of power. Judged by his accomplishment, however, Dunbar
in fiction must be considered as one who followed the leader, not as a
blazer of new trails.
_Chesnutt._ Charles Waddell Chesnutt, however, deserves to be called
a pioneer. Writing to counter charges such as those made by Page in
_Red Rock_, Chesnutt is the first to speak out uncompromisingly, but
artistically, on the problems facing his people. One careful critic has
stated that Chesnutt “was the first Negro novelist, and he is still
the best,” and another has said that his books contain early drafts of
about all of the recent Negro novels.
In Chesnutt’s _The Conjure Woman_, seven tales based upon Negro
superstitions, Uncle Julius recalls Uncle Remus and Page’s Uncle Billy,
but differs from them in his craftiness. He tells his stories not
merely to entertain, or to bewail the beautiful past, toward which he
is ironic, but to gain his point in the present. His dialect is worked
out in great detail, but is not so readable as that of Uncle Remus.
There is good local color throughout, and some interesting characters
emerge.
_The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line_
(1899) deals mainly with problems of race. The title story tells
of a successful Negro in Groveland (Cleveland), the “dean” of the
“Blue-Veins,” who, on the eve of his engagement to a beautiful widow,
theatrically acknowledges a little old black woman who had been his
wife in slavery days and had helped him to freedom. A Negro mother
denies her octoroon daughter in order for her to marry a New Englander
of Mayflower lineage in “Her Virginia Mammy,” a story like Cable’s
“Madame Delphine” but less convincing and gripping. In “The Sheriff’s
Children” a mulatto prisoner, falsely accused of murder, is defended
from a mob by a sheriff who turns out to be his father. Desperate and
cynical, the son is about to kill his father to escape when he is
shot by the sheriff’s daughter. In “The Web of Circumstance” a Negro
blacksmith, falsely accused of stealing a whip, is sentenced to five
years in the penitentiary on the same day that a white murderer is
sentenced to one year. “The Passing of Grandison” shows a cunning
slave, pretending to despise the abolitionist North, returning to his
“understanding” master. He does so, however, only to manage the escape
of all his kith and kin. “A Matter of Principle” satirizes the color
line within the race: Clayton, an uppercrust near-white Negro, who
“declined to associate with black people,” pretends that his house is
quarantined in order to keep a black Congressman from calling on his
daughter. The Congressman turns out to be a mulatto, “well worthy” of
Clayton’s daughter.
_The House Behind the Cedars_ (1900), Chesnutt’s first novel, is
concerned likewise with the color line. Rena, another octoroon heroine,
is insulted by whites and oppressed by her mother and a mulatto suitor.
Honorable devotion comes to her only through an upstanding black hero,
but this cannot forestall her pathetic death. _The Marrow of Tradition_
(1901), less conventional, is better. White characters range from the
aristocratic General Delamere to his debauched grandson Tom; Major
Carteret, demagogue for white supremacy; and McBane, ex-slave driver
who knows one solution: “Burn the nigger.” Negro characters range from
Dr. Miller, a skillful physician, to the militant Josh Green; the
loyal Sandy, and Jerry, a “white man’s nigger.” Sandy is framed for
a murder in the first part of the book. A bloody riot, based on the
one at Wilmington, N. C., is described in the second part. The white
demagogues whip up the mob to fury, because a Negro newspaper has
denounced lynching. Josh Green, who is willing to die rather than be
shot down like a dog, who puts aside “fergetfulness and fergiveness,”
leads the aroused Negroes, when the upper-class Negroes believe that
nothing can be done. The novel closes, however, on a note of forgetting
and forgiving: Dr. Miller, whose own child was killed in the riot, goes
to the home of his wife’s white half-sister, to save her child with his
very great medical skill. With all of its melodrama, the story has
power; badly plotted, it still tells a great deal about social life in
the South. Chesnutt idealizes some Negro characters, but candidly faces
the weaknesses in others. Most important, however, is his going beneath
the surface to social causes.
Chesnutt’s last novel was _The Colonel’s Dream_. Colonel French, an
ex-Confederate officer of “family,” dreams of resurrecting his native
section and bringing it into the ways of prosperity and justice. As in
so many novels of the time, his dream is not realized. He has opposed
to him William Fetters, convict labor contractor, mortgage shark and
political boss, together with the reactionary traditions and the
inertia of the South. When the casket of his aged Negro slave, who had
given his life for the Colonel’s son, is dug up from the family burial
plot and placed on his porch with a K.K.K. warning that the color line
must continue even in death, he sees that his crusade is doomed. After
this novel Chesnutt fell into an almost unbroken silence. Perhaps he
felt the doom of his own crusade to bring about justice.
Whether he was pessimistic about his crusade or not, his achievements
in fiction were worthy. Answering propaganda with propaganda, he
might be expected to have certain faults. He was overinclined to the
melodramatic, to mistaken identity, to the lost document turning up at
the right or wrong moment, to the nick of time entrance. His characters
are generally idealized or conventional. His “better class Negroes”
speak too literary a language and are generally unbelievable models in
behavior. Although attacking the color line within the race, he makes
great use of the hero or heroine of mixed blood, and at times seems to
accept the traditional concepts of Negro character. Even so, however,
his characters stand nearer to the truth than those of Thomas Page or
Thomas Dixon; he does not force them into only two grooves. There is no
gainsaying his knowledge of the southern scene, or of the Negro upper
class in northern cities. Unlike Dunbar he is opposed to the plantation
tradition, sharply critical of southern injustice, and aware of the
sinister forces at work in Reconstruction. Deploring the abuses of that
era, he still sees, like Tourgée, that the story of a South victimized
by carpet-baggers and scalawags is only a convenient half-truth. He
gives high praise to the Yankee schoolmasters and schoolmarms who
swarmed over Dixie to lift a second bondage from the freedmen. He shows
exploitation, riots and lynching mobs, as well as the more refined
exercising of prejudice. Often pompous and roundabout, in the manner
of his times, he nevertheless knew how to hold a reader’s interest. We
must concede that he was melodramatic in plotting, but evidences of a
skillful master’s hand can still be found. He knew a great deal, and
all things considered, he told it well.
_Summary._ Deriving somewhat from the abolitionists, the best of the
authors of this chapter attacked the plantation tradition, but with
the sharper weapons of the growing realism. Twain’s Jim and Roxana,
Tourgée’s Nimbus, Chesnutt’s Josh Green, and even Cable’s Bras Coupé
and Madame Delphine (though they belong to a nearly legendary past)
are far more convincing than Uncle Tom, Topsy and Hildreth’s Archy
Moore. Unlike their more popular contemporaries who defended the
plantation tradition, these authors, at a risk, recorded the injustice
that Negroes met with everywhere in “the tragic era.” They knew that
worshipful house-servants or depraved freedmen were not the sole actors
in the story, and as lovers of truth and justice they wanted the full
story told.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why was Cable considered untrue to the Old South?
2. In what respects is Bras Coupe unusual in fiction about Negroes?
3. Compare the octoroons in antislavery novels with those in novels by
Cable, Twain, and Tourgée.
4. Since Twain characterizes Jim as superstitious and illiterate, how
can Twain be considered sympathetic?
5. Why are Hearn’s beliefs about Negroes termed “stock”?
6. Compare William Wells Brown’s _Clotel_ with Frances Harper’s _Iola
Leroy_.
7. Compare Dunbar and Chesnutt.
8. What new characters appear in this chapter?
CHAPTER VI
OLD PATHS
_Beautiful, Amusing Servitude._ In the early twentieth century, under
the influence of Thomas Nelson Page, a legion of writers wept over the
vanished glory of the old plantation and presented Negroes of extreme
devotedness to their masters. One writer in her book of sketches
grieved:
Aunt Phebe, Uncle Tom, Black Mammy, Uncle Gus, Aunt Jonas, Uncle Isom,
and all the rest--who shall speak all your virtues or enshrine your
simple faith and fidelity? It is as impossible as it is to describe
the affection showered upon you by those whom you called ‘Marster and
Missis.’
Impossible though it may have been, countless authors attempted it,
turning back time in its flight to sweetness and splendor that belong
to another world than this.
Of the short stories in abundance that idealized the Negro, _in his
place_, a few examples must serve. Betty Reynolds Cobb, in “The Coward”
shows little Nemi conquering his great fears, and facing a raging
torrent in order to get a doctor for “li’l Missy.” (Cf. Kate Chopin’s
“Beyond The Bayou.”) In Will Harben’s “The Sale of Uncle Rastus”, a
nearly dead slave shams perfect health in order to fetch a better price
for his bankrupt owner. His heroism reconciles his beloved master to
an estranged brother, who bids two thousand dollars for him. “Dem
boys done made up, en I fotch two thousand dollars! Whooee!” croaks
Uncle Rastus at death’s door. “Abram’s Freedom,” by Edna Turpin, shows
Emmaline, who has struggled to buy her husband’s freedom, saying: “Me
an’ Abram ain’t got nothin’ to do in dis worl’ but to wait on you
an’ master.” These are merely duplicates of stories by more talented
Reconstruction authors, with names and settings changed. Their authors
have little to say, but say it over and over.
Ruth McEnery Stuart rises a notch above these. Although she glorified
the past in _The River’s Children_ (1903) most of her work was local
color of the deep South. In such works as _Napoleon Jackson_ (1902),
_George Washington Jones_ (1903) and _The Second Wooing of Salina
Sue_ (1905), Negro life in the picturesquely shabby towns is quaint
and droll, an unending source of mirth and satisfaction for the
white-folks. Napoleon Jackson, the gentleman of the plush rocker, whose
mother swore that he should never lay hand to a plow, worships old
Marse and is therefore charming in Mrs. Stuart’s sight. His wife Rose
Ann, a visionary, is astonished that people pity Negroes since “we see
mo’n white folks sees.” Marital difficulties and burlesques of Negro
church services furnish much of the drollery. Salina Sue, forced to
marry her common-law husband, speaks of her fifteen-year old daughter:
“Hit’ll be a mighty good an’ ’ligious thing for her to remember in
after-years. Tain’t every yo’ng gal dat kin ricollec’ her pa an’ ma
gittin’ married.”
Better known writers preserving the tradition include the gifted
Sarah Orne Jewett, whose _The Mistress of Sydenham Plantation_ is
like Constance Woolson’s _East Angels_ in showing a northern woman’s
respect for a servant’s loyalty; Frank Stockton, who turned his facile
invention to the Negro in _The Cloverfield’s Carriage_ and _The Late
Mrs. Null_; and Booth Tarkington who invests the old picture with charm
in _Penrod and Sam_. All of these are superior writers to such southern
writers as Mrs. Burton Harrison, Opie Read and Marion Harland, but they
give no new interpretation. Some authors, like Virginia Frasel Boyle
in _Devil Tales_ (1900), followed Harris into the fertile field (and
the wilderness) of folklore. Ed Mott’s _The Black Homer of Jim Town_
(1900) is a collection of folk tales from the Cape Fear country of
North Carolina. Most of them are trite. Slavery is remembered as a good
time, and in one of the tallest of the tales, a Negro in the Federal
army arrives at the battle just in time to intercept a bullet intended
for his Confederate master, in whose arms he dies.
Women writers of the South have been particularly attracted to literary
exercises about the legendary chivalry, the perfect masters and slaves.
In their prefaces, they seem to consider it their duty to “interpret
the Negro race” and to lecture upon the modern Negro’s deficiencies.
Among these might be mentioned Emma Speed Sampson for _Mammy’s White
Folks_ (1919) and _Miss Minerva On The Old Plantation_ (1923); Jane
Baldwin Cotton for _Wall-Eyed Caesar’s Ghost_ (1925) and Virginia
McCormick for _Charcoal and Chalk_ (1931). Pity for “the child who
never had a fat, brown mammy with elastic lap and warm enfolding arms,”
alternates with beaming appreciation of happy-hearted pickaninnies
living an endless picnic. “A real understanding of our colored people”
generally amounts to having great fun out of them. The dialect is often
carefully recorded, but the Negroes say about the same things that Page
had them say long ago, to flatter their white-folks and to make them
laugh.
Although willing to poke gentle fun at his native South, O. Henry kept
to its old tradition about Negro character. Uncle Bushrod in “The
Guardian of The Accolade”, remembering Miss Lucy’s words for Marse
Robert: “a little child but my knight, pure and fearless and widout
reproach,” prevents Robert from absconding with what he thinks to be
the cash of the bank, but what turns out to be two quarts of old silk
velvet Bourbon. “The Fourth in Salvador” has a
buck coon from Georgia who had drifted down there from a busted-up
colored colony that had been started on some possumless land in
Mexico. As soon as he heard us say barbecue he wept for joy and
groveled on the ground.
“The Emancipation of Billy” has an ancient body-servant, Old Jeff, a
member of “de fambly,” who despises “Yankee rascality enduring’ the
war,” speaking “de fambly’s” language _to a T_. “A Municipal Report”
shows a faithful Negro coachman, Uncle Caesar, who supports his
impoverished mistress, and kills her worthless husband (a professional
southerner) for robbing her. A master of surprises, O. Henry has no
surprises for us when he handles Negro characters. They belong to an
endless line.
_Irvin Cobb and The Professional Humorists._ Irvin Cobb, whom some
consider heir to the roving shoes of O. Henry, once had a favorite
character declaim: “I ain’t no problem, I’se a pusson. I craves to be
so reguarded.” But when Cobb regards Jeff Poindexter, he sees little
more than a loyal and ridiculous servant, who says the right things.
Jeff advises a white moving picture producer as follows:
Ef you kin git hold of a crowd of cullid actors w’ich is willin’ to
ack lak the sho’nuff ole time cullid an’ not lak onbleached imitations
of w’ite folks, it seems lak to me the rest of it oughter be plum
easy. Mostly I’d mek the pitchers comical, ef I wuz you. You kin do
’at an’ still not hurt nobody’s feelin’s, w’ite nur black. Ef you
wants to perduse a piece showin’ a lot of niggers gittin’ skinned,
let it be another nigger w’ich skins em.... Then, w’en at the last,
they gits even wid him it’ll still be nigger ag’inst nigger. An’ ef,
oncet in awhile, you meks a kind of serious pitcher ... ’at ought to
fetch there yere new-issue cullid folks w’ich is seemingly become so
plentiful up Nawth. But mainly I’d stick to the laffin’ line ef I wuz
you. An’ whatever else you does, don’t mess wid no race problem.
Irvin Cobb takes Jeff’s advice, fondly affectionate toward the “old
time cullid,” derisive of the new-issue “onbleached imitations of
w’ite folks,” unwilling to hurt the feelings of any of his large white
audience. As a result, his books such as _J. Poindexter, Colored_ and
those about Old Judge Priest rise little above the joke-book level
when dealing with Negroes, in spite of Cobb’s undoubted knowledge of
his native Kentucky. McBlair’s _Mister Fish Kelly_ (1924) is similarly
traditional, with some surface truth to comic elements in Negro life,
but too set upon tickling America.
But that is a well paying business, as such writers as Hugh Wiley,
Arthur Akers, Octavus Roy Cohen and E. K. Means have discovered.
Belonging to light entertainment literature, their stories would
hardly deserve serious attention, were it not for their undoubted
social influence. With situations ranging from the improbable to the
unreal, the comedy, the farce are not “pure,” but are mixed all up with
propaganda for Negro inferiority and subordination. These authors stem
from Page and the Reconstruction: although they stress the comical,
they likewise urge the mutual affection between funny Negroes and their
fine white-folks, and bear witness to the sunny life of the South. Guy
Johnson has written that there is a sort of
folk attitude of the white man toward the Negro.... He must have his
fun out of the Negro, even when writing serious novels about him.
How much more fun the professional marketmen of humor have out of the
Negro is apparent when one reads the stories of Wiley, Akers, and
Cohen, to name only three who write for wide circulation magazines such
as _The Saturday Evening Post_ and the _Red Book_. With the help of the
radio, these family magazines see to it that there is a comic Negro in
every middle class home.
Hugh Wiley in the twenties presented Wildcat, inseparable from
Lady Luck, his unsavory goat. Like O. Henry, Wiley uses outrageous
metaphors, but one does not have to believe the language to be Negro
merely because it is amusing. Pet expressions are such as “crematized
or secluded in de ground” for burial rites, “paraphernalia of chance”
for dice, and other minstrel joke-book relics. The humor is broad,
concerned with perspiring three-hundred pound black Amazons, “battling
brunettes,” a goat outsmelling creation, whose butting causes Wildcat
to “skid over the curb in a pose which cost his army pants half of
their seating capacity.” Wildcat is a “champion ration battler,” barely
making it on four meals a day, lazy except at the irresistible crap
game, where he wins fabulous sums with other-worldly luck. Characters
are named Miss Cuspidora Lee, Vitus Marsden, Honey Tone, Dwindle
Daniels, Punic Hunter, Presidump Ham Grasty, Festus Roach. There
are many jobs (generally unwelcome) and a great deal of money and
food in circulation; the law is loud-mouthed but gentle; things are
“hotsy-totsy” down in Dixie, Lady Luck and the whitefolks will see to
that. It all strives very hard, but it could be more amusing.
Of these professionally funny men, Octavus Roy Cohen is probably
most widely known and industrious. Cohen and his large following are
entranced by the comedy of what Cobb called “onbleached imitations
of white folks.” The idea of Negro doctors, lawyers, bankers,
movie-magnates and society belles in Birmingham is too funny, but not
too funny for words. Some of his annual books are _Assorted Chocolates_
(1922), _Dark Days and Black Knights_ (1923), _Bigger and Blacker_
(1925), _Black and Blue_ (1926) and _Highly Colored_ (1921). All are
highly colored: he names his characters Orifice Latimer, Callous
Deech, Magnolius Ricketts, Excelsior Nix, Forcep Swain, Exotic
Hines, Unit Smith, Jasper De Vord, Chromo Bridal and Atlas Brack.
His dialect is one unheard on land or sea: “Got to ain’t has got;”
“I ain’t sawn her right recent;” “Does anybody discover that I ain’t
you, you is suddenly gwine to become ain’t;” “salisfried, straduced,
light bombastic, applicatin, foolisment; oh, whoa is me!” The plots
and counterplots generally turn around the axis of money or love;
the honest hero defeats the slickers, the boy gets the girl. Florian
Slappey, in Harlem, is fleeced in the cold winter by two Harlem number
men, but the happy ending is usual. The Sons and Daughters of I Will
Arise, The Enter Paradise In Style Life and Death Sassiety, and The
Over The River Buryin’ Sassiety figure prominently. There seems to be
a great deal of money in Negro Birmingham, but when Cohen speaks of
a Negro star being paid one hundred dollars a week by a Negro movie
company, he reveals his myth-making powers. One of Cohen’s recent
heroes, Epic Peters, is a pompously talking Pullman porter, proud of
his service to “quality white folks” whom he can tell at a glance,
happy, amusing, and about as real as his speech: “Goodness, goshness,
Miss Agness, Mr. Foster--I suttinly thought I was gwine see you become
ain’t.”
Arthur K. Akers’ world is less unreal, but equally droll. Jeff thus
explains his connubial woes:
Hit’s on account of me bein’ weak in de’rithmetic. Dat’s huccome I
cain’t ricollect is I got two weddin’s and three d’voces, or three
weddin’s an’ two d’voces. Emmline come in dar somewhar.
Akers has a fondness for names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Columbus
Collins, Aspirin Edwards and Halfportion. His intricate plots
invariably end happily for the dull-witted, inept heroes such as
Gladstone Smith who is “numb from the neck up.” Ipecac Ignalls,
looking like “something dark that had been left under a tent--an
orange-colored tent with LIFE GUARD lettered across it” does not know
how to swim, but he saves the life of a belle by letting her stand
on him while he is on the bottom of the pool drowning. Other comedy
is furnished by lodge-life and financial high-jinks performed by the
Worthymost Master Samson Bates and Horace Tombs, who are Get Rich Quick
Wallingfords in blackface.
E. K. Means, whose stories were collected in volumes called _E. K.
Means_, _More E. K. Means_, and _Further E. K. Means_, insists that he
wrote out of a whimsical fondness for the Negro “to whom God has given
two supreme gifts--Music and Laughter.” He seems to agree with one of
his white characters, however, that the Negro “has a one-cylinder mind
and a smoky spark-plug.” Nigger-Heel Plantation, Hen Scratch Saloon,
Shoofly Methodist Church, Tickfall and Dirty Six are treated with a
mixture of true local color and far-fetched tom-foolery. The characters
have ludicrous names like Whiffletree Bone, Limit Lark, Vakey Vopp,
Dazzle Zenor, Coco Ferret, Ready Rocket, Vinegar Atts, Skeeter Butts.
Means attacks conventional dialect, yet he makes use of invented
phrases: “explavacatin”, “permittunce,” “coming wid a looseness,” “de
orgies” (for church services), “ax her inquirement,” “ain’t right in
her intellectuals,” “I warn’t studyin’ how to save by grace; I was
ponderin’ how to save my grease.” Means regrets that the good life
lived by these naïve villagers is departing; “Ethiopia is stretching
out her hands after art, science, literature and wealth,” Negroes are
becoming “play-like white folks.” He wishes to leave a record of the
“sable sons of laughter and song, in Fiction’s beautiful temple of
dreams.” The laughter, however, is chiefly the haw-hawing of the white
folks; the dreams are practical jokes. Something of the sinister and
ugly is recognized; Negroes at their Uplift League election wrench legs
off of tables in a free-for-all, shot-guns and razors are frequently
used, but the picture remains quaint and comical. In almost every story
we have panic-stricken Negroes “skedaddling,” their “ponderous feet
beating a wild tattoo of panicky retreat upon the sodded turf;” oddly
enough, one cause for fright never mentioned is a southern mob.
These authors contrive a rapid-fire dialogue, now near to life (as in
Akers) and now to the minstrel show (as in Cohen). The white folks
are tolerant, until tenants burn the porches off their homes, or
servants mix up affairs too much, when they wax comically profane.
The Negroes are superstitious, helpless, cowardly, utterly ridiculous
children. Life is easy and indolent except for shrewish wives and
scheming crooks; the razors do not cut, the scantlings used by white
masters on their menials never hurt, since they strike the head,
and the “law” is only a mythical threat. What could be pathos and
tragedy sets off laughter. The settings are supposed to be found in
Demopolis or Birmingham or other southern cities, but they belong to a
_never-never_, cloud-cuckoo land. All in all these stories reveal far
less of Negro life and character than of middle class American taste.
_The Rising Tide of Color._ But there were others who took the Negro
in dead earnest. Negroes were becoming educated, getting property,
leaving the South, and asking for civil rights; they constituted,
therefore, a menace. Southern civilization sought to preserve itself by
peonage, disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching. The authors aided
and paralleled the politicians, who confounded attempts at democracy
by dragging the herring of intermarriage over the countryside. In
proportion as Negroes showed themselves as seeking economic advancement
and civil rights, authors portrayed them as insulting brutes and
rapists.
This stereotype shot up to full growth in these first decades of the
twentieth century. But the seeds, as we have seen, had been sown
long before. Answering abolitionist onslaughts, the _Bible Defense
of Slavery_ had “proved” that Sodom and Gomorrah were strongholds
of _Negro_ vice, and that “the baleful fire of unchaste amour rages
through the Negro’s blood more fiercely....” Hinton Helper, in
_Nojoque_ (1867), had set up black and beastly as synonyms. _The Negro
A Beast_ (1900) by Charles Carroll which proves the Negro to be “a
beast, created with articulate speech, that he may be of service to the
White man,” brought this type of book to a rabid climax. As already
pointed out, Page in _Red Rock_ and _The Negro, The Southerner’s
Problem_ had shown Reconstruction to be a holiday for Negro brutes.
_Thomas Dixon._ After Page, the best known author of Ku Klux Klan
fiction is the Reverend Thomas Dixon. _The Clansman_ and _The Leopard’s
Spots_, because of their sensationalism (cf. chapter titles “The Black
Peril,” “The Unspoken Terror,” “A Thousand Legged Beast,” “The Hunt For
the Animal”) seemed just made for the mentality of early Hollywood,
where D. W. Griffith’s _The Birth of a Nation_ made for Dixon a dubious
sort of immortality, and finally fixed the stereotype in the mass-mind.
_The Leopard’s Spots_ (1902) is Dixon’s masterpiece of hatred. This
long novel has its share of sugary love affairs done in the best
southern tradition, but is chiefly important for its political
bearings. Characters are brought in from _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; Legree
quits drink for the greater vice of becoming a scalawag and a mill
owner. Eliza’s son, George Harris, is educated at Harvard, falls
in love with Senator Lowell’s daughter and is ordered from the
abolitionist home. Tim Shelby, a silk-hatted Negro politician, boasts
that he will one day marry a white woman and is lynched as “Answer of
the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare to pollute with words the
fair womanhood of the South.” Dick, an imbecile, crushes with a rock
the head of a white child and then attacks her. The assaulted child
and the burning of the Negro are described with gusto. Drunk Negro
soldiers drag white brides from their homes; criminal Negroes rove the
countryside, forcing whites to take to the cities. Included in the list
of hateful outragers of the fair Southland are the Yankee schoolmarms,
whom Dixon would like to see shipped back to Boston in glass cages like
rattlesnakes. The Negro is not to be educated, not even industrially,
for this drives him to crime or suicide. A few Negroes like old Nels
obey their white-folks, but Dixon is surprised to find no Negroes in
the mob that lynched Dick. Negro “dominion” and the threat that “the
South will become mulatto instead of Anglo-Saxon” are overthrown when
the Red-Shirts ride.
_The Clansman_ (1905) is another hymn of hate. President Lincoln,
considered pro-southern, is fearful lest “mulatto citizenship be too
dear a price to pay even for emancipation.” Stoneman, a libellous
portrait of Thaddeus Stevens, is shown in the toils of Lydia Brown,
a mulatto of extraordinary animal beauty. Other villains are Silas
Lynch, a mulatto, “with the head of a Caesar and the eyes of the
jungle,” Augustus Caesar, “whose flat nose with enormous perpetually
dilating nostrils, sinister head and enormous cheekbones and jaws
reminded one of the lower order of animal,” and Yankee soldiers whom
faithful ex-slaves obligingly knock down. “A new mob of onion-laden
breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of
American democracy.” Against this reign of terror, culminating in a
rape, painstakingly described, the knights of the Ku Klux Klan rise
in righteous wrath. Gus, whose image was discovered upon the retina
of the dead mother’s eye by strange southern science, is not lynched,
but “executed by the Grand Turk who flung his body on the lawn of the
black Lieutenant-Governor of the State.” In this way civilization was
restored. Reconciliation is exemplified in northern-southern love
affairs, but only when the Negro is returned to serfdom can there be
true reunion.
_The School of Page and Dixon._ Emory’s _A Maryland Manor_ (1901)
is important only as a sign of the trend. The slaves are shown as
lighthearted, needing compulsion to teach them good habits. Chloe, who
runs away frequently, is obeying an inherited love for the woods: “It
was often the case ... fugitives fled from those they loved best.”
From emancipation “the negroes suffered most of all, sinking into a
condition little short of their original barbarism.” Caesar is too
intelligent to accept freedom, “What you take me fur, anyhow?”, etc. As
a reward he is allowed burial in the family graveyard, at his master’s
blessed feet.
In _The Northerner_ (1905) by Nora Davis, a reconciliation novel,
Falls, a Yankee businessman, establishes the Tennessee Valley
Improvement Company to develop electric power in the South, and wins
the Alabama belle in the meanwhile. Falls and Watson, a southern
aristocrat, battle a mob to save an innocent but craven Negro, who,
given a pistol to defend his life, thinks only: “Lawdy, don’t I wisht
I had er piece er M’lindy’s cawn bread.” Miscegenation is a great
concern of the author, who calls it the “Curse of Dixie,” “The Nameless
Shame,” “The Hidden Pain.” Watson, in his cavalier youth, had been
seduced by the brown Lesby, “a snake in the grass.” He loathes his
beautiful quadroon daughter, Rosebud. Miss Davis has him say: “Every
drop of blood in my body turns cold with disgust at the thought--the
sight of her!” And to his daughter, before she is relegated to the
future in store for one “cursed with the black drop,” he declaims:
You should be just, child, to this man--try to see how he is placed.
He has done, and he will do, his duty by you as God gives it to him
to see it.... That was a sin of the flesh, you know, and in the flesh
will he repay. But in the spirit, in all those things which belong to
his higher nature, you can have no part.... He could not love you,
cherish you: his very nature would recoil. It is instinct, child,
blood!”
Rose meekly concurs. Some comic use is made of Pete, a state
Congressman in Reconstruction, now happier as a valet for his
white-folks.
Robert Lee Durham is even more concerned over the “Hidden Shame” in
_The Call of The South_ (1908). John Hayward, the central figure, is
of barely perceptible Negro blood. Of fine ancestry on the white side,
he is a first-rate student and athlete at Harvard before he leaves for
heroic service in the war in Cuba. Becoming footman for a president
who champions liberal democracy, he is thrown in contact with the
president’s daughter. After rescuing her from a runaway horse, and
revealing his heroic past at Harvard and in battle, he wins her, like
a modern Othello, by tales of dangers overcome. They marry secretly,
platonically. Up to this point the novelist has been sympathetic toward
Hayward’s undoubted abilities and undeserved rebuffs. But the platonic
husband and wife, waylaid in a storm, are forced to seek refuge in a
hut.
In a flash of light she sees his face--distorted: with a shriek of
terror she wildly tries to push him from her; but the demon of the
blood of Guinea Gumbo is pitiless, and against the fury of it, as
against the storm, she fights and cries in vain.
The tragedy rushes on: Helen is delivered of a very dark child,
explained as a “recession”; her father dies of heart failure; she goes
mad. A South Carolina cavalier points the moral and adorns the tale:
How shall sickly sentimentality solace your shame if in the blood of
your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red corpuscles of some savage
ancestor shall overmatch your gentle endowment?
For “however risen, redolent of newly applied polish,” the leopard
cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin. It seems that the
skin must be changed for him. Even so, the fundamental savagery is
still there, lurking. Social equality means the “mongrelization of the
superior breed,” of which one “blood deep characteristic is chivalrous
respect for women.” So rings out the Call of the South.
Although a much later book, Jean Sutherland’s _Challenge_ (1926) is
equally fantastic and insidious. The Polish-English Prince Kareninoff,
who is famous as an opponent of race-mixture, has had a son by a woman
who, unknown to him, was part Negro. The son, however, does the proper
thing; he shuts himself in a monastery to save his aristocratic fiancée
from pollution, and then, like his octoroon sisters, goes to Africa to
help his people.
Negro characters in John Trotwood Moore’s novels such as _Ole Mistis_
and _The Bishop of Cottontown_ are in the mildewed tradition. Mammy, in
the second of these, has a new mission: she keeps the children of her
impoverished master from the cotton mills.
You’re down heah preachin’ one thing for niggahs and practisin’
another for yo’ own race; yo’ hair frizzles on yo’ head at th’ort of
niggah slavery, whilst all the time you’re enslavin’ the po’ little
whites that’s got yo’ own blood in their veins.... I come for my child!
Frenzied at the wrongs of the cotton factory, she sets fire to the
“Sodom.” For this she is nearly lynched, but is saved by the heroes
of the novel. “Thirteen dead men lay, and the back-bone of lynching
had been broken forever in Alabama.” This was written in 1906. Moore
condones lynching as
the result of the sudden emancipation of ignorant slaves, who, backed
by the bayonets of their liberators ... perpetuated an unnameable
crime as part of their system of revenge for years of slavery.... And
is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?
Inconsistently, he goes on:
And so these people flocked to the burning--the Negro haters, who had
never owned a slave and had no sympathy--no sentiment for them.
In one scene a group of Negro night-riders, instigated by the villains
of the Union League and a mulatto politician, terrorize the faithful
Negroes. The latter, who had been overseers, had “absorbed many of the
virtues of the best class of whites,” while the Negroes who wished to
vote were “but a few generations removed from the cowardice of darkest
Africa.” Lushly overflowing with love for the poor millhands, Moore has
a kind word for the Negro only as serf.
_Summary._ These authors urged reconciliation of North and South, _but
on southern terms_. They shuddered at the rising tide of bad Negroes,
dreading amalgamation, but too often “bad Negroes” to them were the
educated, or the propertied, or the militant. Their books seem to be
conceived in fear and written with hate. They reflected the thought of
the South of their day, from planter aristocrat and political boss down
to the poor-white on the farm or in the mills. They wanted the South
left alone to deal with the Negro in its own way, and this way, since
the Negro was needed as ignorant laborer and scapegoat, was the way of
exploitation and cruelty. These authors merely transferred melodrama
of action into written melodramas. They were sometimes vicious,
sometimes stupid, and as in the case of Dixon, sometimes mob inciters
rather than novelists. But still, be it recorded to democracy’s shame,
they got what they wanted.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Account for the vogue of Thomas Nelson Page at the beginning of the
century.
2. Why was Cobb anxious to show “Negroes always skinned by Negroes”?
3. What is significant in the fact that after Jeff Poindexter makes his
greatest speech he is given ten dollars?
4. In the recent filibuster on the Anti-Lynching Bill, what arguments
were advanced that are to be found in this chapter?
5. What is the relationship of Page’s _Red Rock_ to the problem fiction
of this chapter?
6. What were the chief problems that concerned southern authors in this
chapter?
7. In what respects do the comic writers and the melodramatists of this
chapter agree?
CHAPTER VII
COUNTER-PROPAGANDA--BEGINNING REALISM
_Negro Apologists._--Aroused by the libels of Thomas Nelson Page
and his school, Negro novelists stepped forward with race defense
and glorification. Explaining weaknesses as the heritage of slavery
and oppression, they wished to hold up to the world “the millions
of honest, God-fearing, industrious, frugal, respectable and
self-respecting Negroes, who are toiling on for the salvation of their
race.” They urged what Kelly Miller wrote in “An Open Letter to Thomas
Dixon, Jr.” (1905):
Within forty years of only partial opportunity ... the American Negro
has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a
professional class, some fifty thousand strong ... some three thousand
Negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from
the best institutions in the North and West.... Negro inventors
have taken out four hundred patents ... scores of Negroes ... take
respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans.
And, as another put it,--“This farm land that they own and operate
if put acre to acre would make a strip of land five miles wide ...
from New York to San Francisco.” They believed that the Negro who had
succeeded in the American way should have his day in court. Some agreed
with Booker Washington, more with DuBois, but all stressed the Negro’s
persecution and his achievement. The times demanded propaganda of them,
they felt; and propaganda they gave, in good measure. The race was
their hero, and preaching a solution their business, upon which they
were grimly intent.
Sutton Griggs, one of the earliest, assured the readers of _Unfettered_
(1902) that neither angels nor demons, but mere human beings made up
his cast of characters. But this is not so. Morlene is described:
A wealth of lovely black hair crowning a head of perfect shape and
queenly poise; a face, the subtle charm of which baffles description;
two lustrous black eyes, wondrously expressive, presided over by
eyebrows that were ideally beautiful; a neck which, with perfect art,
descended and expanded so as to form a part of a faultless bust; as
to form, magnificently well proportioned; when viewed as a whole, the
very essence of loveliness....
It is no wonder then, that she speaks to one of the villains: “Sir,
it takes no prophet to foretell that terrible sorrows await you.” The
hero, Dorlan Warthell, is likewise faultless: “As to color he was
black, but even those prejudiced as to color forgot that prejudice when
they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo.” Dorlan, a power in politics,
deserts the Republican party for betraying his race, and incurs the
hatred of the white Congressman Bloodworth. The ills heaped upon ills
of the southern Negro, a very idealized love affair, long discussions
of the race problem, and Dorlan’s plan to solve it (partly worked out
on a balloon ride) make the book a hodgepodge. The prose is trite and
pompous.
Griggs’ _The Hindered Hand_ (1905) is also a bad novel. The characters
are models of decorum. In a passionate love scene at the end, the hero
Ensal takes one of Tiara’s hands in his, and then overwhelmed, takes
the other:
We fain would draw the curtain just here.... They were married that
night, and the next day set out for Africa, to provide a home for the
American Negro.
All of the darker phases of the South appear in the book, but
melodramatically, unrealistically. The action is slowed up by long
dissertations on “the problem,” including a review of Thomas Dixon’s
_Leopard’s Spots_. Even the two heroines are race orators. George
McClellan’s _Old Greenbottom Inn_ (1906) is subtler propaganda. Most
of the stories tell of the pathetic love affairs of beautiful Negro
girls, but there is some rewarding local color of the Tennessee Valley
and of the earliest Negro schools.
An argument in the guise of fiction is J. W. Grant’s _Out of the
Darkness_ or _Diabolism and Destiny_ (1909). Answering Booker T.
Washington’s conciliatory school of thought, the author writes “What
are houses, land and money to men who are women?” But the mettle
of the author deserves a better novel. His chief characters--the
orator, the salutatorian and the valedictorian of their college
class--become noted as preacher, statesman, and physician respectively.
The physician discovers a cure for yellow fever, saves a beautiful
white girl’s life, and is lynched before the love affair between
them ripens. He is nearly white and bitter towards the white world;
his two classmates are likewise militant. The author continually
stresses the grace, refinement, wealth, palatial homes and property
of upper class Negroes, decries the masses, and demands that the
Negro be measured not by his worst but by his best. Needless to say
the wrongs of the Negro are listed in full, but are seldom shown
movingly. _As We See It_ (1910) by Robert L. Waring deals with a
young black hero, Abe, who leaves scholastic and athletic honors at
Oberlin College to avenge the lynching of his mother and sister. There
is a Damon-Pythias bond between Abe and a white boy, Malcolm, and
between their two fathers, one an Alabama aristocrat and the other his
body-servant. The aristocratic class of the South is praised highly,
while the poor-whites are treated with contempt and hatred. Waring’s
generalizations about the “cracker” are very much like Dixon’s about
Negroes.
_From Superman to Man_ (1917) by J. A. Rogers has only a thin thread
of narrative running through long discussions of the race problem, in
which a Pullman porter embarrasses and refutes white passengers with
his anthropological and sociological information. Quips such as “The
white man’s burden is composed largely of plunder” and “‘To educate the
Negro is only to make him unhappy’ really means ‘Do not educate the
Negro and make the white man unhappier’” carry force, but the book is
more pamphlet then novel.
The apologist whom these authors praised for his uncompromising
attitude was W. E. B. DuBois. His fiction, superior to theirs in
literary value, is similar in many respects. _The Quest of the Silver
Fleece_ (1911) is part fantasy, part propaganda. Zora, who sees visions
of the “little people of the swamps,” rises from a degraded environment
to become a race leader, fit companion for Bles Alwyn, a noble
black boy from Georgia who becomes a force in politics. The plot is
unconvincing; the characters are stiff and talk stiltedly: “Bles, thou
almost persuadest me to be a fool.” But DuBois’ social understanding
gives the novel value. The New England schoolmarms, the southern attack
upon the schools, the scheming to get control of Negro education to
render it harmless, the tie-up of Northern capital with cotton barons,
the shame of Negro treatment, the conniving of political Negroes,--all
of these are revealed by a keen social analyst. DuBois sees how
poor-whites are used “to keep niggers in their place, and the fear of
niggers to keep the poorer whites in theirs.” One white character says
“Derned if I don’t think white slaves and black slaves had ought ter
git together.” But this radical lead is not followed up; the novel is
too taken up with a priggish hero and an unbelievable heroine, and
social reality is subordinated to symbolism. It is a significant book,
however, and if DuBois answered Dixon’s melodrama in kind, it was at
least melodrama pleading for humanity and blasting injustice.
DuBois’ _Darkwater: The Twentieth Century Completion of “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin”_ (1919) contains five tales in a prose that echoes the Bible
and medieval romance. Two modern fairy-tales attack race-hatred and
oppression. “The Second Coming” tells of the birth of a black child in
a Georgia stable while three bishops--“the wise men”--look on. “Jesus
Christ in Texas,” like Upton Sinclair’s “They Call Me Carpenter,”
deals with the return of Christ to a hate-ridden community, where he
is unrecognized by the preacher, but is known to the despised and
rejected. Like H. G. Wells, DuBois, in “The Comet,” makes use of
pseudo-science to drive home social ideas. When Manhattan is destroyed
by the gases of a comet, only two people survive, one a Negro bank
messenger, and the other a white girl, “rarely beautiful and richly
gowned, with darkly-golden hair and jewels.” Alone on earth, the “Bride
of Life” and “great All-Father of the race to be” are broken in upon
and returned to the world of prejudice by the crass “honk-honk” of
rescuers from the world outside of New York City. These stories are
without the usual drive of DuBois’ work; even within the frame of
allegory and fantasy, they lack conviction.
James Weldon Johnson’s _The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man_ (1912)
(first published anonymously) urges that
log-cabins and plantations and dialect speaking ‘darkies’ are perhaps
better known in American literature than any other single picture....
[Too little known] are coloured people who live in respectable homes
and amidst a fair degree of culture.
The hero, a sensitive, light-skinned Negro, expresses an upper-class
snobbishness toward the Negro masses:
The unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk
and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost
repulsion.
Ashamed of “being identified with a people that could with impunity be
treated worse than animals,” he decides to “pass” for white. He travels
widely through the South, to New York and to Europe, mingling generally
with artistic people. Economic security and a happy marriage with a
white woman do not quiet his regret, however, and he calls himself
a “coward, a deserter ... [with] a strange longing for my mother’s
people.” Although the central figure is complex and interesting, the
novel seems to exist primarily for the long discussions of race, and
the showing of the Negro in different milieus. The descriptions of the
“big meeting” and of Bohemian life in New York are valuable realism.
_The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man_ was a ground-breaking novel in
its dealing with the “aristocratic” mulatto, the problem of “passing,”
the Negro artistic world, the urban and European scene, and its subtler
assertion of points where Negroes “are _better_ than anybody else.”
_Summary._ After the long years of caricature and contempt, it was
natural that Negro novelists of the first generation after slavery
should write as apologists. Not literary men, with the exception of
DuBois and Johnson, but most often preachers and teachers, they had a
charge to keep instead of a story to be told. They resented the use of
the “Jim-Crow Negro,” seen in Harris and Page, Dunbar and Chesnutt.
DuBois reveals a refreshing faith in the people at times, but they all
preferred the “talented tenth,” at its most genteel. The heroines are
modest and beautiful, frequently octoroon; the heroes are handsome and
priggish, frequently black. Their characters have high-flown names like
Dorlan Warthell, Ensal Ellwood, Tiara and Bles Alwyn; between these and
comic names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Vakey Vopp, and Epic Peters
there is little to choose. The villains are too often poor-whites.
The incidents are romantic and often fantastic. The injuries of the
Negro are seldom conveyed with full power; like the abolitionists,
these novelists felt that listing could make up for rendering. The race
problem, at the core of their work, turns their novels into tracts.
Acceptance of certain traits as racial, such as optimism, loyalty and
faith, and underestimation of the Negro masses invalidate much of their
discussion. All are concerned with refutation of Thomas Dixon and his
school. They were fighting in a good cause, but the novel was not their
weapon.
_The Tradition of The Abolitionists._ Negro apologists found allies
among northern white liberals who joined in the struggle for Negro
rights. Mary White Ovington, one of the important figures in the
National Association For The Advancement of Colored People, wrote
persuasive propaganda fiction. _The Shadow_ (1920) makes out a case
for Negroes against the white world. A white girl, abandoned by her
aristocratic family, is brought up as colored, until a letter informs
her of her lineage. Her experiences in the white world, complicated by
coincidental meetings with her Negro “brother,” disillusion her, and
she says:
White people are wicked.... They hate goodness.... And they say
they’re so good!... We black people, we are bad.... Well, I want to be
with bad people. I’ve been with good people as long as I can bear....
The novel is worked out romantically. Its pattern and many of its
situations, however, have been taken over by later novelists. Miss
Ovington is likewise the author of _Hazel_ (1913), a story of a little
colored heroine, and the much better _Zeke_ (1931), which is an
informed and sympathetic novel of the life of Negro boys in a southern
school. Her “The White Brute” has been called one of the most memorable
stories against lynching.
Dorothy Canfield’s _The Bent Twig_ (1915) refers to race prejudice in a
midwestern town. When two shy, well-bred girls are discovered to have
Negro blood, their schoolmates taunt them gleefully. An intelligent
liberal--grieved at the humiliation--feels like gathering up his family
and going away from the intolerable question, to Europe, but his wife
grimly remarks: “And what we shall do is, of course, nothing at all.”
Typical of the many works urging the solution of the race problem by
applied Christianity is _Of One Blood_ (1916) by Charles Sheldon, the
author of the religious best-seller _In His Steps_. Sheldon admits that
he has pictured the “heroic, the beautiful and the great of each race,”
but insists that he has not done them justice. The Negro hero is shown
as triumphant college orator, great athlete, and finally agricultural
expert instructing his people. Although nearly lynched in the South,
being rescued melodramatically by a southern member of the “World
Brotherhood,” he will not be “angry, sullen, bitter or revengeful.” The
author concludes that race hatred would be abolished if “all the white
men in the United States were like Abraham Lincoln and all the black
men like Booker Washington,” a hope as extreme as his characterization
and plot. Likewise full of praise for Booker Washington, _The Testing
Fire_ by Alexander Corkey (1911) optimistically prophesies a redeemed
South.
_Early Southern Liberalism._--Groping and hesitant liberalism found
expression in the work of some of the southern novelists. Some were
aware of the heavy hand of the dead past and wanted to shake it off,
others wanted to set down honestly what they saw about them. _The
Southerner_ (1909) first appeared as a serial, _The Autobiography of
a Southerner Since the Civil War_, by Nicholas Worth, whom readers
soon identified as Walter Hines Page. The attack of this book upon
the “mummified” South, its dedication to the laying of the three
ghosts of “The Confederate Dead, of Religious Orthodoxy and of Negro
Domination,” shows how opposed Walter Hines Page of North Carolina was
to the ghost-ridden Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia. The novel is long
and tract-like. Negro characters play an important part. Uncle Ephraim
and Aunt Maria, worshippers of their white family, remember slavery as
a happy state. Balancing these are Sam Worth, the runaway slave who
becomes head of an industrial school; Lissa, another tragic mulatto,
who bears a child to the future governor of the state; the Rev. Doctor
Snodder, meek hang-dog “teacher of the oppressed”; John Marshall, an
intelligent Hampton graduate; gullible office seekers, and a murderer
of a Confederate firebrand. The author of _The Southerner_ had, for his
time, advanced ideas regarding education, civil rights, and democracy,
and these are reflected in his characterizations of Negroes, which,
though not done at full-length, are suggestive departures from the old
and outworn.
Ellen Glasgow, who “carried realism across the Potomac” to the
interpretation of her beloved Virginia, naturally pays attention to
the Negro. He appears, however, as part of the social background, not
as central character. He is viewed with shrewd insight: in _The Miller
of Old Church_ (1911) a Negro farmer, told to be thankful for his crop
instead of complaining, responds:
Dar ain’t nuttin’ ’tall ter be thankful fur in dat, suh, case de Lawd
He ain’t had no mo ter do wid dat ar co’n den old Marse Hawtrey. I jes
ris dat ar co’n wid my own han’ right down de road at my front do’,
and po’d de water on hit outer de pump at my back un. I’se monstrous
glad ter praise de Lawd for what he done done, but I ain’t gwine to
gin ’im credit fur de wuk er my own fis’ en foot.
_Barren Ground_ (1925) contains some honest pictures of Negroes, not
greatly different from the impoverished whites of the broomsedge,
except that they are better and thriftier farmers. With courage Miss
Glasgow introduces the common-law wife of old man Graylock. Once
a handsome Negro woman, she is now slatternly and smoulderingly
resentful, especially when the old man in a drunken fit takes a
horsewhip to his mulatto brood.
The Negro character as a very different sort of background appears in
_Hagar’s Hoard_, by George Kibbe Turner (1920). This gripping novel
tells of the horror of yellow fever as it came to the close-shuttered
houses of Memphis. Negroes serve as a mysterious, sinister chorus.
Memphis is conjured vividly before the reader: “that long ragged line
of old brick blocks--that rendezvous of niggers and thieves--the bad
niggers, and the murderers and the nigger thieves.” Then there are
the sanctified Negroes, “The Hollering Saints,” who are certain that
the yellow fever is “the punishment of God acomin’ down on Memphis.”
Individualized Negroes are Arabella, the faithful house servant,
fanatically awaiting the coming of the Lamb; Make Haste Mose, the
driver of the dead wagon, and a saddle-colored Negro with an immense
scar, lying in wait to rob. All of these, according to the southern boy
who tells the story, are unfathomable:
All white folks knew was what they generally know about niggers--that
bowing and scraping; those brown masks--those faces with all their
muscles trained since the sin of Ham in the Bible; since they went out
in slavery and subjection--to lie still and show nothing. And those
old brown eyes, watching, watching.
Under the pen name of “George Madden Martin,” Mrs. Atwood R. Martin
wrote many stories of southern Negro life. “Her Husband” concerns
a lynching. When Edith Thornberry, a white woman of gentle birth,
discovers that her husband, a poor white, has reverted to type and led
the lynchers, she is set against him. She was “bracketed with those
thousands of southern men and women who speak a universal language
of decency,” but her husband was bracketed with “a pusillanimous
multitude, skulkers ever behind the decent South, lynchers,
night-riders, white caps, Ku Klux.” Unfortunate in its connection
of heredity with decency, the story is still significant for the
sharp protest of an intelligent southern woman against mob-violence.
_Children of The Mist_ (1920) decries the work of agitators upon
Negroes, but is by no means merely Thomas Nelson Page brought up to
date.
_Stirrings of Realism._--When, at the turn of the century, authors
showed a willingness to deal seriously with uneasy segments of American
life, the Negro made his demand upon them. It is significant that most
of the early figures prominent in the history of twentieth century
realism dealt in some measure with the Negro. Among them are Stephen
Crane, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein.
Stephen Crane’s work was generally too advanced for the sentimental
readers of his age, and “The Monster” (1897) was particularly so.
This story of horror lashes out at the stupidity and heartlessness
of a small American town. Henry Johnson, a Negro hostler, rescues a
small boy from a fire. Falling, overcome by the fumes in the burning
laboratory, he has his face eaten away by acid. The boy’s father, Dr.
Trescott, exercises his best skill and keeps Henry alive. When Henry
was thought to be dying, he was lauded as hero and martyr; but kept
alive, a faceless imbecile, he meets with terror and hatred, among the
better class as well as in Watermelon Alley. “The Monster” is more a
sharp satire of a small town’s intolerance than a study of Negroes,
but it has secondary meanings that pertain to Negro life in what it
tells of service, sacrifice, and false affection that goes over into
revulsion. The few pictures of Negro life here and in _Whilomville
Stories_ are done with the vividness to be expected from Stephen Crane.
Negro characters in Upton Sinclair’s _The Jungle_ (1905) are only
incidental, but they are drawn in grim earnest. He shows Negroes
as strikebreakers, brought into Packingtown from the levees or the
country districts of the far South on promises of five dollars a day
and board, with special rates from railroads. The harsh life of scabs
makes them surly and dangerous; most of them have knives, ground to
fine points, hidden in their boots. “Whiskey and women were brought in
by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards.”
After the strike, these “green” Negroes, together with foreigners and
criminals, are turned loose in thousands upon Chicago. This sketch of
the Negro worker, denied admission to unions and thereby forced to the
role of strikebreaker, anticipates much of present-day proletarian
fiction.
Carl Van Vechten considers Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” in _Three
Lives_ (1909) to be “perhaps the first American story in which the
Negro is regarded ... not as an object for condescending compassion
or derision.” “Melanctha” is a slowly unwound character study of a
“subtle, intelligent, half-white girl, Melanctha Herbert,” who “always
wanted peace and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to
get excited.” Her chief love affairs are painstakingly set forth. The
characters talk in a mannered dialogue; they all sound like each other,
and like the white people in the other two stories. Gertrude Stein
speaks of “the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to
negro sunshine,” but her major characters do not have it. The people
she calls “decent,” she likewise calls unmoral and promiscuous or
shows them in razor brawls. White blood in one character “made her see
clear,” and gave “her grit and endurance and vital courage,” but the
power and breakneck courage in Melanctha came to her from her big black
virile father. In spite of these dubious generalizings, “Melanctha”
is important. Though not realistic in the usual sense, it gives a
convincing portrait of a mysterious, uncertain girl, “wandering in her
ways,” doomed to tragedy, a Negro Madame Bovary or Esther Waters.
Setting out early to chart “tragic America,” Theodore Dreiser wrote
“Nigger Jeff” (1918) about a lynching. Dreiser does not make the Negro
innocent, but he shows with somber power the mob hysteria in a town
ironically called Pleasant Valley, the bravery of the sheriff, the
horror of the captured Negro, and the final hanging to the bridge.
And then he goes farther, to the mother and sister of the victim,
and without sentimentality shows their grief. “I’ll get it all in,”
exclaimed the young reporter who covered the case. And Dreiser got it
all in, to make one of his best stories.
_Again The Tragic Mulatto._--Two writers of some repute returned to the
theme of the tragic mulatto. Less romantic than their predecessors,
they still cling to old stereotypes. Margaret Deland’s “A Black Drop”
(1908) tells of Lily, who, although brought up in Nigger Hill, a
section of a midwestern town, by Mammy, a fair Negro woman, “cushiony
and weighing two hundred and fifty pounds,” is considered white. Lily’s
love affair with Framely Stone, son of abolitionists, is broken up.
Miss Wales, his New England Sunday School teacher, points out proof of
the girl’s Negro blood, clinching her case by mentioning her use of
“heavy perfumery.” Miss Deland believes that intermarriage is forbidden
by disgust, “a race protest, a race horror ... organic, biological.”
Instinct, it seems, revolts at intermarriage, but not at liaisons.
Confusing and unconvincing, “A Black Drop” is still not entirely
without sympathy and insight.
In the short story “Carter” (1921) Don Marquis is likewise concerned
with one of the many mulattoes who in fiction tragically yearn “oh
to be white, white, white!” After “passing” for a short while in New
York, he returns to Atlanta, resolved to live and die among Negroes. He
arrives there at the time of a riot, and witnesses “the conflict which
was forever active in his own nature.” He is happy when he is taken
for a white man of the better class by his own white half-brother, but
is plunged into misery when, dying, he is re-identified as “a yaller
nigger.” Carter’s abjectness, and the flattery of whites are laid on a
bit too heavily. Although the story abounds in clichés about mulatto
character, it does approach Negro life, especially the Atlanta riot,
with seriousness.
John Bennett’s _Madame Margot_ (1921) is the legend of a golden Creole
who, in order to keep her ivory daughter from dishonor and betrayal,
“to keep her white to all eternity,” sells herself to Satan. Margot’s
sultry beauty turns to grotesqueness. As old Mother Go-go, in the dirty
Negro quarters, black now instead of ruddy gold, she is claimed by
the devil. An other-worldly romance, _Madame Margot_, for all of its
imaginative remoteness, conveys something of what women like Madame
Margot knew in bitter actuality.
_Summary._ The tendencies seen in this chapter are diverse, ranging
from the race-glorification of Negro apologists to social realism by
important American novelists. At times, as in the case of the tragic
mulatto, the work seems conventional, but in the main we notice that
authors are beginning to take the Negro seriously, revising earlier
stereotypes, and breaking the ground for later realism. The work that
they did is little known, but it is important in the evolution of the
Negro character in American fiction.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why are the weaknesses of the Negro apologists to be expected?
2. Why do novels of the “talented tenth” fail to overthrow the
plantation tradition?
3. Why are novels by southerners included in this chapter?
4. In what respects is Gertrude Stein’s story traditional?
5. What similarities are in all of the stories of mulattoes written by
white authors?
6. Compare DuBois, Chesnutt, and Johnson.
7. What is significant in the final quotation from _Hagar’s Hoard_?
CHAPTER VIII
REALISM AND THE FOLK
_Sociological Realism._--T. S. Stribling’s _Birthright_ (1922) brought
something new in the treatment of Negro life. The novel looks back
in its problem and its preaching, and has its share of superstitions
about “race” such as that Negroes howl their agony aloud and white men
bottle up their grief, and that “to a white man absolute idleness is
impossible ... he must ... do something to burn up the accumulating
sugar in his muscles.” Peter Siner is not completely credible: a
Harvard graduate, he comes back South talking like a dictionary, urging
“autonomous development” of his people, and yet he is easily swindled
by a white banker. His marriage to Cissie, light-fingered and ruined
by a white lout, is strained, to say the least. His opposite, Tump
Pack, is caricatured. But Stribling does protest against the southern
belief that all Negroes are carefree and happy. His description of
Negro lodges, funerals, and workaday life are authentic. Most important
of all, _Birthright_ places the Negro at the center of the picture,
attempts to show the influence of environment upon character, is
ironic at the vaunted southern understanding of Negroes, and attacks
injustice. The following description is quite different from the
pastoral shabbiness that delighted Ruth McEnery Stuart, E. K. Means,
and Paul Laurence Dunbar:
On the edge of Hooker’s Bend, drawn in a rough semi-circle around the
Big Hill, lies Niggertown.... The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles,
some propped with poles.... Up and down its streets flows the slow
negro life of the village.... The public well itself lies at the
southern end of this miserable street, just at the point where the
drainage of the Big Hill collects.... [To this hole in soft clay,
where occasionally pigs fall in and drown] come the unhurried colored
women, who throw in their buckets, and with dexterity that comes with
long practice draw them out full of water.... The inhabitants of
Niggertown suffer from divers diseases; they develop strange ailments
that no amount of physicking will overcome.... About once a year
the state health officer visits Hooker’s Bend and forces the white
soda-water dispensers on the other side of the hill to sterilize their
glasses in the name of the sovereign State of Tennessee.
_Nigger_ by Clement Wood (1922) compresses a very great deal into its
less than three hundred pages. This, too, is a sociological novel,
picturing a Negro family from its origins in slavery to modern life
in Birmingham. After freedom, Jake’s burden of debt on his little
place grows heavier each year. Forced to flee when white hoodlums run
rampant on a periodic lynch-fest, Jake takes his seven grandchildren
to Birmingham, to realize the “emancipation” he has heard of so often.
But one son, Pink, dies in France, a hero; another, Louis, decorated
in France for bravery is shot down by the law; Tom, embittered and
violent, becomes a criminal, and Dave’s love of learning is dulled
by the steel mills. The daughters fare no better. The characters are
completely convincing: the trustful Jake is balanced by Jim Gaines who
kills a white man to defend his daughter. Reverend Elisha Kirkman--“who
had seen slavery ... was weazened and sharp-tongued and wise; black
and white feared the sting that hung in his words”--is new in books
about Negroes, but is not, because of that, unconvincing. Even the
“bad Negroes” are not Dixon’s brutes; having seen lynchings and the
flagrant hypocrisy of the law, they are desperadoes through complete
cynicism. Wood presents his characters with great knowledge and
sympathy; the little family’s anguished but doomed efforts to get along
are tragically moving. There is humor in the book, but it is mainly
grim. Louis, called upon by white examiners to recite the Constitution
before he can vote, orates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The examiner
is amazed and half apologetic: “I’m damned. I didn’ think you knew it
... I didn’ think any nigger knew it.”
_White and Black_ (1922) by H. A. Shands gives a realistic picture of
Texas plantation life, where instead of kindly whites and affectionate
uncles and mammies, there are landlords struggling to get money, and
Negroes at work in the Johnson and Bermuda grass trying to get a bare
living. Joe Williams, an aspiring Negro share-cropper tries to bring
up his daughters decently and is almost frenzied when Ella is seduced
by the planter’s son. Ulysses Mulberry who “ain’t done a thing except
lay around ever since he’s been back and has been runnin’ me down to
the niggers and stirrin’ em up about the low wages paid on the farm,
and jes’ playin’ the big Ike gen’r’lly,” is lynched for outraging a
poor-white girl, in a scene powerfully presented. Richard Sanders, the
preacher, starts as a new character, forward-looking and thoughtful,
if over-academic in his language, but ends up typically, finding
his Bathsheba in a fast woman who affects penitence. The revived Ku
Klux Klan is shown punishing Henry Thompson, a white man who openly
acknowledges his Negro children, although its ranks are filled with
men having clandestine affairs with Negro women. Shands has gleams
of irony, but he does not let his sympathies develop to fullness,
and his book therefore lacks drive. Dorothy Scarborough’s _In The
Land of Cotton_ (1923) also deals with Texas, containing snapshots of
Negro life and some fine folk-songs, presented with the sympathetic
approach of a folk-lorist. The picture is generally pastoral. Realistic
pictures of Negroes in turpentine camps help to redeem Vara Majette’s
_White Blood_ (1924), but the melodrama of the swamp octoroon is still
traditional and unconvincing.
_South Carolina Folk._ The work of Ambrose Gonzales, begun at the end
of the last century but mainly accomplished in the nineteen-twenties,
is an example of southern anecdotage. Gonzales writes as two people:
one, intent upon pugnaciously defending the lost cause, and the other,
keenly interested in the little dramas of the Gullah folk of South
Carolina. _The Black Border_ (1922) contains a passage on Thomas
Nelson Page’s failure to deal fully with Negro life, but this book
and _The Captain_ (1924) are merely extensions of works like Page’s
_Pastime Stories_ and go in no new directions. The hunting and fishing,
the marital irregularities, the hog and chicken stealing of the
black-border Negroes are told with gusto, but hardships and tragedies
are glossed over. Gonzales gets closest to realism in his care for the
language. He has studied the Gullah dialect with so much zeal that the
reader’s task is uneasy. _With Aesop Along The Black Border_ is a sly,
witty rendition of the old fables into the odd speech; the following
concludes “The Fox And The Grapes”:
Bumbye ’e git up en’ ’e walk off, en’ ’e walk berry sedate. Attuwhile
’e biggin fuh grin. ’E suck ’e teet, en’ ’e say to ’eself, ’e say,
“Me yent hab time fuh w’ary me bone en’ t’ing fuh jump attuh no sour
grape lukkuh dem. Soon es Uh smell’ ’um Uh know dem _done_ fuh sour!
No, suh! Ef Uh haffuh chaw t’ing lukkuh dat, Uh gwine hunt green
possimun....” Buh Fox smaa’t!
At the same time that Gonzales was publishing, DuBose Heyward,
sensitive and sympathetic, was taking notes upon Negro life in
Charleston to appear as _Porgy_ (1925). This novel is rightly
influential. In a poem at the outset Heyward pleads for “great hearts
to understand.” His characterization is admirable; he knows a great
deal, and he sees the pity as well as the laughter. His hero is Porgy,
a crippled beggar, whose love for Crown’s Bess regenerates her. The
setting, Catfish Row, a squalid tenement; the saucer-burial scene, the
spirituals and the folk-speech, the steamboat picnic, the furtive fear
of the “white” law are conveyed with brilliant poetic realism. One of
the best bits of writing is the description of the September storm when
Catfish Row sends out its doomed riders to the sea. The finale of the
novel, presenting a Negro as _tragic hero_ is worth quoting:
The keen autumn sun flooded boldly through the entrance and bathed the
drooping form of the goat, the ridiculous wagon, and the bent form of
the man in hard satirical radiance. In its revealing light, Maria saw
that Porgy was an old man. The early tension that had characterized
him, the mellow mood that he had known for one eventful summer, both
had gone; and in their place she saw a face that sagged wearily....
She looked until she could bear the sight no longer; then she stumbled
into her shop and closed the door, leaving Porgy and the goat alone in
an irony of morning sunlight.
The same willingness to see Negroes as heroic is also in _Mamba’s
Daughters_ (1925). “Libel on the South--nothing less than plain
libel.... Who, in pity’s name, from a section which is famous for its
aristocracy, elected to go and hunt up Negroes to be sung about?”
are the words of one of the novel’s patrician ladies. Heyward so
elects, giving us a heart-warming chronicle of two women, Mamba
and Hagar, whose selfless devotion to Lissa transcends the usual
characterization of Negroes. Mamba is the untraditional mammy: sly,
ironic and ambitious for her own. Hagar, an illiterate and grotesque
Amazon, attains nobility in her fierce laboring and fighting for her
daughter. Lissa, who owes her career as a singer to Mamba’s generalship
and Hagar’s sacrifices, does not reach the stature of these, but
is nevertheless a new figure in the gallery of Negro characters.
Heyward’s setting--Catfish Row, the phosphate mines, upper Negro
circles striving for gentility, are conveyed with authenticity, if
not finality. Despite a few incidents of exaggerated humor, such as
Mamba’s appropriating the Judge’s false teeth, the tone is serious.
The exploitation in the mines and the travesty of justice meted out to
the Negro are dispassionately noted. Heyward’s “The Half-Pint Flask”
(1927), one of America’s best stories of terror, is skillfully set
against a background of Gullah superstitions, authentically handled.
Another South Carolinian, Julia Peterkin, is like DuBose Heyward in her
intimacy with her material, and her dealing with Negroes as foreground
_characters_ and not as background _types_. Only occasionally do white
people enter her narratives: here are Negroes seen in terms of their
own quite important lives. Mrs. Peterkin, who is the mistress of a
plantation like the “Blue Brook Plantation” of her fiction, insists
about her Negro characters: “I like them. They are my friends, and I
have learned so much from them.” _Green Thursday_ (1924) bore witness
to the liking for these people. It is a simple and touching group of
connected short stories. Kildee, the central figure, with his growing
love for Missie; Rose, cross in her perplexity, but human; Maum Hannah
who burned the new house of the “po’ buckra” who was dispossessing her,
all are pictured with tenderness and insight. Folk-beliefs and ways
are set down without condescension; the speech is Gullah, but modified
from Gonzales’ phonetic transcriptions; and the description of natural
scenery is done with beauty and originality. _Green Thursday_ is, all
in all, a minor classic.
_Black April_ (1927) differs. Here the colors are stronger. Although
the upbringing of the boy Breeze has the simplicity and poetry of
_Green Thursday_, the other half of the novel is at times violently
primitive. In spite of the church, Blue Brook Plantation is amoral.
The foreman, Black April, is a great man for working and fighting, and
a greater for love affairs, his “outside” children far outnumbering
what he calls his “yard children.” The book furnishes a storehouse of
folk-lore; long catalogues of signs and folk-cures alternating with
scenes of hunting, fishing, fighting, conversion, and love-making. For
all of its horror Black April’s death scene approaches the heroic.
Dying after his feet have rotted off from gangrene, he forces out these
words:
“Bury me in a man-size box--You un’erstan?... I--been--six
feet--fo’--Uncle--six feet--fo’!” The blaze in his eyes fell back,
cold, dim. A long shudder swept over him. The tide had turned.
_Scarlet Sister Mary_ (1928) won for Mrs. Peterkin the Pulitzer
Prize. There is no denying the grasp of her material nor the power of
certain scenes in this work and the succeeding _Bright Skin_ (1932),
but something just as noticeable is the increasing accent upon exotic
primitivity. Sister Mary, abandoned by July, who is wild and footloose,
becomes the scarlet woman of the quarters, having love-affairs and
love-children with startling regularity. Mary’s pagan freedom endears
her to Mrs. Peterkin, who deplores Puritan hypocrisy. Nevertheless the
book has lapses into condescension; “Unex” for “unexpected” is one
of the children’s names, and Mary has twins the same night that her
unmarried daughter bears her child in a woodshed. This is belaboring
with a vengeance. _Bright Skin_ is not so concerned with the plantation
birth-rate as with the death-rate, which is very high from violent
causes. A quiet death in bed seems as unusual for these folk as for
the ancient Anglo-Saxons. Mrs. Peterkin is much less sympathetic to
Cricket, “the bright-skin,” and to bizarre Harlem, than to Blue, the
pure type Negro, and primitive Blue Brook.
What these two books leave suspect _Roll Jordan, Roll_ (1933) brings
out into the open. Acclaimed by her publishers as the “outstanding
chronicler of the American black man’s life,” Mrs. Peterkin in this
book advances trite generalizations that go back to _Swallow Barn_,
contradicts her own evidence, and is more concerned with apologetics
for white southerners than with revelations of Negro character. The
picture she gives is one of Arcadian simplicity and happiness, away
from the evils of industrialism. Negroes are superior to whites:
“Better to be poor and black and contented with whatever God sends than
to be vast-rich and restless.” Since Negro school-children will come
into their legacy of “ancient earthly wisdom” it is no tragedy that
Negro schools are open only from harvest to planting time. Poverty,
ignorance, disease and exploitation are lightly touched upon or omitted.
Plantation days may be hard sometimes if _the moon gets contrary_....
Their stories and songs teach the children to look for victory from
the disadvantages _to which life has sentenced them_, when death takes
their souls to heaven. (Italics mine.)
The Negro’s fear of the chain-gang is airily waved away: “Courtesy and
kindliness are the law of the land.” It does Mrs. Peterkin disservice
to consider her _the_ interpreter of _the Negro_. She is, instead,
a plantation mistress who sees with sympathy and intimacy a few
characters in a restricted segment of South Carolina, from a highly
specialized point of view.
The recorder of another section of South Carolina, not so far off, has
a different tale to tell. A slim volume called _Congaree Sketches_
(1927) was immediately recognized as one of the most faithful
representations of Negro folk life. The author, E. C. L. Adams, a
physician of Columbia, S. C., kept out of the scene, and allowed his
Negro characters to speak for themselves. The result was neither
sentimentality nor clowning. In a poetic dialect, Tad and Scipio and
other spokesmen built up a most convincing picture of Negro life
and character “down in de big swamps, down in de land of mosquito,
down on de Congaree.” There are folk-tales, sermons and prayers, but
chiefly stories in dialogue dealing with dances, hot suppers, wakes,
bootlegging, church services, farming, and the chain gang. The tone
varies from rich comedy, such as that of the Hopkins Negro who throws
heaven into an uproar, and of Ole Sister who does the same for hell,
down to the restrained but powerful satires of southern justice:
“After while ole man Hall walk up to Noah an’ bus’ him over de head
wid er axe halve and beat him up ... an’ Jedge Foolbird axe ole man
Hall what de nigger do ... an’ ole man Hall say ‘He ain’t do nuthin’,
but he look like he goin’ say sumpin,’ and Jedge Foolbird fined Noah
one hunnerd dollars.”
Voice: “What did he do wid ole man Hall?”
Perk: “He fine him fi’ dollars....”
Dr. Adams’ second book, _Nigger to Nigger_, is fuller and even more
forceful. The title suggests the method. Here Negroes are assumed to
be talking to themselves, without any eavesdroppers, although the
author reveals that he has listened closely, and has been privileged
with confidences. As a result the humor is true folk humor, and the
bitterness at social injustice is undiluted. There is fine laughter in
“The Telephone Call,” but most of the tales are tragic. “Fifteen Years”
is the Negroes’ brooding summary of the “Ben Bess Case” where a Negro,
envied by white neighbors, was framed on a rape charge. “A Damn Nigger”
is one of the harshest stories to come out of the new realism.
Jake was a nigger. De judge were a kind judge--a good man--wuh ain’
b’lieve in too severe punishment for white folks when a nigger is
kilt, ain’ matter wha’ kind er white folks--And de solicitor wha’
prosecute an’ see dat de criminal git he full jues is a merciful man.
An’ he got great ideas er bein’ light in punishment of dem white mens.
Some of the sketches deal with slavery, in a manner far removed from
the plantation tradition. The unusual chorus of Tad and Scipio and
their fellows reveals that though they may be unlettered, they are
cynical realists, and are certainly not being fooled. When Reverend
Hickman urges Christian forbearance he is met with taunts:
Dere ain’ no use. De courts er dis land is not for niggers. Ain’
nothin’ but for’em but a gun an’ a knife in a white man’s hand, an’
den de grave, an’ sorrow an’ tear for he people. De Bible say, “De
Lord watcheth de fall of every sparrow,” an’ I says: “Why ain’t He
take He eye off sparrow an’ luh ’em rest some time on bigger game?”
_Nigger to Nigger_ gets more of the true picture of Negro life in the
South than do most other books combined. And the picture, for all of
Dr. Adams’ mastering of humor, is not a pleasant one to linger over.
Acquainted with Gullah Negroes and dialect from their earliest days,
Samuel Gaillard Stoney and Gertrude Mathews Shelby have retold in
_Black Genesis_ (1930) the charming fables of guileful Br’ Rabbit
and foiled Br’ Wolf, short-tempered Br’ Wasp, Br’ Alligator, Br’
Frog, Br’ Partridge and Sis’ Nanny Goat, together with free biblical
reinterpretations of the creation of the world, of Adam, Eve, Cain
and Abel, and the beginning of the race problem. In one of the best
stories, Br’ Rabbit pesters God for a longer tail; God assigns him
difficult tasks to get rid of him. Smart and cocky, Br’ Rabbit turns
up again with his tasks completed, surprising and throwing God out of
patience:
’Bout dat time, God in de Big House look out de window to see how dat
t’under an’ lightnin’ he send fix dat bowdacious Br’ Rabbit, so he
won’t be pesterin’ roun’ no mo’. An’ he see a little somet’ing jis’
a-skeedaddlin’ down de Abenue.... He lean out de window, an’ he put he
two hands to be mout’, an he holler: “Ah-hah! Ah-hah!! AH-HAH!! You so
_drat_ smart! Well, GIT A LONG TAIL YO’SELF!”
_Folk of the Deep South._ R. Emmet Kennedy speaks of the Louisiana
Negroes he knows so well as “unlettered folk who have not lost the
gracious charm of being natural: wonderfully gifted and fairly tingling
with poetic tendencies.” His enthusiasm accounts for good essays upon
their music and their patois. But _Black Cameos_ (1924), Kennedy’s
first book, is more marked by picturesque dialect and songs than by
penetration into character. _Mellows_, a collection of folk “melodies”
includes charming vignettes of life along the dusty roads of the delta.
In _Gritny People_ (1927) Kennedy goes deeper. His aim is to portray
a community opposite New Orleans. The plan is an old one: people of
different types gather at old Aunt Susan Smiley’s cook-shop, and
tell their stories, or are told about. A cross section of rural life
results: there is tragedy as well as comedy, and the life-story of
Gussie is especially moving. _Red Bean Row_ (1929) is an episodic
novel; Kennedy’s abilities, like those of earlier local colorists, seem
best fitted for the short story. The narrative is partly a satire of
a philandering elder, and a traditional story of old Gramma Veenia’s
devotion to a weakling white man of “quality.” Kennedy faithfully
conveys a way of life. Here and there he shows the injustices of the
section; the fire company is indifferent to the burning Negro shanty,
and one woman speaks almost like Dr. Adams’ Tad: “But white folks has
a seecut way of handlin’ the law to suit their own mind, and a poor
simple nigger has to take just what comes along.” All in all, however,
_Red Bean Row_ does not match _Gritny People_.
With a Negro for a nurse and Negroes for playmates, having paid
devoted attention to Negroes in the fields, in the levee camps, on
the river, in church, at picnics and funerals, Roark Bradford is,
as his publishers state, amply qualified to write about the Negro.
Their further assertion (duplicate of her publishers’ claim for Mrs.
Peterkin) “that Roark Bradford is perhaps better fitted to write of the
southern Negro than anyone in the United States” is hardly attested
by his work. In a foreword to “_Ol’ Man Adam An’ His Chillun_” (1928)
Bradford repeats the platitudes about Negro character that have
been used to sanction injustice since proslavery days. There is no
indication from later books that Bradford has changed: his Negroes are
nothing but easy-come, easy-go children, creatures of laughter and of
song. What other observers have recorded, Bradford, for all his wide
experience, has not yet seen.
_Ol’ Man Adam An’ His Chillun_ is rip-roaring burlesque, a book of tall
tales told by an imaginative humorist in the fine tradition of Mark
Twain. A mythical preacher of the old school brings Biblical stories
down from heaven to the realistic setting of the delta:
Well, a long time ago things was diffrunt. Hit wa’nt nothin’ on de
yearth ’cause hit wa’nt no yearth. And hit wa’nt nothin’ nowheres and
ev’day was Sunday. Wid de Lawd r’ared back preachin’ all day long ev’y
day. ’Ceptin’ on Sadday, and den ev’ybody went to de fish fry.... So
one day ev’ybody was out to de fish fry, eatin’ fish and biled custard
and carryin’ on, to all at once de Lawd swallowed some biled custard
which didn’t suit his tase....
For all the truth to idiom, this is obviously not Negro religion. The
difference between the personified God in the spirituals, and God with
a fedora upon his head and a ten-cent segar in his mouth should be
apparent to anyone in the least familiar with Negro believers and their
dread of sacrilege. _The Green Pastures_, suggested by _Ol’ Man Adam
An’ His Chillun_, did something toward getting reverence and awe back
into the material, but here it is pure farce. _King David_ _and the
Philistine Boys_ (1930) repeats this formula, with flagging powers.
_This Side of Jordan_ (1929) is naturalistic local color. Elder Videll,
muddy-colored like the river (Bradford does not like mulattoes), is a
lustful villain. He is killed by Scrap in a scene that sheds more light
on Bradford than on Negro character: “The blade of a razor flashed
through the air.... _Her Negro blood sent it unerringly between two
ribs. Her Indian blood sent it back for an unnecessary second and third
slash._” One surmises that her refusal to be chilled with horror might
be attributed to her Esquimo blood. _John Henry_ (1932), for all of its
amusing folk-speech and lore, belittles the hero. He is changed, not
for the better, from a steel driving railroad man to a cotton-toting
roustabout, from a great working class hero to a woman’s fool. Bradford
has taken undue liberties with folk stuff of dignity and power. The
best of Bradford’s many short stories have been collected in _Let the
Band Play Dixie_ (1935). Some, like “Child of God” have ingenuity
and tenderness, others are first-rate folklore and mulelore, and
some show exotics in honkey-tonks going native with a vengeance. The
characterization is conventional; for all of his comic genius, Bradford
too often merely brings the plantation tradition up to date.
In 1928, Howard Odum, one of America’s leading sociologists, turned
to fiction. Dr. Odum had already interpreted the Negro in his
collaboration with Guy Johnson on _The Negro and His Songs_ and _Negro
Workaday Songs_. _Rainbow Round My Shoulder_ is an attempt to render
fiction sociological. The hero, Left Wing Gordon, is a garrulous
roustabout, rambling from job to job, and from one teasing brown to
another. Left Wing Gordon tells us of his boyhood, his work-life, his
love-life, his “jamborees.” Vividly written passages interpret the
experiences. There is no gainsaying the thorough grasp of the material,
nor the picaresque fascination of its handling. The book is so crammed
with folk-sayings and blues, however, that it seems “made-up,” and both
story and hero get lost. Nevertheless, _Rainbow Round My Shoulder_ is
a valuable case study, done without flattery or concern for delicate
feelings, white or black, humorous without being minstrel, tragic
without being sentimentalized. And Left Wing Gordon is one of the best
folk-characters of recent realism.
_Wings On My Feet_ (1929) takes Left Wing overseas in the World War. It
is told in the same racy idiom, as authentic as thorough investigation
can make it. One of the few treatments of the Negro in the war, it is
valuable for what it shows of a stevedore’s reaction to Armageddon. It
is a compound of humor, pathos, and tragedy.
Me an’ war same thing. Want me to fight; I been doing it all my
life.... White buddies mighty funny, too, sometimes. Sometimes we
sorry for ’em, sometimes we jes’ have to laugh at ’em. Sometimes
we don’t keer if some white boys, meaner’n devil, have hard time,
Lawd, we don’t keer, Lawd we don’t keer. Been treatin’ us wrong,
been hard on colored soldiers. White man been fightin’ colored man.
Now fightin’ selves.... Boys laugh at’ em cause didn’t want salute
officers. Colored soldiers salutin’ all time.... Maybe war got him,
didn’t get me. He’s big captain an’ I’m high private in rear rank, but
I gets there just the same.... Buddy so worried in mind. Germans got
him, blowed him clean to pieces. Wa’n’t necessary for him to go but
nobody couldn’t tell him nothin’. He wus gonna save little child. And
so he gave his life for little French child. Made me sad an’ I kept
hollerin’, “Say, Buddy, is you hurt, is you killed?” Knowed he wus but
jes’ kept hollerin to him....
_Cold Blue Moon_ (1931) is the last and least of this trilogy dealing
with Left Wing Gordon. In this book the hero is among the stable boys
in a shed, telling ghost stories. When his turn comes, he launches,
great tale-teller that he is, into a series of legends on the Old
South. Some of them dispute the plantation tradition, but in the main
they run true to what Odum has called the Grandeur that Was, and the
Glory that Was Not. Left Wing is not at his best in these: he is too
far from the center of the picture.
One of the best twentieth century examples of the Uncle Remus tradition
is John B. Sales’ _The Tree Named John_ (1929), a collection of
Mississippi folk-lore in authentic dialect. Aunt Betsey plants an elm
tree--a quick budder, a fast grower and tough--as a name tree for the
grandchild of Ole Miss. Then she presides over his upbringing, giving
him lessons in folk-cures, nature study and in “spe’ence” (“whut you
gits w’en you won’t larn by lis’enin to whut de old folks tells you”).
She and Aunt Polly and Uncle Alvord tell him tales of animals of old
days. One story, “Ghos’es,” is a bitter story of a master who was kind
until he got drunk, when he became vicious. But _The Tree Named John_
stresses the affection between the white family and its servants, and
“the better and gentler side of the Negro ... a phase of Negro life
which is fast being swallowed up in the ‘Harlem movement.’”
In his _Juneteenth_ (1932), J. Mason Brewer is likewise concerned
“about how unrepresentative of his people in the South and Southwest
the loudly-heralded Negro literature of Harlem is--how false both in
psychology and language.” It is not clear why one should expect the
treatment of Harlem to be representative of Brazos Bottom. One of
the first collections of old-time tales by a Negro, _Juneteenth_ is
generally amusing. In a few tales the tables are turned on old “Massa,”
but there are none so harsh as Sales’ “Ghos’es” or the memories of
slavery found in E. C. L. Adams. A few good additions to the Brer
Rabbit cycle, and some interesting folk-tales called “White Man’s
Nigger: I,” “White Man’s Nigger: II,” “The Tale of the Stud Nigger” and
“Railroad Bill” are included in Carl Carmer’s _Stars Fell on Alabama_
(1934) which, true to its title, concentrates upon the strange and
mysterious. Vincent McHugh’s _Caleb Catlum’s America_ (1937) brings
Uncle Remus and John Henry together with American folk-heroes in a fine
yarn.
_Summary._ Whether sociological realism or folklore or partaking
of both, the books considered in this chapter have been marked by
a close and often sympathetic study of the Negro. Even in the case
of Bradford’s comics and Julia Peterkin’s exotics, authenticity has
been carefully sought. This regard for realism, even when incomplete,
has meant the discarding of traditional estimates. Occasionally as
in Wood and Heyward, and especially in Adams, concern for complete
truth has resulted in the recording of tragedies which no Negro folk
group, however isolated, has been so fortunate as to escape. With new
information and insight these authors have brought the Negro into the
mainstream of American realism.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Trace the growing criticism of the South in this chapter. What is
significant about this?
2. How does the place of the Negro in the picture in this chapter,
differ from his place in the work of Kennedy, Page, Harris, Cable and
Twain?
3. Compare Harris and Adams in their treatment of the folk.
4. Which authors seem closest to the plantation tradition?
5. Read Bradford’s “Foreword” to _Ol’ Man Adam and His Chillun_ and
relate to Thomas Nelson Page.
6. Compare the authors of folk-realism with the apologists of the
preceding chapter.
CHAPTER IX
THE URBAN SCENE
_The Harlem School._--Before 1925 there was little in American fiction
about Negro life in northern cities. But when “the peasant moved
cityward” in the great sweeps of migration, books about the urban Negro
multiplied. The numbers of Negroes in northern cities grew by leaps
and bounds from 1916 on. Although various cities beckoned--Pittsburgh
with its steelmills, Chicago with its stockyards, Detroit with its
automobile factories--it was Harlem that became the Mecca for the
southern Negro, the West Indian, and the African. One historian of
Harlem states that it contains more Negroes to the square mile than any
other spot on earth. Harlem became a Mecca likewise for white pleasure
seekers from downtown and abroad, who, hunting the new thrill with the
desperate eagerness of the post-war generation, rushed to what they
considered a place of primitive abandon, of unfailing “joy of life.”
Cabarets sprang up like mushrooms; putting on a big time became a major
industry. In revolt against Victorian prudishness and repression, and
machine-age standardization, writers and artists escaped to dark Harlem
for vicarious joy, and discovered an “exotic, savage world,” only a
nickel’s subway ride from the heart of an over-civilized city. The
Harlem Boom was useful to Negro writers, who were influenced by the
growing race-consciousness of the “greatest Negro city in the world.”
Some accepted the downtown version of pagan Harlem as gospel, others
put in disclaimers, but all made eager contact with the literary world.
Carl Van Vechten’s _Nigger Heaven_ (1925) was the first novel to
exploit this newly discovered territory, and has remained the most
influential. The author, already known for sophisticated fiction, was
attracted by the high spirits and piquant contrasts of Harlem. Running
through the descriptions of cabarets, wild parties, and sensational
orgies is the story of Byron, an “intellectual” wastrel. He is loved
by Mary, a girl superior to the fast set, but he cannot resist the
wiles of Lasca, “a gorgeous brown Messalina of Seventh Avenue.” Byron’s
character cracks under the strain of fast living. His last gesture
is one of typical futility: in a fit of jealous and drunken rage, he
empties his gun into the body of his rival, who was already dead, while
the police approach.
_Nigger Heaven_ presented a setting and type of life that were
little known to American fiction except for _The Autobiography of An
Ex-Colored Man_. The gin-mills and cabarets, the kept men and loose
ladies of Harlem’s bohemian fringe, have surface accuracy and the
appeal of the unfamiliar. Van Vechten in a short space of time observed
closely. But like a discoverer, he was partial to exotic singularities.
That these exist does not validate the claim of the publishers that
“Herein is caught the fascination and tortured ecstasies of Harlem....
The author tells the story of modern Negro life.” Modern Negro life
is not in _Nigger Heaven_; certain selected scenes to prove Negro
primitivism are.
Claude McKay’s _Home To Harlem_ (1926) has for its setting the
speak-easies, buffet flats and “tonsorial parlors” of a pagan Harlem.
The characters are longshoremen, dining car cooks and waiters, and
members of sporting circles. Casual love affairs are their main
pursuits. Jake, an ex-soldier, recently returned from the World War,
meets and loses a marvelous brown charmer on his first night in
Harlem. His picaresque adventures and those of his cronies take up
the rest of the book, until he finds the long-lost beauty at the end.
Working conditions on the railroad are described with some grimness,
but _Home To Harlem_ lacks McKay’s sharpest protest. McKay’s nearest
approach to his poetry is in the ecstatic worship with which Jake looks
upon the abandon of the gay Mecca.
McKay’s _Banjo_ (1929) is related to the Harlem school of fiction,
describing the life of stevedores, tramps, sailors and panhandlers in
the “Ditch” at Marseilles. Ray, a vagabond intellectual from _Home
To Harlem_, does much of the talking; savoring color, joy and beauty
wherever he finds it, he is attracted to the primitive and violent
longshoremen.
Educated Negroes ashamed of their race’s intuitive love of color
... ashamed of Congo-sounding laughter, ashamed of their complexion
(bleaching out), ashamed of their strong appetites. No being ashamed
for Ray. Rather than lose his soul, let intellect go to hell and live
instinct!
To Ray, “A black man, even though educated, was in closer biological
kinship to the swell of primitive earth life.” Anti-bourgeois and
anti-imperialist, seeing the “civilized world” from the bottom, Ray
is nevertheless a racialist, not a radical. And such, in _Banjo_,
is the author’s position. He has been praised for dealing with the
proletariat, but the beachcombers here can hardly be so considered. It
is hard to see how reliance upon instinct will improve the lot of the
submerged and the defeated.
The Harlem stories in _Gingertown_ (1932) return us to blues singers,
“sweet backs,” entertainers, longshoremen, railroad men, barbers,
chambermaids, bellhops, waiters and beautiful “brownskins.” All of
these are called by McKay the “joy-lovers” of the belt, but their
stories do not reveal great joy. In “Brownskin Blues” and “Mattie and
Her Sweetman” McKay bitterly scores color prejudice among Negroes
themselves; in “Highball” he scores prejudice among the whites.
“Near-White” tells conventionally of the unhappy “passer.” In “Truant,”
a dining car waiter, married to a social climber, throws up his menial
job like a Sherwood Anderson hero. The stories are done with unabashed
realism, but they do not cover a wide range.
McKay’s stories of his native Jamaica in _Gingertown_ and his third
novel _Banana Bottom_ (1933), though realistic, have a pastoral
quality. A setting and way of life are skillfully and affectionately
conveyed in both books and we are spared preachments on “the problem.”
In _Banana Bottom_ especially, character development is uppermost.
The story of Bita Plant, educated in England, is simple and winning.
Minor characters like Squire Gensir, Jubban, Anty Nommy and Crazy
Bow are memorable, not idealized, but emerging with dignity and warm
flesh-and-blood humanity.
Although these are perhaps McKay’s best fiction, the greater part of
his work deals with American Negroes, particularly in Harlem. McKay has
denied that he was influenced by Van Vechten, stating that _Home To
Harlem_ was about completed before _Nigger Heaven_ was published. There
are points of agreement, however; McKay, like Van Vechten, believes
in “the inexpressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black
race,” and therefore seeks in the main the colorful aspects of “the
joy-belt.” There are differences as well. Having worked as dining
car waiter, porter and longshoreman, McKay knew the unskilled Negro
worker at first hand, not from an outside view. “I created my Negro
characters without sandpaper and varnish.” Because of this, his people
are not the quaint, artless innocents endeared to so many authors and
readers. They live hard lives, and are consequently hardened: they may
be ignorant, but they are not naïve. In dealing with the urban worker,
McKay opened a new field. But the Harlem he portrayed still seems too
close to the Harlem of a popular literary fashion. And the “inner
lives” he knows so well have not yet been shown with the depth of
understanding that one might expect of Claude McKay.
Rudolph Fisher portrays Harlem with a jaunty realism. _The Walls
of Jericho_ deals with types as different as piano-movers and
“race-leaders.” The antics of Jinx and Bubber are first-rate slapstick,
and though traces of Octavus Roy Cohen appear, most of the comedy
is close to Harlem side-walks. Fisher is likewise master of irony.
Miss Cramp, the philanthropist, who believes that mulattoes are the
result of the American climate, is caricatured, but the picture of the
Annual Costume Ball of the G.I.A. (General Improvement Association) is
rich comedy of manners. He deftly ridicules the thrill-seekers from
downtown who find everything in Harlem “simply marvelous.” Satiric
toward professional uplifters, _The Walls of Jericho_ still has the New
Negro militancy. Merrit is an embittered “New Negro”; he believes that
the Negro should let the Nordic do the serious things, and spend his
time in “tropic nonchalance, developing nothing but his capacity for
enjoyment,” and then take complete possession through force of numbers.
Fisher likewise shows the spirit of racial unity between the “dicties”
and the masses--“Fays don’ see no difference ’tween dickty shines and
any other kind o’ shines. One jig in danger is ev’y jig in danger.”
It is significant, however, that the wrecking of a Negro’s house in a
white neighborhood is the work of a disgruntled Negro, the villain of
the book.
But Fisher was less interested in the “problem” than in the life and
language of Harlem’s poolrooms, cafes, and barber shops. _The Conjure
Man Dies_ (1932), the first detective novel by a Negro, brings Jinx
and Bubber back to the scene to help solve one of Harlem’s grisliest
murders. A high-brow detective, an efficient Negro police sergeant and
an erudite doctor of voodoo are interesting new characters. The novel
is above the average in its popular field and was followed by a Harlem
tenement murder mystery solved by the same detective.
Before his untimely death, Fisher became one of the best short story
writers of the New Negro movement. “The City of Refuge,” containing a
good description of the southern migrant’s happy amazement at Harlem,
and “Blades of Steel” are first-rate local color of the barber shops,
dance-halls and cafes. “Vestiges” and “Miss Cynthie,” for all of their
light touch, have an unusual tenderness and fidelity to middle class
experience. Fisher was an observer with a quick eye and a keen ear, and
a witty commentator. At times his plots are too neat, with something
of O. Henry’s trickery. His Harlem is less bitter than McKay’s, but it
exists; and his realism, as far as it goes, is as definite as that of
any of the numerous writers who took Harlem for their province.
In Countee Cullen’s _One Way To Heaven_ (1932), Sam Lucas, a one-armed
gambler and vagabond, practices a racket around the churches,
pretending to be saved at revivals and thereby collecting money. His
testimony in a Harlem church converts Mattie, who falls in love with
him. Alternately vicious and sentimental, Sam makes Mattie’s life
miserable until his pretended death-bed vision of salvation brings
happiness to the religious girl. Mattie’s working for Constancia
Brown, an upper-class Negro, serves as an excuse to bring in the
artistic-bohemian Harlem. Cullen’s pictures of this set are almost
cartoons. He lampoons the back-to-Africa movement, the philistines who
form Book-Lovers’ Societies, the public reciters and the extreme New
Negro racialists. But Constancia, who refuses to “pass,” speaks the New
Negro creed:
Enjoyment isn’t across the line. Money is there, and privilege, and
the sort of power which comes with numbers but as for enjoyment, they
don’t know what it is.... I have seen two Negroes turn more than one
dull party, where I was longing for home and Harlem, into a revel
which Puck himself would find it hard to duplicate.
The best part of the novel is the portrayal of the Negro church. This
is fresher material, presented with understanding.
_Purpose Novels._ More realistic than his earlier fiction, _Dark
Princess_ (1928) by W. E. B. DuBois, is still part fantasy, and part
mordant social criticism. As editor of the _Crisis_, DuBois had urged a
union of the darker races of the world. _Dark Princess_ is an allegory
driving home the same message. In its last chapter Matthew Towns, the
Negro hero, flies to his homeplace in rural Virginia where his wife,
Kautilya, Her Royal Highness of Bwodpur, India, has just given birth
to a son, Matthew or Madhu. The son is acclaimed “King of the Snows of
Gaurisaukar, Grand Mughal of Utter India, Messenger and Messiah to all
the Darker Worlds!” Kautilya explains:
There had to be a Maharajah in Bwodpur of the blood royal; else brown
reaction and white intrigue had made of it a footstool of England. If
I had not borne your son ... Bwodpur and Sindrabad, India, and all the
Darker World [would have been lost.]
Less fantastic are the sections dealing with America, in which Matthew
Towns meets with galling insults, lack of opportunity on every hand,
and the smooth chicanery of Negro politicians. Two interesting
characters are Perigua, a Negro anarchist, and Sara, a striving Negro
woman, who plays the political game. There are plots and counterplots
in the manner of E. Phillips Oppenheim. DuBois speaks of the novel as
“rich and colored gossamer of a dream which the Queen of Faerie lent
to me for a season.” But the fusion of dream and social realism is not
achieved; the novel falls between the two.
A prominent figure in the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, Walter White has made use of the novel for social
protest. _The Fire In The Flint_ (1925) tells the tragedy of a
better-class, aspiring Negro family in a Georgia town. Bob Harper kills
two white men who raped his sister. Tracked down by a lynching mob, he
shoots himself with his last bullet. His brother Kenneth, a promising
young physician, is lynched in the ensuing hysteria for “assaulting a
white woman” whom he had been called in to attend. _The Fire In The
Flint_ contains sardonic comment upon the backwardness of the South.
The millhands of Factoryville have only “one strong conviction--the
inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of the ‘nigger’.” Like the
earlier apologists, White makes use of well educated heroes, avoids
dialect in the main, concentrates the injustices of the South into
fairly small compass, and has bitter contempt for the “cracker” and
the Klan. But _The Fire In The Flint_ has more of an impact than the
earlier books on lynching.
Although Walter White’s _Flight_ (1926) describes the Atlanta riot,
it is principally a novel about “passing.” Mimi Daquin, a New Orleans
octoroon of distinguished lineage, has an unfortunate love affair
with an upper class Negro in Atlanta, and goes to the North. Seeking
security for her child she marries a white broker, but remains
essentially unhappy. Her husband has no love for Negroes. Even as a
child, Mimi had believed that Creoles of Negro blood had something
“tangible, yet intangible ... a warmth, a delicate humanness” that
white Creoles did not have. As a woman, she believes that Negroes alone
“can laugh and ... enjoy the benefits of the machine without being
crushed by it.” A furtive trip to Harlem makes her wonder if her somber
cynical white companions, “whose unhappiness shone through all they did
or said,” were worth the price she was paying. When she hears a great
Negro artist singing spirituals, she is set free, and returns to her
own.
_Bourgeois Realism._--Continuing the earlier apologist tradition,
with propaganda a little less direct, certain novelists have set out
to prove the presence of a Negro upper-class, and to deplore the
injustices of its lot. Their standards are bourgeois; they respect
characters in ratio to their color, breeding, gentility, wealth and
prestige. “Realism” is perhaps a misnomer, if these novels are judged
by their plots, which are seldom very life-like; the realism is chiefly
in the settings.
Gertrude Sanborn’s _Veiled Aristocrats_ (1923) reveals the type. The
“aristocrats under the veil” are mulatto descendants of southern
aristocrats--“the souls of worthy men and women caught by a mad fate
in a prison of prejudice!” A sentimental white youth is brought into
contact with these fine people, especially with Carr McClellan, a
World War hero, and a great sculptor. Carr is beloved by the beautiful
daughter of a white financier. At the right time she is revealed to be
colored too, another “veiled aristocrat,” so everything ends happily.
There are many incredible coincidences. Though well-meaning, the author
is still condescending. Her protest concludes lamely: “Fact of the
matter, most of us are not giving our colored brothers a square deal.”
Zona Gale, introducing Jessie Fauset’s third novel, states
inaccurately: “Wherever the American Negro has appeared in fiction,
only the uneducated Negro has been pictured.” She is on surer ground
when she writes that Negroes of education and substance “merit the
awareness of their fellow countrymen.” In her own foreword, Jessie
Fauset reveals her bent to “the colored American who is not pressed too
hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice,”
and who has his own caste lines.
As naturally as his white compatriot he speaks of his “old Boston
families,” “old Philadelphians,” “old Charlestonians.” And he has a
wholesome respect for family and education and labor and the fruits of
labor ... sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress
on the first two of these four.
_There Is Confusion_ (1924) has as central characters Joanna Marshall,
an ambitious dancer, whose “success and fame were instant,” and
Peter Bye, a brilliant, sensitive medical student. The home-life of
middle-class Philadelphia receives some attention, but the love story
receives far more. The “problem” is never far off. In a pageant, Joanna
represents America. Forced by great applause to unmask, she speaks:
I hardly need tell you that there is no one in the audience more
American than I am. My great grandfather fought in the Revolution, my
uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ now.
Joanna refuses to marry a Negro whom she found “charming and
sympathetic ... [but] too white. She did not want a marriage which
would keep the difficulties of color more than ever before her eyes.”
_Plum Bun_ (1929) is greatly concerned with “passing.” Believing
that “the great rewards of life--riches, glamour, pleasure--are for
white-skinned people only,” Angela goes “over the line.” After a
disillusioning liaison with a rich white man, “which left no trace on
her moral nature,” she falls in love with Anthony Cross, and fears to
reveal her secret. But love will find a way: he reveals that he too
is of Negro parentage, “passing” because his father was lynched by a
mob. So now they can marry, as in _Veiled Aristocrats_. The beautiful
brown sister, for whom life has been evenly pleasant, likewise marries
happily at the book’s end.
_The Chinaberry Tree_ (1931) is again concerned less with the
unspectacular drama of the Negro middle class, than with the melodrama
of the octoroon. The two heroines are illegitimate. Laurentine is the
daughter of Aunt Sal and Colonel Halloway, who loved Sal devotedly but
could not marry her. In contrast to Laurentine’s love affair, there is
a great deal of confusion in the life of Melissa, who is saved only in
the nick of time from marrying her half-brother. There are valuable
glimpses of Negro community life in Red Brook, the characters ranging
from Mrs. Ismay, a Bostonian of “innate gentility,” to young pool-room
sports. But the complications springing from the “mystery of birth”
make what could have been realism into old-fashioned romance. Olivia
Cary, who dominates _Comedy, American Style_ (1933) is obsessed by the
need to be white, not out of shame for her blood, but because of the
things which the white world possesses. She persecutes her husband and
drives her daughter into a loveless marriage and her son to suicide.
The bitter comedy of race-prejudice is ultimately blamed. With random
flashes of power, _Comedy, American Style_ is without satiric drive,
and manages to be sentimental instead of tragic.
Jessie Fauset has been called by one critic the American woman most
worthy “to wear the mantle of Jane Austen’s genius.” This comparison
is not apt: Jane Austen’s satiric approach to her people and setting
and her neatly logical plots are not evident in Miss Fauset’s four
novels. Miss Fauset is sentimental, and regardless of her disclaimers,
is an apologist. She records a class in order to praise a race.
Favorite characters are chauvinists, condemning “the dastardly American
whites,” believing that Negro blood is “the leaven that will purify
this Nordic people of their cruelty and their savage lust of power.”
Having courageously set herself to chart the class of Negroes she
knows, Jessie Fauset, at her best, succeeds in a realism of the sort
sponsored by William Dean Howells. Too often, however, instead of
typical Negro middle class experience we get the more spectacular
“passing,” and exceptional Negro artists and cosmopolitans. Miss Fauset
has written:
To be a Negro in America posits a dramatic situation. The elements of
the play fall together involuntarily; they are just waiting for Fate
the producer to quicken them into movement,--for Chance the Prompter
to interpret them with fidelity.
But her novels rely too much upon Fate and Chance.
_The Tragic Mulatto Passes For White._ Nella Larsen’s _Quicksand_
(1928) covers a great deal of ground, from Georgia to Chicago, Harlem,
Copenhagen, and finally a small southern town. Upper class Negroes
are her main characters, and their snobbishness is revealed (both
consciously and unconsciously). Helga Crane is buffeted about, but
does not attain tragic stature. The attempt to reveal a self-centred,
harassed personality is commendable, but is not helped by scenes like
the one in which the sophisticated heroine attends a church meeting,
and there, overwhelmed by the frenzy, begins to yell like one insane,
and to weep torrents of tears. She felt “a supreme aspiration toward
the regaining of simple happiness ... unburdened by the complexities
of the lives she had known.” In _Passing_ (1930) Mrs. Larsen is anxious
to set before us the refinement and good taste of wealthier Negroes.
Clare, who “passes,” is unhappy, and frequently visits Harlem. “You
don’t realize, you can’t realize how I want to see Negroes, to be
with them again, to talk with them, to hear them laugh.” Says the
author’s spokesman, “they always come back.” Discovered in Harlem by
her Negro-hating husband, Clare falls from a sixth story window--death
solves her problems. Her friend, Irene, who would not “pass,” lives in
contrast a happy, respectable life.
White novelists rushed into print with a different version. Vara
Caspary’s _The White Girl_ (1929) and Geoffrey Barnes’ _Dark Lustre_
(1932) are so alike in essentials that they should be considered
together. Both of the heroines are repelled by Negro life and Negro
suitors. Both because of their exotic beauty become artistic models,
and both have tragic love affairs with white men. In _The White Girl_,
Solaria’s secret is revealed by the coincidental appearance of her
brown-skinned brother. Desperate, and believing that she is growing
darker, she drinks poison. In _Dark Lustre_ Aline’s dilemma is solved
by having her die in childbirth, but her whiter baby lives to continue
“a cycle of pain.” Both books advance the old superstitions. Solaria
at a wild party is thus explained: “It was the colored blood in her,
the heritage from some forgotten ancestor, that released these warm
wild winds of passion.” Aline is thus explained: “There was too much
nigger in her to follow a line of reasoning when the black cloud of her
emotions settled over it.” It is all so sad.
Hallie Dickerman’s _Stephen Kent_ (1935), on the other hand, takes
up the cudgel for her mulatto hero’s superiority, but he is made too
superior, winning prizes and acting nobly at every turn. There is
much mystery about “tainted blood,” about the reappearance of colored
blood “unto the third and fourth generations.” A sympathetic plea
for justice, _Stephen Kent_ is still hard to credit. _Imitation of
Life_ (1933) by Fannie Hurst was well meaning, perhaps, but it, too,
perpetuated old stereotypes. Peola longs to be white: “I won’t be a
nigger! I won’t be a nigger!” Her black mother is philosophical about
it: “It may be mixed up wid plenty of white blood ... but thin out
chicken gravy wid water an’ it remains chicken gravy, only not so
good.” When Peola meets with problems:
Lord git de white horses drove out of her blood. Kill de curse--shame
de curse her light-colored pap lef’ for his baby. Chase it, rabbit’s
foot. Chase de wild white horses trampin’ on my chile’s happiness....
It’s de white horses dat’s wild, a-swimmin’ in de blood of mah
chile....
It is no wonder that, longing to be stable, Peola “passes” and
marries on the other side. Delilah, with a “rambunctious capacity for
devotion,” is the old contented slave, brought up to date, worshipful
of her white Miss Honey Bea, to whom her drudgery has brought wealth.
The statement is clear: black Negroes, contented with serving and
worshipping whites; mixed Negroes, discontented, aspiring, and
therefore tragic. Alas, the poor mulatto!
We have thus seen that the mulatto who “passes” has been a victim
of opposing interpretations. Negro novelists urge his unhappiness,
until he is summoned back to his people by the spirituals, or their
full-throated laughter, or their simple sweet ways. One of Wallace
Thurman’s characters says:
My dear, you’ve been reading novels. Thousands of Negroes cross the
line and I assure you that few, if any, feel that fictional urge to
rejoin their own kind.... Negroes who can and do pass are so glad to
get away they probably join the K.K.K. to uphold white supremacy.
But this is heresy: a mystical bond must be shown, the cutting of which
produces grief, since the white world is “pallid and to be pitied.”
White novelists insist upon the mulatto’s unhappiness for other
reasons. To them he is the anguished victim of a divided inheritance.
Mathematically they work it out that his intellectual strivings and
self-control come from his white blood, and his emotional urgings,
indolence and potential savagery come from his Negro blood. Their
favorite character, the octoroon, wretched because of the “single drop
of midnight in her veins,” desires a white lover above all else, and
must therefore go down to a tragic end. The white version is nearly a
century old; the Negro version sprang up recently. Both are examples of
race flattery. Divided between conflicting attitudes, the poor mulatto
finds added unhappiness in his interpreters.
_In Opposition._ But the idealism seen in the apologistic, the
bourgeois, and the “passing” novels found a gleeful critic in George
Schuyler, of the H. L. Mencken school of satirists. _Black No More_
(1931) tells how Dr. Crookman discovers a drug that will turn Negroes
white. Negroes rush to use it, even the chauvinists who had preached
pride of race. Schuyler lampoons both sides, the professional
“race-men” who were tremendous gainers from the “problem,” and the
spokesman of the Knights of Nordica who, though totally ignorant,
discussed over the radio “anthropology, psychology, miscegenation,
cooperation with Christ, getting right with God, and curbing
Bolshevism....” Telling blows are landed on statisticians, rhetorical
windbags, pretentious strivers and hat-in-hand Negroes, but _Black No
More_ is farce rather than satire, in the last analysis--provoking more
mirth than thought. It was, however, refreshingly different. _Slaves
Today_ (1932) is an attack upon the mistreatment of the natives in
Liberia by the upper-class Americo-Liberians. Schuyler’s narrative
sketches in such magazines as _The American Mercury_ are told with
terseness and point.
Wallace Thurman is likewise the “devil’s advocate” in his two novels.
Emma Lou in _The Blacker The Berry_ (1929) is another defeated heroine,
not because she is an octoroon, however, but for precisely the opposite
reason. Well-educated, she is unable to get suitable positions and
social life because she is black. She goes around for a time with the
“New Negro intellectuals,” but is ill at ease with them. Scorned and
rejected, she sinks deeper and deeper into drabness. Thurman thus puts
his finger upon one of the sorest points of the Negro bourgeoisie, its
color snobbishness, “its blue vein circle,” “aspiring to be whiter
and whiter every generation.” His descriptions of Harlem rent parties
and the like are of Van Vechten’s school, but the theme of his novel
deserves attention. Unfortunately the writing is slipshod, and the
steady decline of his central character is less tragic than depressing.
His heroine is as morbidly sensitive about color as any tragic
octoroon, and shows as little fight.
_The Infants of The Spring_ (1932) shows Thurman taking less seriously
his coterie of Harlem artists. Young in years and achievement, they
flatter themselves as “a lost generation,” and like Van Vechten’s
Byron, seek escape in dissipation. One cynical character speaks:
Being a Negro writer in these days is a racket and I’m going to make
the most of it while it lasts. I find queer places for whites to go in
Harlem ... out-of-the-way primitive churches, side street speakeasies
and they fall for it. About twice a year I manage to sell a story....
I am a genius in the making. Thank God for this Negro Literary
Renaissance! Long may it flourish!
Debunking the Bohemian futility of the intellectuals, Thurman is just
as severe on the bourgeois idealists and the various race-messiahs.
_Infants of The Spring_ is at times peevish, at times angry, crudely
written, and not always well thought out. But like Thurman’s first
novel, it had something to say.
_Black Sadie_ (1928) by T. Bowyer Campbell is an irritated
southerner’s attempt to debunk the Harlem that lured jaded Bohemians.
From “corn-field nigger” Sadie rises to be model for the New Negro
exaltation of _Africa victrix_, and the toast of artistic New York.
Even in her affluence, however, Sadie is a kleptomaniac. After causing
a murder, she returns to happy Virginia. “Easy come, easy go, niggers”
are Campbell’s closing words. Campbell’s satire has point, but he is
too vexed to get it across. It is obvious, also, that the stereotype he
prefers is that of the comic menial.
_Dark Surrender_ by Ronald Kirkbride (1933), after describing South
Carolina plantation life in the manner of Julia Peterkin, delivers an
attack upon the “New Negro.” Having deserted a wife on the plantation,
who promptly becomes a Scarlet Sister Mary, Tom goes to the North,
graduates from Harvard with athletic and scholastic honors, visits
Europe, and becomes a great poet. But he gives it all up as “imitation
of the accomplishments of the white man,” and returns to the soil. To
the white owner of the plantation he states that Negroes
who have aspirations and yearn to be great ... are fools in the sense
that they are not true negroes.... To live from day to day in simple
enjoyment, with no cares nor worries, with no great attempts, to
be something which you are not ... that is life, the true life....
The negro has his place in the present, in the simple life, with no
desires but of the body, with no yearnings for the future nor for the
past....
Maxwell Bodenheim, with a naturalist’s approach, could not see in
Harlem only a place of joy-filled Negroes. In _Naked On Roller Skates_
(1931) he shows the harsher, truculent aspects of Harlem dives. In
_Ninth Avenue_ (1926) he shows the seamy aspects of Manhattan. His
white heroine in this book marries a Negro, a better man than any of
the Ninth Avenue set. Contrary to O’Neill’s _All God’s Chillun Got
Wings_ this intermarriage is not doomed to failure. In _Deep River_
(1934) Clement Wood does not have the regret, disdain, or anxiety with
which most southern novelists look upon Harlem and the “New Negro.”
This chronicle of the marriage of a noted Negro singer to a white woman
is frankly done, exploiting a subject generally taboo. But it is hardly
worthy to stand alongside Wood’s earlier novel _Nigger_.
_Summary._ The fiction of urban realism was valuable for introducing
new characters in a new milieu. Whether created by Negro or white
authors, the characters are race-conscious, and at times militant. But
the old stereotypes by no means disappeared. Carl Van Vechten has a
noted magazine editor comment on the possibilities of Negro literature:
Nobody has yet written a good gambling story; nobody has gone into the
curious subject of the divers tribes of the region.... Nobody has ever
done the Negro servant-girl, who refuses to live in. Washing dishes
in the day-time, she returns at night to Harlem where she smacks her
daddy in the jaw or else dances and makes love. On the whole I should
say she has the best time of any domestic servant in the world....
The Negro fast set does everything the Long Island fast set does ...
but it is vastly more amusing ... for the simple reason that it is
_amused_.
Most authors took this to heart. What resulted was a search for the
exotic and an insistence that Negroes were peculiarly marked by a
“joy of living.” Dance-halls, rent-parties, gambling, sprees, casual
love-affairs crowded out more serious realism. The cabin was exchanged
for the cabaret, but Negroes were still described as “creatures of
joy.” Even Negro propagandists urged this, seeking to find some
superior “racial gift.” To look for the true life of a Negro community
in cabarets, most often run by white managers for white thrill-seekers,
is like looking for the truth about slavery in the off-time
banjo-plunking and capers before the big house. Focusing upon carefree
abandon, the Harlem school, like the plantation tradition, neglected
the servitude. Except for brief glimpses, the drama of the workaday
life, the struggles, the conflicts, are missing. And such definite
features of Harlem as the lines of the unemployed, the overcrowded
schools, the delinquent children headed straight to petty crime, the
surly resentment--all of these seeds that bore such bitter fruit in the
Harlem riot--are conspicuously absent.
Bourgeois realists did “apprise white humanity of the better classes
among Negro humanity,” but this is a value apart from the values of
fiction. Their upper-class characters too often seem to serve as
window-display. “Passing for white” is made a much more acute and
frequent problem that it is in ordinary Negro middle class experience.
With discerning satire, Martha Gruening sums up the argument of Negro
bourgeois realism:
I am writing this book because most white people still believe that
all Colored People are cooks called Mandy or Pullman porters called
George--but they aren’t. They think we all live in cotton field cabins
or in city slums, but actually some of us live on Edgecomb Avenue or
Chestnut Street. We don’t all shout at Camp Meeting or even all belong
to the Baptist or Methodist church. Some of us are _Episcopalians_.
If you were privileged to visit our homes (which you aren’t, for we
are just as exclusive as you are) you would find bathtubs, sets of
the best authors and etchings! That’s how refined we are. We have
class distinctions, too.... The daughters of our upper classes are
beautiful and virtuous and look like illustrations in _Vogue_ ... far
more attractive than white girls of the same class, for they come in
assorted shades.... Joy isn’t on your side of the line, nor song, nor
laughter.
There is certainly place in American fiction for treatment of the Negro
middle-class. The precarious situation of this small group could well
attract a realist of vision, not only to satirize its pretense, but
also to record its dogged struggling. But to approve it in proportion
to its resembling white middle-class life, is not the way of important
realism.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What earlier fiction dealt with the Negro in northern cities?
2. How is the Van Vechten tradition similar to the plantation tradition?
3. List the authors who consider the Negro to be a “creature of joy.”
4. Why have the novels of “bourgeois realism” been called “prospectuses
to sell the white world the idea of a Negro middle class?”
5. Why are the opposing attitudes to “passing” examples of race
flattery?
6. What northern cities with large Negro populations are as yet
untreated by novelists?
7. What is race-chauvinism? Point out examples in the fiction
discussed.
CHAPTER X
SOUTHERN REALISM
_Mystics and Poets._ In his _Notebook_ (1926) Sherwood Anderson
tells of a Mississippian who showed the ear of a lynched Negro as a
symbol of “white superiority.” Anderson seldom mentions such gruesome
facts of Negro experience; like Van Vechten and Julia Peterkin he is
attracted to the Negro’s elemental exoticism. In “I Want To Know Why,”
the white hero is drawn to Negro jockeys, cooks and stable boys; in
_Dark Laughter_ (1925) Anderson himself is fascinated by the Negro’s
superiority to dull, standardized whites.
Niggers on the docks, niggers in the city streets, niggers laughing. A
slow dance is going on.... A brown woman having thirteen children--a
different man for every child--going to church too, singing, dancing,
broad shoulders, broad hips, soft eyes, a soft laughing voice....
Negroes singing had sometimes a way of getting at the ultimate truth
of things.
This chorus of happy sensualists mocking repressed whites may explain
“ultimate truth” to Anderson, but a great deal of truth about their
lives escapes his penetrating interest. Harassed by Puritanism and
industrialism, Anderson has found elements that bring him peace, rather
than interpretation of a people.
Waldo Frank looks upon _Holiday_ (1923) as his story of “one of the
greatest of American dramas--the struggle in the South between the
white race and the black ... _each of which ... needs what the other
possesses_.” Like his fellow mystic Anderson, Frank sees Niggertown
to be full of warm song and happy, ironic laughter, free from the
strain of money-making, repressed White-town. But he likewise sees
insult, exploitation and struggle. “Chokin’ is de black man’s life,”
says one old woman, who knows the South too well. The passive cruelty
of White Nazareth is introduced when a Negro deckhand drowns and no
one makes an effort to save him. We see the active cruelty when John
Cloud, ambitious and manly young Negro, and Virginia, “weary of her
whiteness,” of being incessantly sheltered, step out from the pattern.
In a spell of drought and revivals, John and Virginia meet by accident
in the woods above Nazareth. Though “boss-girl” and “servant-man,”
they have been drawn from mutual respect into desire. When Virginia
returns to Nazareth, the meeting is misunderstood, and the men, already
whipped up by religious hysteria, quickly form a mob. Shocked from her
dream of escape, Virginia sinks back into southern conventionality and
half-remorseful inertia, and does not speak. At dusk, John is burned in
the Square of Nazareth.
Frank sees that White-town, assuring itself that the “nigger will stay
in his place,” is still forever suspicious of “the muttering, the
stirring.” More boldly than others, Frank reveals what he considers the
deepest cause of much of the fear:
‘Good mo’nin ... I have been walkin’ by yo’ side all of this street.
An’ yo’ didn’t see me.’ He gives these words with a prophetic dryness.
John feels the ominous threat.... ‘_I’ve watched you, nigger_,’ they
say, ‘_I’ve watched you lookin’ at my daughter. How dare you look at
my daughter? Nigger, that look in yo’ eyes means murder in our land.
How dare you nigger, look so hard at my daughter that you forget to
salute the white man at yo’ side?_’
When Virginia, who knows how free her brother is with Negro women,
laughs at the “fanatical obsessions” of her men-folk, she adds flame to
the tinder. Symbolic and difficult, _Holiday_ is still a true, powerful
and different version of race relations in the South. In _The Death and
Birth of David Markand_ (1933), however, the brief treatment of the
Negro falls below the penetration of _Holiday_.
Deriving in part from Anderson and Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer’s _Cane_
(1923) has much greater intimacy with Negro life, dealing equally well
with the black belt of Georgia and bourgeois Washington. Toomer is
master of fluid, evocative prose; some of his stories are prose-poems.
The sun is hammered to a band of gold. Pine-needles, like mazda,
are brilliantly aglow. No rain has come to take the rustle from the
falling sweet-gum leaves. Over in the forest, across the swamp, a
sawmill blows its closing whistle. Smoke curls up.... Curls up and
spreads itself pine-high above the branch, a single silver band along
the eastern valley. A black boy ... you are the most sleepiest man I
ever seed, Sleeping Beauty ... cradled on a gray mule, guided by the
hollow sound of cowbells, heads for them through a rusty cotton field.
His faithfully portrayed Georgia landscape Toomer has peopled with
faithfully drawn characters, such as Fern, the shiftless, ignorant
beauty of the Georgia Pike, and Becky, a white outcast, who bears two
Negro children. “Blood Burning Moon” tells of the rivalry between a
Negro and a white man for a Negro girl, that ends in a murder and a
lynching. Not propaganda in the manner of the apologists, it is tragic
realism at its best.
Neither debunking Negro society nor glorifying it, Toomer pictures
Washington with the thoroughness of one who knew it from the inside.
The futile, and in the story of “Avey,” the drably tragic revolt
against the smugness of a rising middle-class, are brilliantly set
before us. Toomer was sharply criticized by Negroes for his “betrayal”;
his insight and tenderness seemed to escape them. “Kabnis” is a long,
occasionally obscure story of a northern Negro teaching school in
Georgia. No one has done so well as Toomer the hypocritical school
principal, a petty, puritanical tyrant who truckles to the whites.
Laymon, a preacher-teacher who “knows more than would be good for
anyone other than a silent man”; Halsey, a self-assured, courageous
artisan; and Kabnis, a weakling idealist driven to cynicism and
dissipation until he discovers, mystically, the strength of his people,
are similarly well drawn. Toomer reveals in “Kabnis” an insight
that makes his failure to write a novel about Negro life one of the
undoubted losses of contemporary literature.
In another brilliant first book, _Tropic Death_ (1926), Eric Walrond is
as conversant with his native West Indian life as Toomer was with that
of Georgia. Like Toomer he stressed the tragedy and pain in his milieu
rather than the joy-of-living stressed by the Harlem school. Gifted
with a power of description, Walrond gives us, for the first time, a
vivid sense of Negro life in the tropics below the Gulf stream.
All of the stories deal with death, which to these peasants, sailors
and workers does not come easily, but violently, often horribly. One
child, in the droughts, eats marl; her stomach distended like “a
wind-filling balloon.” Another dies, poisoned by _obeah_. Two “wharf
rats” who dive for the coins flung by bored tourists are killed by
a shark. The approach is unapologetically naturalistic; life in the
tropics is not pleasant to Walrond, and he has not idealized it. He
seems completely familiar with the divers West Indian dialects and with
his characters’ ways of life, whether they are underpaid workers on the
Big Ditch, or truck gardeners in Barbadoes, or waiters and cooks on
the old vessels that plow the Spanish Main. “Subjection” tells of the
murder of a Negro laborer by a marine, for interference when the marine
was beating a sick worker on a road-gang. With the exception of this
story, Walrond writes little of social protest. He is sardonically
aware of the way imperialism is made to work, but his chief purpose
is to make the reader “see,” to give him sense impression of a
unique, interesting world. The prose of _Tropic Death_ is sometimes
overwritten, sometimes too oblique for clarity. But it revealed
uncommon powers that, regrettably, Walrond has not used further.
Langston Hughes’ first novel, _Not Without Laughter_ (1930), one of the
best by a Negro author, is set in a small Kansas town, a transplanted
bit of the South. Sandy’s mother, Annjee, works in the white-folks’
kitchen and his grandmother, Aunt Hager, takes in washing so that Sandy
shall have his chance, in spite of his irresponsible father, Jimboy. A
life poor in the world’s goods is shown to be “not without laughter”:
there are great colored tent meetings, carnivals, barbecues, dances,
and guitar concerts by the beloved vagabond Jimboy. At their best,
however, these enjoyments are poor reliefs from the day’s hard work for
the white-folks. Prejudice lies all around Sandy; going to the carnival
on Children’s Day, he is ordered away with “I told you little darkies
this wasn’t your party.” For Sandy’s pretty, joyful Aunt Harriet, there
was nothing in Stanton after awhile but street-walking to the great
grief of old, tired Aunt Hager. Excepting Aunt Tempy, who is sharply
satirized as a high-toned striver, all of the characters are treated
with sympathy. Here, done with poetic realism, is a good novel of
boyhood.
_God Sends Sunday_ (1931), the first novel of another Negro poet, Arna
Bontemps, deals with sporting life at the turn of the century. Born
on a Red River plantation, little Augie, a lover of horses, becomes
a famous jockey in such racing towns as San Antonio, New Orleans,
Louisville, and St. Louis. At the height of his fame he was “a treat to
casual eyes.”
“I’se gonna git me a two-gallon high-roller hat dat won’t do. Gonna
git me a box-back coat an’ a milk white ves’ wid red roses painted on
it.”... His high-roller had twenty naked women worked in the eyelets
in the crown. His shirts had two-inch candy stripes of purple, pink,
green or orange.... His shoes had mirrors in the toes and dove-colored
uppers with large pearl buttons....
Women flocked to him, especially Della and Florence, whom he loved
“worse than a horse loves corn.” But his luck turns, and Lil Augie says:
I ain’t nobody. I ain’t nuthin. I’s jes a po picked sparrow. I ain’t
big as a dime, an’ I don’t worth a nickel.
With all his bravado and vanity, Lil Augie is courageous as a bantam,
always ready “to try anybody one barrel.” _God Sends Sunday_ is not
pretentious, but it is a well-done portrait of a winning character.
_Against Southern Charm._ Three of the most intelligent women of the
southern literary renaissance have had their say about the South’s
vaunted charm. In Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ _My Heart and My Flesh_
(1927) the heroine discovers that she is half-sister to Stiggins, a
Negro stable boy, who is the half-witted butt of the town, and to two
Negro women. Frustrated and desperate, she turns more and more to
furtive companionship with her sullen half-sisters. The incidental
Negroes who work in boarding house kitchens, or take in washing, or do
the heavy manual labor of the Kentucky town are far from the quaintly
funny folk of Irvin Cobb and Ruth McEnery Stuart.
A roughly similar situation appears in Isa Glenn’s _A Short History of
Julia_ (1928), an incisive attack upon the upper caste South. While
Julia is being brought up as a hot-house plant, her servant Cynthia
has a full and loose love-life. Both end up unhappily, with nothing
to look forward to. Patty, one of the most believable mammies in
fiction, brings up her white charges most decorously, but neglects
her attractive and rebellious daughter. Chivalry is summed up by
Negro characters as “white women jes’ lying and lying to theirselves.”
The aristocratic men-folk, old topers, who, untrue to one “southern
tradition,” often get drunk, declaim that “a pure and virtuous lady is
the finest work of the Almighty.” But they keep Negro mistresses, and,
in their dotage, unlike the earlier gentlemen, “forget to cover up.”
Emily Clark’s _Stuffed Peacocks_ (1927) is affectionately ironic toward
the F. F. V’s. In “Chocolate Sponge,” a servant calmly states that
she is a lady, because her grandfather was Colonel Ashton Wycherly.
Since Negroes did not usually mention such facts, she is “frightfully
uncomfortable to have around.” In spite of the mask of servility, which
the cleverest house-servants “are careful never to let slip,” there are
others who produce discomfort. Mammy Sally
had been separated, as a young woman, from her first husband, whom she
loved, and transplanted in another country.... Her ancient eyes were
inscrutable and not altogether pleasant when she was questioned about
it.
Similarly aloof, unconventional and forbidding are two other mammies,
who disdain both Negro hilarity and white sentimentality. In “Fast
Color,” a Negro butler, almost a “stage darky,” kept his thoughts
carefully guarded. Knowing Negro servants in “their dining-room work,
the most gracious form of labor,” Miss Clark likewise knows that “their
swiftest and simplest ways to impromptu gratuities” are not their only
ways.
_Regionalism._ Less ambitious than the mystics and less probing than
the critics of southern caste, a number of regionalists have followed
the lead of DuBose Heyward, Howard Odum and Julia Peterkin. Nearly a
decade ago a southern critic wrote that “the southerner has had to
turn to the Negro when he wanted to paint life as it is”; and although
less pertinent today, this partly explains the rush to describe the
Negro. Many had new stories to tell, and they told them honestly and
sincerely; many others offered twice-told tales. Their coverage of the
South is widespread, and to follow them from Virginia to Louisiana is
as good a plan as any.
Pernet Patterson’s _The Road to Canaan_ (1931), a collection of eight
stories, deals with Negro life in Richmond and the nearby country.
Some are farcical, as the story where a visiting anthropologist,
seeking to measure heads, spreads terror; some are pathetic. “Conjur”
is a good tale of black magic; “Shoofly,” one the best, re-creates
life in a tobacco factory; and “Buttin’ Blood” tells convincingly of
the friendship of white and Negro boys. With no social protest and
more than a trace of condescension, often engineered to end happily,
Patterson’s stories still show understanding.
Paul Green’s few sketches of Negroes in _Wide Fields_ (1928) do not
have the power of his plays of Negro life, but they are sympathetic and
true. There is bitterness in the stories of Arthur Loring, humble and
hardworking “synonym for what the white folks thought Negroes ought
to be,” and of Lalie Fowler, the mother of a child by a white farmer.
Hardworking tenant farmers, “flash” sports and bad men are convincingly
shown in this book as well as in Green’s novel _The Body of This Earth_
(1935). It is significant that Green made over a story of poor-whites
into a Negro farce, _The Man Who Died At Twelve O’clock_, with hardly
any changes in idiom, characterization, and incident. A different
Carolina locale and type of life are in R. H. Harriss’ _The Foxes_
(1936), a good hunting novel which includes well described Negro
stable-boys, dog trainers, and old servants.
_South Carolina._ A new locale of South Carolina and a new type of
people are discovered in _Po’ Buckra_ (1930) by Gertrude Shelby
and Samuel Stoney, the authors of _Black Genesis_. In a community
of quality white folks, “crackers,” Negroes and “Brass-Ankles,”
Barty attempts to rise out of the last despised group, a mixture of
Portuguese-Indian-Negro and American white stocks. But suspicion and
gossip dog him about, and he becomes a drunkard and murderer. Minor
Negro characters are well handled.
But where the authors of _Po’ Buckra_ stand on their own feet, Mrs.
L. M. Alexander in _Candy_ (1934) seems to lean heavily upon Julia
Peterkin. Trouble visits only rarely the love-free, carefree pagans
of Mimosa Hill Plantation, and then it is such trouble as jealousy.
_Candy_ won a ten thousand dollar prize. _Don’t You Weep, Don’t You
Moan_ (1935) did not win a literary prize, but it did win for its
author, Richard Coleman, the distinction (bandied about by so many
publishers) of being one who in a single book presented “the true
Southern Negro.” Needless to say Coleman approves the old dogmas such
as “A nigger ... like de cotton fiel’ bettuh den any othuh place in de
worl’ ...” and omits from his novel of exotic primitives any mention of
insult and injustice.
_Florida._ Unlike Mrs. Alexander and Coleman, Zora Neale Hurston has no
need to rely upon either DuBose Heyward or Julia Peterkin. Her short
stories “Drenched With Light,” “Spunk” and “The Gilded Six Bits” showed
a command of folklore and idiom excelled by no earlier Negro novelist.
_Jonah’s Gourd Vine_ (1934) recounts the rise of handsome, stalwart
John Buddy from plowboy to moderator of the Baptists of Florida. But
his flair for preaching and praying is exceeded by his weakness for
women; even when he is married to the devoted Lucy who is “pretty as a
speckled pup,” he still cannot hold his straying feet. His fall is as
abrupt as his rise. Loosely constructed, the novel presents authentic
scenes of timber camps, railroad gangs with the “hammer-muscling men,
the liars, fighters, bluffers and lovers,” and the all-colored towns of
Florida. The folk-speech is richly, almost too consistently, poetic.
The characters are less developed than the setting; and the life they
live is self-contained and untroubled. Nevertheless, _Jonah’s Gourd
Vine_ contains the stuff of life, well observed and rendered.
A trained anthropologist as well as a native of Florida, Zora Neale
Hurston has made in _Mules and Men_ (1935) the first substantial
collection of folk-tales by a Negro scholar. Zestful towards her
material, and completely unashamed of it, she ingratiated herself with
the tellers of tall tales in turpentine camps, or on store porches, and
with the preachers of tall sermons in backwoods churches. Whether of
the folk hero John, or of Brer Dog, Brer Snail, and Brer Gator, or of
more contemporary people and activity, Miss Hurston’s “big old lies”
are a delight to read. Miss Hurston writes:
The Negro, in spite of his open-faced laughter, his seeming
acquiescence, is particularly evasive. You see we are a polite people
and do not say to our questioner: ‘Get out of here!’ We smile and tell
him or her something that satisfies the white person, because, caring
so little about us, he doesn’t know what he is missing.... ‘He can
read my writing but he sho’ can’t read my mind.’
Unfortunately, _Mules and Men_ does not uncover so much that white
collectors have been unable to get. The tales ring genuine, but there
seem to be omissions. The picture is too pastoral, with only a bit of
grumbling about hard work, or a few slave anecdotes that turn the
tables on old marster. The bitterness that E. C. L. Adams recorded in
_Nigger to Nigger_ is not to be found in _Mules and Men_.
Miss Hurston’s second novel, _Their Eyes Were Watching God_ (1937)
is informed and sympathetic. After unfortunate marriages--the first
husband, a grubbing farmer, looked like “some old skull-head in de
graveyard,” and the second was intent only upon being the “big voice”
in Eatonville--Janie Sparks is whirled into an idyllic marriage with
high-spirited Tea Cake. There are good sketches of the all-colored town
where comic-serious debates and tall tales are told on the mayor’s
store porch. But the love story and the poetic folk-speech are the
chief interests. The people, “ugly from ignorance and broken from being
poor,” who swarm upon the “muck” for short-time jobs, do not get much
attention. Life in the all-colored town is fairly easy, with enough
money and work to go around. Here and there social protest is evident:
in the aftermath of the hurricane the conscripted grave-diggers are
ordered to make sure of the race of the victims, since the whites are
to get pine coffins, and the Negroes, quick lime.
They’s mighty particular how dese dead folks goes tuh judgment. Look
lak they think God don’t know nothin’ ’bout de Jim Crow law.
The pine barrens and the swamps of Florida are the setting of Edwin
Granberry’s _Strangers and Lovers_ (1928) in which the mutual hostility
of the Negroes and “crackers,” the brutality and the violence are
skillfully detailed. In Theodore Pratt’s _Big Blow_ (1936) a poor white
girl who lives by herself in the waste-land is protected by Clay, a
giant Negro. When a “cracker” forces his attention upon her, Clay saves
the girl, apologetically but firmly. The “cracker” is astounded that
Clay has “put hand to a white man.” Clay is strung up by a mob, and it
is only by the greatest luck that he is saved.
_Georgia._ In _Glory_ (1932), Nan Bagby Stephens, dealing with Negro
life in a small southern Georgia town, is as intimate as Julia Peterkin
with Negro speech and folkways. But her people, not the unmoral pagans
of Blue Brook plantation, are earnest, self-reliant workers, in whose
lives the church plays a very important part. The new minister, though
not an Elmer Gantry, brings grief to the community by seducing Leah,
one of the finest girls of his congregation. Roseanne, her sister, in
a melodramatic scene confronts him with news of the girl’s death, and
revenge is swift. Although the seduction scenes are unconvincing, the
setting and characters are well drawn. Roseanne, shrewd about human
nature until hypnotized by the preacher, is like Heyward’s Mamba and
Hughes’ Aunt Hager, laboring and sacrificing so that the young will
have a chance. Other characters are interesting: the railroad men,
the charcoal peddler, the hair-dresser who says, “I puts ’em in and I
takes ’em out,” meaning that she marcels on one side of the railroad
tracks and straightens hair on the other. And the Ladies Aid Society,
pathetically caring for their little church and worshipful of the
preacher, is much more representative of Negro religion than the usual
scenes of revival frenzy.
_Death Is A Little Man_ (1936) by Minnie Hite Moody likewise deals
with a hard-working, sacrificial heroine of strict morality who,
living in the Atlanta Bottoms, has more than her share of trials and
tribulations. The overfrequent violence becomes melodramatic, much that
affects the life of the Bottoms is left out, and Fate is blamed too
often. But the insight into character, the true local color and the
skillful prose, entirely in the cadence and idiom of southern Negro
speech, bear witness to an informed and sympathetic observer.
_The Black Belt._ _Earth Born_ by Howard Snyder (1929) records the
superstitions, songs, dances and church services of tenant farmers
in the cotton belt. Parson Robinson, the Negro plantation owner, the
wanton Malindy, her lover Big Jim Mississippi, and the violence and
loose love making of an isolated community, are in the tradition of
Julia Peterkin. So is _Ollie Miss_ (1935) by George Wylie Henderson,
the first Negro novelist to deal with sharecroppers. But the heroine,
whether working her crop like a man, or restlessly hankering after the
old days with her lover, or planning a farm for herself and her child,
is well drawn, and the novel is a work of faithful realism.
Reuben Davis’ _Butcher Bird_ (1936), another story of Negro
sharecroppers, likewise centers attention upon a woman, “a butcher bird
... one of these here womens that gobbles up all the mens she can,
then sticks the rest of them around on thorn trees and barb wire till
she gets hongry again.” This wanton brings trouble to the hard-working
hero until his quiet dependability makes a new woman of her and she
sacrifices her life for his. Written out of considerable knowledge of
folk-life, _Butcher Bird_ excels local color like _Earth Born_ by its
sympathetic characterization.
George Lee’s _River George_ (1936) is less concerned with free
love affairs that end in violence, and more with the troubles of
sharecropping life disclosed by recent studies. In the first part,
as good a picture of sharecropping as any Negro author has achieved,
George is a good worker, but since he is educated, knows when he is
cheated, and teaches organization, he is a “bad Negro.” He becomes
worse when the Negro paramour of a white man falls in love with him.
Forced to run away to Memphis after shooting the white man, he becomes
the legendary man of the river, told of in the author’s earlier _Beale
Street_. Unreasonably, he returns to his native section and is lynched
upon arrival. The second part of the book contains too much, but the
first is truthful and therefore bitter. Its grimness stands in no need
of the final less credible lynching.
_The Delta._ Evans Wall writes in _The No-Nation Girl_ (1929) of
Précieuse, the daughter of a white swamp-dweller and a Negro woman.
It is the conventional story of the mulatto, who “had no right to be
born,” falling in love with a white “outsider” and when abandoned,
drowning herself in Suicide Basin, convenient for “no-nation girls.”
The primitive goings-on are often halted for dogmas about the mulatto.
Whenever she is decent, it is because of the inheritance from her
father, who was a degraded outcast. But in moments of passion, her
mother’s inheritance rules:
The girl’s half-heritage of savagery rose in a flood that washed
away all trace of her father’s people except the supersensitiveness
imparted by her taut nerves. She must dance or scream to relieve the
rising torrent of response to the wild, monotonous rhythm.
In _Love Fetish_ (1933) Wall deals with a “no-nation boy” in similar
fashion.
_Gulf Stream_ (1930) by Marie Stanley has more sympathy for the Creole
heroine, but drives home the same thesis--that you “can’t hide from God
and Affaca.” Adele, with “cream-ivory, magnolia petal skin” is easily
seduced by a white man to whose home she delivers laundry. When her
child is born, she refuses to look at it, fearing it will be black.
Years later when she discovers that her daughter is milky-white, she
becomes a devoted mother. The daughter, broadened by education, becomes
engaged to a dark Negro. Adele cannot endure this, and walks into the
bay to commit suicide, but love for her daughter makes her renounce
the usual gesture of the tragic octoroon. Mille Fleurs Island, below
Mobile, the home of mulatto Creoles of wealth and culture, is new to
fiction, as is Adele’s final tirade against the father of her child.
But there is also much of the usual trite generalizing about the
tragedy of mixed blood.
_Louisiana._ Barry Benefield’s _Short Turns_ (1926) includes two
stories of Negro life. In “Ole Mistis” Old Jeff, one of the many
“slaves of legal documents and ruthless legal machinery,” loses his
crops and farm, and would have lost his horse, “Ole Mistis,” but for
a landlord’s last-minute kindheartedness. “Sugar Pie” tells of the
terror in a northern Louisiana town when Negroes are burned out, tarred
and feathered, and hanged upon telegraph poles. Sugar Pie leaves the
hate-ridden town, carrying the corpse of her nearly white baby. _Green
Margins_ by E. P. O’Donnell (1936) is a poetic book of the life in
the delta below New Orleans, the melting pot of Slavonian, Filipino,
French, Italian, Cajan and Negro fishermen, trappers and smugglers.
Outstanding among the strange characters are the mulatto girl, Unga
January, and Bonus, a mad Negro murderer. O’Donnell’s short stories
about Negro life such as “Jesus Knew” are informed, bitter realism.
Elma Godchaux’ _Stubborn Roots_ (1936) has a weird Negro character in
Zero, who, although he insists upon wearing woman’s clothing, is the
dynamic foreman on a sugar cane plantation. The respect and liking
between Zero and the planter is persuasively conveyed. Other Negroes
are convincingly shown at their work of planting and grinding cane
and repairing the Mississippi levees. The same fidelity is in Miss
Godchaux’ “The Horn That Called Bambine” and “Chains,” which contain
sympathetic characterizations of Negro life along the river, with
recognition of the brutality.
Lyle Saxon has brought to his novel _Children of Strangers_ (1937)
the skill and authority of his studies of New Orleans. Contrary to
the usual procedure, the Negroes are treated with seriousness, and
the patronizing whites who see Negroes “as the happiest people in the
world” are ridiculed. Famie, the beautiful descendant of the free
mulattoes who once, cultured and wealthy, owned vast plantations on
Cane River, is the tragic heroine. After a traditional love affair with
a white outlaw, Famie devotes herself to her child. Poverty-stricken,
she sells some of the ancient heirlooms, then she becomes a servant for
whites. These are violations of the caste-tabus, whereas having a child
by a white man was not. When, in her loneliness, she turns to black
people, and finally accepts the attention of Henry Tyler, she cuts the
last family tie. _Children of Strangers_ reveals a little known locale
and people, the last of a
delicate race of Latins which had lived too near the sun.... The very
old were curiously erect, their shoulders back, their chins up. They
were sad, but they had dignity.... The boys and girls were handsome,
their skins cream-colored or light tan....
Almost as interesting as Famie is Henry Tyler, a “shut mouth
nigger--studying to himself all the time, wanting to learn to read
letters.” The only socially conscious character in the book says to
Henry:
It has always been like this in the South ... white men leaning on
black men ... from the beginning. We made slaves of you.... You made
us rich.... In rising, we pushed you further away from us.... Black
men began to think, to move about, to go away.... That is why I
couldn’t get you out of my mind as I watched you sweating in the field
working for something that can never be yours because I have taken it
from you.
Short story writers have industriously added to this new regionalism,
in such numbers that even mention of their names is impracticable.
Wilbur Daniel Steele, however, should be mentioned for his grasp of
folklore and types apparent in such stories as “Sooth” and “Conjure.”
Other stories of distinction are James Boyd’s “Bloodhound,” Vernon
Sherwin’s “Nigger-Lover,” from the many good stories of Negro life
published in _Story Magazine_, and Louis Paul’s “No More Trouble For
Jedwick.” The liberal and radical magazines are publishing informed and
sincere fiction of Negro life. _The Crisis_ and _Opportunity_, Negro
magazines, have published many good interpretations “from the inside.”
Skill and penetration mark such stories as “Symphonesque” by Arthur
Huff Fauset, “The Flyer” by Cecil Blue, “Swamp Moccasin” and “Fog” by
John F. Matheus, and the work of Henry Jones.
An admittedly inadequate word might be included here on children’s
books. In a long line from _Little Black Sambo_ to the newest _Ezekiel_
by Elvira Garner (1937) Negro children have generally been written
of in the same terms as their mothers and fathers, as quaint, living
jokes, designed to make white children laugh. Against this tradition of
comic condescension, Eva Knox Evans, in _Araminta_ (1935) and _Jerome
Anthony_ (1936), has written with sincere and informed sympathy. The
same qualities are in the children’s stories of Arna Bontemps, one
of the most versatile Negro authors, who collaborated with Langston
Hughes on _Popo and Fifina_ (1933) a story of Haitian children, and has
written _You Can’t Pet A Possum_ (1936) and _Sad Faced Boy_ (1937).
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. How does Sherwood Anderson resemble Julia Peterkin and Van Vechten?
2. Account for the growing revolt on the part of southern women against
the tradition of “southern charm.”
3. What is regionalism? How does it differ from local color?
4. What states seem to be as yet uncovered by regionalists?
5. Compare the work of the regionalists with the plantation tradition.
6. What authors include pictures of southern injustice?
7. In what respects are _The No-Nation Girl_, _Gulf Stream_ and
_Children of Strangers_ similar?
CHAPTER XI
NEW ROADS
_The Pattern of Violence._ Although we have seen that such authors
as Wood, Heyward, Adams and Frank revealed southern injustice to
the Negro, it has remained for a later group of writers to register
the fullest social protest. They know the land of the jasmines and
myrtles; but they know a great deal more about it than those gentle
symbols. Aware that one southern tradition--that of violence--is as
long-standing as any, they have added darker color to the picture of
the regionalists and folk-lorists, who often in their search for the
peculiar and amusing, overlooked harsh and socially significant facts.
They record what, according to the formula of taboos and restrictions,
should be unmentioned. In spite of the chorus of comfortable and
ostrich-like people who insist that in their state “the problem has
been solved,” they reveal a widespread pattern of violence.
_Sweet Man_ (1930) by Gilmore Millen tells of John Henry, the son of a
white plantation agent who could not let Negro women alone. John Henry
launches out as a “sweet man,” attractive to women, on the plantations
and in Memphis, and finally becomes the paramour of a wealthy white
woman in California. When, unbalanced by jealousy, she tries to frame
him for rape, he kills her, then himself. The early chapters give a
good, naturalistic picture of plantation life; the last chapters, even
though sensational, are convincing.
_Amber Satyr_ by Roy Flannagan (1932) is similar in some respects.
Luther, strong and handsome, of Negro-Indian stock, has caution enough
to resist the open advances of the love-sick farm wife for whom he
works. But through her brazenness, the affair is discovered, and Luther
is killed by her two brothers-in-law. The newspaper report is the usual
one: Luther was killed by an unknown mob. In ironic contrast, one of
Luther’s murderers is the father of a child by Luther’s daughter,
and at the time of the tragedy a special session of the Virginia
legislature is considering the “racial-integrity” bill. _Amber Satyr_
is shot through with sardonic humor, but its chief impact is tragic.
Less spectacular, Welbourn Kelley’s _Inchin’ Along_ (1932) deals
with Dink Britt, whose enterprise and endurance make him a dangerous
example to the croppers, white and black, who must be kept brow-beaten
and shiftless. A marked man, he narrowly escapes being lynched.
_Inchin’ Along_ has some traditional and silly comments about racial
characteristics, but the sympathy for the plugging hero and the picture
of the hard lot of the tenant farmer, show Kelly to be clear-eyed and
courageous.
Robert Rylee is well informed about life in delta Mississippi, and
deeply concerned with its injustice. In _Deep Dark River_ (1935) Mose
Southwick, a share-cropper, protests against his wife’s carryings-on
with the plantation manager. In self defense Mose kills a bad Negro,
hired to kill him. When Mose is captured and framed, a liberal white
woman lawyer takes his case, but cannot defeat the concerted line-up.
Mose is dependable, sober, self-contained, with grim, double-edged
humor, and burdened by the miseries of his people even more than
by his own. So Mose must be put out of the way. _Deep Dark River_
is unconvincing where Rylee makes his hero a symbol of Christian
resignation and attachment to the soil, and is conventional in such
statements as “Mose had the mystic singing and intuitiveness of
the black race and the intelligence of the white race.” The white
characters here are less intelligent than stupid and vicious. Although
humane, Rylee does not idealize the Negro; he includes sketches of
Negro highjackers, bootleggers, easy women, and toadies for white
folks. His second novel _St. George of Weldon_ (1937) is a character
study of a sensitive southern youth, and the harsh treatment of the
Negro is an important element in his education.
In _Death in The Deep South_ (1936) by Ward Greene, a novel of southern
injustice, the use of the third degree to exact confessions from
Negroes is powerfully depicted. Theodore Strauss’ _Night At Hogwallow_
(1937) is a hair-raising narrative. A Negro laborer is falsely accused
of rape. This results in a battle between a northern road crew and the
aroused southern townsmen, a beating by the Klan, the burning of the
Negro section, and a gruesome lynching. It is a dark melodrama, as life
in towns like Hogwallow too often is.
Jim Tully’s _Circus Parade_ (1927) tells the story of “Whiteface,” a
Negro who rose from stake-driver to clown, and who was burned at the
stake by a mob on the rampage because a Negro had stepped in front
of a white woman in the ticket line. “A Negro Girl” is likewise grim
naturalism; the girl, caught sneaking into the circus, is assaulted
by the circus roughnecks. In _Violence, A Story of Today’s South_ by
Marcet and Emanuel Haldeman-Julius (1928) a Negro boy, in terror of
exposure after a love affair, kills a white girl. He is saved from a
lynching mob, but is electrocuted. In contrast, a philandering white
minister who commits murder is freed.
_Exceptional Negroes._ Sinclair Lewis was one of the first to
break with the preconceptions of the Negro held by Main Street. In
_Arrowsmith_ (1925) he includes a capable Negro scientist who, though
a minor character, stands out from the ruck of the petty, grasping
victims of Lewis’ satire. In _Work of Art_ (1934) the attractive,
intelligent and bookish Tansy Quill illustrates the “common tragedy of
the superior Negro ... laden with all the complexities of twentieth
century America heaped upon the dark burden lugged up from old Africa’s
abyss.” Her suicide is conventional, but it gives Lewis a chance to
satirize authors who, from a casual acquaintance with a hotel maid,
build up masterpieces about Negro psychology and the voodoo of the
swamps.
_Come In At The Door_ (1934) by William March is merciless in its
exposure of certain elements of southern life, and original in its
treatment of Negro characters. A Negro woman, Mitty, bears six children
to the “aristocrat” Robert Hurry, who, gone to seed, is now going
with the wind in the waste land of the delta country. Mitty is wily
but superstitious, loyal but self-centered, kindhearted but capable
of fierce hate. The traditional Aunt Hatty and Jim are well observed.
Most striking of the Negro characters is Baptiste, an educated Creole,
a vagabond philosopher, whose tragedy is to haunt forever the southern
boy whom he tutored.
The portrait of Baptiste indicates that as southern realists look
more closely at life, they too become aware of exceptional Negroes.
T. S. Stribling has complained that “White educated Southerners are
completely cut off from black educated Southerners by the inherited
attitudes of master and slave, and the one really does not know the
other exists.” Lack of contact and ignorance still handicap honest
realists, but their attempt at a complete cast of characters is
noteworthy.
To James Saxon Childers, “White men and black men have long ago walked
out of their color and are only men.” _A Novel About A White Man and
A Black Man In The Deep South_ (1936) deals with Gordon Nicholson, a
white man, and Dave Parker, a Negro, educated at the same northern
school. When Dave, a talented musician, visits his friend, the southern
town is alarmed, since Gordon has a sister Anne. Dave is accused of
a crime for which there is not a shred of evidence. He is acquitted,
but Anne’s end is tragic, merely because Dave visits her brother.
Irritated by northern interference as much as by southern injustice,
Childers believes that the “problem” will gradually be solved by men of
good will. His Negro characters, like most of the educated Negroes in
propaganda novels, are nearly faultless. The novel is unusual in its
sympathy, but it is jumbled, coincidental and not always plausible.
One of the South’s most promising novelists, Hamilton Basso included
recognizable Negro characters in _Relics and Angels_ (1929). _Cinnamon
Seed_ (1934) shows deeper understanding of Negroes, both in slavery
and in the present; Horace, the old family servant; Sam, ambitious,
resentful and therefore doomed, and Lance who rises to be a world
famous “trombone player in a band” are especially well done. In
_Courthouse Square_ (1936) which deals mainly with the plight of a
justice-loving liberal in a southern town, Basso’s pictures of Negro
life are even more authentic and sympathetic. Of Niggertown, which the
Negroes called High Rent, he writes:
Poverty ran through the section like a plague, hunger was a
frequent visitor or permanent boarder in almost every house, but
the inhabitants of High Rent, merging a simple philosophy with the
terrible patience of the poor, complained but little and trusted in
the humanity of a singularly inhumane and white-faced God for eventual
succor and release.
An unusual character is Alcide Fauget, who is “like the reverend and
respected head of a tribe: banker, counsellor, physician, friend.” So
fair that he had attended a white southern medical school, he serves
the darker half of his people. Neither obsequious nor arrogant, he goes
his own way. But when he wishes to buy an old house, falling to rack
and ruin, for a much-needed Negro hospital, he has stepped over his
bounds, and is driven away by a mob of his inferiors. An intelligent,
humane realist, Basso has unobtrusively but memorably conveyed the
tragedy of Negro life in the South.
_The “Multiple” Novel_: Many writers have attempted to give
cross-sections of the life of southern towns by using many characters
on all levels. Margaret Sperry’s _Portrait of Eden_ (1934) shows a
Florida town which, after the boom, sinks back into lethargy and
intolerance. The Negroes are generally shown as exotic primitives,
especially at their shouting services in “The Church of Jesus Colored.”
But the picture has social understanding as well:
Aunt Melissie danced, tangling her feet in a bitter tune against all
the days she’d spent serving white folks, walking their ways, and all
her children born to do bidding to white men. She danced and fell
reeling at last, her shoes flung to the darkness....
Outstanding is the educated Negro, John Marquis, a native of the
section, who, hated by whites and double-crossed by Negroes, wants to
start a school for Negro children. He is lynched, and a white liberal,
his best friend, is murdered. _Portrait of Eden_ has some exaggeration,
but what it records is not too spectacular in a state where the Klan
still rides.
Less directly intent upon revealing intolerance and injustice than
Basso and Miss Sperry, other novelists still include these since they
wish truthful pictures. _Siesta_, by Berry Fleming (1935), is one
of the finest examples. Cotton brokers, cotton farmers, plaintively
wasting “aristocrats,” society folk and crackers, in “Georgetown,”
Alabama, in the long drought of summer, are unforgettably set before
us. Negro characters, an important part of the town’s life, are as
authentically handled. Laney Shields, ambitious and decent, is trapped
in a sordid love affair with the young white doctor for whom she is
office girl. A little boy’s going after the laundry becomes a dangerous
odyssey in the bullying town. Mattie Small, the “obsteprician”; a famed
faith-healing Bishop and his blind stooge, are similarly well drawn.
In _Siesta_ the best talkers refer to the Negro’s tragic mask, and say
that southern whites can know of the Negro only what he wants them to
know. This is wise: Fleming’s recognition of the tragic mask helps him
to get beneath it.
_South_, by Frederick Wight (1935) attempts a panoramic view of a South
Carolina city. Negro characters are only slightly sketched domestics or
levee workers. Mob terror threatens the Negro section at one point, but
is averted when the victim is discovered to be a light-colored Negro
woman. The manufacturing town of “Tuttle,” North Carolina, comes to
life in _Where the Weak Grow Strong_ by Eugene Armfield (1936). Negro
characters are drawn with attention to truth more than to tradition. A
servant asking for her six weeks back pay of twelve dollars, is called
an “ungrateful nigger” and is ordered from the house.
Miss Evelyn, you ain’t got no call to talk to me like that. I only ast
you for what I worked for. I may be a nigger like you says. The Lord
made me the color I is. But I ain’t never done nobody out of the money
that’s coming to them.
A white mother resents the reserving of the carnival merry-go-round for
Negroes, during the supper hour for the whites: “They ought not let
them do it.” A love affair between a Negro man and a white woman is
told with quiet, tragic realism.
_Incidental Characters, But Real._ In George Milburn’s sharply observed
_Oklahoma Town_ (1930), “The Nigger-Lover” tells of a lawyer who earned
his nickname by urging Negroes to vote, who violated taboos such as
handing a Negro boy a glass of water from a soda fountain, and who
is among the first victims in a race riot. In “The Nigger Doctor”
the educated physician makes the town uneasy by his quietly defiant
manner and his scientific skill. _No More Trumpets_ (1933) contains a
story “white Meat” in which a boarding house keeper gets her greatest
delight in baiting Negroes and describing a lynching she saw as a girl.
Deserted by her resentful daughters, she reveals that their father had
Negro blood. In Milburn’s novel _Catalogue_, the lynching of a Negro is
shown to be one of the holiday excitements for Oklahoma yokels.
James T. Farrell, in his trilogy _Studs Lonigan_ (1935), has old man
Lonigan commenting on Amos and Andy:
You would have laughed yourself sick at them. They’re so much like
darkies. Not the fresh northern niggers, but the genuine real southern
darkies, the good niggers ... with long names and honors, just like in
real life.... Golly, Bill, they sure are a card.
In bitter contrast, however, Farrell shows the anger of the Chicago
Irish to the encroaching black belt. Studs Lonigan believes that “they
ought to hang every nigger in the city to telephone poles.” Fellow
victims of poverty, the Negroes and Irish have fierce street fights of
which the riot of 1919 was a natural climax, although Farrell describes
the present as similarly explosive. Except in a few stories, Farrell
does not present individual Negroes, but he has given powerful and
grimly true pictures of northern prejudice, which seems to be little
different from the lynch-spirit of the South.
William Faulkner’s _Sartoris_ (1929) has many minor but ably
individualized Negro characters. Uncle Simon’s dismaying first
automobile ride, and his difficulties as treasurer of the church
board--“he jes put de money out, sort of,”--are well described. Simon
rebukes his son Caspy, who, home from the World War is bragging too
much: “What us niggers want ter be free fer, anyhow. Ain’t we got ez
many white folks now ez we kin suppo’t?” The servants of the tragic
family in Faulkner’s _The Sound and The Fury_ (1920)--Aunt Dilsey,
hobbling about her kitchen, impudent and bullying, with her temper
worn short by the bickering and turmoil, Uncle Job, and Luster, who is
guardian to Benjy, the idiot of the family--are likewise convincing.
The Negroes are generally described from the point of view of their
harassed white folks:
Like I say the only place for them is in the field, where they’d have
to work from sunup to sundown.... They got so they can outguess you
about work before your very eyes.... Shirking and giving you a little
more lip and a little more lip until some day you have to lay them out
with a scantling or something....
The Negroes themselves are an unflattering chorus in this drama of the
fall of a family. One of them expresses their surliness: “I works to
suit de man whut pays me Sat’day night. When I does dat, it don’t leave
me a whole lot of time to please other folks.” Insolent just up to the
breaking point, contradicting their white-folks without apologies,
these servants are miles away from the plantation tradition menials. If
familiarity has not bred contempt, it has at least bred rough irony in
place of worship.
_These Thirteen_ (1931) contains “That Evening Sun,” one of the best
of Negro stories. A Negro woman is shown waiting in dread suspense,
certain that her husband is going to kill her. Nancy is truculent and
cynical about humanity whether white or black. Her husband is likewise
desperate:
I can’t hang around white man’s kitchen. But white man can hang around
mine. White man can come in my house, but I can’t stop him. When white
man wants to come in my house, I ain’t got no house. I can’t stop him,
but he can’t kick me outen it. He can’t do that.
“Dry September” is a powerful lynching story, but the stress is less
upon the victim than upon the psychology of the mob, especially of the
leader. No one knows whether the assault happened or was imagined, but
the mob gets its man.
In _Sanctuary_ (1929) the incidental picture of a jailed Negro murderer
is striking:
He would lean in the window in the evening and sing. After supper
a few Negroes gathered along the fence below--natty, shoddy suits
and sweat-stained overalls shoulder to shoulder--and in chorus with
the murderer, they sang ... “Fo days mo! Den dey ghy ’stroy de bes’
ba’ytone singer in Nawth Mississippi!”
_Light in August_ (1932) has as its most interesting character Joe
Christmas. A foundling, the son of a white mother and a Negro father,
he is raised by his fanatical grandfather. Taken for white until
the mystery of his birth is cleared up, he is silent, friendless
and proud. After he murders a sex-obsessed Yankee woman, a relic of
Reconstruction, he is pursued and killed. Although one character
imputes his tragedy to the warfare in him of white and black, there is
sufficient reason to see him as a victim of a hostile environment. He
is more complex than Faulkner’s other Negroes, fully characterized, and
one of Faulkner’s most memorable creations.
Faulkner is a naturalist, and sees humanity in a harsh light. Like the
weak, mean, and degenerate white characters whom he has set before
us, his Negro characters are shown unflatteringly. House-servants
and farmers, loose women and murderers; whether in rocking ecstasy
in church, or getting the third degree from a sheriff, or fearing to
help out in an accident--“White folks be sayin’ we done it”--they are
all equally convincing. Faulkner records Negro speech with complete
accuracy, but more important, he gets into character with the uncanny
penetration that makes him one of the most significant of the new
novelists. His Negroes are a long way from happy-go-lucky comics. If
they agree in anything, it is in their surly understanding of the
bitter life that they are doomed to live in a backward, hate-ridden
South. He does not write social protest, but he is fiercely intent upon
the truth, and the truth that he sees is tragic.
In _Tobacco Road_, after a Negro has been run down by the crazy-driving
of a poor-white, Jeeter philosophizes: “Wal, niggers will get kilt.”
The same callousness is depicted in Caldwell’s first book, _American
Earth_ (1931). “Saturday Afternoon” tells of a mob’s filling a
Negro “so full of lead that his body sagged from his neck where the
trace-chain held him up.” The Negro was too smart a farmer. “Savannah
River Payday” is even more gruesome. A Negro sawmill hand, killed in
an accident, is being carried to the town’s undertaker. The drunk
“crackers” driving the car hammer out his gold teeth and fight over
them. Arriving in town, they go into a pool room and forget all about
the corpse. _We Are The Living_ (1933) contains Negro cotton-pickers,
and servants whose attractiveness is a household problem. The stories
are frequently humorous but the laughter of the Negroes is ironic at
perplexed and inept “superiors.”
“Candy Man Beechum” in _Kneel To The Rising Sun_ (1935) is about a
travelling boy with flapping feet, who, on his way to see his gal, is
shot down for nothing by a white policeman. “Blue Boy” is the ugly
anecdote of a Negro idiot whose grotesque tricks entertain a group
of satiated “high class ladies and gentlemen.” “Kneel To The Rising
Sun”, probably Caldwell’s greatest short story, portrays the misery of
short-rationed sharecroppers, the sadism of ignorant, bored landlords,
the crushing force of an unjust system. Lonnie, a white man, made a
whining coward by years of share-cropping slavery, betrays Clem, who
has befriended him, to their mutual enemy the landlord, and his mob of
lynchers. Clem is a doggedly courageous Negro, willing to take only so
much before rebelling.
All Arch asked ... was for Clem Henry to overstep his place just one
little half inch, or to talk back to him with just one little short
word, and he would do the rest. Everybody knew what Arch meant by
that, especially if Clem did not turn and run. And Clem had not been
known to run from anybody, after fifteen years in the country.
Caldwell is convinced that “much of the matter about the southern
Negro and the southern white man has been a garbled mixture of romance
and mis-statement,” and the authoritative fiction he writes about his
native sharecropping country bears this out.
_Proletarian Realism._ Caldwell’s “Kneel To The Rising Sun” represents
one of the most important trends in contemporary fiction. The Negro
is at last being discovered as part of the working class. Radical
novelists now stress the exploitation of the Negro masses, and urge
that it is only by the solidarity of all workers that a new social
order can be achieved. In spite of the overstress of propaganda,
these writers contribute a great deal to realism. Seeing many of
the so-called Negro characteristics as class disabilities, aware of
much that is common in the lives of the poor, they have been able
to get close to their characters, without condescension and without
idealizing. They start from the basic beliefs that the Negro has been
a great factor in building up America, that he has been miserably
underpaid, that he is growing steadily more conscious of, and restive
under exploitation, and that he can get nowhere without the white
worker, nor the white worker without him. These are all truths that
have long needed to be told. By themselves, they do not guarantee
good fiction, but they cannot be neglected without falsity to Negro
experience, and the contemporary American scene.
Scott Nearing’s _Free-Born_ (1932), “unpublishable by any commercial
concern,” is as well documented as his _Black America_, a sociological
exposé of exploitation and persecution. The title is ironic: the
“freeborn” Negroes are landless sharecroppers, kept from “jumping
contracts” by a patrol system. One southern judge threatens to adjourn
court and “attend to the matter himself” if there are not enough
“he-Americans” to do a job of lynching. Jim, the hero, sees the burning
of the Rosenwald school and the lynching of his mother and father
(one of the most gruesome ever recorded in fiction and taken from
actuality). His sweetheart is raped and murdered. In Chicago he is
caught up in the race-riot. Embittered and desperate, he is taught by
a communist that “t’aint cause you’se black that you’se exploited,”
and that only by fighting shoulder to shoulder with white workers will
there ever be a “free world under working class control.” Rebuffed by
labor leaders, Jim nevertheless sticks to his new-found cause. Jailed
for leading a strike, he dedicates himself to black and white slaves
“who never were freed ... who keep your high and mighty world a-goin’.”
_Free-Born_ crowds too much upon the shoulders of its young hero, and
is unconvincing in such details as Jim’s continued dialect after he has
read Upton Sinclair, Marx and Lenin. But it is significant as the first
revolutionary novel of Negro life.
_Georgia Nigger_ (1932) is another exposure, attacking the
convict-lease system and the chain-gang, with thorough documentation
based upon visits, prison records and photographs. Spivak describes
such devices of punishment as the iron collar, spikes, double-shackles,
the stocks, the whipping post, the Georgia rack, where convicts are
tortured by stretching, and the “sweat-box, a coffin of thick wood
standing upright.” The convicts who rot their lives away in the filthy
cages may be robbers and killers, or they may just as often be like
David, a mere lad, picked up on petty charges to do the county’s hard
work. Arrested in a round-up because Mr. Deering, in cahoots with the
sheriff, has a lot of cotton to be picked, David is “redeemed” by the
planter. Escaping from Deering’s armed camp, where Negroes who die from
overwork are weighted and buried in the swamp, David is rearrested as a
vagrant, and this time chooses the chain gang in preference to peonage,
exchanging hell for hell. Throughout _Georgia Nigger_ the Negro is
shown to be a catspaw; vicious and murderous guards, landlords and
sheriffs nullify the half-hearted interference of the better-disposed
whites. But it contains more than the shocking; the heartbreaking
struggle of David’s family against poverty is conveyed with deep
feeling.
In Myra Page’s _Gathering Storm_ (1932) the hill-people who have
become underpaid, hungry “lint-heads,” doomed to shameful living, and
the Negroes whose wretchedness is even greater, come together because
of common suffering. Marge, a child of hill-people, reaches out to
Negro workers “across the miles”, denounces the old way of hatred
and bitterness, and urges the new way of solidarity. She and a Negro
organizer are forerunners of the “gathering storm.” Like _Free-Born_ in
many respects, covering too much ground, _Gathering Storm_ is even more
of a thesis novel. But Miss Page’s sympathy with her Negro characters
goes deep.
Dealing with a similar setting, _Call Home The Heart_ contains but
few scenes involving Negroes. Ishma, a mountain woman, saves a Negro
organizer from a lynch mob but is revolted by close contact with
Negroes: “Mountain people are always white.” A matured radical,
recognizing the strength of her long-bred prejudice, patiently tries
to persuade her that unless the workers of both races stand together,
they will continue to be clubbed, driven and starved. Miss Burke’s
_A Stone Came Rolling_ (1935) contains more about the Negro. The
“kindliness” of the past is satirized in an excellent description of a
slave-trading. The present is desperate: a Negro woman says: “I ain’t
had what you could call work in six months--not a tap at a snake.” An
educated Negro, brought in as a safe speaker at a political rally,
waits until white hearers have left, and then attacks the conservative
speechmakers and urges Negroes to organize. Unemployed whites and
Negroes march together, singing militant words to hymn tunes. In such
a crisis, the city fathers, churchmen, and sheriff must have a victim.
Stomp Nelson, a tireless, fearless, Negro organizer is selected, but
by a ruse, his white comrades of the Unemployed Council save him from
the mob. Negro characters are not major actors, but the Negro is shown
as an important participant in the stirring of southern labor. The use
of race prejudice by the overlords to prevent workers’ solidarity is
clearly indicated.
In _Now In November_ (1934) and _Winter Orchard_ (1935) Josephine
Johnson occasionally describes the harshness of Negro life. Her
_Jordanstown_ (1937) records a fight for better living conditions for
the jobless and the underpaid in a small midwestern town. Anna Mosely,
“a tall, mammoth Negress ... too articulate and brooding for her own
people, too proud to be popular with employers ... alien in the bitter
gifts of intelligence and race” is an interesting person, whether in
her married life with Ham, or talking in meetings, or writing the song
for the disinherited, or leading the march, or lying unconquered in
jail, or inspiring the young white leaders: “Not till we do something
all together ... we won’t change mo’ than a stitch in the world.”
The bitterness and understanding of Grace Lumpkin’s “White Man” (1927),
the story of a Negro girl seduced by her employer, reappears with
added power in _A Sign For Cain_ (1935). A small southern community
is well realized: the well meaning but weak liberals, resenting any
interference with their “contented nigras”; the respectable judge
(bought and paid for); the bootlegging and pandering leader of the
American Legion who is the defender of law and order; the white men
with their Negro women; the high-school boys ripe for violence; and
the sheriff who keeps the Negroes “scared to raise their voices too
high.” Nevertheless, when Denis, a young organizer returns home, he
finds allies ready to join his struggle for justice. Denis is slowly
but surely bringing about the union of underpaid white and black
workers, when a few leaflets are lost, and traitors sell him out.
Framed for the murder of a wealthy white woman, Denis is shot by the
real murderer, who fears investigation by the northern lawyers. Denis
is quiet but strong, humble only before the great work he has set
himself to do; in jail, attacked by the deputies, he cries out “I’ve
got no rights as a citizen. Then I stand on my rights as a man.” Other
Negroes are well done: Mum Nancy, whose long years of meekness bring
a sorry inheritance; Selah, the bound-out slavey, awaking to courage
and hatred; Brother Shadrack Morton whose sermon on submissiveness
in lynch-time is drowned out by groans, and Ficents, easy-going, but
insisting “I got some fight in me yet; if there’s something to fight
for.” Most interesting after Denis is old Ed Clarke, whose memory of
his lynched father is still burning, a hard worker, unlearned but
manly, leaving one master because he could do with “less kindness
and more cash,” and contemptuous of “white-folks’ niggers.” The old
plantation record furnishes ironic asides: one entry reads, “Sold Negro
$1,200. Beautiful day”; another reads, “Candies for little Negroes ...
25 cents worth.”
_Negro Novelists On New Roads._ Except for a few cartoons, such as
_Two Black Crows in the A.E.F._, the Negro in the World War has been
scarcely mentioned. Victor Daly’s _Not Only War_ (1932) “dedicated
to the army of disillusioned,” attempts to do justice to the record
of Negro troops. There is less about warfare, however, than about
the workings of race prejudice. A southern white officer, who has
carried on a flirtation with a Negro girl in the states, “breaks” a
Negro non-commissioned officer for visiting a French girl. In a big
drive the white officer is wounded; the Negro soldier tries to save
his life. They are found the next morning, “face downward, their arms
about each other.” Coincidences are too much relied upon, and the novel
follows the apologist pattern, but the aim to deal seriously with what
has been caricatured is noteworthy. _Greater Need Below_ (1936) by
O’Wendell Shaw deals with the life of a southern Negro college, but
the characters are too idealized, and the plot is forced. The subject
deserves a better novel.
Langston Hughes, in _The Ways of White Folks_ (1934), his first
collection of short stories, shows far superior artistry. All of the
stories deal with manifestations of white prejudice. Hughes states
that by white folks he really means “some white folks,” but the stories
which turn the tables of caricature and contempt often seem inclusive.
“Slave On the Block” and “The Blues I’m Playing” satirize the people
“who went in for Negroes--a race that was too charming and naive and
lovely for words.” “A Good Job Gone” shows the break-up of a wealthy
white man who, fascinated by a golden-brown wanton, is jilted for a
Negro elevator boy. “Rejuvenation Through Joy” farcically tells of a
colony of effete whites who listen to lectures by a Negro, passing
for white, who preaches the occult value of primitive rhythm. “Cora,”
one of the most successful stories, attacks small town puritanism. In
“Home” a world renowned artist returns home to be lynched as an “uppity
nigger.” In “Father and Son,” from which the play _Mulatto_ was taken,
the son of Colonel Norwood and his housekeeper, determined not to be “a
white folks’ nigger,” chokes his father to death after a quarrel and is
lynched. In this not always convincing story, Hughes looks forward to
the time when
the cotton will blaze and the cabins will burn and the chains will
be broken, and men, all of a sudden, will shake hands, black men and
white men, like steel meeting steel.
Hughes does not often strike this radical note in _The Ways of White
Folks_; most of his stories protest jim-crow insults and injustice. In
“Professor,” one of his latest stories, he attacks the compromising
race “leader.” Hughes’ stories exist largely for the theses, but they
are skillfully done, realistic in detail and bitingly ironic.
One of the most promising explorations of a new road is Richard
Wright’s “Big Boy Leaves Home,” which appeared in _The New Caravan_
(1936). The portrait of the gang of Negro boys in the South is done
with robust understanding. Swimming in a pool posted “No Trespassing,”
which meant “No dogs and niggers allowed,” the boys are caught by a
white man. In a fight after one of the boys has been shot, Big Boy gets
possession of the man’s rifle, and when the white man lunges for it,
Big Boy shoots him. His pal, Bobo, is caught and lynched. The terror of
the community before Big Boy is spirited away is graphically conveyed.
“Big Boy Leaves Home” is well informed realism, rendered with power and
originality.
Without the distinction of Wright’s technique, Waters Edward Turpin’s
_These Low Grounds_ (1937) is still extremely promising. For the first
time a Negro novelist tells the story of four generations of Negroes.
Thoroughly conversant with the life of the farmers and crabbers and
oyster shuckers of the Eastern Shore, Turpin has had the courage to
handle this life without idealization, without shame, but with full
sympathy. The story has its bitterness and sharp protest. Poverty
is omnipresent, and oppression. The town of Shrewsbury is really
Salisbury, ill-famed because of a recent lynching, and Turpin describes
this tragedy. His characters, for all of their illiteracy and squalor,
have dogged courage. Less successful in his hasty sketches of the life
of better off Negroes in the big cities, Turpin’s novel still belongs
with the best novels by Negro authors.
_Summary._ If many of the foregoing books have contained lynchings,
this may partly be explained as a natural reaction to books that have
stressed the contented, comical or quaintly picturesque Negro in a
sunny South which “understands him.” It is important that American
novelists are revealing the tragic in Negro experience. This has been
present from the earliest, and honest observers know that it has been
met with fortitude and struggle. Some novelists have recorded the
brutality and shame as part of a tragic America; others show the Negro
resisting heroically; and still others, hoping for social justice, are
urging solidarity of all of the oppressed. They indicate a new and
momentous trend in modern literature. It is a trend that makes the
way easier for Negro novelists who, coming of age in technique and
understanding, will find an audience ready for the important stories
that still must be told.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. What subjects tabooed in the South are treated in the novels of this
chapter?
2. Why is it natural to expect that many southern novels would stress
violence?
3. What is the advantage of the “multiple novel” in setting forth a
community’s life?
4. List the “exceptional” negroes in the books of this chapter.
5. What differentiates the radical novelists from the realists who show
the pattern of violence?
6. Compare the newer realists among Negroes with the apologist and the
Harlem school.
CHAPTER XII
HISTORICAL FICTION
The present vogue of historical fiction has given new impetus to the
long-standing interest in the Old South and the Negro. The African
slave-trade, the antebellum and the reconstruction South are popular
hunting grounds. Some novelists continue the plantation tradition,
some, the antislavery tradition, and many others, in the spirit of
regionalism, seek the truth of their sectional pasts, without apology
and without indictment.
_The Slave Trade._ The ghastly middle passage, the shackled mobs
below the hatches, the lack of water, the plagues, are background for
novels like Mary Johnston’s _The Slave Ship_ (1924), and George King’s
_The Last Slaver_ (1936). Deeper pity and understanding inform _The
Trader’s Wife_ (1930) by Jean Kenyon McKenzie. A sheltered Newport girl
confronted by the traffic--“Wretched blacks at sea, packed in trays
like dead fish, stinking like fish, some of them to die ... and to be
cast in the sea”--is broken in Africa by the misery of the barracoon.
As her last gesture before she dies she sets free a contingent of
slaves.
With the dawn there came a wailing on the river--as the canoes
multiplied at the landing--the high desolate wailing that is the voice
of the sorrows of Africa.... It was the slaves come down the river
into the barracoon.
Hervey Allen’s _Anthony Adverse_ (1933) describes the barracoons
through which “Africa was poured into America,” the serpent-like line
composed of hundreds of naked, human bodies rubbed slimy for their
approaching sale with palm oil and rancid butter.... Bamboo withes
stretched from one tight neck-fork to another.... Hovering about it,
and along its flanks were white-robed Arabs with rhinoceros-hide whips.
The bartering, with slaves coquettish, or compliant, or sullen, or
tiger-like, the inspections and the packing on the slave-ships are
fully pictured, obviously after a great deal of research. But it
strikes one as historical pageantry rather than tragedy.
In _Babouk_ (1934), Guy Endore concentrates upon the shocking features
of the slave-trade: the captives “lying shoulder to shoulder, feet
pointing toward the center, not only chained in pairs, but each
pair attached to a great chain--a gigantic necklace of blacks”; the
separated tribesmen forced to sing and dance--“a centipede dancing,
chains clanking”; opthalmy and other epidemics ravaging the hold.
“Nigger-tasters,” telling the slaves’ condition by their sweat, and
other connoisseurs of black flesh winnowed out the drugged, the
doctored; only the finest were fit to be slaves. After horrible life
on San Domingo plantations the slaves revolt. Based upon considerable
research, convincing in its descriptions of the slave-trade, of African
tales and customs, and of West Indian plantations, _Babouk_ is still
more than a historical romance. It is a revolutionary novel, bitterly
opposed to imperialism and the contemporary slavery of any race.
_The Plantation Tradition._ But Endore is unusual; Joseph Hergesheimer
is much more typical. In _Quiet Cities_ (1927) he yearns for the return
of the past, based on slavery--for which “I’d be happy to pay--with
everything, everything the wasted present holds.” In his picture slaves
do little other than raise soft staves of song, or play quoits, or
fiddle, or sleep. The only ugly feature is an ill-smelling slave-den,
for which a transplanted northerner is responsible. Emancipation was
a failure since “a free Negro is more often wretched than not.”
Reconstruction was ignominious: Negro legislators dared to utter shouts
of laughter, with “incredible feet elevated on the desks” in southern
state capitols. Mingo Harth, a vicious Negro politician worthy of
Thomas Dixon, is called a “symbol of Union, a black seal on the fate of
South Carolina.”
Most of the historical romances repeat these patterns with little
variation. Dealing with the times of George Washington, _Princess
Malah_ (1933), by a Negro author, John H. Hill, subscribes in the
main to the plantation tradition of humaneness, mutual affection
and lavishness. Frances Griswold’s _The Tides of Malvern_ (1930)
and Caroline Gordon’s _Penhally_ (1931) recount the long history of
southern families with Negro characters in the background, where they
stay correctly. A few step out of the picture after Sherman’s march,
but the majority will not be moved. In Mary Johnston’s _Miss Delicia
Allen_ (1933) both Negro slaves and white owners are conventionally
drawn.
Somewhat similar to Cable’s _Madame Delphine_ is E. Laroque Tinker’s
_Toucoutou_ (1928). After being married to a white man, Toucoutou is
proved in court to be partly Negro. In bitter envy, Negroes satirize
her in street-songs; whites condemn her because her marriage means
that “a black flood will rush through the crevasse that will sully
white purity and retard our civilization a thousand years.” The
picture of New Orleans is not idyllic; the yellow fever epidemic, the
exotic _bamboula_, _calinda_ and _counjaille_ danced in the _Place
Congo_, and other customs of New Orleans are vividly described. With
some sympathy for his heroine, Tinker yields at times to the doubtful
traditions about the mulatto. _Old New Orleans_ (1931) by E. Laroque
Tinker and Frances Tinker presents minor and familiar Negro characters.
Life on the lower Mississippi, in a later period is in Edna Ferber’s
_Show-Boat_ (1926), which has a few Negroes singing the plaintive songs
of their “wronged race,” and a melodramatic scene involving an octoroon.
_Look Back to Glory_ (1933) by Herbert Ravenel Sass is worshipful
of the duelling cavaliers and glamorous women of low-country South
Carolina, “a paradise ... the proud, the knightly South.” Slavery is
called a godsend to elevate the Negro from barbarism. The subtle poison
of slavery was the “inevitable” miscegenation, “invited nine-tenths of
the time” by Negro girls, and guaranteeing “the purity of the southern
women of education and family.” Best characterized of the Negroes is
Vienna, a beautiful quadroon, to whom “curtsying did not come easy.”
The others are conventional, grateful for the godsend.
The Civil War has long been a favorite subject for historical
novelists, but earlier novels like Winston Churchill’s _The Crisis_
(1901), Upton Sinclair’s _Manassas_ (1904) and Mary Johnston’s _The
Long Roll_ (1911) and _Cease Firing_ (1912) are little concerned
with deepening the characterization of the Negro. _The Battleground_
(1902) by Ellen Glasgow, has many of the standbys of the plantation
tradition--the noble hero who deplores slavery, the wretched free Negro
and the giant slave who rescues his master (one of the most familiar
battle activities from “Marse Chan” to _So Red The Rose_.) Recent Civil
War novels like Caroline Gordon’s _None Shall Look Back_ (1936) and
Clifford Dowdey’s _Bugles Blow No More_ (1936) are skillfully written
and based upon research, but the latter does not particularly extend to
Negro characters.
The slaves in _Old Miss_ (1929) by T. Bowyer Campbell are “like
children, trusting, expecting, receiving everything as a matter of
course from their masters.” The hero is proslavery, only because of
altruism: “What would the poor things do without us to care for them,
and see that they pass peaceful, useful lives?” When Aunt Christian is
told that she is free, she angrily hits her informant with a stick,
like the ancient tyrants upon hearing bad news. Roark Bradford’s
_Kingdom Coming_ (1933) likewise carries the thesis that freedom was
a mistake. Aunt Free buys her freedom and then does not want it;
Telegram is set free by a Yankee firing squad; free Negroes die like
flies in concentration camps. There is an interesting account of the
“blind Underground” which held out false hopes of freedom that ended
in murder. That the freed Negro is little better off than the slave is
true in sections that Bradford should know very well, but it hardly
seems a defense of slavery. Promising “the true story of slavery and
the true story of freedom,” _Kingdom Coming_ merely gives some good
local color of plantation life and voodoo, to support the century-old
beliefs advanced in _Swallow Barn_.
Stark Young has shown a knowledge of certain types of Negroes in
sketches like “The Poorhouse Goes to The Circus” (1929) and _Heaven
Trees_ (1926). His best seller, _So Red The Rose_ (1934), is a
melancholy recital of the folk-tales that southerners heard in their
youth. The war blown along by northern and southern windbags destroys
“a gracious system of living that has seldom seen its equal.” Negroes,
in spite of “fetid ... old maid idealism” had their best place in that
system. A typical old faithful, William Veal, seeks his dead master
on the battlefield at night; he felt the hair of the corpses until he
found him: “he knew him by his hair; you know how fine it was.” In
contrast are the Negro soldiers--grog-filled burners and looters--and
the ingrates who run off to the Yankees and are stricken with plagues.
Written in skillful, disarming prose, _So Red The Rose_ nevertheless
remains a thrice-told tale.
Elliot Crayton McCants in _White Oak Farm_ (1928) gives the traditional
picture of Reconstruction, though with less rancor than Page and Dixon.
_Bottom Rail On Top_ (1935) by H. J. Eckenrode is a less orthodox
novel, not in the “bloody-shirt” tradition. Negroes scatter after
emancipation and learn fast in reconstruction. The hero is often shown
siding with the Negroes and radicals in the brawling.
Not fooled by all of the hallowed creeds of the South, Margaret
Mitchell in the best-selling _Gone With The Wind_ (1937) accepts
whole-heartedly the traditional estimate of the Negro. “Slaves were
neither miserable nor unfortunate.... There never had been a slave sold
from Tara and only one whipping.” Mammy, Dilcey, Toby and the other
house-servants, proud of their quality white-folks, disdainful of field
hands, “free issues” and poor whites, have been with us time and time
again. Slaves who were different were “mean.” The “least energetic,
trustworthy and intelligent and most vicious and brutal” were the ones
who left the plantation to enjoy a long “carnival of idleness and theft
and insolence” interrupted only by plagues in crowded Atlanta. Negro
insults range from “looking impudent” and being “uppity to a lady” to
assuming Anglo-Saxon prerogatives:
In the legislature ... they spent most of their time eating goobers
and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes. They
frolicked....
But the intelligent house-servants, the highest caste, spoke the
correct, heart-warming lines:
Ah done had nuff freedom. Ah wants somebody to feed me good vittles
reglar an’ tell me what ter do an’ what not ter do, an’ look affer me
when Ah gets sick.
Needless to say, the Klan is as knightly here as in _The Authentic
History of the Ku Klux Klan_, an authentic hymn of praise.
_Summary._ DuBose Heyward has written: “This relationship [between
master and slave] has been sentimentalized and utilized _ad nauseam_
in writing of the slave period.” The plots of the foregoing books are
uninventive, and the characters and situations are repeated over and
over. Aristocrats and house-servants still monopolize attention, as if
the many “yeoman” farmers and field-hands had not existed. With the
hindsight of the present, secession is admitted to have been bad, but
although most of the aristocrats detested slavery (in principle), the
intelligent Negroes detested freedom (in principle and practise) and
the romancers agree with the Negroes. The very infrequent floggings
are the work of uncouth overseers, who are knocked down by blooded
cavaliers. Fugitive slaves have been spirited away from these books.
Faithful servants bring back dead heroes from battlefields, bury the
silver, despise the Yankees and prefer to work for their ex-masters
without wages. Unfaithful slaves, corrupted from their childish virtue,
run away to die in concentration camps, or loot, insult and rape.
Negroes who bought land, rushed to schools and proved freedom to be
no mistake, are non-existent, in spite of the record. An unpartisan
historian writes:
These Reconstruction governments erected public school systems;
democratized local and county units, created public social services,
and sought to distribute tax burdens equitably.
But in these books the legislatures are composed of a few depraved
Northerners, and a mob of Negroes who did little else but put their
feet upon desks and “eat peanuts by the peck.” The Freedmen’s Bureau is
villainous, the Klan reproachless, organized to preserve chastity, not
for political and economic control.
It is wrong to assume that these books are merely pageants of a
departed past; they definitely further attitudes that justify the worst
kind of contemporary reaction. Their popularity is a dangerous sign.
Based on the principle that the many must be kept “in their place” for
the good of the few, they encourage slavery in a world where slaves are
still too numerous.
_The Anti-Slavery Tradition._ But there is a party of opposition which,
like Emerson, has cried “fiddle-faddle to the Old South.” In the
tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion Tourgée, some twentieth
century authors have described the tragedy of slavery, and have dealt
with heroes and heroines who would not buckle under.
Rowland E. Robinson, in _Out of Bondage and Other Stories_ (collected
posthumously in 1936) records the heroism and drama of the Underground
Railroad in Vermont where slaves on their way to Canada were hidden
in loaded sleighs and wagons, or stowed away in attics or barnlofts
or deserted sugar-houses. John E. Paynter’s _Fugitives of the Pearl_
(1930) one of the few historic romances by Negro authors, deals with
the escape of seventy-seven Negroes from Washington aboard the _Pearl_,
whose captain was an abolitionist. A Negro informer gave away their
plot, and they were captured down the Potomac. Of the old school in
technique, _Fugitives of the Pearl_ is more fictionalized history than
a re-creation of characters and settings. But the precarious life of
Negroes in antebellum Washington, “the seat and center of the slave
trade” is truthfully presented.
_The Railroad to Freedom_ (1932) by Hildegarde Swift is the
fictionalized biography of Harriet Tubman, the most famous agent
of the Underground Railroad, and a nurse and scout with the Union
troops. Supposed to be a story for children, _The Railroad to_
_Freedom_ is still one of the best records of an important movement
and a fascinating heroine of American history. One of America’s
finest historical novels, _God’s Angry Man_ (1933) by Leonard Ehrlich
re-creates the life and times of John Brown. There is unusual sympathy
in the treatment of the Negro characters. These are Frederick Douglass,
who is willing to use violence against slavers but not against a
government arsenal, realizing bitterly that too many Negroes, broken
by slavery, wanted only “hot yams and a roof and not to be beaten”;
“Emperor” Green, who, in spite of Douglass’ logic, says the historic
“I b’lieve I go wid de ole man”; Harriet Tubman, the splendid, wanted
“dead or alive, and ten thousand dollars would be paid for the body”;
William Still, who knew more about the “underground” than any man in
the land, saying to Brown “You free them, I’ll lead them out”; John
Copeland, mulatto student at Oberlin, who left his garret lamp of
learning for an even finer light, and Dangerfield Newby, killed in
action, with a wife in the far South who was never to be redeemed. All
of these are brought to life in a moving book.
_Black Thunder_ (1936) by Arna Bontemps likewise bears witness to a
staunch desire to be free--a fact of the Negro’s past that most of
the historical romancers have not cared to record. _Black Thunder_
deals with Gabriel’s Rebellion in the Virginia of 1800. Gabriel, the
strongest slave of Henrico county, is courageous as well:
I been studying about freedom a heap, me. I heard a plenty folks talk
and I listened a heap.... Something keep telling me that anything
what’s equal to a gray squirrel wants to be free.
Stimulated by the example of Touissant in Haiti and by the propaganda
of the _Amis des Noirs_ and exasperated by an act of cruelty, Gabriel
leads eleven hundred slaves upon Richmond. A storm postpones the
attack, and the treachery of Pharaoh and Ben does the rest. The leaders
are hanged, Gabriel’s sweetheart Juba is sold to the deep South, and
Ben goes on driving the cariole for the aristocrats. In addition to
Gabriel, other Negroes are excellently characterized: Ben, the docile,
gray-headed house-boy; Melody, the quadroon darling of rich planters’
sons; Juba, handsome and spirited, sole woman on the march; Mingo,
whose personal freedom is not enough; and Bundy, who “kept drinking
up all that rum because he couldn’t get up enough nerve to make his
get-away.” _Black Thunder_ does not have the urgent passion of _God’s
Angry Man_; it is elegy rather than a tocsin of revolt, but it is a
fine American historical novel.
_Realism._ In _Look Homeward, Angel_ Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical
hero decries
The romantic halo ... the whole fantastic distortion of that
period where people were said to live in mansions and slavery was
a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming,
the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his
happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, beautiful, all
men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger,
death-mocking cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of
the barren spiritual wilderness ... when their cheap mythology, their
legend of the charm of their manners, the aristocratic culture ...
made him writhe ... so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of
their antagonism, that he still pretended the most fantastic devotion
to them.
Many other southerners of Wolfe’s generation, as seen in the previous
chapter, have recognized the barren spiritual wilderness; others have
repudiated or at least humanized the legend.
John Peale Bishop, although not so outspoken as Wolfe and Faulkner,
approaches the legend realistically in _Many Thousands Gone_ (1930),
stories of the Civil War and postwar years. Just as the southerners are
not marvels of gallantry and beauty, the Negroes, while certainly not
flattered, are recognizable products of slavery. One old woman while
her mistress lies dead is more worried about her promised freedom than
grief-stricken; a sullen girl blazes forth her hatred of her carping
mistress, and leaves to cook for the Yankees, for whose love-making
she has been prepared by her experiences with southern gentlemen. In
one symbolic story, Bones, a marvelous cook, gives two old Virginia
ladies a feeling of security; in reality a lunatic, he is submissive
and devoted, and they are willing to live in terror as long as they can
live in the tradition, their dear “obsession.”
Christopher Ward’s _Jonathan Drew, A Rolling Stone_ (1932), and _A
Yankee Rover_ (1932) carry the Yankee hero all over early nineteenth
century America. One dramatic section shows Drew saving two slaves from
border ruffians who were running a “blind underground” and fomenting
a slave insurrection in order to plunder the countryside. _A Yankee
Rover_ deals more fully with slavery; one of the episodes involves
Tommy, the little “white nigger,” whose aristocratic father does not
leave him free.
What d’ye say to a nigger that ain’t no color at all cause he’s white
... as white as any on ye an’ whiter than most ... with straight silky
hair, no kinks at all, an yaller hair at that, golden yaller, an’ blue
eyes? Ef that ain’t jest a natural curiosity.... Pass up lot 56, Mr.
Barnes.
As we have seen the “blind underground” intrigues both the realists and
the defenders of the Old South, who traditionally isolate criminals as
the agents of the underground railroad. The “blind underground” did
exist as a profitable enterprise for such gangs as Murrel’s, but this
hardly explains the neglect of the genuine underground that carried
thousands of slaves to the North. The workings of this system appear
incidentally in MacKinlay Kantor’s _Arouse and Beware_ (1936). In this
impartial and accurate narrative we have most interesting descriptions
of the “Right Sort of People,” “The Sons of America,” both whites and
Negroes, who with their grips and passwords and secret hiding places
enable three fugitives to get to the Union lines. One slave woman, in
a low tone, gives them valuable information, and then, to fool her
curious children, curses them. The narrator says:
There was a canniness about these slaves which I had never imagined
before. I had thought them barbaric or stupid or lazy ... and
doubtless many of them were. And many others, too, were loyal to their
masters and the Confederacy; but somehow I cannot hear jubilee singers
chanting of Moses, and bondage and their freedom from it, without
thinking of this thin, brown-faced wench, with her high shoulders and
long straight arms....
Andrew Lytle’s “Mister McGregor” (1936) is a first-rate story of
slavery. Rhears, “no common field-hand, but proud, black and spoiled”
had “fretted and sulled” over McGregor’s whipping his wife Bella, and
rather than run away, he decides to have it out with his owner. In one
of the best fights of “frontier” realism, Rhears is stabbed by his
master. The teller says of Rhears
I never seen such guts in nobody, nigger or white man.... Rhears spoke
so low you could hardly hear him: “Marster, if you hadn’t got me, I’d
a got you.”
In Lytle’s _The Long Night_ (1936) Negroes are only incidental, but
the organized stealing of slaves by a band of frontier criminals is
important to the plot.
A young southerner muses disgustedly in Evelyn Scott’s _Migrations_
(1927): “How close we come to the niggers without knowing anything
about them.” Being aware that merely “coming close” is not knowledge,
Mrs. Scott presents convincing Negro characters. Silas is filled
with hatred for the white father of his sweetheart Fanny’s baby. But
conditioned to respect his master, as Fanny had done to her sorrow,
he persuades himself that the overseer was responsible. His sullen
disobedience causes him to be lashed and he takes to the woods. Bosh
is a less successful runaway; a half-wit, he frightens a white girl
and is caught by a mob and burned to death. Of a very different type is
Eugenia De Negre Blair, a brilliant and handsome adventuress, who has a
trace of Negro blood. Without the emphasis of the abolitionists, Mrs.
Scott still records the uneasy and tragic aspects of slavery.
In _The Wave_ (1929), a series of chronicles of the Civil War, the
stories of Eugenia and Silas are continued. One of the best sections
shows the Negroes swarming to Sherman’s army; Aunt Nancy, to whom the
army means food but who has given too much strength to slavery to live
to see the promised land of freedom; Dilsy, who hopes that life-long
drudgery is over; Lou, apologetic because her religious master had
influenced her; Anna, bold and ready; and Uncle Vic, who has been
sold to one “mean piece uv trash after another.” When the Federals,
realizing that the horde of fugitives is more than they bargained for,
tear up the pontoon bridges, they discover that the horde still presses
on to freedom. “Gawd, you gotta shoot ’em to stop ’em.” There is
symbolism in both the despairing cry of the Negroes left on the bank:
“My home is ovah Jawdon,” and the callousness of the Yankee who thinks:
“If we could only let them drown. Dam ’em, they get over their Jordan,
but we have to carry ’em.”
In _A Calendar of Sin_ (1931), Mrs. Scott re-creates the
Reconstruction: the Klan, determined to return the Negro to
slavery--where was the tobacco to come from?--flogging Negroes,
destroying schools, hounding Yankees; and the carpet-baggers, more
intent on wealth and politics than on helping the impoverished,
ignorant and often shiftless Negroes--both pretending high idealism to
cover up lurking meanness. Good comedy is in the episode of the old
Auntie, who suspicious of Yankees anyway, leaves the new school in
high dudgeon because, instead of learning to read the Bible right-off,
she is started on the alphabet. There is a powerful narrative about
a mulatto lynched for assault. Some Negroes, taught by “the raw-hide
whip on their naked backs” betray the Union League and deny that they
want the vote and book-learning. Others show a grasp of the developing
folk-belief that everything mean and bad in the South “comes to us fru
de Yankees.” Although the narratives are called “American Melodramas,”
Mrs. Scott portrays neither villains nor heroes but sensitively
understood human beings. And that is why, for truth to an era and a
section, her work is immeasurably superior to such real melodramas as
_Gone With the Wind_.
T. S. Stribling’s earlier _Birthright_ is excelled by his trilogy
of a southern family: _The Forge_ (1931), _The Store_ (1933) and
_Unfinished Cathedral_ (1934). In _The Forge_, the pictures of slave
life and character are among the most convincing in American fiction.
The plantation tradition gets short shrift. Old man Vaiden runs a
one-horse, two-mule farm, but calls himself a “gentleman” since he owns
five Negroes. A hard-fisted, hard drinking, bull-headed, irascible
Primitive Baptist, blustering in north Alabama dialect instead of
in cultured phrases, he wins some liking and, more important, is a
credible human being. To Vaiden, as to so many farmers “on the make,”
slavery meant “working the daylight out of slaves.” The slaves’ food is
little more than corn-dodgers and bacon, and the boasted medical care
is what “would be given a sick calf.” Attached to the family and farm
by lifelong ties, the slaves still want freedom. While George is being
praised as devoted, he is nursing hatred against his master.
Gracie Vaiden stands out. Although friendly with her white
half-sisters, she broods over slavery. She feels that the flogging of
her husband
transformed her from a kind of tentative wife of Solomon into a brood
mare ... changed Solomon into a stud; and her child, if she and
Solomon had a child, into a little animal.
She reasons correctly; she is ravished by Miltiades Vaiden who does not
know that he is her half-brother. On the eve of secession she would
have been sold to clear up her father’s debts if she had not escaped
to the Yankee lines. Stribling’s pictures of the Reconstruction,
especially of the Klan, are likewise unorthodox and authentic.
In _The Store_ Gracie Vaiden, who has been the mistress first of the
Yankee lieutenant who becomes governor of Alabama, and then of a
white merchant, a pillar of the church, works so that her octoroon
son can escape the shame she has met with as a Negro. From the start,
however, we see that Touissaint is doomed. “The most despisable nigger
in Florence,” he will not run from bullying white boys, hates shining
shoes, and insists upon honest dealing in the store, standing up for
a whole pound when “everybody knows a nigger pound is about twelve
ounces.” Come of age, he tries to vote, but his blue eyes and blond
hair do not prove that his grandfather was free; and he fights a
“cracker” who insults his mother. Just as his mother was put on the
block because her white half-sisters and brothers ran up bills at the
store, so Touissaint loses all of his year’s work because his landlord
(and father) messes up a business deal. As an end to his rebellious
career he is lynched. While Gracie is cutting down his body, “A dozen
drunken voices in the mob broke into laughter at the downfall of the
Negro mother and her dead son.” His father furnishes the mules and
wagon to carry him away. Other Negro characters are surly, cunning and
aware of what is being done to them: “If dey shawt weight you too much,
wras’le wid de Lawd about hit in prayah”.... “If a white man di’n fly
into uh niggah tull he done somepin to him, all us niggahs be settin’
in easy chairs.” Stribling presents with fine sympathy the Negro urchin
who announced the miracle: “I can write my name....” Lucy, Touissaint’s
wife, prefers farming to domestic service. She thereby astounds the
ex-planters to whom these “uppish” Negroes who want independence and
education are “unnatural, highly affected and utterly absurd ... the
new uncomfortable colored people.”
In _Unfinished Cathedral_ the Negro characters are shown to be more
and more progressive and educated, but still subjected to indecency
from both upper-class and hoodlum whites. Militant Negroes are now in
the picture; even beneath their grotesque robes, the lodge brothers
carry guns. There is a frame-up very similar to the Scottsboro case;
the bankers, realtors, sheriffs, judges, and even clergy are shown to
be closely related to lynching mobs. One of the boys hustled off a
train is Gracie’s great-grandson. To Miltiades Vaiden, now eminently
respectable, Gracie cries out:
What colored relations? I was born to my mother, old Hannah, long
after Old Pap sold off her husband Jericho! I’m not white for nothing!
Aunt Creasy told me long ago that my father was Old Pap, the same as
yours! Toussaint, the son I had by you, was nothing but a Vaiden on
both sides. The child Lucy had by Toussaint, the son you hanged, I
named Marcia; and Marcia’s boy you’re holding in jail this minute. Who
would my grandchild come back to see except white people, Miltiades?
To these words the old Colonel replies: “Shame on you, Gracie ...
talking disrespectfully like this.” In spite of some faults, such as
the stretched coincidences, this trilogy is remarkable for the honesty,
courage and sympathy with which a southern author has faced the past.
William Faulkner’s “The Raid” (1934) describes the blowing up of the
bridges to destroy the Negroes following Sherman’s army, a scene
relished by southerners as symbolic, but the slave boy Ringo and
the doggedly marching contrabands are excellently done. Thoroughly
conversant with the old South, Faulkner has created in _Absalom,
Absalom!_ (1936) a credible and powerful, if at times fantastic novel
out of “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales” and old letters. From the
bleak hills of western Virginia where the cabins were “boiling with
children,” Thomas Sutpen comes to frontier Mississippi, “a country
of lawless opportunity.” Naked, plastered over with muck against
mosquitoes, he and his “wild Negroes tore a plantation out of the
wilderness ... dragged a house and garden out of the virgin swamp.”
But the Sutpen line is doomed. Charles Bon, Sutpen’s son by a woman in
Haiti, who was discarded because she had a “spot of Negro blood,” is
murdered to keep him from marrying Sutpen’s daughter (the incest was
less abhorred than the miscegenation). The Sutpen fortunes decline,
until at the last we see Jim Bond, Charles Bon’s mulatto grandson,
lurking around the ashes of the destroyed mansion. A Mississippi “Fall
of the House of Usher,” _Absalom, Absalom!_ seems in part an allegory
of slavery. Negro characters, whether the savages so like their wild
master, or Clytie, Sutpen’s mulatto daughter, who could be neither
tamed nor freed, or Charles Bon, most elegant cavalier and yet of Negro
blood; or Charles’ son, who in self-laceration turns completely to
Negroes, are original and convincing, “living creatures, living flesh
to feel pain and writhe and cry out.”
_Conclusion._ A northerner in _Absalom, Absalom!_ ironical at the
tyranny of the southern legends, says:
What is it? Something you live and breathe in like air?... A kind of
entailed birthright ... of never forgiving General Sherman, so that
forevermore as long as your children’s children produce children you
won’t be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed
in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?
Faulkner himself has felt the fascination of the plantation birthright,
but he determined to be honest in spite of tradition. Of a different
order of genius, he still belongs with his fellow southerners Stribling
and Evelyn Scott, who are trying above all else to give a truthful
reinterpretation of the old South, and therefore of the Negro. Their
work is by no means completely adequate, but together with the work of
other honest, sympathetic writers, northern and southern, Negro and
white, historical novelists or recorders of contemporary America, it
gives promise that the Negro character in fiction may meet with the
justice that has been so long deferred.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Since slavery has been abolished, what social policy is served by
the continued defense of the plantation tradition?
2. List similar characters and incidents in the plantation tradition
novels of this chapter.
3. Describe the antislavery heroes mentioned as the plantation
tradition would characterize them.
4. Why are so many southern aristocrats in these books shown as
opponents of slavery?
5. Account for the best-selling qualities of _So Red the Rose_ and
_Gone With The Wind_.
6. Defend, attack, or qualify: “Since these historical romances
are based on research, they must be truthful about Negro life and
character.”
7. What are the contributions of Stribling and Evelyn Scott to the
southern historical novel?
SELECTED READING LIST
_Books_
1. Barton, Rebecca Chalmers: _Race Consciousness and The American
Negro_--Arnold Busck, Copenhagen--1934.
2. Boynton, Percy H.: _Literature and American Life_--Ginn & Co., New
York--1936.
3. Brawley, Benjamin Griffith: _The Negro in Literature and
Art_--Duffield and Co., New York--1929, revised and enlarged to _The
Negro Genius_--Dodd, Mead & Co., New York--1937.
4. Calverton, V. F.: _The Liberation of American Literature_--Chas.
Scribner’s Sons, New York--1932.
5. DuBois, W. E. B.: _The Gift of Black Folk_--The Stratford Co.,
Boston--1924.
6. Edgar, Pelham: _The Art of the Novel_--The Macmillan Co., New
York--1933.
7. Ford, Nick Aaron: _The Contemporary Negro Novel_--Meador Co.,
Boston--1936.
8. Gaines, Francis Pendleton: _The Southern Plantation_--Columbia
University Press, New York--1925.
9. Green, Elizabeth Lay: _The Negro in Contemporary American
Literature_--The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill--1928.
10. Hartwick, Harry: _The Foreground of American Fiction_--American
Book Co., New York--1934.
11. Hatcher, Harlan: _Creating The Modern American Novel_--Farrar and
Rinehart, New York--1935.
12. Hicks, Granville: _The Great Tradition_--The Macmillan Co., New
York--1933.
13. Lewissohn, Ludwig: _Expression In America_--Harper & Bros., New
York--1932.
14. Linn, James Weber, and Taylor, Houghton Wells: _A Foreword to
Fiction_--D. Appleton-Century Co., New York--1935.
15. Locke, Alain: _The New Negro_--A. & C. Boni, New York--1925.
16. Loggins, Vernon: _The Negro Author_--Columbia University Press,
New York--1931.
17. Loggins, Vernon: _I Hear America_--Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New
York--1937.
18. Nelson, John Herbert: _The Negro Character In American
Literature_--University of Kansas, Lawrence--1926.
19. Parrington, V. F.: _Main Currents in American Thought_--Harcourt,
Brace & Co., New York--1930.
20. Pattee, Fred Lewis: _The Development of the American Short
Story_--Harper & Bros., New York--1923.
21. Pattee, Fred Lewis: _The First Century of American Literature,
1770-1870_--D. Appleton, Century Co., New York--1935.
22. Pattee, Fred Lewis: _A History of American Literature Since
1870_--The Century Co., New York--1915.
23. Quinn, Arthur Hobson: _American Fiction_--D. Appleton, Century
Co., New York--1936.
24. Turner, Lorenzo Dow: _Anti-slavery Sentiment in American
Literature Prior to 1865_--The Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History, Inc., Washington--1929.
25. Van Doren, Carl: _The American Novel_--The Macmillan Co., New
York--1931.
_Articles_
1. Braithwaite, William Stanley: “The Negro In American Literature” in
_The New Negro_, edited by Alain Locke--A. & C. Boni, New York--1925.
2. Brawley, Benjamin Griffith: “The Negro In American Fiction”
in _Anthology of American Negro Literature_, edited by V. F.
Calverton--The Modern Library, New York--1929.
3. Brown, Sterling A.: “Negro Characters As Seen By White Authors”
in _Journal of Negro Education_ (April, 1933),--Howard University,
Washington, D. C.
4. Brown, Sterling A.: “Our Literary Audience” in _Opportunity, a
Journal of Negro Life_, February, 1930.
5. Brown, Sterling A.: “The Literary Scene: Chronicle and Comment” in
_Opportunity, a Journal of Negro Life_ from 1930-36.
6. Burke, Kenneth: “The Negro’s Pattern of Life” in _The Saturday
Review of Literature_, July 29, 1933.
7. Chamberlain, John: “The Negro As Writer” in _The Bookman_, Vol.
LXX, February, 1930.
8. Clay, Eugene: “The Negro In Recent American Literature” in
_American Writers’ Congress_, edited by Henry Hart--International
Publishers, Inc., New York--1935.
9. Davidson, Donald: “The Trend of Literature” in _Culture In The
South_, edited by W. T. Couch--University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill--1935.
10. Davis, Allison: “Our Negro Intellectuals” in _The Crisis_, August,
1928.
11. Farrell, James T.: “The Short Story” in _American Writers’
Congress_, edited by Henry Hart--International Publishers, Inc., New
York--1935.
12. Gordon, Eugene: “Social and Political Problems of the
Negro Writer” in _American Writers’ Congress_, edited by Henry
Hart--International Publishers, Inc., New York--1935.
13. Gruening, Martha: “The Negro Renaissance” in _Hound and Horn_,
April-June, 1932.
14. Johnson, Guy: “Folk Values in Recent Literature on the Negro” in
_Folk-Say_, edited by B. A. Botkin--University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman--1930.
15. Locke, Alain: “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and
Literature” in _The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science_, Vol. CXXXX, November, 1928.
16. Locke, Alain: “Negro Youth Speaks” in _The New Negro_, edited by
Alain Locke--A. & C. Boni, New York--1925.
17. Locke, Alain: “Retrospective Reviews” (annual surveys of books in
_Opportunity, a Journal of Negro Life_, from 1929 to date.)
18. T. K. Whipple: “The Negro and Modern Literature” in _Creative
Reading_, Vol. III, No. 11, Institute of Current Literature,
Cambridge, Mass.--1929.
19. White, Walter: “Negro Literature” in _American Writers On American
Literature_, edited by John Macy--Horace Liveright, Inc., New
York--1931.
20. Woodson, Carter G.: “The Negro and American Literature” in _The
African Background Outlined_ by Carter G. Woodson--The Association For
The Study of Negro Life and History, Washington, D. C.--1936.
21. Wright, Richard: “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in _New Challenge_,
Fall, 1937.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.
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