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Title: The Negro in American fiction

Author: Sterling A. Brown

Editor: Alain Locke

Release date: July 12, 2023 [eBook #71171]

Language: English

Original publication: United States: Kennikat Press, 1938

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71171

Credits: Alan, Tim Lindell and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
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*** 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:
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.

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