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

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.