THE NEGRO
IN AMERICAN FICTION
_by_
STERLING BROWN
KENNIKAT PRESS, INC./PORT WASHINGTON, N. Y.
KENNIKAT PRESS SERIES IN NEGRO CULTURE AND HISTORY
THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN FICTION
Copyright 1937 by Associates in Negro Folk Education
Reissued in 1968 by Kennikat Press
Library of Congress Catalog Card No: 68-25492
Manufactured in the United States of America
EDITORIAL FOREWORD
This Bronze Booklet aims at a survey of the Negro in American fiction,
both as character and author. It is the first full-length presentation
of this subject, but differs from the usual academic survey by giving
a penetrating analysis of the social factors and attitudes behind
the various schools and periods considered. Sterling A. Brown, now
associate professor of English at Howard University, born and educated
in Washington, D. C., was graduated from Williams College in 1922 with
Phi Beta Kappa honors and the Clark Fellowship to Harvard, received his
master’s degree at Harvard in 1923, and has since pursued graduate work
in English literature at Harvard University. He has had wide experience
teaching at Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, Va., 1923-26,
at Lincoln University, Mo., 1926-28, Fisk University, 1928-29, and at
Howard University from 1929 to date. His volume of verse, _Southern
Road_, published in 1932, put him in the advance-guard of younger
Negro poets, and, as well, the then new school of American regionalist
literature. In 1937, Professor Brown was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship for creative writing and among other things, will complete
for publication his second volume of verse, “_No Hiding Place_.” Since
1936, he has been directing editor on Negro materials of the _Federal
Writers’ Project_ at Washington headquarters. For the last five years,
his literary book review comments in _Opportunity_ under the caption:
“_The Literary Scene_,” have revealed a critical talent of sane but
progressive and unacademic tendencies,--a point of view that the reader
will find characteristically carried through in this provocative and
masterly study.
ALAIN LOCKE
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE
Introduction 1
I. EARLY APPEARANCES 5
II. THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY
FICTION 17
III. ANTISLAVERY FICTION 31
IV. RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS
SOUTH 49
V. RECONSTRUCTION: THE NOT SO GLORIOUS
SOUTH 64
VI. OLD PATHS 84
VII. COUNTER-PROPAGANDA--BEGINNING
REALISM 100
VIII. REALISM AND THE FOLK 115
IX. THE URBAN SCENE 131
X. SOUTHERN REALISM 151
XI. NEW ROADS 169
XII. HISTORICAL FICTION 189
INTRODUCTION
The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his
treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice.
Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been
interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters.
I swear their nature is beyond my comprehension. A strange
people!--merry ’mid their misery--laughing through their tears, like
the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they!
They tread life’s path as if ’twere strewn with roses devoid of
thorns, and make the most of life with natures of sunshine and song.
Most American readers would take this to refer to the Negro, but
it was spoken of the Irish, in a play dealing with one of the most
desperate periods of Ireland’s tragic history. The Jew has been treated
similarly by his persecutors. The African, and especially the South
African native, is now receiving substantially the same treatment
as the American Negro. Literature dealing with the peasant and the
working-class has, until recently, conformed to a similar pattern.
The blind men gathered about the elephant. Each one felt the part of
the elephant’s anatomy closest to him, the trunk, tusk, eyes, ear,
hoof, hide and tail. Then each became an authority on the elephant.
The elephant was all trunk, or all hoof or all hide, or all tail. So
ran their separate truths. The single truth was that all were blind.
This fable, pertinent to our study, might be continued to tell how some
of the blind men returned to their kingdoms of the blind where it was
advantageous to believe that the elephant was all trunk or tusk.
We shall see in this study how stereotypes--that the Negro is _all_
this, that, or the other--have evolved at the dictates of social
policy. When slavery was being attacked, for instance, southern authors
countered with the contented slave; when cruelties were mentioned,
they dragged forward the comical and happy-hearted Negro. Admittedly
wrong for white people, slavery was represented as a boon for Negroes,
on theological, biological, psychological warrant. Since Negroes
were of “peculiar endowment,” slavery could not hurt them, although,
inconsistently, it was their punishment, since they were cursed of
God. A corollary was the wretched freedman, a fish out of water. In
Reconstruction, when threatened with such dire fate as Negroes’ voting,
going to school, and working for themselves (i.e., Negro domination),
southern authors added the stereotype of the brute Negro. Even today
much social policy demands that slavery be shown as blessed and
fitting, and the Negro as ludicrously ignorant of his own best good.
Many authors who are not hostile to the Negro and some who profess
friendship still stress a “peculiar endowment” at the expense of the
Negro’s basic humanity. Some antislavery authors seemed to believe that
submissiveness was a mystical African quality, and chose mulattoes
for their rebellious heroes, attributing militancy and intelligence
to a white heritage. Many contemporary authors exploit the Negro’s
quaintness, his “racial qualities.” Whether they do this for an escape
from drab, standardized life or out of genuine artistic interest or, in
the case of Negro authors, out of race pride, their work suffers from
the narrowness of allegory. It must be added that these authors play
into the hands of reactionaries, who, once a difference is established,
use it to justify peculiar position and peculiar treatment.
Whether the Negro was human was one of the problems that racked the
brains of the cultured Old South. The finally begrudged admission that
perhaps he was, has remained largely nominal in letters as in life.
Complete, complex humanity has been denied to him. He is too often
like characters in the medieval allegories: now Loyalty, or Mirth, or
Servility, or Quaintness, or Exuberance, or Brutishness, or Lust. Only
seldom is he shown as Labor or Persecution, although he was brought
here to supply the first, and as payment received the second.
Since there is no stereotype without some basis in actuality, it goes
without saying that individuals could be found resembling Page’s loyal
Uncle Billy or Stark Young’s William Veal, or Dixon’s brutal Gus, or
Scarlet Sister Mary or Van Vechten’s Lasca, or even Uncle Tom and
Florian Slappey. But when, as is frequent, generalizations are drawn
from these about a race or a section, the author oversteps his bounds
as novelist, and becomes an amateur social scientist whose guesses are
valueless, and even dangerous. Fiction, especially on so controversial
a subject as the American Negro, is still subjective, and novelists
would do well to recognize that they are recording a few characters in
a confined social segment, often from a prejudiced point of view. They
cannot, like Bacon, take all for their province.
Fortunately for American fiction, however, there have been authors,
even from the outset, who heard the Negro speak as Shakespeare heard
Shylock:
He hath disgraced me ... laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains,
scorned my nation ... cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and
what’s his reason? I am a Jew.... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and
if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest,
we will resemble you in that.
We shall see in the nineteenth century many writers, from Melville to
Cable, who have shown sympathy and comprehension. Nevertheless it is
to present-day realists, a large number of them southerners, that one
must look for the greatest justice to Negro life and character. They
have been less concerned with race than with environment; they have
sought to get at social causes rather than to prop a social order.
In spite of the publishers’ dicta that certain authors know _the_ Negro
better than Negroes themselves; in spite of certain authors who believe
that slave-holding ancestry is necessary in order truly to know Negroes
(on the theory that only the owner, or his descendants, can know the
owned); in spite of the science of Negro mind-reading, flourishing
below the Mason-Dixon line, it is likely that Negro authors will, after
the apprentice years, write most fully and most deeply about their own
people. As we go to the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the French for
the truth about their people; as we go to the workers and not to the
stockholders, to the tenants and croppers and not to the landlords, for
the truth about the lives of tenants and croppers, so it seems that we
should expect the truth of Negro life from Negroes. The Negro artist
has a fine task ahead of him to render this truth in enduring fiction.
So far, much of what seems truthful has been the work of sympathetic
white authors. In all probability white authors will continue to
write about the Negro. Sometimes similarly conditioned in America’s
class structure, sometimes extremely sensitive and understanding,
they will get at valuable truth. But Negro novelists must accept the
responsibility of being the ultimate portrayers of their own.
CHAPTER I
EARLY APPEARANCES
_Early Fiction._ When Americans started to write novels, at the end
of the eighteenth century, the Negro was definitely part and parcel
of American life. Colonial authors from Cotton Mather and Samuel
Sewall to Benjamin Franklin, Crèvecour and John Woolman had protested
his enslavement. He was the rock upon which the constitution nearly
split. In the North, there were still a few slaves and a growing body
of freedmen, some of whom, like Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker,
Richard Allen, and Crispus Attucks, were more than locally known. The
vast hordes of slaves, together with a good number of free Negroes,
were a more integral part of southern society. They had cleared the
forests and laid the roads, had built the fine houses and wrought
the beautiful iron-work; had labored on the tobacco, rice, indigo
and cotton plantations so that their masters could buy more slaves.
Cotton was not yet king, the cotton-gin was not invented; but the
broad backs of the slaves were still supporting a heavy load. Whether
as house-servant grateful for easy favors, and contributing to the
master’s feeling of safety, or field-hand, or fugitive stealing away to
the North, or intractable revolter, throwing both northern and southern
communities into consternation, the Negro was recognizably part of the
American scene.
But the first groping American novels were still tied to Mother
England’s leading strings. For all of their patriotism, the novelists
were little concerned with American actualities. When the Negro
character was included, he was a shadowy figure in the background, an
element of romantic side interest, closer to Aphra Behn’s _Oroonoko_
and Defoe’s fiction than to what the novelists could have seen about
them.
The earliest novels, William Hill Brown’s _The Power of Sympathy_
(1789) and Mrs. Susannah Rowson’s _The Inquisitor_ (1794), true to
their sentimental models, have antislavery feeling. Hugh Brackenridge’s
_Modern Chivalry_ (1792 to 1815) contains a good ironic attack upon the
slave-trade, and a less successful character Cuff, whose jargon seems
plucked out of Defoe:
Now, shentiman, I say, dat de first man was da black a-man, an’ de
first woman was de black a-woman: get two-tree children; de rain vasha
dese, an’ de snow pleach, an’ de coula came brown, yella, coppa coula,
and at de last quite fite....
Royal Tyler’s _The Algerine Captive_ (1797) deplores the “middle
passage” horrors of the slave-trade in the sentimental mode: “I thought
of my native land and blushed.” Charles Brockden Brown’s novels contain
Negro characters only incidentally. There were no English models to
make these early novelists aware that servitude and struggle could be
subjects for fiction.
_Irving._ In the nineteenth century, interest in the Negro increased.
In _Salmagundi_ (1807) Washington Irving, a brisk young man-about-town,
records the Negro curiosities he finds, such as the “Negro wench,
principal musician at a ball.” He describes a dance in Haiti with
unctuous ridicule:
In the middle of the rout, when all was buzz, slip-slop, clack and
perfume, who should enter but Tucky Squash! The yellow beauties
blushed blue and the black ones blushed as red as they could ... for
he was the pride of the court, the pick of all the sable fair ones of
Hayti. Such breadth of nose, such exuberance of lip! his shins had the
true cucumber curve; his face in dancing shone like a kettle.... When
he laughed, there appeared from ear to ear a _chevaux de-frize_ of
teeth that rivaled the shark’s in whiteness.... No Long Island Negro
could shuffle you “double-trouble” or “hoe corn and dig potatoes” more
scientifically.
Here we have the first comic Negro in American fiction, assured of long
employment from Irving to Octavus Roy Cohen. _Salmagundi_ likewise
includes Caesar, a “weatherbeaten wiseacre of a Negro,” who henpecks
his masters, tell stories of ghosts, goblins and witches, and, like a
good man Friday, accompanies his master to his sparking and dancing.
Caesar is repeated in _The Knickerbocker History of New York_ (1809) as
an old crone who would croak:
a string of incredible stories about New England witches--grisly ghost
horses without heads,--and hairbreadth escapes, and bloody encounters
among the Indians.
“Adventures of the Black Fisherman” in _Tales of A Traveler_ (1824)
tells us only that Black Sam or Mud Sam was “supposed to know all the
fish in the river by their christian names,” and that he had a “great
relish for the horrible,” such as executions, and that all of the
urchins felt free to play tricks upon him. Irving does not attempt to
give his speech, much less his character.
_Cooper._ The first American novelist to aim at fullness in his
presentation of American life, James Fenimore Cooper naturally included
the Negro. Although limited in information and skill, he expanded and
improved upon the slight sketches of his forerunners. He presents
Negroes of many types. First of all, there is Caesar Thompson, the
loyal retainer in _The Spy_ (1821). True to the prevailing literary
attitude of the gentry towards underlings, Cooper burlesques his
appearance with what passed for humor in those days:
But it was in his legs that nature had indulged her most capricious
humor. There was an abundance of material injudiciously used. The
calves were neither before nor behind, but rather on the outer side of
the limb, inclining forward.... The leg was placed so near the center
as to make it sometimes a matter of dispute whether he was not walking
backward.
Nevertheless Caesar is shown as crafty, and courageous in the
service of his family. Cooper’s interest in Negroes is continued in
_The Pioneers_ (1823) in Agamemnon, not a slave but a legal ward, a
man-of-all work whose deference does not keep him from mirth at his
master’s expense, and Abraham, a free black who shares in the rough
frontier life.
A different type is the free Sailor, Scipio Africa, one of the heroes
of _The Red Rover_ (1827). In physique, seamanship, self-control, and
intelligence he is superior to his sailing mates, but this does not
shield him from their petty insults. There is pathos in the scene of
his death:
If he is not (a Christian) I don’t know who the devil is. A man who
serves his country, is true to his messmate, and has no sulk about
him, I call a saint, so far as mere religion goes. I say, Guinea, my
hearty, give the chaplain a grip of the fist.... A Spanish windlass
would not give a stronger screw than the knuckle of that nigger an
hour ago; and now, you see to what a giant may be brought!
In _The Last of The Mohicans_ (1826), Cora Munro, the offspring of a
mixed marriage, is shown to be resourceful and strong, above the usual
run of Cooper’s “females.” It is worthy of note, since she is the first
of a long line of “octoroons,” that her end is tragic.
Cooper thus anticipates later creators of Negro characters, presenting
the faithful house servant, the courageous man of action, and the
octoroon doomed to tragedy. Though crudely recorded, his dialect
rises above the usually impossible Negro speech in early novels. No
abolitionist, Cooper still did not favor slavery, and honest observer
that he was, he refuses to see the Negro, even when grotesquely
described, as subhuman.
_Simms._ William Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, differed from
Cooper, his northern model, in that he defended slavery ardently.
In his fiction, however, Negroes are presented without excessive
argument. They range from the obsequious house-servant to the
brave freeman. Hector, in _The Yemassee_ (1832) is a heroic slave,
participating gallantly in the Indian warfare, volunteering for
perilous service, warning blockhouses, and rescuing his master. He is
extremely loyal and refuses to be freed.
I d--n to h---, maussa, if I gwine to be free.... ’Tis onpossible,
maussa.... Enty I know wha’ kind of ting freedom is wid black man? Ha!
you make Hector free, he turn wuss more nor poor buckrah--he tief out
of de shop--he git drunk and lie in de ditch....
This passage is the first and most influential example of a scene soon
to be hackneyed. Caesar in _Guy Rivers_ (1834) is subservient, but
cunning and philosophical. _The Partisan_ (1835) gains in interest
because of the presence of Tom, who is such a good cook that Porgy, his
gourmet master, will not brook his being abused. Tom repays by keeping
his master fat and happy “so long as dere’s coon and possum, squirrel,
patridges and dub, duck in de ribber, and fish in de pond.”
Simms’ _Richard Hurdis_ (1838) shows slaves accompanying their masters
on the move to the Alabama frontier, dancing, singing, sometimes
listening to a fellow slave’s impromptu verses:
In them he satirized his companions without mercy ... and did not
spare his own master, whom he compared to a squirrel that had lived
upon good corn so long that he now hungered for bad in his desire for
change.
In _The Forayers_ (1855) Cato is a slave-driver, courageous and devoted
to his family, and Benny Bowlegs, another driver, is
a moral steam engine. He pushed his master as well as his brother
slaves.... Push at the beginning, push in the middle, push at the end,
and Ben’s pushing made crops.
_The Wigwam and The Cabin_ (1845) a collection of stories, is unusual
in showing Negroes at the center of the picture. “The Loves of The
Driver” casts side-lights upon plantation customs, and the “Lazy Crow”
is the first to portray Negro superstition and folkways.
In numbers, and a certain rudimentary realism, the Negro characters
in Simms’ many novels go beyond those of any other early nineteenth
century novelist. Simms bungles when he tries to record the Gullah
dialect, but the effort is worthy of comment. Striving to be accepted
as a southern gentleman, Simms shows his slaves, generally, to be
well cared for and contented. Nevertheless, his urge to realism
kept him from showing slavery to be an endless picnic. Masters held
forth freedom as a reward for service; they knew, if the contented
slaves did not. All in all, however, Simms is noteworthy more for
the extensiveness of his gallery of Negroes than for any depth of
characterization.
As Simms showed Negroes participating in the backwoods life and
warfare of the South, so earlier writers of the westward movement
included sketches of Negroes. Paulding’s _Westward Ho_ (1832) deals
with southerners leaving what romancers were to consider Arcadia for
a better land. In this novel, Pompey, like Simms’ Hector, refuses
freedom. _Nick of The Woods_ (1837) a melodrama of bloody Kentucky
by Robert Bird, includes several Negroes. Emperor is most fully
characterized: like Cooper’s Caesar he is loyal, worshipful of quality,
and, grotesque. Although his “natural” cowardice is insisted upon, his
actions belie this, as he fights for his “little missie” and dies the
death of a hero, “gored by numberless wounds, and trampled by the feet
of his slayers.”
_The Virginians._ Virginia is the setting for such novelists as W. A.
Carruthers, Beverley and George Tucker, and John Esten Cooke. Their
novels describe the gentry and their complaisant slaves who enter the
books as unobtrusively as they entered the grand dining rooms to bring
in sweet missives or decanters of old port. These mammies and butlers
and coachmen are interchangeable, appearing in different books under
different classical names, but always the same.
Toby in Poe’s “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840) is “as ugly an
old gentleman as ever spoke, having ... swollen lips, large white
protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and
bow-legs.” He is another of Poe’s sad attempts at humor. Jupiter, in
“The Gold-Bug” (1843), traditionally refuses to leave his master, but
threatens in all seriousness to beat him, a hot-blooded cavalier, with
a big stick. His dialect, an attempt at Gullah, is language belonging
with Poe’s masterpieces, “out of space and out of time.” Poe revealed
that his southern upbringing had borne fruit, however, when, defending
slavery from “the fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists” he writes
that it is the will of God that the Negro should have a “peculiar
nature,” of which one characteristic is his tremendous loyalty to his
master, “to which the white man’s heart is a stranger.” The master has
a “reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent”:
he who is taught to call the little negro his in this sense and
_because he loves him_, shall love him _because he is his_.
_Melville._ A greater writer than Poe in his grasp of character, Herman
Melville was above this sophistry in dealing with human beings. A
northerner, Melville did not know slavery at first hand; but a mariner,
he did know Negro seamen. _Moby Dick_ (1851) reveals this knowledge.
[Daggoo] a gigantic coal-black negro ... retained all his barbaric
virtues and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp
of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in
looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white
flag come to beg truce from a fortress.
If Daggoo is the “noble savage,” Pip, as sympathetically created, is
of another breed. Pip’s cowardice is not considered racial but is
naturally human.
Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle ye shall see him,
beating his tambourine, prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for
to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels
and beat his tambourine in glory: called a coward here, hailed a hero
there!
Negro sailors, generally courageous and praiseworthy, occur in
Melville’s other romances of the sea.
_Benito Cereno_ (1855) is a masterpiece of mystery, suspense and
terror. Captain Delano of the _Bachelor’s Delight_, discovering a
vessel in distress along the uninhabited coast of Chile, boards her
to render aid. He is interested in the many Negroes he finds on the
decks: “like most men of a good blithe heart he took to Negroes not
philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland
dogs.” He is mystified, however, when the gamesome Negroes flare up
in momentary rage, and especially by their continual clashing their
hatchets together. Only when Don Benito, in desperation, escapes to
Delano’s ship, does the real truth dawn.
There had been a revolt on board the _San Dominick_; the Negro sailors
and the slaves had killed many of the whites, and had kept the others
alive only for their skill as navigators in order to reach a Negro
country. The mutineers and revolters are overcome in a bloody battle,
carried to Lima, and executed. The contrast between the reputed
gentleness of Negroes “that makes them the best body-servants in
the world,” and the fierceness with which they fight for freedom is
forcibly driven home. Certain Negroes stand out: Babo who, resembling a
“begging friar,” engineered the revolt with great skill and is almost
fiendish in his manner of breaking down Cereno’s morale; Francesco,
the mulatto barber; Don José, personal servant of a Spanish Don;
and Atulfa, an untamed African chieftain, all filled with hatred for
whites. Melville graphically pictures the slave mothers, “equally
ready to die for their infants or fight for them”; the four old men
monotonously polishing their hatchets; and the murderous Ashantees. All
bear witness to what Melville recognized as a spirit that it would take
years of slavery to break.
Although opposed to slavery, Melville does not make _Benito Cereno_
into an abolitionist tract; he is more concerned with a thrilling
narrative and character portrayal. But although the mutineers are
blood-thirsty and cruel, Melville does not make them into villains;
they revolt as mankind has always revolted. Because Melville was
unwilling to look upon men as “Isolatoes,” wishing instead of discover
the “common continent of man,” he comes nearer the truth in his
scattered pictures of a few unusual Negroes than do the other authors
of this period.
_Frontier Humor._ The southern humorists, thriving from the thirties
to the sixties, introduce the Negro only incidentally in their
picture of horse-swapping, gander-pulling, camp meetings, fights, and
political brawls. Because they were realistic, the “plantations” they
show are most often backwood farms. The hard-fisted frontier squires,
with a love of horse-play, and a callousness necessary for survival,
treat their slaves as one would expect: they are neither Legrees nor
American versions of Sir Roger de Coverly. In _Georgia Scenes_ (1835),
Longstreet non-committally shows a Southern backwoods “lady” knocking
her servant around from mere habit. In _Adventures of Simon Suggs_
(1846) Johnson Hooper gives good pictures of southern camp-meetings,
at which Negroes and whites vie in religious hysteria, mingling
indiscriminately in the hollow square, plunging and pitching about in
the “jerks” and screaming “glory” in unsegregated chorus.
George Harris in _Sut Lovingood Yarns_ (1867) tells of a rowdy whose
antics include poking a hornet’s nest into a Negro camp meeting. At
another time, Sut removes a corpse and lays a snoring, drunken Negro in
the coffin. When the slave preacher Simon comes to the coffin he yells:
“Oh Goramighty massy on dis soul; de debil hesef on top of brudder
Seize!...” Jis then I moaned out in a orful doleful vise, “Hiperkrit,
cum tu hell, I has a claim ontu you fu holdin the bag while Seize
stole co’n.” He jes rar’d backwards, an’ fell outen the door wif his
hans locked, an’ sed he in a weak ... sort of vise, “Please marster”
an’ jis fainted, he soon cum to a-runnin’, fer I hearn the co’n
crashin thru the big field like a in-gine were runnin’ express thru
hit. I hain’t seen Simon ter this day.
Other humorists tell of frontier surgery upon slaves; if they were not
ill before, they were near death’s door after the barbarous operations.
The tone of the humorists is burlesque, which often sinks to the
level of present-day “darky” jokes. Nevertheless, southern humor is
significant. The assumption that Negroes are especially designed as
butts for rough practical jokes is probably closer to the reality of
the antebellum South than the sentimentality of more ambitious works.
True to the manner of cracker-box philosophers, Artemus Ward attacks
the sentimentalized and the unconventional, and delivers many of the
“common-man’s” jibes at abolitionists and Negroes. “The Octoroon” is,
at least, a refreshing departure from the shopworn tragic mode.
“Hush--shese a Octoroon!”
“No! sez I ... yu don’t say so! How long she bin that way?”
“From her arliest infuncy,” sed he.
“Wall, what upon arth duz she do it fur?” I inquired.
“She kan’t help it.... It’s the brand of Kane.”
Oberlin College is lampooned for being rather “too strong on
Ethiopians.” Though a good Unionist in the war, Artemus Ward, unlike
his successor Nasby, does not reveal any sympathy for the Negro.
_Summary._ Irving’s tellers of mysterious legends, Cooper’s
house-servants, Melville’s mates in the foc’sle, and the obsequious
servants of the Virginia cavaliers reflect their authors’ interests
and experience more than they interpret Negro life. Simms’ blood and
thunder melodramas and the farces of the frontier humorists give more
varied types and experiences, with some crude realism. Melville’s
_Benito Cereno_ goes more deeply into character. In the main, however,
these subsidiary characters are not very convincing. They speak a
pidgin English, closer to the speech of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday than
to that of nineteenth century Negroes. Cooper and Simms tried to record
dialects; Simms is probably better since Gullah is nearer to pidgin
English, but he is still inaccurate. Some authors presented the Negro
with dignity and sympathy, but serious realism was still far off. It
is worthy of note, however, that such favorite Negro characters as the
fabler, the loyal servant, the buffoon, the tragic octoroon, the noble
savage, and the revolter, appear in these early books.
Although in a few cases propaganda for or against slavery raises its
head, these subsidiary characters are not made into walking arguments.
Toward the end of this period, however, the slavery debate broke out,
and, in the words of one critic, “the world of nature was lost in the
world of controversy.”
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why were early American novels “tied to Mother England’s leading
strings?”
2. What tradition of English literature might account for Irving’s and
Cooper’s humorous treatment of the Negro?
3. Since Simms was proslavery, what is inconsistent about his showing
Negroes being set free as reward for heroic services?
4. What historical incidents could have suggested Melville’s _Benito
Cereno_?
5. What in Poe’s life might have occasioned his attitude toward the
Negro?
6. In which of the works mentioned is the Negro character a foreground
character?