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.