RECONSTRUCTION: THE NOT SO GLORIOUS SOUTH
_Cable._ Although he had served as an officer in the Confederate
Cavalry, George Washington Cable was aware of much that was wrong
in the old South and the new. His _The Silent South_ and _The Negro
Question_ are antidotes to Page’s dangerous drugs; against the convict
lease system, for instance, Cable wrote with startling pertinence even
for our own day. Cordially hated in the South, he took up residence in
Massachusetts, but though in “exile” he kept close to his heart the
best interests of his section.
Praised as the first southerner to include just and sympathetic
recognition of the Negro, Cable portrays Negroes or the background
of slavery in most of his novels. For our purposes _Old Creole Days_
(1879) and _The Grandissimes_ (1880) are most important. _Old Creole
Days_ re-creates, with vivid local color, early nineteenth century
Louisiana. In “Posson Jone”, a faithful servant outwits the sharpers
who were preying upon his master; if the situation is old, the details
are sharply observed. Less kindly pictures of slavery appear in “’Tite
Poulette” and “Madame Delphine”, stories of octoroons of a warm
seductive beauty, cultivated with care so that they may be “protected”
by some Louisiana grandee. This “protection” does not keep tragedy
from their lives, however. To these women, says Cable, “every white
man in this country is a pirate.” Therefore, both mothers in these
stories pretend that their daughters are not really theirs, in order
that the girls may get around the law that rigorously forbade marriage
of octoroons to “pure whites.” Bitterly acquainted with what faces
her lovely daughter, Delphine cries out against the law “to keep the
two races separate”: “A lie, Pere Jerome! Separate! No-o-o! They do
not want to keep us separated; no, no! But they _do_ want to keep us
despised!”
In _The Grandissimes_, a long novel of old Louisiana, we have
the background of slavery well worked in, and in the foreground,
individualized Negro characters, far more convincing than the
abolitionist victims. Outstanding is Honoré Grandissime, “free man of
color,” educated, successful in business but an ineffectual victim of
caste. Though true to New Orleans history, his type has been neglected
in fiction for the more fascinating octoroon heroine. Palmyre is one of
the best characterized octoroons in fiction.
This woman had stood all her life with dagger drawn, on the defensive
against what certainly was to her an unmerciful world.... And yet by
inexorable decree, she belonged to what we used to call “the happiest
people under the sun.” We ought to stop saying that.
Under domineering and insult, Palmyre is shown as silent; “and so,”
says Cable, “sometimes is fire in the wall.” Clemence, illiterate and
superstitious, has folk-shrewdness:
You mus’n b’lieve all dis-yeh nonsense ’bout insurrectionin’; all
fool-nigga talk. W’at we want to be insurrectionin’ faw? We de
happiest people in de God’s worl’! Yes, we is; you jis oughteh gimme
fawty an’ lemme go! Please gen’lemen!
Her cunning does not help, however, in this drastic case; she is told
to run, and is coolly shot, stone dead.
One of the most unusual figures is the gigantic Bras Coupé, captured
king of the Jaloffs, a legendary figure with counterpart in Louisiana
history. He is contemptuous of whites, and kills the Negro driver who
first tells him to work. Driven to the swamps for striking down his
master, he puts a curse on the plantation. When he is captured he is
“hamstrung”, in accordance with the _Code Noir_. When the name of his
worst enemy falls upon his ears, even though dying, he spits upon the
floor; when he is begged to forgive, he merely smiles. “God keep thy
enemy from such a smile”, says the author.
Cable’s fiction shows full acquaintance with folk-songs, speech, lore
and superstition, but unlike his contemporaries, Page and Harris,
he does not use the material to support old traditions. He makes
clear-eyed, telling observations on the South. A blow, punishable in a
white offender by a small fine or conviction, assured Bras Coupé the
death of a felon, by the old Code Noir.
(We have a Code Noir now, but the new one is a mental reservation,
not an enactment).... The guests stood for an instant as if frozen,
smitten stiff with the expectation of insurrection, conflagration and
rapine (just as we do today whenever some poor swaggering Pompey rolls
up his fist and gets a ball through his body)....
“It seems to be one of the self-punitive characteristics of tyranny,
whether the tyrant be a man, a community, or a caste, to have a
pusillanimous fear of its victims.” But Cable does not over-idealize
the Negro. He is sharp toward the mulatto caste--“the saddest slaves of
all.”
Your men, for a little property, and your women, for a little amorous
attention let themselves be shorn even of the virtue of discontent....
I would rather be a runaway in the swamp than content myself with such
a freedom.
Although Cable helped to establish the tragic mulatto stereotypes, his
portraits of this caste are drawn from a specific situation in the
past, more pronounced in New Orleans though widespread in the South.
The stereotype has fascinated later writers who have fallen under
Cable’s charm. But they are without his information and sympathy, and
are therefore less truthful. All in all, Cable is one of the finest
creators of Negro character in the nineteenth century.
_Twain._ Like Cable, Twain was of southern birth and upbringing, and
fought in the Confederate army (but for a short time only, in a spirit
of horseplay, learning only how to retreat). The two men lectured
together. Both had sympathies for the underdog and both attacked the
sham chivalry of the South. Mark Twain insisted that he was almost
completely without race prejudice and that the color brown was “the
most beautiful and satisfying of all the complexions vouchsafed to
man.” He loved the spirituals best among music. In his youth he grew up
with slave boys as playmates; in his manhood he paid a Negro student’s
way through Yale, as “part of the reparation due from every white to
every black man.”
Twain’s first treatment of Negroes in _The Gilded Age_ (1873), however,
is largely traditional, unlike “A True Story (Repeated Word For Word
As I Heard It)” which is a bitter memory of cruelty and separation,
contradicting Thomas Nelson Page’s formula stories.
In _Huckleberry Finn_ (1884) the callousness of the South to the Negro
is indicated briefly, without preaching, but impellingly. Huck informs
Aunt Sally that a steamboat blew out a cylinder head:
“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”
“No’m. Killed a nigger.”
“Well, it’s lucky because sometimes people do get hurt....”
In this book Twain deepens the characterization of Jim, who, like Tom
and Huck and the rest of that fine company, was drawn from life. He
is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead
cats, doodle-bugs and signs of _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer_. Running
away from old Miss Watson, who, though religious, “pecks on” him all
the time, treats him “pooty rough” and wants a trader’s eight hundred
dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the
Mississippi. His talks enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best
in detailing his experience with high finance--he once owned fourteen
dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s
Yes, en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself en I’s wuth
eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’.
But he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and
save money so he could buy his wife, and then they would both work to
buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them. Huck is
“frozen at such thoughts;” torn between what he had been taught was
moral and his friendliness for an underdog. Jim is the best example
in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the
tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet
clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is
completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchman should talk like
people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose
trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the
poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, “cain’t git no
situation.” He tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not
knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever:
... En all uv a sudden I says pow! jis’ as loud as I could yell. She
never budge! Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms,
en say, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Almighty forgive po’
ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!”
Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb--en I’d been
a-treatin’ her so!
From the great tenderness and truth of this portrait _Pudd’nhead
Wilson_ (1894), Twain’s last novel concerning Negroes, falls a great
way. In violent, ugly Dawson’s Landing a fantastic tale is set.
Roxana, only one-sixteenth Negro, a handsome earthy Amazon, is the
mother of a son, Valet de Chambre, fathered by a gentleman of the
F.F.V’s. This baby was born on the same day as her master’s son,
Thomas à Becket Driscoll, and looks exactly like him. In order to
save the baby from slavery, Roxy exchanges the two. The boys grow up
with their positions reversed; the false Valet is ruined by slavery,
and Tom, ruined by pampering, becomes a liar, coward, gambler, thief
and murderer. In desperate straits, he tricks his mother and sells
her down the river. Although Tom’s character could be attributed to a
rigid caste system that granted excessive power to petty people, Twain
leaves many readers believing that he agrees with Roxy who, astounded
by her son’s worthlessness, muttered: “Ain’t nigger enough in him to
show in his finger-nails, en dat takes mighty little, yit dey’s enough
to paint his soul.” Twain has little good to say for slavery in this
book. Roxy’s terror of being sold “down the river,” and her experiences
there under a vicious Yankee overseer are grimly realistic. Roxy is a
first-rate preliminary sketch. By no means faultless, a petty thief
and a liar, she is capable of sacrifice, and has intelligence, pride,
and courage. If Twain had spent more time in developing her portrait,
_Pudd’nhead Wilson_ would have been a better novel.
_Humorists._ One of those humorists whose misspellings and satiric
temper pleased Abraham Lincoln, Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke),
wrote _Nasby: Divers Views, Opinions and Prophecies_ (1866) and
_Ekkoes From Kentucky_ (1868), both showing post-war attitudes to the
Negro. Pretending to be a Copperhead postmaster, Nasby reveals himself
as an ignorant, besotted politician, forever dragging in the race
question for personal gain. Some of Nasby’s shafts could well be used
at southern rabble-rousers today. Nasby shows how the cry of Negro
domination and amalagmation rose whenever the slightest effort was made
for justice to the freedmen. Severely satirical of southern chivalry,
Nasby shows the white daughters of John Guttle, a gentleman of Mobile,
fighting against their Negro half-sisters over their father’s tomb, and
concludes that “there wuz some disadvantages attending the patriarkle
system.” To those who saw the Negro as unfit for freedom he wrote:
Three hundred niggers ... wuz wrencht from paternal care to starve,
which the most uv ’em are industriously doin’ at about $3 per day.
He advises the legislatures to forbid Negroes to leave their country,
and then to pass laws setting up a maximum wage for Negroes of five
dollars a month. Thousands of Negroes will then die by midwinter and
the rest will beg to be reenslaved.
We kin ... pint 2 their bodies and say in a sepulkered tone: ‘Wen
niggers wuz wuth $1500, they wuz not allowed to die thus--behold the
froots uv Ablishun philanthropy.’
For all of his burlesque, Nasby saw clearly and prophesied sanely. A
whole school of southern writers came along and did in dead earnest
what he had counselled in bitter jest.
_Samantha On The Race Problem_ by Marietta Holley counsels colonization
even so late as 1892, recounts the tragedies of a few superior
mulattoes, and most important, shows the Florida Ku Klux Klan at its
work of burning schools and terrorizing Negroes who were forging ahead.
_Northern Novelists._ John William DeForest’s realistic novels of the
South immediately after the Civil War, _Miss Ravenal’s Conversion From
Secession_ _to Loyalty_ (1867) and _Kate Beaumont_ (1872), contain
minor Negro characters, but these are generally typical. In 1867,
Rebecca Harding Davis wrote the dramatic, sympathetic _Waiting For The
Verdict_, the first novel to deal with the dilemma of the fair Negro
who attains a superior position without being suspected of having
Negro blood. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short stories of the South,
written in the eighties, have been praised for their sane balance. In
“Rodman The Keeper” she describes with sympathy the freedmen--bent,
dull-eyed and ignorant, singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” on their way
to the graves of Federal Soldiers “who had done something wonderful
for them and their children.” Generally, however, Miss Woolson is
irritated by the freedmen, reserving her liking for those who are
traditionally loyal to their white-folks, and seeing little in “the
glories of freedom” except the “freedom to die.” “King David” shows a
Northern educator who gives up in the face of “universal, irresponsible
ignorance.” Miss Woolson recognizes the shiftlessness and chauvinism
of the planter class, but keeps her sharpness for the “misguided and
untimely idealism” of northerners. She tries so hard to be just to the
fallen ex-planter that she is less than just to the rising ex-slaves.
In these grievous times, the second stood in the greater need of
justice.
_Tourgée._ Albion Tourgée differed from Miss Woolson sharply in his
discoveries. He had a good chance for observation. He was an officer
in the Union Army, and after the war remained in North Carolina as a
judge. If he is a typical example of a carpetbagger, then his class
has met with grave underestimation. He was thoughtful, considerate,
courageous and honest. Like Miss Woolson, he recognized the gravity of
the problem facing the South. Unlike her, however, he did not believe
that the problem existed only because the freedmen were irresponsible,
ignorant and unready for citizenship. He had seen too often what she
omitted from her picture: the mob violence of the Regulators and the
Ku Klux Klan, the determination to restore slavery, the ostracism
of the “misguided” school teachers, the burning of the schools. He
was a humane man, and he could not hold his peace. But he spoke on
the unpopular side, and today he is barely mentioned in histories of
American literature.
_A Fool’s Errand_, by “One of the Fools” (1879), is largely
autobiographical, and has been called “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of
Reconstruction.” Colonel Servosse, an officer of the Federal Army, took
up residence in the South, foolishly believing that, with the end of
the war, the North-South hostility would end. He soon learns better;
for lending aid to Negroes in need he is called a “nigger lover,” for
making a speech urging justice to Negroes he barely escapes being
horsewhipped. Yankee schoolmarms are insulted. When northern troops
are withdrawn, terrorization of Negroes quickly follows. A Union
League organizer is killed by the Klan, which is composed of prominent
southerners. Negroes are shown hard at work, struggling to make their
living, enthusiastically welcoming schools, lurking about the edges of
crowds at political meetings, listening intently to the speeches, or
organizing for protection. In a section hotly intent that there shall
be no “nigger witnesses, no nigger juries, no nigger voters,” all of
this is insolence and insult.
Jerry is the type of uncle not before met with in American fiction. He
is religious and devoted to Servosse, not out of loyalty of slave to
master, but out of gratitude that Servosse was helping his people to
true freedom. Jerry has his dignity; when whites ridicule his church
services he says:
An’ when you all laughs at us, we can’t help tinkin’ dat we mout a
done better ef we hadn’t been kep’ slaves all our lives by you uns.
But in one of his sermons, he tells too much about the Klan’s most
recent murder, and he is swung from a tree to prove that “It don’t
do fer niggers to know too much.” Another different Negro is the
blacksmith, Bob Martin, who makes such a good living that he becomes
a marked man for the night riders. He scornfully ridicules the
superstition that the Klan is ghostly, showing his scarred back as
proof of the Klan’s “humanity.” He tells a shocking story of his own
beating, the abuse of his wife and daughter, the death of his baby,
and the destroying of his home, all supposed to teach him to be more
respectful of white folks and less anxious to vote for radicals. Bob
is of the stuff of heroes, however; he was in the Union Army at Fort
Wagner, and he doggedly swears that “ef dere’s any mo’ Kluckers raidin’
roun’ Burke’s Corner, dar’ll be some funerals too.” Later editions
of _A Fool’s Errand_ included documentary evidence of the sinister
workings of the Klan, a key to the truth something like the _Key to
Uncle Tom’s Cabin_.
The title _A Fool’s Errand_ lays blame only on the folly of rash
hopes for improvement in the South, not on the effort to get justice.
_Bricks Without Straw_ (1880) is a more developed attempt to show the
desperate problem, to prove that without support from the rest of the
country, those few who were struggling were “making bricks without
straw.” Nimbus, the outstanding Negro character, is uneducated, but
he fought in the Civil War, and is a man of courage and good, hard
sense. Industrious and thrifty, he is disliked by the whites because
he has a good house, a tobacco barn, a fine crop and valuable stock,
and a church and schoolhouse on his place. He adds to these injuries
the insult of wanting pay for his wife’s services, and schools and the
vote for all of his people. When the Klansmen, among whom are many
aristocrats--“the freedmen’s best friends”--come after him, Nimbus,
aided by his wife Lugena, who fights with an axe, resists fiercely,
and finally gets away. Returning years later, broken in health but
not in spirit after experiencing riots, peonage and prison camps,
Nimbus will not stay, but leads an exodus to Kansas. Elijah Hill, the
schoolteacher, and Berry Lawson, good-natured avoider of trouble, but
wily and loyal to Nimbus, are interesting minor figures.
Tourgée’s other books on the Negro are not so valuable as these. _A
Royal Gentleman_ (1881), written earlier as _Toinette_, is pretentious,
with a crowded plot. Mabel, mother of Toinette, is crazed by her
unhappy life as the mistress of a white slave owner, and tries to
murder those who would inflict upon her daughter the same fate. But
Toinette, a refined olive-skinned beauty, is in love with, and beloved
by her owner. Since he is a “royal gentleman,” marriage cannot take
place, and tragedy follows. The characters are idealized, and the
incidents far-fetched. _Hot Plowshares_ (1883) is a historical novel
on the state of the nation preceding the Civil War. Great attention
is paid to the rise of antislavery sentiment and the Underground
Railroad. _Pactolus Prime_ (1890) shows the economic hardships faced
by Negroes in Washington, D. C. Pactolus is the father of a girl whom
he disclaims in order that she may live as white, may be lifted “from
shame to honor.” Upon her discovery of the real truth, she takes the
vows as Sister Pactola, and dedicates her life to her race. The story
is not completely convincing, but Tourgee again reveals himself as
well conversant with problems faced by Negroes. These novels have more
argument than characters in action, but the argument is what has been
too easily forgotten today.
_Hearn._ To Lafcadio Hearn the southern novel was “gushy-floriated
English--written in bad taste, wishy-washy trash.” With his sympathy
for the underdog, strengthened by his connection with the quadroon
Althea Foley, he admired Cable’s defense of the Negro. Nevertheless,
Hearn did not censure the South openly. He held stock beliefs such as
that the Negro would disappear in freedom--“dependent like the ivy, he
needs some strong oak-like friend to cling to”--and that it was only
the mulatto influence that made slaves unmanageable. Always attracted
by the unusual and picturesque, Hearn became an authority on Louisiana
lore, making friends with the _bonnes vielles negresses_, who sold
homemade sweetmeats in New Orleans, and the mysterious Voodoo Queen,
Marie Laveau. But the teeming levees come to life only in sketches
like “Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee” and “Banjo Jim’s Story” (1876). In
the West Indies Hearn was struck by the “appetizing golden bodies of
the Martinique Quadroons, sensuous but childlike,” gossiped with the
washerwomen and treasured their soft slurring talk; and watched
the _porteuses_ on their way to market in the early morning, huge
baskets of fruit and vegetables balanced on their heads, their skirts
tucked into a belt in front, showing the shapely muscled bronze of
their legs, as they walked with all the lithe feline grace of some
wild animal.
_Youma_, “La Giablesse” and “Un Ravenant” are good fiction of the
West Indies, but the wealth of Hearn’s sensitive observation appears
in his travel reporting. He was better in describing settings than in
presenting character.
_Howells._ The serious phase of Negro life that William Dean Howells
thought worthy of inclusion in his canvas of the American scene
was the age-worn tragedy of the octoroon. In _An Imperative Duty_
(1892), Rhoda, the beautiful daughter of a northern physician and an
accomplished octoroon, bore no evidence of Negro blood. On the eve of
her marriage, she is told her lineage by her duty-bound aunt. Later,
passing for an Italian and happily married to a man who is undisturbed
by her lineage, she is still wretched at her “disgrace.” The novel is
sympathetic, but there were graver, less romantic problems of Negro
life that a novelist of Howells’ scope and ability might have presented.
_Negro Novelists._ Two Negro authors who had given their best energies
to the antislavery struggle turned to fiction in the post-Civil War
years. William Wells Brown’s _My Southern Home_ (1880) included
sketches of southern Negro folklife, before the successes of Page and
Harris. Frances Harper, whose antislavery poetry was popular, now
defended her race in _Iola Leroy_ or _Shadows Uplifted_ (1892). Iola,
granddaughter of a Creole planter, has the experiences usual to fiction
of the beautiful “white slave.” She is kept ignorant of her race, and
educated in the North. When her white father’s marriage to her quadroon
mother is called illegal, she is sold as a slave. After indignities in
slavery, she is rescued, and serves as a nurse in a Civil War hospital.
She rejects the love of a white New England physician, who, though
knowing her race, wishes to marry her. With her brothers and long-lost
uncle, all of whom refuse to “pass for white,” she dedicates herself
to her people. The book is “uplifting” but is far from convincing in
incident, speech, and characterization. Iola is another of the octoroon
heroines too angelic for acceptance. Some of the minor characters are
better, but they cannot redeem the novel.
_Dunbar._ Dunbar has aptly described the typical setting for his
fiction:
Happy Hollow.... Wherever Negroes colonize in the cities or villages,
North or South, wherever the hod-carrier, the porter, and the waiter
are the society men of the town; wherever the picnic and the excursion
are the chief summer diversion, and the revival the winter-time of
repentance.... Wherever laughter and tears rub elbows by day, and the
spirit of labour and laziness shake hands, there--there--is Happy
Hollow.
_In Old Plantation Days_ (1903) repeats the Thomas Nelson Page formula.
Negro house servants comically ape the “quality,” or intervene in
lovers’ quarrels, or in duels between cavaliers. One slave deceives
his beloved master into believing that the good times of slavery
still prevail. The planters, highbred and chivalrous, and the slaves,
childish and devoted, rival each other in affection and sacrifice.
These anecdotes of slavery, but a step above minstrel jokes, are all
too happy for words, and too happy for truth.
The harshness of Reconstruction and of Dunbar’s own time is likewise
conventionally neglected in his other volumes of short stories: _Folks
From Dixie_ (1898), _The Strength of Gideon_ (1900), and _The Heart
of Happy Hollow_ (1904). Freedmen discover that after all their best
friends are their kindly ex-masters. In “Nels Hatton’s Revenge,” an
upstanding Negro gives his hard-earned money and best clothes to his
destitute master, who had abused him when a slave. The venality of
Reconstruction politicians, which certainly existed, is satirized; but
the gains of Reconstruction, which certainly exist, are understressed.
Probably with due cause, Dunbar feared the rising poor-whites;
therefore, like many Negro spokesmen of the period, he idealized the
ex-planter class, the “aristocrats,” _without_ due cause.
Dunbar’s fiction veers away from anything more serious than laughter
or gentle tears. “At Shaft 11” shows the difficulties of Negro
strikebreakers; but, afraid of organized labor, Dunbar idealized
owners, operators, and staunchly loyal Negro workers who get to be
foremen, thus carrying over the plantation tradition formula into the
industrial scene. “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope” faces the loose-living of
a “Happy Hollow,” and then is lost in sentimental compromise. Dunbar
wrote two stories of lynching, “The Lynching of Jule Benson” and the
unusually ironic “The Tragedy at Three Corners.” But Dunbar usually
places the hardships of Negro life in the city, as in “Jimsella,” with
pastoral distrust of the city and faith in rural virtue. Fast livers,
quacks, politicians and hypocritical race leaders are occasionally
attacked.
_The Sport of the Gods_ (1902), Dunbar’s most ambitious novel, is
the only one that is chiefly about Negroes. The first of the book is
trite, but the latter section, though confused and melodramatic, has
a grimness that Dunbar seldom showed. Berry, the innocent victim of a
degenerate white man’s crime in the South, and his family, the victim
of hostile New York, are treated somewhat in the manner of Hardy’s
tragic laughing-stocks. The book has serious weaknesses, but it gives
promise that Dunbar, but for his untimely death, might have become a
prose writer of power. Judged by his accomplishment, however, Dunbar
in fiction must be considered as one who followed the leader, not as a
blazer of new trails.
_Chesnutt._ Charles Waddell Chesnutt, however, deserves to be called
a pioneer. Writing to counter charges such as those made by Page in
_Red Rock_, Chesnutt is the first to speak out uncompromisingly, but
artistically, on the problems facing his people. One careful critic has
stated that Chesnutt “was the first Negro novelist, and he is still
the best,” and another has said that his books contain early drafts of
about all of the recent Negro novels.
In Chesnutt’s _The Conjure Woman_, seven tales based upon Negro
superstitions, Uncle Julius recalls Uncle Remus and Page’s Uncle Billy,
but differs from them in his craftiness. He tells his stories not
merely to entertain, or to bewail the beautiful past, toward which he
is ironic, but to gain his point in the present. His dialect is worked
out in great detail, but is not so readable as that of Uncle Remus.
There is good local color throughout, and some interesting characters
emerge.
_The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line_
(1899) deals mainly with problems of race. The title story tells
of a successful Negro in Groveland (Cleveland), the “dean” of the
“Blue-Veins,” who, on the eve of his engagement to a beautiful widow,
theatrically acknowledges a little old black woman who had been his
wife in slavery days and had helped him to freedom. A Negro mother
denies her octoroon daughter in order for her to marry a New Englander
of Mayflower lineage in “Her Virginia Mammy,” a story like Cable’s
“Madame Delphine” but less convincing and gripping. In “The Sheriff’s
Children” a mulatto prisoner, falsely accused of murder, is defended
from a mob by a sheriff who turns out to be his father. Desperate and
cynical, the son is about to kill his father to escape when he is
shot by the sheriff’s daughter. In “The Web of Circumstance” a Negro
blacksmith, falsely accused of stealing a whip, is sentenced to five
years in the penitentiary on the same day that a white murderer is
sentenced to one year. “The Passing of Grandison” shows a cunning
slave, pretending to despise the abolitionist North, returning to his
“understanding” master. He does so, however, only to manage the escape
of all his kith and kin. “A Matter of Principle” satirizes the color
line within the race: Clayton, an uppercrust near-white Negro, who
“declined to associate with black people,” pretends that his house is
quarantined in order to keep a black Congressman from calling on his
daughter. The Congressman turns out to be a mulatto, “well worthy” of
Clayton’s daughter.
_The House Behind the Cedars_ (1900), Chesnutt’s first novel, is
concerned likewise with the color line. Rena, another octoroon heroine,
is insulted by whites and oppressed by her mother and a mulatto suitor.
Honorable devotion comes to her only through an upstanding black hero,
but this cannot forestall her pathetic death. _The Marrow of Tradition_
(1901), less conventional, is better. White characters range from the
aristocratic General Delamere to his debauched grandson Tom; Major
Carteret, demagogue for white supremacy; and McBane, ex-slave driver
who knows one solution: “Burn the nigger.” Negro characters range from
Dr. Miller, a skillful physician, to the militant Josh Green; the
loyal Sandy, and Jerry, a “white man’s nigger.” Sandy is framed for
a murder in the first part of the book. A bloody riot, based on the
one at Wilmington, N. C., is described in the second part. The white
demagogues whip up the mob to fury, because a Negro newspaper has
denounced lynching. Josh Green, who is willing to die rather than be
shot down like a dog, who puts aside “fergetfulness and fergiveness,”
leads the aroused Negroes, when the upper-class Negroes believe that
nothing can be done. The novel closes, however, on a note of forgetting
and forgiving: Dr. Miller, whose own child was killed in the riot, goes
to the home of his wife’s white half-sister, to save her child with his
very great medical skill. With all of its melodrama, the story has
power; badly plotted, it still tells a great deal about social life in
the South. Chesnutt idealizes some Negro characters, but candidly faces
the weaknesses in others. Most important, however, is his going beneath
the surface to social causes.
Chesnutt’s last novel was _The Colonel’s Dream_. Colonel French, an
ex-Confederate officer of “family,” dreams of resurrecting his native
section and bringing it into the ways of prosperity and justice. As in
so many novels of the time, his dream is not realized. He has opposed
to him William Fetters, convict labor contractor, mortgage shark and
political boss, together with the reactionary traditions and the
inertia of the South. When the casket of his aged Negro slave, who had
given his life for the Colonel’s son, is dug up from the family burial
plot and placed on his porch with a K.K.K. warning that the color line
must continue even in death, he sees that his crusade is doomed. After
this novel Chesnutt fell into an almost unbroken silence. Perhaps he
felt the doom of his own crusade to bring about justice.
Whether he was pessimistic about his crusade or not, his achievements
in fiction were worthy. Answering propaganda with propaganda, he
might be expected to have certain faults. He was overinclined to the
melodramatic, to mistaken identity, to the lost document turning up at
the right or wrong moment, to the nick of time entrance. His characters
are generally idealized or conventional. His “better class Negroes”
speak too literary a language and are generally unbelievable models in
behavior. Although attacking the color line within the race, he makes
great use of the hero or heroine of mixed blood, and at times seems to
accept the traditional concepts of Negro character. Even so, however,
his characters stand nearer to the truth than those of Thomas Page or
Thomas Dixon; he does not force them into only two grooves. There is no
gainsaying his knowledge of the southern scene, or of the Negro upper
class in northern cities. Unlike Dunbar he is opposed to the plantation
tradition, sharply critical of southern injustice, and aware of the
sinister forces at work in Reconstruction. Deploring the abuses of that
era, he still sees, like Tourgée, that the story of a South victimized
by carpet-baggers and scalawags is only a convenient half-truth. He
gives high praise to the Yankee schoolmasters and schoolmarms who
swarmed over Dixie to lift a second bondage from the freedmen. He shows
exploitation, riots and lynching mobs, as well as the more refined
exercising of prejudice. Often pompous and roundabout, in the manner
of his times, he nevertheless knew how to hold a reader’s interest. We
must concede that he was melodramatic in plotting, but evidences of a
skillful master’s hand can still be found. He knew a great deal, and
all things considered, he told it well.
_Summary._ Deriving somewhat from the abolitionists, the best of the
authors of this chapter attacked the plantation tradition, but with
the sharper weapons of the growing realism. Twain’s Jim and Roxana,
Tourgée’s Nimbus, Chesnutt’s Josh Green, and even Cable’s Bras Coupé
and Madame Delphine (though they belong to a nearly legendary past)
are far more convincing than Uncle Tom, Topsy and Hildreth’s Archy
Moore. Unlike their more popular contemporaries who defended the
plantation tradition, these authors, at a risk, recorded the injustice
that Negroes met with everywhere in “the tragic era.” They knew that
worshipful house-servants or depraved freedmen were not the sole actors
in the story, and as lovers of truth and justice they wanted the full
story told.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why was Cable considered untrue to the Old South?
2. In what respects is Bras Coupe unusual in fiction about Negroes?
3. Compare the octoroons in antislavery novels with those in novels by
Cable, Twain, and Tourgée.
4. Since Twain characterizes Jim as superstitious and illiterate, how
can Twain be considered sympathetic?
5. Why are Hearn’s beliefs about Negroes termed “stock”?
6. Compare William Wells Brown’s _Clotel_ with Frances Harper’s _Iola
Leroy_.
7. Compare Dunbar and Chesnutt.
8. What new characters appear in this chapter?