OLD PATHS
_Beautiful, Amusing Servitude._ In the early twentieth century, under
the influence of Thomas Nelson Page, a legion of writers wept over the
vanished glory of the old plantation and presented Negroes of extreme
devotedness to their masters. One writer in her book of sketches
grieved:
Aunt Phebe, Uncle Tom, Black Mammy, Uncle Gus, Aunt Jonas, Uncle Isom,
and all the rest--who shall speak all your virtues or enshrine your
simple faith and fidelity? It is as impossible as it is to describe
the affection showered upon you by those whom you called ‘Marster and
Missis.’
Impossible though it may have been, countless authors attempted it,
turning back time in its flight to sweetness and splendor that belong
to another world than this.
Of the short stories in abundance that idealized the Negro, _in his
place_, a few examples must serve. Betty Reynolds Cobb, in “The Coward”
shows little Nemi conquering his great fears, and facing a raging
torrent in order to get a doctor for “li’l Missy.” (Cf. Kate Chopin’s
“Beyond The Bayou.”) In Will Harben’s “The Sale of Uncle Rastus”, a
nearly dead slave shams perfect health in order to fetch a better price
for his bankrupt owner. His heroism reconciles his beloved master to
an estranged brother, who bids two thousand dollars for him. “Dem
boys done made up, en I fotch two thousand dollars! Whooee!” croaks
Uncle Rastus at death’s door. “Abram’s Freedom,” by Edna Turpin, shows
Emmaline, who has struggled to buy her husband’s freedom, saying: “Me
an’ Abram ain’t got nothin’ to do in dis worl’ but to wait on you
an’ master.” These are merely duplicates of stories by more talented
Reconstruction authors, with names and settings changed. Their authors
have little to say, but say it over and over.
Ruth McEnery Stuart rises a notch above these. Although she glorified
the past in _The River’s Children_ (1903) most of her work was local
color of the deep South. In such works as _Napoleon Jackson_ (1902),
_George Washington Jones_ (1903) and _The Second Wooing of Salina
Sue_ (1905), Negro life in the picturesquely shabby towns is quaint
and droll, an unending source of mirth and satisfaction for the
white-folks. Napoleon Jackson, the gentleman of the plush rocker, whose
mother swore that he should never lay hand to a plow, worships old
Marse and is therefore charming in Mrs. Stuart’s sight. His wife Rose
Ann, a visionary, is astonished that people pity Negroes since “we see
mo’n white folks sees.” Marital difficulties and burlesques of Negro
church services furnish much of the drollery. Salina Sue, forced to
marry her common-law husband, speaks of her fifteen-year old daughter:
“Hit’ll be a mighty good an’ ’ligious thing for her to remember in
after-years. Tain’t every yo’ng gal dat kin ricollec’ her pa an’ ma
gittin’ married.”
Better known writers preserving the tradition include the gifted
Sarah Orne Jewett, whose _The Mistress of Sydenham Plantation_ is
like Constance Woolson’s _East Angels_ in showing a northern woman’s
respect for a servant’s loyalty; Frank Stockton, who turned his facile
invention to the Negro in _The Cloverfield’s Carriage_ and _The Late
Mrs. Null_; and Booth Tarkington who invests the old picture with charm
in _Penrod and Sam_. All of these are superior writers to such southern
writers as Mrs. Burton Harrison, Opie Read and Marion Harland, but they
give no new interpretation. Some authors, like Virginia Frasel Boyle
in _Devil Tales_ (1900), followed Harris into the fertile field (and
the wilderness) of folklore. Ed Mott’s _The Black Homer of Jim Town_
(1900) is a collection of folk tales from the Cape Fear country of
North Carolina. Most of them are trite. Slavery is remembered as a good
time, and in one of the tallest of the tales, a Negro in the Federal
army arrives at the battle just in time to intercept a bullet intended
for his Confederate master, in whose arms he dies.
Women writers of the South have been particularly attracted to literary
exercises about the legendary chivalry, the perfect masters and slaves.
In their prefaces, they seem to consider it their duty to “interpret
the Negro race” and to lecture upon the modern Negro’s deficiencies.
Among these might be mentioned Emma Speed Sampson for _Mammy’s White
Folks_ (1919) and _Miss Minerva On The Old Plantation_ (1923); Jane
Baldwin Cotton for _Wall-Eyed Caesar’s Ghost_ (1925) and Virginia
McCormick for _Charcoal and Chalk_ (1931). Pity for “the child who
never had a fat, brown mammy with elastic lap and warm enfolding arms,”
alternates with beaming appreciation of happy-hearted pickaninnies
living an endless picnic. “A real understanding of our colored people”
generally amounts to having great fun out of them. The dialect is often
carefully recorded, but the Negroes say about the same things that Page
had them say long ago, to flatter their white-folks and to make them
laugh.
Although willing to poke gentle fun at his native South, O. Henry kept
to its old tradition about Negro character. Uncle Bushrod in “The
Guardian of The Accolade”, remembering Miss Lucy’s words for Marse
Robert: “a little child but my knight, pure and fearless and widout
reproach,” prevents Robert from absconding with what he thinks to be
the cash of the bank, but what turns out to be two quarts of old silk
velvet Bourbon. “The Fourth in Salvador” has a
buck coon from Georgia who had drifted down there from a busted-up
colored colony that had been started on some possumless land in
Mexico. As soon as he heard us say barbecue he wept for joy and
groveled on the ground.
“The Emancipation of Billy” has an ancient body-servant, Old Jeff, a
member of “de fambly,” who despises “Yankee rascality enduring’ the
war,” speaking “de fambly’s” language _to a T_. “A Municipal Report”
shows a faithful Negro coachman, Uncle Caesar, who supports his
impoverished mistress, and kills her worthless husband (a professional
southerner) for robbing her. A master of surprises, O. Henry has no
surprises for us when he handles Negro characters. They belong to an
endless line.
_Irvin Cobb and The Professional Humorists._ Irvin Cobb, whom some
consider heir to the roving shoes of O. Henry, once had a favorite
character declaim: “I ain’t no problem, I’se a pusson. I craves to be
so reguarded.” But when Cobb regards Jeff Poindexter, he sees little
more than a loyal and ridiculous servant, who says the right things.
Jeff advises a white moving picture producer as follows:
Ef you kin git hold of a crowd of cullid actors w’ich is willin’ to
ack lak the sho’nuff ole time cullid an’ not lak onbleached imitations
of w’ite folks, it seems lak to me the rest of it oughter be plum
easy. Mostly I’d mek the pitchers comical, ef I wuz you. You kin do
’at an’ still not hurt nobody’s feelin’s, w’ite nur black. Ef you
wants to perduse a piece showin’ a lot of niggers gittin’ skinned,
let it be another nigger w’ich skins em.... Then, w’en at the last,
they gits even wid him it’ll still be nigger ag’inst nigger. An’ ef,
oncet in awhile, you meks a kind of serious pitcher ... ’at ought to
fetch there yere new-issue cullid folks w’ich is seemingly become so
plentiful up Nawth. But mainly I’d stick to the laffin’ line ef I wuz
you. An’ whatever else you does, don’t mess wid no race problem.
Irvin Cobb takes Jeff’s advice, fondly affectionate toward the “old
time cullid,” derisive of the new-issue “onbleached imitations of
w’ite folks,” unwilling to hurt the feelings of any of his large white
audience. As a result, his books such as _J. Poindexter, Colored_ and
those about Old Judge Priest rise little above the joke-book level
when dealing with Negroes, in spite of Cobb’s undoubted knowledge of
his native Kentucky. McBlair’s _Mister Fish Kelly_ (1924) is similarly
traditional, with some surface truth to comic elements in Negro life,
but too set upon tickling America.
But that is a well paying business, as such writers as Hugh Wiley,
Arthur Akers, Octavus Roy Cohen and E. K. Means have discovered.
Belonging to light entertainment literature, their stories would
hardly deserve serious attention, were it not for their undoubted
social influence. With situations ranging from the improbable to the
unreal, the comedy, the farce are not “pure,” but are mixed all up with
propaganda for Negro inferiority and subordination. These authors stem
from Page and the Reconstruction: although they stress the comical,
they likewise urge the mutual affection between funny Negroes and their
fine white-folks, and bear witness to the sunny life of the South. Guy
Johnson has written that there is a sort of
folk attitude of the white man toward the Negro.... He must have his
fun out of the Negro, even when writing serious novels about him.
How much more fun the professional marketmen of humor have out of the
Negro is apparent when one reads the stories of Wiley, Akers, and
Cohen, to name only three who write for wide circulation magazines such
as _The Saturday Evening Post_ and the _Red Book_. With the help of the
radio, these family magazines see to it that there is a comic Negro in
every middle class home.
Hugh Wiley in the twenties presented Wildcat, inseparable from
Lady Luck, his unsavory goat. Like O. Henry, Wiley uses outrageous
metaphors, but one does not have to believe the language to be Negro
merely because it is amusing. Pet expressions are such as “crematized
or secluded in de ground” for burial rites, “paraphernalia of chance”
for dice, and other minstrel joke-book relics. The humor is broad,
concerned with perspiring three-hundred pound black Amazons, “battling
brunettes,” a goat outsmelling creation, whose butting causes Wildcat
to “skid over the curb in a pose which cost his army pants half of
their seating capacity.” Wildcat is a “champion ration battler,” barely
making it on four meals a day, lazy except at the irresistible crap
game, where he wins fabulous sums with other-worldly luck. Characters
are named Miss Cuspidora Lee, Vitus Marsden, Honey Tone, Dwindle
Daniels, Punic Hunter, Presidump Ham Grasty, Festus Roach. There
are many jobs (generally unwelcome) and a great deal of money and
food in circulation; the law is loud-mouthed but gentle; things are
“hotsy-totsy” down in Dixie, Lady Luck and the whitefolks will see to
that. It all strives very hard, but it could be more amusing.
Of these professionally funny men, Octavus Roy Cohen is probably
most widely known and industrious. Cohen and his large following are
entranced by the comedy of what Cobb called “onbleached imitations
of white folks.” The idea of Negro doctors, lawyers, bankers,
movie-magnates and society belles in Birmingham is too funny, but not
too funny for words. Some of his annual books are _Assorted Chocolates_
(1922), _Dark Days and Black Knights_ (1923), _Bigger and Blacker_
(1925), _Black and Blue_ (1926) and _Highly Colored_ (1921). All are
highly colored: he names his characters Orifice Latimer, Callous
Deech, Magnolius Ricketts, Excelsior Nix, Forcep Swain, Exotic
Hines, Unit Smith, Jasper De Vord, Chromo Bridal and Atlas Brack.
His dialect is one unheard on land or sea: “Got to ain’t has got;”
“I ain’t sawn her right recent;” “Does anybody discover that I ain’t
you, you is suddenly gwine to become ain’t;” “salisfried, straduced,
light bombastic, applicatin, foolisment; oh, whoa is me!” The plots
and counterplots generally turn around the axis of money or love;
the honest hero defeats the slickers, the boy gets the girl. Florian
Slappey, in Harlem, is fleeced in the cold winter by two Harlem number
men, but the happy ending is usual. The Sons and Daughters of I Will
Arise, The Enter Paradise In Style Life and Death Sassiety, and The
Over The River Buryin’ Sassiety figure prominently. There seems to be
a great deal of money in Negro Birmingham, but when Cohen speaks of
a Negro star being paid one hundred dollars a week by a Negro movie
company, he reveals his myth-making powers. One of Cohen’s recent
heroes, Epic Peters, is a pompously talking Pullman porter, proud of
his service to “quality white folks” whom he can tell at a glance,
happy, amusing, and about as real as his speech: “Goodness, goshness,
Miss Agness, Mr. Foster--I suttinly thought I was gwine see you become
ain’t.”
Arthur K. Akers’ world is less unreal, but equally droll. Jeff thus
explains his connubial woes:
Hit’s on account of me bein’ weak in de’rithmetic. Dat’s huccome I
cain’t ricollect is I got two weddin’s and three d’voces, or three
weddin’s an’ two d’voces. Emmline come in dar somewhar.
Akers has a fondness for names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Columbus
Collins, Aspirin Edwards and Halfportion. His intricate plots
invariably end happily for the dull-witted, inept heroes such as
Gladstone Smith who is “numb from the neck up.” Ipecac Ignalls,
looking like “something dark that had been left under a tent--an
orange-colored tent with LIFE GUARD lettered across it” does not know
how to swim, but he saves the life of a belle by letting her stand
on him while he is on the bottom of the pool drowning. Other comedy
is furnished by lodge-life and financial high-jinks performed by the
Worthymost Master Samson Bates and Horace Tombs, who are Get Rich Quick
Wallingfords in blackface.
E. K. Means, whose stories were collected in volumes called _E. K.
Means_, _More E. K. Means_, and _Further E. K. Means_, insists that he
wrote out of a whimsical fondness for the Negro “to whom God has given
two supreme gifts--Music and Laughter.” He seems to agree with one of
his white characters, however, that the Negro “has a one-cylinder mind
and a smoky spark-plug.” Nigger-Heel Plantation, Hen Scratch Saloon,
Shoofly Methodist Church, Tickfall and Dirty Six are treated with a
mixture of true local color and far-fetched tom-foolery. The characters
have ludicrous names like Whiffletree Bone, Limit Lark, Vakey Vopp,
Dazzle Zenor, Coco Ferret, Ready Rocket, Vinegar Atts, Skeeter Butts.
Means attacks conventional dialect, yet he makes use of invented
phrases: “explavacatin”, “permittunce,” “coming wid a looseness,” “de
orgies” (for church services), “ax her inquirement,” “ain’t right in
her intellectuals,” “I warn’t studyin’ how to save by grace; I was
ponderin’ how to save my grease.” Means regrets that the good life
lived by these naïve villagers is departing; “Ethiopia is stretching
out her hands after art, science, literature and wealth,” Negroes are
becoming “play-like white folks.” He wishes to leave a record of the
“sable sons of laughter and song, in Fiction’s beautiful temple of
dreams.” The laughter, however, is chiefly the haw-hawing of the white
folks; the dreams are practical jokes. Something of the sinister and
ugly is recognized; Negroes at their Uplift League election wrench legs
off of tables in a free-for-all, shot-guns and razors are frequently
used, but the picture remains quaint and comical. In almost every story
we have panic-stricken Negroes “skedaddling,” their “ponderous feet
beating a wild tattoo of panicky retreat upon the sodded turf;” oddly
enough, one cause for fright never mentioned is a southern mob.
These authors contrive a rapid-fire dialogue, now near to life (as in
Akers) and now to the minstrel show (as in Cohen). The white folks
are tolerant, until tenants burn the porches off their homes, or
servants mix up affairs too much, when they wax comically profane.
The Negroes are superstitious, helpless, cowardly, utterly ridiculous
children. Life is easy and indolent except for shrewish wives and
scheming crooks; the razors do not cut, the scantlings used by white
masters on their menials never hurt, since they strike the head,
and the “law” is only a mythical threat. What could be pathos and
tragedy sets off laughter. The settings are supposed to be found in
Demopolis or Birmingham or other southern cities, but they belong to a
_never-never_, cloud-cuckoo land. All in all these stories reveal far
less of Negro life and character than of middle class American taste.
_The Rising Tide of Color._ But there were others who took the Negro
in dead earnest. Negroes were becoming educated, getting property,
leaving the South, and asking for civil rights; they constituted,
therefore, a menace. Southern civilization sought to preserve itself by
peonage, disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching. The authors aided
and paralleled the politicians, who confounded attempts at democracy
by dragging the herring of intermarriage over the countryside. In
proportion as Negroes showed themselves as seeking economic advancement
and civil rights, authors portrayed them as insulting brutes and
rapists.
This stereotype shot up to full growth in these first decades of the
twentieth century. But the seeds, as we have seen, had been sown
long before. Answering abolitionist onslaughts, the _Bible Defense
of Slavery_ had “proved” that Sodom and Gomorrah were strongholds
of _Negro_ vice, and that “the baleful fire of unchaste amour rages
through the Negro’s blood more fiercely....” Hinton Helper, in
_Nojoque_ (1867), had set up black and beastly as synonyms. _The Negro
A Beast_ (1900) by Charles Carroll which proves the Negro to be “a
beast, created with articulate speech, that he may be of service to the
White man,” brought this type of book to a rabid climax. As already
pointed out, Page in _Red Rock_ and _The Negro, The Southerner’s
Problem_ had shown Reconstruction to be a holiday for Negro brutes.
_Thomas Dixon._ After Page, the best known author of Ku Klux Klan
fiction is the Reverend Thomas Dixon. _The Clansman_ and _The Leopard’s
Spots_, because of their sensationalism (cf. chapter titles “The Black
Peril,” “The Unspoken Terror,” “A Thousand Legged Beast,” “The Hunt For
the Animal”) seemed just made for the mentality of early Hollywood,
where D. W. Griffith’s _The Birth of a Nation_ made for Dixon a dubious
sort of immortality, and finally fixed the stereotype in the mass-mind.
_The Leopard’s Spots_ (1902) is Dixon’s masterpiece of hatred. This
long novel has its share of sugary love affairs done in the best
southern tradition, but is chiefly important for its political
bearings. Characters are brought in from _Uncle Tom’s Cabin_; Legree
quits drink for the greater vice of becoming a scalawag and a mill
owner. Eliza’s son, George Harris, is educated at Harvard, falls
in love with Senator Lowell’s daughter and is ordered from the
abolitionist home. Tim Shelby, a silk-hatted Negro politician, boasts
that he will one day marry a white woman and is lynched as “Answer of
the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare to pollute with words the
fair womanhood of the South.” Dick, an imbecile, crushes with a rock
the head of a white child and then attacks her. The assaulted child
and the burning of the Negro are described with gusto. Drunk Negro
soldiers drag white brides from their homes; criminal Negroes rove the
countryside, forcing whites to take to the cities. Included in the list
of hateful outragers of the fair Southland are the Yankee schoolmarms,
whom Dixon would like to see shipped back to Boston in glass cages like
rattlesnakes. The Negro is not to be educated, not even industrially,
for this drives him to crime or suicide. A few Negroes like old Nels
obey their white-folks, but Dixon is surprised to find no Negroes in
the mob that lynched Dick. Negro “dominion” and the threat that “the
South will become mulatto instead of Anglo-Saxon” are overthrown when
the Red-Shirts ride.
_The Clansman_ (1905) is another hymn of hate. President Lincoln,
considered pro-southern, is fearful lest “mulatto citizenship be too
dear a price to pay even for emancipation.” Stoneman, a libellous
portrait of Thaddeus Stevens, is shown in the toils of Lydia Brown,
a mulatto of extraordinary animal beauty. Other villains are Silas
Lynch, a mulatto, “with the head of a Caesar and the eyes of the
jungle,” Augustus Caesar, “whose flat nose with enormous perpetually
dilating nostrils, sinister head and enormous cheekbones and jaws
reminded one of the lower order of animal,” and Yankee soldiers whom
faithful ex-slaves obligingly knock down. “A new mob of onion-laden
breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of
American democracy.” Against this reign of terror, culminating in a
rape, painstakingly described, the knights of the Ku Klux Klan rise
in righteous wrath. Gus, whose image was discovered upon the retina
of the dead mother’s eye by strange southern science, is not lynched,
but “executed by the Grand Turk who flung his body on the lawn of the
black Lieutenant-Governor of the State.” In this way civilization was
restored. Reconciliation is exemplified in northern-southern love
affairs, but only when the Negro is returned to serfdom can there be
true reunion.
_The School of Page and Dixon._ Emory’s _A Maryland Manor_ (1901)
is important only as a sign of the trend. The slaves are shown as
lighthearted, needing compulsion to teach them good habits. Chloe, who
runs away frequently, is obeying an inherited love for the woods: “It
was often the case ... fugitives fled from those they loved best.”
From emancipation “the negroes suffered most of all, sinking into a
condition little short of their original barbarism.” Caesar is too
intelligent to accept freedom, “What you take me fur, anyhow?”, etc. As
a reward he is allowed burial in the family graveyard, at his master’s
blessed feet.
In _The Northerner_ (1905) by Nora Davis, a reconciliation novel,
Falls, a Yankee businessman, establishes the Tennessee Valley
Improvement Company to develop electric power in the South, and wins
the Alabama belle in the meanwhile. Falls and Watson, a southern
aristocrat, battle a mob to save an innocent but craven Negro, who,
given a pistol to defend his life, thinks only: “Lawdy, don’t I wisht
I had er piece er M’lindy’s cawn bread.” Miscegenation is a great
concern of the author, who calls it the “Curse of Dixie,” “The Nameless
Shame,” “The Hidden Pain.” Watson, in his cavalier youth, had been
seduced by the brown Lesby, “a snake in the grass.” He loathes his
beautiful quadroon daughter, Rosebud. Miss Davis has him say: “Every
drop of blood in my body turns cold with disgust at the thought--the
sight of her!” And to his daughter, before she is relegated to the
future in store for one “cursed with the black drop,” he declaims:
You should be just, child, to this man--try to see how he is placed.
He has done, and he will do, his duty by you as God gives it to him
to see it.... That was a sin of the flesh, you know, and in the flesh
will he repay. But in the spirit, in all those things which belong to
his higher nature, you can have no part.... He could not love you,
cherish you: his very nature would recoil. It is instinct, child,
blood!”
Rose meekly concurs. Some comic use is made of Pete, a state
Congressman in Reconstruction, now happier as a valet for his
white-folks.
Robert Lee Durham is even more concerned over the “Hidden Shame” in
_The Call of The South_ (1908). John Hayward, the central figure, is
of barely perceptible Negro blood. Of fine ancestry on the white side,
he is a first-rate student and athlete at Harvard before he leaves for
heroic service in the war in Cuba. Becoming footman for a president
who champions liberal democracy, he is thrown in contact with the
president’s daughter. After rescuing her from a runaway horse, and
revealing his heroic past at Harvard and in battle, he wins her, like
a modern Othello, by tales of dangers overcome. They marry secretly,
platonically. Up to this point the novelist has been sympathetic toward
Hayward’s undoubted abilities and undeserved rebuffs. But the platonic
husband and wife, waylaid in a storm, are forced to seek refuge in a
hut.
In a flash of light she sees his face--distorted: with a shriek of
terror she wildly tries to push him from her; but the demon of the
blood of Guinea Gumbo is pitiless, and against the fury of it, as
against the storm, she fights and cries in vain.
The tragedy rushes on: Helen is delivered of a very dark child,
explained as a “recession”; her father dies of heart failure; she goes
mad. A South Carolina cavalier points the moral and adorns the tale:
How shall sickly sentimentality solace your shame if in the blood of
your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red corpuscles of some savage
ancestor shall overmatch your gentle endowment?
For “however risen, redolent of newly applied polish,” the leopard
cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin. It seems that the
skin must be changed for him. Even so, the fundamental savagery is
still there, lurking. Social equality means the “mongrelization of the
superior breed,” of which one “blood deep characteristic is chivalrous
respect for women.” So rings out the Call of the South.
Although a much later book, Jean Sutherland’s _Challenge_ (1926) is
equally fantastic and insidious. The Polish-English Prince Kareninoff,
who is famous as an opponent of race-mixture, has had a son by a woman
who, unknown to him, was part Negro. The son, however, does the proper
thing; he shuts himself in a monastery to save his aristocratic fiancée
from pollution, and then, like his octoroon sisters, goes to Africa to
help his people.
Negro characters in John Trotwood Moore’s novels such as _Ole Mistis_
and _The Bishop of Cottontown_ are in the mildewed tradition. Mammy, in
the second of these, has a new mission: she keeps the children of her
impoverished master from the cotton mills.
You’re down heah preachin’ one thing for niggahs and practisin’
another for yo’ own race; yo’ hair frizzles on yo’ head at th’ort of
niggah slavery, whilst all the time you’re enslavin’ the po’ little
whites that’s got yo’ own blood in their veins.... I come for my child!
Frenzied at the wrongs of the cotton factory, she sets fire to the
“Sodom.” For this she is nearly lynched, but is saved by the heroes
of the novel. “Thirteen dead men lay, and the back-bone of lynching
had been broken forever in Alabama.” This was written in 1906. Moore
condones lynching as
the result of the sudden emancipation of ignorant slaves, who, backed
by the bayonets of their liberators ... perpetuated an unnameable
crime as part of their system of revenge for years of slavery.... And
is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?
Inconsistently, he goes on:
And so these people flocked to the burning--the Negro haters, who had
never owned a slave and had no sympathy--no sentiment for them.
In one scene a group of Negro night-riders, instigated by the villains
of the Union League and a mulatto politician, terrorize the faithful
Negroes. The latter, who had been overseers, had “absorbed many of the
virtues of the best class of whites,” while the Negroes who wished to
vote were “but a few generations removed from the cowardice of darkest
Africa.” Lushly overflowing with love for the poor millhands, Moore has
a kind word for the Negro only as serf.
_Summary._ These authors urged reconciliation of North and South, _but
on southern terms_. They shuddered at the rising tide of bad Negroes,
dreading amalgamation, but too often “bad Negroes” to them were the
educated, or the propertied, or the militant. Their books seem to be
conceived in fear and written with hate. They reflected the thought of
the South of their day, from planter aristocrat and political boss down
to the poor-white on the farm or in the mills. They wanted the South
left alone to deal with the Negro in its own way, and this way, since
the Negro was needed as ignorant laborer and scapegoat, was the way of
exploitation and cruelty. These authors merely transferred melodrama
of action into written melodramas. They were sometimes vicious,
sometimes stupid, and as in the case of Dixon, sometimes mob inciters
rather than novelists. But still, be it recorded to democracy’s shame,
they got what they wanted.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Account for the vogue of Thomas Nelson Page at the beginning of the
century.
2. Why was Cobb anxious to show “Negroes always skinned by Negroes”?
3. What is significant in the fact that after Jeff Poindexter makes his
greatest speech he is given ten dollars?
4. In the recent filibuster on the Anti-Lynching Bill, what arguments
were advanced that are to be found in this chapter?
5. What is the relationship of Page’s _Red Rock_ to the problem fiction
of this chapter?
6. What were the chief problems that concerned southern authors in this
chapter?
7. In what respects do the comic writers and the melodramatists of this
chapter agree?