COUNTER-PROPAGANDA--BEGINNING REALISM
_Negro Apologists._--Aroused by the libels of Thomas Nelson Page
and his school, Negro novelists stepped forward with race defense
and glorification. Explaining weaknesses as the heritage of slavery
and oppression, they wished to hold up to the world “the millions
of honest, God-fearing, industrious, frugal, respectable and
self-respecting Negroes, who are toiling on for the salvation of their
race.” They urged what Kelly Miller wrote in “An Open Letter to Thomas
Dixon, Jr.” (1905):
Within forty years of only partial opportunity ... the American Negro
has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a
professional class, some fifty thousand strong ... some three thousand
Negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from
the best institutions in the North and West.... Negro inventors
have taken out four hundred patents ... scores of Negroes ... take
respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans.
And, as another put it,--“This farm land that they own and operate
if put acre to acre would make a strip of land five miles wide ...
from New York to San Francisco.” They believed that the Negro who had
succeeded in the American way should have his day in court. Some agreed
with Booker Washington, more with DuBois, but all stressed the Negro’s
persecution and his achievement. The times demanded propaganda of them,
they felt; and propaganda they gave, in good measure. The race was
their hero, and preaching a solution their business, upon which they
were grimly intent.
Sutton Griggs, one of the earliest, assured the readers of _Unfettered_
(1902) that neither angels nor demons, but mere human beings made up
his cast of characters. But this is not so. Morlene is described:
A wealth of lovely black hair crowning a head of perfect shape and
queenly poise; a face, the subtle charm of which baffles description;
two lustrous black eyes, wondrously expressive, presided over by
eyebrows that were ideally beautiful; a neck which, with perfect art,
descended and expanded so as to form a part of a faultless bust; as
to form, magnificently well proportioned; when viewed as a whole, the
very essence of loveliness....
It is no wonder then, that she speaks to one of the villains: “Sir,
it takes no prophet to foretell that terrible sorrows await you.” The
hero, Dorlan Warthell, is likewise faultless: “As to color he was
black, but even those prejudiced as to color forgot that prejudice when
they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo.” Dorlan, a power in politics,
deserts the Republican party for betraying his race, and incurs the
hatred of the white Congressman Bloodworth. The ills heaped upon ills
of the southern Negro, a very idealized love affair, long discussions
of the race problem, and Dorlan’s plan to solve it (partly worked out
on a balloon ride) make the book a hodgepodge. The prose is trite and
pompous.
Griggs’ _The Hindered Hand_ (1905) is also a bad novel. The characters
are models of decorum. In a passionate love scene at the end, the hero
Ensal takes one of Tiara’s hands in his, and then overwhelmed, takes
the other:
We fain would draw the curtain just here.... They were married that
night, and the next day set out for Africa, to provide a home for the
American Negro.
All of the darker phases of the South appear in the book, but
melodramatically, unrealistically. The action is slowed up by long
dissertations on “the problem,” including a review of Thomas Dixon’s
_Leopard’s Spots_. Even the two heroines are race orators. George
McClellan’s _Old Greenbottom Inn_ (1906) is subtler propaganda. Most
of the stories tell of the pathetic love affairs of beautiful Negro
girls, but there is some rewarding local color of the Tennessee Valley
and of the earliest Negro schools.
An argument in the guise of fiction is J. W. Grant’s _Out of the
Darkness_ or _Diabolism and Destiny_ (1909). Answering Booker T.
Washington’s conciliatory school of thought, the author writes “What
are houses, land and money to men who are women?” But the mettle
of the author deserves a better novel. His chief characters--the
orator, the salutatorian and the valedictorian of their college
class--become noted as preacher, statesman, and physician respectively.
The physician discovers a cure for yellow fever, saves a beautiful
white girl’s life, and is lynched before the love affair between
them ripens. He is nearly white and bitter towards the white world;
his two classmates are likewise militant. The author continually
stresses the grace, refinement, wealth, palatial homes and property
of upper class Negroes, decries the masses, and demands that the
Negro be measured not by his worst but by his best. Needless to say
the wrongs of the Negro are listed in full, but are seldom shown
movingly. _As We See It_ (1910) by Robert L. Waring deals with a
young black hero, Abe, who leaves scholastic and athletic honors at
Oberlin College to avenge the lynching of his mother and sister. There
is a Damon-Pythias bond between Abe and a white boy, Malcolm, and
between their two fathers, one an Alabama aristocrat and the other his
body-servant. The aristocratic class of the South is praised highly,
while the poor-whites are treated with contempt and hatred. Waring’s
generalizations about the “cracker” are very much like Dixon’s about
Negroes.
_From Superman to Man_ (1917) by J. A. Rogers has only a thin thread
of narrative running through long discussions of the race problem, in
which a Pullman porter embarrasses and refutes white passengers with
his anthropological and sociological information. Quips such as “The
white man’s burden is composed largely of plunder” and “‘To educate the
Negro is only to make him unhappy’ really means ‘Do not educate the
Negro and make the white man unhappier’” carry force, but the book is
more pamphlet then novel.
The apologist whom these authors praised for his uncompromising
attitude was W. E. B. DuBois. His fiction, superior to theirs in
literary value, is similar in many respects. _The Quest of the Silver
Fleece_ (1911) is part fantasy, part propaganda. Zora, who sees visions
of the “little people of the swamps,” rises from a degraded environment
to become a race leader, fit companion for Bles Alwyn, a noble
black boy from Georgia who becomes a force in politics. The plot is
unconvincing; the characters are stiff and talk stiltedly: “Bles, thou
almost persuadest me to be a fool.” But DuBois’ social understanding
gives the novel value. The New England schoolmarms, the southern attack
upon the schools, the scheming to get control of Negro education to
render it harmless, the tie-up of Northern capital with cotton barons,
the shame of Negro treatment, the conniving of political Negroes,--all
of these are revealed by a keen social analyst. DuBois sees how
poor-whites are used “to keep niggers in their place, and the fear of
niggers to keep the poorer whites in theirs.” One white character says
“Derned if I don’t think white slaves and black slaves had ought ter
git together.” But this radical lead is not followed up; the novel is
too taken up with a priggish hero and an unbelievable heroine, and
social reality is subordinated to symbolism. It is a significant book,
however, and if DuBois answered Dixon’s melodrama in kind, it was at
least melodrama pleading for humanity and blasting injustice.
DuBois’ _Darkwater: The Twentieth Century Completion of “Uncle Tom’s
Cabin”_ (1919) contains five tales in a prose that echoes the Bible
and medieval romance. Two modern fairy-tales attack race-hatred and
oppression. “The Second Coming” tells of the birth of a black child in
a Georgia stable while three bishops--“the wise men”--look on. “Jesus
Christ in Texas,” like Upton Sinclair’s “They Call Me Carpenter,”
deals with the return of Christ to a hate-ridden community, where he
is unrecognized by the preacher, but is known to the despised and
rejected. Like H. G. Wells, DuBois, in “The Comet,” makes use of
pseudo-science to drive home social ideas. When Manhattan is destroyed
by the gases of a comet, only two people survive, one a Negro bank
messenger, and the other a white girl, “rarely beautiful and richly
gowned, with darkly-golden hair and jewels.” Alone on earth, the “Bride
of Life” and “great All-Father of the race to be” are broken in upon
and returned to the world of prejudice by the crass “honk-honk” of
rescuers from the world outside of New York City. These stories are
without the usual drive of DuBois’ work; even within the frame of
allegory and fantasy, they lack conviction.
James Weldon Johnson’s _The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man_ (1912)
(first published anonymously) urges that
log-cabins and plantations and dialect speaking ‘darkies’ are perhaps
better known in American literature than any other single picture....
[Too little known] are coloured people who live in respectable homes
and amidst a fair degree of culture.
The hero, a sensitive, light-skinned Negro, expresses an upper-class
snobbishness toward the Negro masses:
The unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk
and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost
repulsion.
Ashamed of “being identified with a people that could with impunity be
treated worse than animals,” he decides to “pass” for white. He travels
widely through the South, to New York and to Europe, mingling generally
with artistic people. Economic security and a happy marriage with a
white woman do not quiet his regret, however, and he calls himself
a “coward, a deserter ... [with] a strange longing for my mother’s
people.” Although the central figure is complex and interesting, the
novel seems to exist primarily for the long discussions of race, and
the showing of the Negro in different milieus. The descriptions of the
“big meeting” and of Bohemian life in New York are valuable realism.
_The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man_ was a ground-breaking novel in
its dealing with the “aristocratic” mulatto, the problem of “passing,”
the Negro artistic world, the urban and European scene, and its subtler
assertion of points where Negroes “are _better_ than anybody else.”
_Summary._ After the long years of caricature and contempt, it was
natural that Negro novelists of the first generation after slavery
should write as apologists. Not literary men, with the exception of
DuBois and Johnson, but most often preachers and teachers, they had a
charge to keep instead of a story to be told. They resented the use of
the “Jim-Crow Negro,” seen in Harris and Page, Dunbar and Chesnutt.
DuBois reveals a refreshing faith in the people at times, but they all
preferred the “talented tenth,” at its most genteel. The heroines are
modest and beautiful, frequently octoroon; the heroes are handsome and
priggish, frequently black. Their characters have high-flown names like
Dorlan Warthell, Ensal Ellwood, Tiara and Bles Alwyn; between these and
comic names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Vakey Vopp, and Epic Peters
there is little to choose. The villains are too often poor-whites.
The incidents are romantic and often fantastic. The injuries of the
Negro are seldom conveyed with full power; like the abolitionists,
these novelists felt that listing could make up for rendering. The race
problem, at the core of their work, turns their novels into tracts.
Acceptance of certain traits as racial, such as optimism, loyalty and
faith, and underestimation of the Negro masses invalidate much of their
discussion. All are concerned with refutation of Thomas Dixon and his
school. They were fighting in a good cause, but the novel was not their
weapon.
_The Tradition of The Abolitionists._ Negro apologists found allies
among northern white liberals who joined in the struggle for Negro
rights. Mary White Ovington, one of the important figures in the
National Association For The Advancement of Colored People, wrote
persuasive propaganda fiction. _The Shadow_ (1920) makes out a case
for Negroes against the white world. A white girl, abandoned by her
aristocratic family, is brought up as colored, until a letter informs
her of her lineage. Her experiences in the white world, complicated by
coincidental meetings with her Negro “brother,” disillusion her, and
she says:
White people are wicked.... They hate goodness.... And they say
they’re so good!... We black people, we are bad.... Well, I want to be
with bad people. I’ve been with good people as long as I can bear....
The novel is worked out romantically. Its pattern and many of its
situations, however, have been taken over by later novelists. Miss
Ovington is likewise the author of _Hazel_ (1913), a story of a little
colored heroine, and the much better _Zeke_ (1931), which is an
informed and sympathetic novel of the life of Negro boys in a southern
school. Her “The White Brute” has been called one of the most memorable
stories against lynching.
Dorothy Canfield’s _The Bent Twig_ (1915) refers to race prejudice in a
midwestern town. When two shy, well-bred girls are discovered to have
Negro blood, their schoolmates taunt them gleefully. An intelligent
liberal--grieved at the humiliation--feels like gathering up his family
and going away from the intolerable question, to Europe, but his wife
grimly remarks: “And what we shall do is, of course, nothing at all.”
Typical of the many works urging the solution of the race problem by
applied Christianity is _Of One Blood_ (1916) by Charles Sheldon, the
author of the religious best-seller _In His Steps_. Sheldon admits that
he has pictured the “heroic, the beautiful and the great of each race,”
but insists that he has not done them justice. The Negro hero is shown
as triumphant college orator, great athlete, and finally agricultural
expert instructing his people. Although nearly lynched in the South,
being rescued melodramatically by a southern member of the “World
Brotherhood,” he will not be “angry, sullen, bitter or revengeful.” The
author concludes that race hatred would be abolished if “all the white
men in the United States were like Abraham Lincoln and all the black
men like Booker Washington,” a hope as extreme as his characterization
and plot. Likewise full of praise for Booker Washington, _The Testing
Fire_ by Alexander Corkey (1911) optimistically prophesies a redeemed
South.
_Early Southern Liberalism._--Groping and hesitant liberalism found
expression in the work of some of the southern novelists. Some were
aware of the heavy hand of the dead past and wanted to shake it off,
others wanted to set down honestly what they saw about them. _The
Southerner_ (1909) first appeared as a serial, _The Autobiography of
a Southerner Since the Civil War_, by Nicholas Worth, whom readers
soon identified as Walter Hines Page. The attack of this book upon
the “mummified” South, its dedication to the laying of the three
ghosts of “The Confederate Dead, of Religious Orthodoxy and of Negro
Domination,” shows how opposed Walter Hines Page of North Carolina was
to the ghost-ridden Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia. The novel is long
and tract-like. Negro characters play an important part. Uncle Ephraim
and Aunt Maria, worshippers of their white family, remember slavery as
a happy state. Balancing these are Sam Worth, the runaway slave who
becomes head of an industrial school; Lissa, another tragic mulatto,
who bears a child to the future governor of the state; the Rev. Doctor
Snodder, meek hang-dog “teacher of the oppressed”; John Marshall, an
intelligent Hampton graduate; gullible office seekers, and a murderer
of a Confederate firebrand. The author of _The Southerner_ had, for his
time, advanced ideas regarding education, civil rights, and democracy,
and these are reflected in his characterizations of Negroes, which,
though not done at full-length, are suggestive departures from the old
and outworn.
Ellen Glasgow, who “carried realism across the Potomac” to the
interpretation of her beloved Virginia, naturally pays attention to
the Negro. He appears, however, as part of the social background, not
as central character. He is viewed with shrewd insight: in _The Miller
of Old Church_ (1911) a Negro farmer, told to be thankful for his crop
instead of complaining, responds:
Dar ain’t nuttin’ ’tall ter be thankful fur in dat, suh, case de Lawd
He ain’t had no mo ter do wid dat ar co’n den old Marse Hawtrey. I jes
ris dat ar co’n wid my own han’ right down de road at my front do’,
and po’d de water on hit outer de pump at my back un. I’se monstrous
glad ter praise de Lawd for what he done done, but I ain’t gwine to
gin ’im credit fur de wuk er my own fis’ en foot.
_Barren Ground_ (1925) contains some honest pictures of Negroes, not
greatly different from the impoverished whites of the broomsedge,
except that they are better and thriftier farmers. With courage Miss
Glasgow introduces the common-law wife of old man Graylock. Once
a handsome Negro woman, she is now slatternly and smoulderingly
resentful, especially when the old man in a drunken fit takes a
horsewhip to his mulatto brood.
The Negro character as a very different sort of background appears in
_Hagar’s Hoard_, by George Kibbe Turner (1920). This gripping novel
tells of the horror of yellow fever as it came to the close-shuttered
houses of Memphis. Negroes serve as a mysterious, sinister chorus.
Memphis is conjured vividly before the reader: “that long ragged line
of old brick blocks--that rendezvous of niggers and thieves--the bad
niggers, and the murderers and the nigger thieves.” Then there are
the sanctified Negroes, “The Hollering Saints,” who are certain that
the yellow fever is “the punishment of God acomin’ down on Memphis.”
Individualized Negroes are Arabella, the faithful house servant,
fanatically awaiting the coming of the Lamb; Make Haste Mose, the
driver of the dead wagon, and a saddle-colored Negro with an immense
scar, lying in wait to rob. All of these, according to the southern boy
who tells the story, are unfathomable:
All white folks knew was what they generally know about niggers--that
bowing and scraping; those brown masks--those faces with all their
muscles trained since the sin of Ham in the Bible; since they went out
in slavery and subjection--to lie still and show nothing. And those
old brown eyes, watching, watching.
Under the pen name of “George Madden Martin,” Mrs. Atwood R. Martin
wrote many stories of southern Negro life. “Her Husband” concerns
a lynching. When Edith Thornberry, a white woman of gentle birth,
discovers that her husband, a poor white, has reverted to type and led
the lynchers, she is set against him. She was “bracketed with those
thousands of southern men and women who speak a universal language
of decency,” but her husband was bracketed with “a pusillanimous
multitude, skulkers ever behind the decent South, lynchers,
night-riders, white caps, Ku Klux.” Unfortunate in its connection
of heredity with decency, the story is still significant for the
sharp protest of an intelligent southern woman against mob-violence.
_Children of The Mist_ (1920) decries the work of agitators upon
Negroes, but is by no means merely Thomas Nelson Page brought up to
date.
_Stirrings of Realism._--When, at the turn of the century, authors
showed a willingness to deal seriously with uneasy segments of American
life, the Negro made his demand upon them. It is significant that most
of the early figures prominent in the history of twentieth century
realism dealt in some measure with the Negro. Among them are Stephen
Crane, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein.
Stephen Crane’s work was generally too advanced for the sentimental
readers of his age, and “The Monster” (1897) was particularly so.
This story of horror lashes out at the stupidity and heartlessness
of a small American town. Henry Johnson, a Negro hostler, rescues a
small boy from a fire. Falling, overcome by the fumes in the burning
laboratory, he has his face eaten away by acid. The boy’s father, Dr.
Trescott, exercises his best skill and keeps Henry alive. When Henry
was thought to be dying, he was lauded as hero and martyr; but kept
alive, a faceless imbecile, he meets with terror and hatred, among the
better class as well as in Watermelon Alley. “The Monster” is more a
sharp satire of a small town’s intolerance than a study of Negroes,
but it has secondary meanings that pertain to Negro life in what it
tells of service, sacrifice, and false affection that goes over into
revulsion. The few pictures of Negro life here and in _Whilomville
Stories_ are done with the vividness to be expected from Stephen Crane.
Negro characters in Upton Sinclair’s _The Jungle_ (1905) are only
incidental, but they are drawn in grim earnest. He shows Negroes
as strikebreakers, brought into Packingtown from the levees or the
country districts of the far South on promises of five dollars a day
and board, with special rates from railroads. The harsh life of scabs
makes them surly and dangerous; most of them have knives, ground to
fine points, hidden in their boots. “Whiskey and women were brought in
by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards.”
After the strike, these “green” Negroes, together with foreigners and
criminals, are turned loose in thousands upon Chicago. This sketch of
the Negro worker, denied admission to unions and thereby forced to the
role of strikebreaker, anticipates much of present-day proletarian
fiction.
Carl Van Vechten considers Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” in _Three
Lives_ (1909) to be “perhaps the first American story in which the
Negro is regarded ... not as an object for condescending compassion
or derision.” “Melanctha” is a slowly unwound character study of a
“subtle, intelligent, half-white girl, Melanctha Herbert,” who “always
wanted peace and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to
get excited.” Her chief love affairs are painstakingly set forth. The
characters talk in a mannered dialogue; they all sound like each other,
and like the white people in the other two stories. Gertrude Stein
speaks of “the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to
negro sunshine,” but her major characters do not have it. The people
she calls “decent,” she likewise calls unmoral and promiscuous or
shows them in razor brawls. White blood in one character “made her see
clear,” and gave “her grit and endurance and vital courage,” but the
power and breakneck courage in Melanctha came to her from her big black
virile father. In spite of these dubious generalizings, “Melanctha”
is important. Though not realistic in the usual sense, it gives a
convincing portrait of a mysterious, uncertain girl, “wandering in her
ways,” doomed to tragedy, a Negro Madame Bovary or Esther Waters.
Setting out early to chart “tragic America,” Theodore Dreiser wrote
“Nigger Jeff” (1918) about a lynching. Dreiser does not make the Negro
innocent, but he shows with somber power the mob hysteria in a town
ironically called Pleasant Valley, the bravery of the sheriff, the
horror of the captured Negro, and the final hanging to the bridge.
And then he goes farther, to the mother and sister of the victim,
and without sentimentality shows their grief. “I’ll get it all in,”
exclaimed the young reporter who covered the case. And Dreiser got it
all in, to make one of his best stories.
_Again The Tragic Mulatto._--Two writers of some repute returned to the
theme of the tragic mulatto. Less romantic than their predecessors,
they still cling to old stereotypes. Margaret Deland’s “A Black Drop”
(1908) tells of Lily, who, although brought up in Nigger Hill, a
section of a midwestern town, by Mammy, a fair Negro woman, “cushiony
and weighing two hundred and fifty pounds,” is considered white. Lily’s
love affair with Framely Stone, son of abolitionists, is broken up.
Miss Wales, his New England Sunday School teacher, points out proof of
the girl’s Negro blood, clinching her case by mentioning her use of
“heavy perfumery.” Miss Deland believes that intermarriage is forbidden
by disgust, “a race protest, a race horror ... organic, biological.”
Instinct, it seems, revolts at intermarriage, but not at liaisons.
Confusing and unconvincing, “A Black Drop” is still not entirely
without sympathy and insight.
In the short story “Carter” (1921) Don Marquis is likewise concerned
with one of the many mulattoes who in fiction tragically yearn “oh
to be white, white, white!” After “passing” for a short while in New
York, he returns to Atlanta, resolved to live and die among Negroes. He
arrives there at the time of a riot, and witnesses “the conflict which
was forever active in his own nature.” He is happy when he is taken
for a white man of the better class by his own white half-brother, but
is plunged into misery when, dying, he is re-identified as “a yaller
nigger.” Carter’s abjectness, and the flattery of whites are laid on a
bit too heavily. Although the story abounds in clichés about mulatto
character, it does approach Negro life, especially the Atlanta riot,
with seriousness.
John Bennett’s _Madame Margot_ (1921) is the legend of a golden Creole
who, in order to keep her ivory daughter from dishonor and betrayal,
“to keep her white to all eternity,” sells herself to Satan. Margot’s
sultry beauty turns to grotesqueness. As old Mother Go-go, in the dirty
Negro quarters, black now instead of ruddy gold, she is claimed by
the devil. An other-worldly romance, _Madame Margot_, for all of its
imaginative remoteness, conveys something of what women like Madame
Margot knew in bitter actuality.
_Summary._ The tendencies seen in this chapter are diverse, ranging
from the race-glorification of Negro apologists to social realism by
important American novelists. At times, as in the case of the tragic
mulatto, the work seems conventional, but in the main we notice that
authors are beginning to take the Negro seriously, revising earlier
stereotypes, and breaking the ground for later realism. The work that
they did is little known, but it is important in the evolution of the
Negro character in American fiction.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Why are the weaknesses of the Negro apologists to be expected?
2. Why do novels of the “talented tenth” fail to overthrow the
plantation tradition?
3. Why are novels by southerners included in this chapter?
4. In what respects is Gertrude Stein’s story traditional?
5. What similarities are in all of the stories of mulattoes written by
white authors?
6. Compare DuBois, Chesnutt, and Johnson.
7. What is significant in the final quotation from _Hagar’s Hoard_?