HISTORICAL FICTION
The present vogue of historical fiction has given new impetus to the
long-standing interest in the Old South and the Negro. The African
slave-trade, the antebellum and the reconstruction South are popular
hunting grounds. Some novelists continue the plantation tradition,
some, the antislavery tradition, and many others, in the spirit of
regionalism, seek the truth of their sectional pasts, without apology
and without indictment.
_The Slave Trade._ The ghastly middle passage, the shackled mobs
below the hatches, the lack of water, the plagues, are background for
novels like Mary Johnston’s _The Slave Ship_ (1924), and George King’s
_The Last Slaver_ (1936). Deeper pity and understanding inform _The
Trader’s Wife_ (1930) by Jean Kenyon McKenzie. A sheltered Newport girl
confronted by the traffic--“Wretched blacks at sea, packed in trays
like dead fish, stinking like fish, some of them to die ... and to be
cast in the sea”--is broken in Africa by the misery of the barracoon.
As her last gesture before she dies she sets free a contingent of
slaves.
With the dawn there came a wailing on the river--as the canoes
multiplied at the landing--the high desolate wailing that is the voice
of the sorrows of Africa.... It was the slaves come down the river
into the barracoon.
Hervey Allen’s _Anthony Adverse_ (1933) describes the barracoons
through which “Africa was poured into America,” the serpent-like line
composed of hundreds of naked, human bodies rubbed slimy for their
approaching sale with palm oil and rancid butter.... Bamboo withes
stretched from one tight neck-fork to another.... Hovering about it,
and along its flanks were white-robed Arabs with rhinoceros-hide whips.
The bartering, with slaves coquettish, or compliant, or sullen, or
tiger-like, the inspections and the packing on the slave-ships are
fully pictured, obviously after a great deal of research. But it
strikes one as historical pageantry rather than tragedy.
In _Babouk_ (1934), Guy Endore concentrates upon the shocking features
of the slave-trade: the captives “lying shoulder to shoulder, feet
pointing toward the center, not only chained in pairs, but each
pair attached to a great chain--a gigantic necklace of blacks”; the
separated tribesmen forced to sing and dance--“a centipede dancing,
chains clanking”; opthalmy and other epidemics ravaging the hold.
“Nigger-tasters,” telling the slaves’ condition by their sweat, and
other connoisseurs of black flesh winnowed out the drugged, the
doctored; only the finest were fit to be slaves. After horrible life
on San Domingo plantations the slaves revolt. Based upon considerable
research, convincing in its descriptions of the slave-trade, of African
tales and customs, and of West Indian plantations, _Babouk_ is still
more than a historical romance. It is a revolutionary novel, bitterly
opposed to imperialism and the contemporary slavery of any race.
_The Plantation Tradition._ But Endore is unusual; Joseph Hergesheimer
is much more typical. In _Quiet Cities_ (1927) he yearns for the return
of the past, based on slavery--for which “I’d be happy to pay--with
everything, everything the wasted present holds.” In his picture slaves
do little other than raise soft staves of song, or play quoits, or
fiddle, or sleep. The only ugly feature is an ill-smelling slave-den,
for which a transplanted northerner is responsible. Emancipation was
a failure since “a free Negro is more often wretched than not.”
Reconstruction was ignominious: Negro legislators dared to utter shouts
of laughter, with “incredible feet elevated on the desks” in southern
state capitols. Mingo Harth, a vicious Negro politician worthy of
Thomas Dixon, is called a “symbol of Union, a black seal on the fate of
South Carolina.”
Most of the historical romances repeat these patterns with little
variation. Dealing with the times of George Washington, _Princess
Malah_ (1933), by a Negro author, John H. Hill, subscribes in the
main to the plantation tradition of humaneness, mutual affection
and lavishness. Frances Griswold’s _The Tides of Malvern_ (1930)
and Caroline Gordon’s _Penhally_ (1931) recount the long history of
southern families with Negro characters in the background, where they
stay correctly. A few step out of the picture after Sherman’s march,
but the majority will not be moved. In Mary Johnston’s _Miss Delicia
Allen_ (1933) both Negro slaves and white owners are conventionally
drawn.
Somewhat similar to Cable’s _Madame Delphine_ is E. Laroque Tinker’s
_Toucoutou_ (1928). After being married to a white man, Toucoutou is
proved in court to be partly Negro. In bitter envy, Negroes satirize
her in street-songs; whites condemn her because her marriage means
that “a black flood will rush through the crevasse that will sully
white purity and retard our civilization a thousand years.” The
picture of New Orleans is not idyllic; the yellow fever epidemic, the
exotic _bamboula_, _calinda_ and _counjaille_ danced in the _Place
Congo_, and other customs of New Orleans are vividly described. With
some sympathy for his heroine, Tinker yields at times to the doubtful
traditions about the mulatto. _Old New Orleans_ (1931) by E. Laroque
Tinker and Frances Tinker presents minor and familiar Negro characters.
Life on the lower Mississippi, in a later period is in Edna Ferber’s
_Show-Boat_ (1926), which has a few Negroes singing the plaintive songs
of their “wronged race,” and a melodramatic scene involving an octoroon.
_Look Back to Glory_ (1933) by Herbert Ravenel Sass is worshipful
of the duelling cavaliers and glamorous women of low-country South
Carolina, “a paradise ... the proud, the knightly South.” Slavery is
called a godsend to elevate the Negro from barbarism. The subtle poison
of slavery was the “inevitable” miscegenation, “invited nine-tenths of
the time” by Negro girls, and guaranteeing “the purity of the southern
women of education and family.” Best characterized of the Negroes is
Vienna, a beautiful quadroon, to whom “curtsying did not come easy.”
The others are conventional, grateful for the godsend.
The Civil War has long been a favorite subject for historical
novelists, but earlier novels like Winston Churchill’s _The Crisis_
(1901), Upton Sinclair’s _Manassas_ (1904) and Mary Johnston’s _The
Long Roll_ (1911) and _Cease Firing_ (1912) are little concerned
with deepening the characterization of the Negro. _The Battleground_
(1902) by Ellen Glasgow, has many of the standbys of the plantation
tradition--the noble hero who deplores slavery, the wretched free Negro
and the giant slave who rescues his master (one of the most familiar
battle activities from “Marse Chan” to _So Red The Rose_.) Recent Civil
War novels like Caroline Gordon’s _None Shall Look Back_ (1936) and
Clifford Dowdey’s _Bugles Blow No More_ (1936) are skillfully written
and based upon research, but the latter does not particularly extend to
Negro characters.
The slaves in _Old Miss_ (1929) by T. Bowyer Campbell are “like
children, trusting, expecting, receiving everything as a matter of
course from their masters.” The hero is proslavery, only because of
altruism: “What would the poor things do without us to care for them,
and see that they pass peaceful, useful lives?” When Aunt Christian is
told that she is free, she angrily hits her informant with a stick,
like the ancient tyrants upon hearing bad news. Roark Bradford’s
_Kingdom Coming_ (1933) likewise carries the thesis that freedom was
a mistake. Aunt Free buys her freedom and then does not want it;
Telegram is set free by a Yankee firing squad; free Negroes die like
flies in concentration camps. There is an interesting account of the
“blind Underground” which held out false hopes of freedom that ended
in murder. That the freed Negro is little better off than the slave is
true in sections that Bradford should know very well, but it hardly
seems a defense of slavery. Promising “the true story of slavery and
the true story of freedom,” _Kingdom Coming_ merely gives some good
local color of plantation life and voodoo, to support the century-old
beliefs advanced in _Swallow Barn_.
Stark Young has shown a knowledge of certain types of Negroes in
sketches like “The Poorhouse Goes to The Circus” (1929) and _Heaven
Trees_ (1926). His best seller, _So Red The Rose_ (1934), is a
melancholy recital of the folk-tales that southerners heard in their
youth. The war blown along by northern and southern windbags destroys
“a gracious system of living that has seldom seen its equal.” Negroes,
in spite of “fetid ... old maid idealism” had their best place in that
system. A typical old faithful, William Veal, seeks his dead master
on the battlefield at night; he felt the hair of the corpses until he
found him: “he knew him by his hair; you know how fine it was.” In
contrast are the Negro soldiers--grog-filled burners and looters--and
the ingrates who run off to the Yankees and are stricken with plagues.
Written in skillful, disarming prose, _So Red The Rose_ nevertheless
remains a thrice-told tale.
Elliot Crayton McCants in _White Oak Farm_ (1928) gives the traditional
picture of Reconstruction, though with less rancor than Page and Dixon.
_Bottom Rail On Top_ (1935) by H. J. Eckenrode is a less orthodox
novel, not in the “bloody-shirt” tradition. Negroes scatter after
emancipation and learn fast in reconstruction. The hero is often shown
siding with the Negroes and radicals in the brawling.
Not fooled by all of the hallowed creeds of the South, Margaret
Mitchell in the best-selling _Gone With The Wind_ (1937) accepts
whole-heartedly the traditional estimate of the Negro. “Slaves were
neither miserable nor unfortunate.... There never had been a slave sold
from Tara and only one whipping.” Mammy, Dilcey, Toby and the other
house-servants, proud of their quality white-folks, disdainful of field
hands, “free issues” and poor whites, have been with us time and time
again. Slaves who were different were “mean.” The “least energetic,
trustworthy and intelligent and most vicious and brutal” were the ones
who left the plantation to enjoy a long “carnival of idleness and theft
and insolence” interrupted only by plagues in crowded Atlanta. Negro
insults range from “looking impudent” and being “uppity to a lady” to
assuming Anglo-Saxon prerogatives:
In the legislature ... they spent most of their time eating goobers
and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes. They
frolicked....
But the intelligent house-servants, the highest caste, spoke the
correct, heart-warming lines:
Ah done had nuff freedom. Ah wants somebody to feed me good vittles
reglar an’ tell me what ter do an’ what not ter do, an’ look affer me
when Ah gets sick.
Needless to say, the Klan is as knightly here as in _The Authentic
History of the Ku Klux Klan_, an authentic hymn of praise.
_Summary._ DuBose Heyward has written: “This relationship [between
master and slave] has been sentimentalized and utilized _ad nauseam_
in writing of the slave period.” The plots of the foregoing books are
uninventive, and the characters and situations are repeated over and
over. Aristocrats and house-servants still monopolize attention, as if
the many “yeoman” farmers and field-hands had not existed. With the
hindsight of the present, secession is admitted to have been bad, but
although most of the aristocrats detested slavery (in principle), the
intelligent Negroes detested freedom (in principle and practise) and
the romancers agree with the Negroes. The very infrequent floggings
are the work of uncouth overseers, who are knocked down by blooded
cavaliers. Fugitive slaves have been spirited away from these books.
Faithful servants bring back dead heroes from battlefields, bury the
silver, despise the Yankees and prefer to work for their ex-masters
without wages. Unfaithful slaves, corrupted from their childish virtue,
run away to die in concentration camps, or loot, insult and rape.
Negroes who bought land, rushed to schools and proved freedom to be
no mistake, are non-existent, in spite of the record. An unpartisan
historian writes:
These Reconstruction governments erected public school systems;
democratized local and county units, created public social services,
and sought to distribute tax burdens equitably.
But in these books the legislatures are composed of a few depraved
Northerners, and a mob of Negroes who did little else but put their
feet upon desks and “eat peanuts by the peck.” The Freedmen’s Bureau is
villainous, the Klan reproachless, organized to preserve chastity, not
for political and economic control.
It is wrong to assume that these books are merely pageants of a
departed past; they definitely further attitudes that justify the worst
kind of contemporary reaction. Their popularity is a dangerous sign.
Based on the principle that the many must be kept “in their place” for
the good of the few, they encourage slavery in a world where slaves are
still too numerous.
_The Anti-Slavery Tradition._ But there is a party of opposition which,
like Emerson, has cried “fiddle-faddle to the Old South.” In the
tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion Tourgée, some twentieth
century authors have described the tragedy of slavery, and have dealt
with heroes and heroines who would not buckle under.
Rowland E. Robinson, in _Out of Bondage and Other Stories_ (collected
posthumously in 1936) records the heroism and drama of the Underground
Railroad in Vermont where slaves on their way to Canada were hidden
in loaded sleighs and wagons, or stowed away in attics or barnlofts
or deserted sugar-houses. John E. Paynter’s _Fugitives of the Pearl_
(1930) one of the few historic romances by Negro authors, deals with
the escape of seventy-seven Negroes from Washington aboard the _Pearl_,
whose captain was an abolitionist. A Negro informer gave away their
plot, and they were captured down the Potomac. Of the old school in
technique, _Fugitives of the Pearl_ is more fictionalized history than
a re-creation of characters and settings. But the precarious life of
Negroes in antebellum Washington, “the seat and center of the slave
trade” is truthfully presented.
_The Railroad to Freedom_ (1932) by Hildegarde Swift is the
fictionalized biography of Harriet Tubman, the most famous agent
of the Underground Railroad, and a nurse and scout with the Union
troops. Supposed to be a story for children, _The Railroad to_
_Freedom_ is still one of the best records of an important movement
and a fascinating heroine of American history. One of America’s
finest historical novels, _God’s Angry Man_ (1933) by Leonard Ehrlich
re-creates the life and times of John Brown. There is unusual sympathy
in the treatment of the Negro characters. These are Frederick Douglass,
who is willing to use violence against slavers but not against a
government arsenal, realizing bitterly that too many Negroes, broken
by slavery, wanted only “hot yams and a roof and not to be beaten”;
“Emperor” Green, who, in spite of Douglass’ logic, says the historic
“I b’lieve I go wid de ole man”; Harriet Tubman, the splendid, wanted
“dead or alive, and ten thousand dollars would be paid for the body”;
William Still, who knew more about the “underground” than any man in
the land, saying to Brown “You free them, I’ll lead them out”; John
Copeland, mulatto student at Oberlin, who left his garret lamp of
learning for an even finer light, and Dangerfield Newby, killed in
action, with a wife in the far South who was never to be redeemed. All
of these are brought to life in a moving book.
_Black Thunder_ (1936) by Arna Bontemps likewise bears witness to a
staunch desire to be free--a fact of the Negro’s past that most of
the historical romancers have not cared to record. _Black Thunder_
deals with Gabriel’s Rebellion in the Virginia of 1800. Gabriel, the
strongest slave of Henrico county, is courageous as well:
I been studying about freedom a heap, me. I heard a plenty folks talk
and I listened a heap.... Something keep telling me that anything
what’s equal to a gray squirrel wants to be free.
Stimulated by the example of Touissant in Haiti and by the propaganda
of the _Amis des Noirs_ and exasperated by an act of cruelty, Gabriel
leads eleven hundred slaves upon Richmond. A storm postpones the
attack, and the treachery of Pharaoh and Ben does the rest. The leaders
are hanged, Gabriel’s sweetheart Juba is sold to the deep South, and
Ben goes on driving the cariole for the aristocrats. In addition to
Gabriel, other Negroes are excellently characterized: Ben, the docile,
gray-headed house-boy; Melody, the quadroon darling of rich planters’
sons; Juba, handsome and spirited, sole woman on the march; Mingo,
whose personal freedom is not enough; and Bundy, who “kept drinking
up all that rum because he couldn’t get up enough nerve to make his
get-away.” _Black Thunder_ does not have the urgent passion of _God’s
Angry Man_; it is elegy rather than a tocsin of revolt, but it is a
fine American historical novel.
_Realism._ In _Look Homeward, Angel_ Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical
hero decries
The romantic halo ... the whole fantastic distortion of that
period where people were said to live in mansions and slavery was
a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming,
the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his
happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, beautiful, all
men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger,
death-mocking cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of
the barren spiritual wilderness ... when their cheap mythology, their
legend of the charm of their manners, the aristocratic culture ...
made him writhe ... so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of
their antagonism, that he still pretended the most fantastic devotion
to them.
Many other southerners of Wolfe’s generation, as seen in the previous
chapter, have recognized the barren spiritual wilderness; others have
repudiated or at least humanized the legend.
John Peale Bishop, although not so outspoken as Wolfe and Faulkner,
approaches the legend realistically in _Many Thousands Gone_ (1930),
stories of the Civil War and postwar years. Just as the southerners are
not marvels of gallantry and beauty, the Negroes, while certainly not
flattered, are recognizable products of slavery. One old woman while
her mistress lies dead is more worried about her promised freedom than
grief-stricken; a sullen girl blazes forth her hatred of her carping
mistress, and leaves to cook for the Yankees, for whose love-making
she has been prepared by her experiences with southern gentlemen. In
one symbolic story, Bones, a marvelous cook, gives two old Virginia
ladies a feeling of security; in reality a lunatic, he is submissive
and devoted, and they are willing to live in terror as long as they can
live in the tradition, their dear “obsession.”
Christopher Ward’s _Jonathan Drew, A Rolling Stone_ (1932), and _A
Yankee Rover_ (1932) carry the Yankee hero all over early nineteenth
century America. One dramatic section shows Drew saving two slaves from
border ruffians who were running a “blind underground” and fomenting
a slave insurrection in order to plunder the countryside. _A Yankee
Rover_ deals more fully with slavery; one of the episodes involves
Tommy, the little “white nigger,” whose aristocratic father does not
leave him free.
What d’ye say to a nigger that ain’t no color at all cause he’s white
... as white as any on ye an’ whiter than most ... with straight silky
hair, no kinks at all, an yaller hair at that, golden yaller, an’ blue
eyes? Ef that ain’t jest a natural curiosity.... Pass up lot 56, Mr.
Barnes.
As we have seen the “blind underground” intrigues both the realists and
the defenders of the Old South, who traditionally isolate criminals as
the agents of the underground railroad. The “blind underground” did
exist as a profitable enterprise for such gangs as Murrel’s, but this
hardly explains the neglect of the genuine underground that carried
thousands of slaves to the North. The workings of this system appear
incidentally in MacKinlay Kantor’s _Arouse and Beware_ (1936). In this
impartial and accurate narrative we have most interesting descriptions
of the “Right Sort of People,” “The Sons of America,” both whites and
Negroes, who with their grips and passwords and secret hiding places
enable three fugitives to get to the Union lines. One slave woman, in
a low tone, gives them valuable information, and then, to fool her
curious children, curses them. The narrator says:
There was a canniness about these slaves which I had never imagined
before. I had thought them barbaric or stupid or lazy ... and
doubtless many of them were. And many others, too, were loyal to their
masters and the Confederacy; but somehow I cannot hear jubilee singers
chanting of Moses, and bondage and their freedom from it, without
thinking of this thin, brown-faced wench, with her high shoulders and
long straight arms....
Andrew Lytle’s “Mister McGregor” (1936) is a first-rate story of
slavery. Rhears, “no common field-hand, but proud, black and spoiled”
had “fretted and sulled” over McGregor’s whipping his wife Bella, and
rather than run away, he decides to have it out with his owner. In one
of the best fights of “frontier” realism, Rhears is stabbed by his
master. The teller says of Rhears
I never seen such guts in nobody, nigger or white man.... Rhears spoke
so low you could hardly hear him: “Marster, if you hadn’t got me, I’d
a got you.”
In Lytle’s _The Long Night_ (1936) Negroes are only incidental, but
the organized stealing of slaves by a band of frontier criminals is
important to the plot.
A young southerner muses disgustedly in Evelyn Scott’s _Migrations_
(1927): “How close we come to the niggers without knowing anything
about them.” Being aware that merely “coming close” is not knowledge,
Mrs. Scott presents convincing Negro characters. Silas is filled
with hatred for the white father of his sweetheart Fanny’s baby. But
conditioned to respect his master, as Fanny had done to her sorrow,
he persuades himself that the overseer was responsible. His sullen
disobedience causes him to be lashed and he takes to the woods. Bosh
is a less successful runaway; a half-wit, he frightens a white girl
and is caught by a mob and burned to death. Of a very different type is
Eugenia De Negre Blair, a brilliant and handsome adventuress, who has a
trace of Negro blood. Without the emphasis of the abolitionists, Mrs.
Scott still records the uneasy and tragic aspects of slavery.
In _The Wave_ (1929), a series of chronicles of the Civil War, the
stories of Eugenia and Silas are continued. One of the best sections
shows the Negroes swarming to Sherman’s army; Aunt Nancy, to whom the
army means food but who has given too much strength to slavery to live
to see the promised land of freedom; Dilsy, who hopes that life-long
drudgery is over; Lou, apologetic because her religious master had
influenced her; Anna, bold and ready; and Uncle Vic, who has been
sold to one “mean piece uv trash after another.” When the Federals,
realizing that the horde of fugitives is more than they bargained for,
tear up the pontoon bridges, they discover that the horde still presses
on to freedom. “Gawd, you gotta shoot ’em to stop ’em.” There is
symbolism in both the despairing cry of the Negroes left on the bank:
“My home is ovah Jawdon,” and the callousness of the Yankee who thinks:
“If we could only let them drown. Dam ’em, they get over their Jordan,
but we have to carry ’em.”
In _A Calendar of Sin_ (1931), Mrs. Scott re-creates the
Reconstruction: the Klan, determined to return the Negro to
slavery--where was the tobacco to come from?--flogging Negroes,
destroying schools, hounding Yankees; and the carpet-baggers, more
intent on wealth and politics than on helping the impoverished,
ignorant and often shiftless Negroes--both pretending high idealism to
cover up lurking meanness. Good comedy is in the episode of the old
Auntie, who suspicious of Yankees anyway, leaves the new school in
high dudgeon because, instead of learning to read the Bible right-off,
she is started on the alphabet. There is a powerful narrative about
a mulatto lynched for assault. Some Negroes, taught by “the raw-hide
whip on their naked backs” betray the Union League and deny that they
want the vote and book-learning. Others show a grasp of the developing
folk-belief that everything mean and bad in the South “comes to us fru
de Yankees.” Although the narratives are called “American Melodramas,”
Mrs. Scott portrays neither villains nor heroes but sensitively
understood human beings. And that is why, for truth to an era and a
section, her work is immeasurably superior to such real melodramas as
_Gone With the Wind_.
T. S. Stribling’s earlier _Birthright_ is excelled by his trilogy
of a southern family: _The Forge_ (1931), _The Store_ (1933) and
_Unfinished Cathedral_ (1934). In _The Forge_, the pictures of slave
life and character are among the most convincing in American fiction.
The plantation tradition gets short shrift. Old man Vaiden runs a
one-horse, two-mule farm, but calls himself a “gentleman” since he owns
five Negroes. A hard-fisted, hard drinking, bull-headed, irascible
Primitive Baptist, blustering in north Alabama dialect instead of
in cultured phrases, he wins some liking and, more important, is a
credible human being. To Vaiden, as to so many farmers “on the make,”
slavery meant “working the daylight out of slaves.” The slaves’ food is
little more than corn-dodgers and bacon, and the boasted medical care
is what “would be given a sick calf.” Attached to the family and farm
by lifelong ties, the slaves still want freedom. While George is being
praised as devoted, he is nursing hatred against his master.
Gracie Vaiden stands out. Although friendly with her white
half-sisters, she broods over slavery. She feels that the flogging of
her husband
transformed her from a kind of tentative wife of Solomon into a brood
mare ... changed Solomon into a stud; and her child, if she and
Solomon had a child, into a little animal.
She reasons correctly; she is ravished by Miltiades Vaiden who does not
know that he is her half-brother. On the eve of secession she would
have been sold to clear up her father’s debts if she had not escaped
to the Yankee lines. Stribling’s pictures of the Reconstruction,
especially of the Klan, are likewise unorthodox and authentic.
In _The Store_ Gracie Vaiden, who has been the mistress first of the
Yankee lieutenant who becomes governor of Alabama, and then of a
white merchant, a pillar of the church, works so that her octoroon
son can escape the shame she has met with as a Negro. From the start,
however, we see that Touissaint is doomed. “The most despisable nigger
in Florence,” he will not run from bullying white boys, hates shining
shoes, and insists upon honest dealing in the store, standing up for
a whole pound when “everybody knows a nigger pound is about twelve
ounces.” Come of age, he tries to vote, but his blue eyes and blond
hair do not prove that his grandfather was free; and he fights a
“cracker” who insults his mother. Just as his mother was put on the
block because her white half-sisters and brothers ran up bills at the
store, so Touissaint loses all of his year’s work because his landlord
(and father) messes up a business deal. As an end to his rebellious
career he is lynched. While Gracie is cutting down his body, “A dozen
drunken voices in the mob broke into laughter at the downfall of the
Negro mother and her dead son.” His father furnishes the mules and
wagon to carry him away. Other Negro characters are surly, cunning and
aware of what is being done to them: “If dey shawt weight you too much,
wras’le wid de Lawd about hit in prayah”.... “If a white man di’n fly
into uh niggah tull he done somepin to him, all us niggahs be settin’
in easy chairs.” Stribling presents with fine sympathy the Negro urchin
who announced the miracle: “I can write my name....” Lucy, Touissaint’s
wife, prefers farming to domestic service. She thereby astounds the
ex-planters to whom these “uppish” Negroes who want independence and
education are “unnatural, highly affected and utterly absurd ... the
new uncomfortable colored people.”
In _Unfinished Cathedral_ the Negro characters are shown to be more
and more progressive and educated, but still subjected to indecency
from both upper-class and hoodlum whites. Militant Negroes are now in
the picture; even beneath their grotesque robes, the lodge brothers
carry guns. There is a frame-up very similar to the Scottsboro case;
the bankers, realtors, sheriffs, judges, and even clergy are shown to
be closely related to lynching mobs. One of the boys hustled off a
train is Gracie’s great-grandson. To Miltiades Vaiden, now eminently
respectable, Gracie cries out:
What colored relations? I was born to my mother, old Hannah, long
after Old Pap sold off her husband Jericho! I’m not white for nothing!
Aunt Creasy told me long ago that my father was Old Pap, the same as
yours! Toussaint, the son I had by you, was nothing but a Vaiden on
both sides. The child Lucy had by Toussaint, the son you hanged, I
named Marcia; and Marcia’s boy you’re holding in jail this minute. Who
would my grandchild come back to see except white people, Miltiades?
To these words the old Colonel replies: “Shame on you, Gracie ...
talking disrespectfully like this.” In spite of some faults, such as
the stretched coincidences, this trilogy is remarkable for the honesty,
courage and sympathy with which a southern author has faced the past.
William Faulkner’s “The Raid” (1934) describes the blowing up of the
bridges to destroy the Negroes following Sherman’s army, a scene
relished by southerners as symbolic, but the slave boy Ringo and
the doggedly marching contrabands are excellently done. Thoroughly
conversant with the old South, Faulkner has created in _Absalom,
Absalom!_ (1936) a credible and powerful, if at times fantastic novel
out of “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales” and old letters. From the
bleak hills of western Virginia where the cabins were “boiling with
children,” Thomas Sutpen comes to frontier Mississippi, “a country
of lawless opportunity.” Naked, plastered over with muck against
mosquitoes, he and his “wild Negroes tore a plantation out of the
wilderness ... dragged a house and garden out of the virgin swamp.”
But the Sutpen line is doomed. Charles Bon, Sutpen’s son by a woman in
Haiti, who was discarded because she had a “spot of Negro blood,” is
murdered to keep him from marrying Sutpen’s daughter (the incest was
less abhorred than the miscegenation). The Sutpen fortunes decline,
until at the last we see Jim Bond, Charles Bon’s mulatto grandson,
lurking around the ashes of the destroyed mansion. A Mississippi “Fall
of the House of Usher,” _Absalom, Absalom!_ seems in part an allegory
of slavery. Negro characters, whether the savages so like their wild
master, or Clytie, Sutpen’s mulatto daughter, who could be neither
tamed nor freed, or Charles Bon, most elegant cavalier and yet of Negro
blood; or Charles’ son, who in self-laceration turns completely to
Negroes, are original and convincing, “living creatures, living flesh
to feel pain and writhe and cry out.”
_Conclusion._ A northerner in _Absalom, Absalom!_ ironical at the
tyranny of the southern legends, says:
What is it? Something you live and breathe in like air?... A kind of
entailed birthright ... of never forgiving General Sherman, so that
forevermore as long as your children’s children produce children you
won’t be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed
in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?
Faulkner himself has felt the fascination of the plantation birthright,
but he determined to be honest in spite of tradition. Of a different
order of genius, he still belongs with his fellow southerners Stribling
and Evelyn Scott, who are trying above all else to give a truthful
reinterpretation of the old South, and therefore of the Negro. Their
work is by no means completely adequate, but together with the work of
other honest, sympathetic writers, northern and southern, Negro and
white, historical novelists or recorders of contemporary America, it
gives promise that the Negro character in fiction may meet with the
justice that has been so long deferred.
DISCUSSION QUESTIONS
1. Since slavery has been abolished, what social policy is served by
the continued defense of the plantation tradition?
2. List similar characters and incidents in the plantation tradition
novels of this chapter.
3. Describe the antislavery heroes mentioned as the plantation
tradition would characterize them.
4. Why are so many southern aristocrats in these books shown as
opponents of slavery?
5. Account for the best-selling qualities of _So Red the Rose_ and
_Gone With The Wind_.
6. Defend, attack, or qualify: “Since these historical romances
are based on research, they must be truthful about Negro life and
character.”
7. What are the contributions of Stribling and Evelyn Scott to the
southern historical novel?
SELECTED READING LIST
_Books_
1. Barton, Rebecca Chalmers: _Race Consciousness and The American
Negro_--Arnold Busck, Copenhagen--1934.
2. Boynton, Percy H.: _Literature and American Life_--Ginn & Co., New
York--1936.
3. Brawley, Benjamin Griffith: _The Negro in Literature and
Art_--Duffield and Co., New York--1929, revised and enlarged to _The
Negro Genius_--Dodd, Mead & Co., New York--1937.
4. Calverton, V. F.: _The Liberation of American Literature_--Chas.
Scribner’s Sons, New York--1932.
5. DuBois, W. E. B.: _The Gift of Black Folk_--The Stratford Co.,
Boston--1924.
6. Edgar, Pelham: _The Art of the Novel_--The Macmillan Co., New
York--1933.
7. Ford, Nick Aaron: _The Contemporary Negro Novel_--Meador Co.,
Boston--1936.
8. Gaines, Francis Pendleton: _The Southern Plantation_--Columbia
University Press, New York--1925.
9. Green, Elizabeth Lay: _The Negro in Contemporary American
Literature_--The University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill--1928.
10. Hartwick, Harry: _The Foreground of American Fiction_--American
Book Co., New York--1934.
11. Hatcher, Harlan: _Creating The Modern American Novel_--Farrar and
Rinehart, New York--1935.
12. Hicks, Granville: _The Great Tradition_--The Macmillan Co., New
York--1933.
13. Lewissohn, Ludwig: _Expression In America_--Harper & Bros., New
York--1932.
14. Linn, James Weber, and Taylor, Houghton Wells: _A Foreword to
Fiction_--D. Appleton-Century Co., New York--1935.
15. Locke, Alain: _The New Negro_--A. & C. Boni, New York--1925.
16. Loggins, Vernon: _The Negro Author_--Columbia University Press,
New York--1931.
17. Loggins, Vernon: _I Hear America_--Thomas Y. Crowell Co., New
York--1937.
18. Nelson, John Herbert: _The Negro Character In American
Literature_--University of Kansas, Lawrence--1926.
19. Parrington, V. F.: _Main Currents in American Thought_--Harcourt,
Brace & Co., New York--1930.
20. Pattee, Fred Lewis: _The Development of the American Short
Story_--Harper & Bros., New York--1923.
21. Pattee, Fred Lewis: _The First Century of American Literature,
1770-1870_--D. Appleton, Century Co., New York--1935.
22. Pattee, Fred Lewis: _A History of American Literature Since
1870_--The Century Co., New York--1915.
23. Quinn, Arthur Hobson: _American Fiction_--D. Appleton, Century
Co., New York--1936.
24. Turner, Lorenzo Dow: _Anti-slavery Sentiment in American
Literature Prior to 1865_--The Association for the Study of Negro Life
and History, Inc., Washington--1929.
25. Van Doren, Carl: _The American Novel_--The Macmillan Co., New
York--1931.
_Articles_
1. Braithwaite, William Stanley: “The Negro In American Literature” in
_The New Negro_, edited by Alain Locke--A. & C. Boni, New York--1925.
2. Brawley, Benjamin Griffith: “The Negro In American Fiction”
in _Anthology of American Negro Literature_, edited by V. F.
Calverton--The Modern Library, New York--1929.
3. Brown, Sterling A.: “Negro Characters As Seen By White Authors”
in _Journal of Negro Education_ (April, 1933),--Howard University,
Washington, D. C.
4. Brown, Sterling A.: “Our Literary Audience” in _Opportunity, a
Journal of Negro Life_, February, 1930.
5. Brown, Sterling A.: “The Literary Scene: Chronicle and Comment” in
_Opportunity, a Journal of Negro Life_ from 1930-36.
6. Burke, Kenneth: “The Negro’s Pattern of Life” in _The Saturday
Review of Literature_, July 29, 1933.
7. Chamberlain, John: “The Negro As Writer” in _The Bookman_, Vol.
LXX, February, 1930.
8. Clay, Eugene: “The Negro In Recent American Literature” in
_American Writers’ Congress_, edited by Henry Hart--International
Publishers, Inc., New York--1935.
9. Davidson, Donald: “The Trend of Literature” in _Culture In The
South_, edited by W. T. Couch--University of North Carolina Press,
Chapel Hill--1935.
10. Davis, Allison: “Our Negro Intellectuals” in _The Crisis_, August,
1928.
11. Farrell, James T.: “The Short Story” in _American Writers’
Congress_, edited by Henry Hart--International Publishers, Inc., New
York--1935.
12. Gordon, Eugene: “Social and Political Problems of the
Negro Writer” in _American Writers’ Congress_, edited by Henry
Hart--International Publishers, Inc., New York--1935.
13. Gruening, Martha: “The Negro Renaissance” in _Hound and Horn_,
April-June, 1932.
14. Johnson, Guy: “Folk Values in Recent Literature on the Negro” in
_Folk-Say_, edited by B. A. Botkin--University of Oklahoma Press,
Norman--1930.
15. Locke, Alain: “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and
Literature” in _The Annals of the American Academy of Political and
Social Science_, Vol. CXXXX, November, 1928.
16. Locke, Alain: “Negro Youth Speaks” in _The New Negro_, edited by
Alain Locke--A. & C. Boni, New York--1925.
17. Locke, Alain: “Retrospective Reviews” (annual surveys of books in
_Opportunity, a Journal of Negro Life_, from 1929 to date.)
18. T. K. Whipple: “The Negro and Modern Literature” in _Creative
Reading_, Vol. III, No. 11, Institute of Current Literature,
Cambridge, Mass.--1929.
19. White, Walter: “Negro Literature” in _American Writers On American
Literature_, edited by John Macy--Horace Liveright, Inc., New
York--1931.
20. Woodson, Carter G.: “The Negro and American Literature” in _The
African Background Outlined_ by Carter G. Woodson--The Association For
The Study of Negro Life and History, Washington, D. C.--1936.
21. Wright, Richard: “Blueprint for Negro Writing” in _New Challenge_,
Fall, 1937.
Transcriber's Notes:
Italics are shown thus: _sloping_.
Variations in spelling and hyphenation are retained.
Perceived typographical errors have been changed.