the Negro race, and also as an instance of an artist who has worked for
years to realize his possibilities, we might cite such a shining example
as Charles S. Gilpin, the star of "The Emperor Jones" in the New York
theatrical season of 1920-21. Here is a man who for years dreamed of
attainment in the field of the legitimate drama, but who found no
opening; but who with it all did not despair, and now, after years of
striving and waiting, stands with his rounded experience and poise as an
honor and genuine contributor to the American stage.
Charles S. Gilpin was born in Richmond, Va., the youngest child in a
large family. His mother was a nurse in the city hospital; his father a
hard-working man in a steel plant. He was educated at St. Frances'
Convent, where he sang well and took some part in amateur theatricals;
but he was to work a long while yet before he found a chance to do the
kind of work that he wanted to do, and meanwhile he was to earn his
living as printer or barber or otherwise, just as occasion served. He
himself has recently said, "I've been in stock companies, vaudeville,
minstrel shows, and carnivals; but not until 1907 did I have an
opportunity to show an audience that the Negro has dramatic talent and
likes to play parts other than comedy ones."
It was in the 90's that Mr. Gilpin began his professional work as a
variety performer in Richmond, and he soon joined a traveling
organization. In 1903 he was one of the Gilmore Canadian Jubilee
Singers; in 1905 he was with Williams and Walker; the next season with
Gus Hill's "Smart Set"; and then from 1907 to 1909 with the Pekin Stock
Company of Chicago. This last company consisted of about forty members,
of whom eleven were finally selected for serious drama. Mr. Gilpin was
one of these; but the manager died, and once more the aspiring actor was
forced back to vaudeville.
Now followed ten long years--ten years of the kind that blast and kill,
and with which even the strongest man sometimes goes under. With the New
York managers there was no opening. And yet sometimes there was
hope--not only hope, but leadership and effort for others, as when Mr.
Gilpin carried a company of his own to the Lafayette Theatre and helped
to begin the production of Broadway shows. Life was leading--somewhere;
but meanwhile one had to live, and the way was as yet uncertain. At
last, in 1919, came a chance to play William Custis, the old Negro in
Drinkwater's "Abraham Lincoln."
The part was not a great one. It was still bound by racial limitations
and Custis appeared in only one scene. Nevertheless the work was
serious; here at least was opportunity.
In the early fall of 1920 Mr. Gilpin was still playing Custis and
helping to make the play a success. Meanwhile, however, Eugene O'Neill,
one of the most original playwrights in the country, had written "The
Emperor Jones"; and Charles S. Gilpin was summoned to the part of the
star.
There were many who regretted to see him leave "Abraham Lincoln," and
some indeed who wondered if he did the wise thing. To Charles Gilpin,
however, came the decision that sooner or later must be faced by every
artist, and indeed by every man in any field of endeavor--either to rest
on safe and assumed achievement, or to believe in one's own self, take
the great risk, and launch out into the unknown. He choose to believe in
himself. His work was one of the features of the New York theatrical
season of 1920-21, and at the annual dinner of the Drama League in 1921
he was one of the ten guests who were honored as having contributed most
to the American theatre within the year.
The play on which this success has been based is a highly original and
dramatic study of panic and fear. The Emperor Jones is a Negro who has
broken out of jail in the United States and escaped to what is termed a
"West Indian Island not yet self-determined by white marines." Here he
is sufficiently bold and ingenious to make himself ruler within two
years. He moves unharmed among his sullen subjects by virtue of a legend
of his invention that only a silver bullet can harm him, but at length
when he has reaped all the riches in sight, he deems it advisable to
flee. As the play begins, the measured sound of a beating tom-tom in the
hills gives warning that the natives are in conclave, using all kinds of
incantations to work themselves up to the point of rebellion. Nightfall
finds the Emperor at the edge of a forest where he has food hidden and
through whose trackless waste he knows a way to safety and freedom. His
revolver carries five bullets for his pursuers and a silver one for
himself in case of need. Bold and adventurous, he plunges into the
jungle at sunset; but at dawn, half-crazed, naked, and broken, he
stumbles back to the starting-place only to find the natives quietly
waiting for him there. Now follows a vivid portrayal of strange sounds
and shadows, with terrible visions from the past. As the Emperor's fear
quickens, the forest seems filled with threatening people who stare at
and bid for him. Finally, shrieking at the worst vision of all, he is
driven back to the clearing and to his death, the tom-tom beating ever
nearer and faster according as his panic grows.
To the work of this remarkable part--which is so dominating in the play
that it has been called a dramatic monologue--Mr. Gilpin brings the
resources of a matured and thoroughly competent actor. His performance
is powerful and richly imaginative, and only other similarly strong
plays are now needed for the further enlargement of the art of an actor
who has already shown himself capable of the hardest work and the
highest things.
For once the critics were agreed. Said Alexander Woolcott in the _New
York Times_ with reference to those who produced the play: "They have
acquired an actor, one who has it in him to invoke the pity and the
terror and the indescribable foreboding which are part of the secret of
'The Emperor Jones.'" Kenneth MacGowan wrote in the _Globe_; "Gilpin's
is a sustained and splendid piece of acting. The moment when he raises
his naked body against the moonlit sky, beyond the edge of the jungle,
and prays, is such a dark lyric of the flesh, such a cry of the
primitive being, as I have never seen in the theatre"; and in the
_Tribune_ Heywood Broun said of the actor: "He sustains the succession
of scenes in monologue not only because his voice is one of a gorgeous
natural quality, but because he knows just what to do with it. All the
notes are there and he has also an extraordinary facility for being in
the right place at the right time." Such comments have been re-echoed by
the thousands who have witnessed Mr. Gilpin's thrilling work, and in
such a record as this he deserves further credit as one who has finally
bridged the chasm between popular comedy and the legitimate drama, and
who thus by sheer right of merit steps into his own as the foremost
actor that the Negro race has produced within recent years.
APPENDIX
_1. THE NEGRO IN AMERICAN FICTION_
Ever since Sydney Smith sneered at American books a hundred years ago,
honest critics have asked themselves if the literature of the United
States was not really open to the charge of provincialism. Within the
last year or two the argument has been very much revived; and an English
critic, Mr. Edward Garnett, writing in _The Atlantic Monthly_, has
pointed out that with our predigested ideas and made-to-order fiction we
not only discourage individual genius, but make it possible for the
multitude to think only such thoughts as have passed through a sieve.
Our most popular novelists, and sometimes our most respectable writers,
see only the sensation that is uppermost for the moment in the mind of
the crowd--divorce, graft, tainted meat or money--and they proceed to
cut the cloth of their fiction accordingly. Mr. Owen Wister, a "regular
practitioner" of the novelist's art, in substance admitting the weight
of these charges, lays the blame on our crass democracy which utterly
refuses to do its own thinking and which is satisfied only with the
tinsel and gewgaws and hobbyhorses of literature. And no theme has
suffered so much from the coarseness of the mob-spirit in literature as
that of the Negro.
As a matter of fact, the Negro in his problems and strivings offers to
American writers the greatest opportunity that could possibly be given
to them to-day. It is commonly agreed that only one other large
question, that of the relations of capital and labor, is of as much
interest to the American public; and even this great issue fails to
possess quite the appeal offered by the Negro from the social
standpoint. One can only imagine what a Victor Hugo, detached and
philosophical, would have done with such a theme in a novel. When we see
what actually has been done--how often in the guise of fiction a writer
has preached a sermon or shouted a political creed, or vented his
spleen--we are not exactly proud of the art of novel-writing as it has
been developed in the United States of America. Here was opportunity for
tragedy, for comedy, for the subtle portrayal of all the relations of
man with his fellow man, for faith and hope and love and sorrow. And
yet, with the Civil War fifty years in the distance, not one novel or
one short story of the first rank has found its inspiration in this
great theme. Instead of such work we have consistently had traditional
tales, political tracts, and lurid melodramas.
Let us see who have approached the theme, and just what they have done
with it, for the present leaving out of account all efforts put forth by
Negro writers themselves.
The names of four exponents of Southern life come at once to
mind--George W. Cable, Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and
Thomas Dixon; and at once, in their outlook and method of work, the
first two become separate from the last two. Cable and Harris have
looked toward the past, and have embalmed vanished or vanishing types.
Mr. Page and Mr. Dixon, with their thought on the present (though for
the most part they portray the recent past), have used the novel as a
vehicle for political propaganda.
It was in 1879 that "Old Creole Days" evidenced the advent of a new
force in American literature; and on the basis of this work, and of "The
Grandissimes" which followed, Mr. Cable at once took his place as the
foremost portrayer of life in old New Orleans. By birth, by temperament,
and by training he was thoroughly fitted for the task to which he set
himself. His mother was from New England, his father of the stock of
colonial Virginia; and the stern Puritanism of the North was mellowed by
the gentler influences of the South. Moreover, from his long
apprenticeship in newspaper work in New Orleans he had received
abundantly the knowledge and training necessary for his work. Setting
himself to a study of the Negro of the old regime, he made a specialty
of the famous--and infamous--quadroon society of Louisiana of the third
and fourth decades of the last century. And excellent as was his work,
turning his face to the past in manner as well as in matter, from the
very first he raised the question propounded by this paper. In his
earliest volume there was a story entitled "'Tite Poulette," the heroine
of which was a girl amazingly fair, the supposed daughter of one Madame
John. A young Dutchman fell in love with 'Tite Poulette, championed her
cause at all times, suffered a beating and stabbing for her, and was by
her nursed back to life and love. In the midst of his perplexity about
joining himself to a member of another race, came the word from Madame
John that the girl was not her daughter, but the child of yellow fever
patients whom she had nursed until they died, leaving their infant in
her care. Immediately upon the publication of this story, the author
received a letter from a young woman who had actually lived in very much
the same situation as that portrayed in "'Tite Poulette," telling him
that his story was not true to life and that he knew it was not, for
Madame John really was the mother of the heroine. Accepting the
criticism, Mr. Cable set about the composition of "Madame Delphine," in
which the situation is somewhat similar, but in which at the end the
mother tamely makes a confession to a priest. What is the trouble? The
artist is so bound by circumstances and hemmed in by tradition that he
simply has not the courage to launch out into the deep and work out his
human problems for himself. Take a representative portrait from "The
Grandissimes":
Clemence had come through ages of African savagery, through
fires that do not refine, but that blunt and blast and blacken
and char; starvation, gluttony, drunkenness, thirst, drowning,
nakedness, dirt, fetichism, debauchery, slaughter, pestilence,
and the rest--she was their heiress; they left her the cinders
of human feelings.... She had had children of assorted
colors--had one with her now, the black boy that brought the
basil to Joseph; the others were here and there, some in the
Grandissime households or field-gangs, some elsewhere within
occasional sight, some dead, some not accounted for.
Husbands--like the Samaritan woman's. We know she was a
constant singer and laugher.
Very brilliant of course; and yet Clemence is a relic, not a prophecy.
Still more of a relic is Uncle Remus. For decades now, this charming old
Negro has been held up to the children of the South as the perfect
expression of the beauty of life in the glorious times "befo' de wah,"
when every Southern gentleman was suckled at the bosom of a "black
mammy." Why should we not occasionally attempt to paint the Negro of the
new day--intelligent, ambitious, thrifty, manly? Perhaps he is not so
poetic; but certainly the human element is greater.
To the school of Cable and Harris belong also of course Miss Grace King
and Mrs. Ruth McEnery Stuart, a thoroughly representative piece of work
being Mrs. Stuart's "Uncle 'Riah's Christmas Eve." Other more popular
writers of the day, Miss Mary Johnston and Miss Ellen Glasgow for
instance, attempt no special analysis of the Negro. They simply take him
for granted as an institution that always has existed and always will
exist, as a hewer of wood and drawer of water, from the first flush of
creation to the sounding of the trump of doom.
But more serious is the tone when we come to Thomas Nelson Page and
Thomas Dixon. We might tarry for a few minutes with Mr. Page to listen
to more such tales as those of Uncle Remus; but we must turn to living
issues. Times have changed. The grandson of Uncle Remus does not feel
that he must stand with his hat in his hand when he is in our presence,
and he even presumes to help us in the running of our government. This
will never do; so in "Red Rock" and "The Leopard's Spots" it must be
shown that he should never have been allowed to vote anyway, and those
honorable gentlemen in the Congress of the United States in the year
1865 did not know at all what they were about. Though we are given the
characters and setting of a novel, the real business is to show that the
Negro has been the "sentimental pet" of the nation all too long. By all
means let us have an innocent white girl, a burly Negro, and a burning
at the stake, or the story would be incomplete.
We have the same thing in "The Clansman," a "drama of fierce revenge."
But here we are concerned very largely with the blackening of a man's
character. Stoneman (Thaddeus Stevens very thinly disguised) is himself
the whole Congress of the United States. He is a gambler, and "spends a
part of almost every night at Hall & Pemberton's Faro Place on
Pennsylvania Avenue." He is hysterical, "drunk with the joy of a
triumphant vengeance." "The South is conquered soil," he says to the
President (a mere figure-head, by the way), "I mean to blot it from the
map." Further: "It is but the justice and wisdom of heaven that the
Negro shall rule the land of his bondage. It is the only solution of the
race problem. Wait until I put a ballot in the hand of every Negro, and
a bayonet at the breast of every white man from the James to the Rio
Grande." Stoneman, moreover, has a mistress, a mulatto woman, a "yellow
vampire" who dominates him completely. "Senators, representatives,
politicians of low and high degree, artists, correspondents, foreign
ministers, and cabinet officers hurried to acknowledge their fealty to
the uncrowned king, and hail the strange brown woman who held the keys
of his house as the first lady of the land." This, let us remember, was
for some months the best-selling book in the United States. A slightly
altered version of it has very recently commanded such prices as were
never before paid for seats at a moving-picture entertainment; and with
"The Traitor" and "The Southerner" it represents our most popular
treatment of the gravest social question in American life! "The
Clansman" is to American literature exactly what a Louisiana mob is to
American democracy. Only too frequently, of course, the mob represents
us all too well.
Turning from the longer works of fiction to the short story, I have been
interested to see how the matter has been dealt with here. For purposes
of comparison I have selected from ten representative periodicals as
many distinct stories, no one of which was published more than ten years
ago; and as these are in almost every case those stories that first
strike the eye in a periodical index, we may assume that they are
thoroughly typical. The ten are: "Shadow," by Harry Stillwell Edwards,
in the _Century_ (December, 1906); "Callum's Co'tin': A Plantation
Idyl," by Frank H. Sweet, in the _Craftsman_ (March, 1907); "His
Excellency the Governor," by L. M. Cooke, in _Putnam's_ (February,
1908); "The Black Drop," by Margaret Deland in _Collier's Weekly_ (May 2
and 9, 1908); "Jungle Blood," by Elmore Elliott Peake, in _McClure's_
(September, 1908); "The Race-Rioter," by Harris Merton Lyon, in the
_American_ (February, 1910); "Shadow," by Grace MacGowan Cooke and Alice
MacGowan, in _Everybody's_ (March, 1910); "Abram's Freedom," by Edna
Turpin, in the _Atlantic_ (September, 1912); "A Hypothetical Case," by
Norman Duncan, in _Harper's_ (June, 1915); and "The Chalk Game," by L.
B. Yates, in the _Saturday Evening Post_ (June 5, 1915). For high
standards of fiction I think we may safely say that, all in all, the
periodicals here mentioned are representative of the best that America
has to offer. In some cases the story cited is the only one on the Negro
question that a magazine has published within the decade.
"Shadow" (in the _Century_) is the story of a Negro convict who for a
robbery committed at the age of fourteen was sentenced to twenty years
of hard labor in the mines of Alabama. An accident disabled him,
however, and prevented his doing the regular work for the full period of
his imprisonment. At twenty he was a hostler, looking forward in despair
to the fourteen years of confinement still waiting for him. But the
three little girls of the prison commissioner visit the prison. Shadow
performs many little acts of kindness for them, and their hearts go out
to him. They storm the governor and the judge for his pardon, and
present the Negro with his freedom as a Christmas gift. The story is not
long, but it strikes a note of genuine pathos.
"Callum's Co'tin'" is concerned with a hard-working Negro, a blacksmith,
nearly forty, who goes courting the girl who called at his shop to get a
trinket mended for her mistress. At first he makes himself ridiculous by
his finery; later he makes the mistake of coming to a crowd of
merrymakers in his working clothes. More and more, however, he storms
the heart of the girl, who eventually capitulates. From the standpoint
simply of craftsmanship, the story is an excellent piece of work.
"His Excellency the Governor" deals with the custom on Southern
plantations of having, in imitation of the white people, a Negro
"governor" whose duty it was to settle minor disputes. At the death of
old Uncle Caleb, who for years had held this position of responsibility,
his son Jubal should have been the next in order. He was likely to be
superseded, however, by loud-mouthed Sambo, though urged to assert
himself by Maria, his wife, an old house-servant who had no desire
whatever to be defeated for the place of honor among the women by Sue, a
former field-hand. At the meeting where all was to be decided, however,
Jubal with the aid of his fiddle completely confounded his rival and
won. There are some excellent touches in the story; but, on the whole,
the composition is hardly more than fair in literary quality.
"The Black Drop," throughout which we see the hand of an experienced
writer, analyzes the heart of a white boy who is in love with a girl who
is almost white, and who when the test confronts him suffers the
tradition that binds him to get the better of his heart. "But you will
still believe that I love you?" he asks, ill at ease as they separate.
"No, of course I can not believe that," replies the girl.
"Jungle Blood" is the story of a simple-minded, simple-hearted Negro of
gigantic size who in a moment of fury kills his pretty wife and the
white man who has seduced her. The tone of the whole may be gleaned from
the description of Moss Harper's father: "An old darky sat drowsing on
the stoop. There was something ape-like about his long arms, his flat,
wide-nostriled nose, and the mat of gray wool which crept down his
forehead to within two inches of his eyebrows."
"The Race-Rioter" sets forth the stand of a brave young sheriff to
protect his prisoner, a Negro boy, accused of the assault and murder of
a little white girl. Hank Egge tries by every possible subterfuge to
defeat the plans of a lynching party, and finally dies riddled with
bullets as he is defending his prisoner. The story is especially
remarkable for the strong and sympathetic characterization of such
contrasting figures as young Egge and old Dikeson, the father of the
dead girl.
"Shadow" (in _Everybody's_) is a story that depends for its force very
largely upon incident. It studies the friendship of a white boy, Ranny,
and a black boy, Shadow, a relationship that is opposed by both the
Northern white mother and the ambitious and independent Negro mother. In
a fight, Shad breaks a collar-bone for Ranny; later he saves him from
drowning. In the face of Ranny's white friends, all the harsher side of
the problem is seen; and yet the human element is strong beneath it
all. The story, not without considerable merit as it is, would have been
infinitely stronger if the friendship of the two boys had been pitched
on a higher plane. As it is, Shad is very much like a dog following his
master.
"Abram's Freedom" is at the same time one of the most clever and one of
the most provoking stories with which we have to deal. It is a perfect
example of how one may walk directly up to the light and then
deliberately turn his back upon it. The story is set just before the
Civil War. It deals with the love of the slave Abram for a free young
woman, Emmeline. "All his life he had heard and used the phrase 'free
nigger' as a term of contempt. What, then, was this vague feeling, not
definite enough yet to be a wish or even a longing?" So far, so good.
Emmeline inspires within her lover the highest ideals of manhood, and he
becomes a hostler in a livery-stable, paying to his master so much a
year for his freedom. Then comes the astounding and forced conclusion.
At the very moment when, after years of effort, Emmeline has helped her
husband to gain his freedom (and when all the slaves are free as a
matter of fact by virtue of the Emancipation Proclamation), Emmeline,
whose husband has special reason to be grateful to his former master,
says to the lady of the house: "Me an' Abram ain't got nothin' to do in
dis worl' but to wait on you an' master."
In "A Hypothetical Case" we again see the hand of a master-craftsman. Is
a white boy justified in shooting a Negro who has offended him? The
white father is not quite at ease, quibbles a good deal, but finally
says Yes. The story, however, makes it clear that the Negro did not
strike the boy. He was a hermit living on the Florida coast and
perfectly abased when he met Mercer and his two companions. When the
three boys pursued him and finally overtook him, the Negro simply held
the hands of Mercer until the boy had recovered his temper. Mercer in
his rage really struck himself.