CHAPTER I

EARLY APPEARANCES

Early Fiction.When Americans started to write novels, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro was definitely part and parcel of American life. Colonial authors from Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall to Benjamin Franklin, Crèvecour and John Woolman had protested his enslavement. He was the rock upon which the constitution nearly split. In the North, there were still a few slaves and a growing body of freedmen, some of whom, like Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, and Crispus Attucks, were more than locally known. The vast hordes of slaves, together with a good number of free Negroes, were a more integral part of southern society. They had cleared the forests and laid the roads, had built the fine houses and wrought the beautiful iron-work; had labored on the tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton plantations so that their masters could buy more slaves. Cotton was not yet king, the cotton-gin was not invented; but the broad backs of the slaves were still supporting a heavy load. Whether as house-servant grateful for easy favors, and contributing to the master’s feeling of safety, or field-hand, or fugitive stealing away to the North, or intractable revolter, throwing both northern and southern communities into consternation, the Negro was recognizably part of the American scene.

But the first groping American novels were still tied to Mother England’s leading strings. For all of their patriotism, the novelists were little concerned with American actualities. When the Negro character wasincluded, he was a shadowy figure in the background, an element of romantic side interest, closer to Aphra Behn’sOroonokoand Defoe’s fiction than to what the novelists could have seen about them.

The earliest novels, William Hill Brown’sThe Power of Sympathy(1789) and Mrs. Susannah Rowson’sThe Inquisitor(1794), true to their sentimental models, have antislavery feeling. Hugh Brackenridge’sModern Chivalry(1792 to 1815) contains a good ironic attack upon the slave-trade, and a less successful character Cuff, whose jargon seems plucked out of Defoe:

Now, shentiman, I say, dat de first man was da black a-man, an’ de first woman was de black a-woman: get two-tree children; de rain vasha dese, an’ de snow pleach, an’ de coula came brown, yella, coppa coula, and at de last quite fite....

Royal Tyler’sThe Algerine Captive(1797) deplores the “middle passage” horrors of the slave-trade in the sentimental mode: “I thought of my native land and blushed.” Charles Brockden Brown’s novels contain Negro characters only incidentally. There were no English models to make these early novelists aware that servitude and struggle could be subjects for fiction.

Irving.In the nineteenth century, interest in the Negro increased. InSalmagundi(1807) Washington Irving, a brisk young man-about-town, records the Negro curiosities he finds, such as the “Negro wench, principal musician at a ball.” He describes a dance in Haiti with unctuous ridicule:

In the middle of the rout, when all was buzz, slip-slop, clack and perfume, who should enter but Tucky Squash! The yellow beauties blushed blue and the black ones blushed as red as they could ... for he was the pride of the court, the pick of all the sable fair ones of Hayti. Such breadth of nose, such exuberance of lip! his shins had the true cucumber curve; his face in dancing shone like a kettle.... When he laughed, there appeared from ear to ear achevaux de-frizeof teeth that rivaled the shark’s in whiteness.... No Long Island Negro could shuffle you “double-trouble” or “hoe corn and dig potatoes” more scientifically.

Here we have the first comic Negro in American fiction, assured of long employment from Irving to Octavus Roy Cohen.Salmagundilikewise includes Caesar, a “weatherbeaten wiseacre of a Negro,” who henpecks his masters, tell stories of ghosts, goblins and witches, and, like a good man Friday, accompanies his master to his sparking and dancing. Caesar is repeated inThe Knickerbocker History of New York(1809) as an old crone who would croak:

a string of incredible stories about New England witches—grisly ghost horses without heads,—and hairbreadth escapes, and bloody encounters among the Indians.

“Adventures of the Black Fisherman” inTales of A Traveler(1824) tells us only that Black Sam or Mud Sam was “supposed to know all the fish in the river by their christian names,” and that he had a “great relish for the horrible,” such as executions, and that all of the urchins felt free to play tricks upon him. Irving does not attempt to give his speech, much less his character.

Cooper.The first American novelist to aim at fullness in his presentation of American life, James Fenimore Cooper naturally included the Negro. Although limited in information and skill, he expanded and improved upon the slight sketches of his forerunners. He presents Negroes of many types. First of all, there is Caesar Thompson, the loyal retainer inThe Spy(1821). True to the prevailing literary attitude of the gentry towards underlings, Cooper burlesques his appearance with what passed for humor in those days:

But it was in his legs that nature had indulged her most capricious humor. There was an abundance of material injudiciously used. The calves were neither before nor behind, but rather on the outer side of the limb, inclining forward.... The leg was placed so near the center as to make it sometimes a matter of dispute whether he was not walking backward.

Nevertheless Caesar is shown as crafty, and courageous in the service of his family. Cooper’s interest in Negroes is continued inThe Pioneers(1823) in Agamemnon, not a slave but a legal ward, a man-of-all work whose deference does not keep him from mirth at his master’s expense, and Abraham, a free black who shares in the rough frontier life.

A different type is the free Sailor, Scipio Africa, one of the heroes ofThe Red Rover(1827). In physique, seamanship, self-control, and intelligence he is superior to his sailing mates, but this does not shield him from their petty insults. There is pathos in the scene of his death:

If he is not (a Christian) I don’t know who the devil is. A man who serves his country, is true to his messmate, and has no sulk about him, I call a saint, so far as mere religion goes. I say, Guinea, my hearty, give the chaplain a grip of the fist.... A Spanish windlass would not give a stronger screw than the knuckle of that nigger an hour ago; and now, you see to what a giant may be brought!

InThe Last of The Mohicans(1826), Cora Munro, the offspring of a mixed marriage, is shown to be resourceful and strong, above the usual run of Cooper’s “females.” It is worthy of note, since she is the first of a long line of “octoroons,” that her end is tragic.

Cooper thus anticipates later creators of Negro characters, presenting the faithful house servant, the courageous man of action, and the octoroon doomed to tragedy. Though crudely recorded, his dialect rises above the usually impossible Negro speech in early novels. No abolitionist, Cooper still did not favor slavery, and honest observer that he was, he refuses to see the Negro, even when grotesquely described, as subhuman.

Simms.William Gilmore Simms, of South Carolina, differed from Cooper, his northern model, in that he defended slavery ardently. In his fiction, however,Negroes are presented without excessive argument. They range from the obsequious house-servant to the brave freeman. Hector, inThe Yemassee(1832) is a heroic slave, participating gallantly in the Indian warfare, volunteering for perilous service, warning blockhouses, and rescuing his master. He is extremely loyal and refuses to be freed.

I d—n to h—-, maussa, if I gwine to be free.... ’Tis onpossible, maussa.... Enty I know wha’ kind of ting freedom is wid black man? Ha! you make Hector free, he turn wuss more nor poor buckrah—he tief out of de shop—he git drunk and lie in de ditch....

This passage is the first and most influential example of a scene soon to be hackneyed. Caesar inGuy Rivers(1834) is subservient, but cunning and philosophical.The Partisan(1835) gains in interest because of the presence of Tom, who is such a good cook that Porgy, his gourmet master, will not brook his being abused. Tom repays by keeping his master fat and happy “so long as dere’s coon and possum, squirrel, patridges and dub, duck in de ribber, and fish in de pond.”

Simms’Richard Hurdis(1838) shows slaves accompanying their masters on the move to the Alabama frontier, dancing, singing, sometimes listening to a fellow slave’s impromptu verses:

In them he satirized his companions without mercy ... and did not spare his own master, whom he compared to a squirrel that had lived upon good corn so long that he now hungered for bad in his desire for change.

InThe Forayers(1855) Cato is a slave-driver, courageous and devoted to his family, and Benny Bowlegs, another driver, is

a moral steam engine. He pushed his master as well as his brother slaves.... Push at the beginning, push in the middle, push at the end, and Ben’s pushing made crops.

The Wigwam and The Cabin(1845) a collection of stories, is unusual in showing Negroes at the centerof the picture. “The Loves of The Driver” casts side-lights upon plantation customs, and the “Lazy Crow” is the first to portray Negro superstition and folkways.

In numbers, and a certain rudimentary realism, the Negro characters in Simms’ many novels go beyond those of any other early nineteenth century novelist. Simms bungles when he tries to record the Gullah dialect, but the effort is worthy of comment. Striving to be accepted as a southern gentleman, Simms shows his slaves, generally, to be well cared for and contented. Nevertheless, his urge to realism kept him from showing slavery to be an endless picnic. Masters held forth freedom as a reward for service; they knew, if the contented slaves did not. All in all, however, Simms is noteworthy more for the extensiveness of his gallery of Negroes than for any depth of characterization.

As Simms showed Negroes participating in the backwoods life and warfare of the South, so earlier writers of the westward movement included sketches of Negroes. Paulding’sWestward Ho(1832) deals with southerners leaving what romancers were to consider Arcadia for a better land. In this novel, Pompey, like Simms’ Hector, refuses freedom.Nick of The Woods(1837) a melodrama of bloody Kentucky by Robert Bird, includes several Negroes. Emperor is most fully characterized: like Cooper’s Caesar he is loyal, worshipful of quality, and, grotesque. Although his “natural” cowardice is insisted upon, his actions belie this, as he fights for his “little missie” and dies the death of a hero, “gored by numberless wounds, and trampled by the feet of his slayers.”

The Virginians.Virginia is the setting for such novelists as W. A. Carruthers, Beverley and George Tucker, and John Esten Cooke. Their novels describethe gentry and their complaisant slaves who enter the books as unobtrusively as they entered the grand dining rooms to bring in sweet missives or decanters of old port. These mammies and butlers and coachmen are interchangeable, appearing in different books under different classical names, but always the same.

Toby in Poe’s “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840) is “as ugly an old gentleman as ever spoke, having ... swollen lips, large white protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and bow-legs.” He is another of Poe’s sad attempts at humor. Jupiter, in “The Gold-Bug” (1843), traditionally refuses to leave his master, but threatens in all seriousness to beat him, a hot-blooded cavalier, with a big stick. His dialect, an attempt at Gullah, is language belonging with Poe’s masterpieces, “out of space and out of time.” Poe revealed that his southern upbringing had borne fruit, however, when, defending slavery from “the fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists” he writes that it is the will of God that the Negro should have a “peculiar nature,” of which one characteristic is his tremendous loyalty to his master, “to which the white man’s heart is a stranger.” The master has a “reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent”:

he who is taught to call the little negro his in this sense andbecause he loves him, shall love himbecause he is his.

Melville.A greater writer than Poe in his grasp of character, Herman Melville was above this sophistry in dealing with human beings. A northerner, Melville did not know slavery at first hand; but a mariner, he did know Negro seamen.Moby Dick(1851) reveals this knowledge.

[Daggoo] a gigantic coal-black negro ... retained all his barbaric virtues and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce from a fortress.

If Daggoo is the “noble savage,” Pip, as sympathetically created, is of another breed. Pip’s cowardice is not considered racial but is naturally human.

Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle ye shall see him, beating his tambourine, prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels and beat his tambourine in glory: called a coward here, hailed a hero there!

Negro sailors, generally courageous and praiseworthy, occur in Melville’s other romances of the sea.

Benito Cereno(1855) is a masterpiece of mystery, suspense and terror. Captain Delano of theBachelor’s Delight, discovering a vessel in distress along the uninhabited coast of Chile, boards her to render aid. He is interested in the many Negroes he finds on the decks: “like most men of a good blithe heart he took to Negroes not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.” He is mystified, however, when the gamesome Negroes flare up in momentary rage, and especially by their continual clashing their hatchets together. Only when Don Benito, in desperation, escapes to Delano’s ship, does the real truth dawn.

There had been a revolt on board theSan Dominick; the Negro sailors and the slaves had killed many of the whites, and had kept the others alive only for their skill as navigators in order to reach a Negro country. The mutineers and revolters are overcome in a bloody battle, carried to Lima, and executed. The contrast between the reputed gentleness of Negroes “that makes them the best body-servants in the world,” and the fierceness with which they fight for freedom is forcibly driven home. Certain Negroes stand out: Babo who, resembling a “begging friar,” engineered the revolt with great skill and is almost fiendish in his manner of breaking down Cereno’s morale; Francesco, the mulatto barber; Don José, personal servantof a Spanish Don; and Atulfa, an untamed African chieftain, all filled with hatred for whites. Melville graphically pictures the slave mothers, “equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them”; the four old men monotonously polishing their hatchets; and the murderous Ashantees. All bear witness to what Melville recognized as a spirit that it would take years of slavery to break.

Although opposed to slavery, Melville does not makeBenito Cerenointo an abolitionist tract; he is more concerned with a thrilling narrative and character portrayal. But although the mutineers are blood-thirsty and cruel, Melville does not make them into villains; they revolt as mankind has always revolted. Because Melville was unwilling to look upon men as “Isolatoes,” wishing instead of discover the “common continent of man,” he comes nearer the truth in his scattered pictures of a few unusual Negroes than do the other authors of this period.

Frontier Humor.The southern humorists, thriving from the thirties to the sixties, introduce the Negro only incidentally in their picture of horse-swapping, gander-pulling, camp meetings, fights, and political brawls. Because they were realistic, the “plantations” they show are most often backwood farms. The hard-fisted frontier squires, with a love of horse-play, and a callousness necessary for survival, treat their slaves as one would expect: they are neither Legrees nor American versions of Sir Roger de Coverly. InGeorgia Scenes(1835), Longstreet non-committally shows a Southern backwoods “lady” knocking her servant around from mere habit. InAdventures of Simon Suggs(1846) Johnson Hooper gives good pictures of southern camp-meetings, at which Negroes and whites vie in religious hysteria, mingling indiscriminately in the hollow square, plunging and pitching about in the“jerks” and screaming “glory” in unsegregated chorus.

George Harris inSut Lovingood Yarns(1867) tells of a rowdy whose antics include poking a hornet’s nest into a Negro camp meeting. At another time, Sut removes a corpse and lays a snoring, drunken Negro in the coffin. When the slave preacher Simon comes to the coffin he yells:

“Oh Goramighty massy on dis soul; de debil hesef on top of brudder Seize!...” Jis then I moaned out in a orful doleful vise, “Hiperkrit, cum tu hell, I has a claim ontu you fu holdin the bag while Seize stole co’n.” He jes rar’d backwards, an’ fell outen the door wif his hans locked, an’ sed he in a weak ... sort of vise, “Please marster” an’ jis fainted, he soon cum to a-runnin’, fer I hearn the co’n crashin thru the big field like a in-gine were runnin’ express thru hit. I hain’t seen Simon ter this day.

Other humorists tell of frontier surgery upon slaves; if they were not ill before, they were near death’s door after the barbarous operations.

The tone of the humorists is burlesque, which often sinks to the level of present-day “darky” jokes. Nevertheless, southern humor is significant. The assumption that Negroes are especially designed as butts for rough practical jokes is probably closer to the reality of the antebellum South than the sentimentality of more ambitious works.

True to the manner of cracker-box philosophers, Artemus Ward attacks the sentimentalized and the unconventional, and delivers many of the “common-man’s” jibes at abolitionists and Negroes. “The Octoroon” is, at least, a refreshing departure from the shopworn tragic mode.

“Hush—shese a Octoroon!”“No! sez I ... yu don’t say so! How long she bin that way?”“From her arliest infuncy,” sed he.“Wall, what upon arth duz she do it fur?” I inquired.“She kan’t help it.... It’s the brand of Kane.”

“Hush—shese a Octoroon!”

“No! sez I ... yu don’t say so! How long she bin that way?”

“From her arliest infuncy,” sed he.

“Wall, what upon arth duz she do it fur?” I inquired.

“She kan’t help it.... It’s the brand of Kane.”

Oberlin College is lampooned for being rather “too strong on Ethiopians.” Though a good Unionist inthe war, Artemus Ward, unlike his successor Nasby, does not reveal any sympathy for the Negro.

Summary.Irving’s tellers of mysterious legends, Cooper’s house-servants, Melville’s mates in the foc’sle, and the obsequious servants of the Virginia cavaliers reflect their authors’ interests and experience more than they interpret Negro life. Simms’ blood and thunder melodramas and the farces of the frontier humorists give more varied types and experiences, with some crude realism. Melville’sBenito Cerenogoes more deeply into character. In the main, however, these subsidiary characters are not very convincing. They speak a pidgin English, closer to the speech of Robinson Crusoe’s Friday than to that of nineteenth century Negroes. Cooper and Simms tried to record dialects; Simms is probably better since Gullah is nearer to pidgin English, but he is still inaccurate. Some authors presented the Negro with dignity and sympathy, but serious realism was still far off. It is worthy of note, however, that such favorite Negro characters as the fabler, the loyal servant, the buffoon, the tragic octoroon, the noble savage, and the revolter, appear in these early books.

Although in a few cases propaganda for or against slavery raises its head, these subsidiary characters are not made into walking arguments. Toward the end of this period, however, the slavery debate broke out, and, in the words of one critic, “the world of nature was lost in the world of controversy.”

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why were early American novels “tied to Mother England’s leading strings?”

2. What tradition of English literature might account for Irving’s and Cooper’s humorous treatment of the Negro?

3. Since Simms was proslavery, what is inconsistent about his showing Negroes being set free as reward for heroic services?

4. What historical incidents could have suggested Melville’sBenito Cereno?

5. What in Poe’s life might have occasioned his attitude toward the Negro?

6. In which of the works mentioned is the Negro character a foreground character?

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