CHAPTER IV

RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS SOUTH

The Triumph of The Tradition.IfUncle Tom’s Cabintriumphed in the antebellum “battle of the books,” being widely remembered while its opponents are forgotten, the plantation tradition was to score a signal victory in the Reconstruction. Although no longer needed to defend a tottering institution, it was now needed to prove that Negroes were happy as slaves and hopelessly unequipped for freedom, so that slavery could be resurrected in practise though not in name. Ancestor worshippers, the sons of a fighting generation, remembering bitterly the deaths of their fathers, uncles, or brothers, the sufferings of their families and themselves, brought the passion of the defeated to their descriptions. Many, politically astute, used the plantation tradition to further their ambitions.

The authors of the reconstruction were better writers than their antebellum predecessors. Moreover, they were farther from slavery, and since their memories were often those of childhood, they idealized to a much greater degree. Some proslavery authors, like William Thompson, had admitted, for instance, that many slaves had the harshest kind of masters; others unconsciously allowed facts to enter that their descendants considered too uncouth for mention. Nostalgic yearning brought it about that, according to Gaines:

Slavery was softened until whatever may have been evil was regarded as accidental.... The scale of life was steadily enlarged, the colors were made increasingly vivid. Estates swelled in size and mansions grew proportionately great. Gentlemen were perfected in courtly grace, gay girls in loveliness, slaves in immeasurable devotion.

With the seductiveness of any past seen through “the golden haze of retrospect,” with realism to the surface of Negro life, disarmingly affectionate references to Negroes of the old school, and a mastery of the tricks of fiction, the plantation tradition came into its own. The Negro was established as contented slave, entertaining child and docile ward, until misled by “radical” agitators, when he became a dangerous beast.

Local Color.Following Bret Harte’s discovery of the picturesque and quaint in California’s past, local colorists sprang up all over the nation. Many southern regions were staked out as claims worth mining. Charles Egbert Craddock in the Tennessee mountains, Mark Twain in the Mississippi valley, George Washington Cable in fabulous New Orleans brought the wealth of their discoveries to a literature that had fallen on lean years. Coincidentally with the rise of the local colorists, a new interest in the South, the scene of America’s greatest war, was awakening. Magazines, especiallyScribner’s, attempted to slake this curiosity. A great outburst of dialect stories resulted. Among the first of the writers to realize the picturesque interest of the southern Negro was Sherwood Bonner (Mrs. Katherine McDowell), a pioneer in local color fiction as Russell was in poetry (she had even written dialect poetry of the Negro before Russell’s book appeared). Many of herDialect Tales(1878) andSuwanee River Tales(1884) are about Negroes. They are interesting as first attempts, but they illustrate the chief weaknesses of local color: they reveal odd turns of speech and customs but the characterization is superficial and condescending. Southern local colorists were soon to sweep the North with a different formula; fidelity to speech and manners was to be combined with regret “for the dear dead days beyond recall.”

Thomas Nelson Page.Most elegiac of these authors, and probably most persuasive in casting a golden glow over the antebellum South is Thomas Nelson Page. With a mastery of pathos and stirring melodrama, hisIn Ole Virginia(1887) sets a pattern that time has not been able to wear out. The three best known stories of this volume are “Marse Chan,” “Meh Lady,” and “Unc’ Edinburg’s Drownin’.” They are told in the dialect of eastern Virginia, accurately recorded. The literary device used in all three stories is quite simple: an old Negro, garrulous in praise of the old days, tells a tale of handsome cavaliers and lovely ladies, with stress upon the love between master and slave. Marse Chan saves a slave’s life at the cost of his own sight; Uncle Edinburg is saved by his young master from a raging torrent; Uncle Billy defends his charges from marauding Yankee soldiers, and supports them after the war. The stories end in lovers’ meetings; as in Shakespeare, the courtship of lord and lady is balanced by the comical courtship of the servants. Page has his three ventriloquist’s dummies agreeing upon the blessedness of slavery. Sam says:

Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes’ Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac’! Niggers didn’t hed nothing ’tall to do.... Dyar warn’ no trouble nor nothin’.

Uncle Edinburg seconds the emotion:

Oh! nuttin’ warn’ too good for niggers dem times; an’ de little niggers wuz runnin’ roun’ right ’stracted.... Dis nigger ain’ nuver gwine forgit it.”

And Uncle Billy:

I wuz settin’ in de do’ wid meh pipe, an heah ’em settin’ dyah on de front steps, dee voices soun’in low like bees, an’ de moon sort o’ mellow over de yard, an’ I sort o’ got to studyin’ an’ hit pear like de plantation live once mo’, an’ de ain’ no mo’ scufflin’, an de ol times done come back agin....

“No Haid Pawn,” a ghost story in the same volume, has a Negro character who differed from other slavesin that he was without amiability or docility, superstition or reverence. Page adds significantly, “He was the most brutal negro I ever knew.”The Negro: The Southerner’s Problemstates Page’s lavish praise for the “old time darky” and his virulent disgust at the “new issue,” ruined by emancipation;Red Rock(1898) embodies this hatred in fiction. The docile mastiffs have become mad dogs; the carriers of the rabies are Yankee soldiers and schoolmarms, carpet-baggers, and scalawags. Mammy Krenda, Waverly, Tarquin, and Jerry are sympathetically treated because they despise the northern interlopers, and stand hand-in-hand before quality. Less servile Negroes are called insolent swaggerers. Moses, a mulatto trick doctor, is the worst of these. He orates: “I’m just as good as any white man.... I’m goin’ to marry a white ’ooman and meck white folks wait on me.” Within a few pages he is likened to “a hyena in a cage,” “a reptile,” “a species of worm,” “a wild beast.” He attempts to assault one of the heroines, the daughter of an abolitionist mother; this Page considers a fit harvest for interference with the most chivalrous of civilizations. Page thus anticipates such authors as Thomas Dixon whose stock in trade is the brute Negro, and whose pat response to any assertion of Negro rights is the cry of intermarriage or rape.

Such a volume asPastime Stories(1894) deals less with the good times than with Page’s own days. The Negro characters are petty thieves and drunkards, but are dealt with jocularly. There is ridicule in Uncle Jack’s “Views on Geography”:

You knows de way to de spring and de wood-pile, an’ de mill, an’ when you gits a little bigger I’s gwine to show you de way to de hoe-handle, an’ de cawn-furrer, an’ dat’s all de geog-aphy a nigger’s got to know.

One story shows approvingly how a mulatto office-seeker is thwarted by a faithful Negro for the sakeof his master’s political advantage.Bred in the Bone(1904) adds nothing to Page’s usual characterizations, dealing largely with the antics of comic menials.

Harris.It was from the slave quarters that Joel Chandler Harris started his trip to literary immortality. As a lonely boy, shy with people of his own race, he turned for companionship to the cabins on a Georgia plantation. There he met Uncle George Terrell, the original of Uncle Remus; there he started his long study of Negro lore, and there he learned something of the story-telling art and something of his wisdom. For years the slaves had been telling fables of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox and Brer Terrapin, some of the stories having come from Africa. But no one had dug in this mine before Harris. A true artist, he recognized the value of what he found. He is more than a reteller, however; he altered, adapted, polished and sharpened until the products differ from folk tales. For all of the fascination of Brer Rabbit and company, the fabler is stressed more than the characters. Instead of being by the folk for the folk, Uncle Remus tells the stories to entertain a white child. Harris lost something authentic when he adopted this framework, but he gained Uncle Remus. And Uncle Remus is worth gaining. By no means the typical product of slavery, as Harris implies, he is still finely conceived: a venerable, pampered Negro with a gift for quaint philosophizing and for poetic speech, having (or allowed to have) only pleasant memories, fortunate above his brothers—one of the best characters in American literature.

In folk-idiom, the tales are kept close to the people. No author before Harris had recorded Negro speech with anything like his skill. Walter Hines Page stated: “I have Mr. Harris’ word for it that he canthinkin the Negro dialect. He could translate even Emerson,perhaps Bronson Alcott in it....” Any random excerpt will reveal this ability:

Bimeby, one day, after Brer Fox bin doin’ all dat he could fer ter ketch Brer Rabbit, en Brer Rabbit bin doin’ all he could fer to keep ’im fum it, Brer Fox say to hisse’f dat he’d put up a game on Brer Rabbit, en he ain’t mo’n got de wuds out’n his mouf twel Brer Rabbit come a lopin up de big road, lookin’ des ez plump en ez fat, en ez sassy ez a Moggin hoss in a barley patch....“All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m monstus full er fleas dis mawnin’,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

“All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan’. I’m monstus full er fleas dis mawnin’,” sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

Strewn through the stories is much local color, well-observed and true. Fine turns of speech reveal the slave’s mind. The use of Brer Rabbit as the hero is noteworthy. Forced to pit his cunning against enemies of greater physical strength, he was perhaps a symbol for people who needed craft in order to survive. But whether victor over Brer Wolf, or victim to the Tar-baby, he is a likeable scamp, who has come loping lickety-split down the years.

Before finishing his long cycle of tales, Uncle Remus revealed himself more thoroughly than any preceding Negro character. But Harris was a journalist, as well as a writer of fiction, and he was called upon to give his version of the critical times. It was here that his ability to translate anything into Negro dialect was misused. He made Uncle Remus the mouthpiece for defending orthodox southern attitudes. Needless to say, Uncle Remus diminishes in stature; he becomes less a man, more a walking delegate. The old man keeps his hat in his hand too much. He defends the glory of the Old South, he admires his white folks, he satirizes education for Negroes:

Hit’s de ruinashun er dis country.... Put a spellin’-book in a nigger’s han’s, en right den en dar’ you loozes a plow-hand.... What’s a nigger gwineter ’larn outen books? I kin take a bar’l stave an’ fling mo’ sense inter a nigger in one minnit dan all de schoolhouses betwixt dis en de State er Midgigin.... Wid one bar’l stave I kin fa’rly lif’ de vail er ignunce.

When Negroes migrated for better working conditions, or out of fear, Uncle Remus almost frantically begs them to “stay off them kyars.” That an old Negro, spoiled by his white-folks, and patronized by southern journalists, might say what his hearers want to hear, and even believe it, is quite probable. But as racial adviser, Uncle Remus forfeits our trust in him; he is too fluently the mouthpiece of southern policy. He did better telling how Brer Rabbit fooled Brer Fox by slick talk, or when he said: “Watch out we’en you’er gittin’ all you want. Fattenin’ hogs ain’t in luck.”

Many of Harris’s other stories repeat usual characters in usual situations. In “Aunt Fountain’s Prisoner” the old auntie saves a Yankee’s life and presides over his successful courtship of a southern girl. “Mingo” tells of a slave of “meritorious humility,” “a cut above” the Negroes who accepted freedom. In “Baalam and His Master,” Baalam, of a “fearlessness rare among slaves” fights alongside his roistering master in tavern brawls and digs a hole in the wall of a jail to be near him. Although Ananias is mean-looking, his sacrifice for his master, ruined by the war, proves him to be an old familiar, merely with a new face. Like the typical southern authors of his time, Harris does not show the Negro who would fight or work or exercise his wits in his own cause.

A few runaways and freed Negroes attracted his attention. Free Betsey inSister Janeand Mink inOn the Plantationare as devoted to their little missy and massa, however, as Uncle Remus. “Free Joe” is the pathetic story of a freed Negro, feared by the whites and avoided, but hardly envied, by the slaves. After his wife was sold by a master well nicknamed Old Spite, and his faithful little dog was killed by Old Spite’s hounds, he dies, heartbroken. Humane andintelligent, Harris uses “Free Joe” to attack the popular notion that Negroes always “grin at trouble.” The forces making a free Negro an outcast are clearly indicated. But dyed-in-the-wool southerners could use Joe’s shiftlessness to prove that a freed Negro could not stand alone, and Harris’s picture of the laughing, singing slaves who despised Free Joe might bear them out. Joe is certainly not a typical free Negro, but the sympathy in his portrait is deeper than any of Harris’s contemporaries dared show.

“Mom Bi” tells of an unusual mammy. In spite of her withered arm, Mom Bi is a black Amazon, with eyes that “shone like those of a wild animal not afraid of the hunter.” She was not religious:

Ef de Lawd call me in de chu’ch I gwine, ef he no call I no gwine, enty? I no yerry him call dis long time....

Whoever crossed her—white or black, old or young—got a piece of her mind. She outspokenly scorns the South Carolina “sandhillers” or “tackies,” and laughs at them for going to war to “fight for rich folks’ niggers.” In the Civil War she is a grim prophet of Yankee victory, and therefore is considered a lunatic. Again, however, Harris cannot shake off the heavy hand of tradition. Mom Bi forgives the sale of her daughter Maria, but is grieved that her young master Gabriel was killed in battle, fighting alongside of poor white folks. Emancipated, she goes down to live with Maria, her daughter; when smallpox kills off Maria and her children, she returns (as do most of the Negroes whom Harris likes) to the old homeplace. “I done bin come back,” says she. “I bin come back fer stay, but I free, dough!”

Like “Mom Bi,” “Blue Dave” promises much more than it gives. Dave, an inky black powerfully built runaway, has become a legend before the story opensfor fearlessness and terrorism. In the story proper, however, we merely get a Hercules devoted to a family because the young master resembles a former Virginian owner. Dave has said over and over again that slavery “ain’t no home for me,” but he is bought by the family he has served, and lives happily ever after as a model slave. “Where’s Duncan,” more than any other of Harris’s stories, touches upon the sinister and repellent. A swarthy dark-bearded vagabond fiddler tells mysteriously of a planter who sold his son to a trader. The last scene, recalling Poe’s effects, shows an old mansion afire; in the light of the flames, a mulatto woman cries out “Where’s Duncan?” and stabs the white father of her son with a carving knife. Crooked-leg Jake saw Duncan, the fiddler, sitting in a corner, seemingly enjoying the spectacle.

The last story shows that Harris saw in slavery something more than a perpetual Mardi Gras; he knew that there was hatred as well as mutual affection, the ugly as well as the pleasant. Harris promised “scenes such as have never been described in any of the books that profess to tell about life in the South before the war.” But with all of his value as a realist, Harris never came fully to grips with the reality of the South or of Negro experience. He was a kindly man, and wished the wounds of war bound up. He could give some praise to Negroes struggling to achieve property and education. But he was a southerner, living in vexatious times, and therefore his fiction almost always glorified the faithful self-denying slave of the old South, for whom the old ways of slavery were the best. He achieved a fine portrait in Uncle Remus, but Uncle Remus had brothers and children of a different stamp, whom Harris touched gingerly, if at all. Harris came a good distance down the road toward fairness if compared with Thomas Nelson Page. But compared withGeorge Washington Cable and Mark Twain, he still lagged behind.

Harris recorded some of the folk-lore of the “saltwater” Negroes with success, but it remained for Charles C. Jones to do the fuller job inNegro Myths from the Georgia Coast(1888). These tales are worthy to stand by those of Uncle Remus and, lacking the editorializing, are closer to the originals. They are told in the unique lingo of the rice-field and sea-island Negroes. The first in the “untrodden field of the swamp region of Georgia and the Carolinas,” Jones discovered what later folk-lorists like Samuel Stoney, Gertrude Shelby and Ambrose Gonzales have found attractive.

Edwards.Harry Stillwell Edwards belongs to the long line of Georgians from Longstreet down to Erskine Caldwell who write of the Old South with more realism and less worship. His Major Crawford Worthington, for instance, is a portly, profane, self-willed sportsman who considers the Negro an unfailing source of amusement. Worthington’s slave Isam is an annual runaway, not because slavery is harsh, but because he likes vacations. “The Two Runaways” tells of a vacation on which master and slave, boon companions, live high on stolen corn and melons. They enjoy seeing each other in difficulties. When a buck deer and the fat major are wrestling, Isam, a safe, happy ringsider, cries out:

Stick ter ’im Mass Craffud, stick ter ’im! Hit’s better fer one ter die den bofe! Hole ’im Mass Craffud.... Wo’ deer! Stick ter ’im, Mass Craffud, steddy!

Tables are turned in “The Woodhaven Goat” when a goat, maddened by bees, butts and drags Isam all over the yard. From beneath the house, the Major

looked out through tears with a sudden delight at the negro’s predicament, sobbing and choking with emotion ... he franticallybeat the dry soil about him with his fist for some moments. “Better for one to die than two.... Stick to him, Isam.... Whoa, goat!”

“Aeneas Africanus” (1920) humorously tells of a black Eneas, who confused by the duplication of town-names, covered 3350 miles through seven states, over a period of eight years, trying to get back to his quality whitefolks. Like his Major, Edwards seemed to have studied the Negro only on his amusing side. But he was willing to poke fun at some of the absurdities of the Old South, and his robust horseplay is a relief from sentimentality.

F. Hopkinson Smith.Few authors dealt with a rough-and-ready friendship between a swearing master and a none-too-obsequious slave in the manner of Edwards. More typical is the sentimental, genteel treatment of mutual affection as inColonel Carter of Cartersvilleby F. Hopkinson Smith (1891), a portrait of a quixotic Virginia gentleman and his devoted servant, Chad. Chad exists only to prepare choice dishes of canvas-back duck and terrapin for his moneyless but epicurean master, to support the colonel’s hospitality with his pitiful stored earnings, to be a bulwark against the harsh Yankee world, and to express his disdain for people who are “not quality.” With his wife Henny, a similar model of loyalty, he furnishes comic relief and glorifies the “good old days.”Colonel Carter’s Christmas(1903) adds little to the characterization of the sentimental pair.

James Lane Allen.Sentimentalist and idealist, James Lane Allen could find little blemish in the antebellum South according to “Uncle Tom At Home in Kentucky”, his refutation of Mrs. Stowe. “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” (1888) tells of the great affection between a sweet Kentucky Colonel—so unworldly that when he runs a store he chivalrously gives awaythe wares—and his faithful servant, Peter Cotton. Peter is completely self-forgetful, but must be made ludicrous as well. His blue-jeans coat, with very long and spacious tails, is embroidered with scriptural texts, the word “Amen” being located just “over the end of Peter’s spine.” The master’s death is followed in a year by Peter’s. The world after the Civil War was no fit place for these two, which is no great reflection, since too often they act like halfwits. In “King Solomon of Kentucky” (1891) a free Negro woman, who has made some money selling cakes and pies, buys a white vagabond on the block, because he was a friend of her dead Virginia master. The vagabond is regenerated and becomes the town hero in a cholera epidemic. The introduction of the auction block is almost unmatched in plantation tradition literature, but it is significant that a white man is the one sold from it.

Grace King and Kate Chopin.In resentment at Cable’s attacks upon the plantation tradition, discussed in the next chapter, many southerners set up Grace King and Kate Chopin as more truthful observers of Louisiana. Undoubtedly both are more traditional. Few troubles fret the slaves in Grace King’s stories, except in the case of octoroons who grieve that they are not white. “Monsieur Motte” tells of a Negro woman, Marcelite, who supports in a fashionable school the daughter of her dead mistress, pretending that money comes from a non-existent uncle, Monsieur Motte. InBalcony Stories(1893), Joe is likewise the devoted servant, begging to be sold because his master’s widow is in need of money. “A Crippled Hope” tells of a Negro girl, whose value as a nurse for sick slaves in the auction mart keeps her from being sold to “delicate ladies,” whom she would have loved to serve. When freedom comesshe does not want it; she only wants to succor the ailing. “The Little Convent Girl” is about a sad-faced girl, who is suddenly discovered to have a negro mother. The girl drowns, escaping her fate. Even at the age of twelve, a tragic octoroon! Negroes not octoroons have a merry time:

And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks, and singing of Jim Crow Songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through red lips, and laughing, and talking ... bewildering, entrancing!

Kate Chopin was a sensitive, skillful teller of tales. HerBayou Folk(1894) is a collection laid in and around Natchitoches Parish near Red River, of which she presents the local customs and patois admirably. But the Negroes she portrays are still models of loyalty and self-denial. In “A No Account Creole,” La Chatte, a broad black mammy, is guardian over the love affairs of the white creoles. “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” shows a fiery plantation owner who for a time flouts the community taboo of consorting with mulattoes. “In Sabine” depicts Uncle Mortimer protecting a white woman who is abused by her hard drinking husband. “Beyond the Bayou” shows a gaunt, black woman overcoming her extreme fear of the bayou to carry home a little white child whom she loves. “The Benitou’s Slave” pictures extreme devotion. “Desirée’s Baby”, probably Mrs. Chopin’s best known work, deals with a young creole husband and wife to whom is born a child who gives evidence of Negro blood. The outraged husband sends his wife away in disgrace. He then, discovers, through an old letter, that the Negro blood came from his own mother; she was thankful, she said, that her son would never know.

Of the numerous short stories defending the Old South space forbids more than mention of a selectedfew. Maurice Thompson in “Ben and Judas” (1889) wrote a good story of a mutual affection between owner and owned. In “The Balance of Power,” Thompson has a crafty Negro, who walks on “bofe sides of de fence,” managing it so that the young man wins the beautiful girl while her father is conceded the election. The story is inconsequential, but it does show the colonel winning political support by stating that his rival is supported by Negroes. Of a different type is “An Incident” by Sarah Barnwell Elliott, which dramatizes the terror at the “brute” Negro, and is concerned with “what answer the future would have for this awful problem.”

Summary.Plantation tradition fiction of the Reconstruction added realism of speech and custom, but with few exceptions, this realism was subordinated to the purpose of showing the mutual affection between the races which the North had partly destroyed in a foolish war. Negro characters, at their best, are shown only in relationship with kindly southern whites; at their worst, in relationship with predatory Yankees. They are never shown in relationship to themselves. They are confined to the two opposite grooves of loyalty or ingratitude. The authors, remembering their childhood when it is likely that they had Negro playmates as boon companions, made slavery a boyish romp. It was flattering to believe that their fathers and mothers were objects of universal love and worship. It was charming for a man accustomed to deference and submission to believe these to be ordained in heaven. It was uncomfortable to believe that irony, or shrewd appraisal could lurk behind the bland smile, the pull on the forelock, the low curtsey. Perish the thought! A kindly critic of the South paraphrases the legend:

Way down upon the Suwanee River the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home, where, bound for Louisiana, Little Evahas a banjo on her knee, and Old Black Joe, Uncle Remus and Miss Sally’s little boy listen to the mocking-bird and watch a sweet chariot swing low one frosty mornin’. The gallant Pelham and his comrades bend forever over the hands of adorable girls in crinoline; under the duelling oaks Colonel Carter of Cartersville and Marse Chan blaze away at each other with pistols by the light of the silvery moon on Mobile Bay ...

And we might add: the happy slaves are forever singing in the beautiful fields of white cotton, and forever black mammies fondle their little marses and missies and exude love for all the rich folks in Dixie, and body servants rescue the perishing, care for the dying, serve their beloved masters until death let them depart in peace, to serve in heaven, forever and ever.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why was the earlier plantation tradition fiction less persuasive than that written in Reconstruction?

2. What were reasons why the “brute” Negro was seldom mentioned in antebellum fiction, and so frequently mentioned in Reconstruction?

3. What in the testimony of Page’s three Uncles supports the fact that Virginia was a slave-breeding state?

4. Compare Harris and Page.

5. Why is Edwards closer to the “frontier humorists” than to Allen?

6. Since instances of mutual affection in slavery could undoubtedly be found, why should not literature celebrating it be considered a trustworthy guide to the Old South?

7. List the runaways and “bad Negroes” mentioned in this chapter, with the authors’ characterizations of them.

8. Account for the absence of characters of mixed blood.

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