CHAPTER V

RECONSTRUCTION: THE NOT SO GLORIOUS SOUTH

Cable.Although he had served as an officer in the Confederate Cavalry, George Washington Cable was aware of much that was wrong in the old South and the new. HisThe Silent SouthandThe Negro Questionare antidotes to Page’s dangerous drugs; against the convict lease system, for instance, Cable wrote with startling pertinence even for our own day. Cordially hated in the South, he took up residence in Massachusetts, but though in “exile” he kept close to his heart the best interests of his section.

Praised as the first southerner to include just and sympathetic recognition of the Negro, Cable portrays Negroes or the background of slavery in most of his novels. For our purposesOld Creole Days(1879) andThe Grandissimes(1880) are most important.Old Creole Daysre-creates, with vivid local color, early nineteenth century Louisiana. In “Posson Jone”, a faithful servant outwits the sharpers who were preying upon his master; if the situation is old, the details are sharply observed. Less kindly pictures of slavery appear in “’Tite Poulette” and “Madame Delphine”, stories of octoroons of a warm seductive beauty, cultivated with care so that they may be “protected” by some Louisiana grandee. This “protection” does not keep tragedy from their lives, however. To these women, says Cable, “every white man in this country is a pirate.” Therefore, both mothers in these stories pretend that their daughters are not really theirs, in order that the girls may get around the law that rigorously forbade marriage ofoctoroons to “pure whites.” Bitterly acquainted with what faces her lovely daughter, Delphine cries out against the law “to keep the two races separate”: “A lie, Pere Jerome! Separate! No-o-o! They do not want to keep us separated; no, no! But theydowant to keep us despised!”

InThe Grandissimes, a long novel of old Louisiana, we have the background of slavery well worked in, and in the foreground, individualized Negro characters, far more convincing than the abolitionist victims. Outstanding is Honoré Grandissime, “free man of color,” educated, successful in business but an ineffectual victim of caste. Though true to New Orleans history, his type has been neglected in fiction for the more fascinating octoroon heroine. Palmyre is one of the best characterized octoroons in fiction.

This woman had stood all her life with dagger drawn, on the defensive against what certainly was to her an unmerciful world.... And yet by inexorable decree, she belonged to what we used to call “the happiest people under the sun.” We ought to stop saying that.

Under domineering and insult, Palmyre is shown as silent; “and so,” says Cable, “sometimes is fire in the wall.” Clemence, illiterate and superstitious, has folk-shrewdness:

You mus’n b’lieve all dis-yeh nonsense ’bout insurrectionin’; all fool-nigga talk. W’at we want to be insurrectionin’ faw? We de happiest people in de God’s worl’! Yes, we is; you jis oughteh gimme fawty an’ lemme go! Please gen’lemen!

Her cunning does not help, however, in this drastic case; she is told to run, and is coolly shot, stone dead.

One of the most unusual figures is the gigantic Bras Coupé, captured king of the Jaloffs, a legendary figure with counterpart in Louisiana history. He is contemptuous of whites, and kills the Negro driver who first tells him to work. Driven to the swamps forstriking down his master, he puts a curse on the plantation. When he is captured he is “hamstrung”, in accordance with theCode Noir. When the name of his worst enemy falls upon his ears, even though dying, he spits upon the floor; when he is begged to forgive, he merely smiles. “God keep thy enemy from such a smile”, says the author.

Cable’s fiction shows full acquaintance with folk-songs, speech, lore and superstition, but unlike his contemporaries, Page and Harris, he does not use the material to support old traditions. He makes clear-eyed, telling observations on the South. A blow, punishable in a white offender by a small fine or conviction, assured Bras Coupé the death of a felon, by the old Code Noir.

(We have a Code Noir now, but the new one is a mental reservation, not an enactment).... The guests stood for an instant as if frozen, smitten stiff with the expectation of insurrection, conflagration and rapine (just as we do today whenever some poor swaggering Pompey rolls up his fist and gets a ball through his body)....

“It seems to be one of the self-punitive characteristics of tyranny, whether the tyrant be a man, a community, or a caste, to have a pusillanimous fear of its victims.” But Cable does not over-idealize the Negro. He is sharp toward the mulatto caste—“the saddest slaves of all.”

Your men, for a little property, and your women, for a little amorous attention let themselves be shorn even of the virtue of discontent.... I would rather be a runaway in the swamp than content myself with such a freedom.

Although Cable helped to establish the tragic mulatto stereotypes, his portraits of this caste are drawn from a specific situation in the past, more pronounced in New Orleans though widespread in the South. The stereotype has fascinated later writers who have fallen under Cable’s charm. But they are without his information and sympathy, and are therefore lesstruthful. All in all, Cable is one of the finest creators of Negro character in the nineteenth century.

Twain.Like Cable, Twain was of southern birth and upbringing, and fought in the Confederate army (but for a short time only, in a spirit of horseplay, learning only how to retreat). The two men lectured together. Both had sympathies for the underdog and both attacked the sham chivalry of the South. Mark Twain insisted that he was almost completely without race prejudice and that the color brown was “the most beautiful and satisfying of all the complexions vouchsafed to man.” He loved the spirituals best among music. In his youth he grew up with slave boys as playmates; in his manhood he paid a Negro student’s way through Yale, as “part of the reparation due from every white to every black man.”

Twain’s first treatment of Negroes inThe Gilded Age(1873), however, is largely traditional, unlike “A True Story (Repeated Word For Word As I Heard It)” which is a bitter memory of cruelty and separation, contradicting Thomas Nelson Page’s formula stories.

InHuckleberry Finn(1884) the callousness of the South to the Negro is indicated briefly, without preaching, but impellingly. Huck informs Aunt Sally that a steamboat blew out a cylinder head:

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”“No’m. Killed a nigger.”“Well, it’s lucky because sometimes people do get hurt....”

“Good gracious! anybody hurt?”

“No’m. Killed a nigger.”

“Well, it’s lucky because sometimes people do get hurt....”

In this book Twain deepens the characterization of Jim, who, like Tom and Huck and the rest of that fine company, was drawn from life. He is no longer the simple-minded, mysterious guide in the ways of dead cats, doodle-bugs and signs ofThe Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Running away from old Miss Watson, who, though religious, “pecks on” him all the time,treats him “pooty rough” and wants a trader’s eight hundred dollars for him, Jim joins Huck on the immortal journey down the Mississippi. His talks enlivens the voyage. He is at his comic best in detailing his experience with high finance—he once owned fourteen dollars. But the fun is brought up sharp by Jim’s

Yes, en I’s rich now, come to look at it. I owns myself en I’s wuth eight hund’d dollars. I wisht I had de money, I wouldn’t want no mo’.

But he did want more. He wanted to get to a free state and work and save money so he could buy his wife, and then they would both work to buy their children, or get an abolitionist to go steal them. Huck is “frozen at such thoughts;” torn between what he had been taught was moral and his friendliness for an underdog. Jim is the best example in nineteenth century fiction of the average Negro slave (not the tragic mulatto or the noble savage), illiterate, superstitious, yet clinging to his hope for freedom, to his love for his own. And he is completely believable, whether arguing that Frenchman should talk like people, or doing most of the work on the raft, or forgiving Huck whose trick caused him to be bitten by a snake, or sympathizing with the poor little Dauphin, who, since America has no kings, “cain’t git no situation.” He tells of his little daughter, whom he had struck, not knowing she disobeyed because she had become deaf from scarlet fever:

... En all uv a sudden I says pow! jis’ as loud as I could yell. She never budge! Oh, Huck, I bust out a-cryin’ en grab her up in my arms, en say, “Oh, de po’ little thing! De Lord God Almighty forgive po’ ole Jim, kaze he never gwyne to forgive hisself as long’s he live!” Oh, she was plumb deef en dumb, Huck, plum deef en dumb—en I’d been a-treatin’ her so!

From the great tenderness and truth of this portraitPudd’nhead Wilson(1894), Twain’s last novel concerning Negroes, falls a great way. In violent,ugly Dawson’s Landing a fantastic tale is set. Roxana, only one-sixteenth Negro, a handsome earthy Amazon, is the mother of a son, Valet de Chambre, fathered by a gentleman of the F.F.V’s. This baby was born on the same day as her master’s son, Thomas à Becket Driscoll, and looks exactly like him. In order to save the baby from slavery, Roxy exchanges the two. The boys grow up with their positions reversed; the false Valet is ruined by slavery, and Tom, ruined by pampering, becomes a liar, coward, gambler, thief and murderer. In desperate straits, he tricks his mother and sells her down the river. Although Tom’s character could be attributed to a rigid caste system that granted excessive power to petty people, Twain leaves many readers believing that he agrees with Roxy who, astounded by her son’s worthlessness, muttered: “Ain’t nigger enough in him to show in his finger-nails, en dat takes mighty little, yit dey’s enough to paint his soul.” Twain has little good to say for slavery in this book. Roxy’s terror of being sold “down the river,” and her experiences there under a vicious Yankee overseer are grimly realistic. Roxy is a first-rate preliminary sketch. By no means faultless, a petty thief and a liar, she is capable of sacrifice, and has intelligence, pride, and courage. If Twain had spent more time in developing her portrait,Pudd’nhead Wilsonwould have been a better novel.

Humorists.One of those humorists whose misspellings and satiric temper pleased Abraham Lincoln, Petroleum V. Nasby (David Ross Locke), wroteNasby: Divers Views, Opinions and Prophecies(1866) andEkkoes From Kentucky(1868), both showing post-war attitudes to the Negro. Pretending to be a Copperhead postmaster, Nasby reveals himself as an ignorant, besotted politician, forever dragging in the race question for personal gain. Some ofNasby’s shafts could well be used at southern rabble-rousers today. Nasby shows how the cry of Negro domination and amalagmation rose whenever the slightest effort was made for justice to the freedmen. Severely satirical of southern chivalry, Nasby shows the white daughters of John Guttle, a gentleman of Mobile, fighting against their Negro half-sisters over their father’s tomb, and concludes that “there wuz some disadvantages attending the patriarkle system.” To those who saw the Negro as unfit for freedom he wrote:

Three hundred niggers ... wuz wrencht from paternal care to starve, which the most uv ’em are industriously doin’ at about $3 per day.

He advises the legislatures to forbid Negroes to leave their country, and then to pass laws setting up a maximum wage for Negroes of five dollars a month. Thousands of Negroes will then die by midwinter and the rest will beg to be reenslaved.

We kin ... pint 2 their bodies and say in a sepulkered tone: ‘Wen niggers wuz wuth $1500, they wuz not allowed to die thus—behold the froots uv Ablishun philanthropy.’

For all of his burlesque, Nasby saw clearly and prophesied sanely. A whole school of southern writers came along and did in dead earnest what he had counselled in bitter jest.

Samantha On The Race Problemby Marietta Holley counsels colonization even so late as 1892, recounts the tragedies of a few superior mulattoes, and most important, shows the Florida Ku Klux Klan at its work of burning schools and terrorizing Negroes who were forging ahead.

Northern Novelists.John William DeForest’s realistic novels of the South immediately after the Civil War,Miss Ravenal’s Conversion From Secessionto Loyalty(1867) andKate Beaumont(1872), contain minor Negro characters, but these are generally typical. In 1867, Rebecca Harding Davis wrote the dramatic, sympatheticWaiting For The Verdict, the first novel to deal with the dilemma of the fair Negro who attains a superior position without being suspected of having Negro blood. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short stories of the South, written in the eighties, have been praised for their sane balance. In “Rodman The Keeper” she describes with sympathy the freedmen—bent, dull-eyed and ignorant, singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” on their way to the graves of Federal Soldiers “who had done something wonderful for them and their children.” Generally, however, Miss Woolson is irritated by the freedmen, reserving her liking for those who are traditionally loyal to their white-folks, and seeing little in “the glories of freedom” except the “freedom to die.” “King David” shows a Northern educator who gives up in the face of “universal, irresponsible ignorance.” Miss Woolson recognizes the shiftlessness and chauvinism of the planter class, but keeps her sharpness for the “misguided and untimely idealism” of northerners. She tries so hard to be just to the fallen ex-planter that she is less than just to the rising ex-slaves. In these grievous times, the second stood in the greater need of justice.

Tourgée.Albion Tourgée differed from Miss Woolson sharply in his discoveries. He had a good chance for observation. He was an officer in the Union Army, and after the war remained in North Carolina as a judge. If he is a typical example of a carpetbagger, then his class has met with grave underestimation. He was thoughtful, considerate, courageous and honest. Like Miss Woolson, he recognized the gravity of the problem facing the South. Unlikeher, however, he did not believe that the problem existed only because the freedmen were irresponsible, ignorant and unready for citizenship. He had seen too often what she omitted from her picture: the mob violence of the Regulators and the Ku Klux Klan, the determination to restore slavery, the ostracism of the “misguided” school teachers, the burning of the schools. He was a humane man, and he could not hold his peace. But he spoke on the unpopular side, and today he is barely mentioned in histories of American literature.

A Fool’s Errand, by “One of the Fools” (1879), is largely autobiographical, and has been called “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Reconstruction.” Colonel Servosse, an officer of the Federal Army, took up residence in the South, foolishly believing that, with the end of the war, the North-South hostility would end. He soon learns better; for lending aid to Negroes in need he is called a “nigger lover,” for making a speech urging justice to Negroes he barely escapes being horsewhipped. Yankee schoolmarms are insulted. When northern troops are withdrawn, terrorization of Negroes quickly follows. A Union League organizer is killed by the Klan, which is composed of prominent southerners. Negroes are shown hard at work, struggling to make their living, enthusiastically welcoming schools, lurking about the edges of crowds at political meetings, listening intently to the speeches, or organizing for protection. In a section hotly intent that there shall be no “nigger witnesses, no nigger juries, no nigger voters,” all of this is insolence and insult.

Jerry is the type of uncle not before met with in American fiction. He is religious and devoted to Servosse, not out of loyalty of slave to master, but out of gratitude that Servosse was helping his people totrue freedom. Jerry has his dignity; when whites ridicule his church services he says:

An’ when you all laughs at us, we can’t help tinkin’ dat we mout a done better ef we hadn’t been kep’ slaves all our lives by you uns.

But in one of his sermons, he tells too much about the Klan’s most recent murder, and he is swung from a tree to prove that “It don’t do fer niggers to know too much.” Another different Negro is the blacksmith, Bob Martin, who makes such a good living that he becomes a marked man for the night riders. He scornfully ridicules the superstition that the Klan is ghostly, showing his scarred back as proof of the Klan’s “humanity.” He tells a shocking story of his own beating, the abuse of his wife and daughter, the death of his baby, and the destroying of his home, all supposed to teach him to be more respectful of white folks and less anxious to vote for radicals. Bob is of the stuff of heroes, however; he was in the Union Army at Fort Wagner, and he doggedly swears that “ef dere’s any mo’ Kluckers raidin’ roun’ Burke’s Corner, dar’ll be some funerals too.” Later editions ofA Fool’s Errandincluded documentary evidence of the sinister workings of the Klan, a key to the truth something like theKey to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The titleA Fool’s Errandlays blame only on the folly of rash hopes for improvement in the South, not on the effort to get justice.Bricks Without Straw(1880) is a more developed attempt to show the desperate problem, to prove that without support from the rest of the country, those few who were struggling were “making bricks without straw.” Nimbus, the outstanding Negro character, is uneducated, but he fought in the Civil War, and is a man of courage and good, hard sense. Industrious and thrifty, he is disliked by the whites because he has a good house, atobacco barn, a fine crop and valuable stock, and a church and schoolhouse on his place. He adds to these injuries the insult of wanting pay for his wife’s services, and schools and the vote for all of his people. When the Klansmen, among whom are many aristocrats—“the freedmen’s best friends”—come after him, Nimbus, aided by his wife Lugena, who fights with an axe, resists fiercely, and finally gets away. Returning years later, broken in health but not in spirit after experiencing riots, peonage and prison camps, Nimbus will not stay, but leads an exodus to Kansas. Elijah Hill, the schoolteacher, and Berry Lawson, good-natured avoider of trouble, but wily and loyal to Nimbus, are interesting minor figures.

Tourgée’s other books on the Negro are not so valuable as these.A Royal Gentleman(1881), written earlier asToinette, is pretentious, with a crowded plot. Mabel, mother of Toinette, is crazed by her unhappy life as the mistress of a white slave owner, and tries to murder those who would inflict upon her daughter the same fate. But Toinette, a refined olive-skinned beauty, is in love with, and beloved by her owner. Since he is a “royal gentleman,” marriage cannot take place, and tragedy follows. The characters are idealized, and the incidents far-fetched.Hot Plowshares(1883) is a historical novel on the state of the nation preceding the Civil War. Great attention is paid to the rise of antislavery sentiment and the Underground Railroad.Pactolus Prime(1890) shows the economic hardships faced by Negroes in Washington, D. C. Pactolus is the father of a girl whom he disclaims in order that she may live as white, may be lifted “from shame to honor.” Upon her discovery of the real truth, she takes the vows as Sister Pactola, and dedicates her life to her race. The story is not completely convincing, but Tourgee again reveals himself as wellconversant with problems faced by Negroes. These novels have more argument than characters in action, but the argument is what has been too easily forgotten today.

Hearn.To Lafcadio Hearn the southern novel was “gushy-floriated English—written in bad taste, wishy-washy trash.” With his sympathy for the underdog, strengthened by his connection with the quadroon Althea Foley, he admired Cable’s defense of the Negro. Nevertheless, Hearn did not censure the South openly. He held stock beliefs such as that the Negro would disappear in freedom—“dependent like the ivy, he needs some strong oak-like friend to cling to”—and that it was only the mulatto influence that made slaves unmanageable. Always attracted by the unusual and picturesque, Hearn became an authority on Louisiana lore, making friends with thebonnes vielles negresses, who sold homemade sweetmeats in New Orleans, and the mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau. But the teeming levees come to life only in sketches like “Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee” and “Banjo Jim’s Story” (1876). In the West Indies Hearn was struck by the “appetizing golden bodies of the Martinique Quadroons, sensuous but childlike,” gossiped with the washerwomen and treasured their soft slurring talk; and watched

theporteuseson their way to market in the early morning, huge baskets of fruit and vegetables balanced on their heads, their skirts tucked into a belt in front, showing the shapely muscled bronze of their legs, as they walked with all the lithe feline grace of some wild animal.

Youma, “La Giablesse” and “Un Ravenant” are good fiction of the West Indies, but the wealth of Hearn’s sensitive observation appears in his travel reporting. He was better in describing settings than in presenting character.

Howells.The serious phase of Negro life that William Dean Howells thought worthy of inclusion in his canvas of the American scene was the age-worn tragedy of the octoroon. InAn Imperative Duty(1892), Rhoda, the beautiful daughter of a northern physician and an accomplished octoroon, bore no evidence of Negro blood. On the eve of her marriage, she is told her lineage by her duty-bound aunt. Later, passing for an Italian and happily married to a man who is undisturbed by her lineage, she is still wretched at her “disgrace.” The novel is sympathetic, but there were graver, less romantic problems of Negro life that a novelist of Howells’ scope and ability might have presented.

Negro Novelists.Two Negro authors who had given their best energies to the antislavery struggle turned to fiction in the post-Civil War years. William Wells Brown’sMy Southern Home(1880) included sketches of southern Negro folklife, before the successes of Page and Harris. Frances Harper, whose antislavery poetry was popular, now defended her race inIola LeroyorShadows Uplifted(1892). Iola, granddaughter of a Creole planter, has the experiences usual to fiction of the beautiful “white slave.” She is kept ignorant of her race, and educated in the North. When her white father’s marriage to her quadroon mother is called illegal, she is sold as a slave. After indignities in slavery, she is rescued, and serves as a nurse in a Civil War hospital. She rejects the love of a white New England physician, who, though knowing her race, wishes to marry her. With her brothers and long-lost uncle, all of whom refuse to “pass for white,” she dedicates herself to her people. The book is “uplifting” but is far from convincing in incident, speech, and characterization. Iola is another of the octoroon heroines too angelic foracceptance. Some of the minor characters are better, but they cannot redeem the novel.

Dunbar.Dunbar has aptly described the typical setting for his fiction:

Happy Hollow.... Wherever Negroes colonize in the cities or villages, North or South, wherever the hod-carrier, the porter, and the waiter are the society men of the town; wherever the picnic and the excursion are the chief summer diversion, and the revival the winter-time of repentance.... Wherever laughter and tears rub elbows by day, and the spirit of labour and laziness shake hands, there—there—is Happy Hollow.

In Old Plantation Days(1903) repeats the Thomas Nelson Page formula. Negro house servants comically ape the “quality,” or intervene in lovers’ quarrels, or in duels between cavaliers. One slave deceives his beloved master into believing that the good times of slavery still prevail. The planters, highbred and chivalrous, and the slaves, childish and devoted, rival each other in affection and sacrifice. These anecdotes of slavery, but a step above minstrel jokes, are all too happy for words, and too happy for truth.

The harshness of Reconstruction and of Dunbar’s own time is likewise conventionally neglected in his other volumes of short stories:Folks From Dixie(1898),The Strength of Gideon(1900), andThe Heart of Happy Hollow(1904). Freedmen discover that after all their best friends are their kindly ex-masters. In “Nels Hatton’s Revenge,” an upstanding Negro gives his hard-earned money and best clothes to his destitute master, who had abused him when a slave. The venality of Reconstruction politicians, which certainly existed, is satirized; but the gains of Reconstruction, which certainly exist, are understressed. Probably with due cause, Dunbar feared the rising poor-whites; therefore, like many Negro spokesmen of the period, he idealized the ex-planter class, the “aristocrats,”withoutdue cause.

Dunbar’s fiction veers away from anything more serious than laughter or gentle tears. “At Shaft 11” shows the difficulties of Negro strikebreakers; but, afraid of organized labor, Dunbar idealized owners, operators, and staunchly loyal Negro workers who get to be foremen, thus carrying over the plantation tradition formula into the industrial scene. “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope” faces the loose-living of a “Happy Hollow,” and then is lost in sentimental compromise. Dunbar wrote two stories of lynching, “The Lynching of Jule Benson” and the unusually ironic “The Tragedy at Three Corners.” But Dunbar usually places the hardships of Negro life in the city, as in “Jimsella,” with pastoral distrust of the city and faith in rural virtue. Fast livers, quacks, politicians and hypocritical race leaders are occasionally attacked.

The Sport of the Gods(1902), Dunbar’s most ambitious novel, is the only one that is chiefly about Negroes. The first of the book is trite, but the latter section, though confused and melodramatic, has a grimness that Dunbar seldom showed. Berry, the innocent victim of a degenerate white man’s crime in the South, and his family, the victim of hostile New York, are treated somewhat in the manner of Hardy’s tragic laughing-stocks. The book has serious weaknesses, but it gives promise that Dunbar, but for his untimely death, might have become a prose writer of power. Judged by his accomplishment, however, Dunbar in fiction must be considered as one who followed the leader, not as a blazer of new trails.

Chesnutt.Charles Waddell Chesnutt, however, deserves to be called a pioneer. Writing to counter charges such as those made by Page inRed Rock, Chesnutt is the first to speak out uncompromisingly, but artistically, on the problems facing his people. One careful critic has stated that Chesnutt “was the firstNegro novelist, and he is still the best,” and another has said that his books contain early drafts of about all of the recent Negro novels.

In Chesnutt’sThe Conjure Woman, seven tales based upon Negro superstitions, Uncle Julius recalls Uncle Remus and Page’s Uncle Billy, but differs from them in his craftiness. He tells his stories not merely to entertain, or to bewail the beautiful past, toward which he is ironic, but to gain his point in the present. His dialect is worked out in great detail, but is not so readable as that of Uncle Remus. There is good local color throughout, and some interesting characters emerge.

The Wife of His Youth, and Other Stories of the Color Line(1899) deals mainly with problems of race. The title story tells of a successful Negro in Groveland (Cleveland), the “dean” of the “Blue-Veins,” who, on the eve of his engagement to a beautiful widow, theatrically acknowledges a little old black woman who had been his wife in slavery days and had helped him to freedom. A Negro mother denies her octoroon daughter in order for her to marry a New Englander of Mayflower lineage in “Her Virginia Mammy,” a story like Cable’s “Madame Delphine” but less convincing and gripping. In “The Sheriff’s Children” a mulatto prisoner, falsely accused of murder, is defended from a mob by a sheriff who turns out to be his father. Desperate and cynical, the son is about to kill his father to escape when he is shot by the sheriff’s daughter. In “The Web of Circumstance” a Negro blacksmith, falsely accused of stealing a whip, is sentenced to five years in the penitentiary on the same day that a white murderer is sentenced to one year. “The Passing of Grandison” shows a cunning slave, pretending to despise the abolitionist North, returning to his “understanding” master.He does so, however, only to manage the escape of all his kith and kin. “A Matter of Principle” satirizes the color line within the race: Clayton, an uppercrust near-white Negro, who “declined to associate with black people,” pretends that his house is quarantined in order to keep a black Congressman from calling on his daughter. The Congressman turns out to be a mulatto, “well worthy” of Clayton’s daughter.

The House Behind the Cedars(1900), Chesnutt’s first novel, is concerned likewise with the color line. Rena, another octoroon heroine, is insulted by whites and oppressed by her mother and a mulatto suitor. Honorable devotion comes to her only through an upstanding black hero, but this cannot forestall her pathetic death.The Marrow of Tradition(1901), less conventional, is better. White characters range from the aristocratic General Delamere to his debauched grandson Tom; Major Carteret, demagogue for white supremacy; and McBane, ex-slave driver who knows one solution: “Burn the nigger.” Negro characters range from Dr. Miller, a skillful physician, to the militant Josh Green; the loyal Sandy, and Jerry, a “white man’s nigger.” Sandy is framed for a murder in the first part of the book. A bloody riot, based on the one at Wilmington, N. C., is described in the second part. The white demagogues whip up the mob to fury, because a Negro newspaper has denounced lynching. Josh Green, who is willing to die rather than be shot down like a dog, who puts aside “fergetfulness and fergiveness,” leads the aroused Negroes, when the upper-class Negroes believe that nothing can be done. The novel closes, however, on a note of forgetting and forgiving: Dr. Miller, whose own child was killed in the riot, goes to the home of his wife’s white half-sister, to save her child with his very great medical skill. With allof its melodrama, the story has power; badly plotted, it still tells a great deal about social life in the South. Chesnutt idealizes some Negro characters, but candidly faces the weaknesses in others. Most important, however, is his going beneath the surface to social causes.

Chesnutt’s last novel wasThe Colonel’s Dream. Colonel French, an ex-Confederate officer of “family,” dreams of resurrecting his native section and bringing it into the ways of prosperity and justice. As in so many novels of the time, his dream is not realized. He has opposed to him William Fetters, convict labor contractor, mortgage shark and political boss, together with the reactionary traditions and the inertia of the South. When the casket of his aged Negro slave, who had given his life for the Colonel’s son, is dug up from the family burial plot and placed on his porch with a K.K.K. warning that the color line must continue even in death, he sees that his crusade is doomed. After this novel Chesnutt fell into an almost unbroken silence. Perhaps he felt the doom of his own crusade to bring about justice.

Whether he was pessimistic about his crusade or not, his achievements in fiction were worthy. Answering propaganda with propaganda, he might be expected to have certain faults. He was overinclined to the melodramatic, to mistaken identity, to the lost document turning up at the right or wrong moment, to the nick of time entrance. His characters are generally idealized or conventional. His “better class Negroes” speak too literary a language and are generally unbelievable models in behavior. Although attacking the color line within the race, he makes great use of the hero or heroine of mixed blood, and at times seems to accept the traditional concepts of Negro character. Even so, however, his characters standnearer to the truth than those of Thomas Page or Thomas Dixon; he does not force them into only two grooves. There is no gainsaying his knowledge of the southern scene, or of the Negro upper class in northern cities. Unlike Dunbar he is opposed to the plantation tradition, sharply critical of southern injustice, and aware of the sinister forces at work in Reconstruction. Deploring the abuses of that era, he still sees, like Tourgée, that the story of a South victimized by carpet-baggers and scalawags is only a convenient half-truth. He gives high praise to the Yankee schoolmasters and schoolmarms who swarmed over Dixie to lift a second bondage from the freedmen. He shows exploitation, riots and lynching mobs, as well as the more refined exercising of prejudice. Often pompous and roundabout, in the manner of his times, he nevertheless knew how to hold a reader’s interest. We must concede that he was melodramatic in plotting, but evidences of a skillful master’s hand can still be found. He knew a great deal, and all things considered, he told it well.

Summary.Deriving somewhat from the abolitionists, the best of the authors of this chapter attacked the plantation tradition, but with the sharper weapons of the growing realism. Twain’s Jim and Roxana, Tourgée’s Nimbus, Chesnutt’s Josh Green, and even Cable’s Bras Coupé and Madame Delphine (though they belong to a nearly legendary past) are far more convincing than Uncle Tom, Topsy and Hildreth’s Archy Moore. Unlike their more popular contemporaries who defended the plantation tradition, these authors, at a risk, recorded the injustice that Negroes met with everywhere in “the tragic era.” They knew that worshipful house-servants or depraved freedmen were not the sole actors in the story, and as lovers of truth and justice they wanted the full story told.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why was Cable considered untrue to the Old South?

2. In what respects is Bras Coupe unusual in fiction about Negroes?

3. Compare the octoroons in antislavery novels with those in novels by Cable, Twain, and Tourgée.

4. Since Twain characterizes Jim as superstitious and illiterate, how can Twain be considered sympathetic?

5. Why are Hearn’s beliefs about Negroes termed “stock”?

6. Compare William Wells Brown’sClotelwith Frances Harper’sIola Leroy.

7. Compare Dunbar and Chesnutt.

8. What new characters appear in this chapter?

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