CHAPTER VI

OLD PATHS

Beautiful, Amusing Servitude.In the early twentieth century, under the influence of Thomas Nelson Page, a legion of writers wept over the vanished glory of the old plantation and presented Negroes of extreme devotedness to their masters. One writer in her book of sketches grieved:

Aunt Phebe, Uncle Tom, Black Mammy, Uncle Gus, Aunt Jonas, Uncle Isom, and all the rest—who shall speak all your virtues or enshrine your simple faith and fidelity? It is as impossible as it is to describe the affection showered upon you by those whom you called ‘Marster and Missis.’

Impossible though it may have been, countless authors attempted it, turning back time in its flight to sweetness and splendor that belong to another world than this.

Of the short stories in abundance that idealized the Negro,in his place, a few examples must serve. Betty Reynolds Cobb, in “The Coward” shows little Nemi conquering his great fears, and facing a raging torrent in order to get a doctor for “li’l Missy.” (Cf. Kate Chopin’s “Beyond The Bayou.”) In Will Harben’s “The Sale of Uncle Rastus”, a nearly dead slave shams perfect health in order to fetch a better price for his bankrupt owner. His heroism reconciles his beloved master to an estranged brother, who bids two thousand dollars for him. “Dem boys done made up, en I fotch two thousand dollars! Whooee!” croaks Uncle Rastus at death’s door. “Abram’s Freedom,” by Edna Turpin, shows Emmaline, who has struggled to buy her husband’s freedom, saying: “Me an’ Abram ain’t got nothin’ to do in dis worl’ but towait on you an’ master.” These are merely duplicates of stories by more talented Reconstruction authors, with names and settings changed. Their authors have little to say, but say it over and over.

Ruth McEnery Stuart rises a notch above these. Although she glorified the past inThe River’s Children(1903) most of her work was local color of the deep South. In such works asNapoleon Jackson(1902),George Washington Jones(1903) andThe Second Wooing of Salina Sue(1905), Negro life in the picturesquely shabby towns is quaint and droll, an unending source of mirth and satisfaction for the white-folks. Napoleon Jackson, the gentleman of the plush rocker, whose mother swore that he should never lay hand to a plow, worships old Marse and is therefore charming in Mrs. Stuart’s sight. His wife Rose Ann, a visionary, is astonished that people pity Negroes since “we see mo’n white folks sees.” Marital difficulties and burlesques of Negro church services furnish much of the drollery. Salina Sue, forced to marry her common-law husband, speaks of her fifteen-year old daughter: “Hit’ll be a mighty good an’ ’ligious thing for her to remember in after-years. Tain’t every yo’ng gal dat kin ricollec’ her pa an’ ma gittin’ married.”

Better known writers preserving the tradition include the gifted Sarah Orne Jewett, whoseThe Mistress of Sydenham Plantationis like Constance Woolson’sEast Angelsin showing a northern woman’s respect for a servant’s loyalty; Frank Stockton, who turned his facile invention to the Negro inThe Cloverfield’s CarriageandThe Late Mrs. Null; and Booth Tarkington who invests the old picture with charm inPenrod and Sam. All of these are superior writers to such southern writers as Mrs. Burton Harrison, Opie Read and Marion Harland, but they giveno new interpretation. Some authors, like Virginia Frasel Boyle inDevil Tales(1900), followed Harris into the fertile field (and the wilderness) of folklore. Ed Mott’sThe Black Homer of Jim Town(1900) is a collection of folk tales from the Cape Fear country of North Carolina. Most of them are trite. Slavery is remembered as a good time, and in one of the tallest of the tales, a Negro in the Federal army arrives at the battle just in time to intercept a bullet intended for his Confederate master, in whose arms he dies.

Women writers of the South have been particularly attracted to literary exercises about the legendary chivalry, the perfect masters and slaves. In their prefaces, they seem to consider it their duty to “interpret the Negro race” and to lecture upon the modern Negro’s deficiencies. Among these might be mentioned Emma Speed Sampson forMammy’s White Folks(1919) andMiss Minerva On The Old Plantation(1923); Jane Baldwin Cotton forWall-Eyed Caesar’s Ghost(1925) and Virginia McCormick forCharcoal and Chalk(1931). Pity for “the child who never had a fat, brown mammy with elastic lap and warm enfolding arms,” alternates with beaming appreciation of happy-hearted pickaninnies living an endless picnic. “A real understanding of our colored people” generally amounts to having great fun out of them. The dialect is often carefully recorded, but the Negroes say about the same things that Page had them say long ago, to flatter their white-folks and to make them laugh.

Although willing to poke gentle fun at his native South, O. Henry kept to its old tradition about Negro character. Uncle Bushrod in “The Guardian of The Accolade”, remembering Miss Lucy’s words for Marse Robert: “a little child but my knight, pure and fearless and widout reproach,” prevents Robert from abscondingwith what he thinks to be the cash of the bank, but what turns out to be two quarts of old silk velvet Bourbon. “The Fourth in Salvador” has a

buck coon from Georgia who had drifted down there from a busted-up colored colony that had been started on some possumless land in Mexico. As soon as he heard us say barbecue he wept for joy and groveled on the ground.

“The Emancipation of Billy” has an ancient body-servant, Old Jeff, a member of “de fambly,” who despises “Yankee rascality enduring’ the war,” speaking “de fambly’s” languageto a T. “A Municipal Report” shows a faithful Negro coachman, Uncle Caesar, who supports his impoverished mistress, and kills her worthless husband (a professional southerner) for robbing her. A master of surprises, O. Henry has no surprises for us when he handles Negro characters. They belong to an endless line.

Irvin Cobb and The Professional Humorists.Irvin Cobb, whom some consider heir to the roving shoes of O. Henry, once had a favorite character declaim: “I ain’t no problem, I’se a pusson. I craves to be so reguarded.” But when Cobb regards Jeff Poindexter, he sees little more than a loyal and ridiculous servant, who says the right things. Jeff advises a white moving picture producer as follows:

Ef you kin git hold of a crowd of cullid actors w’ich is willin’ to ack lak the sho’nuff ole time cullid an’ not lak onbleached imitations of w’ite folks, it seems lak to me the rest of it oughter be plum easy. Mostly I’d mek the pitchers comical, ef I wuz you. You kin do ’at an’ still not hurt nobody’s feelin’s, w’ite nur black. Ef you wants to perduse a piece showin’ a lot of niggers gittin’ skinned, let it be another nigger w’ich skins em.... Then, w’en at the last, they gits even wid him it’ll still be nigger ag’inst nigger. An’ ef, oncet in awhile, you meks a kind of serious pitcher ... ’at ought to fetch there yere new-issue cullid folks w’ich is seemingly become so plentiful up Nawth. But mainly I’d stick to the laffin’ line ef I wuz you. An’ whatever else you does, don’t mess wid no race problem.

Irvin Cobb takes Jeff’s advice, fondly affectionate toward the “old time cullid,” derisive of the new-issue“onbleached imitations of w’ite folks,” unwilling to hurt the feelings of any of his large white audience. As a result, his books such asJ. Poindexter, Coloredand those about Old Judge Priest rise little above the joke-book level when dealing with Negroes, in spite of Cobb’s undoubted knowledge of his native Kentucky. McBlair’sMister Fish Kelly(1924) is similarly traditional, with some surface truth to comic elements in Negro life, but too set upon tickling America.

But that is a well paying business, as such writers as Hugh Wiley, Arthur Akers, Octavus Roy Cohen and E. K. Means have discovered. Belonging to light entertainment literature, their stories would hardly deserve serious attention, were it not for their undoubted social influence. With situations ranging from the improbable to the unreal, the comedy, the farce are not “pure,” but are mixed all up with propaganda for Negro inferiority and subordination. These authors stem from Page and the Reconstruction: although they stress the comical, they likewise urge the mutual affection between funny Negroes and their fine white-folks, and bear witness to the sunny life of the South. Guy Johnson has written that there is a sort of

folk attitude of the white man toward the Negro.... He must have his fun out of the Negro, even when writing serious novels about him.

How much more fun the professional marketmen of humor have out of the Negro is apparent when one reads the stories of Wiley, Akers, and Cohen, to name only three who write for wide circulation magazines such asThe Saturday Evening Postand theRed Book. With the help of the radio, these family magazines see to it that there is a comic Negro in every middle class home.

Hugh Wiley in the twenties presented Wildcat, inseparable from Lady Luck, his unsavory goat. Like O. Henry, Wiley uses outrageous metaphors, but one does not have to believe the language to be Negro merely because it is amusing. Pet expressions are such as “crematized or secluded in de ground” for burial rites, “paraphernalia of chance” for dice, and other minstrel joke-book relics. The humor is broad, concerned with perspiring three-hundred pound black Amazons, “battling brunettes,” a goat outsmelling creation, whose butting causes Wildcat to “skid over the curb in a pose which cost his army pants half of their seating capacity.” Wildcat is a “champion ration battler,” barely making it on four meals a day, lazy except at the irresistible crap game, where he wins fabulous sums with other-worldly luck. Characters are named Miss Cuspidora Lee, Vitus Marsden, Honey Tone, Dwindle Daniels, Punic Hunter, Presidump Ham Grasty, Festus Roach. There are many jobs (generally unwelcome) and a great deal of money and food in circulation; the law is loud-mouthed but gentle; things are “hotsy-totsy” down in Dixie, Lady Luck and the whitefolks will see to that. It all strives very hard, but it could be more amusing.

Of these professionally funny men, Octavus Roy Cohen is probably most widely known and industrious. Cohen and his large following are entranced by the comedy of what Cobb called “onbleached imitations of white folks.” The idea of Negro doctors, lawyers, bankers, movie-magnates and society belles in Birmingham is too funny, but not too funny for words. Some of his annual books areAssorted Chocolates(1922),Dark Days and Black Knights(1923),Bigger and Blacker(1925),Black and Blue(1926) andHighly Colored(1921). All are highly colored: he names his characters Orifice Latimer, Callous Deech,Magnolius Ricketts, Excelsior Nix, Forcep Swain, Exotic Hines, Unit Smith, Jasper De Vord, Chromo Bridal and Atlas Brack. His dialect is one unheard on land or sea: “Got to ain’t has got;” “I ain’t sawn her right recent;” “Does anybody discover that I ain’t you, you is suddenly gwine to become ain’t;” “salisfried, straduced, light bombastic, applicatin, foolisment; oh, whoa is me!” The plots and counterplots generally turn around the axis of money or love; the honest hero defeats the slickers, the boy gets the girl. Florian Slappey, in Harlem, is fleeced in the cold winter by two Harlem number men, but the happy ending is usual. The Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise, The Enter Paradise In Style Life and Death Sassiety, and The Over The River Buryin’ Sassiety figure prominently. There seems to be a great deal of money in Negro Birmingham, but when Cohen speaks of a Negro star being paid one hundred dollars a week by a Negro movie company, he reveals his myth-making powers. One of Cohen’s recent heroes, Epic Peters, is a pompously talking Pullman porter, proud of his service to “quality white folks” whom he can tell at a glance, happy, amusing, and about as real as his speech: “Goodness, goshness, Miss Agness, Mr. Foster—I suttinly thought I was gwine see you become ain’t.”

Arthur K. Akers’ world is less unreal, but equally droll. Jeff thus explains his connubial woes:

Hit’s on account of me bein’ weak in de’rithmetic. Dat’s huccome I cain’t ricollect is I got two weddin’s and three d’voces, or three weddin’s an’ two d’voces. Emmline come in dar somewhar.

Akers has a fondness for names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Columbus Collins, Aspirin Edwards and Halfportion. His intricate plots invariably end happily for the dull-witted, inept heroes such as GladstoneSmith who is “numb from the neck up.” Ipecac Ignalls, looking like “something dark that had been left under a tent—an orange-colored tent with LIFE GUARD lettered across it” does not know how to swim, but he saves the life of a belle by letting her stand on him while he is on the bottom of the pool drowning. Other comedy is furnished by lodge-life and financial high-jinks performed by the Worthymost Master Samson Bates and Horace Tombs, who are Get Rich Quick Wallingfords in blackface.

E. K. Means, whose stories were collected in volumes calledE. K. Means,More E. K. Means, andFurther E. K. Means, insists that he wrote out of a whimsical fondness for the Negro “to whom God has given two supreme gifts—Music and Laughter.” He seems to agree with one of his white characters, however, that the Negro “has a one-cylinder mind and a smoky spark-plug.” Nigger-Heel Plantation, Hen Scratch Saloon, Shoofly Methodist Church, Tickfall and Dirty Six are treated with a mixture of true local color and far-fetched tom-foolery. The characters have ludicrous names like Whiffletree Bone, Limit Lark, Vakey Vopp, Dazzle Zenor, Coco Ferret, Ready Rocket, Vinegar Atts, Skeeter Butts. Means attacks conventional dialect, yet he makes use of invented phrases: “explavacatin”, “permittunce,” “coming wid a looseness,” “de orgies” (for church services), “ax her inquirement,” “ain’t right in her intellectuals,” “I warn’t studyin’ how to save by grace; I was ponderin’ how to save my grease.” Means regrets that the good life lived by these naïve villagers is departing; “Ethiopia is stretching out her hands after art, science, literature and wealth,” Negroes are becoming “play-like white folks.” He wishes to leave a record of the “sable sons of laughter and song, in Fiction’s beautiful temple of dreams.” The laughter, however,is chiefly the haw-hawing of the white folks; the dreams are practical jokes. Something of the sinister and ugly is recognized; Negroes at their Uplift League election wrench legs off of tables in a free-for-all, shot-guns and razors are frequently used, but the picture remains quaint and comical. In almost every story we have panic-stricken Negroes “skedaddling,” their “ponderous feet beating a wild tattoo of panicky retreat upon the sodded turf;” oddly enough, one cause for fright never mentioned is a southern mob.

These authors contrive a rapid-fire dialogue, now near to life (as in Akers) and now to the minstrel show (as in Cohen). The white folks are tolerant, until tenants burn the porches off their homes, or servants mix up affairs too much, when they wax comically profane. The Negroes are superstitious, helpless, cowardly, utterly ridiculous children. Life is easy and indolent except for shrewish wives and scheming crooks; the razors do not cut, the scantlings used by white masters on their menials never hurt, since they strike the head, and the “law” is only a mythical threat. What could be pathos and tragedy sets off laughter. The settings are supposed to be found in Demopolis or Birmingham or other southern cities, but they belong to anever-never, cloud-cuckoo land. All in all these stories reveal far less of Negro life and character than of middle class American taste.

The Rising Tide of Color.But there were others who took the Negro in dead earnest. Negroes were becoming educated, getting property, leaving the South, and asking for civil rights; they constituted, therefore, a menace. Southern civilization sought to preserve itself by peonage, disfranchisement, segregation, and lynching. The authors aided and paralleled the politicians, who confounded attempts at democracy by dragging the herring of intermarriage overthe countryside. In proportion as Negroes showed themselves as seeking economic advancement and civil rights, authors portrayed them as insulting brutes and rapists.

This stereotype shot up to full growth in these first decades of the twentieth century. But the seeds, as we have seen, had been sown long before. Answering abolitionist onslaughts, theBible Defense of Slaveryhad “proved” that Sodom and Gomorrah were strongholds ofNegrovice, and that “the baleful fire of unchaste amour rages through the Negro’s blood more fiercely....” Hinton Helper, inNojoque(1867), had set up black and beastly as synonyms.The Negro A Beast(1900) by Charles Carroll which proves the Negro to be “a beast, created with articulate speech, that he may be of service to the White man,” brought this type of book to a rabid climax. As already pointed out, Page inRed RockandThe Negro, The Southerner’s Problemhad shown Reconstruction to be a holiday for Negro brutes.

Thomas Dixon.After Page, the best known author of Ku Klux Klan fiction is the Reverend Thomas Dixon.The ClansmanandThe Leopard’s Spots, because of their sensationalism (cf. chapter titles “The Black Peril,” “The Unspoken Terror,” “A Thousand Legged Beast,” “The Hunt For the Animal”) seemed just made for the mentality of early Hollywood, where D. W. Griffith’sThe Birth of a Nationmade for Dixon a dubious sort of immortality, and finally fixed the stereotype in the mass-mind.

The Leopard’s Spots(1902) is Dixon’s masterpiece of hatred. This long novel has its share of sugary love affairs done in the best southern tradition, but is chiefly important for its political bearings. Characters are brought in fromUncle Tom’s Cabin; Legree quits drink for the greater vice of becominga scalawag and a mill owner. Eliza’s son, George Harris, is educated at Harvard, falls in love with Senator Lowell’s daughter and is ordered from the abolitionist home. Tim Shelby, a silk-hatted Negro politician, boasts that he will one day marry a white woman and is lynched as “Answer of the Anglo-Saxon race to Negro lips that dare to pollute with words the fair womanhood of the South.” Dick, an imbecile, crushes with a rock the head of a white child and then attacks her. The assaulted child and the burning of the Negro are described with gusto. Drunk Negro soldiers drag white brides from their homes; criminal Negroes rove the countryside, forcing whites to take to the cities. Included in the list of hateful outragers of the fair Southland are the Yankee schoolmarms, whom Dixon would like to see shipped back to Boston in glass cages like rattlesnakes. The Negro is not to be educated, not even industrially, for this drives him to crime or suicide. A few Negroes like old Nels obey their white-folks, but Dixon is surprised to find no Negroes in the mob that lynched Dick. Negro “dominion” and the threat that “the South will become mulatto instead of Anglo-Saxon” are overthrown when the Red-Shirts ride.

The Clansman(1905) is another hymn of hate. President Lincoln, considered pro-southern, is fearful lest “mulatto citizenship be too dear a price to pay even for emancipation.” Stoneman, a libellous portrait of Thaddeus Stevens, is shown in the toils of Lydia Brown, a mulatto of extraordinary animal beauty. Other villains are Silas Lynch, a mulatto, “with the head of a Caesar and the eyes of the jungle,” Augustus Caesar, “whose flat nose with enormous perpetually dilating nostrils, sinister head and enormous cheekbones and jaws reminded one of the lower order of animal,” and Yankee soldiers whom faithfulex-slaves obligingly knock down. “A new mob of onion-laden breath, mixed with perspiring African odour, became the symbol of American democracy.” Against this reign of terror, culminating in a rape, painstakingly described, the knights of the Ku Klux Klan rise in righteous wrath. Gus, whose image was discovered upon the retina of the dead mother’s eye by strange southern science, is not lynched, but “executed by the Grand Turk who flung his body on the lawn of the black Lieutenant-Governor of the State.” In this way civilization was restored. Reconciliation is exemplified in northern-southern love affairs, but only when the Negro is returned to serfdom can there be true reunion.

The School of Page and Dixon.Emory’sA Maryland Manor(1901) is important only as a sign of the trend. The slaves are shown as lighthearted, needing compulsion to teach them good habits. Chloe, who runs away frequently, is obeying an inherited love for the woods: “It was often the case ... fugitives fled from those they loved best.” From emancipation “the negroes suffered most of all, sinking into a condition little short of their original barbarism.” Caesar is too intelligent to accept freedom, “What you take me fur, anyhow?”, etc. As a reward he is allowed burial in the family graveyard, at his master’s blessed feet.

InThe Northerner(1905) by Nora Davis, a reconciliation novel, Falls, a Yankee businessman, establishes the Tennessee Valley Improvement Company to develop electric power in the South, and wins the Alabama belle in the meanwhile. Falls and Watson, a southern aristocrat, battle a mob to save an innocent but craven Negro, who, given a pistol to defend his life, thinks only: “Lawdy, don’t I wisht I had er piece er M’lindy’s cawn bread.” Miscegenation is a greatconcern of the author, who calls it the “Curse of Dixie,” “The Nameless Shame,” “The Hidden Pain.” Watson, in his cavalier youth, had been seduced by the brown Lesby, “a snake in the grass.” He loathes his beautiful quadroon daughter, Rosebud. Miss Davis has him say: “Every drop of blood in my body turns cold with disgust at the thought—the sight of her!” And to his daughter, before she is relegated to the future in store for one “cursed with the black drop,” he declaims:

You should be just, child, to this man—try to see how he is placed. He has done, and he will do, his duty by you as God gives it to him to see it.... That was a sin of the flesh, you know, and in the flesh will he repay. But in the spirit, in all those things which belong to his higher nature, you can have no part.... He could not love you, cherish you: his very nature would recoil. It is instinct, child, blood!”

Rose meekly concurs. Some comic use is made of Pete, a state Congressman in Reconstruction, now happier as a valet for his white-folks.

Robert Lee Durham is even more concerned over the “Hidden Shame” inThe Call of The South(1908). John Hayward, the central figure, is of barely perceptible Negro blood. Of fine ancestry on the white side, he is a first-rate student and athlete at Harvard before he leaves for heroic service in the war in Cuba. Becoming footman for a president who champions liberal democracy, he is thrown in contact with the president’s daughter. After rescuing her from a runaway horse, and revealing his heroic past at Harvard and in battle, he wins her, like a modern Othello, by tales of dangers overcome. They marry secretly, platonically. Up to this point the novelist has been sympathetic toward Hayward’s undoubted abilities and undeserved rebuffs. But the platonic husband and wife, waylaid in a storm, are forced to seek refuge in a hut.

In a flash of light she sees his face—distorted: with a shriek of terror she wildly tries to push him from her; but the demon of the blood of Guinea Gumbo is pitiless, and against the fury of it, as against the storm, she fights and cries in vain.

The tragedy rushes on: Helen is delivered of a very dark child, explained as a “recession”; her father dies of heart failure; she goes mad. A South Carolina cavalier points the moral and adorns the tale:

How shall sickly sentimentality solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your gentle endowment?

For “however risen, redolent of newly applied polish,” the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin. It seems that the skin must be changed for him. Even so, the fundamental savagery is still there, lurking. Social equality means the “mongrelization of the superior breed,” of which one “blood deep characteristic is chivalrous respect for women.” So rings out the Call of the South.

Although a much later book, Jean Sutherland’sChallenge(1926) is equally fantastic and insidious. The Polish-English Prince Kareninoff, who is famous as an opponent of race-mixture, has had a son by a woman who, unknown to him, was part Negro. The son, however, does the proper thing; he shuts himself in a monastery to save his aristocratic fiancée from pollution, and then, like his octoroon sisters, goes to Africa to help his people.

Negro characters in John Trotwood Moore’s novels such asOle MistisandThe Bishop of Cottontownare in the mildewed tradition. Mammy, in the second of these, has a new mission: she keeps the children of her impoverished master from the cotton mills.

You’re down heah preachin’ one thing for niggahs and practisin’ another for yo’ own race; yo’ hair frizzles on yo’ head at th’ort of niggah slavery, whilst all the time you’re enslavin’ the po’ little whites that’s got yo’ own blood in their veins.... I come for my child!

Frenzied at the wrongs of the cotton factory, she sets fire to the “Sodom.” For this she is nearly lynched, but is saved by the heroes of the novel. “Thirteen dead men lay, and the back-bone of lynching had been broken forever in Alabama.” This was written in 1906. Moore condones lynching as

the result of the sudden emancipation of ignorant slaves, who, backed by the bayonets of their liberators ... perpetuated an unnameable crime as part of their system of revenge for years of slavery.... And is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?

Inconsistently, he goes on:

And so these people flocked to the burning—the Negro haters, who had never owned a slave and had no sympathy—no sentiment for them.

In one scene a group of Negro night-riders, instigated by the villains of the Union League and a mulatto politician, terrorize the faithful Negroes. The latter, who had been overseers, had “absorbed many of the virtues of the best class of whites,” while the Negroes who wished to vote were “but a few generations removed from the cowardice of darkest Africa.” Lushly overflowing with love for the poor millhands, Moore has a kind word for the Negro only as serf.

Summary.These authors urged reconciliation of North and South,but on southern terms. They shuddered at the rising tide of bad Negroes, dreading amalgamation, but too often “bad Negroes” to them were the educated, or the propertied, or the militant. Their books seem to be conceived in fear and written with hate. They reflected the thought of the South of their day, from planter aristocrat and political boss down to the poor-white on the farm or in the mills. They wanted the South left alone to deal with the Negro in its own way, and this way, since the Negro was needed as ignorant laborer and scapegoat, was the way of exploitation and cruelty. These authors merelytransferred melodrama of action into written melodramas. They were sometimes vicious, sometimes stupid, and as in the case of Dixon, sometimes mob inciters rather than novelists. But still, be it recorded to democracy’s shame, they got what they wanted.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Account for the vogue of Thomas Nelson Page at the beginning of the century.

2. Why was Cobb anxious to show “Negroes always skinned by Negroes”?

3. What is significant in the fact that after Jeff Poindexter makes his greatest speech he is given ten dollars?

4. In the recent filibuster on the Anti-Lynching Bill, what arguments were advanced that are to be found in this chapter?

5. What is the relationship of Page’sRed Rockto the problem fiction of this chapter?

6. What were the chief problems that concerned southern authors in this chapter?

7. In what respects do the comic writers and the melodramatists of this chapter agree?

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