CHAPTER VII

COUNTER-PROPAGANDA—BEGINNING REALISM

Negro Apologists.—Aroused by the libels of Thomas Nelson Page and his school, Negro novelists stepped forward with race defense and glorification. Explaining weaknesses as the heritage of slavery and oppression, they wished to hold up to the world “the millions of honest, God-fearing, industrious, frugal, respectable and self-respecting Negroes, who are toiling on for the salvation of their race.” They urged what Kelly Miller wrote in “An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.” (1905):

Within forty years of only partial opportunity ... the American Negro has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a professional class, some fifty thousand strong ... some three thousand Negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from the best institutions in the North and West.... Negro inventors have taken out four hundred patents ... scores of Negroes ... take respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans.

And, as another put it,—“This farm land that they own and operate if put acre to acre would make a strip of land five miles wide ... from New York to San Francisco.” They believed that the Negro who had succeeded in the American way should have his day in court. Some agreed with Booker Washington, more with DuBois, but all stressed the Negro’s persecution and his achievement. The times demanded propaganda of them, they felt; and propaganda they gave, in good measure. The race was their hero, and preaching a solution their business, upon which they were grimly intent.

Sutton Griggs, one of the earliest, assured the readers ofUnfettered(1902) that neither angels nordemons, but mere human beings made up his cast of characters. But this is not so. Morlene is described:

A wealth of lovely black hair crowning a head of perfect shape and queenly poise; a face, the subtle charm of which baffles description; two lustrous black eyes, wondrously expressive, presided over by eyebrows that were ideally beautiful; a neck which, with perfect art, descended and expanded so as to form a part of a faultless bust; as to form, magnificently well proportioned; when viewed as a whole, the very essence of loveliness....

It is no wonder then, that she speaks to one of the villains: “Sir, it takes no prophet to foretell that terrible sorrows await you.” The hero, Dorlan Warthell, is likewise faultless: “As to color he was black, but even those prejudiced as to color forgot that prejudice when they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo.” Dorlan, a power in politics, deserts the Republican party for betraying his race, and incurs the hatred of the white Congressman Bloodworth. The ills heaped upon ills of the southern Negro, a very idealized love affair, long discussions of the race problem, and Dorlan’s plan to solve it (partly worked out on a balloon ride) make the book a hodgepodge. The prose is trite and pompous.

Griggs’The Hindered Hand(1905) is also a bad novel. The characters are models of decorum. In a passionate love scene at the end, the hero Ensal takes one of Tiara’s hands in his, and then overwhelmed, takes the other:

We fain would draw the curtain just here.... They were married that night, and the next day set out for Africa, to provide a home for the American Negro.

All of the darker phases of the South appear in the book, but melodramatically, unrealistically. The action is slowed up by long dissertations on “the problem,” including a review of Thomas Dixon’sLeopard’s Spots. Even the two heroines are race orators. George McClellan’sOld Greenbottom Inn(1906) is subtler propaganda. Most of the stories tell of the patheticlove affairs of beautiful Negro girls, but there is some rewarding local color of the Tennessee Valley and of the earliest Negro schools.

An argument in the guise of fiction is J. W. Grant’sOut of the DarknessorDiabolism and Destiny(1909). Answering Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory school of thought, the author writes “What are houses, land and money to men who are women?” But the mettle of the author deserves a better novel. His chief characters—the orator, the salutatorian and the valedictorian of their college class—become noted as preacher, statesman, and physician respectively. The physician discovers a cure for yellow fever, saves a beautiful white girl’s life, and is lynched before the love affair between them ripens. He is nearly white and bitter towards the white world; his two classmates are likewise militant. The author continually stresses the grace, refinement, wealth, palatial homes and property of upper class Negroes, decries the masses, and demands that the Negro be measured not by his worst but by his best. Needless to say the wrongs of the Negro are listed in full, but are seldom shown movingly.As We See It(1910) by Robert L. Waring deals with a young black hero, Abe, who leaves scholastic and athletic honors at Oberlin College to avenge the lynching of his mother and sister. There is a Damon-Pythias bond between Abe and a white boy, Malcolm, and between their two fathers, one an Alabama aristocrat and the other his body-servant. The aristocratic class of the South is praised highly, while the poor-whites are treated with contempt and hatred. Waring’s generalizations about the “cracker” are very much like Dixon’s about Negroes.

From Superman to Man(1917) by J. A. Rogers has only a thin thread of narrative running through long discussions of the race problem, in which a Pullman porter embarrasses and refutes white passengerswith his anthropological and sociological information. Quips such as “The white man’s burden is composed largely of plunder” and “‘To educate the Negro is only to make him unhappy’ really means ‘Do not educate the Negro and make the white man unhappier’” carry force, but the book is more pamphlet then novel.

The apologist whom these authors praised for his uncompromising attitude was W. E. B. DuBois. His fiction, superior to theirs in literary value, is similar in many respects.The Quest of the Silver Fleece(1911) is part fantasy, part propaganda. Zora, who sees visions of the “little people of the swamps,” rises from a degraded environment to become a race leader, fit companion for Bles Alwyn, a noble black boy from Georgia who becomes a force in politics. The plot is unconvincing; the characters are stiff and talk stiltedly: “Bles, thou almost persuadest me to be a fool.” But DuBois’ social understanding gives the novel value. The New England schoolmarms, the southern attack upon the schools, the scheming to get control of Negro education to render it harmless, the tie-up of Northern capital with cotton barons, the shame of Negro treatment, the conniving of political Negroes,—all of these are revealed by a keen social analyst. DuBois sees how poor-whites are used “to keep niggers in their place, and the fear of niggers to keep the poorer whites in theirs.” One white character says “Derned if I don’t think white slaves and black slaves had ought ter git together.” But this radical lead is not followed up; the novel is too taken up with a priggish hero and an unbelievable heroine, and social reality is subordinated to symbolism. It is a significant book, however, and if DuBois answered Dixon’s melodrama in kind, it was at least melodrama pleading for humanity and blasting injustice.

DuBois’Darkwater: The Twentieth Century Completion of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”(1919) contains five tales in a prose that echoes the Bible and medieval romance. Two modern fairy-tales attack race-hatred and oppression. “The Second Coming” tells of the birth of a black child in a Georgia stable while three bishops—“the wise men”—look on. “Jesus Christ in Texas,” like Upton Sinclair’s “They Call Me Carpenter,” deals with the return of Christ to a hate-ridden community, where he is unrecognized by the preacher, but is known to the despised and rejected. Like H. G. Wells, DuBois, in “The Comet,” makes use of pseudo-science to drive home social ideas. When Manhattan is destroyed by the gases of a comet, only two people survive, one a Negro bank messenger, and the other a white girl, “rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair and jewels.” Alone on earth, the “Bride of Life” and “great All-Father of the race to be” are broken in upon and returned to the world of prejudice by the crass “honk-honk” of rescuers from the world outside of New York City. These stories are without the usual drive of DuBois’ work; even within the frame of allegory and fantasy, they lack conviction.

James Weldon Johnson’sThe Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man(1912) (first published anonymously) urges that

log-cabins and plantations and dialect speaking ‘darkies’ are perhaps better known in American literature than any other single picture.... [Too little known] are coloured people who live in respectable homes and amidst a fair degree of culture.

The hero, a sensitive, light-skinned Negro, expresses an upper-class snobbishness toward the Negro masses:

The unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost repulsion.

Ashamed of “being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals,” he decides to “pass” for white. He travels widely through the South, to New York and to Europe, mingling generally with artistic people. Economic security and a happy marriage with a white woman do not quiet his regret, however, and he calls himself a “coward, a deserter ... [with] a strange longing for my mother’s people.” Although the central figure is complex and interesting, the novel seems to exist primarily for the long discussions of race, and the showing of the Negro in different milieus. The descriptions of the “big meeting” and of Bohemian life in New York are valuable realism.The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Manwas a ground-breaking novel in its dealing with the “aristocratic” mulatto, the problem of “passing,” the Negro artistic world, the urban and European scene, and its subtler assertion of points where Negroes “arebetterthan anybody else.”

Summary.After the long years of caricature and contempt, it was natural that Negro novelists of the first generation after slavery should write as apologists. Not literary men, with the exception of DuBois and Johnson, but most often preachers and teachers, they had a charge to keep instead of a story to be told. They resented the use of the “Jim-Crow Negro,” seen in Harris and Page, Dunbar and Chesnutt. DuBois reveals a refreshing faith in the people at times, but they all preferred the “talented tenth,” at its most genteel. The heroines are modest and beautiful, frequently octoroon; the heroes are handsome and priggish, frequently black. Their characters have high-flown names like Dorlan Warthell, Ensal Ellwood, Tiara and Bles Alwyn; between these and comic names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Vakey Vopp, and Epic Peters there is little to choose. The villains aretoo often poor-whites. The incidents are romantic and often fantastic. The injuries of the Negro are seldom conveyed with full power; like the abolitionists, these novelists felt that listing could make up for rendering. The race problem, at the core of their work, turns their novels into tracts. Acceptance of certain traits as racial, such as optimism, loyalty and faith, and underestimation of the Negro masses invalidate much of their discussion. All are concerned with refutation of Thomas Dixon and his school. They were fighting in a good cause, but the novel was not their weapon.

The Tradition of The Abolitionists.Negro apologists found allies among northern white liberals who joined in the struggle for Negro rights. Mary White Ovington, one of the important figures in the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People, wrote persuasive propaganda fiction.The Shadow(1920) makes out a case for Negroes against the white world. A white girl, abandoned by her aristocratic family, is brought up as colored, until a letter informs her of her lineage. Her experiences in the white world, complicated by coincidental meetings with her Negro “brother,” disillusion her, and she says:

White people are wicked.... They hate goodness.... And they say they’re so good!... We black people, we are bad.... Well, I want to be with bad people. I’ve been with good people as long as I can bear....

The novel is worked out romantically. Its pattern and many of its situations, however, have been taken over by later novelists. Miss Ovington is likewise the author ofHazel(1913), a story of a little colored heroine, and the much betterZeke(1931), which is an informed and sympathetic novel of the life of Negro boys in a southern school. Her “The White Brute” has been called one of the most memorable stories against lynching.

Dorothy Canfield’sThe Bent Twig(1915) refers to race prejudice in a midwestern town. When two shy, well-bred girls are discovered to have Negro blood, their schoolmates taunt them gleefully. An intelligent liberal—grieved at the humiliation—feels like gathering up his family and going away from the intolerable question, to Europe, but his wife grimly remarks: “And what we shall do is, of course, nothing at all.”

Typical of the many works urging the solution of the race problem by applied Christianity isOf One Blood(1916) by Charles Sheldon, the author of the religious best-sellerIn His Steps. Sheldon admits that he has pictured the “heroic, the beautiful and the great of each race,” but insists that he has not done them justice. The Negro hero is shown as triumphant college orator, great athlete, and finally agricultural expert instructing his people. Although nearly lynched in the South, being rescued melodramatically by a southern member of the “World Brotherhood,” he will not be “angry, sullen, bitter or revengeful.” The author concludes that race hatred would be abolished if “all the white men in the United States were like Abraham Lincoln and all the black men like Booker Washington,” a hope as extreme as his characterization and plot. Likewise full of praise for Booker Washington,The Testing Fireby Alexander Corkey (1911) optimistically prophesies a redeemed South.

Early Southern Liberalism.—Groping and hesitant liberalism found expression in the work of some of the southern novelists. Some were aware of the heavy hand of the dead past and wanted to shake it off, others wanted to set down honestly what they saw about them.The Southerner(1909) first appeared as a serial,The Autobiography of a Southerner Since the Civil War, by Nicholas Worth, whom readers soon identified as Walter Hines Page. The attackof this book upon the “mummified” South, its dedication to the laying of the three ghosts of “The Confederate Dead, of Religious Orthodoxy and of Negro Domination,” shows how opposed Walter Hines Page of North Carolina was to the ghost-ridden Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia. The novel is long and tract-like. Negro characters play an important part. Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Maria, worshippers of their white family, remember slavery as a happy state. Balancing these are Sam Worth, the runaway slave who becomes head of an industrial school; Lissa, another tragic mulatto, who bears a child to the future governor of the state; the Rev. Doctor Snodder, meek hang-dog “teacher of the oppressed”; John Marshall, an intelligent Hampton graduate; gullible office seekers, and a murderer of a Confederate firebrand. The author ofThe Southernerhad, for his time, advanced ideas regarding education, civil rights, and democracy, and these are reflected in his characterizations of Negroes, which, though not done at full-length, are suggestive departures from the old and outworn.

Ellen Glasgow, who “carried realism across the Potomac” to the interpretation of her beloved Virginia, naturally pays attention to the Negro. He appears, however, as part of the social background, not as central character. He is viewed with shrewd insight: inThe Miller of Old Church(1911) a Negro farmer, told to be thankful for his crop instead of complaining, responds:

Dar ain’t nuttin’ ’tall ter be thankful fur in dat, suh, case de Lawd He ain’t had no mo ter do wid dat ar co’n den old Marse Hawtrey. I jes ris dat ar co’n wid my own han’ right down de road at my front do’, and po’d de water on hit outer de pump at my back un. I’se monstrous glad ter praise de Lawd for what he done done, but I ain’t gwine to gin ’im credit fur de wuk er my own fis’ en foot.

Barren Ground(1925) contains some honest pictures of Negroes, not greatly different from the impoverishedwhites of the broomsedge, except that they are better and thriftier farmers. With courage Miss Glasgow introduces the common-law wife of old man Graylock. Once a handsome Negro woman, she is now slatternly and smoulderingly resentful, especially when the old man in a drunken fit takes a horsewhip to his mulatto brood.

The Negro character as a very different sort of background appears inHagar’s Hoard, by George Kibbe Turner (1920). This gripping novel tells of the horror of yellow fever as it came to the close-shuttered houses of Memphis. Negroes serve as a mysterious, sinister chorus. Memphis is conjured vividly before the reader: “that long ragged line of old brick blocks—that rendezvous of niggers and thieves—the bad niggers, and the murderers and the nigger thieves.” Then there are the sanctified Negroes, “The Hollering Saints,” who are certain that the yellow fever is “the punishment of God acomin’ down on Memphis.” Individualized Negroes are Arabella, the faithful house servant, fanatically awaiting the coming of the Lamb; Make Haste Mose, the driver of the dead wagon, and a saddle-colored Negro with an immense scar, lying in wait to rob. All of these, according to the southern boy who tells the story, are unfathomable:

All white folks knew was what they generally know about niggers—that bowing and scraping; those brown masks—those faces with all their muscles trained since the sin of Ham in the Bible; since they went out in slavery and subjection—to lie still and show nothing. And those old brown eyes, watching, watching.

Under the pen name of “George Madden Martin,” Mrs. Atwood R. Martin wrote many stories of southern Negro life. “Her Husband” concerns a lynching. When Edith Thornberry, a white woman of gentle birth, discovers that her husband, a poor white, has reverted to type and led the lynchers, she is set againsthim. She was “bracketed with those thousands of southern men and women who speak a universal language of decency,” but her husband was bracketed with “a pusillanimous multitude, skulkers ever behind the decent South, lynchers, night-riders, white caps, Ku Klux.” Unfortunate in its connection of heredity with decency, the story is still significant for the sharp protest of an intelligent southern woman against mob-violence.Children of The Mist(1920) decries the work of agitators upon Negroes, but is by no means merely Thomas Nelson Page brought up to date.

Stirrings of Realism.—When, at the turn of the century, authors showed a willingness to deal seriously with uneasy segments of American life, the Negro made his demand upon them. It is significant that most of the early figures prominent in the history of twentieth century realism dealt in some measure with the Negro. Among them are Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein.

Stephen Crane’s work was generally too advanced for the sentimental readers of his age, and “The Monster” (1897) was particularly so. This story of horror lashes out at the stupidity and heartlessness of a small American town. Henry Johnson, a Negro hostler, rescues a small boy from a fire. Falling, overcome by the fumes in the burning laboratory, he has his face eaten away by acid. The boy’s father, Dr. Trescott, exercises his best skill and keeps Henry alive. When Henry was thought to be dying, he was lauded as hero and martyr; but kept alive, a faceless imbecile, he meets with terror and hatred, among the better class as well as in Watermelon Alley. “The Monster” is more a sharp satire of a small town’s intolerance than a study of Negroes, but it has secondary meanings that pertain to Negro life in what it tells of service, sacrifice, and false affection that goesover into revulsion. The few pictures of Negro life here and inWhilomville Storiesare done with the vividness to be expected from Stephen Crane.

Negro characters in Upton Sinclair’sThe Jungle(1905) are only incidental, but they are drawn in grim earnest. He shows Negroes as strikebreakers, brought into Packingtown from the levees or the country districts of the far South on promises of five dollars a day and board, with special rates from railroads. The harsh life of scabs makes them surly and dangerous; most of them have knives, ground to fine points, hidden in their boots. “Whiskey and women were brought in by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards.” After the strike, these “green” Negroes, together with foreigners and criminals, are turned loose in thousands upon Chicago. This sketch of the Negro worker, denied admission to unions and thereby forced to the role of strikebreaker, anticipates much of present-day proletarian fiction.

Carl Van Vechten considers Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” inThree Lives(1909) to be “perhaps the first American story in which the Negro is regarded ... not as an object for condescending compassion or derision.” “Melanctha” is a slowly unwound character study of a “subtle, intelligent, half-white girl, Melanctha Herbert,” who “always wanted peace and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to get excited.” Her chief love affairs are painstakingly set forth. The characters talk in a mannered dialogue; they all sound like each other, and like the white people in the other two stories. Gertrude Stein speaks of “the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro sunshine,” but her major characters do not have it. The people she calls “decent,” she likewise calls unmoral and promiscuousor shows them in razor brawls. White blood in one character “made her see clear,” and gave “her grit and endurance and vital courage,” but the power and breakneck courage in Melanctha came to her from her big black virile father. In spite of these dubious generalizings, “Melanctha” is important. Though not realistic in the usual sense, it gives a convincing portrait of a mysterious, uncertain girl, “wandering in her ways,” doomed to tragedy, a Negro Madame Bovary or Esther Waters.

Setting out early to chart “tragic America,” Theodore Dreiser wrote “Nigger Jeff” (1918) about a lynching. Dreiser does not make the Negro innocent, but he shows with somber power the mob hysteria in a town ironically called Pleasant Valley, the bravery of the sheriff, the horror of the captured Negro, and the final hanging to the bridge. And then he goes farther, to the mother and sister of the victim, and without sentimentality shows their grief. “I’ll get it all in,” exclaimed the young reporter who covered the case. And Dreiser got it all in, to make one of his best stories.

Again The Tragic Mulatto.—Two writers of some repute returned to the theme of the tragic mulatto. Less romantic than their predecessors, they still cling to old stereotypes. Margaret Deland’s “A Black Drop” (1908) tells of Lily, who, although brought up in Nigger Hill, a section of a midwestern town, by Mammy, a fair Negro woman, “cushiony and weighing two hundred and fifty pounds,” is considered white. Lily’s love affair with Framely Stone, son of abolitionists, is broken up. Miss Wales, his New England Sunday School teacher, points out proof of the girl’s Negro blood, clinching her case by mentioning her use of “heavy perfumery.” Miss Deland believes that intermarriage is forbidden by disgust,“a race protest, a race horror ... organic, biological.” Instinct, it seems, revolts at intermarriage, but not at liaisons. Confusing and unconvincing, “A Black Drop” is still not entirely without sympathy and insight.

In the short story “Carter” (1921) Don Marquis is likewise concerned with one of the many mulattoes who in fiction tragically yearn “oh to be white, white, white!” After “passing” for a short while in New York, he returns to Atlanta, resolved to live and die among Negroes. He arrives there at the time of a riot, and witnesses “the conflict which was forever active in his own nature.” He is happy when he is taken for a white man of the better class by his own white half-brother, but is plunged into misery when, dying, he is re-identified as “a yaller nigger.” Carter’s abjectness, and the flattery of whites are laid on a bit too heavily. Although the story abounds in clichés about mulatto character, it does approach Negro life, especially the Atlanta riot, with seriousness.

John Bennett’sMadame Margot(1921) is the legend of a golden Creole who, in order to keep her ivory daughter from dishonor and betrayal, “to keep her white to all eternity,” sells herself to Satan. Margot’s sultry beauty turns to grotesqueness. As old Mother Go-go, in the dirty Negro quarters, black now instead of ruddy gold, she is claimed by the devil. An other-worldly romance,Madame Margot, for all of its imaginative remoteness, conveys something of what women like Madame Margot knew in bitter actuality.

Summary.The tendencies seen in this chapter are diverse, ranging from the race-glorification of Negro apologists to social realism by important American novelists. At times, as in the case of the tragic mulatto, the work seems conventional, but in the main we notice that authors are beginning to take the Negroseriously, revising earlier stereotypes, and breaking the ground for later realism. The work that they did is little known, but it is important in the evolution of the Negro character in American fiction.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Why are the weaknesses of the Negro apologists to be expected?

2. Why do novels of the “talented tenth” fail to overthrow the plantation tradition?

3. Why are novels by southerners included in this chapter?

4. In what respects is Gertrude Stein’s story traditional?

5. What similarities are in all of the stories of mulattoes written by white authors?

6. Compare DuBois, Chesnutt, and Johnson.

7. What is significant in the final quotation fromHagar’s Hoard?

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