CHAPTER XII

HISTORICAL FICTION

The present vogue of historical fiction has given new impetus to the long-standing interest in the Old South and the Negro. The African slave-trade, the antebellum and the reconstruction South are popular hunting grounds. Some novelists continue the plantation tradition, some, the antislavery tradition, and many others, in the spirit of regionalism, seek the truth of their sectional pasts, without apology and without indictment.

The Slave Trade.The ghastly middle passage, the shackled mobs below the hatches, the lack of water, the plagues, are background for novels like Mary Johnston’sThe Slave Ship(1924), and George King’sThe Last Slaver(1936). Deeper pity and understanding informThe Trader’s Wife(1930) by Jean Kenyon McKenzie. A sheltered Newport girl confronted by the traffic—“Wretched blacks at sea, packed in trays like dead fish, stinking like fish, some of them to die ... and to be cast in the sea”—is broken in Africa by the misery of the barracoon. As her last gesture before she dies she sets free a contingent of slaves.

With the dawn there came a wailing on the river—as the canoes multiplied at the landing—the high desolate wailing that is the voice of the sorrows of Africa.... It was the slaves come down the river into the barracoon.

Hervey Allen’sAnthony Adverse(1933) describes the barracoons through which “Africa was poured into America,” the serpent-like line

composed of hundreds of naked, human bodies rubbed slimy for their approaching sale with palm oil and rancid butter....Bamboo withes stretched from one tight neck-fork to another.... Hovering about it, and along its flanks were white-robed Arabs with rhinoceros-hide whips.

The bartering, with slaves coquettish, or compliant, or sullen, or tiger-like, the inspections and the packing on the slave-ships are fully pictured, obviously after a great deal of research. But it strikes one as historical pageantry rather than tragedy.

InBabouk(1934), Guy Endore concentrates upon the shocking features of the slave-trade: the captives “lying shoulder to shoulder, feet pointing toward the center, not only chained in pairs, but each pair attached to a great chain—a gigantic necklace of blacks”; the separated tribesmen forced to sing and dance—“a centipede dancing, chains clanking”; opthalmy and other epidemics ravaging the hold. “Nigger-tasters,” telling the slaves’ condition by their sweat, and other connoisseurs of black flesh winnowed out the drugged, the doctored; only the finest were fit to be slaves. After horrible life on San Domingo plantations the slaves revolt. Based upon considerable research, convincing in its descriptions of the slave-trade, of African tales and customs, and of West Indian plantations,Baboukis still more than a historical romance. It is a revolutionary novel, bitterly opposed to imperialism and the contemporary slavery of any race.

The Plantation Tradition.But Endore is unusual; Joseph Hergesheimer is much more typical. InQuiet Cities(1927) he yearns for the return of the past, based on slavery—for which “I’d be happy to pay—with everything, everything the wasted present holds.” In his picture slaves do little other than raise soft staves of song, or play quoits, or fiddle, or sleep. The only ugly feature is an ill-smelling slave-den, for which a transplanted northerner is responsible. Emancipation was a failure since “a free Negro is more oftenwretched than not.” Reconstruction was ignominious: Negro legislators dared to utter shouts of laughter, with “incredible feet elevated on the desks” in southern state capitols. Mingo Harth, a vicious Negro politician worthy of Thomas Dixon, is called a “symbol of Union, a black seal on the fate of South Carolina.”

Most of the historical romances repeat these patterns with little variation. Dealing with the times of George Washington,Princess Malah(1933), by a Negro author, John H. Hill, subscribes in the main to the plantation tradition of humaneness, mutual affection and lavishness. Frances Griswold’sThe Tides of Malvern(1930) and Caroline Gordon’sPenhally(1931) recount the long history of southern families with Negro characters in the background, where they stay correctly. A few step out of the picture after Sherman’s march, but the majority will not be moved. In Mary Johnston’sMiss Delicia Allen(1933) both Negro slaves and white owners are conventionally drawn.

Somewhat similar to Cable’sMadame Delphineis E. Laroque Tinker’sToucoutou(1928). After being married to a white man, Toucoutou is proved in court to be partly Negro. In bitter envy, Negroes satirize her in street-songs; whites condemn her because her marriage means that “a black flood will rush through the crevasse that will sully white purity and retard our civilization a thousand years.” The picture of New Orleans is not idyllic; the yellow fever epidemic, the exoticbamboula,calindaandcounjailledanced in thePlace Congo, and other customs of New Orleans are vividly described. With some sympathy for his heroine, Tinker yields at times to the doubtful traditions about the mulatto.Old New Orleans(1931) by E. Laroque Tinker and Frances Tinker presents minor and familiar Negro characters. Life on thelower Mississippi, in a later period is in Edna Ferber’sShow-Boat(1926), which has a few Negroes singing the plaintive songs of their “wronged race,” and a melodramatic scene involving an octoroon.

Look Back to Glory(1933) by Herbert Ravenel Sass is worshipful of the duelling cavaliers and glamorous women of low-country South Carolina, “a paradise ... the proud, the knightly South.” Slavery is called a godsend to elevate the Negro from barbarism. The subtle poison of slavery was the “inevitable” miscegenation, “invited nine-tenths of the time” by Negro girls, and guaranteeing “the purity of the southern women of education and family.” Best characterized of the Negroes is Vienna, a beautiful quadroon, to whom “curtsying did not come easy.” The others are conventional, grateful for the godsend.

The Civil War has long been a favorite subject for historical novelists, but earlier novels like Winston Churchill’sThe Crisis(1901), Upton Sinclair’sManassas(1904) and Mary Johnston’sThe Long Roll(1911) andCease Firing(1912) are little concerned with deepening the characterization of the Negro.The Battleground(1902) by Ellen Glasgow, has many of the standbys of the plantation tradition—the noble hero who deplores slavery, the wretched free Negro and the giant slave who rescues his master (one of the most familiar battle activities from “Marse Chan” toSo Red The Rose.) Recent Civil War novels like Caroline Gordon’sNone Shall Look Back(1936) and Clifford Dowdey’sBugles Blow No More(1936) are skillfully written and based upon research, but the latter does not particularly extend to Negro characters.

The slaves inOld Miss(1929) by T. Bowyer Campbell are “like children, trusting, expecting, receiving everything as a matter of course from their masters.”The hero is proslavery, only because of altruism: “What would the poor things do without us to care for them, and see that they pass peaceful, useful lives?” When Aunt Christian is told that she is free, she angrily hits her informant with a stick, like the ancient tyrants upon hearing bad news. Roark Bradford’sKingdom Coming(1933) likewise carries the thesis that freedom was a mistake. Aunt Free buys her freedom and then does not want it; Telegram is set free by a Yankee firing squad; free Negroes die like flies in concentration camps. There is an interesting account of the “blind Underground” which held out false hopes of freedom that ended in murder. That the freed Negro is little better off than the slave is true in sections that Bradford should know very well, but it hardly seems a defense of slavery. Promising “the true story of slavery and the true story of freedom,”Kingdom Comingmerely gives some good local color of plantation life and voodoo, to support the century-old beliefs advanced inSwallow Barn.

Stark Young has shown a knowledge of certain types of Negroes in sketches like “The Poorhouse Goes to The Circus” (1929) andHeaven Trees(1926). His best seller,So Red The Rose(1934), is a melancholy recital of the folk-tales that southerners heard in their youth. The war blown along by northern and southern windbags destroys “a gracious system of living that has seldom seen its equal.” Negroes, in spite of “fetid ... old maid idealism” had their best place in that system. A typical old faithful, William Veal, seeks his dead master on the battlefield at night; he felt the hair of the corpses until he found him: “he knew him by his hair; you know how fine it was.” In contrast are the Negro soldiers—grog-filled burners and looters—and the ingrates who run off to the Yankees and arestricken with plagues. Written in skillful, disarming prose,So Red The Rosenevertheless remains a thrice-told tale.

Elliot Crayton McCants inWhite Oak Farm(1928) gives the traditional picture of Reconstruction, though with less rancor than Page and Dixon.Bottom Rail On Top(1935) by H. J. Eckenrode is a less orthodox novel, not in the “bloody-shirt” tradition. Negroes scatter after emancipation and learn fast in reconstruction. The hero is often shown siding with the Negroes and radicals in the brawling.

Not fooled by all of the hallowed creeds of the South, Margaret Mitchell in the best-sellingGone With The Wind(1937) accepts whole-heartedly the traditional estimate of the Negro. “Slaves were neither miserable nor unfortunate.... There never had been a slave sold from Tara and only one whipping.” Mammy, Dilcey, Toby and the other house-servants, proud of their quality white-folks, disdainful of field hands, “free issues” and poor whites, have been with us time and time again. Slaves who were different were “mean.” The “least energetic, trustworthy and intelligent and most vicious and brutal” were the ones who left the plantation to enjoy a long “carnival of idleness and theft and insolence” interrupted only by plagues in crowded Atlanta. Negro insults range from “looking impudent” and being “uppity to a lady” to assuming Anglo-Saxon prerogatives:

In the legislature ... they spent most of their time eating goobers and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes. They frolicked....

But the intelligent house-servants, the highest caste, spoke the correct, heart-warming lines:

Ah done had nuff freedom. Ah wants somebody to feed me good vittles reglar an’ tell me what ter do an’ what not ter do, an’ look affer me when Ah gets sick.

Needless to say, the Klan is as knightly here as inThe Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan, an authentic hymn of praise.

Summary.DuBose Heyward has written: “This relationship [between master and slave] has been sentimentalized and utilizedad nauseamin writing of the slave period.” The plots of the foregoing books are uninventive, and the characters and situations are repeated over and over. Aristocrats and house-servants still monopolize attention, as if the many “yeoman” farmers and field-hands had not existed. With the hindsight of the present, secession is admitted to have been bad, but although most of the aristocrats detested slavery (in principle), the intelligent Negroes detested freedom (in principle and practise) and the romancers agree with the Negroes. The very infrequent floggings are the work of uncouth overseers, who are knocked down by blooded cavaliers. Fugitive slaves have been spirited away from these books. Faithful servants bring back dead heroes from battlefields, bury the silver, despise the Yankees and prefer to work for their ex-masters without wages. Unfaithful slaves, corrupted from their childish virtue, run away to die in concentration camps, or loot, insult and rape. Negroes who bought land, rushed to schools and proved freedom to be no mistake, are non-existent, in spite of the record. An unpartisan historian writes:

These Reconstruction governments erected public school systems; democratized local and county units, created public social services, and sought to distribute tax burdens equitably.

But in these books the legislatures are composed of a few depraved Northerners, and a mob of Negroes who did little else but put their feet upon desks and “eat peanuts by the peck.” The Freedmen’s Bureau is villainous, the Klan reproachless, organized to preserve chastity, not for political and economic control.

It is wrong to assume that these books are merely pageants of a departed past; they definitely further attitudes that justify the worst kind of contemporary reaction. Their popularity is a dangerous sign. Based on the principle that the many must be kept “in their place” for the good of the few, they encourage slavery in a world where slaves are still too numerous.

The Anti-Slavery Tradition.But there is a party of opposition which, like Emerson, has cried “fiddle-faddle to the Old South.” In the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion Tourgée, some twentieth century authors have described the tragedy of slavery, and have dealt with heroes and heroines who would not buckle under.

Rowland E. Robinson, inOut of Bondage and Other Stories(collected posthumously in 1936) records the heroism and drama of the Underground Railroad in Vermont where slaves on their way to Canada were hidden in loaded sleighs and wagons, or stowed away in attics or barnlofts or deserted sugar-houses. John E. Paynter’sFugitives of the Pearl(1930) one of the few historic romances by Negro authors, deals with the escape of seventy-seven Negroes from Washington aboard thePearl, whose captain was an abolitionist. A Negro informer gave away their plot, and they were captured down the Potomac. Of the old school in technique,Fugitives of the Pearlis more fictionalized history than a re-creation of characters and settings. But the precarious life of Negroes in antebellum Washington, “the seat and center of the slave trade” is truthfully presented.

The Railroad to Freedom(1932) by Hildegarde Swift is the fictionalized biography of Harriet Tubman, the most famous agent of the Underground Railroad, and a nurse and scout with the Union troops. Supposed to be a story for children,The Railroad toFreedomis still one of the best records of an important movement and a fascinating heroine of American history. One of America’s finest historical novels,God’s Angry Man(1933) by Leonard Ehrlich re-creates the life and times of John Brown. There is unusual sympathy in the treatment of the Negro characters. These are Frederick Douglass, who is willing to use violence against slavers but not against a government arsenal, realizing bitterly that too many Negroes, broken by slavery, wanted only “hot yams and a roof and not to be beaten”; “Emperor” Green, who, in spite of Douglass’ logic, says the historic “I b’lieve I go wid de ole man”; Harriet Tubman, the splendid, wanted “dead or alive, and ten thousand dollars would be paid for the body”; William Still, who knew more about the “underground” than any man in the land, saying to Brown “You free them, I’ll lead them out”; John Copeland, mulatto student at Oberlin, who left his garret lamp of learning for an even finer light, and Dangerfield Newby, killed in action, with a wife in the far South who was never to be redeemed. All of these are brought to life in a moving book.

Black Thunder(1936) by Arna Bontemps likewise bears witness to a staunch desire to be free—a fact of the Negro’s past that most of the historical romancers have not cared to record.Black Thunderdeals with Gabriel’s Rebellion in the Virginia of 1800. Gabriel, the strongest slave of Henrico county, is courageous as well:

I been studying about freedom a heap, me. I heard a plenty folks talk and I listened a heap.... Something keep telling me that anything what’s equal to a gray squirrel wants to be free.

Stimulated by the example of Touissant in Haiti and by the propaganda of theAmis des Noirsand exasperated by an act of cruelty, Gabriel leads eleven hundred slaves upon Richmond. A storm postpones theattack, and the treachery of Pharaoh and Ben does the rest. The leaders are hanged, Gabriel’s sweetheart Juba is sold to the deep South, and Ben goes on driving the cariole for the aristocrats. In addition to Gabriel, other Negroes are excellently characterized: Ben, the docile, gray-headed house-boy; Melody, the quadroon darling of rich planters’ sons; Juba, handsome and spirited, sole woman on the march; Mingo, whose personal freedom is not enough; and Bundy, who “kept drinking up all that rum because he couldn’t get up enough nerve to make his get-away.”Black Thunderdoes not have the urgent passion ofGod’s Angry Man; it is elegy rather than a tocsin of revolt, but it is a fine American historical novel.

Realism.InLook Homeward, AngelThomas Wolfe’s autobiographical hero decries

The romantic halo ... the whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to live in mansions and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, beautiful, all men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of the barren spiritual wilderness ... when their cheap mythology, their legend of the charm of their manners, the aristocratic culture ... made him writhe ... so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of their antagonism, that he still pretended the most fantastic devotion to them.

Many other southerners of Wolfe’s generation, as seen in the previous chapter, have recognized the barren spiritual wilderness; others have repudiated or at least humanized the legend.

John Peale Bishop, although not so outspoken as Wolfe and Faulkner, approaches the legend realistically inMany Thousands Gone(1930), stories of the Civil War and postwar years. Just as the southerners are not marvels of gallantry and beauty, the Negroes, while certainly not flattered, are recognizable products of slavery. One old woman while her mistress liesdead is more worried about her promised freedom than grief-stricken; a sullen girl blazes forth her hatred of her carping mistress, and leaves to cook for the Yankees, for whose love-making she has been prepared by her experiences with southern gentlemen. In one symbolic story, Bones, a marvelous cook, gives two old Virginia ladies a feeling of security; in reality a lunatic, he is submissive and devoted, and they are willing to live in terror as long as they can live in the tradition, their dear “obsession.”

Christopher Ward’sJonathan Drew, A Rolling Stone(1932), andA Yankee Rover(1932) carry the Yankee hero all over early nineteenth century America. One dramatic section shows Drew saving two slaves from border ruffians who were running a “blind underground” and fomenting a slave insurrection in order to plunder the countryside.A Yankee Roverdeals more fully with slavery; one of the episodes involves Tommy, the little “white nigger,” whose aristocratic father does not leave him free.

What d’ye say to a nigger that ain’t no color at all cause he’s white ... as white as any on ye an’ whiter than most ... with straight silky hair, no kinks at all, an yaller hair at that, golden yaller, an’ blue eyes? Ef that ain’t jest a natural curiosity.... Pass up lot 56, Mr. Barnes.

As we have seen the “blind underground” intrigues both the realists and the defenders of the Old South, who traditionally isolate criminals as the agents of the underground railroad. The “blind underground” did exist as a profitable enterprise for such gangs as Murrel’s, but this hardly explains the neglect of the genuine underground that carried thousands of slaves to the North. The workings of this system appear incidentally in MacKinlay Kantor’sArouse and Beware(1936). In this impartial and accurate narrative we have most interesting descriptions of the “Right Sort of People,” “The Sons of America,” both whites andNegroes, who with their grips and passwords and secret hiding places enable three fugitives to get to the Union lines. One slave woman, in a low tone, gives them valuable information, and then, to fool her curious children, curses them. The narrator says:

There was a canniness about these slaves which I had never imagined before. I had thought them barbaric or stupid or lazy ... and doubtless many of them were. And many others, too, were loyal to their masters and the Confederacy; but somehow I cannot hear jubilee singers chanting of Moses, and bondage and their freedom from it, without thinking of this thin, brown-faced wench, with her high shoulders and long straight arms....

Andrew Lytle’s “Mister McGregor” (1936) is a first-rate story of slavery. Rhears, “no common field-hand, but proud, black and spoiled” had “fretted and sulled” over McGregor’s whipping his wife Bella, and rather than run away, he decides to have it out with his owner. In one of the best fights of “frontier” realism, Rhears is stabbed by his master. The teller says of Rhears

I never seen such guts in nobody, nigger or white man.... Rhears spoke so low you could hardly hear him: “Marster, if you hadn’t got me, I’d a got you.”

In Lytle’sThe Long Night(1936) Negroes are only incidental, but the organized stealing of slaves by a band of frontier criminals is important to the plot.

A young southerner muses disgustedly in Evelyn Scott’sMigrations(1927): “How close we come to the niggers without knowing anything about them.” Being aware that merely “coming close” is not knowledge, Mrs. Scott presents convincing Negro characters. Silas is filled with hatred for the white father of his sweetheart Fanny’s baby. But conditioned to respect his master, as Fanny had done to her sorrow, he persuades himself that the overseer was responsible. His sullen disobedience causes him to be lashed and he takes to the woods. Bosh is a less successful runaway;a half-wit, he frightens a white girl and is caught by a mob and burned to death. Of a very different type is Eugenia De Negre Blair, a brilliant and handsome adventuress, who has a trace of Negro blood. Without the emphasis of the abolitionists, Mrs. Scott still records the uneasy and tragic aspects of slavery.

InThe Wave(1929), a series of chronicles of the Civil War, the stories of Eugenia and Silas are continued. One of the best sections shows the Negroes swarming to Sherman’s army; Aunt Nancy, to whom the army means food but who has given too much strength to slavery to live to see the promised land of freedom; Dilsy, who hopes that life-long drudgery is over; Lou, apologetic because her religious master had influenced her; Anna, bold and ready; and Uncle Vic, who has been sold to one “mean piece uv trash after another.” When the Federals, realizing that the horde of fugitives is more than they bargained for, tear up the pontoon bridges, they discover that the horde still presses on to freedom. “Gawd, you gotta shoot ’em to stop ’em.” There is symbolism in both the despairing cry of the Negroes left on the bank: “My home is ovah Jawdon,” and the callousness of the Yankee who thinks: “If we could only let them drown. Dam ’em, they get over their Jordan, but we have to carry ’em.”

InA Calendar of Sin(1931), Mrs. Scott re-creates the Reconstruction: the Klan, determined to return the Negro to slavery—where was the tobacco to come from?—flogging Negroes, destroying schools, hounding Yankees; and the carpet-baggers, more intent on wealth and politics than on helping the impoverished, ignorant and often shiftless Negroes—both pretending high idealism to cover up lurking meanness. Good comedy is in the episode of the old Auntie, who suspiciousof Yankees anyway, leaves the new school in high dudgeon because, instead of learning to read the Bible right-off, she is started on the alphabet. There is a powerful narrative about a mulatto lynched for assault. Some Negroes, taught by “the raw-hide whip on their naked backs” betray the Union League and deny that they want the vote and book-learning. Others show a grasp of the developing folk-belief that everything mean and bad in the South “comes to us fru de Yankees.” Although the narratives are called “American Melodramas,” Mrs. Scott portrays neither villains nor heroes but sensitively understood human beings. And that is why, for truth to an era and a section, her work is immeasurably superior to such real melodramas asGone With the Wind.

T. S. Stribling’s earlierBirthrightis excelled by his trilogy of a southern family:The Forge(1931),The Store(1933) andUnfinished Cathedral(1934). InThe Forge, the pictures of slave life and character are among the most convincing in American fiction. The plantation tradition gets short shrift. Old man Vaiden runs a one-horse, two-mule farm, but calls himself a “gentleman” since he owns five Negroes. A hard-fisted, hard drinking, bull-headed, irascible Primitive Baptist, blustering in north Alabama dialect instead of in cultured phrases, he wins some liking and, more important, is a credible human being. To Vaiden, as to so many farmers “on the make,” slavery meant “working the daylight out of slaves.” The slaves’ food is little more than corn-dodgers and bacon, and the boasted medical care is what “would be given a sick calf.” Attached to the family and farm by lifelong ties, the slaves still want freedom. While George is being praised as devoted, he is nursing hatred against his master.

Gracie Vaiden stands out. Although friendly with her white half-sisters, she broods over slavery. She feels that the flogging of her husband

transformed her from a kind of tentative wife of Solomon into a brood mare ... changed Solomon into a stud; and her child, if she and Solomon had a child, into a little animal.

She reasons correctly; she is ravished by Miltiades Vaiden who does not know that he is her half-brother. On the eve of secession she would have been sold to clear up her father’s debts if she had not escaped to the Yankee lines. Stribling’s pictures of the Reconstruction, especially of the Klan, are likewise unorthodox and authentic.

InThe StoreGracie Vaiden, who has been the mistress first of the Yankee lieutenant who becomes governor of Alabama, and then of a white merchant, a pillar of the church, works so that her octoroon son can escape the shame she has met with as a Negro. From the start, however, we see that Touissaint is doomed. “The most despisable nigger in Florence,” he will not run from bullying white boys, hates shining shoes, and insists upon honest dealing in the store, standing up for a whole pound when “everybody knows a nigger pound is about twelve ounces.” Come of age, he tries to vote, but his blue eyes and blond hair do not prove that his grandfather was free; and he fights a “cracker” who insults his mother. Just as his mother was put on the block because her white half-sisters and brothers ran up bills at the store, so Touissaint loses all of his year’s work because his landlord (and father) messes up a business deal. As an end to his rebellious career he is lynched. While Gracie is cutting down his body, “A dozen drunken voices in the mob broke into laughter at the downfall of the Negro mother and her dead son.” His father furnishes the mulesand wagon to carry him away. Other Negro characters are surly, cunning and aware of what is being done to them: “If dey shawt weight you too much, wras’le wid de Lawd about hit in prayah”.... “If a white man di’n fly into uh niggah tull he done somepin to him, all us niggahs be settin’ in easy chairs.” Stribling presents with fine sympathy the Negro urchin who announced the miracle: “I can write my name....” Lucy, Touissaint’s wife, prefers farming to domestic service. She thereby astounds the ex-planters to whom these “uppish” Negroes who want independence and education are “unnatural, highly affected and utterly absurd ... the new uncomfortable colored people.”

InUnfinished Cathedralthe Negro characters are shown to be more and more progressive and educated, but still subjected to indecency from both upper-class and hoodlum whites. Militant Negroes are now in the picture; even beneath their grotesque robes, the lodge brothers carry guns. There is a frame-up very similar to the Scottsboro case; the bankers, realtors, sheriffs, judges, and even clergy are shown to be closely related to lynching mobs. One of the boys hustled off a train is Gracie’s great-grandson. To Miltiades Vaiden, now eminently respectable, Gracie cries out:

What colored relations? I was born to my mother, old Hannah, long after Old Pap sold off her husband Jericho! I’m not white for nothing! Aunt Creasy told me long ago that my father was Old Pap, the same as yours! Toussaint, the son I had by you, was nothing but a Vaiden on both sides. The child Lucy had by Toussaint, the son you hanged, I named Marcia; and Marcia’s boy you’re holding in jail this minute. Who would my grandchild come back to see except white people, Miltiades?

To these words the old Colonel replies: “Shame on you, Gracie ... talking disrespectfully like this.” In spite of some faults, such as the stretched coincidences, this trilogy is remarkable for the honesty, courageand sympathy with which a southern author has faced the past.

William Faulkner’s “The Raid” (1934) describes the blowing up of the bridges to destroy the Negroes following Sherman’s army, a scene relished by southerners as symbolic, but the slave boy Ringo and the doggedly marching contrabands are excellently done. Thoroughly conversant with the old South, Faulkner has created inAbsalom, Absalom!(1936) a credible and powerful, if at times fantastic novel out of “a few old mouth-to-mouth tales” and old letters. From the bleak hills of western Virginia where the cabins were “boiling with children,” Thomas Sutpen comes to frontier Mississippi, “a country of lawless opportunity.” Naked, plastered over with muck against mosquitoes, he and his “wild Negroes tore a plantation out of the wilderness ... dragged a house and garden out of the virgin swamp.” But the Sutpen line is doomed. Charles Bon, Sutpen’s son by a woman in Haiti, who was discarded because she had a “spot of Negro blood,” is murdered to keep him from marrying Sutpen’s daughter (the incest was less abhorred than the miscegenation). The Sutpen fortunes decline, until at the last we see Jim Bond, Charles Bon’s mulatto grandson, lurking around the ashes of the destroyed mansion. A Mississippi “Fall of the House of Usher,”Absalom, Absalom!seems in part an allegory of slavery. Negro characters, whether the savages so like their wild master, or Clytie, Sutpen’s mulatto daughter, who could be neither tamed nor freed, or Charles Bon, most elegant cavalier and yet of Negro blood; or Charles’ son, who in self-laceration turns completely to Negroes, are original and convincing, “living creatures, living flesh to feel pain and writhe and cry out.”

Conclusion.A northerner inAbsalom, Absalom!ironical at the tyranny of the southern legends, says:

What is it? Something you live and breathe in like air?... A kind of entailed birthright ... of never forgiving General Sherman, so that forevermore as long as your children’s children produce children you won’t be anything but a descendant of a long line of colonels killed in Pickett’s charge at Manassas?

Faulkner himself has felt the fascination of the plantation birthright, but he determined to be honest in spite of tradition. Of a different order of genius, he still belongs with his fellow southerners Stribling and Evelyn Scott, who are trying above all else to give a truthful reinterpretation of the old South, and therefore of the Negro. Their work is by no means completely adequate, but together with the work of other honest, sympathetic writers, northern and southern, Negro and white, historical novelists or recorders of contemporary America, it gives promise that the Negro character in fiction may meet with the justice that has been so long deferred.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Since slavery has been abolished, what social policy is served by the continued defense of the plantation tradition?

2. List similar characters and incidents in the plantation tradition novels of this chapter.

3. Describe the antislavery heroes mentioned as the plantation tradition would characterize them.

4. Why are so many southern aristocrats in these books shown as opponents of slavery?

5. Account for the best-selling qualities ofSo Red the RoseandGone With The Wind.

6. Defend, attack, or qualify: “Since these historical romances are based on research, they must be truthful about Negro life and character.”

7. What are the contributions of Stribling and Evelyn Scott to the southern historical novel?

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