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Introduction 1

INTRODUCTION

The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice. Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters.

I swear their nature is beyond my comprehension. A strange people!--merry 'mid their misery--laughing through their tears, like the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they! They tread life's path as if 'twere strewn with roses devoid of thorns, and make the most of life with natures of sunshine and song.

Most American readers would take this to refer to the Negro, but it was spoken of the Irish, in a play dealing with one of the most desperate periods of Ireland's tragic history. The Jew has been treated similarly by his persecutors. The African, and especially the South African native, is now receiving substantially the same treatment as the American Negro. Literature dealing with the peasant and the working-class has, until recently, conformed to a similar pattern.

The blind men gathered about the elephant. Each one felt the part of the elephant's anatomy closest to him, the trunk, tusk, eyes, ear, hoof, hide and tail. Then each became an authority on the elephant. The elephant was all trunk, or all hoof or all hide, or all tail. So ran their separate truths. The single truth was that all were blind. This fable, pertinent to our study, might be continued to tell how some of the blind men returned to their kingdoms of the blind where it was advantageous to believe that the elephant was all trunk or tusk.

Many authors who are not hostile to the Negro and some who profess friendship still stress a "peculiar endowment" at the expense of the Negro's basic humanity. Some antislavery authors seemed to believe that submissiveness was a mystical African quality, and chose mulattoes for their rebellious heroes, attributing militancy and intelligence to a white heritage. Many contemporary authors exploit the Negro's quaintness, his "racial qualities." Whether they do this for an escape from drab, standardized life or out of genuine artistic interest or, in the case of Negro authors, out of race pride, their work suffers from the narrowness of allegory. It must be added that these authors play into the hands of reactionaries, who, once a difference is established, use it to justify peculiar position and peculiar treatment.

Whether the Negro was human was one of the problems that racked the brains of the cultured Old South. The finally begrudged admission that perhaps he was, has remained largely nominal in letters as in life. Complete, complex humanity has been denied to him. He is too often like characters in the medieval allegories: now Loyalty, or Mirth, or Servility, or Quaintness, or Exuberance, or Brutishness, or Lust. Only seldom is he shown as Labor or Persecution, although he was brought here to supply the first, and as payment received the second.

Since there is no stereotype without some basis in actuality, it goes without saying that individuals could be found resembling Page's loyal Uncle Billy or Stark Young's William Veal, or Dixon's brutal Gus, or Scarlet Sister Mary or Van Vechten's Lasca, or even Uncle Tom and Florian Slappey. But when, as is frequent, generalizations are drawn from these about a race or a section, the author oversteps his bounds as novelist, and becomes an amateur social scientist whose guesses are valueless, and even dangerous. Fiction, especially on so controversial a subject as the American Negro, is still subjective, and novelists would do well to recognize that they are recording a few characters in a confined social segment, often from a prejudiced point of view. They cannot, like Bacon, take all for their province.

Fortunately for American fiction, however, there have been authors, even from the outset, who heard the Negro speak as Shakespeare heard Shylock:

He hath disgraced me ... laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains, scorned my nation ... cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and what's his reason? I am a Jew.... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that.

We shall see in the nineteenth century many writers, from Melville to Cable, who have shown sympathy and comprehension. Nevertheless it is to present-day realists, a large number of them southerners, that one must look for the greatest justice to Negro life and character. They have been less concerned with race than with environment; they have sought to get at social causes rather than to prop a social order.

EARLY APPEARANCES

Now, shentiman, I say, dat de first man was da black a-man, an' de first woman was de black a-woman: get two-tree children; de rain vasha dese, an' de snow pleach, an' de coula came brown, yella, coppa coula, and at de last quite fite....

a string of incredible stories about New England witches--grisly ghost horses without heads,--and hairbreadth escapes, and bloody encounters among the Indians.

But it was in his legs that nature had indulged her most capricious humor. There was an abundance of material injudiciously used. The calves were neither before nor behind, but rather on the outer side of the limb, inclining forward.... The leg was placed so near the center as to make it sometimes a matter of dispute whether he was not walking backward.

If he is not I don't know who the devil is. A man who serves his country, is true to his messmate, and has no sulk about him, I call a saint, so far as mere religion goes. I say, Guinea, my hearty, give the chaplain a grip of the fist.... A Spanish windlass would not give a stronger screw than the knuckle of that nigger an hour ago; and now, you see to what a giant may be brought!

Cooper thus anticipates later creators of Negro characters, presenting the faithful house servant, the courageous man of action, and the octoroon doomed to tragedy. Though crudely recorded, his dialect rises above the usually impossible Negro speech in early novels. No abolitionist, Cooper still did not favor slavery, and honest observer that he was, he refuses to see the Negro, even when grotesquely described, as subhuman.

In them he satirized his companions without mercy ... and did not spare his own master, whom he compared to a squirrel that had lived upon good corn so long that he now hungered for bad in his desire for change.

a moral steam engine. He pushed his master as well as his brother slaves.... Push at the beginning, push in the middle, push at the end, and Ben's pushing made crops.

In numbers, and a certain rudimentary realism, the Negro characters in Simms' many novels go beyond those of any other early nineteenth century novelist. Simms bungles when he tries to record the Gullah dialect, but the effort is worthy of comment. Striving to be accepted as a southern gentleman, Simms shows his slaves, generally, to be well cared for and contented. Nevertheless, his urge to realism kept him from showing slavery to be an endless picnic. Masters held forth freedom as a reward for service; they knew, if the contented slaves did not. All in all, however, Simms is noteworthy more for the extensiveness of his gallery of Negroes than for any depth of characterization.

Toby in Poe's "The Journal of Julius Rodman" is "as ugly an old gentleman as ever spoke, having ... swollen lips, large white protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and bow-legs." He is another of Poe's sad attempts at humor. Jupiter, in "The Gold-Bug" , traditionally refuses to leave his master, but threatens in all seriousness to beat him, a hot-blooded cavalier, with a big stick. His dialect, an attempt at Gullah, is language belonging with Poe's masterpieces, "out of space and out of time." Poe revealed that his southern upbringing had borne fruit, however, when, defending slavery from "the fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists" he writes that it is the will of God that the Negro should have a "peculiar nature," of which one characteristic is his tremendous loyalty to his master, "to which the white man's heart is a stranger." The master has a "reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent":

a gigantic coal-black negro ... retained all his barbaric virtues and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce from a fortress.

If Daggoo is the "noble savage," Pip, as sympathetically created, is of another breed. Pip's cowardice is not considered racial but is naturally human.

Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod's forecastle ye shall see him, beating his tambourine, prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels and beat his tambourine in glory: called a coward here, hailed a hero there!

Negro sailors, generally courageous and praiseworthy, occur in Melville's other romances of the sea.

"Oh Goramighty massy on dis soul; de debil hesef on top of brudder Seize!..." Jis then I moaned out in a orful doleful vise, "Hiperkrit, cum tu hell, I has a claim ontu you fu holdin the bag while Seize stole co'n." He jes rar'd backwards, an' fell outen the door wif his hans locked, an' sed he in a weak ... sort of vise, "Please marster" an' jis fainted, he soon cum to a-runnin', fer I hearn the co'n crashin thru the big field like a in-gine were runnin' express thru hit. I hain't seen Simon ter this day.

Other humorists tell of frontier surgery upon slaves; if they were not ill before, they were near death's door after the barbarous operations.

The tone of the humorists is burlesque, which often sinks to the level of present-day "darky" jokes. Nevertheless, southern humor is significant. The assumption that Negroes are especially designed as butts for rough practical jokes is probably closer to the reality of the antebellum South than the sentimentality of more ambitious works.

True to the manner of cracker-box philosophers, Artemus Ward attacks the sentimentalized and the unconventional, and delivers many of the "common-man's" jibes at abolitionists and Negroes. "The Octoroon" is, at least, a refreshing departure from the shopworn tragic mode.

"Hush--shese a Octoroon!"

"No! sez I ... yu don't say so! How long she bin that way?"

"From her arliest infuncy," sed he.

"Wall, what upon arth duz she do it fur?" I inquired.

"She kan't help it.... It's the brand of Kane."

Oberlin College is lampooned for being rather "too strong on Ethiopians." Though a good Unionist in the war, Artemus Ward, unlike his successor Nasby, does not reveal any sympathy for the Negro.

Although in a few cases propaganda for or against slavery raises its head, these subsidiary characters are not made into walking arguments. Toward the end of this period, however, the slavery debate broke out, and, in the words of one critic, "the world of nature was lost in the world of controversy."

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

THE PLANTATION TRADITION: PRO-SLAVERY FICTION

The setting is familiar:

The old plantation; a great mansion; exquisitely gowned ladies and courtly gentlemen moving with easy grace upon the broad veranda behind stalwart columns; surrounding the yard an almost illimitable stretch of white cotton; darkies singingly at work in the fields, Negro quarters, off on one side, around which little pickaninnies tumbled in gay frolic.

It is used in advertisements for coffee, pancake flour, phonograph records, and whiskey. It is a favorite American dream. The characters are as constant as the cotton bolls: the courtly planter, the one hundred per-cent southern belle, the duelling cavalier, the mammy or cook, "broadbosomed ... with vari-colored turban, spotless apron, and beaming face," the plantation uncle, black counterpart "of the master so loyally served and imitated," and the banjo-plunking minstrel of the quarters.

Plantation tradition fiction, reenforcing proslavery thought, was in turn reenforced by it. Occasionally southern economists admitted that slavery was the basis of southern commerce and civilization. But these dismal scientists were too outspoken for the sentimental romancers. Southern physiologists who proved that "by an unknown law of nature none but the black race can bear exposure to the tropical sun," justified the sippers of juleps on shaded verandahs. Theologians defended slavery as having Biblical support since Ham was cursed by God. In the main, however, the plantation tradition advanced less unfeeling arguments: the grown-up slaves were contented, the pickaninnies were frolicking, the steamboat was hooting around the bend, God was in his heaven, and all was right with the world.

essentially parasitical, dependent upon guidance for his most indispensable necessaries, without foresight or thrift of any kind.... I am quite sure they never could become a happier people than I find them here.... No tribe of people have ever passed from barbarism to civilization whose progress has been more secure from harm, more genial to their character, or better supplied with mild and beneficent guardianship adapted to the actual state of their intellectual feebleness, than the negroes of Swallow Barn.

In accordance with this ideal coloring, Negro children are shown "basking on the sunny sides of cabins terrapins luxuriating on the logs of a mill-pond." Slaves seem to be kept busiest tending their own garden patches, of which they sell the produce. "I never meet a Negro man--unless he is quite old--that he is not whistling; and the women sing from morning to night." Negroes are shown as ludicrous:

And when to these are added a few, reverend, wrinkled decrepit old men, with faces shortened as if with drawing strings, noses that seemed to have run all to nostril, and with feet of the configuration of a mattock, my readers will have a tolerably correct idea of the negro-quarter.

Hardships come chiefly from meddling abolitionists: "We alone are able to deal properly with the subject." Kennedy shows how he can add sweetening to the bitter by explaining the breaking up of families as follows:

broken hearted slaves killin' themselves in despair--task-master's whip acuttin' into their flesh--burnin' suns,--day o' toil--nights o' grief--pestilential rice grounds--chains--starvation--misery and death,--grand figurs them for oratory.

He is unwilling that abolitionists should be lynched, but they should learn how the cowskin feels. To prove slavery no hardship, he reasons that a married woman is a slave, and if she happens to get the upper hand, the husband is a slave, and leads a worse life than any Negro. Sam's brother, a lawyer in Charleston, S. C., forces an old white swindler to buy a Negro back into slavery, for the good of the Negro. These stories do not belong to the plantation tradition, for some mention "nigger-jockies," i.e., "gentlemen who trade in nigger flesh," and a planter who has "one white wife and fourteen black concubines." But they are proslavery in sympathy. Sam Slick is significant in that he represents a large number of northerners who were never too fond of Negroes and strongly opposed abolition. Some of these became catchers of runaway slaves, and many expressed their hatred of the Civil War in the Draft Riots.

When William H. Thompson, Georgia humorist, sent Major Jones on his travels in the forties, he was able to get in many proslavery thrusts. Mary Jones wants to take along her slave Prissy, since she is unwilling to have white servants:

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