Read Ebook: The Negro in American fiction by Brown Sterling A Locke Alain Editor

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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:

I could never bear to see a white gall toatin' my child about, waiting on me like a nigger. It would hurt my conscience to keep anybody 'bout me in that condition, who was as white and as good as me.... A servant, to be any account as a servant, is got to have a different kind of spirit from other people; and anybody that would make a nigger of a white child, because it was pore, hain't got no Christian principle in 'em.

Uncle Ned believes that abolitionists have horns like billy-goats, eyes like balls of fire, and great forked tails like sea serpents. "Ugh, chile, dey wusser'n collery-morbus." When these fierce creatures get hold of Negroes, ruin is come; here is Major Jones describing the free Negroes of the North:

Pore, miserable, sickly-lookin' creaters! it was enuff to make a abolitionist's hart ake to see 'em crawlin' out of the damp straw of the cellars, to sun themselves on the cellar-dores till they got able to start out to by or to steal sumthing to eat ... many of 'em was diseased and bloated up like frogs, and lay sprawlin' about like so many cooters in a mud-hole ... like lizards in a pile of rotten logs.... This, thinks I, is nigger freedom: this is the condition to which the philanthropists of the North wants to bring the happy black people of the South!

Dinah: "... An' den wha' would be de feelin's of your own Dinah. She would curse de hour when she was born. No, no! I cannot consent to be a party to sich an arrangement."

Tom: "How silly you talk. You will do noffin yourself, an' you will let no one help. I begin to think, you hab revoked your decision.... Dere you hab it; you now know'd my feelin's."

Dinah did not know what to say in reply ... "there is something in this idea of being free that I cannot comprehend," she thought to herself.

to the real, bitter, oppression that in our own midst sweeps its thousands out of a life of penury into premature graves?

Tears should not be shed for Uncle Tom--"a hardy, strong and powerful Negro"--but should be reserved for helpless, defenseless, children--"of the same color as yourself." Writing of plantation Negroes she wishes that she too had "taken lessons of a colored professor, and was conversant enough with Negro dialect, to launch out boldly into their sea of beauties," but she is forced to leave the speech to her readers' imagination. Little is left to their imagination, however, when she describes the cabins of the field-hands, embowered in Cherokee roses. At this point, the book's illustration resembles a suburban paradise adjoining the White House. When the slave-mistress gently patted a quadroon's head, she "intimated a freedom which is not often shown to the servants in the North." Mrs. Rush is correct here; there was a great deal of such freedom.

"Dis, sir, is no country for free black men: Africa de only place he, sir...."

Aunt Judy's African blood had not been corrupted by the base mingling of a paler strain. Black as ebony was her smooth and shining skin, on which the dazzling ivory of her teeth threw gleams bright as the moon at midnight. Judy had loved--adored, reverenced her, as being of a superior, holier race than her own.

his skull has a hardness and thickness greater than our own, which defy the arrowy sunbeams ... and his skin secretes a far greater quantity of moisture and throws back the heat absorbed by us.

Crissy, misled by an abolitionist, crosses the Ohio and finds freedom too much for her--"the only slavery she had ever known." An incipient revolt is nipped by Moreland, who, appalled by "the intolerable burden of the slaves' treachery and ingratitude" says:

I would rather, ten thousand times, cultivate these broad fields myself, than be served by faithless hand and false, hollow hearts. I have hands that can work. I would do it cheerfully; if labor was the portion God had assigned to me in the world. Better, far better, the toiling limbs than the aching heart! He paused a moment in indescribable emotion.

The slaves, naturally, break down and weep. All are forgiven, except Vulcan, who had lifted his "rebel arm" against Moreland: "You must never more wield the hammer or strike the anvil for me.... Go--you are free!" Poor Vulcan....

Make me free! how can I free any more? Dem da nonsense people, and what dem want take me from Miss Alice for?... I wonder if I been sick and couldn't do any ting, ef dem would nuss me and take care o' me liken Miss Alice.... I tink dem crazy 'bout free. Free bery good ting, but free ent all; when you sick, free won't make you well, free won't gib you clo's, no hom'ny, let 'lone meat.

I am so satisfied that slavery is the school God has established for the conversion of barbarous nations, that were I an absolute Queen of these United States, my first missionary enterprise would be to send to Africa, to bring the heathen as slaves to this Christian land, and keep them in bondage until compulsory labor had tamed their beastliness....

Mrs. Schoolcraft was a bit late, however; for over two centuries countless ships had been sent, and millions of Africans had been brought "to school" in Christian lands.

Since "not a living man can swear that he has ever heard antislavery sentiment from a slave in the South," the suffering of the Negro, to Mrs. Schoolcraft, is a lie whipped up by northern politicians. Runaway slaves are always the good-for-nothing rowdies, who flee to escape work and discipline. The separation of slave husbands and wives is no tragedy, since all are polygamists as in Africa.

It is not believed by the author that such a monstrosity has ever occurred in South Carolina, as a mistress there usually takes more care of her little Negro property than a black mother ever does of her children.

Well, heah's sump'n else, mastuh: we read in the book of Leviticus dat de childin of Isr'l was told dey should buy slaves. I marked de place, and I'll jes read it to you; doe I s'pose you's seed it many a time. It's in de twenty-fif' chapter, de forty-fif' and sixt' verse.

Truly religious, Moses says that he submits because the Bible tells him that such is his duty. Justus approaches the second Negro with ludicrous pomp: "Let an ardent desire to alleviate the woes of the suffering plead my excuse for the breach of decorum." To this the Negro responds: "What for massah make fun of puoh nigger dis way!" The third specimen, farthest down in the physical and mental scale, runs away with Justus, only to steal his horse and saddle-bags and return to his master. Justus soon learns the proslavery creed that freeing the Negro will merely "people the penitentiary or feed the gibbet."

Nature, by their inferior capacity and cheerful submission to their lot, has so well fitted them for this position.... The lot of the serving classes in all countries imposes a burden.

The intractable, the ironic, the abused Negro is nowhere on these plantations. Congressmen might deplore in legislative halls the injuries done the South by the Underground Railroad, and southern newspapers might be filled with descriptions of runaways, some second offenders with branded scars on their faces. But runaways in these books are generally flighty creatures and half-wits, and even they finally steal back to the South. Judicial records might be full of instances of brutality, but the occasional whippings are shown to be for due cause such as stealing a ham from a poor woman who could not spare it. Miscegenation is missing in spite of the proofs walking about in the great houses or in the fields or the slave-pens. Slavery is shown as a beneficent guardianship, never as a system of cheap and abundant labor that furnished the basis of a few large fortunes .

In spite of the exaggerations and omissions, however, certain damning evidence creeps in. Though too kind to maltreat Negroes, the cavaliers are adept at tarring-and-feathering, riding on rails, and lynching abolitionist villains, probably out of consideration for the Negro's welfare. Slavery is sometimes considered as not the Negro's final state; at some indefinite time he would be returned to Africa to bear witness to the civilization and Christianity he had seen in America. And lastly, the arguers are betrayed by their argumentative tactics: It isn't true; but since it is, you are worse. Thus: it isn't true that slavery is a bad system, it is really a fine thing--no worse than the northern and English system of wage-slavery, which is terrible. Proslavery authors were justified in protesting the exploitation of northern factory workers, but to argue that therefore slavery was blessed, is to prove that a man's broken leg is not painful since another man has a broken arm.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

ANTISLAVERY FICTION

When antislavery fiction appeared, therefore, it found an audience prepared, and the arguments, the characters and a literary form set up.

Under a burning sun, hundreds of collared men ... toiling in trenches.... Standing grimly over these, were men unlike them; armed with long thongs, which descended upon the toilers.

After close scrutiny the strangers, in amazement, swear that the slaves are men. For this they are branded as "firebrands, come to light the flame of revolt." The southern spokesman exclaims: "The first blow struck for them dissolves the Union of Vivenza's vales. The northern tribes well know it." Melville warns northerners not to feel self-righteous, and does not malign southerners, since "the soil decides the man," and they have grown up with slavery. Some slaves even seem happy, but Melville adds significantly "not as men." Melville is perplexed about the solution, and fatalistically concludes that "Time must befriend these thralls," but he is certain that slavery is "a blot, foul as the crater-pool of hell."

Were we content to be an humble imitator, we know of no one whom we should be prouder to follow than the noble author of that wonderful work "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But we owe it to ourselves to say that our little book was projected before the publication of the latter; and our Jamie Parker, we think, had only one predecessor--and that we had not seen--in this species of literature.

Fact is, I've got a specimen lot ... of Anglo-Saxon blood, I reckon they calls it; at any rate, I'm takin' ter market some of the best blood in the "Old Dominion".... Ingenus, ain't it now, for a body to tarn a body's own blood to sich account.

A Yankee overseer, who "calculates what a nigger is wuth, and how long he'll last on the hard drive plan;" a beautiful octoroon and her mother, crazy Millie, deranged by the tragedy of slavery, are types that will frequently be met with in later fiction. Although apologetic to "fastidious readers" who might object to her recording "dialectal peculiarities," Mrs. Pierson kept voluminous notebooks "to secure accuracy in the nondescript vernacular of the cabin and the hut." She sees the social setting, likewise, with accuracy; she records what southern novelists preferred not to show: the poor whites, not an accident but a logical result of slavery; and the worn-out, profitless land, which brought it about that Virginia's best crop was the crop of slave children in the quarters.

When Mrs. Stowe rattled the bones of the skeletons in southern closets, howls arose from the manors. A South Carolinian recorded the rumor:

That the whole "nigger kingdom" of the South had been killed, smothered, torn to pieces by bloodhounds, ground up for bone manure; children dragged from mothers' breasts, and the whole plantations turned into slaughter-houses, we fully expected; and yet nobody had read it.

This was an indirect admission that a white man in chains was more pitiful to behold than the African similarly placed. Their most impassioned plea was in behalf of a person little resembling their swarthy prot?g?s....

The plots are strained and melodramatic. Too often the kindly disposed master dies suddenly, without having chance to fulfill his promises of freedom. Too often, on the other hand, the slave's problems are solved by breaks of good luck at the book's end.

DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

RECONSTRUCTION: THE GLORIOUS SOUTH

The authors of the reconstruction were better writers than their antebellum predecessors. Moreover, they were farther from slavery, and since their memories were often those of childhood, they idealized to a much greater degree. Some proslavery authors, like William Thompson, had admitted, for instance, that many slaves had the harshest kind of masters; others unconsciously allowed facts to enter that their descendants considered too uncouth for mention. Nostalgic yearning brought it about that, according to Gaines:

Slavery was softened until whatever may have been evil was regarded as accidental.... The scale of life was steadily enlarged, the colors were made increasingly vivid. Estates swelled in size and mansions grew proportionately great. Gentlemen were perfected in courtly grace, gay girls in loveliness, slaves in immeasurable devotion.

With the seductiveness of any past seen through "the golden haze of retrospect," with realism to the surface of Negro life, disarmingly affectionate references to Negroes of the old school, and a mastery of the tricks of fiction, the plantation tradition came into its own. The Negro was established as contented slave, entertaining child and docile ward, until misled by "radical" agitators, when he became a dangerous beast.

Dem wuz good ole times, marster--de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac'! Niggers didn't hed nothing 'tall to do.... Dyar warn' no trouble nor nothin'.

Uncle Edinburg seconds the emotion:

Oh! nuttin' warn' too good for niggers dem times; an' de little niggers wuz runnin' roun' right 'stracted.... Dis nigger ain' nuver gwine forgit it."

And Uncle Billy:

I wuz settin' in de do' wid meh pipe, an heah 'em settin' dyah on de front steps, dee voices soun'in low like bees, an' de moon sort o' mellow over de yard, an' I sort o' got to studyin' an' hit pear like de plantation live once mo', an' de ain' no mo' scufflin', an de ol times done come back agin....

You knows de way to de spring and de wood-pile, an' de mill, an' when you gits a little bigger I's gwine to show you de way to de hoe-handle, an' de cawn-furrer, an' dat's all de geog-aphy a nigger's got to know.

Bimeby, one day, after Brer Fox bin doin' all dat he could fer ter ketch Brer Rabbit, en Brer Rabbit bin doin' all he could fer to keep 'im fum it, Brer Fox say to hisse'f dat he'd put up a game on Brer Rabbit, en he ain't mo'n got de wuds out'n his mouf twel Brer Rabbit come a lopin up de big road, lookin' des ez plump en ez fat, en ez sassy ez a Moggin hoss in a barley patch....

"All right, Brer Fox, but you better holler fum whar you stan'. I'm monstus full er fleas dis mawnin'," sez Brer Rabbit, sezee.

Strewn through the stories is much local color, well-observed and true. Fine turns of speech reveal the slave's mind. The use of Brer Rabbit as the hero is noteworthy. Forced to pit his cunning against enemies of greater physical strength, he was perhaps a symbol for people who needed craft in order to survive. But whether victor over Brer Wolf, or victim to the Tar-baby, he is a likeable scamp, who has come loping lickety-split down the years.

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