F. Hopkinson Smith. Few authors dealt with a rough-and-ready friendship between a swearing master and a none-too-obsequious slave in the manner of Edwards. More typical is the sentimental, genteel treatment of mutual affection as in Colonel Carter of Cartersville by F. Hopkinson Smith (1891), a portrait of a quixotic Virginia gentleman and his devoted servant, Chad. Chad exists only to prepare choice dishes of canvas-back duck and terrapin for his moneyless but epicurean master, to support the colonel’s hospitality with his pitiful stored earnings, to be a bulwark against the harsh Yankee world, and to express his disdain for people who are “not quality.” With his wife Henny, a similar model of loyalty, he furnishes comic relief and glorifies the “good old days.” Colonel Carter’s Christmas (1903) adds little to the characterization of the sentimental pair.

James Lane Allen. Sentimentalist and idealist, James Lane Allen could find little blemish in the antebellum South according to “Uncle Tom At Home in Kentucky”, his refutation of Mrs. Stowe. “Two Gentlemen of Kentucky” (1888) tells of the great affection between a sweet Kentucky Colonel—so unworldly that when he runs a store he chivalrously gives away the wares—and his faithful servant, Peter Cotton. Peter is completely self-forgetful, but must be made ludicrous as well. His blue-jeans coat, with very long and spacious tails, is embroidered with scriptural texts, the word “Amen” being located just “over the end of Peter’s spine.” The master’s death is followed in a year by Peter’s. The world after the Civil War was no fit place for these two, which is no great reflection, since too often they act like halfwits. In “King Solomon of Kentucky” (1891) a free Negro woman, who has made some money selling cakes and pies, buys a white vagabond on the block, because he was a friend of her dead Virginia master. The vagabond is regenerated and becomes the town hero in a cholera epidemic. The introduction of the auction block is almost unmatched in plantation tradition literature, but it is significant that a white man is the one sold from it.

Grace King and Kate Chopin. In resentment at Cable’s attacks upon the plantation tradition, discussed in the next chapter, many southerners set up Grace King and Kate Chopin as more truthful observers of Louisiana. Undoubtedly both are more traditional. Few troubles fret the slaves in Grace King’s stories, except in the case of octoroons who grieve that they are not white. “Monsieur Motte” tells of a Negro woman, Marcelite, who supports in a fashionable school the daughter of her dead mistress, pretending that money comes from a non-existent uncle, Monsieur Motte. In Balcony Stories (1893), Joe is likewise the devoted servant, begging to be sold because his master’s widow is in need of money. “A Crippled Hope” tells of a Negro girl, whose value as a nurse for sick slaves in the auction mart keeps her from being sold to “delicate ladies,” whom she would have loved to serve. When freedom comes she does not want it; she only wants to succor the ailing. “The Little Convent Girl” is about a sad-faced girl, who is suddenly discovered to have a negro mother. The girl drowns, escaping her fate. Even at the age of twelve, a tragic octoroon! Negroes not octoroons have a merry time:

And then what a rolling of barrels, and shouldering of sacks, and singing of Jim Crow Songs, and pacing of Jim Crow steps; and black skins glistening through torn shirts, and white teeth gleaming through red lips, and laughing, and talking ... bewildering, entrancing!

Kate Chopin was a sensitive, skillful teller of tales. Her Bayou Folk (1894) is a collection laid in and around Natchitoches Parish near Red River, of which she presents the local customs and patois admirably. But the Negroes she portrays are still models of loyalty and self-denial. In “A No Account Creole,” La Chatte, a broad black mammy, is guardian over the love affairs of the white creoles. “In and Out of Old Natchitoches” shows a fiery plantation owner who for a time flouts the community taboo of consorting with mulattoes. “In Sabine” depicts Uncle Mortimer protecting a white woman who is abused by her hard drinking husband. “Beyond the Bayou” shows a gaunt, black woman overcoming her extreme fear of the bayou to carry home a little white child whom she loves. “The Benitou’s Slave” pictures extreme devotion. “Desirée’s Baby”, probably Mrs. Chopin’s best known work, deals with a young creole husband and wife to whom is born a child who gives evidence of Negro blood. The outraged husband sends his wife away in disgrace. He then, discovers, through an old letter, that the Negro blood came from his own mother; she was thankful, she said, that her son would never know.

Of the numerous short stories defending the Old South space forbids more than mention of a selected few. Maurice Thompson in “Ben and Judas” (1889) wrote a good story of a mutual affection between owner and owned. In “The Balance of Power,” Thompson has a crafty Negro, who walks on “bofe sides of de fence,” managing it so that the young man wins the beautiful girl while her father is conceded the election. The story is inconsequential, but it does show the colonel winning political support by stating that his rival is supported by Negroes. Of a different type is “An Incident” by Sarah Barnwell Elliott, which dramatizes the terror at the “brute” Negro, and is concerned with “what answer the future would have for this awful problem.”

Summary. Plantation tradition fiction of the Reconstruction added realism of speech and custom, but with few exceptions, this realism was subordinated to the purpose of showing the mutual affection between the races which the North had partly destroyed in a foolish war. Negro characters, at their best, are shown only in relationship with kindly southern whites; at their worst, in relationship with predatory Yankees. They are never shown in relationship to themselves. They are confined to the two opposite grooves of loyalty or ingratitude. The authors, remembering their childhood when it is likely that they had Negro playmates as boon companions, made slavery a boyish romp. It was flattering to believe that their fathers and mothers were objects of universal love and worship. It was charming for a man accustomed to deference and submission to believe these to be ordained in heaven. It was uncomfortable to believe that irony, or shrewd appraisal could lurk behind the bland smile, the pull on the forelock, the low curtsey. Perish the thought! A kindly critic of the South paraphrases the legend:

Way down upon the Suwanee River the sun shines bright on my old Kentucky home, where, bound for Louisiana, Little Eva has a banjo on her knee, and Old Black Joe, Uncle Remus and Miss Sally’s little boy listen to the mocking-bird and watch a sweet chariot swing low one frosty mornin’. The gallant Pelham and his comrades bend forever over the hands of adorable girls in crinoline; under the duelling oaks Colonel Carter of Cartersville and Marse Chan blaze away at each other with pistols by the light of the silvery moon on Mobile Bay ...

And we might add: the happy slaves are forever singing in the beautiful fields of white cotton, and forever black mammies fondle their little marses and missies and exude love for all the rich folks in Dixie, and body servants rescue the perishing, care for the dying, serve their beloved masters until death let them depart in peace, to serve in heaven, forever and ever.

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