Northern Novelists. John William DeForest’s realistic novels of the South immediately after the Civil War, Miss Ravenal’s Conversion From Secession to Loyalty (1867) and Kate Beaumont (1872), contain minor Negro characters, but these are generally typical. In 1867, Rebecca Harding Davis wrote the dramatic, sympathetic Waiting For The Verdict, the first novel to deal with the dilemma of the fair Negro who attains a superior position without being suspected of having Negro blood. Constance Fenimore Woolson’s short stories of the South, written in the eighties, have been praised for their sane balance. In “Rodman The Keeper” she describes with sympathy the freedmen—bent, dull-eyed and ignorant, singing “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” on their way to the graves of Federal Soldiers “who had done something wonderful for them and their children.” Generally, however, Miss Woolson is irritated by the freedmen, reserving her liking for those who are traditionally loyal to their white-folks, and seeing little in “the glories of freedom” except the “freedom to die.” “King David” shows a Northern educator who gives up in the face of “universal, irresponsible ignorance.” Miss Woolson recognizes the shiftlessness and chauvinism of the planter class, but keeps her sharpness for the “misguided and untimely idealism” of northerners. She tries so hard to be just to the fallen ex-planter that she is less than just to the rising ex-slaves. In these grievous times, the second stood in the greater need of justice.

Tourgée. Albion Tourgée differed from Miss Woolson sharply in his discoveries. He had a good chance for observation. He was an officer in the Union Army, and after the war remained in North Carolina as a judge. If he is a typical example of a carpetbagger, then his class has met with grave underestimation. He was thoughtful, considerate, courageous and honest. Like Miss Woolson, he recognized the gravity of the problem facing the South. Unlike her, however, he did not believe that the problem existed only because the freedmen were irresponsible, ignorant and unready for citizenship. He had seen too often what she omitted from her picture: the mob violence of the Regulators and the Ku Klux Klan, the determination to restore slavery, the ostracism of the “misguided” school teachers, the burning of the schools. He was a humane man, and he could not hold his peace. But he spoke on the unpopular side, and today he is barely mentioned in histories of American literature.

A Fool’s Errand, by “One of the Fools” (1879), is largely autobiographical, and has been called “The Uncle Tom’s Cabin of Reconstruction.” Colonel Servosse, an officer of the Federal Army, took up residence in the South, foolishly believing that, with the end of the war, the North-South hostility would end. He soon learns better; for lending aid to Negroes in need he is called a “nigger lover,” for making a speech urging justice to Negroes he barely escapes being horsewhipped. Yankee schoolmarms are insulted. When northern troops are withdrawn, terrorization of Negroes quickly follows. A Union League organizer is killed by the Klan, which is composed of prominent southerners. Negroes are shown hard at work, struggling to make their living, enthusiastically welcoming schools, lurking about the edges of crowds at political meetings, listening intently to the speeches, or organizing for protection. In a section hotly intent that there shall be no “nigger witnesses, no nigger juries, no nigger voters,” all of this is insolence and insult.

Jerry is the type of uncle not before met with in American fiction. He is religious and devoted to Servosse, not out of loyalty of slave to master, but out of gratitude that Servosse was helping his people to true freedom. Jerry has his dignity; when whites ridicule his church services he says:

An’ when you all laughs at us, we can’t help tinkin’ dat we mout a done better ef we hadn’t been kep’ slaves all our lives by you uns.

But in one of his sermons, he tells too much about the Klan’s most recent murder, and he is swung from a tree to prove that “It don’t do fer niggers to know too much.” Another different Negro is the blacksmith, Bob Martin, who makes such a good living that he becomes a marked man for the night riders. He scornfully ridicules the superstition that the Klan is ghostly, showing his scarred back as proof of the Klan’s “humanity.” He tells a shocking story of his own beating, the abuse of his wife and daughter, the death of his baby, and the destroying of his home, all supposed to teach him to be more respectful of white folks and less anxious to vote for radicals. Bob is of the stuff of heroes, however; he was in the Union Army at Fort Wagner, and he doggedly swears that “ef dere’s any mo’ Kluckers raidin’ roun’ Burke’s Corner, dar’ll be some funerals too.” Later editions of A Fool’s Errand included documentary evidence of the sinister workings of the Klan, a key to the truth something like the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

The title A Fool’s Errand lays blame only on the folly of rash hopes for improvement in the South, not on the effort to get justice. Bricks Without Straw (1880) is a more developed attempt to show the desperate problem, to prove that without support from the rest of the country, those few who were struggling were “making bricks without straw.” Nimbus, the outstanding Negro character, is uneducated, but he fought in the Civil War, and is a man of courage and good, hard sense. Industrious and thrifty, he is disliked by the whites because he has a good house, a tobacco barn, a fine crop and valuable stock, and a church and schoolhouse on his place. He adds to these injuries the insult of wanting pay for his wife’s services, and schools and the vote for all of his people. When the Klansmen, among whom are many aristocrats—“the freedmen’s best friends”—come after him, Nimbus, aided by his wife Lugena, who fights with an axe, resists fiercely, and finally gets away. Returning years later, broken in health but not in spirit after experiencing riots, peonage and prison camps, Nimbus will not stay, but leads an exodus to Kansas. Elijah Hill, the schoolteacher, and Berry Lawson, good-natured avoider of trouble, but wily and loyal to Nimbus, are interesting minor figures.

Tourgée’s other books on the Negro are not so valuable as these. A Royal Gentleman (1881), written earlier as Toinette, is pretentious, with a crowded plot. Mabel, mother of Toinette, is crazed by her unhappy life as the mistress of a white slave owner, and tries to murder those who would inflict upon her daughter the same fate. But Toinette, a refined olive-skinned beauty, is in love with, and beloved by her owner. Since he is a “royal gentleman,” marriage cannot take place, and tragedy follows. The characters are idealized, and the incidents far-fetched. Hot Plowshares (1883) is a historical novel on the state of the nation preceding the Civil War. Great attention is paid to the rise of antislavery sentiment and the Underground Railroad. Pactolus Prime (1890) shows the economic hardships faced by Negroes in Washington, D. C. Pactolus is the father of a girl whom he disclaims in order that she may live as white, may be lifted “from shame to honor.” Upon her discovery of the real truth, she takes the vows as Sister Pactola, and dedicates her life to her race. The story is not completely convincing, but Tourgee again reveals himself as well conversant with problems faced by Negroes. These novels have more argument than characters in action, but the argument is what has been too easily forgotten today.

Hearn. To Lafcadio Hearn the southern novel was “gushy-floriated English—written in bad taste, wishy-washy trash.” With his sympathy for the underdog, strengthened by his connection with the quadroon Althea Foley, he admired Cable’s defense of the Negro. Nevertheless, Hearn did not censure the South openly. He held stock beliefs such as that the Negro would disappear in freedom—“dependent like the ivy, he needs some strong oak-like friend to cling to”—and that it was only the mulatto influence that made slaves unmanageable. Always attracted by the unusual and picturesque, Hearn became an authority on Louisiana lore, making friends with the bonnes vielles negresses, who sold homemade sweetmeats in New Orleans, and the mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie Laveau. But the teeming levees come to life only in sketches like “Dolly, an Idyl of the Levee” and “Banjo Jim’s Story” (1876). In the West Indies Hearn was struck by the “appetizing golden bodies of the Martinique Quadroons, sensuous but childlike,” gossiped with the washerwomen and treasured their soft slurring talk; and watched

the porteuses on their way to market in the early morning, huge baskets of fruit and vegetables balanced on their heads, their skirts tucked into a belt in front, showing the shapely muscled bronze of their legs, as they walked with all the lithe feline grace of some wild animal.