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.
In spite of the publishers’ dicta that certain authors know the Negro better than Negroes themselves; in spite of certain authors who believe that slave-holding ancestry is necessary in order truly to know Negroes (on the theory that only the owner, or his descendants, can know the owned); in spite of the science of Negro mind-reading, flourishing below the Mason-Dixon line, it is likely that Negro authors will, after the apprentice years, write most fully and most deeply about their own people. As we go to the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the French for the truth about their people; as we go to the workers and not to the stockholders, to the tenants and croppers and not to the landlords, for the truth about the lives of tenants and croppers, so it seems that we should expect the truth of Negro life from Negroes. The Negro artist has a fine task ahead of him to render this truth in enduring fiction. So far, much of what seems truthful has been the work of sympathetic white authors. In all probability white authors will continue to write about the Negro. Sometimes similarly conditioned in America’s class structure, sometimes extremely sensitive and understanding, they will get at valuable truth. But Negro novelists must accept the responsibility of being the ultimate portrayers of their own.
CHAPTER I
EARLY APPEARANCES
Early Fiction. When Americans started to write novels, at the end of the eighteenth century, the Negro was definitely part and parcel of American life. Colonial authors from Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewall to Benjamin Franklin, Crèvecour and John Woolman had protested his enslavement. He was the rock upon which the constitution nearly split. In the North, there were still a few slaves and a growing body of freedmen, some of whom, like Phillis Wheatley, Benjamin Banneker, Richard Allen, and Crispus Attucks, were more than locally known. The vast hordes of slaves, together with a good number of free Negroes, were a more integral part of southern society. They had cleared the forests and laid the roads, had built the fine houses and wrought the beautiful iron-work; had labored on the tobacco, rice, indigo and cotton plantations so that their masters could buy more slaves. Cotton was not yet king, the cotton-gin was not invented; but the broad backs of the slaves were still supporting a heavy load. Whether as house-servant grateful for easy favors, and contributing to the master’s feeling of safety, or field-hand, or fugitive stealing away to the North, or intractable revolter, throwing both northern and southern communities into consternation, the Negro was recognizably part of the American scene.
But the first groping American novels were still tied to Mother England’s leading strings. For all of their patriotism, the novelists were little concerned with American actualities. When the Negro character was included, he was a shadowy figure in the background, an element of romantic side interest, closer to Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko and Defoe’s fiction than to what the novelists could have seen about them.
The earliest novels, William Hill Brown’s The Power of Sympathy (1789) and Mrs. Susannah Rowson’s The Inquisitor (1794), true to their sentimental models, have antislavery feeling. Hugh Brackenridge’s Modern Chivalry (1792 to 1815) contains a good ironic attack upon the slave-trade, and a less successful character Cuff, whose jargon seems plucked out of Defoe:
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....
Royal Tyler’s The Algerine Captive (1797) deplores the “middle passage” horrors of the slave-trade in the sentimental mode: “I thought of my native land and blushed.” Charles Brockden Brown’s novels contain Negro characters only incidentally. There were no English models to make these early novelists aware that servitude and struggle could be subjects for fiction.
Irving. In the nineteenth century, interest in the Negro increased. In Salmagundi (1807) Washington Irving, a brisk young man-about-town, records the Negro curiosities he finds, such as the “Negro wench, principal musician at a ball.” He describes a dance in Haiti with unctuous ridicule: