Youma, “La Giablesse” and “Un Ravenant” are good fiction of the West Indies, but the wealth of Hearn’s sensitive observation appears in his travel reporting. He was better in describing settings than in presenting character.
Howells. The serious phase of Negro life that William Dean Howells thought worthy of inclusion in his canvas of the American scene was the age-worn tragedy of the octoroon. In An Imperative Duty (1892), Rhoda, the beautiful daughter of a northern physician and an accomplished octoroon, bore no evidence of Negro blood. On the eve of her marriage, she is told her lineage by her duty-bound aunt. Later, passing for an Italian and happily married to a man who is undisturbed by her lineage, she is still wretched at her “disgrace.” The novel is sympathetic, but there were graver, less romantic problems of Negro life that a novelist of Howells’ scope and ability might have presented.
Negro Novelists. Two Negro authors who had given their best energies to the antislavery struggle turned to fiction in the post-Civil War years. William Wells Brown’s My Southern Home (1880) included sketches of southern Negro folklife, before the successes of Page and Harris. Frances Harper, whose antislavery poetry was popular, now defended her race in Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted (1892). Iola, granddaughter of a Creole planter, has the experiences usual to fiction of the beautiful “white slave.” She is kept ignorant of her race, and educated in the North. When her white father’s marriage to her quadroon mother is called illegal, she is sold as a slave. After indignities in slavery, she is rescued, and serves as a nurse in a Civil War hospital. She rejects the love of a white New England physician, who, though knowing her race, wishes to marry her. With her brothers and long-lost uncle, all of whom refuse to “pass for white,” she dedicates herself to her people. The book is “uplifting” but is far from convincing in incident, speech, and characterization. Iola is another of the octoroon heroines too angelic for acceptance. Some of the minor characters are better, but they cannot redeem the novel.
Dunbar. Dunbar has aptly described the typical setting for his fiction:
Happy Hollow.... Wherever Negroes colonize in the cities or villages, North or South, wherever the hod-carrier, the porter, and the waiter are the society men of the town; wherever the picnic and the excursion are the chief summer diversion, and the revival the winter-time of repentance.... Wherever laughter and tears rub elbows by day, and the spirit of labour and laziness shake hands, there—there—is Happy Hollow.
In Old Plantation Days (1903) repeats the Thomas Nelson Page formula. Negro house servants comically ape the “quality,” or intervene in lovers’ quarrels, or in duels between cavaliers. One slave deceives his beloved master into believing that the good times of slavery still prevail. The planters, highbred and chivalrous, and the slaves, childish and devoted, rival each other in affection and sacrifice. These anecdotes of slavery, but a step above minstrel jokes, are all too happy for words, and too happy for truth.
The harshness of Reconstruction and of Dunbar’s own time is likewise conventionally neglected in his other volumes of short stories: Folks From Dixie (1898), The Strength of Gideon (1900), and The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904). Freedmen discover that after all their best friends are their kindly ex-masters. In “Nels Hatton’s Revenge,” an upstanding Negro gives his hard-earned money and best clothes to his destitute master, who had abused him when a slave. The venality of Reconstruction politicians, which certainly existed, is satirized; but the gains of Reconstruction, which certainly exist, are understressed. Probably with due cause, Dunbar feared the rising poor-whites; therefore, like many Negro spokesmen of the period, he idealized the ex-planter class, the “aristocrats,” without due cause.
Dunbar’s fiction veers away from anything more serious than laughter or gentle tears. “At Shaft 11” shows the difficulties of Negro strikebreakers; but, afraid of organized labor, Dunbar idealized owners, operators, and staunchly loyal Negro workers who get to be foremen, thus carrying over the plantation tradition formula into the industrial scene. “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope” faces the loose-living of a “Happy Hollow,” and then is lost in sentimental compromise. Dunbar wrote two stories of lynching, “The Lynching of Jule Benson” and the unusually ironic “The Tragedy at Three Corners.” But Dunbar usually places the hardships of Negro life in the city, as in “Jimsella,” with pastoral distrust of the city and faith in rural virtue. Fast livers, quacks, politicians and hypocritical race leaders are occasionally attacked.
The Sport of the Gods (1902), Dunbar’s most ambitious novel, is the only one that is chiefly about Negroes. The first of the book is trite, but the latter section, though confused and melodramatic, has a grimness that Dunbar seldom showed. Berry, the innocent victim of a degenerate white man’s crime in the South, and his family, the victim of hostile New York, are treated somewhat in the manner of Hardy’s tragic laughing-stocks. The book has serious weaknesses, but it gives promise that Dunbar, but for his untimely death, might have become a prose writer of power. Judged by his accomplishment, however, Dunbar in fiction must be considered as one who followed the leader, not as a blazer of new trails.
Chesnutt. Charles Waddell Chesnutt, however, deserves to be called a pioneer. Writing to counter charges such as those made by Page in Red Rock, Chesnutt is the first to speak out uncompromisingly, but artistically, on the problems facing his people. One careful critic has stated that Chesnutt “was the first Negro novelist, and he is still the best,” and another has said that his books contain early drafts of about all of the recent Negro novels.