Of the short stories in abundance that idealized the Negro, in his place, a few examples must serve. Betty Reynolds Cobb, in “The Coward” shows little Nemi conquering his great fears, and facing a raging torrent in order to get a doctor for “li’l Missy.” (Cf. Kate Chopin’s “Beyond The Bayou.”) In Will Harben’s “The Sale of Uncle Rastus”, a nearly dead slave shams perfect health in order to fetch a better price for his bankrupt owner. His heroism reconciles his beloved master to an estranged brother, who bids two thousand dollars for him. “Dem boys done made up, en I fotch two thousand dollars! Whooee!” croaks Uncle Rastus at death’s door. “Abram’s Freedom,” by Edna Turpin, shows Emmaline, who has struggled to buy her husband’s freedom, saying: “Me an’ Abram ain’t got nothin’ to do in dis worl’ but to wait on you an’ master.” These are merely duplicates of stories by more talented Reconstruction authors, with names and settings changed. Their authors have little to say, but say it over and over.
Ruth McEnery Stuart rises a notch above these. Although she glorified the past in The River’s Children (1903) most of her work was local color of the deep South. In such works as Napoleon Jackson (1902), George Washington Jones (1903) and The Second Wooing of Salina Sue (1905), Negro life in the picturesquely shabby towns is quaint and droll, an unending source of mirth and satisfaction for the white-folks. Napoleon Jackson, the gentleman of the plush rocker, whose mother swore that he should never lay hand to a plow, worships old Marse and is therefore charming in Mrs. Stuart’s sight. His wife Rose Ann, a visionary, is astonished that people pity Negroes since “we see mo’n white folks sees.” Marital difficulties and burlesques of Negro church services furnish much of the drollery. Salina Sue, forced to marry her common-law husband, speaks of her fifteen-year old daughter: “Hit’ll be a mighty good an’ ’ligious thing for her to remember in after-years. Tain’t every yo’ng gal dat kin ricollec’ her pa an’ ma gittin’ married.”
Better known writers preserving the tradition include the gifted Sarah Orne Jewett, whose The Mistress of Sydenham Plantation is like Constance Woolson’s East Angels in showing a northern woman’s respect for a servant’s loyalty; Frank Stockton, who turned his facile invention to the Negro in The Cloverfield’s Carriage and The Late Mrs. Null; and Booth Tarkington who invests the old picture with charm in Penrod and Sam. All of these are superior writers to such southern writers as Mrs. Burton Harrison, Opie Read and Marion Harland, but they give no new interpretation. Some authors, like Virginia Frasel Boyle in Devil Tales (1900), followed Harris into the fertile field (and the wilderness) of folklore. Ed Mott’s The Black Homer of Jim Town (1900) is a collection of folk tales from the Cape Fear country of North Carolina. Most of them are trite. Slavery is remembered as a good time, and in one of the tallest of the tales, a Negro in the Federal army arrives at the battle just in time to intercept a bullet intended for his Confederate master, in whose arms he dies.
Women writers of the South have been particularly attracted to literary exercises about the legendary chivalry, the perfect masters and slaves. In their prefaces, they seem to consider it their duty to “interpret the Negro race” and to lecture upon the modern Negro’s deficiencies. Among these might be mentioned Emma Speed Sampson for Mammy’s White Folks (1919) and Miss Minerva On The Old Plantation (1923); Jane Baldwin Cotton for Wall-Eyed Caesar’s Ghost (1925) and Virginia McCormick for Charcoal and Chalk (1931). Pity for “the child who never had a fat, brown mammy with elastic lap and warm enfolding arms,” alternates with beaming appreciation of happy-hearted pickaninnies living an endless picnic. “A real understanding of our colored people” generally amounts to having great fun out of them. The dialect is often carefully recorded, but the Negroes say about the same things that Page had them say long ago, to flatter their white-folks and to make them laugh.
Although willing to poke gentle fun at his native South, O. Henry kept to its old tradition about Negro character. Uncle Bushrod in “The Guardian of The Accolade”, remembering Miss Lucy’s words for Marse Robert: “a little child but my knight, pure and fearless and widout reproach,” prevents Robert from absconding with what he thinks to be the cash of the bank, but what turns out to be two quarts of old silk velvet Bourbon. “The Fourth in Salvador” has a
buck coon from Georgia who had drifted down there from a busted-up colored colony that had been started on some possumless land in Mexico. As soon as he heard us say barbecue he wept for joy and groveled on the ground.
“The Emancipation of Billy” has an ancient body-servant, Old Jeff, a member of “de fambly,” who despises “Yankee rascality enduring’ the war,” speaking “de fambly’s” language to a T. “A Municipal Report” shows a faithful Negro coachman, Uncle Caesar, who supports his impoverished mistress, and kills her worthless husband (a professional southerner) for robbing her. A master of surprises, O. Henry has no surprises for us when he handles Negro characters. They belong to an endless line.
Irvin Cobb and The Professional Humorists. Irvin Cobb, whom some consider heir to the roving shoes of O. Henry, once had a favorite character declaim: “I ain’t no problem, I’se a pusson. I craves to be so reguarded.” But when Cobb regards Jeff Poindexter, he sees little more than a loyal and ridiculous servant, who says the right things. Jeff advises a white moving picture producer as follows:
Ef you kin git hold of a crowd of cullid actors w’ich is willin’ to ack lak the sho’nuff ole time cullid an’ not lak onbleached imitations of w’ite folks, it seems lak to me the rest of it oughter be plum easy. Mostly I’d mek the pitchers comical, ef I wuz you. You kin do ’at an’ still not hurt nobody’s feelin’s, w’ite nur black. Ef you wants to perduse a piece showin’ a lot of niggers gittin’ skinned, let it be another nigger w’ich skins em.... Then, w’en at the last, they gits even wid him it’ll still be nigger ag’inst nigger. An’ ef, oncet in awhile, you meks a kind of serious pitcher ... ’at ought to fetch there yere new-issue cullid folks w’ich is seemingly become so plentiful up Nawth. But mainly I’d stick to the laffin’ line ef I wuz you. An’ whatever else you does, don’t mess wid no race problem.
Irvin Cobb takes Jeff’s advice, fondly affectionate toward the “old time cullid,” derisive of the new-issue “onbleached imitations of w’ite folks,” unwilling to hurt the feelings of any of his large white audience. As a result, his books such as J. Poindexter, Colored and those about Old Judge Priest rise little above the joke-book level when dealing with Negroes, in spite of Cobb’s undoubted knowledge of his native Kentucky. McBlair’s Mister Fish Kelly (1924) is similarly traditional, with some surface truth to comic elements in Negro life, but too set upon tickling America.