But that is a well paying business, as such writers as Hugh Wiley, Arthur Akers, Octavus Roy Cohen and E. K. Means have discovered. Belonging to light entertainment literature, their stories would hardly deserve serious attention, were it not for their undoubted social influence. With situations ranging from the improbable to the unreal, the comedy, the farce are not “pure,” but are mixed all up with propaganda for Negro inferiority and subordination. These authors stem from Page and the Reconstruction: although they stress the comical, they likewise urge the mutual affection between funny Negroes and their fine white-folks, and bear witness to the sunny life of the South. Guy Johnson has written that there is a sort of
folk attitude of the white man toward the Negro.... He must have his fun out of the Negro, even when writing serious novels about him.
How much more fun the professional marketmen of humor have out of the Negro is apparent when one reads the stories of Wiley, Akers, and Cohen, to name only three who write for wide circulation magazines such as The Saturday Evening Post and the Red Book. With the help of the radio, these family magazines see to it that there is a comic Negro in every middle class home.
Hugh Wiley in the twenties presented Wildcat, inseparable from Lady Luck, his unsavory goat. Like O. Henry, Wiley uses outrageous metaphors, but one does not have to believe the language to be Negro merely because it is amusing. Pet expressions are such as “crematized or secluded in de ground” for burial rites, “paraphernalia of chance” for dice, and other minstrel joke-book relics. The humor is broad, concerned with perspiring three-hundred pound black Amazons, “battling brunettes,” a goat outsmelling creation, whose butting causes Wildcat to “skid over the curb in a pose which cost his army pants half of their seating capacity.” Wildcat is a “champion ration battler,” barely making it on four meals a day, lazy except at the irresistible crap game, where he wins fabulous sums with other-worldly luck. Characters are named Miss Cuspidora Lee, Vitus Marsden, Honey Tone, Dwindle Daniels, Punic Hunter, Presidump Ham Grasty, Festus Roach. There are many jobs (generally unwelcome) and a great deal of money and food in circulation; the law is loud-mouthed but gentle; things are “hotsy-totsy” down in Dixie, Lady Luck and the whitefolks will see to that. It all strives very hard, but it could be more amusing.
Of these professionally funny men, Octavus Roy Cohen is probably most widely known and industrious. Cohen and his large following are entranced by the comedy of what Cobb called “onbleached imitations of white folks.” The idea of Negro doctors, lawyers, bankers, movie-magnates and society belles in Birmingham is too funny, but not too funny for words. Some of his annual books are Assorted Chocolates (1922), Dark Days and Black Knights (1923), Bigger and Blacker (1925), Black and Blue (1926) and Highly Colored (1921). All are highly colored: he names his characters Orifice Latimer, Callous Deech, Magnolius Ricketts, Excelsior Nix, Forcep Swain, Exotic Hines, Unit Smith, Jasper De Vord, Chromo Bridal and Atlas Brack. His dialect is one unheard on land or sea: “Got to ain’t has got;” “I ain’t sawn her right recent;” “Does anybody discover that I ain’t you, you is suddenly gwine to become ain’t;” “salisfried, straduced, light bombastic, applicatin, foolisment; oh, whoa is me!” The plots and counterplots generally turn around the axis of money or love; the honest hero defeats the slickers, the boy gets the girl. Florian Slappey, in Harlem, is fleeced in the cold winter by two Harlem number men, but the happy ending is usual. The Sons and Daughters of I Will Arise, The Enter Paradise In Style Life and Death Sassiety, and The Over The River Buryin’ Sassiety figure prominently. There seems to be a great deal of money in Negro Birmingham, but when Cohen speaks of a Negro star being paid one hundred dollars a week by a Negro movie company, he reveals his myth-making powers. One of Cohen’s recent heroes, Epic Peters, is a pompously talking Pullman porter, proud of his service to “quality white folks” whom he can tell at a glance, happy, amusing, and about as real as his speech: “Goodness, goshness, Miss Agness, Mr. Foster—I suttinly thought I was gwine see you become ain’t.”
Arthur K. Akers’ world is less unreal, but equally droll. Jeff thus explains his connubial woes:
Hit’s on account of me bein’ weak in de’rithmetic. Dat’s huccome I cain’t ricollect is I got two weddin’s and three d’voces, or three weddin’s an’ two d’voces. Emmline come in dar somewhar.
Akers has a fondness for names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Columbus Collins, Aspirin Edwards and Halfportion. His intricate plots invariably end happily for the dull-witted, inept heroes such as Gladstone Smith who is “numb from the neck up.” Ipecac Ignalls, looking like “something dark that had been left under a tent—an orange-colored tent with LIFE GUARD lettered across it” does not know how to swim, but he saves the life of a belle by letting her stand on him while he is on the bottom of the pool drowning. Other comedy is furnished by lodge-life and financial high-jinks performed by the Worthymost Master Samson Bates and Horace Tombs, who are Get Rich Quick Wallingfords in blackface.
E. K. Means, whose stories were collected in volumes called E. K. Means, More E. K. Means, and Further E. K. Means, insists that he wrote out of a whimsical fondness for the Negro “to whom God has given two supreme gifts—Music and Laughter.” He seems to agree with one of his white characters, however, that the Negro “has a one-cylinder mind and a smoky spark-plug.” Nigger-Heel Plantation, Hen Scratch Saloon, Shoofly Methodist Church, Tickfall and Dirty Six are treated with a mixture of true local color and far-fetched tom-foolery. The characters have ludicrous names like Whiffletree Bone, Limit Lark, Vakey Vopp, Dazzle Zenor, Coco Ferret, Ready Rocket, Vinegar Atts, Skeeter Butts. Means attacks conventional dialect, yet he makes use of invented phrases: “explavacatin”, “permittunce,” “coming wid a looseness,” “de orgies” (for church services), “ax her inquirement,” “ain’t right in her intellectuals,” “I warn’t studyin’ how to save by grace; I was ponderin’ how to save my grease.” Means regrets that the good life lived by these naïve villagers is departing; “Ethiopia is stretching out her hands after art, science, literature and wealth,” Negroes are becoming “play-like white folks.” He wishes to leave a record of the “sable sons of laughter and song, in Fiction’s beautiful temple of dreams.” The laughter, however, is chiefly the haw-hawing of the white folks; the dreams are practical jokes. Something of the sinister and ugly is recognized; Negroes at their Uplift League election wrench legs off of tables in a free-for-all, shot-guns and razors are frequently used, but the picture remains quaint and comical. In almost every story we have panic-stricken Negroes “skedaddling,” their “ponderous feet beating a wild tattoo of panicky retreat upon the sodded turf;” oddly enough, one cause for fright never mentioned is a southern mob.
These authors contrive a rapid-fire dialogue, now near to life (as in Akers) and now to the minstrel show (as in Cohen). The white folks are tolerant, until tenants burn the porches off their homes, or servants mix up affairs too much, when they wax comically profane. The Negroes are superstitious, helpless, cowardly, utterly ridiculous children. Life is easy and indolent except for shrewish wives and scheming crooks; the razors do not cut, the scantlings used by white masters on their menials never hurt, since they strike the head, and the “law” is only a mythical threat. What could be pathos and tragedy sets off laughter. The settings are supposed to be found in Demopolis or Birmingham or other southern cities, but they belong to a never-never, cloud-cuckoo land. All in all these stories reveal far less of Negro life and character than of middle class American taste.