In a flash of light she sees his face—distorted: with a shriek of terror she wildly tries to push him from her; but the demon of the blood of Guinea Gumbo is pitiless, and against the fury of it, as against the storm, she fights and cries in vain.
The tragedy rushes on: Helen is delivered of a very dark child, explained as a “recession”; her father dies of heart failure; she goes mad. A South Carolina cavalier points the moral and adorns the tale:
How shall sickly sentimentality solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your gentle endowment?
For “however risen, redolent of newly applied polish,” the leopard cannot change his spots, nor the Ethiopian his skin. It seems that the skin must be changed for him. Even so, the fundamental savagery is still there, lurking. Social equality means the “mongrelization of the superior breed,” of which one “blood deep characteristic is chivalrous respect for women.” So rings out the Call of the South.
Although a much later book, Jean Sutherland’s Challenge (1926) is equally fantastic and insidious. The Polish-English Prince Kareninoff, who is famous as an opponent of race-mixture, has had a son by a woman who, unknown to him, was part Negro. The son, however, does the proper thing; he shuts himself in a monastery to save his aristocratic fiancée from pollution, and then, like his octoroon sisters, goes to Africa to help his people.
Negro characters in John Trotwood Moore’s novels such as Ole Mistis and The Bishop of Cottontown are in the mildewed tradition. Mammy, in the second of these, has a new mission: she keeps the children of her impoverished master from the cotton mills.
You’re down heah preachin’ one thing for niggahs and practisin’ another for yo’ own race; yo’ hair frizzles on yo’ head at th’ort of niggah slavery, whilst all the time you’re enslavin’ the po’ little whites that’s got yo’ own blood in their veins.... I come for my child!
Frenzied at the wrongs of the cotton factory, she sets fire to the “Sodom.” For this she is nearly lynched, but is saved by the heroes of the novel. “Thirteen dead men lay, and the back-bone of lynching had been broken forever in Alabama.” This was written in 1906. Moore condones lynching as
the result of the sudden emancipation of ignorant slaves, who, backed by the bayonets of their liberators ... perpetuated an unnameable crime as part of their system of revenge for years of slavery.... And is not the honor of a white woman more than the hide of a broncho?
Inconsistently, he goes on: