7. In what respects do the comic writers and the melodramatists of this chapter agree?
CHAPTER VII
COUNTER-PROPAGANDA—BEGINNING REALISM
Negro Apologists.—Aroused by the libels of Thomas Nelson Page and his school, Negro novelists stepped forward with race defense and glorification. Explaining weaknesses as the heritage of slavery and oppression, they wished to hold up to the world “the millions of honest, God-fearing, industrious, frugal, respectable and self-respecting Negroes, who are toiling on for the salvation of their race.” They urged what Kelly Miller wrote in “An Open Letter to Thomas Dixon, Jr.” (1905):
Within forty years of only partial opportunity ... the American Negro has cut down his illiteracy by over fifty per cent; has produced a professional class, some fifty thousand strong ... some three thousand Negroes have taken collegiate degrees, over three hundred being from the best institutions in the North and West.... Negro inventors have taken out four hundred patents ... scores of Negroes ... take respectable rank in the company of distinguished Americans.
And, as another put it,—“This farm land that they own and operate if put acre to acre would make a strip of land five miles wide ... from New York to San Francisco.” They believed that the Negro who had succeeded in the American way should have his day in court. Some agreed with Booker Washington, more with DuBois, but all stressed the Negro’s persecution and his achievement. The times demanded propaganda of them, they felt; and propaganda they gave, in good measure. The race was their hero, and preaching a solution their business, upon which they were grimly intent.
Sutton Griggs, one of the earliest, assured the readers of Unfettered (1902) that neither angels nor demons, but mere human beings made up his cast of characters. But this is not so. Morlene is described:
A wealth of lovely black hair crowning a head of perfect shape and queenly poise; a face, the subtle charm of which baffles description; two lustrous black eyes, wondrously expressive, presided over by eyebrows that were ideally beautiful; a neck which, with perfect art, descended and expanded so as to form a part of a faultless bust; as to form, magnificently well proportioned; when viewed as a whole, the very essence of loveliness....
It is no wonder then, that she speaks to one of the villains: “Sir, it takes no prophet to foretell that terrible sorrows await you.” The hero, Dorlan Warthell, is likewise faultless: “As to color he was black, but even those prejudiced as to color forgot that prejudice when they gazed upon this ebony-like Apollo.” Dorlan, a power in politics, deserts the Republican party for betraying his race, and incurs the hatred of the white Congressman Bloodworth. The ills heaped upon ills of the southern Negro, a very idealized love affair, long discussions of the race problem, and Dorlan’s plan to solve it (partly worked out on a balloon ride) make the book a hodgepodge. The prose is trite and pompous.
Griggs’ The Hindered Hand (1905) is also a bad novel. The characters are models of decorum. In a passionate love scene at the end, the hero Ensal takes one of Tiara’s hands in his, and then overwhelmed, takes the other: