We fain would draw the curtain just here.... They were married that night, and the next day set out for Africa, to provide a home for the American Negro.
All of the darker phases of the South appear in the book, but melodramatically, unrealistically. The action is slowed up by long dissertations on “the problem,” including a review of Thomas Dixon’s Leopard’s Spots. Even the two heroines are race orators. George McClellan’s Old Greenbottom Inn (1906) is subtler propaganda. Most of the stories tell of the pathetic love affairs of beautiful Negro girls, but there is some rewarding local color of the Tennessee Valley and of the earliest Negro schools.
An argument in the guise of fiction is J. W. Grant’s Out of the Darkness or Diabolism and Destiny (1909). Answering Booker T. Washington’s conciliatory school of thought, the author writes “What are houses, land and money to men who are women?” But the mettle of the author deserves a better novel. His chief characters—the orator, the salutatorian and the valedictorian of their college class—become noted as preacher, statesman, and physician respectively. The physician discovers a cure for yellow fever, saves a beautiful white girl’s life, and is lynched before the love affair between them ripens. He is nearly white and bitter towards the white world; his two classmates are likewise militant. The author continually stresses the grace, refinement, wealth, palatial homes and property of upper class Negroes, decries the masses, and demands that the Negro be measured not by his worst but by his best. Needless to say the wrongs of the Negro are listed in full, but are seldom shown movingly. As We See It (1910) by Robert L. Waring deals with a young black hero, Abe, who leaves scholastic and athletic honors at Oberlin College to avenge the lynching of his mother and sister. There is a Damon-Pythias bond between Abe and a white boy, Malcolm, and between their two fathers, one an Alabama aristocrat and the other his body-servant. The aristocratic class of the South is praised highly, while the poor-whites are treated with contempt and hatred. Waring’s generalizations about the “cracker” are very much like Dixon’s about Negroes.
From Superman to Man (1917) by J. A. Rogers has only a thin thread of narrative running through long discussions of the race problem, in which a Pullman porter embarrasses and refutes white passengers with his anthropological and sociological information. Quips such as “The white man’s burden is composed largely of plunder” and “‘To educate the Negro is only to make him unhappy’ really means ‘Do not educate the Negro and make the white man unhappier’” carry force, but the book is more pamphlet then novel.
The apologist whom these authors praised for his uncompromising attitude was W. E. B. DuBois. His fiction, superior to theirs in literary value, is similar in many respects. The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) is part fantasy, part propaganda. Zora, who sees visions of the “little people of the swamps,” rises from a degraded environment to become a race leader, fit companion for Bles Alwyn, a noble black boy from Georgia who becomes a force in politics. The plot is unconvincing; the characters are stiff and talk stiltedly: “Bles, thou almost persuadest me to be a fool.” But DuBois’ social understanding gives the novel value. The New England schoolmarms, the southern attack upon the schools, the scheming to get control of Negro education to render it harmless, the tie-up of Northern capital with cotton barons, the shame of Negro treatment, the conniving of political Negroes,—all of these are revealed by a keen social analyst. DuBois sees how poor-whites are used “to keep niggers in their place, and the fear of niggers to keep the poorer whites in theirs.” One white character says “Derned if I don’t think white slaves and black slaves had ought ter git together.” But this radical lead is not followed up; the novel is too taken up with a priggish hero and an unbelievable heroine, and social reality is subordinated to symbolism. It is a significant book, however, and if DuBois answered Dixon’s melodrama in kind, it was at least melodrama pleading for humanity and blasting injustice.
DuBois’ Darkwater: The Twentieth Century Completion of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1919) contains five tales in a prose that echoes the Bible and medieval romance. Two modern fairy-tales attack race-hatred and oppression. “The Second Coming” tells of the birth of a black child in a Georgia stable while three bishops—“the wise men”—look on. “Jesus Christ in Texas,” like Upton Sinclair’s “They Call Me Carpenter,” deals with the return of Christ to a hate-ridden community, where he is unrecognized by the preacher, but is known to the despised and rejected. Like H. G. Wells, DuBois, in “The Comet,” makes use of pseudo-science to drive home social ideas. When Manhattan is destroyed by the gases of a comet, only two people survive, one a Negro bank messenger, and the other a white girl, “rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair and jewels.” Alone on earth, the “Bride of Life” and “great All-Father of the race to be” are broken in upon and returned to the world of prejudice by the crass “honk-honk” of rescuers from the world outside of New York City. These stories are without the usual drive of DuBois’ work; even within the frame of allegory and fantasy, they lack conviction.
James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man (1912) (first published anonymously) urges that
log-cabins and plantations and dialect speaking ‘darkies’ are perhaps better known in American literature than any other single picture.... [Too little known] are coloured people who live in respectable homes and amidst a fair degree of culture.
The hero, a sensitive, light-skinned Negro, expresses an upper-class snobbishness toward the Negro masses:
The unkempt appearance, the shambling, slouching gait and loud talk and laughter of these people aroused in me a feeling of almost repulsion.