The Negro in American fiction

by Sterling A. Brown

Ashamed of “being identified with a people that could with impunity be treated worse than animals,” he decides to “pass” for white. He travels widely through the South, to New York and to Europe, mingling generally with artistic people. Economic security and a happy marriage with a white woman do not quiet his regret, however, and he calls himself a “coward, a deserter ... [with] a strange longing for my mother’s people.” Although the central figure is complex and interesting, the novel seems to exist primarily for the long discussions of race, and the showing of the Negro in different milieus. The descriptions of the “big meeting” and of Bohemian life in New York are valuable realism. The Autobiography of An Ex-Colored Man was a ground-breaking novel in its dealing with the “aristocratic” mulatto, the problem of “passing,” the Negro artistic world, the urban and European scene, and its subtler assertion of points where Negroes “are better than anybody else.”

Summary. After the long years of caricature and contempt, it was natural that Negro novelists of the first generation after slavery should write as apologists. Not literary men, with the exception of DuBois and Johnson, but most often preachers and teachers, they had a charge to keep instead of a story to be told. They resented the use of the “Jim-Crow Negro,” seen in Harris and Page, Dunbar and Chesnutt. DuBois reveals a refreshing faith in the people at times, but they all preferred the “talented tenth,” at its most genteel. The heroines are modest and beautiful, frequently octoroon; the heroes are handsome and priggish, frequently black. Their characters have high-flown names like Dorlan Warthell, Ensal Ellwood, Tiara and Bles Alwyn; between these and comic names like Shakespeare Shackleford, Vakey Vopp, and Epic Peters there is little to choose. The villains are too often poor-whites. The incidents are romantic and often fantastic. The injuries of the Negro are seldom conveyed with full power; like the abolitionists, these novelists felt that listing could make up for rendering. The race problem, at the core of their work, turns their novels into tracts. Acceptance of certain traits as racial, such as optimism, loyalty and faith, and underestimation of the Negro masses invalidate much of their discussion. All are concerned with refutation of Thomas Dixon and his school. They were fighting in a good cause, but the novel was not their weapon.

The Tradition of The Abolitionists. Negro apologists found allies among northern white liberals who joined in the struggle for Negro rights. Mary White Ovington, one of the important figures in the National Association For The Advancement of Colored People, wrote persuasive propaganda fiction. The Shadow (1920) makes out a case for Negroes against the white world. A white girl, abandoned by her aristocratic family, is brought up as colored, until a letter informs her of her lineage. Her experiences in the white world, complicated by coincidental meetings with her Negro “brother,” disillusion her, and she says:

White people are wicked.... They hate goodness.... And they say they’re so good!... We black people, we are bad.... Well, I want to be with bad people. I’ve been with good people as long as I can bear....

The novel is worked out romantically. Its pattern and many of its situations, however, have been taken over by later novelists. Miss Ovington is likewise the author of Hazel (1913), a story of a little colored heroine, and the much better Zeke (1931), which is an informed and sympathetic novel of the life of Negro boys in a southern school. Her “The White Brute” has been called one of the most memorable stories against lynching.

Dorothy Canfield’s The Bent Twig (1915) refers to race prejudice in a midwestern town. When two shy, well-bred girls are discovered to have Negro blood, their schoolmates taunt them gleefully. An intelligent liberal—grieved at the humiliation—feels like gathering up his family and going away from the intolerable question, to Europe, but his wife grimly remarks: “And what we shall do is, of course, nothing at all.”

Typical of the many works urging the solution of the race problem by applied Christianity is Of One Blood (1916) by Charles Sheldon, the author of the religious best-seller In His Steps. Sheldon admits that he has pictured the “heroic, the beautiful and the great of each race,” but insists that he has not done them justice. The Negro hero is shown as triumphant college orator, great athlete, and finally agricultural expert instructing his people. Although nearly lynched in the South, being rescued melodramatically by a southern member of the “World Brotherhood,” he will not be “angry, sullen, bitter or revengeful.” The author concludes that race hatred would be abolished if “all the white men in the United States were like Abraham Lincoln and all the black men like Booker Washington,” a hope as extreme as his characterization and plot. Likewise full of praise for Booker Washington, The Testing Fire by Alexander Corkey (1911) optimistically prophesies a redeemed South.

Early Southern Liberalism.—Groping and hesitant liberalism found expression in the work of some of the southern novelists. Some were aware of the heavy hand of the dead past and wanted to shake it off, others wanted to set down honestly what they saw about them. The Southerner (1909) first appeared as a serial, The Autobiography of a Southerner Since the Civil War, by Nicholas Worth, whom readers soon identified as Walter Hines Page. The attack of this book upon the “mummified” South, its dedication to the laying of the three ghosts of “The Confederate Dead, of Religious Orthodoxy and of Negro Domination,” shows how opposed Walter Hines Page of North Carolina was to the ghost-ridden Thomas Nelson Page of Virginia. The novel is long and tract-like. Negro characters play an important part. Uncle Ephraim and Aunt Maria, worshippers of their white family, remember slavery as a happy state. Balancing these are Sam Worth, the runaway slave who becomes head of an industrial school; Lissa, another tragic mulatto, who bears a child to the future governor of the state; the Rev. Doctor Snodder, meek hang-dog “teacher of the oppressed”; John Marshall, an intelligent Hampton graduate; gullible office seekers, and a murderer of a Confederate firebrand. The author of The Southerner had, for his time, advanced ideas regarding education, civil rights, and democracy, and these are reflected in his characterizations of Negroes, which, though not done at full-length, are suggestive departures from the old and outworn.

Ellen Glasgow, who “carried realism across the Potomac” to the interpretation of her beloved Virginia, naturally pays attention to the Negro. He appears, however, as part of the social background, not as central character. He is viewed with shrewd insight: in The Miller of Old Church (1911) a Negro farmer, told to be thankful for his crop instead of complaining, responds:

Dar ain’t nuttin’ ’tall ter be thankful fur in dat, suh, case de Lawd He ain’t had no mo ter do wid dat ar co’n den old Marse Hawtrey. I jes ris dat ar co’n wid my own han’ right down de road at my front do’, and po’d de water on hit outer de pump at my back un. I’se monstrous glad ter praise de Lawd for what he done done, but I ain’t gwine to gin ’im credit fur de wuk er my own fis’ en foot.