Barren Ground (1925) contains some honest pictures of Negroes, not greatly different from the impoverished whites of the broomsedge, except that they are better and thriftier farmers. With courage Miss Glasgow introduces the common-law wife of old man Graylock. Once a handsome Negro woman, she is now slatternly and smoulderingly resentful, especially when the old man in a drunken fit takes a horsewhip to his mulatto brood.
The Negro character as a very different sort of background appears in Hagar’s Hoard, by George Kibbe Turner (1920). This gripping novel tells of the horror of yellow fever as it came to the close-shuttered houses of Memphis. Negroes serve as a mysterious, sinister chorus. Memphis is conjured vividly before the reader: “that long ragged line of old brick blocks—that rendezvous of niggers and thieves—the bad niggers, and the murderers and the nigger thieves.” Then there are the sanctified Negroes, “The Hollering Saints,” who are certain that the yellow fever is “the punishment of God acomin’ down on Memphis.” Individualized Negroes are Arabella, the faithful house servant, fanatically awaiting the coming of the Lamb; Make Haste Mose, the driver of the dead wagon, and a saddle-colored Negro with an immense scar, lying in wait to rob. All of these, according to the southern boy who tells the story, are unfathomable:
All white folks knew was what they generally know about niggers—that bowing and scraping; those brown masks—those faces with all their muscles trained since the sin of Ham in the Bible; since they went out in slavery and subjection—to lie still and show nothing. And those old brown eyes, watching, watching.
Under the pen name of “George Madden Martin,” Mrs. Atwood R. Martin wrote many stories of southern Negro life. “Her Husband” concerns a lynching. When Edith Thornberry, a white woman of gentle birth, discovers that her husband, a poor white, has reverted to type and led the lynchers, she is set against him. She was “bracketed with those thousands of southern men and women who speak a universal language of decency,” but her husband was bracketed with “a pusillanimous multitude, skulkers ever behind the decent South, lynchers, night-riders, white caps, Ku Klux.” Unfortunate in its connection of heredity with decency, the story is still significant for the sharp protest of an intelligent southern woman against mob-violence. Children of The Mist (1920) decries the work of agitators upon Negroes, but is by no means merely Thomas Nelson Page brought up to date.
Stirrings of Realism.—When, at the turn of the century, authors showed a willingness to deal seriously with uneasy segments of American life, the Negro made his demand upon them. It is significant that most of the early figures prominent in the history of twentieth century realism dealt in some measure with the Negro. Among them are Stephen Crane, Upton Sinclair, Theodore Dreiser and Gertrude Stein.
Stephen Crane’s work was generally too advanced for the sentimental readers of his age, and “The Monster” (1897) was particularly so. This story of horror lashes out at the stupidity and heartlessness of a small American town. Henry Johnson, a Negro hostler, rescues a small boy from a fire. Falling, overcome by the fumes in the burning laboratory, he has his face eaten away by acid. The boy’s father, Dr. Trescott, exercises his best skill and keeps Henry alive. When Henry was thought to be dying, he was lauded as hero and martyr; but kept alive, a faceless imbecile, he meets with terror and hatred, among the better class as well as in Watermelon Alley. “The Monster” is more a sharp satire of a small town’s intolerance than a study of Negroes, but it has secondary meanings that pertain to Negro life in what it tells of service, sacrifice, and false affection that goes over into revulsion. The few pictures of Negro life here and in Whilomville Stories are done with the vividness to be expected from Stephen Crane.
Negro characters in Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle (1905) are only incidental, but they are drawn in grim earnest. He shows Negroes as strikebreakers, brought into Packingtown from the levees or the country districts of the far South on promises of five dollars a day and board, with special rates from railroads. The harsh life of scabs makes them surly and dangerous; most of them have knives, ground to fine points, hidden in their boots. “Whiskey and women were brought in by the carload and sold to them, and hell was let loose in the yards.” After the strike, these “green” Negroes, together with foreigners and criminals, are turned loose in thousands upon Chicago. This sketch of the Negro worker, denied admission to unions and thereby forced to the role of strikebreaker, anticipates much of present-day proletarian fiction.
Carl Van Vechten considers Gertrude Stein’s “Melanctha” in Three Lives (1909) to be “perhaps the first American story in which the Negro is regarded ... not as an object for condescending compassion or derision.” “Melanctha” is a slowly unwound character study of a “subtle, intelligent, half-white girl, Melanctha Herbert,” who “always wanted peace and quiet, and always she could only find new ways to get excited.” Her chief love affairs are painstakingly set forth. The characters talk in a mannered dialogue; they all sound like each other, and like the white people in the other two stories. Gertrude Stein speaks of “the wide abandoned laughter that gives the broad glow to negro sunshine,” but her major characters do not have it. The people she calls “decent,” she likewise calls unmoral and promiscuous or shows them in razor brawls. White blood in one character “made her see clear,” and gave “her grit and endurance and vital courage,” but the power and breakneck courage in Melanctha came to her from her big black virile father. In spite of these dubious generalizings, “Melanctha” is important. Though not realistic in the usual sense, it gives a convincing portrait of a mysterious, uncertain girl, “wandering in her ways,” doomed to tragedy, a Negro Madame Bovary or Esther Waters.
Setting out early to chart “tragic America,” Theodore Dreiser wrote “Nigger Jeff” (1918) about a lynching. Dreiser does not make the Negro innocent, but he shows with somber power the mob hysteria in a town ironically called Pleasant Valley, the bravery of the sheriff, the horror of the captured Negro, and the final hanging to the bridge. And then he goes farther, to the mother and sister of the victim, and without sentimentality shows their grief. “I’ll get it all in,” exclaimed the young reporter who covered the case. And Dreiser got it all in, to make one of his best stories.
Again The Tragic Mulatto.—Two writers of some repute returned to the theme of the tragic mulatto. Less romantic than their predecessors, they still cling to old stereotypes. Margaret Deland’s “A Black Drop” (1908) tells of Lily, who, although brought up in Nigger Hill, a section of a midwestern town, by Mammy, a fair Negro woman, “cushiony and weighing two hundred and fifty pounds,” is considered white. Lily’s love affair with Framely Stone, son of abolitionists, is broken up. Miss Wales, his New England Sunday School teacher, points out proof of the girl’s Negro blood, clinching her case by mentioning her use of “heavy perfumery.” Miss Deland believes that intermarriage is forbidden by disgust, “a race protest, a race horror ... organic, biological.” Instinct, it seems, revolts at intermarriage, but not at liaisons. Confusing and unconvincing, “A Black Drop” is still not entirely without sympathy and insight.