The Negro in American fiction

by Sterling A. Brown

7. What is significant in the final quotation from Hagar’s Hoard?

CHAPTER VIII

REALISM AND THE FOLK

Sociological Realism.—T. S. Stribling’s Birthright (1922) brought something new in the treatment of Negro life. The novel looks back in its problem and its preaching, and has its share of superstitions about “race” such as that Negroes howl their agony aloud and white men bottle up their grief, and that “to a white man absolute idleness is impossible ... he must ... do something to burn up the accumulating sugar in his muscles.” Peter Siner is not completely credible: a Harvard graduate, he comes back South talking like a dictionary, urging “autonomous development” of his people, and yet he is easily swindled by a white banker. His marriage to Cissie, light-fingered and ruined by a white lout, is strained, to say the least. His opposite, Tump Pack, is caricatured. But Stribling does protest against the southern belief that all Negroes are carefree and happy. His description of Negro lodges, funerals, and workaday life are authentic. Most important of all, Birthright places the Negro at the center of the picture, attempts to show the influence of environment upon character, is ironic at the vaunted southern understanding of Negroes, and attacks injustice. The following description is quite different from the pastoral shabbiness that delighted Ruth McEnery Stuart, E. K. Means, and Paul Laurence Dunbar:

On the edge of Hooker’s Bend, drawn in a rough semi-circle around the Big Hill, lies Niggertown.... The grimy cabins lean at crazy angles, some propped with poles.... Up and down its streets flows the slow negro life of the village.... The public well itself lies at the southern end of this miserable street, just at the point where the drainage of the Big Hill collects.... [To this hole in soft clay, where occasionally pigs fall in and drown] come the unhurried colored women, who throw in their buckets, and with dexterity that comes with long practice draw them out full of water.... The inhabitants of Niggertown suffer from divers diseases; they develop strange ailments that no amount of physicking will overcome.... About once a year the state health officer visits Hooker’s Bend and forces the white soda-water dispensers on the other side of the hill to sterilize their glasses in the name of the sovereign State of Tennessee.

Nigger by Clement Wood (1922) compresses a very great deal into its less than three hundred pages. This, too, is a sociological novel, picturing a Negro family from its origins in slavery to modern life in Birmingham. After freedom, Jake’s burden of debt on his little place grows heavier each year. Forced to flee when white hoodlums run rampant on a periodic lynch-fest, Jake takes his seven grandchildren to Birmingham, to realize the “emancipation” he has heard of so often. But one son, Pink, dies in France, a hero; another, Louis, decorated in France for bravery is shot down by the law; Tom, embittered and violent, becomes a criminal, and Dave’s love of learning is dulled by the steel mills. The daughters fare no better. The characters are completely convincing: the trustful Jake is balanced by Jim Gaines who kills a white man to defend his daughter. Reverend Elisha Kirkman—“who had seen slavery ... was weazened and sharp-tongued and wise; black and white feared the sting that hung in his words”—is new in books about Negroes, but is not, because of that, unconvincing. Even the “bad Negroes” are not Dixon’s brutes; having seen lynchings and the flagrant hypocrisy of the law, they are desperadoes through complete cynicism. Wood presents his characters with great knowledge and sympathy; the little family’s anguished but doomed efforts to get along are tragically moving. There is humor in the book, but it is mainly grim. Louis, called upon by white examiners to recite the Constitution before he can vote, orates Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address. The examiner is amazed and half apologetic: “I’m damned. I didn’ think you knew it ... I didn’ think any nigger knew it.”

White and Black (1922) by H. A. Shands gives a realistic picture of Texas plantation life, where instead of kindly whites and affectionate uncles and mammies, there are landlords struggling to get money, and Negroes at work in the Johnson and Bermuda grass trying to get a bare living. Joe Williams, an aspiring Negro share-cropper tries to bring up his daughters decently and is almost frenzied when Ella is seduced by the planter’s son. Ulysses Mulberry who “ain’t done a thing except lay around ever since he’s been back and has been runnin’ me down to the niggers and stirrin’ em up about the low wages paid on the farm, and jes’ playin’ the big Ike gen’r’lly,” is lynched for outraging a poor-white girl, in a scene powerfully presented. Richard Sanders, the preacher, starts as a new character, forward-looking and thoughtful, if over-academic in his language, but ends up typically, finding his Bathsheba in a fast woman who affects penitence. The revived Ku Klux Klan is shown punishing Henry Thompson, a white man who openly acknowledges his Negro children, although its ranks are filled with men having clandestine affairs with Negro women. Shands has gleams of irony, but he does not let his sympathies develop to fullness, and his book therefore lacks drive. Dorothy Scarborough’s In The Land of Cotton (1923) also deals with Texas, containing snapshots of Negro life and some fine folk-songs, presented with the sympathetic approach of a folk-lorist. The picture is generally pastoral. Realistic pictures of Negroes in turpentine camps help to redeem Vara Majette’s White Blood (1924), but the melodrama of the swamp octoroon is still traditional and unconvincing.

South Carolina Folk. The work of Ambrose Gonzales, begun at the end of the last century but mainly accomplished in the nineteen-twenties, is an example of southern anecdotage. Gonzales writes as two people: one, intent upon pugnaciously defending the lost cause, and the other, keenly interested in the little dramas of the Gullah folk of South Carolina. The Black Border (1922) contains a passage on Thomas Nelson Page’s failure to deal fully with Negro life, but this book and The Captain (1924) are merely extensions of works like Page’s Pastime Stories and go in no new directions. The hunting and fishing, the marital irregularities, the hog and chicken stealing of the black-border Negroes are told with gusto, but hardships and tragedies are glossed over. Gonzales gets closest to realism in his care for the language. He has studied the Gullah dialect with so much zeal that the reader’s task is uneasy. With Aesop Along The Black Border is a sly, witty rendition of the old fables into the odd speech; the following concludes “The Fox And The Grapes”:

Bumbye ’e git up en’ ’e walk off, en’ ’e walk berry sedate. Attuwhile ’e biggin fuh grin. ’E suck ’e teet, en’ ’e say to ’eself, ’e say, “Me yent hab time fuh w’ary me bone en’ t’ing fuh jump attuh no sour grape lukkuh dem. Soon es Uh smell’ ’um Uh know dem done fuh sour! No, suh! Ef Uh haffuh chaw t’ing lukkuh dat, Uh gwine hunt green possimun....” Buh Fox smaa’t!

At the same time that Gonzales was publishing, DuBose Heyward, sensitive and sympathetic, was taking notes upon Negro life in Charleston to appear as Porgy (1925). This novel is rightly influential. In a poem at the outset Heyward pleads for “great hearts to understand.” His characterization is admirable; he knows a great deal, and he sees the pity as well as the laughter. His hero is Porgy, a crippled beggar, whose love for Crown’s Bess regenerates her. The setting, Catfish Row, a squalid tenement; the saucer-burial scene, the spirituals and the folk-speech, the steamboat picnic, the furtive fear of the “white” law are conveyed with brilliant poetic realism. One of the best bits of writing is the description of the September storm when Catfish Row sends out its doomed riders to the sea. The finale of the novel, presenting a Negro as tragic hero is worth quoting: