There had to be a Maharajah in Bwodpur of the blood royal; else brown reaction and white intrigue had made of it a footstool of England. If I had not borne your son ... Bwodpur and Sindrabad, India, and all the Darker World [would have been lost.]
Less fantastic are the sections dealing with America, in which Matthew Towns meets with galling insults, lack of opportunity on every hand, and the smooth chicanery of Negro politicians. Two interesting characters are Perigua, a Negro anarchist, and Sara, a striving Negro woman, who plays the political game. There are plots and counterplots in the manner of E. Phillips Oppenheim. DuBois speaks of the novel as “rich and colored gossamer of a dream which the Queen of Faerie lent to me for a season.” But the fusion of dream and social realism is not achieved; the novel falls between the two.
A prominent figure in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Walter White has made use of the novel for social protest. The Fire In The Flint (1925) tells the tragedy of a better-class, aspiring Negro family in a Georgia town. Bob Harper kills two white men who raped his sister. Tracked down by a lynching mob, he shoots himself with his last bullet. His brother Kenneth, a promising young physician, is lynched in the ensuing hysteria for “assaulting a white woman” whom he had been called in to attend. The Fire In The Flint contains sardonic comment upon the backwardness of the South. The millhands of Factoryville have only “one strong conviction—the inherent and carefully nurtured hatred of the ‘nigger’.” Like the earlier apologists, White makes use of well educated heroes, avoids dialect in the main, concentrates the injustices of the South into fairly small compass, and has bitter contempt for the “cracker” and the Klan. But The Fire In The Flint has more of an impact than the earlier books on lynching.
Although Walter White’s Flight (1926) describes the Atlanta riot, it is principally a novel about “passing.” Mimi Daquin, a New Orleans octoroon of distinguished lineage, has an unfortunate love affair with an upper class Negro in Atlanta, and goes to the North. Seeking security for her child she marries a white broker, but remains essentially unhappy. Her husband has no love for Negroes. Even as a child, Mimi had believed that Creoles of Negro blood had something “tangible, yet intangible ... a warmth, a delicate humanness” that white Creoles did not have. As a woman, she believes that Negroes alone “can laugh and ... enjoy the benefits of the machine without being crushed by it.” A furtive trip to Harlem makes her wonder if her somber cynical white companions, “whose unhappiness shone through all they did or said,” were worth the price she was paying. When she hears a great Negro artist singing spirituals, she is set free, and returns to her own.
Bourgeois Realism.—Continuing the earlier apologist tradition, with propaganda a little less direct, certain novelists have set out to prove the presence of a Negro upper-class, and to deplore the injustices of its lot. Their standards are bourgeois; they respect characters in ratio to their color, breeding, gentility, wealth and prestige. “Realism” is perhaps a misnomer, if these novels are judged by their plots, which are seldom very life-like; the realism is chiefly in the settings.
Gertrude Sanborn’s Veiled Aristocrats (1923) reveals the type. The “aristocrats under the veil” are mulatto descendants of southern aristocrats—“the souls of worthy men and women caught by a mad fate in a prison of prejudice!” A sentimental white youth is brought into contact with these fine people, especially with Carr McClellan, a World War hero, and a great sculptor. Carr is beloved by the beautiful daughter of a white financier. At the right time she is revealed to be colored too, another “veiled aristocrat,” so everything ends happily. There are many incredible coincidences. Though well-meaning, the author is still condescending. Her protest concludes lamely: “Fact of the matter, most of us are not giving our colored brothers a square deal.”
Zona Gale, introducing Jessie Fauset’s third novel, states inaccurately: “Wherever the American Negro has appeared in fiction, only the uneducated Negro has been pictured.” She is on surer ground when she writes that Negroes of education and substance “merit the awareness of their fellow countrymen.” In her own foreword, Jessie Fauset reveals her bent to “the colored American who is not pressed too hard by the Furies of Prejudice, Ignorance, and Economic Injustice,” and who has his own caste lines.
As naturally as his white compatriot he speaks of his “old Boston families,” “old Philadelphians,” “old Charlestonians.” And he has a wholesome respect for family and education and labor and the fruits of labor ... sufficiently conservative to lay a slightly greater stress on the first two of these four.
There Is Confusion (1924) has as central characters Joanna Marshall, an ambitious dancer, whose “success and fame were instant,” and Peter Bye, a brilliant, sensitive medical student. The home-life of middle-class Philadelphia receives some attention, but the love story receives far more. The “problem” is never far off. In a pageant, Joanna represents America. Forced by great applause to unmask, she speaks:
I hardly need tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ now.