As Simms showed Negroes participating in the backwoods life and warfare of the South, so earlier writers of the westward movement included sketches of Negroes. Paulding’s Westward Ho (1832) deals with southerners leaving what romancers were to consider Arcadia for a better land. In this novel, Pompey, like Simms’ Hector, refuses freedom. Nick of The Woods (1837) a melodrama of bloody Kentucky by Robert Bird, includes several Negroes. Emperor is most fully characterized: like Cooper’s Caesar he is loyal, worshipful of quality, and, grotesque. Although his “natural” cowardice is insisted upon, his actions belie this, as he fights for his “little missie” and dies the death of a hero, “gored by numberless wounds, and trampled by the feet of his slayers.”
The Virginians. Virginia is the setting for such novelists as W. A. Carruthers, Beverley and George Tucker, and John Esten Cooke. Their novels describe the gentry and their complaisant slaves who enter the books as unobtrusively as they entered the grand dining rooms to bring in sweet missives or decanters of old port. These mammies and butlers and coachmen are interchangeable, appearing in different books under different classical names, but always the same.
Toby in Poe’s “The Journal of Julius Rodman” (1840) is “as ugly an old gentleman as ever spoke, having ... swollen lips, large white protruding eyes, flat nose, long ears, double head, pot-belly, and bow-legs.” He is another of Poe’s sad attempts at humor. Jupiter, in “The Gold-Bug” (1843), traditionally refuses to leave his master, but threatens in all seriousness to beat him, a hot-blooded cavalier, with a big stick. His dialect, an attempt at Gullah, is language belonging with Poe’s masterpieces, “out of space and out of time.” Poe revealed that his southern upbringing had borne fruit, however, when, defending slavery from “the fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists” he writes that it is the will of God that the Negro should have a “peculiar nature,” of which one characteristic is his tremendous loyalty to his master, “to which the white man’s heart is a stranger.” The master has a “reciprocal feeling of parental attachment to his humble dependent”:
he who is taught to call the little negro his in this sense and because he loves him, shall love him because he is his.
Melville. A greater writer than Poe in his grasp of character, Herman Melville was above this sophistry in dealing with human beings. A northerner, Melville did not know slavery at first hand; but a mariner, he did know Negro seamen. Moby Dick (1851) reveals this knowledge.
[Daggoo] a gigantic coal-black negro ... retained all his barbaric virtues and erect as a giraffe, moved about the decks in all the pomp of six feet five in his socks. There was a corporeal humility in looking up at him; and a white man standing before him seemed a white flag come to beg truce from a fortress.
If Daggoo is the “noble savage,” Pip, as sympathetically created, is of another breed. Pip’s cowardice is not considered racial but is naturally human.
Poor Alabama boy! On the grim Pequod’s forecastle ye shall see him, beating his tambourine, prelusive of the eternal time, when sent for to the great quarter-deck on high, he was bid strike in with angels and beat his tambourine in glory: called a coward here, hailed a hero there!
Negro sailors, generally courageous and praiseworthy, occur in Melville’s other romances of the sea.
Benito Cereno (1855) is a masterpiece of mystery, suspense and terror. Captain Delano of the Bachelor’s Delight, discovering a vessel in distress along the uninhabited coast of Chile, boards her to render aid. He is interested in the many Negroes he finds on the decks: “like most men of a good blithe heart he took to Negroes not philanthropically, but genially, just as other men to Newfoundland dogs.” He is mystified, however, when the gamesome Negroes flare up in momentary rage, and especially by their continual clashing their hatchets together. Only when Don Benito, in desperation, escapes to Delano’s ship, does the real truth dawn.