5. What differentiates the radical novelists from the realists who show the pattern of violence?
6. Compare the newer realists among Negroes with the apologist and the Harlem school.
CHAPTER XII
HISTORICAL FICTION
The present vogue of historical fiction has given new impetus to the long-standing interest in the Old South and the Negro. The African slave-trade, the antebellum and the reconstruction South are popular hunting grounds. Some novelists continue the plantation tradition, some, the antislavery tradition, and many others, in the spirit of regionalism, seek the truth of their sectional pasts, without apology and without indictment.
The Slave Trade. The ghastly middle passage, the shackled mobs below the hatches, the lack of water, the plagues, are background for novels like Mary Johnston’s The Slave Ship (1924), and George King’s The Last Slaver (1936). Deeper pity and understanding inform The Trader’s Wife (1930) by Jean Kenyon McKenzie. A sheltered Newport girl confronted by the traffic—“Wretched blacks at sea, packed in trays like dead fish, stinking like fish, some of them to die ... and to be cast in the sea”—is broken in Africa by the misery of the barracoon. As her last gesture before she dies she sets free a contingent of slaves.
With the dawn there came a wailing on the river—as the canoes multiplied at the landing—the high desolate wailing that is the voice of the sorrows of Africa.... It was the slaves come down the river into the barracoon.
Hervey Allen’s Anthony Adverse (1933) describes the barracoons through which “Africa was poured into America,” the serpent-like line
composed of hundreds of naked, human bodies rubbed slimy for their approaching sale with palm oil and rancid butter.... Bamboo withes stretched from one tight neck-fork to another.... Hovering about it, and along its flanks were white-robed Arabs with rhinoceros-hide whips.
The bartering, with slaves coquettish, or compliant, or sullen, or tiger-like, the inspections and the packing on the slave-ships are fully pictured, obviously after a great deal of research. But it strikes one as historical pageantry rather than tragedy.