In Babouk (1934), Guy Endore concentrates upon the shocking features of the slave-trade: the captives “lying shoulder to shoulder, feet pointing toward the center, not only chained in pairs, but each pair attached to a great chain—a gigantic necklace of blacks”; the separated tribesmen forced to sing and dance—“a centipede dancing, chains clanking”; opthalmy and other epidemics ravaging the hold. “Nigger-tasters,” telling the slaves’ condition by their sweat, and other connoisseurs of black flesh winnowed out the drugged, the doctored; only the finest were fit to be slaves. After horrible life on San Domingo plantations the slaves revolt. Based upon considerable research, convincing in its descriptions of the slave-trade, of African tales and customs, and of West Indian plantations, Babouk is still more than a historical romance. It is a revolutionary novel, bitterly opposed to imperialism and the contemporary slavery of any race.
The Plantation Tradition. But Endore is unusual; Joseph Hergesheimer is much more typical. In Quiet Cities (1927) he yearns for the return of the past, based on slavery—for which “I’d be happy to pay—with everything, everything the wasted present holds.” In his picture slaves do little other than raise soft staves of song, or play quoits, or fiddle, or sleep. The only ugly feature is an ill-smelling slave-den, for which a transplanted northerner is responsible. Emancipation was a failure since “a free Negro is more often wretched than not.” Reconstruction was ignominious: Negro legislators dared to utter shouts of laughter, with “incredible feet elevated on the desks” in southern state capitols. Mingo Harth, a vicious Negro politician worthy of Thomas Dixon, is called a “symbol of Union, a black seal on the fate of South Carolina.”
Most of the historical romances repeat these patterns with little variation. Dealing with the times of George Washington, Princess Malah (1933), by a Negro author, John H. Hill, subscribes in the main to the plantation tradition of humaneness, mutual affection and lavishness. Frances Griswold’s The Tides of Malvern (1930) and Caroline Gordon’s Penhally (1931) recount the long history of southern families with Negro characters in the background, where they stay correctly. A few step out of the picture after Sherman’s march, but the majority will not be moved. In Mary Johnston’s Miss Delicia Allen (1933) both Negro slaves and white owners are conventionally drawn.
Somewhat similar to Cable’s Madame Delphine is E. Laroque Tinker’s Toucoutou (1928). After being married to a white man, Toucoutou is proved in court to be partly Negro. In bitter envy, Negroes satirize her in street-songs; whites condemn her because her marriage means that “a black flood will rush through the crevasse that will sully white purity and retard our civilization a thousand years.” The picture of New Orleans is not idyllic; the yellow fever epidemic, the exotic bamboula, calinda and counjaille danced in the Place Congo, and other customs of New Orleans are vividly described. With some sympathy for his heroine, Tinker yields at times to the doubtful traditions about the mulatto. Old New Orleans (1931) by E. Laroque Tinker and Frances Tinker presents minor and familiar Negro characters. Life on the lower Mississippi, in a later period is in Edna Ferber’s Show-Boat (1926), which has a few Negroes singing the plaintive songs of their “wronged race,” and a melodramatic scene involving an octoroon.
Look Back to Glory (1933) by Herbert Ravenel Sass is worshipful of the duelling cavaliers and glamorous women of low-country South Carolina, “a paradise ... the proud, the knightly South.” Slavery is called a godsend to elevate the Negro from barbarism. The subtle poison of slavery was the “inevitable” miscegenation, “invited nine-tenths of the time” by Negro girls, and guaranteeing “the purity of the southern women of education and family.” Best characterized of the Negroes is Vienna, a beautiful quadroon, to whom “curtsying did not come easy.” The others are conventional, grateful for the godsend.
The Civil War has long been a favorite subject for historical novelists, but earlier novels like Winston Churchill’s The Crisis (1901), Upton Sinclair’s Manassas (1904) and Mary Johnston’s The Long Roll (1911) and Cease Firing (1912) are little concerned with deepening the characterization of the Negro. The Battleground (1902) by Ellen Glasgow, has many of the standbys of the plantation tradition—the noble hero who deplores slavery, the wretched free Negro and the giant slave who rescues his master (one of the most familiar battle activities from “Marse Chan” to So Red The Rose.) Recent Civil War novels like Caroline Gordon’s None Shall Look Back (1936) and Clifford Dowdey’s Bugles Blow No More (1936) are skillfully written and based upon research, but the latter does not particularly extend to Negro characters.
The slaves in Old Miss (1929) by T. Bowyer Campbell are “like children, trusting, expecting, receiving everything as a matter of course from their masters.” The hero is proslavery, only because of altruism: “What would the poor things do without us to care for them, and see that they pass peaceful, useful lives?” When Aunt Christian is told that she is free, she angrily hits her informant with a stick, like the ancient tyrants upon hearing bad news. Roark Bradford’s Kingdom Coming (1933) likewise carries the thesis that freedom was a mistake. Aunt Free buys her freedom and then does not want it; Telegram is set free by a Yankee firing squad; free Negroes die like flies in concentration camps. There is an interesting account of the “blind Underground” which held out false hopes of freedom that ended in murder. That the freed Negro is little better off than the slave is true in sections that Bradford should know very well, but it hardly seems a defense of slavery. Promising “the true story of slavery and the true story of freedom,” Kingdom Coming merely gives some good local color of plantation life and voodoo, to support the century-old beliefs advanced in Swallow Barn.
Stark Young has shown a knowledge of certain types of Negroes in sketches like “The Poorhouse Goes to The Circus” (1929) and Heaven Trees (1926). His best seller, So Red The Rose (1934), is a melancholy recital of the folk-tales that southerners heard in their youth. The war blown along by northern and southern windbags destroys “a gracious system of living that has seldom seen its equal.” Negroes, in spite of “fetid ... old maid idealism” had their best place in that system. A typical old faithful, William Veal, seeks his dead master on the battlefield at night; he felt the hair of the corpses until he found him: “he knew him by his hair; you know how fine it was.” In contrast are the Negro soldiers—grog-filled burners and looters—and the ingrates who run off to the Yankees and are stricken with plagues. Written in skillful, disarming prose, So Red The Rose nevertheless remains a thrice-told tale.
Elliot Crayton McCants in White Oak Farm (1928) gives the traditional picture of Reconstruction, though with less rancor than Page and Dixon. Bottom Rail On Top (1935) by H. J. Eckenrode is a less orthodox novel, not in the “bloody-shirt” tradition. Negroes scatter after emancipation and learn fast in reconstruction. The hero is often shown siding with the Negroes and radicals in the brawling.
Not fooled by all of the hallowed creeds of the South, Margaret Mitchell in the best-selling Gone With The Wind (1937) accepts whole-heartedly the traditional estimate of the Negro. “Slaves were neither miserable nor unfortunate.... There never had been a slave sold from Tara and only one whipping.” Mammy, Dilcey, Toby and the other house-servants, proud of their quality white-folks, disdainful of field hands, “free issues” and poor whites, have been with us time and time again. Slaves who were different were “mean.” The “least energetic, trustworthy and intelligent and most vicious and brutal” were the ones who left the plantation to enjoy a long “carnival of idleness and theft and insolence” interrupted only by plagues in crowded Atlanta. Negro insults range from “looking impudent” and being “uppity to a lady” to assuming Anglo-Saxon prerogatives: