In the legislature ... they spent most of their time eating goobers and easing their unaccustomed feet into and out of new shoes. They frolicked....
But the intelligent house-servants, the highest caste, spoke the correct, heart-warming lines:
Ah done had nuff freedom. Ah wants somebody to feed me good vittles reglar an’ tell me what ter do an’ what not ter do, an’ look affer me when Ah gets sick.
Needless to say, the Klan is as knightly here as in The Authentic History of the Ku Klux Klan, an authentic hymn of praise.
Summary. DuBose Heyward has written: “This relationship [between master and slave] has been sentimentalized and utilized ad nauseam in writing of the slave period.” The plots of the foregoing books are uninventive, and the characters and situations are repeated over and over. Aristocrats and house-servants still monopolize attention, as if the many “yeoman” farmers and field-hands had not existed. With the hindsight of the present, secession is admitted to have been bad, but although most of the aristocrats detested slavery (in principle), the intelligent Negroes detested freedom (in principle and practise) and the romancers agree with the Negroes. The very infrequent floggings are the work of uncouth overseers, who are knocked down by blooded cavaliers. Fugitive slaves have been spirited away from these books. Faithful servants bring back dead heroes from battlefields, bury the silver, despise the Yankees and prefer to work for their ex-masters without wages. Unfaithful slaves, corrupted from their childish virtue, run away to die in concentration camps, or loot, insult and rape. Negroes who bought land, rushed to schools and proved freedom to be no mistake, are non-existent, in spite of the record. An unpartisan historian writes:
These Reconstruction governments erected public school systems; democratized local and county units, created public social services, and sought to distribute tax burdens equitably.
But in these books the legislatures are composed of a few depraved Northerners, and a mob of Negroes who did little else but put their feet upon desks and “eat peanuts by the peck.” The Freedmen’s Bureau is villainous, the Klan reproachless, organized to preserve chastity, not for political and economic control.
It is wrong to assume that these books are merely pageants of a departed past; they definitely further attitudes that justify the worst kind of contemporary reaction. Their popularity is a dangerous sign. Based on the principle that the many must be kept “in their place” for the good of the few, they encourage slavery in a world where slaves are still too numerous.
The Anti-Slavery Tradition. But there is a party of opposition which, like Emerson, has cried “fiddle-faddle to the Old South.” In the tradition of Harriet Beecher Stowe and Albion Tourgée, some twentieth century authors have described the tragedy of slavery, and have dealt with heroes and heroines who would not buckle under.
Rowland E. Robinson, in Out of Bondage and Other Stories (collected posthumously in 1936) records the heroism and drama of the Underground Railroad in Vermont where slaves on their way to Canada were hidden in loaded sleighs and wagons, or stowed away in attics or barnlofts or deserted sugar-houses. John E. Paynter’s Fugitives of the Pearl (1930) one of the few historic romances by Negro authors, deals with the escape of seventy-seven Negroes from Washington aboard the Pearl, whose captain was an abolitionist. A Negro informer gave away their plot, and they were captured down the Potomac. Of the old school in technique, Fugitives of the Pearl is more fictionalized history than a re-creation of characters and settings. But the precarious life of Negroes in antebellum Washington, “the seat and center of the slave trade” is truthfully presented.