The Railroad to Freedom (1932) by Hildegarde Swift is the fictionalized biography of Harriet Tubman, the most famous agent of the Underground Railroad, and a nurse and scout with the Union troops. Supposed to be a story for children, The Railroad to Freedom is still one of the best records of an important movement and a fascinating heroine of American history. One of America’s finest historical novels, God’s Angry Man (1933) by Leonard Ehrlich re-creates the life and times of John Brown. There is unusual sympathy in the treatment of the Negro characters. These are Frederick Douglass, who is willing to use violence against slavers but not against a government arsenal, realizing bitterly that too many Negroes, broken by slavery, wanted only “hot yams and a roof and not to be beaten”; “Emperor” Green, who, in spite of Douglass’ logic, says the historic “I b’lieve I go wid de ole man”; Harriet Tubman, the splendid, wanted “dead or alive, and ten thousand dollars would be paid for the body”; William Still, who knew more about the “underground” than any man in the land, saying to Brown “You free them, I’ll lead them out”; John Copeland, mulatto student at Oberlin, who left his garret lamp of learning for an even finer light, and Dangerfield Newby, killed in action, with a wife in the far South who was never to be redeemed. All of these are brought to life in a moving book.
Black Thunder (1936) by Arna Bontemps likewise bears witness to a staunch desire to be free—a fact of the Negro’s past that most of the historical romancers have not cared to record. Black Thunder deals with Gabriel’s Rebellion in the Virginia of 1800. Gabriel, the strongest slave of Henrico county, is courageous as well:
I been studying about freedom a heap, me. I heard a plenty folks talk and I listened a heap.... Something keep telling me that anything what’s equal to a gray squirrel wants to be free.
Stimulated by the example of Touissant in Haiti and by the propaganda of the Amis des Noirs and exasperated by an act of cruelty, Gabriel leads eleven hundred slaves upon Richmond. A storm postpones the attack, and the treachery of Pharaoh and Ben does the rest. The leaders are hanged, Gabriel’s sweetheart Juba is sold to the deep South, and Ben goes on driving the cariole for the aristocrats. In addition to Gabriel, other Negroes are excellently characterized: Ben, the docile, gray-headed house-boy; Melody, the quadroon darling of rich planters’ sons; Juba, handsome and spirited, sole woman on the march; Mingo, whose personal freedom is not enough; and Bundy, who “kept drinking up all that rum because he couldn’t get up enough nerve to make his get-away.” Black Thunder does not have the urgent passion of God’s Angry Man; it is elegy rather than a tocsin of revolt, but it is a fine American historical novel.
Realism. In Look Homeward, Angel Thomas Wolfe’s autobiographical hero decries
The romantic halo ... the whole fantastic distortion of that period where people were said to live in mansions and slavery was a benevolent institution, conducted to a constant banjo-strumming, the strewn largesses of the colonel and the shuffle-dance of his happy dependents, where all women were pure, gentle, beautiful, all men chivalrous and brave, and the Rebel horde a company of swagger, death-mocking cavaliers. Years later, when he could no longer think of the barren spiritual wilderness ... when their cheap mythology, their legend of the charm of their manners, the aristocratic culture ... made him writhe ... so great was his fear of the legend, his fear of their antagonism, that he still pretended the most fantastic devotion to them.
Many other southerners of Wolfe’s generation, as seen in the previous chapter, have recognized the barren spiritual wilderness; others have repudiated or at least humanized the legend.
John Peale Bishop, although not so outspoken as Wolfe and Faulkner, approaches the legend realistically in Many Thousands Gone (1930), stories of the Civil War and postwar years. Just as the southerners are not marvels of gallantry and beauty, the Negroes, while certainly not flattered, are recognizable products of slavery. One old woman while her mistress lies dead is more worried about her promised freedom than grief-stricken; a sullen girl blazes forth her hatred of her carping mistress, and leaves to cook for the Yankees, for whose love-making she has been prepared by her experiences with southern gentlemen. In one symbolic story, Bones, a marvelous cook, gives two old Virginia ladies a feeling of security; in reality a lunatic, he is submissive and devoted, and they are willing to live in terror as long as they can live in the tradition, their dear “obsession.”
Christopher Ward’s Jonathan Drew, A Rolling Stone (1932), and A Yankee Rover (1932) carry the Yankee hero all over early nineteenth century America. One dramatic section shows Drew saving two slaves from border ruffians who were running a “blind underground” and fomenting a slave insurrection in order to plunder the countryside. A Yankee Rover deals more fully with slavery; one of the episodes involves Tommy, the little “white nigger,” whose aristocratic father does not leave him free.
What d’ye say to a nigger that ain’t no color at all cause he’s white ... as white as any on ye an’ whiter than most ... with straight silky hair, no kinks at all, an yaller hair at that, golden yaller, an’ blue eyes? Ef that ain’t jest a natural curiosity.... Pass up lot 56, Mr. Barnes.