As we have seen the “blind underground” intrigues both the realists and the defenders of the Old South, who traditionally isolate criminals as the agents of the underground railroad. The “blind underground” did exist as a profitable enterprise for such gangs as Murrel’s, but this hardly explains the neglect of the genuine underground that carried thousands of slaves to the North. The workings of this system appear incidentally in MacKinlay Kantor’s Arouse and Beware (1936). In this impartial and accurate narrative we have most interesting descriptions of the “Right Sort of People,” “The Sons of America,” both whites and Negroes, who with their grips and passwords and secret hiding places enable three fugitives to get to the Union lines. One slave woman, in a low tone, gives them valuable information, and then, to fool her curious children, curses them. The narrator says:
There was a canniness about these slaves which I had never imagined before. I had thought them barbaric or stupid or lazy ... and doubtless many of them were. And many others, too, were loyal to their masters and the Confederacy; but somehow I cannot hear jubilee singers chanting of Moses, and bondage and their freedom from it, without thinking of this thin, brown-faced wench, with her high shoulders and long straight arms....
Andrew Lytle’s “Mister McGregor” (1936) is a first-rate story of slavery. Rhears, “no common field-hand, but proud, black and spoiled” had “fretted and sulled” over McGregor’s whipping his wife Bella, and rather than run away, he decides to have it out with his owner. In one of the best fights of “frontier” realism, Rhears is stabbed by his master. The teller says of Rhears
I never seen such guts in nobody, nigger or white man.... Rhears spoke so low you could hardly hear him: “Marster, if you hadn’t got me, I’d a got you.”
In Lytle’s The Long Night (1936) Negroes are only incidental, but the organized stealing of slaves by a band of frontier criminals is important to the plot.
A young southerner muses disgustedly in Evelyn Scott’s Migrations (1927): “How close we come to the niggers without knowing anything about them.” Being aware that merely “coming close” is not knowledge, Mrs. Scott presents convincing Negro characters. Silas is filled with hatred for the white father of his sweetheart Fanny’s baby. But conditioned to respect his master, as Fanny had done to her sorrow, he persuades himself that the overseer was responsible. His sullen disobedience causes him to be lashed and he takes to the woods. Bosh is a less successful runaway; a half-wit, he frightens a white girl and is caught by a mob and burned to death. Of a very different type is Eugenia De Negre Blair, a brilliant and handsome adventuress, who has a trace of Negro blood. Without the emphasis of the abolitionists, Mrs. Scott still records the uneasy and tragic aspects of slavery.
In The Wave (1929), a series of chronicles of the Civil War, the stories of Eugenia and Silas are continued. One of the best sections shows the Negroes swarming to Sherman’s army; Aunt Nancy, to whom the army means food but who has given too much strength to slavery to live to see the promised land of freedom; Dilsy, who hopes that life-long drudgery is over; Lou, apologetic because her religious master had influenced her; Anna, bold and ready; and Uncle Vic, who has been sold to one “mean piece uv trash after another.” When the Federals, realizing that the horde of fugitives is more than they bargained for, tear up the pontoon bridges, they discover that the horde still presses on to freedom. “Gawd, you gotta shoot ’em to stop ’em.” There is symbolism in both the despairing cry of the Negroes left on the bank: “My home is ovah Jawdon,” and the callousness of the Yankee who thinks: “If we could only let them drown. Dam ’em, they get over their Jordan, but we have to carry ’em.”
In A Calendar of Sin (1931), Mrs. Scott re-creates the Reconstruction: the Klan, determined to return the Negro to slavery—where was the tobacco to come from?—flogging Negroes, destroying schools, hounding Yankees; and the carpet-baggers, more intent on wealth and politics than on helping the impoverished, ignorant and often shiftless Negroes—both pretending high idealism to cover up lurking meanness. Good comedy is in the episode of the old Auntie, who suspicious of Yankees anyway, leaves the new school in high dudgeon because, instead of learning to read the Bible right-off, she is started on the alphabet. There is a powerful narrative about a mulatto lynched for assault. Some Negroes, taught by “the raw-hide whip on their naked backs” betray the Union League and deny that they want the vote and book-learning. Others show a grasp of the developing folk-belief that everything mean and bad in the South “comes to us fru de Yankees.” Although the narratives are called “American Melodramas,” Mrs. Scott portrays neither villains nor heroes but sensitively understood human beings. And that is why, for truth to an era and a section, her work is immeasurably superior to such real melodramas as Gone With the Wind.
T. S. Stribling’s earlier Birthright is excelled by his trilogy of a southern family: The Forge (1931), The Store (1933) and Unfinished Cathedral (1934). In The Forge, the pictures of slave life and character are among the most convincing in American fiction. The plantation tradition gets short shrift. Old man Vaiden runs a one-horse, two-mule farm, but calls himself a “gentleman” since he owns five Negroes. A hard-fisted, hard drinking, bull-headed, irascible Primitive Baptist, blustering in north Alabama dialect instead of in cultured phrases, he wins some liking and, more important, is a credible human being. To Vaiden, as to so many farmers “on the make,” slavery meant “working the daylight out of slaves.” The slaves’ food is little more than corn-dodgers and bacon, and the boasted medical care is what “would be given a sick calf.” Attached to the family and farm by lifelong ties, the slaves still want freedom. While George is being praised as devoted, he is nursing hatred against his master.
Gracie Vaiden stands out. Although friendly with her white half-sisters, she broods over slavery. She feels that the flogging of her husband