Race Novels

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RACE NOVELS

In many ways "race" is everywhere one looks in American literature, and the decades from the end of the Civil War through the beginning of literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance in the 1910s and 1920s, respectively, are no exception. Even Henry James and Edith Wharton, whose fictional worlds centered on the nation's white middle and upper classes, concerned themselves on occasion with the problem of depicting nonwhite characters. More importantly, in selecting the centers of consciousness for their novels or in constructing the knowable communities of their literary worlds, James and Wharton intertwined matters of social and aesthetic discrimination. If we credit at all Ernest Hemingway's assertion that the literature of the United States begins with Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Tom Sawyer's Comrade) (1885), a novel that centers on the relationship between a black man and a white adolescent, then we might be justified in asking whether any American novel escapes being a race novel. A major thrust of recent scholarly engagements with the period is to see race as a constituent feature of the American literary imagination. This suggests that labeling a body of work as race novels is somewhat problematic. It would probably make more sense to reiterate Ralph Ellison's contention that neither the national identity nor the literature of the United States through the mid-twentieth century exists outside of the problem of race.

This being said, what may justify describing some novels from this period as "race" novels is that many writers composed and published their works with the hope of affecting the laws, practices, and attitudes directed at former slaves and the nation's other subordinated population groups. Race, as a term, obviously encompasses more than the social and political differences between blacks and whites, and to some extent the literature of this period reflects this broader awareness. For example, Helen Hunt Jackson (1830–1885) attempted to awaken the nation's conscience to the atrocities whites had perpetrated against Native Americans by writing a work of nonfiction, A Century of Dishonor: A Sketch of the United States Government's Dealings with Some of the Indian Tribes (1881), which she mailed to every member of the United States Senate in an effort to change national policy. Unsatisfied with the response to her efforts, Jackson supplemented her exposé with her 1884 novel, Ramona: A Story, a tale of love in which a mixed-race heroine discovers her Native American heritage. Jackson's novel was only one indication that such factors as the mid-century appropriation of lands in the American West and the Southwest along with increasing immigration from southern and eastern Europe and China contributed to a hyperawareness of human difference. Reflecting these differences was a proliferation of short stories in the major monthly magazines focusing on local customs and linguistic differences. The term "race novel," however, tended to be reserved for fiction such as Jackson's Ramona that addressed itself to solving a significant social problem—and during this era, the problem to which most of these novels addressed themselves was the ongoing discrimination against African Americans in their effort to secure their rights as citizens.

THE NOVEL AND RECONSTRUCTION

The early pattern for this work was set as the Civil War was coming to a close. John William De Forest (1826–1906), who coined the term "the great American novel," wrote Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) about the war and its aftermath. Not only did his novel include an attempt by one of its characters to reorganize black labor in the South, but De Forest, who had served in the Union Army, also went on himself to work for the Bureau of Refugees, Freedmen, and Abandoned Lands (more familiarly known as the Freedmen's Bureau) in South Carolina from 1866 through 1868. The Freedmen's Bureau was the institution most directly responsible for protecting the rights and the livelihoods of former slaves in the south during the period of Reconstruction (1866–1877). De Forest's novel, despite his sympathy for the former slaves, did not represent optimistically the prospects for full and equal citizenship for blacks after the war.

Also combining fictional endeavors with official and unofficial advocacy on behalf of black Americans were two other white authors, Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) and George Washington Cable (1844–1925). Tourgée, who also served in the Union Army during the war, became a staunch supporter of Reconstruction in North Carolina, where he was a Republican Party official and a Superior Court Judge. He is perhaps best known for having argued on behalf of Homer A. Plessy, who unsuccessfully challenged the constitutionality of segregated rail cars in the landmark 1896 Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson. Long before Plessy, however, Tourgée had castigated the Republican Party for its lukewarm support of the former slaves in two novels, A Fool's Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), both of which drew upon his experiences in North Carolina. Likewise a Civil War veteran, but on the side of the Confederacy, George Washington Cable became, after the war, perhaps the most prominent southern advocate for black civil rights of his generation, arguing against such ills as the convict-lease system. His most prominent race-related novel is The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (1880), which takes up the plight of free people of color under slavery as a way of pointing up the wrong of racial prejudice.

Closer to the center of the American literary mainstream, Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, who were to all intents and purposes Civil War noncombatants, wrote novels that drew attention, albeit sometimes ambivalently, to racial inequality. The moral heart of Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is Huck's decision to "go to Hell," rather than return Jim to slavery. A later novel, Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), uses the device of switching two babies in their cradles as a way of demonstrating that racial behavior and language were the result of social conditioning. Yet the novel's satire leaves intact the possibility that certain racial traits are innate. Howells, who from his editorial perches at the Atlantic Monthly and Harper's had advocated for realist approaches to novel writing, engaged directly the problem of black/white racial difference in An Imperative Duty (1891). The novel focuses on a genteel female character who learns of her black ancestry only as she reaches the stage of courtship. In keeping with his distaste for sentimentalism, Howells prevents his heroine from making the self-sacrifice of foregoing marriage to a white suitor for an educational career in the South, working on behalf of the race she has newly discovered as her own. Instead, her suitor, a white doctor who is fully aware of her background, cajoles her into accepting her proposal.

THE MUTED VOICES OF THE FORMER SLAVES

If white American authors were first out of the gate in establishing the racial themes of the postbellum period, they did so fully expecting to be overtaken by African Americans themselves. In an essay entitled "The South as a Field for Fiction" (1888), Tourgée declared that the lives of the former slaves, as well as those of poor white southerners, constituted the most promising source for distinctive American writing. Tourgée argues that the future of American literature lay in championing those forms, melodramatic and romantic, best suited to the epic sweep of war, reunion, and reaction in the South. The African American essayist and social critic Anna Julia Cooper (1858–1964) warned that until black authors, particularly black female authors, had told their stories both American society and American literature would fall short of their fulfillment. Cooper's voice was seconded by Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825–1911), a novelist, poet, and social crusader, who concluded her novel Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892) with a note observing that while the "race has not had very long to straighten its hands from the hoe, to grasp the pen and wield it as a power for good," there was reason for optimism (p. 282).

According to this line of thinking, the turn-of-twentieth-century literary world should have expected to see many former slaves abandoning the kitchen and cotton field for the writing desk, recapitulating the itineraries of antebellum authors such as Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Wells Brown (1813–1884), and Harriet Ann Jacobs (1813–1896), each of whom had written memorably of their escapes from slavery to freedom. Brown had also authored Clotel;or, the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States, which appeared in 1853, the first novel published by an African American. That same year Douglass published his only work of fiction, "The Heroic Slave," a novella about a slave rebellion. Both works were written in the wake of the novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896), which had galvanized abolitionist literature the year before and had become a model and a foil for writers, black and white. The evils of slavery and the problem of racial prejudice were the issues to which antebellum race fiction addressed itself. So many of these works were published that in 1858 John Mercer Langston hailed the "splendid achievement" of the antislavery movement in having established "its own literature" (Langston, p. 61).

In the years after the war, with the matter of slavery presumably settled, the issue of race revolved around questions of how completely African Americans would be incorporated into the polity. The literary issue was whether or not this quest for full citizenship would find its imaginative chroniclers among the former slaves. Had a system of universal public education based on the classical liberal curriculum of New England's schools been established in the South, more of the writers who emerged at the turn of the twentieth century might have been former slaves. Instead, because many whites, including those from the north, opposed the former slaves' demands for universal education, a large proportion of the schools for blacks that did open employed curricula designed to produce contented agricultural and industrial workers rather than equal citizens. And while these schools did not achieve their aim of reconciling the mass of black Americans to second-class citizenship, they did garner resources and support that might otherwise have gone to schools more in line with African American aspirations. Somewhat ironically, the most visible node of opposition to the classical liberal education model centered on Booker T. Washington (1856–1915), himself a former slave, whose Tuskegee Institute championed an industrial education model. Speaking to the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895, Washington disparaged literary aspirations among the former slaves, declaiming, "no race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem" (p. 220).

THE FICTION OF THE BLACK ELITE

Washington's opposition to the humanistic educational aims embraced by many African Americans was voiced against the backdrop of severe reprisals and state-sanctioned terrorism in the nation's southern states against those black Americans who sought to exercise the rights granted them by the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments to the United States Constitution. The early 1890s witnessed a dramatic increase in brutal lynchings, as state after state rolled back the political, civil, and economic gains made during Reconstruction. Much of the black voting that had taken place since Reconstruction was suppressed by rewriting state constitutions and by looking the other way when what rights that remained were not enforced. The latter years of the 1890s and the early years of the twentieth century were pockmarked by race riots in such cities as Wilmington, North Carolina, and Atlanta, Georgia. Not surprisingly, then, the most prominent black novelists of this period were not individuals who had experienced directly the oppressive regime of southern field and domestic labor. Rather, while turn-of-the-twentieth-century black authors suffered economically, politically, psychologically, and sometimes physically from Jim Crow strictures, they wrote their novels not as former slaves but on behalf of the former slaves. Consequently, the sympathy and sensitivity these writers brought to bear in portraying the plight of both the freed slaves and their better-educated fellow citizens did not prevent them from reproducing a social vision in which former field hands and cooks deferred to characters displaying gentility, literacy, and conventional beauty. Even though black political equality was not up for grabs in these works, their authors tended to acquiesce in the belief that a majority of the former slaves and their descendants needed moral, intellectual, and political guidance before they could exercise their political rights responsibly.

Frances Harper's Iola Leroy exemplifies this problem. In representing the speech of illiterate black characters early in the novel, Harper stresses that the slaves' broken English does not indicate their intellectual incapacity but rather their political astuteness about the implications for them of the Civil War. Harper remarks, "some of the shrewder slaves, coming in contact with their masters and overhearing their conversations, invented a phraseology to convey in the most unsuspected manner news to each other from the battle-field" (pp. 8–9). Yet later in the same novel one of Harper's exemplary characters, upon reading in the newspapers that black women were no longer fit to work as servants for whites, comes to the conclusion that these same black women must also be "unfit to be mothers to their own children, and she conceived the idea of opening a school to train future wives and mothers" (p. 199). This oscillation between viewing the freed slaves as ready to act on their own behalf and, alternately, as a disorganized populace awaiting direction from a college-educated elite—the group that Du Bois was to call the "Talented Tenth"—reflects how this elite stratum was pushed to rebut charges of black inferiority even as its spokespersons argued for the necessity of racial uplift.

In order to depict racial inequality as a caste system and to dramatize racial pride, most of these fictions focused on characters whose skin color and educational status would have allowed them to be taken for white. Although antebellum authors had used this character type—whom critics have termed the "tragic mulatto"—to highlight the irrationality and injustice of slavery, race novels of the postbellum era tended to employ these characters to dramatize black racial identity as something worth choosing. Harper's Iola Leroy repeatedly draws her readers' attention to the decisions made by her main characters to insist on being black even when the material inducements to assuming a white identity are considerable. Likewise, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930) underwrote a commitment to the race with interracial marriage among the black upper classes in several of her plots. Hopkins, who edited Colored American Magazine, published four novels between 1900 and 1903, including Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900).

More ambivalent about the capacity of a mixed-race elite to consolidate itself for class leadership were two novels by Charles Waddell Chesnutt (1858–1932), The House behind the Cedars (1900) and The Marrow of Tradition (1901). The former is a tragedy of racial passing, which subordinates condemnation of passing to a criticism of the hypocrisy of whites who make race the only criterion of human judgment. The latter, one of only three black-authored race novels to respond to the aesthetics of literary realism (the others being Paul Laurence Dunbar's The Sport of the Gods and James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), fictionalized the violent white attack on the black citizenry of Wilmington, North Carolina. This race riot targeted the city's black middle class, and Chesnutt's novel uses this violence to delineate the sources and consequences of white supremacy.

The Sport of the Gods (1902) by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906) was the author's only novel focusing on black characters and chronicles the ill fortunes of a black family forced to migrate from the South to the North after the father is falsely convicted of stealing money. The novel offers a naturalist examination of the effects of the urban environment on character development.

RESPONDING TO THE LITERATURE OF WHITE SUPREMACY

Not only did black novelists from the turn of the twentieth century write against actual lynchings, race riots, and political disenfranchisement, but also against popular novels that defended the white supremacist order of the Jim Crow South. In 1898 Thomas Nelson Page (1853–1922) published Red Rock: A Chronicle of Reconstruction, which echoed the historiography of William A. Dunning and others in excoriating Reconstruction as an unjustified imperialist assault on the South. This view was underscored when Thomas Dixon (1864–1946) published The Leopard's Spots: A Romance of the White Man's Burden 1865–1900 (1902) and The Clansman: An Historical Romance of the Ku Klux Klan (1905). Both novels depicted black demands for the franchise as a sexual threat to white womanhood, and Dixon, in particular, justified the use of violence against black men. Dixon's novel provided the basis for D. W. Griffith's racist feature film The Birth of A Nation (1915), the success of which indicated how the tenets of Southern white supremacy were truly national in scope.

One of the African American authors challenging these racist depictions was Sutton Elbert Griggs (1872–1930), a Texas-born Baptist minister who published five novels between 1899 and 1908. The first, Imperium in Imperio (1899), has often been remarked for the attention that it gives to black separatism, although Griggs's commitment throughout his works is to black equality within the United States. Griggs was specifically asked to write The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist (1905) as a response to Dixon's work, which he did, but without garnering anywhere near the attention that rewarded Dixon's efforts.

W. E. B. (William Edward Burghardt) Du Bois (1868–1963), who in 1903 published his landmark book The Souls of Black Folk, a text that, among other things, celebrates the distinctiveness of black musical expression, also wrote his first novel during this period. The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911) weaves an exposé of the cotton economy and Du Bois's ambivalent relation to the untutored folk into a plot that also reveals the economic basis of Southern opposition to black education.

The work that both caps the race novels of the turn-of-the-century and opens onto the era of the Harlem Renaissance is James Weldon Johnson's The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), which was first published in 1912 and re-published in 1927. The fictionalized autobiography of an accomplished pianist who successfully passes for white, the novel recycles many of the themes and problems of the earlier race novels. Yet by extending Du Bois's celebration of black spirituals to include secular forms of expression like ragtime, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man delineates what was to become a major premise of twentieth-century African American fiction: the belief that the nurturing of a distinctively black culture was a necessary component of black political activity.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Chesnutt, Charles W. The Marrow of Tradition. 1901. New York: Penguin Books, 1993.

De Forest, John William. Miss Ravenel's Conversion from Secession to Loyalty. 1867. New York: Penguin, 2000.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Vintage Library of America, 1990.

Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted. 1892. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Johnson, James Weldon. The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man. 1912. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Langston, John Mercer. Freedom and Citizenship: Selected Lectures and Addresses. 1883. Miami, Fla.: Mnemosyne, 1969.

Washington, Booker T. Up from Slavery: The Autobiography of Booker T. Washington, The Foremost Educator of His Times. 1901. New York: University Books, 1989.