I doubt if there exists any more valuable record for the study of the social history of the Negro in America than the naïve reflection of American social attitudes and their changes in the literary treatment of Negro life and character. More sensitively, and more truly than the conscious conventions of journalism and public debate, do these relatively unconscious values trace the fundamental attitudes of the American mind. Indeed, very often public professions are at utter variance with actual social practices, and in the matter of the Negro this variance is notably paradoxical. The statement that the North loves the Negro and dislikes Negroes, while the South hates the Negro but loves Negroes, is a crude generalization of the paradox, with just enough truth in it, however, to give us an interesting cue for further analysis. What this essay attempts must necessarily be a cursory preliminary survey: detailed intensive study of American social attitudes toward the Negro, using the changes of the literary tradition as clues, must be seriously undertaken later.
For a cursory survey, a tracing of the attitude toward the Negro as reflected in American letters gives us seven stages or phases, supplying not only an interesting cycle of shifts in public taste and interest, but a rather significant curve for social history. And more interesting perhaps than the attitudes themselves are the underlying issues and reactions of class attitudes and relationships which have been basically responsible for these attitudes. Moreover, instead of a single fixed attitude, sectionally divided and opposed, as the popular presumption goes, it will be seen that American attitudes toward the Negro have changed radically and often, with dramatic turns and with a curious reversal of rôle between the North and the South according to the class consciousness and interests dominant at any given time. With allowances for generalization, so far as literature records it, Negro life has run a gamut of seven notes,—heroics, sentiment, melodrama, comedy, farce, problem-discussion and æsthetic interest—as, in their respective turns, strangeness, domestic familiarity, moral controversy, pity, hatred, bewilderment, and curiosity, have dominated the public mind. Naturally, very few of these attitudes have been favorable to anything approaching adequate or even artistic portrayal; the Negro has been shunted from one stereotype into the other, but in this respect has been no more the sufferer than any other subject class, the particular brunt of whose servitude has always seemed to me to consist in the fate of having their psychological traits dictated to them. Of course, the Negro has been a particularly apt social mimic, and has assumed protective coloration with almost every change—thereby hangs the secret of his rather unusual survival. But of course a price has been paid, and that is that the Negro, after three hundred years of residence and association, even to himself, is falsely known and little understood. It becomes all the more interesting, now that we are verging for the first time on conditions admitting anything like true portraiture and self-portrayal to review in retrospect the conditions which have made the Negro traditionally in turn a dreaded primitive, a domestic pet, a moral issue, a ward, a scapegoat, a bogey and pariah, and finally what he has been all along, could he have been seen that way, a flesh and blood human, with nature’s chronic but unpatented varieties.
Largely because Negro portraiture has rarely if ever run afoul of literary genius, these changes have rather automatically followed the trend of popular feeling, and fall almost into historical period stages, with very little overlapping. Roughly we may outline them as a Colonial period attitude (1760–1820), a pre-Abolition period (1820–45), the Abolitionist period (1845–65), the Early Reconstruction period (1870–85), the late Reconstruction period (1885–95), the Industrial period (1895–1920), and the Contemporary period since 1920. The constant occurrence and recurrence of the Negro, even as a minor figure, throughout this wide range is in itself an indication of the importance of the Negro as a social issue in American life, and of the fact that his values are not to be read by intrinsic but by extrinsic coefficients. He has dramatized constantly two aspects of white psychology in a projected and naïvely divorced shape—first, the white man’s wish for self-justification, whether he be at any given time anti-Negro or pro-Negro, and, second, more subtly registered, an avoidance of the particular type that would raise an embarrassing question for the social conscience of the period; as, for example, the black slave rebel at the time when all efforts were being made after the abatement of the slave trade to domesticate the Negro; or the defeatist fiction types of 1895–1920, when the curve of Negro material progress took such a sharp upward rise. There is no insinuation that much of this sort of reflection has been as conscious or deliberately propagandist as is often charged and believed; it is really more significant as an expression of “unconscious social wish,” for whenever there has been direct and avowed propaganda there has always been awakened a reaction in public attitude and a swift counter-tendency. Except in a few outstanding instances, literature has merely registered rather than moulded public sentiment on this question.
Through the Colonial days and extending as late as 1820, Negro life was treated as strange and distant. The isolated instances treat the Negro almost heroically, with an exotic curiosity that quite gaudily romanticized him. At that time, as in the more familiar romantic treatment of the American Indian, there was registered in the emphasis upon “savage traits” and strange ways a revulsion to his social assimilation. The typical figure of the period is a pure blood, often represented as a “noble captive,” a type neither fully domesticated nor understood, and shows that far from being a familiar the Negro was rather a dreaded curiosity. Incidentally, this undoubtedly was a period of close association between the more domesticated Indian tribes and the Negroes—an almost forgotten chapter in the history of race relations in America which the heavy admixture of Indian blood in the Negro strain silently attests; so the association of the two in the public mind may have had more than casual grounds. Two of the most interesting features of this period are the frank concession of ancestry and lineage to the Negro at a time before the serious onset of miscegenation, and the hectic insistence upon Christian virtues and qualities in the Negro at a time when the Negro masses could not have been the model Christians they were represented to be, and which they did in fact become later. As James Oneal has pointed out in an earlier article, the notion of the boon of Christianity placated the bad conscience of the slave traders, and additionally at that time there was reason at least in the feeling of insecurity to sense that it was good social insurance to stress it.
By 1820 or 1825 the Negro was completely domesticated, and patriarchal relations had set in. The strange savage had become a sentimentally humored peasant. The South was beginning to develop its “aristocratic tradition,” and the slave figure was the necessary foil of its romanticism. According to F. P. Gaines, “the plantation makes its first important appearance in American literature in John Pendleton Kennedy’s Swallow Barn (1832) and William Carruther’s The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834).” As one would expect, the really important figures of the régime are discreetly ignored,—the mulatto house servant concubine and her children; the faithful male body-servant, paradoxically enough, came in for a compensating publicity. In fact, the South was rapidly developing feudal intricacies and their strange, oft-repeated loyalties, and was actually on the verge of a golden age of romance when the shadow of scandal from Northern criticism darkened the high-lights of the whole régime and put the South on the defensive. It is a very significant fact that between 1845 and 1855 there should have appeared nearly a score of plays and novels on the subject of the quadroon girl and her tragic mystery, culminating in William Wells Brown’s bold exposè Clothel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853), as the caption of the unexpurgated English edition of this black Abolitionist’s novel read. Southern romance was chilled to the marrow, and did not resume the genial sentimental approach to race characters for over a generation.
With the political issues of slave and free territory looming, and the moral issues of the Abolitionist controversy coming on, Negro life took on in literature the aspects of melodrama. The portraiture which had started was hastily dropped for exaggerated types representing polemical issues. The exaggerated tone was oddly enough set by the Negro himself, for long before Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) the lurid slave narratives had set the pattern of Job-like suffering and melodramatic incident. Apart from its detailed dependence on Josiah Henson’s actual story, Mrs. Stowe’s novel simply capitalized a pattern of story and character already definitely outlined in 1845–50, and in some exceptional anticipations ten years previous. Of course, with this period the vital portrayal of the Negro passed temporarily out of the hands of the South and became dominantly an expression of Northern interest and sentiment. In its controversial literature, naturally the South responded vehemently to the Abolitionist’s challenge with the other side of the melodramatic picture,—the Negro as a brute and villain. But the formal retaliations of Reconstruction fiction were notably absent; except for a slight shift to the more docile type of Negro and peasant life further removed from the life of the “big house,” G. P. James and others continued the mildly propagandist fiction of the patriarchal tradition,—an interesting indication of how the impending danger of the slave régime was minimized in the mass mind of the South. Uncle Tom’s Cabin, of course, passes as the acme of the literature of the Abolitionist period, and it is in relation to its influence upon the issues involved. But as far as literary values go, Clothel by Wells Brown and The Garies and Their Friends by Frank J. Webb were closer studies both of Negro character and of the Negro situation. Their daring realism required them to be published abroad, and they are to be reckoned like the Paris school of Russian fiction as the forerunners of the native work of several generations later. Especially Webb’s book, with its narrative of a sophisticated and cultured group of free Negroes, was in its day a bold departure from prevailing conventions. Either of these books would have been greater still had it consciously protested against the melodramatic stereotypes then in public favor; but the temptation to cater to the vogue of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was perhaps too great. The sensational popularity of the latter, and its influence upon the public mind, is only another instance of the effect of a great social issue to sustain melodrama as classic as long as the issue lives. The artistic costs of all revolutions and moral reforms is high.
The Early Reconstruction period supplied the inevitable sentimental reaction to the tension of the war period. The change to sentimental genre is quite understandable. If the South could have resumed the portrayal of its life at the point where controversy had broken in, there would be a notable Southern literature today. But the South was especially prone to sugar-coat the slave régime in a protective reaction against the exposures of the Abolitionist literature. Northern fiction in works like the novels of Albion Tourgee continued its incriminations, and Southern literature became more and more propagandist. At first it was only in a secondary sense derogatory of the Negro; the primary aim was self-justification and romantic day-dreaming about the past. In the effort to glorfy the lost tradition and balm the South’s inferiority complex after the defeat, Uncle Tom was borrowed back as counter-propaganda, refurbished as the devoted, dependent, happy, care-free Negro, whom the South had always loved and protected, and whom it knew “better than he knew himself.” The protective devices of this fiction, the accumulative hysteria of self-delusion associated with its promulgation, as well as the comparatively universal acceptance of so obvious a myth, form one of the most interesting chapters in the entire history of social mind. There is no denying the effectiveness of the Page-Cable school of fiction as Southern propaganda. In terms of popular feeling it almost recouped the reverses of the war. The North, having been fed only on stereotypes, came to ignore the Negro in any intimate or critical way through the deceptive influence of those very stereotypes. At least, these figures Southern fiction painted were more convincingly human and real, which in my judgment accounted in large part for the extraordinary ease with which the Southern version of the Negro came to be accepted by the Northern reading public, along with the dictum that the South knows the Negro.
But the false values in the situation spoiled the whole otherwise promising school—Chandler Harris excepted—as a contrast of the later work of Cable or Page with their earlier work will convincingly show. Beginning with good genre drawing that had the promise of something, they ended in mediocre chromographic romanticism. Though the genteel tradition never fully curdled into hatred, more and more hostilely it focussed upon the Negro as the scapegoat of the situation. And then came a flood of flagrantly derogatory literature as the sudden rise of figures like Thomas Dixon, paralleling the Vardamans and Tillmans of political life, marked the assumption of the master-class tradition by the mass psychology of the “poor-whites.” Reconstruction fiction thus completed the swing made quite inevitable by the extreme arc of Abolitionist literature; the crudities and animus of the one merely countered the bathos and bias of the other. In both periods the treatment of Negro life was artistically unsatisfactory, and subject to the distortions of sentiment, propaganda, and controversy. The heavy artillery of this late Reconstruction attack has shambled its own guns; but the lighter fussilade of farce still holds out and still harasses those who stand guard over the old controversial issues. But the advance front of creative effort and attack has moved two stages further on.
As a result of the discussion of the Late Reconstruction period “White Supremacy” had become more than a slogan of the Southern chauvinists; it became a mild general social hysteria, which gave an almost biological significance to the race problem. It is interesting to note how suddenly the “problem of miscegenation” became important at a time when there was less of it than at any period within a century and a quarter, and how the mulatto, the skeleton in the family closet, suddenly was trotted out for attention and scrutiny. From 1895 or so on, this problem was for over a decade a veritable obsession; and from William Dean Howells’ Imperative Duty to Stribling’s Birthright the typical and dominant figure of literary interest is the mulatto as a symbol of social encroachment, and the fear of some “atavism of blood” through him wreaking vengeance for slavery. While serious literature was discussing the mulatto and his problem, less serious literature was in a sub-conscious way no less seriously occupied with the negative side of the same problem;—namely, extolling the unambitious, servile, and “racially characteristic” Negro who in addition to presenting diverting humor represented no serious social competition or encroachment. The public mind of the whole period was concentrated on the Negro “in” and “out of his place;” and the pseudo-scientific popularizations of evolutionism added their belabored corollaries. But the real basic proposition underlying it all was the sensing for the first time of the serious competition and rivalry of the Negro’s social effort and the failure of his social handicaps to effectively thwart it.
Many will be speculating shortly upon the reasons for the literary and artistic emancipation of the Negro, at a time when his theme seemed most hopelessly in the double grip of social prejudice and moral Victorianism. Of course, realism had its share in the matter; the general reaction away from types was bound to reach even the stock Negro stereotypes. Again, the local color fad and the naturally exotic tendencies of conscious ætheticism gave the untouched field of Negro life an attractive lure. The gradual assertion of Negro artists trying at first to counteract the false drawing and values of popular writers, but eventually in the few finer talents motivated by the more truly artistic motives of self-expression, played its additional part. But in my judgment the really basic factor in the sharp and astonishing break in the literary tradition and attitude toward the Negro came in the revolt against Puritanism. This seems to me to explain why current literature and art are for the moment so preoccupied with the primitive and pagan and emotional aspects of Negro life and character; and why suddenly something almost amounting to infatuation has invested the Negro subject with interest and fascination. The release which almost everyone had thought must come about through a change in moral evaluation, a reform of opinion, has actually and suddenly come about merely as a shift of interest, a revolution of taste. From it there looms the imminent possibility not only of a true literature of the Negro but of a Negro Literature as such. It becomes especially interesting to watch whether the artistic possibilities of these are to be realized, since thrice before this social issues have scotched the artistic potentialities of Negro life, and American literature is thereby poorer in the fields of the historical romance, the period novel, and great problem-drama than it should be. But the work of Waldo Frank, Jean Toomer, Walter White, Rudolph Fisher, and Du Bose Heyward promises greatly; and if we call up the most analogous case as a basis of forecast,—the tortuous way by which the peasant came into Russian literature and the brilliant sudden transformation his advent eventually effected, we may predict, for both subject and its creative exponents, the Great Age of this particular section of American life and strand in the American experience.