The republication, starting in the 1960s, of many long-unavailable nineteenth-century African American novels, and the wealth of critical discourses on those recovered texts that have flourished since the 1970s, have led to a profound rethinking of traditional critical evaluations of the fiction written by African Americans after slavery. Rather than as a historically valuable but artistically less significant bridge between the antebellum origins of the African American novel and the celebrated explosion of literary creativity during the New Negro Renaissance, postbellum African American fiction is now being reevaluated as important in its own right for its formal experimentation with, and revision of, a large variety of novelistic genres.
African American authors wrote historical, utopian, political, and religious novels, juvenile and detective fiction, and Bildungsromane. They explored international themes, expanding their focus to include not only Europe but also Africa and the Caribbean, and they were actively engaged with contemporary literary movements such as local color fiction, realism, naturalism, and, in the early twentieth century, modernism. Actively opposing the stereotypes and prejudices prevalent in contemporary mainstream American literature and determined to intervene as writers in the culture wars raging at the time, they forcefully opened a new literary space for the representation of blacks in fiction. They challenged restrictive definitions of American literature, and of American culture as a whole, through a radical revision of prevalent literary modes and the use of metanarrative clues that call attention to those revisionary practices, as well as through the elaboration of innovative strategies of representation, including the transgressive blending of different genres. In the novels of Charles W. Chesnutt, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline E. Hopkins, Sutton E. Griggs, Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman, J. McHenry Jones, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, realism is cross-fertilized by romance and the oral folk tradition, as well as by intricate family sagas and utopian longings that bring the weight of the past or the politically charged hopes for a better future to bear upon the representation and interpretation of the present.
The decades that followed the end of the Civil War in 1865 and the abolition of slavery witnessed both the opening up of new opportunities for former slaves and the continuation of old racial hierarchies and prejudices under new forms. Since there was no redistribution of land in the South and the promise of “40 acres and a mule” remained unfulfilled, freedom for millions of ex-slaves came without any structural improvement in their condition of economic dispossession and subordination. Nevertheless, against overwhelming odds, African Americans fought actively to change that situation, pursuing the goals of social, political, and economic advancement. Education was deemed central to the uplift of the race. Postbellum decades saw a proliferation of freedmen’s schools, black colleges, literary societies and clubs, journals, and independent black presses.
At the national level, however, the increasing disinterest in the plight of former slaves and the end of Reconstruction in 1877 led to a rapid reorganization of the old racialized power structure in the South and to an increase of racial tension and discrimination also in the North. The economic neo-slavery of tenancy and sharecropping, the violence and intimidation of terroristic white-supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan, and the systematic political disenfranchisement of African Americans, with the proliferation of “Jim Crow” laws which eroded the civil rights supposedly guaranteed by the 14th and 15th Amendments, were accompanied by an increase in racial violence that saw the outbreak of major anti-black riots both North and South and a dramatic rise in the number of lynchings, which reached a peak in the 1890s. Lynchings, ritualized and publicized spectacles of mutilation and murder that drew large crowds of men, women, and also children, emerged as tools of social control and repression of blacks considered “too” determined or enterprising, as African American journalist Ida B. Wells documented at the time.
The epitome and the emblem of the virulent racism of the times, racial violence and lynchings, are themes present in most of the major novels discussed in this chapter. They are also featured prominently in lesser-known African American works of fiction such as Walter H. Stowers and William H. Anderson’s Appointed: An American Novel (published under the pseudonym “Sanda” in 1894), G. Langhorne Pryor’s Neither Bond nor Free: A Plea (1902), Charles H. Fowler’s Historical Romance of the American Negro (1902), Edward A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), J. W. Grant’s Out of the Darkness: or Diabolism and Destiny (1909), Robert Lewis Waring’s As We See It (1910), Charles Henry Holmes’s Ethiopia: The Land of Promise (A Book with a Purpose) (1917), J. A. Rogers’s From Superman to Man (1917), and Sarah Lee Brown Fleming’s Hope’s Highway (1918). Novels like J. McHenry Jones’s Hearts of Gold (1896) featured also other kinds of violence, such as that directed against black prison inmates in labor camps in the South. As had happened during slavery, “Jim Crow” segregationist practices, which were institutionalized in 1896 with the infamous “separate but equal” Supreme Court decision in Plessy v. Ferguson, enforced two dramatically different experiences of American life for blacks and whites. Significantly, the years at the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, which American historians call respectively the “Gilded Age” and the “Progressive period,” have been defined the “nadir” of African American history.1
Segregation, of course, had a devastating impact not only at a social, but also at a cultural level. Societal inequalities and discriminatory practices were in fact actively rationalized and legitimized by pseudo-biological theories on the inferiority of blacks, alternatively portrayed as “naturally” docile Sambos or violent brutes. The numerous pseudo-scholarly treatises on the topic were compounded and reinforced at a more capillary level by the prevailing demeaning stereotypes of African Americans in popular culture. The success of blackface minstrel shows, with their caricatural portrayals of blacks, is but an example of the mainstream cultural consensus on the inferiority of blacks which also found more “highbrow” expression in literature: from the violent racism of Thomas Dixon’s Ku Klux Klan novels to the insidious condescension of bestselling plantation fiction à la Thomas Nelson Page (which reinterpreted slavery as a benign institution that took care of a supposedly defenseless and naturally servile race).
In response to this extremely hostile cultural terrain, the second half of the nineteenth century witnessed a veritable flowering of African American fiction, stimulated by the growth of a black readership, by the multiplication of African American journals and publishing houses, and by the conviction, prevalent among black intellectuals and activists, that literature was a powerful tool to combat prevalent racial stereotypes, to reinforce the cultural pride and self-awareness of African Americans, and to foster the process of racial uplift. In combating the “battle of images” that raged in this period, the strategy of African American novelists was not simply to produce propagandistic work that reversed popular stereotypes.2 Rather, they proposed complex and literarily innovative representations of the rich cultural heritage, the complex humanity, and the history of resistance of African Americans. Indeed, it is one of the ironies of literary history that the extremely oppressive historical circumstances in which African American writers produced their fictions have for a long time been invoked more as a benign excuse for the supposedly poor quality of their craft (and therefore as a reason for the critical neglect of their work), rather than as proof of the irrepressible determination and artistic self-awareness with which African American authors defied contemporary dicta of race and gender, devising transgressive and original literary means for the counter-hegemonic representation of blacks. Their proclaimed faith in the power of the pen notwithstanding, African American authors could not, of course, magically rectify contemporary injustices, but they did actively intervene as writers in the battle to shape the cultural imagery of their time in less racially oppressive ways. Their strategies of literary intervention had a crucial, albeit not yet fully recognized, impact on the development of subsequent African American and American fiction as a whole.
The challenges that African American novelists faced in their determination to represent a segregated, racially “bifurcated American world” from their subaltern and socially marginalized point of view were many and serious.3 In the first place, they faced a double and profoundly divided audience of black and white readers with often diametrically opposed perspectives, histories, and experiences of American society, as well as with very disparate degrees of knowledge of black culture and evaluations of its significance.
Recently, scholars like Claudia Tate and Frances Smith Foster have questioned traditional critical assumptions that post-slavery fiction was aimed primarily at a white audience. The above-mentioned growth of a black readership, the multiplication and cultural impact of literary societies, and the rise of a strong independent black press, meant that African American writers could count also on a black audience. Minnie’s Sacrifice (1869), Sowing and Reaping (1876–1877), and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889), the first three novels written by Frances E. W. Harper (all recently rediscovered by Foster), were serialized in the newspaper of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The Christian Recorder, and they were primarily aimed at a black audience. Similarly, Pauline E. Hopkins serialized in Colored American Magazine three of her four novels (Hagar’s Daughter: A Story of Southern Caste Prejudice, 1901–1902; Winona: A Tale of Negro Life in the South and Southwest, 1902; Of One Blood; or, The Hidden Self, 1902–1903). Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman’s, Beryl Weston’s Ambition: The Story of an Afro-American Girl’s Life (1893) and Clancy Street (1898–1899) first appeared in The A.M.E. Church Review. Sutton E. Griggs published his own novels and distributed them in black communities in the South.
However, since one of the aims of the African American novel was not only, so to speak, to preach to the converted, but also to promote intercultural understanding and undermine the prevailing stereotypes of blacks in white minds, typically the novel after slavery is a multilayered, multiple-voiced text, aimed at a dual audience and readable at a variety of levels depending on the kinds of cultural knowledge the reader brings to the text. The interpretation of any novel is always contingent upon the reader’s degree of knowledge, but the specificity of these African American texts rests in their deliberate multiple-voicedness, in their use of strategies of signifying, of coded communication, and in the systematic metanarrative ways in which the authors draw the readers’ attention to the process of interpretation, pointing to the treacherousness of the act of reading, foregrounding the unreliability of appearances, underlining the superficiality of traditional cultural scripts, and questioning the politics of production and transmission of knowledge. Explicit comments on the revisionary goals and the dual audience of African American fiction are made in the forewords, openings, or closures of such different novels as Harper’s Minnie’s Sacrifice and Iola Leroy; or, Shadows Uplifted (1892), Hopkins’s Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Dunbar’s The Sport of the Gods (1902), Fowler’s Historical Romance of the American Negro (1902), Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), or Griggs’s The Hindered Hand; or, The Reign of the Repressionist (1905), which explicitly critiques Dixon’s Ku Klux Klan novels. Along similar lines, the deferred happy endings that characterize many African American domestic novels of this period (e.g. Hopkins’s Contending Forces or Johnson’s 1890 Clarence and Corinne), and the predominance of the theme of passing-for-white, or passing as it is generally known, are narrative devices that unsettle, respectively, the readers’ expectations and their sense of the legibility of reality in ways that foreground the process of interpretation itself.
The African American novel after slavery is characteristically also dominated by a deconstructive approach to the past which prefigures late twentieth-century literary concerns. It re-told and reinterpreted the past, reading the black experience as an inextricable part of the nation’s past and as an indispensable vantage point to interpret American culture and society as a whole. This reflexive attitude toward the past dominates not only those works that are set in the slavery period, like James H. W. Howard’s antiplantation Bond and Free: A True Tale of Slave Times (1886), Thomas Detter’s Nellie Brown; or, The Jealous Wife (1871), or Hopkins’s Winona (1902). The emphasis on the continued impact of the slave past on the social and cultural hierarchies of the present, as well as on the most personal choices of the protagonists (including the choice of a marriage partner) characterizes also those African American novels that focus mostly on the decades that followed the end of the Civil War. In both cases, the emphasis on the past serves a dual goal. On the one hand, the reinterpretation of slavery and the focus on the culture of resistance of the slaves – issues which African American novelists knew to be absent from traditional history books – revised the history of African America, stimulated cultural pride, and functioned as a means of community building. On the other, they represented a way to anticipate objections and to help suspend the white readers’ disbelief when presented with a black-centered view of American society that questioned dominant historical accounts and ran against white readers’ own experiences and self-interest.
In response to these complex and conflictual representational needs, mulatto heroes and heroines feature prominently in the African American novel after slavery. In white fiction, the mulatto was a stock literary figure that had enjoyed great popularity in the antebellum period, and had prospered also in postbellum decades. Several ideological issues coalesced in the white stereotype of the tragic mulatto. What spelled the tragic fate of these in-between figures, in fact, was the supposedly clear differentiation and incompatibility of the races, which fed the reassuring conviction that racial difference was ultimately always legible and easy to regulate, since “blood will tell.” Precisely because of its popularity and stereotyped qualities, the mulatto had been profoundly revised in the works of the founding authors of African American fiction, as noted in chapter 1. Also in the hands of postbellum African American authors, the mulatto could be profoundly subversive, emerging as the living symbol of the historical reality of racial interconnectedness and as proof that, contrary to racist mythology, blacks and whites were “of one blood.” While the option to pass for white is characteristically rejected in favor of belonging to the black community, mulattoes more often than not enjoy a far from tragic fate in black fiction. In fact, the mulatto hero’s or heroine’s survival against all stereotypes, discriminations, and societal odds parallels and highlights that of the black community as a whole.
Long indicted as a symptom of middle-class bias, racial self-hatred, and internalization of white values, in African American fiction before the New Negro Renaissance, the trope of passing functions instead as an aggressive strategy to reinterpret race as a sociocultural construct, rather than a biological destiny, and to appropriate and deconstruct the oppressive, albeit elusive, notion of whiteness that served as the normative standard to identify and evaluate blackness. African American novelists explored explicitly this transgressive potential of passing as a theme, using it as a literary device to cross the color line, to bridge fictionally the social separation between blacks and whites that was systematically enforced by segregation, to undermine pseudo-biological arguments on the naturalness of racial hierarchies, as well as to show, through the increased social mobility and success of the white-looking passer, the systematic discriminatory practices that enforced separate social destinies for blacks and whites. The dislike of white readers for and the interest of black audiences in this literary transgression of the societal norms of racial segregation emerge clearly from Hopkins’s scathing 1903 reply to the letter of complaint of a white reader of the Colored American Magazine.4
Through their use of the trope of passing and the foregrounding of seemingly more conventional all-but-white protagonists, African American writers also opened a space for the non-caricatural representation of visibly black characters and for a reevaluation of the distinctiveness of African American culture. The black characters who surround the all-but-white protagonist in Harper’s, Chesnutt’s, or Hopkins’s fiction do not provide stereotypical comic relief. On the contrary, they are the spokespersons of those historic and cultural values of black America that lead Iola Leroy, for instance, to relinquish the possibility of passing and instead to cast her lot with her mother’s people. In turn, the passer’s preference for the black community reinterprets African Americanness as the consciousness of a distinctive historical, social, and cultural heritage, rather than as an intrinsic condition of dispossession. To avoid stereotyped misinterpretations, the aforementioned authors significantly insert in their novels also visibly black major characters who vie with the all-but-white protagonist for predominance. In Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), the character of Lucille Delany represents the truly new professional black woman Harper celebrates; in Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901), Venus Johnson emerges as detective heroine of the novel; and in Chesnutt’s The House Behind the Cedars (1900), dark-skinned and working-class Frank Fowler proves himself to be the only truly noble-hearted Southern gentleman, whose selflessness and generosity will give way, in Chesnutt’s second published novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901), to the more overtly confrontational heroism and courage of the folk character Josh Green. Dark-skinned folk characters emerge not only as major supporting actors, but as the unquestioned protagonists of several novels of this period, such as Tillman’s Clancy Street (1898–1899), Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio (1899), and Du Bois’s The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911).
The conflicting representational needs that led many African American authors to deploy the mulatto as a “narrative device of mediation” also led them to adopt and adapt the conventions of utopian fiction.5 Utopian fiction, which centers on the imaginative construction of an ideal society, had become extremely popular at the turn of the century. In their enormously influential works, white bestselling authors like Edward Bellamy projected into the future the racist and eugenist tendencies of their times, imagining in Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888) a perfect future from which blacks have disappeared or where they enjoy separate and unequal status, as in the sequel Equality (1897). Building on a little-known early antecedent like Lorenzo D. Blackson’s Christian utopia, The Rise and Progress of the Kingdoms of Light and Darkness; or, The Reigns of Kings Alpha and Abandon (1867), turn-of-the-century African American writers profoundly revised the formal conventions and thematic concerns of utopian fiction. Blending utopia with the Bildungsroman, the romance, and intricate family sagas to emphasize the continued impact of the past on the future, African American writers focused less on the description of a perfect future social order than on the process of personal and social change that could make such a perfect society possible by preparing individuals worthy of inhabiting it. A case in point is Sutton E. Griggs’s first novel, Imperium in Imperio (1899), where the author details the birth of a “new Negro, self-respecting, fearless, and determined in the assertion of his rights.”6 Griggs foregrounds the meaning of the black experience in dystopian, segregated, and racist turn-of-the-century American society, by focusing on the Bildung of two exceptionally talented black youths: Belton Piedmont, the son of a poor but caring mother, and Bernard Belgrave, the unacknowledged mulatto son of a powerful white senator who uses his power to secretly promote his son’s career. It is Belton’s life especially that reveals the absurd, wildly oppressive workings of segregation that haunt and hamper the lives of Griggs’s protagonists in this and in his other four novels (Overshadowed, 1901; Unfettered, 1902; The Hindered Hand, 1905; and Pointing the Way, 1908).
Imperium in Imperio celebrates Belton’s resilience and self-respect in the face of unbelievable oppression. Griggs uses “race travel,” as opposed to the more traditional utopian devices of space or time travel, to foreground the parallel, but dramatically different realities blacks and whites live in because of segregation. Within the economy of utopian conventions, the presence of segregation is defamiliarized as a world turned upside down, dominated by perverted values that punish (black) intelligence and reward (white) violence and cowardice. In the novel, black resilience and self-determination take political reality in the Imperium, a secret black society that has military and institutional powers and that, to fulfill its mission to protect the life and property of black Americans, contemplates the possibility of secession and war against the United States. While the disruptive potential of the Imperium is ultimately exorcized by its dismantlement, the closure of the novel sees Griggs’s fictional narrator threaten white America with the possibility of the Imperium’s rebirth, unless racial equality is achieved.
With a similarly innovative use of utopian conventions, in Of One Blood Pauline E. Hopkins blends the utopian element connected with the splendid secret African civilization of Telassar, where the ex-passer Ruel Briggs will eventually rule as king, with an intricate family saga rooted in United States slavery. This interracial family saga, a theme which also characterizes her other three novels, foregrounds the long-term evil consequences of the peculiar institution, the moral bankruptcy of segregation, and its disruptive consequences on the entire American social fabric. In another important novel of this period, Iola Leroy (1892), Frances E. W. Harper writes a historical novel of slavery and reconstruction that, like Hopkins’s, goes against plantation nostalgia. In Iola Leroy, Harper depicts realistically the difficulties and violence of the Reconstruction period, and finally articulates an inspirational utopian vision of a future South that will be a land of freedom for all. With her emphasis on the Bildung of the title character and on the qualities of the truly “new,” professional black woman, Lucille Delany, Harper adds a specifically feminist dimension to her utopia.
The focus on the plight of the black woman, as paradigmatic of the condition of oppression and also of the ethos of resistance of the black community as a whole, dominates the fiction written by Harper, Hopkins, and other literary exponents of the Black Woman’s Era at the turn of the century, including Amelia E. Johnson, Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, and Katherine Davis Chapman Tillman. As critic Claudia Tate has argued, these domestic novels foreground female-centered environments, marginalizing and subverting patriarchal power relations, and centering on new models of more independent women who are able to reconcile familial duties with a satisfying professional career, as in the case of Lucille Delany in Iola Leroy or of the title character of Tillman’s Beryl Weston’s Ambition.
The work of Amelia E. Johnson reveals a different strategy to deal with the dilemmas of representing race in a segregated society. Johnson was the first black woman to write Sunday School fiction for the American Baptist Publication Society, one of the largest white publishing houses of the time, and her fiction represents an important and long-neglected early moment in the tradition of African American juvenile fiction. Amelia E. Johnson was an activist in the African American community, and in her essays for such journals as T. Thomas Fortune’s The New York Age she was outspoken on racial issues, including, for instance, the need for “race publishing houses” to enable African American authors to write without incurring white censorship.7 However, her three Sunday School novels (Clarence and Corinne; or, God’s Way, 1890; The Hazeley Family, 1894; Martina Meriden; or, What Is My Motive?, 1901) feature racially indeterminate characters, that is, characters who are not explicitly described as black and could therefore be assumed to be white by white readers. This choice was not unique, nor was it only a defensive strategy to circumvent white readers’s disinterest in black matters. Several other African American writers opted for racially indeterminate or even white protagonists, including Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins, author of Megda (1891) and Four Girls at Cottage City (1895), Charles Chesnutt in The Colonel’s Dream (1905), Edward A. Johnson in his utopian novel Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), as well as Paul Laurence Dunbar, the celebrated poet and short story writer, in his first three novels (The Uncalled, 1898; The Love of Landry, 1900; The Fanatics, 1901). In these novels that engaged in passing for white, the choice of racially indeterminate or white characters afforded a way to address problematic issues (such as the need for self-realization in the face of societal constraints or prejudices, as in Dunbar’s The Uncalled, or the pressing contemporary realities of urban poverty, alcoholism, and family disruption, in the case of Amelia Johnson’s novels), without presenting them as specifically racialized problems linked with the supposed social pathology of blacks.
In Amelia E. Johnson’s juvenile fiction, her young, racially indeterminate heroines, who are typically isolated in a hostile environment dominated by poverty and family disruption, are prized for their determination and resilience in the face of such unfortunate circumstances. They triumph spiritually, in the first place, by strengthening their faith in “God’s way,” but also, more practically, by enforcing those values of domesticity, orderliness, and self-discipline that eventually enable them to overcome the adverse circumstances they happen to live in. Both Amelia E. Johnson and Emma Dunham Kelley-Hawkins do include racial signifiers that make it possible to decode their protagonists’ racial indeterminacy not necessarily as whiteness but also as blackness (e.g. the color-coded title of Johnson’s second novel and her emphasis on her female protagonists’ dark, black, or brown eyes, or Kelley-Hawkins’s references to a well-known black resort town in Megda), thereby restoring the multilayered, signifying qualities of their novels. Nevertheless, the novels that engage in passing reveal a diminished, or at least more covert, oppositional value. They emerge as less transgressive and innovative in terms not only of their social critique, but also of their literary qualities. For instance, the spiritual and religious emphasis of Johnson’s and Kelley-Hawkins’s new women translates into their greater adherence to the standards of true womanhood, which are less problematized than in Harper’s or Hopkins’s novels, while E. A. Johnson’s Light Ahead for the Negro follows more closely the literary conventions of utopian fiction and advances a less radical vision of racial equality than Griggs projected in Imperium. To make this same point from a different angle, Dunbar’s only novel with explicitly black protagonists moves more radically than his previous ones toward naturalism and anticipates concerns of the New Negro Renaissance.
In the first novel published by the most widely nationally acclaimed African American prose writer of the pre-Harlem Renaissance period, Charles W. Chesnutt, passing is central both as theme and as narrative device, a dual use that enables the author to articulate a sharp and literarily sophisticated critique of traditional narrative representations of blackness. Chesnutt had theorized a strategy of oblique literary intervention early on. In 1880, when he was 21 years old, he wrote in his journal: “The subtle, almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the negro, which is common to most Americans . . . cannot be stormed and taken by assault . . . It is the province of literature . . . to accustom the public mind to the idea; and . . . while amusing them to . . . lead them on imperceptibly, unconsciously step by step to the desired state of feeling.”8 Chesnutt first practiced this strategy in short stories that he succeeded in having published in the prestigious white literary magazine The Atlantic Monthly and which were later collected in The Conjure Woman (1899), published by Houghton Mifflin. Superficially evocative of plantation nostalgia, these stories juxtapose a first-person, racially indeterminate narrator and an ex-slave, whose stories of the old times before the war bring to life the greed and inhumanity of the masters, as well as the spiritual and physical world of the slaves. The storyteller’s eloquence and verbal inventiveness strengthen, in the very process of telling, the revisionary portrayal of blacks as complex figures that emerges also from the content of the stories. In the longer fiction Chesnutt wrote after the success of The Conjure Woman, such literary sophistication and revisionary strategies became even more subtle and oblique, both because his identity as a black writer had become known to the public (a fact that heavily influenced the reception of his subsequent work) and because of the more overtly controversial topics he dealt with, such as miscegenation in The House Behind the Cedars, a race riot in The Marrow of Tradition, and post-Reconstruction politics in The Colonel’s Dream.
The censorship white editors exercised on innovative, realistic representations of blackness emerges clearly from the repeated rejections of earlier versions of Chesnutt’s first novel, such as “Rena Walden” and Mandy Oxendine. The version of The House Behind the Cedars that was finally accepted for publication by the prestigious white publishing house Houghton Mifflin features a story of miscegenation that seems to evoke rather straightforwardly the traditional white script of the tragic mulatto, while instead involving the reader in a complex metanarrative and intertextual questioning of traditional modes of representation and reception of blackness. This process occurs at several levels. In telling the story of the two siblings John and Rena Walden, who decide to pass for white to take advantage of the opportunities that segregation denies to African Americans, Chesnutt masterfully manipulates the Jamesian narrative strategy of the limited point of view. He introduces the readers to the opinions of a character, John Walden, who is only later revealed to be black. By the time that discovery occurs, however, readers have already learned to sympathize with and appreciate the intelligence, irony, and business sense of this self-made man, a fact which later makes it difficult even for potentially biased readers to see him as a stereotypically simple-minded and thriftless black character. At the same time, Chesnutt plays with intertextual references to such popular texts as Sir Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe (1819) in order to ridicule the chivalric pretenses of an unregenerate post-Reconstruction South. He also constructs his all-but-white heroine as a composite of such opposite female characters as Scott’s Rowena and Rebecca, unsettling the readerly expectations elicited by his references to these popular characters. Chesnutt thus succeeds in making the reader experience as problematic the tragic fate of his female protagonist and, by extension, the politics of representation of race in American (as well as in European) fiction. Similarly, the contrast between the realism of the first half of the novel and the exasperated melodrama of the second half is so extreme as to call attention to itself and become parodic of traditional tragic mulatto fictions. The traditional tragic fate of the mulatto in white-authored novels is also transgressed through the final survival of the greatest trickster of the novel, John Walden, who at the end resumes his life as successful passer.
Chesnutt’s critique of romanticized portrayals of the segregated South becomes even more explicit in The Marrow of Tradition, a historical novel that focuses on the racist terrorism that led to the 1898 anti-black riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, an infamous historical event that also inspired David Bryant Fulton’s 1900 novel, Hanover, or the Persecution of the Lowly. The negative reception that greeted The Marrow of Tradition confirmed that realistic portrayals of race in American society were not welcomed by mainstream critics (including Chesnutt’s long-time supporter William Dean Howells) and led the author to conclude: “I am beginning to suspect that the public as a rule does not care for books in which the principal characters are colored people, or written with a striking sympathy with that race as contrasted to the white race.”9
At the beginning of the twentieth century, however, Chesnutt was not the only African American novelist to respond with increased narrative directness and realism to the worsening conditions African Americans faced, as racial violence was rampant and segregation was an institutionalized fact of American society that severely restricted the life opportunities of black Americans. Building on the militancy and readiness for armed self-defense that Griggs had voiced explicitly in Imperium in Imperio, Chesnutt introduces in The Marrow of Tradition the character of Josh Green, a “black giant” who fights back against rioting whites and also avenges his father’s death at the hands of a white mob.10 While in The Marrow of Tradition Josh Green dies after having killed the white villain, other novels of this period sanction the legitimacy of self-defense against wanton white racial violence through their protagonists’ survival. In Robert Lewis Waring’s As We See It (1910), for instance, the protagonist Abe Overlay moves North after killing the murderers of his mother and sister, while in Pauline Hopkins’s Winona, the enslaved Judah fights bravely with John Brown and then expatriates to England where he enters the service of the Queen and is eventually knighted.
Focusing on a Southern black family in his fourth novel, his only one featuring black protagonists, Dunbar also responded to worsening social conditions. In The Sport of the Gods, which opens with an ironic comment on the great quantity of novels monotonously reiterating “regret of the old days” of slavery, Dunbar gives a naturalistic portrayal of the devastating and inescapable effects of racism not only in the South but also in the North.11 The Hamiltons’ move to New York, in fact, does not open up real alternatives for them. In his stark description of the superficial glitter and tough realities of the city, Dunbar builds on the realistic portrayal of working-class urban poverty in Tillman’s Clancy Street and Johnson’s Clarence and Corinne, and also anticipates the Harlem novels of the New Negro Renaissance. In his first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), the famous African American intellectual Du Bois focused both on the South and the North to give voice, like Dunbar, to the changing realities of African America, including the early stages of the Great Migration that in the years around World War I would bring millions of black Southerners to the major Northern cities. Du Bois, however, eschewed Dunbar’s naturalistic sense of inescapability and doom. He blended his analysis of the economics of racism and the exploitation of blacks in the cotton industry with a romance, unsettling the literary conventions of naturalism (with its problematic emphasis on racial destiny) and opening instead a narrative space for the celebration of the culture and the spirituality of black folk.
Published a year after The Quest of the Silver Fleece, James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912) also reflects the cultural and social impact of the changing demographics of African America, while celebrating the rich expressive culture of black folk. In this novel, Johnson deliberately builds on the previous tradition of African American prose. He puts classic tropes to new modernist literary uses, but also shows the continuity and distinctiveness of black American culture. Like Chesnutt, Johnson engages in an innovative and experimental play with the limited point of view and with parodic intertextuality to construct a fictional first-person narrator who is profoundly unreliable. The Ex-Coloured Man reveals his unreliability in the very process of recounting his life. His ambition to present himself as a race hero is constantly undercut by his egotistic self-pity, by superficial evaluations that bespeak his alienation from African American culture, and by a deep-seated materialism that leads him to admire uncritically the white American world he will eventually join permanently by passing. Significantly, the narrator remains nameless throughout the novel because, having passed into white society and, unhampered by discrimination, having prospered as a businessman, he does not want to jeopardize his social standing and economic success by making his racial heritage known.
The peregrinations of the fictional narrator follow classic trajectories in African American history and fiction, foregrounding also tropes and environments that will become characteristic of New Negro fiction: the migration from the rural South to the urban North, the expatriation to Europe, the return to the South, where the Ex-Coloured Man, who at one point decides to make a career as a musician, looks for sources of inspiration in the folk traditions of music and oratory. Johnson filters reality through the eyes of his protagonist, whose unreliability emerges obliquely and ironically through his self-aggrandizing attempt to compare himself to such heroic protagonists of African American history and culture as Frederick Douglass and William E. B. Du Bois, while misinterpreting in unwittingly parodic ways their life and work. Similarly revealing are the intertextual references to classic dramatic situations in nineteenth-century African American fiction, like lynching. While in previous African American novels the reality of racial violence motivated the protagonists to commit themselves even more fully to the cause of racial justice, in the case of the Ex-Coloured Man, on the contrary, the lynching he witnesses leads him to praise the murderers as belonging to “a great people,” to express contempt for the victim, as well as to finalize his decision to pass.12
While parody is unwitting in the case of the fictional narrator, it is deliberately and finely tuned by the author. The selfishness and racial alienation of the Ex-Coloured Man emerge by contrast to the heroic models he misinterprets, and serve a dual narrative function. On the one hand, the Ex-Coloured Man becomes a ridiculing parody of the racial prejudices of the white society he so deeply admires. On the other, that same parody celebrates, indirectly but powerfully, the values of race solidarity, loyalty, and pride the protagonist cannot live up to. As critic Robert Stepto has argued, within the parodic economy of the novel, the Ex-Coloured Man functions as a “negative example” of blackness, and his condescending evaluations of black culture and constant surprise at black excellence turn into a celebration of that culture and a critique of white stereotypes.13 James Weldon Johnson thus reelaborates within a modernist aesthetic those strategies of signifying, of coded communication that characterize African American fiction from its inception. He creates a multilayered text that, like its African American fictional antecedents, is readable at a variety of levels and addresses a double and divided audience.
Ironically, Johnson’s sophisticated modernist parodic novel has for a long time been taken at face value. First published anonymously in 1912, it was largely read as a real autobiography, and it did not elicit much interest. Republished explicitly as a novel in 1927, with the author’s name appended to it, at the height of the New Negro Renaissance, at a time when Johnson was famous as the curator of important anthologies and as NAACP secretary, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man was received triumphantly, though it was still praised for its documentary value. Six years later, in 1933, Johnson would publish his real autobiography, Along This Way, also in the attempt to dispel misconceptions about his novel. Today, the critical work of Robert B. Stepto, Valerie Smith, and Lucinda MacKethan has conclusively established the generic status and literary sophistication of Johnson’s novel.
The history of the reception of The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, however, remains revealing and paradigmatic of the underestimation from which African American fiction, and especially pre-Harlem Renaissance fiction, has suffered and, to some extent, continues to suffer. The process of recovery and reinterpretation of the early texts that is currently under way is slowly changing and expanding our perception of the African American, as well as of the American literary canon. Much critical work still needs to be done, however, to restore a more historically and critically sensitive appreciation for the literary craft of early African American novelists, for the depth and originality of their revision of contemporary genres, as well as for the intra- and interracial intertextual relationships they established with other contemporaneous American writers. Most importantly, recovering a fuller sense of the power of their vision and their innovative contributions to the development of the art of fiction will open up the possibility of revising traditional literary genealogies, moving beyond long-standing assumptions of a one-way influence of white on black writers, and enriching in new and complex ways our reading of American literary history and culture as a whole.
1. Rayford W. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought: The Nadir, 1877–1901 (New York: Dial, 1954).
2. Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892–1976 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1980), p. 25.
3. Dickson D. Bruce, Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877–1915 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), p. 10.
4. Pauline E. Hopkins, “Reply to Cordelia A. Condict,” March 1903, in The Norton Anthology of African American Fiction, ed. H. L. Gates and N. Y. McKay (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), pp. 594–595.
5. Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 89.
6. Sutton E. Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), p. 62.
7. Amelie E. Johnson, “Afro-American Literature,” The New York Age, 30 January 1892: n.p.
8. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, ed. R. Brodhead (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), pp. 139–140.
9. Charles W. Chesnutt, qtd. in W. L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1980), p. 127.
10. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), p. 309.
11. Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902; rpt. New York: Dodd, Mead, 1981), p. 23.
12. James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912; rpt. New York: Hill & Wang, 1960), p. 189.
13. Robert B. Stepto, From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), p. 104.