Sterling A. Brown

“ As we go to the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the French for the truth about their people; as we go to the workers and not to the stockholders, to the tenants and croppers and not to the landlords, for the truth about the lives of tenants and croppers, so it seems that we should expect the truth of Negro life from Negroes. The Negro artist has a fine task ahead of him to render this truth in enduring fiction. ”

“ In Old Plantation Days (1903) repeats the Thomas Nelson Page formula. Negro house servants comically ape the “quality,” or intervene in lovers’ quarrels, or in duels between cavaliers. One slave deceives his beloved master into believing that the good times of slavery still prevail. The planters, highbred and chivalrous, and the slaves, childish and devoted, rival each other in affection and sacrifice. These anecdotes of slavery, but a step above minstrel jokes, are all too happy for words, and too happy for truth. ”

“ Since “not a living man can swear that he has ever heard antislavery sentiment from a slave in the South,” the suffering of the Negro, to Mrs. Schoolcraft, is a lie whipped up by northern politicians. Runaway slaves are always the good-for-nothing rowdies, who flee to escape work and discipline. The separation of slave husbands and wives is no tragedy, since all are polygamists as in Africa. ”

“ A plantation with a kindly master was basis for generalizing about all plantations, of whatever type, in whatever sections. A pampered house-servant, who refuses uncertain freedom for a comparatively easy place, becomes the Negro slave; a poor unemployed wretch becomes the freedman.
The intractable, the ironic, the abused Negro is nowhere on these plantations. Congressmen might deplore in legislative halls the injuries done the South by the Underground Railroad, and southern newspapers might be filled with descriptions of runaways, some second offenders with branded scars on their faces. ”

“ I never dreamed that slavery could present an aspect so tender and affectionate!” The husband, though a perfect master, modestly says that he is “not as good as the majority of masters.” His slaves are fat, sleek and good natured; on Sunday, at church, they are “fashionably attired” and there is “the rustle of tissues, the fluttering of muslin and laces, the waving of feathery fans, the glitter of jewelry.” The planter proves that the Negro was divinely ordained for slavery since
his skull has a hardness and thickness greater than our own, which defy the arrowy sunbeams ... ”

“ Even Negro propagandists urged this, seeking to find some superior “racial gift.” To look for the true life of a Negro community in cabarets, most often run by white managers for white thrill-seekers, is like looking for the [Pg 149] truth about slavery in the off-time banjo-plunking and capers before the big house. Focusing upon carefree abandon, the Harlem school, like the plantation tradition, neglected the servitude. Except for brief glimpses, the drama of the workaday life, the struggles, the conflicts, are missing. ”

“ The Negro is at last being discovered as part of the working class. Radical novelists now stress the exploitation of the Negro masses, and urge that it is only by the solidarity of all workers that a new social order can be achieved. In spite of the overstress of propaganda, these writers contribute a great deal to realism. Seeing many of the so-called Negro characteristics as class disabilities, aware of much that is common in the lives of the poor, they have been able to get close to their characters, without condescension and without idealizing. ”

“ Justus soon learns the proslavery creed that freeing the Negro will merely “people the penitentiary or feed the gibbet.”
Nature, by their inferior capacity and cheerful submission to their lot, has so well fitted them for this position.... The lot of the serving classes in all countries imposes a burden.
Grief is expressed for the white working class of the North; the female slave finds no parallel to the degradation of northern prostitutes. Abounding in such arguments, The Yankee Slave Dealer, though poor in characterization and plot, was the type of novel that the South wanted. ”

“ Stowe has a wide range of Negro characters, and one southern critic finds in Uncle Tom’s Cabin just about all of the traits he is willing to grant the Negro. High spirits are shown on Shelby’s Kentucky plantation, but tragedy lurks in the background. Mrs. Stowe handles the tragedy with the bold melodramatic strokes of Dickens; but she artfully blends the shocking with humor and pathos, with mystery and suspense; familiar domestic scenes with cotton-planting, steamboating on the river and gambling in New Orleans; pious moralizing with fascinating wickedness—all in all a successful recipe. ”

“ Wherever Negroes colonize in the cities or villages, North or South, wherever the hod-carrier, the porter, and the waiter are the society men of the town; wherever the picnic and the excursion are the chief summer diversion, and the revival the winter-time of repentance.... Wherever laughter and tears rub elbows by day, and the spirit of labour and laziness shake hands, there—there—is Happy Hollow. ”

“ Jim, the hero, sees the burning of the Rosenwald school and the lynching of his mother and father (one of the most gruesome ever recorded in fiction and taken from actuality) . His sweetheart is raped and murdered. In Chicago he is caught up in the race-riot. Embittered and desperate, he is taught by a communist that “t’aint cause you’se black that you’se exploited,” and that only by fighting shoulder to shoulder with white workers will there ever be a “free world under working class control.” Rebuffed by labor leaders, Jim nevertheless sticks to his new-found cause. ”

“ It is no lie that there were slave auctions, slave cellars such as the ones where the flies “got to old Prue,” public whipping posts, mothers separated from their children, and slaves like Cassy whose beauty was their doom. With allowances for sentimentality and melodrama, essential truth is in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To argue against its artistic faults and to consider it incomplete representation are possible. The charge of lying, however, is confusing. Mrs. Stowe showed that slavery was a great wrong, and that Negroes are human. Is it here that critics believe that she lies? ”

“ Unemployed whites and Negroes march together, singing militant words to hymn tunes. In such a crisis, the city fathers, churchmen, and sheriff must have a victim. Stomp Nelson, a tireless, fearless, Negro organizer is selected, but by a ruse, his white comrades of the Unemployed Council save him from the mob. Negro characters are not major actors, but the Negro is shown as an important participant in the stirring of southern labor. The use of race prejudice by the overlords to prevent workers’ solidarity is clearly indicated. ”

“ Some are farcical, as the story where a visiting anthropologist, seeking to measure heads, spreads terror; some are pathetic. “Conjur” is a good tale of black magic; “Shoofly,” one the best, re-creates life in a tobacco factory; and “Buttin’ Blood” tells convincingly of the friendship of white and Negro boys. With no social protest and more than a trace of condescension, often engineered to end happily, Patterson’s stories still show understanding.
Paul Green’s few sketches of Negroes in Wide Fields (1928) do not have the power of his plays of Negro life, but they are sympathetic and true. ”

“ A small southern community is well realized: the well meaning but weak liberals, resenting any interference with their “contented nigras”; the respectable judge (bought and paid for) ; the bootlegging and pandering leader of the American Legion who is the defender of law and order; the white men with their Negro women; the high-school boys ripe for violence; and the sheriff who keeps the Negroes “scared to raise their voices too high.” Nevertheless, when Denis, a young organizer returns home, he finds allies ready to join his struggle for justice. ”

“ Not propaganda in the manner of the apologists, it is tragic realism at its best.
Neither debunking Negro society nor glorifying it, Toomer pictures Washington with the thoroughness of one who knew it from the inside. The futile, and in the story of “Avey,” the drably tragic revolt against the smugness of a rising middle-class, are brilliantly set before us. Toomer was sharply criticized by Negroes for his “betrayal”; his insight and tenderness seemed to escape them. “Kabnis” is a long, occasionally obscure story of a northern Negro teaching school in Georgia. ”

“ Well-educated, she is unable to get suitable positions and social life because she is black. She goes around for a time with the “New Negro intellectuals,” but is ill at ease with them. Scorned and rejected, she sinks deeper and deeper into drabness. Thurman thus puts his finger upon one of the sorest points of the Negro bourgeoisie, its color snobbishness, “its blue vein circle,” “aspiring to be whiter and whiter every generation.” His descriptions of Harlem rent parties and the like are of Van Vechten’s school, but the theme of his novel deserves attention. ”

“ To prove slavery no hardship, he reasons that a married woman is a slave, and if she happens to get the upper hand, the husband is a slave, and leads a worse life than any Negro. Sam’s brother, a lawyer in Charleston, S. C., forces an old white swindler to buy a Negro back into slavery, for the good of the Negro. These stories do not belong to the plantation tradition, for some mention “nigger-jockies,” i.e., “gentlemen who trade in nigger flesh,” and a planter who has “one white wife and fourteen black concubines.” ”

“ Her husband has no love for Negroes. Even as a child, Mimi had believed that Creoles of Negro blood had something “tangible, yet intangible ... a warmth, a delicate humanness” that white Creoles did not have. As a woman, she believes that Negroes alone “can laugh and ... enjoy the benefits of the machine without being crushed by it.” A furtive trip to Harlem makes her wonder if her somber cynical white companions, “whose unhappiness shone through all they did or said,” were worth the price she was paying. ”

“ The injuries of the Negro are seldom conveyed with full power; like the abolitionists, these novelists felt that listing could make up for rendering. The race problem, at the core of their work, turns their novels into tracts. Acceptance of certain traits as racial, such as optimism, loyalty and faith, and underestimation of the Negro masses invalidate much of their discussion. All are concerned with refutation of Thomas Dixon and his school. They were fighting in a good cause, but the novel was not their weapon. ”

“ Instead of being by the folk for the folk, Uncle Remus tells the stories to entertain a white child. Harris lost something authentic when he adopted this framework, but he gained Uncle Remus. And Uncle Remus is worth gaining. By no means the typical product of slavery, as Harris implies, he is still finely conceived: a venerable, pampered Negro with a gift for quaint philosophizing and for poetic speech, having (or allowed to have) only pleasant memories, fortunate above his brothers—one of the best characters in American literature.
In folk-idiom, the tales are kept close to the people. ”

“ Slavery is shown as a beneficent guardianship, [Pg 29] never as a system of cheap and abundant labor that furnished the basis of a few large fortunes (and assured an impoverished, disfranchised class of poor whites) .
In spite of the exaggerations and omissions, however, certain damning evidence creeps in. Though too kind to maltreat Negroes, the cavaliers are adept at tarring-and-feathering, riding on rails, and lynching abolitionist villains, probably out of consideration for the Negro’s welfare. Slavery is sometimes considered as not the Negro’s final state ”