Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem African American Literature and Culture, 1877 -1919

EDITED BY Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard

New York University Press

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NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2006 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Post-bellum, pre-Harlem : African American literature and culture, 1877- 1919 / edited by Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-0-8147-3167-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-io: 0-8147-3167-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8147—3168—0 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-io: 0-8147-3168-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. African American arts—19th century. 2. African American arts—20th century. I. McCaskill, Barbara. II. Gebhard, Caroline. NX512.3.A35P65 2006 306.4'708996073—dc22 2005037589 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durabihty.

Manufactured in the United States of America

c 10 987654321 p 10 987654321 Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction i Caroline Gebhard and Barbara McCaskill

PART I : Reimagining the Past

1 Creative Collaboration: As African American as Sweet Potato Pie 17 Frances Smith Foster

2 Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the “New Negro” Novel of the Nadir 34 Carla L. Peterson

PART II : Meeting Freedom: Self-Invention, Artistic Innovation, and Race Progress (iSyos-iSSos)

3 Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister 59 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

4 “Manly Husbands and Womanly Wives”: The Leadership of Educator Lucy Craft Laney 74 Audrey Thomas McCluskey

vii viii Contents Contents ix 5 Old and New Issue Servants: “Race” Men and Women Weigh In 12 War Work, Social Work, Community Work: Barbara Ryan ^ Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Federal War Work Agencies, and Southern African American Women 197 Nikki L Brown 6 Savannah’s Colored Tribune, the Reverend E. K. Love, and the Sacred Rebellion of Uplift Barbara McCaskill 13 Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimk^, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama 210 PARI : Encountering Jim Crow: African American Literature Koritha A. Mitchell and the Mainstream (1890s)

7 A Marginal Man in Black Bohemia: 14 Henry Ossawa Tanner and W. E. B. Du Bois: James Weldon Johnson in the New York Tenderloin n? African American Art and “High Culture” Robert M. Dowling at the Turn into the Twentieth Century 231 Margaret Crumpton Winter and Rhonda Reymond

8 Jamming with Julius: Charles Chesnutt and the Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem Blues 15 The Folk, the School, and the Marketplace: Barbara A. Baker Locations of Culture in The Souls of Black Folk 250 Andrew J. Scheiber

9 Rewriting Dunbar: Realism, Black Women Poets, and the Genteel Topical List of Selected Works 269 Paula Bernat Bennett ^ About the Contributors 281

Index 285 10 Inventing a “Negro Literature”: Race, Dialect, and Gender in the Early Work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson ' Caroline Gebhard

part IV : Turning the Century: New Political, Cultural, and Personal Aesthetics (1900-1917)

11 No Excuses for Our Dirt: Booker T. Washington and a “New Negro” Middle Class Philip J. Kowalski Chapter 3

Landscapes of Labor Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister

Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw

From his arrival in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1869, until his death there in 1901, Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) painted the landscape of southern New England in a style that has often been described as deriva­ tive of the Barbizon school. However, unlike the Barbizon painters, who sought to create pastoral scenes of idyUic peasant life in the French coun­ tryside, Bannister frequently depicted farms and other rural locations that evoke the history of Rhode Island chattel slavery. He first emigrated from New Brunswick, Canada, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1850, and his life exemplifies many of the challenges and achievements that creative African Americans faced and attained during the second half of the nineteenth century. Similar to the paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner, or the neoclas­ sical sculpture of Edmonia Lewis, Bannister’s compositions provide a win­ dow on the intellectual and creative terrain that socially concerned artists of the period confronted. In a short catalog entry on the undated painting The Haygatherers (c. 1893), art historian Corrine Jennings suggests that “the presence of Black figures, relatively uncommon in Bannister’s work, has raised speculation that the painting stands as an oblique reference to the plantation system of Rhode Island’s past and to its role in the slave trade.” ^ Indeed, paintings such as The Haygatherers and Workers in the Fields (c. 1890) reveal a space in which the artist could explore a legacy of racial oppression within a contemporary international artistic language of landscape and noble peasantry. In this way Bannister was able both to commemorate the rapidly disappearing evidence of Rhode Island’s plan­ tation history and to elevate the labor of its stiU disempowered black folk. m-a 59 60 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 6i

Bannister accomplished this radical move in two ways: first, by refer­ encing the African American religious tradition; and second, by subvert­ ing the visual vernacular of French landscape painting and its then current vogue for semirealism and the rural picturesque. His status as a privileged artist allowed him to negotiate these issues of class and race. In his work he identifies with the social issues facing former slaves while simultane­ ously escaping them via his own fi-eeborn status and through the patron­ age of both the black and the white bourgeoisie. We witness this paradox in the rectangular canvas of Haygatherers, within whose borders a large, green-and-brown hay field set beneath a low-lying horizon opens before the spectator. The field is framed from below by a bit of wild grass that sprouts wildflowers and dandelion puffs, and on the left by a group of three trees that anchors the composition by extending all the way to the top margin of the painting. The third tree, at the far left of the canvas, is only partially visible, giving the effect of the continuation of the imaginary space beyond the picture frame. In the middle ground and to the right, within the yellow-brown of the hay field, two dark-skinned women labor at what appears to be the work of gather­ ing hay to place atop the large hay wain at the back of the composition. Their presence in the middle ground rhymes nicely with the two trees at Edward Mitchell Bannister. The Haygatherers, c. 1893. Oil on canvas. 171/8 x 23 left, and is further emphasized by the placement of two smaller trees 1/8 inches. Private collection. directly above and behind them in the far distance. With this twinning, the two women make up the lower corner of a pyramidal arrangement that finds its apex in a third group of treetops that rises behind the hay wain if not overcome or transcended. He renders a world in which crossing and its minute attendants. over, the action of moving from one reality to another, from labor to The women are lost in the space of the hay field, which swirls about leisure, can be achieved by fording a river of grass as though it were the their knees, truncating them and blocking their forward progress. There is River Jordan. He shows these black bodies as analogous to the Israelites, no visible path behind them to indicate the direction from which they who wandered in the wilderness for forty years waiting for the ultimate have come, nor is there any sign that they have cleared the crop and are reward of the Promised Land, yet still within the control of the plantation now gleaning the remains. As their right arms reach forward in tandem, system that had enslaved their ancestors, still within Pharaoh’s reach. This toward the pastoral field of wildflowers and the stand of trees that borders ability to depict an unpopular reality in a popular mode makes Bannister’s the two spaces, they appear to be swimming across a great sea of grass, the work in general, and Haygatherers in particular, some of the most dynamic trampled blades that surround them arching like waves. This swimming landscape painting of the late nineteenth century. motion moves them apart from the other figures, as though they have The post-bellum-pre-Harlem period when Bannister completed his strayed fi-om the distant harbor of the hay wain and the life of labor that it mature work brought great changes to the American art world. This represents, and are now approaching the pastoral promise that rises in the important half-century saw the exponential expansion of national inter­ foreground. ests, as the barely reunited country promoted industrialization at home In Haygatherers, Bannister creates for the spectator a world in which and new-found imperialist opportunities abroad. It also witnessed the size the drudgery of daily life and the curse of humble birth can be challenged. of the artisan class retract as the professional and working classes grew. 62 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 63

Just as those who practiced crafts felt the increasing competition of the his immediate community during the mid-nineteenth century was also mechanized workplace, so did critical changes occur in the demographics crucial. By the late 1840s Bannister had settled in Boston with his brothers of those who were able to produce so-called fine art. With the rise of pho­ and had begun working as a hairdresser while painting on the side. As his tography, they no longer needed painted portraits to decorate their skills developed, he began to pick up work painting portraits of the local homes; they now longed for intimate landscapes and tasteful objects to white abolitionists and the growing numbers of black bourgeoisie in the grace their parlors. area. These economic and social changes came in the aftermath of significant One of Bannister’s earliest known portraits. Dr. John Van Surley antebellum agitation by the abolitionists and womens rights adherents DeGrasse (c. 1848), is of a noted black physician and antislavery activist who, prior to the war, had taken great interest in the creative potential of who subsequently served as the first black surgeon in the Civil War.® The Afi-ican Americans. This focus, which centered on artistic achievement as a image presents the doctor as a well dressed, middle-class professional. way to emphasize the humanity of black slaves and their free counterparts Bannister’s painting joined others in the DeGrasse family collection, and their worthiness to participate in the American democracy, laid a including one of Isaiah DeGrasse, the doctor’s father, by the African foundation for notable, but extremely limited, African American artistic American painter and print maker Patrick Reason. Several years later, success in abolitionist enclaves centered in Boston, Philadelphia, and Bannister also completed a pastel portrait of Cordelia Howard, the future Cincinnati. Mrs. DeGrasse, which joined a painting by the European American Bannister was among several African American artists who received William Matthew Prior of Cordelia’s mother, Margaret Gardner.^ That the their initial support from individual abolitionists and from antislavery DeGrasse and Howard families were able to afford multiple painted por­ societies, and then went on to garner prizes and acclaim from the main­ traits of family members, and that these works remained in the family stream art world following the Civil War. The landscape painter Robert through the late twentieth century, speaks to the solidity and dynamism of Scott Duncanson (1821-1872)2 and the sculptor Lewis^ are two other the African American social system that had developed in Boston during prominent artists to emerge from these environments. Bannister was free­ the nineteenth century. The portrait of Dr. DeGrasse is a visual testament born and had a mixed racial heritage. His father may have been from Bar­ to Bannister’s involvement in the abolitionist work in Boston and to his bados; however, there is compelling evidence that his family immigrated status as a midlevel, but well established, artist. to New Brunswick, fleeing the newly established United States as Loyalists Like many other freeborn African Americans before him, Bannister following Britain s defeat in the Revolutionary War.^ Once they were set­ used his talent to support the cause of abolition numerous times during tled in Canada, his grandfather may have worked as a “servant” for the the 1850s, and just a year into the Civil War he made a full-length, posthu­ prominent Hatch family. Following the death of his parents, a youthful mous portrait of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (location unknown) that Bannister worked on the estate belonging to Harris Hatch before serving was sold at a charity auction. His portrait of the white leader of the Mass­ as a sailor on one of the many ships that plied the northeastern seaboard achusetts Fifty-fourth, the first black regiment commissioned in the between Nova Scotia and New York.^ This experience on a plantation in Union Army, joined a number of other commemorations of the fallen eastern Canada must have impacted his thinking about the racial politics hero, including a bust by Lewis.® Comparable to Cincinnati’s abolitionists, of field labor when he approached it as artistic subject matter much later who applauded and supported the career of the African American painter in his life. This is perhaps why he is so sympathetic to the plight of the Duncanson, the Boston antislavery community was vigorous in its pro­ figures that swim across the river of grass in Haygatherers: in many ways motion and utilization of free black creativity to propagandize for the they repeat his experience of leaving a life of field labor for one of self- cause.® determination. This involvement in Boston art and politics enabled Bannister to make The foundational support that Bannister received through abolitionist inroads into the mainstream art establishment during the late antebellum patronage, while he struggled for artistic recognition and creative accep­ period and the Civil War. It helped him to grow and develop despite the tance from the dominant culture, cannot be understated. Yet support from hostile racial environment of the United States during this era. In addi- 64 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 65

for African Americans living in Boston had changed dramatically. Many displaced former slaves had begun making their way north in search of work and opportunity. Within a few years the community of free black professionals to which the Bannisters belonged, many of whom had been in the area long before the war, began to see their social status slip. They were no longer readily identifiable within an increasingly large black pop­ ulation, and they faced racist slights on the streets and elsewhere in the public sphere. As freedmen skilled primarily in farm work flooded the increasingly industrialized labor markets of northern cities, working-class whites (who were themselves mostly immigrants from Ireland and other impoverished European countries) adopted racist attitudes about the right to work. Further, the white community that had supported the abolitionist cause was now far less interested in the current situation for African Americans, having been more enamored by the idea of freedom than by the reality of the free blacks who now filled their city.'® This tense climate led in some cases to race riots and generally made the environment of the city unbearable for many middle-class black families, who increasingly found that their presumption of social privilege was not a protection against racially motivated violence.

Edward Mitchell Bannister. Dr. John V. DeGrasse, c. In 1869 Bannister and Carteaux, possibly threatened by the continued 1848. Oil on canvas. 23 inches. Kenkeleba House, Inc. erosion of race relations and their own social status, removed themselves to the significantly smaller city of Providence. At the time, the city was home to a small community of artists, and its environs were characterized wn, his wfe Christiana Carteaux, whom he met in the 1850s, was unques­ by the remnants of what had once been a large system of plantations and tionably his greatest patron and supporter. Carteaux, who had roots in the shipping businesses linked to the slave trade. Some members of Rhode ative American communities around Providence, was a fellow hair­ Island’s African American population, exemplified by Carteaux’s own dresser who owned her own salon. She was also active in the antislavery family, had mixed with Native Americans from the area, creating a movement (during the war she served in the Colored Women’s Aoxhiary) dynamic ethnic community. It was during this period, in this fresh loca­ and when they married in 1858, her financial acumen enabled Bannister to tion, that Bannister’s style fully matured. His landscapes began to show devote nearly all his time to his art. During this period he received some the influence of the Barbizon school, the anticlassical style of painting that formal art training at Boston’s Lowell Institute under the painter WiUiam began in the French countryside with the work of Theodore Rousseau, Rimmer and began to expand his repertoire fi-om portraits to religious which focused on the spiritual and emotional properties of landscape. subjects, genre, still life, and later, landscape painting. These serene spaces featured peasants who seemed to coexist peacefully Unfortunately, much of the social progress that Bannister made in the with the beasts of the field; they were explorations of humanity’s harmo­ 1860s was challenged during the post-beUum-pre-Harlem decades as the nious interaction with God’s creation. In opposition to the studio-pro­ dommant culture of the United States became increasingly hostUe to black duced epic oil paintings, the “Great Pictures” of the Hudson River school creativity. This negative attitude retarded the spread of Afi-ican American style that artists like Duncanson had painted at the height of his career in artistic culture during the Gilded Age. FoUowing the Civfi War the climate the 1860s, Barbizon-influenced landscapes were generally done outdoors and were intimate in scale. That American art critics and consumers 66 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 67

shifted their taste in landscape painting from epic to contemplative in the and holding a red parasol, while another sits at her feet. The man faces 1870s is evident not only in the rapid decline of Duncanson’s reputation them both. following his death in 1872 but also in the survival of Bannister’s career, Together, the three adults, with their triangular arrangement and the which embraced the new style. arresting red of the parasol, draw the spectator’s gaze up and into the dark Following his relocation to Rhode Island, Bannister developed his block that is Fort Dumpling. The fort, whose upper form line is clearly method of painting through first-hand study of the regional landscape visible against the white clouds of the sky, rises like a forbidding piece of around Providence. Here he found a welcoming arts community and in the living rock on which it is perched. As a military installation on Nara­ 1873, with his colleagues George Whitaker and Charles Stetson, he helped gansett Bay, it references both the forceful conquest of Coanicut Island to found the Providence Art Club. Still in existence today, the club proved from the Wampanoag and Naragansett peoples, Christiana Carteaux’s to be an influential organization. Its proximity to Newport and the well- ancestors, and Rhode Island’s establishment as a slaveholding state and a heeled summer populations that the region attracted enabled members to leader in the triangular, transatlantic slave trade. During the period exhibit and sell their work to an influential bourgeoisie and upper-class between 1709 and 1807 nearly one thousand slaving voyages were made to clientele. Testifying to his involvement in its foundation, a silhouette of Africa by vessels registered in the Naragansett Bay region." The nearby Bannister’s profile is visible behind the front door of the clubhouse. town of Warwick, for example, was named for the second Earl of Warwick, Through his affiliation with the Providence Art Club, and his work in who established Providence Plantation and had the dubious distinction of founding the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878, Bannister saw many bringing the first black slaves to the British colonies in 1619. In the colonial of his works move into private collections. Eventually, he was able to era that followed, the area surrounding Narragansett Bay had the largest devote all his time to painting, traveling up and down the New England population of slaves in New England. They could be found working in coastline, exploring the many islands in Naragansett Bay in his small South County plantations or as servants in merchant households. When yacht. In this way he became familiar with the various locations that had read through the lens of history, the ship in the water to the fort’s left factored heavily in the Rhode Island slave trade, its many ports where ambivalently references both the horror of the Middle Passage and Ban­ Africans had been put ashore. If in Haygatherers Bannister had raised the nister’s own love of sailing. legacy of slavery and the presence of black folk in the landscape to a bibli­ Bannister’s landscapes of the 1890s, such as Fort Dumpling, which fea­ cal level, then the paintings that he made of these historically loaded sites tures the maritime legacy of slavery in seemingly idyllic surroundings, or did something just as powerful, if more covert. In these compositions he Haygatherers, in which black bodies attempt to ford a river of endless records the industrial revolution altering the pastoral world and, as Cor- labor, may be read as subtle visual metaphors of the Middle Passage, rine Jennings has rightly argued, “his use of rivers and the sea reflects a attempts to pass over racial barriers as well as into the heavenly reward. In lost ancestral heritage and the longing for freedom, and his ships have this way a river painted by Bannister can be read both as surrogate for the been identified as signifying freedom.”" journey that slaves made as they fled from slavery to freedom in the This belief in the power of landscape to retain history, empowering the northern states and as an allusion to the biblical River Jordan that the terrain to stand as witness to the past, is evident in the seascape Fort Israelites crossed to the Promised Land after having wandered in the Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island (c. 1890). Fort Dumpling is a rectangu­ wilderness for forty years following their flight from Egypt." Fort lar composition divided by diagonal lines and pyramidal forms. In this Dumpling itself stands as though it were the Sphinx, a witness to the pas­ scene of leisure, four figural groups, made up of light-skinned men, sage of many stolen and enslaved black bodies before its cliff side. women, and children, relax along the seashore. Three children in yellow The identification of the plight of African Americans with biblical straw hats hunch within the shadow of the cliff at the lower right of the figures—even after the end of slavery—that we see in Haygatherers is also composition, as though examining a newfound treasure. Close by them, at present in the work of Lewis and Tanner. In 1869 Lewis created a marble the center of the space, is a group of three adult figures, a man and two sculpture of Hagar, the Egyptian handmaiden of the barren Sarah who is women. One woman stands with her back to the spectator, facing the sea forced to lie with her mistress’s husband Abraham and is then cast into the 68 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 69

desert once she conceives her master’s heir. As a woman abused by and the spectator, for they speak to the struggle with racial representation that separated from patriarchy, the subject of Hagar constituted a fitting way the artist grappled with throughout his career. After having begun his for Lewis to comment on the social disadvantages faced by black women artistic practice painting many black Bostonians—a body of work that in the United States both under and after slavery. included commissioned portraits such as those for the DeGrasse-Howard In contrast to the water imagery of Bannister, or the metaphorical family as well as a personal portrait of his wife that is now at the Newport transposition of Lewis, Tanner approached biblical subject matter and its Museum—in his landscapes he rarely included any African American relationship to African American religious culture in his paintings by characters. This absence of black bodies in his images may be read as a using the people of North Africa, whom he came to know through his survival mode by which he submerged his blackness beneath a generic travels in the region, as his models. Having expatriated to France in the landscape aesthetic that called for a benign white presence in the composi­ 1890s, Tanner made numerous paintings of biblical scenes using Moroc­ tion, an assumed white producer of the object, and an ideal white specta­ cans and other North Africans as models, and depicting their living cities tor standing before it. as though they were ancient scenery. This sublimation into whiteness that we see in much of Bannister’s Art historian Adrienne Childs has argued that Tanner’s use of African painting, with obvious notable exceptions, was also apparent in the covert models for biblical characters seems to have been a solution that he manner he submitted his work to exhibitions, often keeping his racial reached to deal with the vexing criticism that was heaped upon him when identity a secret. For example, in 1876 he entered an already much lauded he stopped painting African American characters following The Banjo Les­ work. Under the Oaks (location unknown), in the competition at the son (1893) and The Thankful Poor (1893—1894).*^ Tanner was never forgiven Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. There it won first prize for painting by some critics for having abandoned the sympathetic treatment of and gave rise to one of the most frequently recounted stories of nine­ African Americans found in these two images of black men passing on teenth-century African American art history, one that reflects the racism their cultural capital, in the form of music lessons and piety, to young and difficulties with which post-bellum-pre-Harlem black artists con­ boys. In fact, it is for these works that he is most often remembered, even tended: though they are not representative of his mature style or of the biblical subject matter to which he was most frequently drawn. Rather, The Banjo I learned from the newspapers that “54” had received a first prize medal, so I Lesson and The Thankful Poor were explorations of ways to render the hurried to the Committee Rooms to make sure the report was true. There popular motif of the folk in American terms. Tanner sought to represent was a great crowd there ahead of me. As I jostled among them many African Americans as an authentic folk, the rustic peasants that peopled so resented my presence, some actually commenting within my hearing in a many French paintings of the 1880s and 1890s. In fact, during the period most petulant manner what is that colored person in here for? Finally when between 1893 and 1895 in which he painted these authentic black folk, he I succeeded in reaching the desk where inquiries were made, I endeavored also executed The Bagpipe Lesson (1894) and The Young Sabot Maker to gain the attention of the official in charge. He was very insolent. Without (1895), two images of Brittany peasants teaching their offspring the joys of raising his eyes, he demanded in the most exasperating tone of voice, “Well music and the skill of shoemaking.*® what do you want here any way? Speak lively.” “I want to enquire [sic] con­ Just as his younger colleague Tanner was searching for a compelling cerning 54. Is it a prize winner?” “What’s that to you,” said he? In an instant way to paint African Americans, so too was Bannister investigating modes my blood was up: the looks that passed between him and others in the for depicting black bodies as the folk inhabitants of the countryside. And room were unmistakable. I was not an artist to them, simply an inquisitive in the same vein as Tanner, he chose to render them as though they were colored man; controlling myself, I said deliberately, “I am interested in the not only the French peasants Barbizon painters had so adored but also report that Under the Oaks has received a prize; I painted the picture.” An biblical heroes. And yet, despite the emphasis on the contemplative and explosion could not have made a more marked impression. Without hesita­ transcendent power of landscape that we ftnd in Bannister’s work. Fort tion he apologized, and soon everyone in the room was bowing and scrap­ Dumpling and Haygatherers must become more than idyllic retreats for ing to me.'^ 70 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 71

This type of national success must have been bittersweet for Bannister tion for Bannister’s landscapes; his paintings were largely unknown to his­ because, while it garnered him recognition from black and white commu­ torians of American art and virtually unseen outside of Rhode Island col­ nities outside New England, it also exposed him to the tide of racism that lections. There were few eyes to look into the sea of grass and out across had continued to rise in the United States. And it was just this type of the bay waters to search for the struggle of racial representation that Ban­ reception that probably caused him to shy away from black characters and nister engaged in his landscapes of Rhode Island’s plantation past. from overtly racialized subject matter. To the white officials and attendees of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, like the Bostonians he had left behind, he would never be distinguishable from the blacks that labored in me hay fields he painted. Nevertheless, he continued to exhibit nationally, NOTES in 1879 at the National Academy of Design, and in 1880 at the New Orleans 1. Edward M. Bannister: A Centennial Retrospective (New York: Kenkeleba Cotton Centennial Exposition. House, 2001), an exhibition catalog, 22. The artistic production of Bannister, and that of his colleagues Dun- 2. The best source of biographical information on Duncanson is Joseph D. canson Lewis, and Tanner, speaks to the changing modes of visualizing Ketner’s Emergence of the African American Artist (Columbia: University of Mis­ the global African experience that occurred in the second half of the nine­ souri Press, 1993). Ketner’s exhaustive research established an extensive biographi­ teenth century, and it reteUs the obstacles they encountered due to their cal history for Duncanson, as well as reproducing a large number of the artist’s paintings for the first time. socially proscribed identities as they negotiated spaces of race and repre­ 3. For recent work on Lewis, see Kirstin Buick, “The Ideal Works of Edmonia sentation. Because of the reactionary historical oppression of black cre­ Lewis: Invoking and Inverting Autobiography,” in Reading American Art, ed. Mari­ ativity, today we are familiar with the work and careers of only a handffil anne Doezema and Elizabeth Milroy (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), of the African American artists who were active between 1865 and 1920. 190-207; and Marilyn Richardson, “Edmonia Lewis’s The Death of Cleopatra: This IS due in part to the limited critical reception they received during Myth and Identity,” International Review of African American Art 12.2 (1995): 36- eir lifetimes, and also to the institutional racism that kept their work out 52. of most museum coUections untfi the late twentieth century. Further, after 4. According to the website of the Nova Scotia Museum, the Bannister sur­ finding the dominant art world at best unresponsive and, more typically, name appears in the Book of Negroes, which lists “Black passengers leaving New openly hostile to their efforts, many of these artists, with the exception of York on British ships in 1783.” Only three copies of this handwritten book survive Duncanson, who died in 1872, chose alternate avenues for their careers. that give “a name, age, physical description, and status (slave or free) for each pas­ Bannister, of course, left Boston for the relative isolation of Providence, senger, and often an owner’s name and place of residence.” This list is the starting where he was able to develop a strong reputation amidst a growing colony point for research about black Loyalists. See Nova Scotia Museum, “Remembering Black Loyalists: Black Communities in Nova Scotia,” Nova Scotia Museum, of regionally motivated landscape artists. Lewis expatriated permanently http://museum.gov.ns.ca/blackloyalists/index.htm. to Rome after the mid-i87os, where she entered a community of American 5. Corrine Jennings, interview with author, January 26, 2002. Significant work scffiptors, many of them women. And Tanner sought the unique status on Bannister has been done by, and under the auspices of, collector and indepen­ and relaUve racial freedom of France, where he lived permanently from dent art historian Corrine Jennings. Through Jennings’s New York City gallery, 1895 until his death in 1923. Kenkeleba House, two retrospectives of Bannister’s work—at the Whitney FoUowing their deaths at the turn of the century, the reputations of Museum of American Art at Champion and the Roger Kng Gallery in Newport, both Lewis and Bannister suffered a rapid descent into obscurity, as the Rhode Island—have been mounted in the last decade. The catalogs for these two Jyles m which they had painted and sculpted fell rapidly out of fashion. shows, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828-1901 (New York: Kenkeleba House, 1992; Their work, and that of Tanner as well, was further marginalized by critics Stamford, CT: Whitney Museum of American Art at Champion; New York: dis­ durmg the subsequent “Harlem Renaissance,” who found it derivative and tributed by Harry N. Abrams, 1992) and Edward M. Bannister: A Centennial Retro­ imitative of white aesthetics rather than authentically African American.'® spective (New York: Kenkeleba House, 2001) are the primary sources for Up until the last decades of the twentieth century there was little apprecia­ information on the artist. 6. Dr. DeGrasse gave Bannister his first nonportrait commission in 1854 for 72 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 73

The Ship Outward Bound {Edward M. Bannister, 5). More information on the a cargo of molasses before returning home to Rhode Island, where the remaining DeGrasse Family and their role in African American life in nineteenth-century Africans would be sold as slaves and the molasses made into rum. Through this Boston can be found in the DeGrasse-Howard papers at the Massachusetts Histor­ type of triangular trade over one hundred thousand Africans, nearly one-fifth of ical Society. the total number of slaves imported to North America during the period, found 7. Reason, who was probably based in Philadelphia, is better known for his themselves on vessels owned by Rhode Islanders. print Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”—after the late-eighteenth-century Josiah 13. This idea of a racialized landscape, in which African American religious Wedgewood plaque that first showed a shackled and kneeling slave pleading for culture can be read into the natural surroundings, is one first put forth by art his­ freedom—than for his paintings. Almost as little is known about the life of Prior, torian David Lubin in his fine essay on Duncanson. See Lubin’s Picturing a Nation: who is often called a “plain painter” or a “limner,” terms that refer to the flat lin­ Art and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America (New Haven, CT: Yale Uni­ earity of his images. Many of the extant portraits he did are of black sitters, versity Press, 1994), 107-57. including one of the abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor William 14. Kirstin Buick’s essay “The Ideal Works of Edmonia Lewis: Invoking and Whipper (1848), which would seem to indicate his own antislavery sentiments Inverting Autobiography,” in Reading American Art, ed. Doezema and Milroy, 190- quite clearly. 207, argues that the artist used both white racial features and biblical subject mat­ 8. Art historian Katie Mullis Kresser has written a very interesting unpublished ter to approach difficult racial topics and to push for the inclusion of black paper on the Shaw Memorial that argues in part that the white Brahmin commu­ females into the cultural space of womanhood. nity of Boston sought to wrest the memory of Shaw’s sacrifice from what they 15. Art historian Adrienne Childs proposes that Tanner was the first black deemed to be the inappropriate hands of black artists like Bannister and Lewis by American professional artist to go to Africa. She investigates the significance of his systematically marginalizing and discounting black participation in various depiction of black figures in his biblical and orientalist genre scenes in “Tanner, memorial efforts. She states that Shaw, as a favorite scion of Boston’s prosperous Orientalism, and the Development of African American Art” (paper presented at Brahmin community, was greatly mourned when he fell at Fort Wagner in the the “Laying Claim” conference, Colgate University, October 25-27,2001). campaign to take Charleston, South Carolina, in 1863. Over the next fifty years his 16. Judith Wilson presents a strong case for Tanner’s desire to make black folk memory would be increasingly revered in art work until his martyrdom reached a into ideal American peasants. See her “Lifting the ‘Veil’: Henry O. Tanner’s The Chrisdike level in the Shaw Memorial (1893) on Boston Common, by the white Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor,” in Critical Issues in American Art, ed. Mary sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens, which shows him on horseback as though he Ann Calo (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1998), 199-219. were entering Jerusalem. Katie Mullis Kresser, “A Special Precinct: The Shaw 17. As recorded in George Whitaker, “Edward Mitchell Bannister,” undated Memorial and Brahmin Self-Definition in Late Nineteenth-Century Boston” typescript, 4-5, Edward Mitchell Bannister Papers, Archives of American Art, (unpublished paper, 2003). Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 9- Up until the Civil War, Duncanson found patronage from abolitionists for 18. See Alain Locke, The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and his artistic career. But this generous, politically motivated support came with cer­ of the Negro Theme in Art (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, tain thematic strings attached. At least once, as evidenced by his 1853 painting of 1940). Uncle Tom and Little Eva (Detroit Institute of Arts), Duncanson uncharacteristi- caUy opted to render popular subject matter from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Toms Cabin (1852). It is likely that the painting was commissioned, since nothing else like it appears in Duncanson’s oeuvre. 10. Holland, “Reaching behind the VeU,” in Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828- 1901, 27. 11. Ibid., 4. 12. According to Jay Coughtry’s book The Notorious Triangle: Rhode Island and the African Slave Trade, igoo—1807 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981), the slave ships would travel first to the Gold Coast, where they would collect kid­ napped Africans in exchange for rum and brandy. Then they Would proceed south to the West Indies, where they would offload the majority of the slaves and take on