I

Vo.

THE IMAGE OF THE "WHITE LIBERAL" IN

BLACK AMERICAN FICTION AND DRAMA

Norma Ramsay Jones

A Dissertation

Submitted to the Graduate School of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

August 1973

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY cLo 5 5 6 8 4 5 ii

ABSTRACT

Literary criticism has examined white American writing to determine whether black characters have received stereotypical treat­ ment, but little notice has been paid to white characters created by black authors. Existing criticism has focused on the frequently appearing White Oppressor stereotype.

This study presented the other major white characterization, the White Liberal, "who opposes prevailing standards by relatively less oppressive behavior toward blacks." It was hoped that studying the White Liberal would show whether black writers, free from the hatred and fear entering into creation of the Oppressor stereotype, had learned to create complex, round white characters, thus reflecting artistic growth. It was assumed that the white liberal image in various periods of history would indicate any progress made in race relations.

The image of the White Liberal was examined in the black fiction and drama of four periods of black American experience: Protest (1853-1920), Harlem Renaissance (1920-1930), Between "Pride" and "Power" (1930 to the mid-Sixties), Militancy (mid-Sixties to the present). Major liberal characters were analyzed and typed according to motive for liberalism. Dominant character types and modes of artistic treatment were noted. Results of period analyses were then compared.

Comparison of white liberal characters’ motivation in histori­ cal context showed that the moral estimate of liberal motivation altered in relation to the amount of oppression blacks experienced in a given era and the extent to which they were dependent upon whites. Excepting a few multi-dimensional portraits from the late Fifties and early Sixties, the White Liberal was usually stereotyped. As a race relations indicator, the image of the White Liberal showed that blacks know whites as imperfectly as whites know blacks. Ill

In appreciation

—for all the help I have received in writing this disser­ tation—from my chairman, Dr. Alma J. Payne, and the members of my doctoral committee, Drs. Frank Baldanza, Virginia E. Leland and Raymond Yeager. Exciting teachers and sound scholars, they have long since become good friends.

—to my mother, Helen M. Jones, whose sacrifices made my education possible, and to whom the present work is most affectionately dedicated. IV

CONTENTS

CHAPTER Page

I. INTRODUCTION ...... 1

II. ALWAYS IN A CONTEXT OF PROTEST...... 9

III. AMID AWAKENING...... 56

IV. THE PERIOD BETWEEN "PRIDE"A ND "POWER" ...... 101

V. IN THE HANDS OF THE MILITANTS...... 156

VI. CONCLUSIONS...... 180

LIST OF WORKS CITED 192 V

"There was a brightness in him." —Alan Paton

"If you want to be a bridge you must be willing to be walked on." —Marjorie Penney I

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

American blacks have often complained that their fellow

citizens view them as a class rather than as individuals. Today’s

blacks demand more emphatically than ever that whites relinquish the

stereotypical blinders which have prevented genuine confrontation with black persons. In literature the racial upheavals of recent years have forced critics to reconsider how white writers portray black

characters and to ask whether an unfair use of stereotype prevails.

There have been several studies of black portraiture in white writing; for example, two-thirds of the essays in Gross and Hardy’s Images of the Negro in American Literature deal with whites’ presentation of blacks.1 There have also been lengthier treatments of the black image in the work of individual white authors, such as Nilon’s study of the

Negroes in Faulkner.2

Less attention has been devoted to black writers’ characteri­ zation of whites. The present inquiry has turned up only two extended studies of the white image in black American literature, both of them unpublished doctoral dissertations. James Byrd reviewed the portrayal of white character in one hundred and ten black novels.3 And David

Britt studied the white image in the work of four important twentieth century black novelists.11 There have also been some brief studies of a limited class of white characters such as Klotman’s research on the

1 2

White Bitch archetype in black fiction.5

These works have provided a helpful background for the present

effort, which seeks to supplement them. Mr. Byrd and Mr. Britt have

employed opposite techniques in approaching the matter of white

portraiture. Mr. Byrd covers over a hundred novels by sixty-nine

authors but in trying to gain scope limits the depth of analysis of

character types discovered. The nature of his typing tends to depend upon superficial qualities such as the characters’ profession or position in society: the Benevolent White Father of Mulattoes, the

Northern Teacher, the Southern Sheriff. Britt, on the other hand, offers a far more intensive discussion of his writers’ development of their white characters but limits himself to the work of only four,

Hughes, Wright, Baldwin and Ellison. Furthermore, the Byrd study ends with 1950 and Britt’s with Baldwin’s Going to Meet the Man (1965).6

Considering the wealth of black writing since then, it is none too soon to begin updating the analysis of the white image. Neither study attempts to discuss the white image in black drama.7

The major limitation of most preceding research is that studies of the white image in general tend to deal chiefly with the

White Oppressor. ^Jt is certainly a valid emphasis, since oppression of blacks is a cardinal fact of American life which has been consis­ tently referred to in black and white literature. However, it is also probably true that the portrait of the White OppressorJ is not nearly so significant from a critical point of view as that of the White

Liberal. A study of the white man who is, in some sense, sympathetic 3

to the black cause will avoid the numerous stereotypes associated with

the white enemy and enable us to see whether black writers have grown

in their ability to create complex, round white characters. Charac­

ters depicted,as "the enemy" are more likely to be stereotypical

because the hatred and fear felt for an enemy is founded upon ignor­

ance, and the ignoring of human depth and complexity is fundamental to

the creation of stereotype. There is at least a greater possibility

that in the creation of White Liberals black writers will deal with

that variety of human feelings, thoughts, and behaviors which inspire

multidimensional portraiture.

Furthermore, a consideration of the changing image of the

White Liberal is timely. In the revolutionary black rhetoric of the

mid-Sixties the term itself became an insult. LBelieving in the role

of the artist as prophet—in the etymological sense of "speaker forth"

of fundamental truth rather than as "foreteller"—we may ask what

light black writers, past and present, can shed upon current hostile black attitudes toward White Liberals.

But before such an analysis is undertaken we first have to define what a White Liberal is. At the outset we acknowledge that

this term has different meanings for different people. Some users

simply mean a seemingly benevolent white person. Others try to tie it to those who espouse various brands of political liberalism; and this is particularly confusing, because sotae political conservatives, because of their relative friendliness toward blacks, may be regarded as White Liberals. To add to the confusion, some blacks now say that 4

White Liberals are not really "liberal" at all. At the very least

they say that White Liberals are guilty of gross presumption, as

summed up by James Baldwin: "There is no role for the white liberal

[in social change], he is our affliction." Baldwin goes on to speak

of "a certain missionary complex on the part of white liberals, whose

assumption basically seems to be that I am much worse off than they

are and that they must help me into the light."8 At worst, the White

Liberal is seen as positively harmful. As Stokely Carmichael puts it,

"I think the biggest problem with the white liberal in America, and

perhaps the liberal around the world, is that his primary task is to stop confrontation, stop conflicts, not to redress grievances, but to

stop confrontation." The White Liberal actually "enjoys the status quo; while he himself may not be actively oppressing other people, he enjoys the fruits of that oppression. And he rhetorically tries to claim that he is disgusted with the system as it is."9 Even white social critics like Tom Wolfe take the White Liberal to task. In his devastating attack on New York East Side "radical chic," Wolfe exposes the "Have a Panther for Tea" syndrome as irresponsible dilettantism by wealthy whites looking for excitement coupled with the right to feel virtuous. Wolfe does admit that the basic impulse of radical chic is sincere but insists that it has been hopelessly sullied by a "concern for maintaining a proper East Side life-style in New York society."10

\jClarification of the problem of how to describe a White

Liberal and of the reason why the term has fallen into such disrepute is offered by Marian Musgrave, who says that blacks are no "longer 5

willing to praise those "liberals" whose sole contribution to the

cause of justice is mere unwillingness to support overt oppression.

This kind of "liberal," she says is "a man whose mind is so open that

the wind whistles through it—a man who refuses to see that there are

not two sides to every question.1,1 Ultimately she concludes that the

term has become one of opprobrium because "In the U.S. certain words

have a high cathexis," that is they have become invested with strong

positive value. (For example, "motherhood" and "patriotism" used to

have a high plus value—and still do in some quarters.) "’Liberal*

also has been a plus word, and because of this, people whose only

’liberal’ act has been not to leave when a black enters a coach or

hotel have claimed to be liberals." Such people are trying to get for

themselves the positive benefits of the label without actually paying

any dues.12

Since this term has become so slippery that it now means

almost whatever the user intends, I offer the definition used in my

own study. It is based upon the assumption that practically all white

characters in black writing can be divided into the categories of

Liberals and Oppressors. White Oppressors actively support or tacitly

accept any form of injustice to blacks. White Liberals, in word or

action, oppose the prevailing social or legal standards of their milieu by relatively less oppressive behavior toward blacks. This is

a very broad definition of "white liberal," and will include a number

of characters whom most blacks would abhor.

This dissertation will present a catalog of white liberal

character types which appear in the black fiction and drama of four 6

successive periods of American cultural history. The basis for

developing these types will consist of an inductive analysis of the

characters’ motivation for liberalism. The naming of types, as well

as the historical divisions, are the writer’s own. There are several

reasons for making motivation the primary focus in assessing the white

liberal types. Obviously, to stress motivation is to gain more

insight into a character than, for example, trying to type according

to job or social class (although both of these may need to be consid­

ered in coming to understand a specific character’s total motivation).

Also, the amount of attention which an author gives to motivation is an important clue to whether he will create flat or round characters.

Finally, motivation is the crucial issue in the problem of how blacks perceive and relate to whites. It is the questioning of the motives of real life White Liberals which has led to the virulent denuncia­

tions by today’s angry blacks. We intend to ask whether this is echoed—and even presaged—in black literature.

Discussion of the treatment of the white liberal image in each of the cultural eras will be preceded by a summary of pertinent black history. One reason for this is that{black literary themes are often very closely related to the socio-cultural context^ Furthermore, since most black and white Americans do not know black history as well as they ought it seems necessary to give more extensive treatment of historical background than for a study of white writing.

This study will not attempt to present a directory of all the white liberal characters who appear in black writing but through the 7 use of significant, representative white liberal portraits to show the dominant character types in the black writing of each period.

a few terms need to be clarified. "Black," "Negro," and

"Afro-American" are used interchangeably, with "black" being used most often because it is most commonly used by today’s blacks themselves* and also because it is the most logical opposite of "white." "Black writing" and "black literature" denote writing by black authors?}

Many critics have observed that only one hundred years elapsed between the publication of the first black novel (Clotel, 1853) and

Ralph Ellison’s receiving the National Book Award for Invisible Man

(1953). This dissertation will attempt to discover whether the broad gains in black literary artistry have been paralleled by a similar achievement in portrayal of the most significant group of white characters. 8

FOOTNOTES

1Seymour L. Gross and John Edward Hardy, Images of the Negro in American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966).

2Charles H. Nilon, Faulkner and. the Negro (New York: Citadel Press, 1965).

3James W. Byrd, "The Portrayal of White Character by Negro Novelists, 1900-1950," Diss. George Peabody College for Teachers, 1955.

‘’David D. Britt, "The Image of the White Man in the Fiction of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison," Diss. Emory University, 1968.

5Phyllis Klotman, "The White Bitch Archetype in Contemporary Black Fiction," Unpubl. Paper delivered at Midwest MLA, Fall 1972.

^Inexplicably, Britt also fails to include Wright’s The Outsider (1953), which contains a series of well developed white portraits.

7Britt does, however, make passing reference to one play, Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie (1964).

8James Baldwin, in "Liberalism and the Negro," A Round-Table Discussion in Commentary, 37 (March 1964), 37.

9Stokely Carmichael, Stokely Speaks (New York: Random House, Vintage, 1971), pp. 169, 172.

10Tom Wolfe, Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970), p. 41.

11These comments were made in an open forum following a lecture by Dr. Musgrave at Bowling Green State University in the Spring of 1973.

12Marian E. Musgrave, "Games Liberals Play," Unpubl. Paper delivered before the NAACP Chapter, Oxford, Ohio. CHAPTER II

ALWAYS IN A CONTEXT OF PROTEST

White liberal portraiture in black American writing was begun

by the father of black American fiction and drama, William Wells Brown

(ca. 1814-1884). A black abolitionist, Brown had been born in slavery,

the son of a mulatto mother and a white man. While in his teens,

Brown made his first escape attempt, taking his mother with him; but

the two were captured and the mother "sent down the river" to what

would almost surely be an early death under the hardships of planta­

tion labor. Brown never saw her again, and he was to carry with him

for the rest of his life a sense of guilt over his mother’s fate.

In 1834 Brown succeeded in escaping and began a new life for

himself in the North, which included working at whatever job he could

get and rigorously educating himself. In 1847 his abilities as

speaker and writer were recognized when he was given a position with

the Massachusetts Antislavery Society as a replacement for Frederick

Douglass who had resigned after some ideological friction.

Brown was even sent to England by the Society to enlist over­ seas support for the cause of abolition. While Brown was there,

Congress enacted the Fugitive Slave Law, making it impossible for him to return to America. During this involuntary exile, he continued his work for the Society but also found time to write the first black

American novel, CZoteZ; or. The President's Daughter: A Narrative of

9 10

Slave Life in the United States (London, 1853; revised and reprinted

under different names in 1860-61, 1864, and 1867). Brown later went

on to write a number of plays which were meant for public reading

rather than the stage.1

Only three novels by American blacks were published before the

beginning of post-Reconstruction protest in the 1890’s, and Clotel is

by far the most important of the three.2 Neither of the other works

makes an important addition to the group of white liberal types

delineated by Brown, whereas white characters do figure importantly in

Brown’s novel which falls primarily in the tradition of tragic mulatto

literature already established by white playwrights and novelists.

The plot of Clotel involves the series of misfortunes exper­

ienced by the former mistress and mulatto daughters of Thomas Jeffer­

son, beginning with their sale at public auction when the girls are in

their middle teens. In the end, pursued by slave-catchers, the daughter, Clotel chooses death by drowning in the Potomac River in full view of the White House, where her natural father had lived as

President. Althesa, Clotel’s younger sister, after a very happy marriage to a white man in New Orleans, dies in an epidemic along with her husband. Their two white-appearing daughters are then sold as slaves, one choosing death rather than dishonor, the other dying of a broken heart after an unsuccessful rescue attempt in which her white lover is killed. The only near-white female character to. eventually escape misfortune is Clotel’s daughter by a white master. After a series of melodramatic vicissitudes, this girl is finally reunited in 11

Europe with her mulatto lover whom she had once helped to escape from

prison.

While the foregoing is certainly the main plot of CZoteZ, an

additional one is so fully developed and comprises so large a share of

the content of the work (about 37%), that it seems more than a mere

subplot. This is the story of the white family who become owners of

Clotel’s mother after the auction at the beginning of the book. The main characters in this plot are white, and except for the fact that

they own Clotel’s mother, their activities bear no relation to what

goes on in the other plot. Aside from being prime proof that Brown had much to learn about the craft of the novel, what is significant about this plot situation is that CZoteZ may be seen, not as one novel, but two, with the second in embryo. And, for our purposes here, it should be noted that the embryonic work which makes up so large a part of this first of all black novels is a story about white people.

Furthermore, the major white characters must, by our definition, be classified as white liberals.

It is, of course, hardly surprising to find what we are defining as white liberals in an abolitionist novel, since any character favoring the end of slavery in the 1850’s holds a view contrary to that of the majority of society. What is interesting about the "white plot" of CZoteZ is the amount of space given it, and its potential independence as a separate work of fiction. Clotel’s mother is the only link between the plots; and after her sale to the plantation-owning Methodist parson, she only reappears briefly in the 12

"white plot" as she goes about her work in the kitchen and then, again,

when a sentence mentions her death.

If the white man of liberal sympathies figures so importantly

in this first black novel, we must now ask about the basis of that

liberalism. The answer is that, with one exception, the liberals of

Clotel belong to a class which will henceforth be denoted as the

"Idealistic Liberal." Again, this is not surprising. In his survey

of nineteenth century white American attitudes toward the Negro,

George Fredrickson shows that for the entire period the nature and

potential of the black man were the subject of a fierce intellectual

debate. In his discussion of "the differing predictions made about

the ultimate destiny of American blacks," Fredrickson believes he can

reveal the numerous and varying ideological biases with regard to the

blacks’ nature.3

Professor Fredrickson’s attitude survey is well worth noting,

because so many of the positions delineated in his work have persisted

even until the present time. Liberal attitudes in the period before

the Civil War were held by Colonizers and Abolitionists. Colonizers

were conservative in spirit and environmentalist in theory. jThey ' p believed that the black man, even should he be freed, could not

fulfill his potential while living in a prejudiced and discriminatory^■

'^American society? They also feared that the continued presence in

America of slaves and oppressed freedmen would eventually lead to a

bloody black rebellion. Thus, the return of blacks to Africa would be

of benefit to both races.4 The Abolitionists, too, were 13 environmentalists; they differed from the Colonizers, however, in insisting that rather than remove blacks from an evil environment, the nation must and could cause that environment to change. To them, the colonialist "doctrine of ineradicable white prejudice was unchristian and undemocratic."5 Abolitionism was significantly influenced by the evangelism of the 1830’s and its ideals of human and social perfecti­ bility.6

Although Colonizers must be considered liberals according to the definition we have adopted (since their schemes to improve the lot of black men, for various reasons, ran counter to the laws and wishes of the major part of society), it is apparent that they are the most conservative of all the liberals. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Colonizer never appears in black literature. The Abolition­ ist presents a different picture! He is often included; and, in fiction, as in fact, his goal is the end of the slave system, and, failing that, the escape or emancipation of as many slaves as possible

From either Christian or democratic motives, he does not fear the introduction of many black freedmen into society. His chief theoret­ ical opponents are those who hold the position that blacks are inferior to whites by reason of heredity, that under the laws of God or Nature, all men are simply not created equal.

The Idealistic Liberals of Clotel represent both the religious and rationalist orientations. Christian idealism is shown in the character of Georgiana, the only daughter of Parson Peck and heiress to the Peck plantation. Brown makes an ironic contrast between the 14 pure faith of the daughter and the crassness of the father, who had come South as a young man and stayed on to marry a wealthy woman.

Several examples are given of the rationalizations employed by this godly man in order that he may enjoy the fruits of his slaves’ labor, but his essential cruelty is revealed when he casually participates in the separation of a slave mother from her young daughter.

Like her father, Georgiana had been educated in the North.

She has apparently been influenced by abolitionist thinking to reject the treatment of blacks in her native region. She is also intensely religious and believes "that the Bible was both the bulwark of

Christianity and of liberty."7 Her views on slavery are delivered early in the story in the context of a conversation between her father and his northern visitor, Carlton, in which she is invited to participate:

To judge justly of the character of anything, we must know what it does. That which is good does good, and that which is evil does evil. . . . Whatever, in its proper tendency and general effect, produces, secures, or extends human wel­ fare, is according to the will of God, and is good. ... On the other hand, whatever in its proper tendency and general effect destroys, abridges, or renders insecure, human welfare, is opposed to God’s will, and is evil. . . . Can that then be right, be well doing—can that obey God’s behest, which makes a man a slave? which dooms him and all his posterity, in limitless generations, to bondage, to unrequited toil through life? ’Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.’ This single passage of Scripture should cause us to have re­ spect to the rights of the slave. True Christian love is of an enlarged, disinterested nature. It loves all who love the Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity, without regard to color or condition.8

This speech fairly well summarizes the idealistic Christian liberal position on slavery. In the novel it is contrasted with the religious 15

justification of slavery in the sermon of a white missionary to the

S-laves in which he preaches on the same scriptural idea cited by

Georgiana ("do unto others") and uses it as a basis for exhorting the

slaves to give better service to their masters.

Along with this southern Christian liberal girl we also have a

northern liberal in the person of Carlton. His liberalism is based on

democratic rationalist thought. At one point he says, "I am a

digciple of Rousseau, and have for years made the rights of man my

gtiidy; and -I must confess to you that -I can see no difference between white men and black men as regards liberty."9 In answer, the parson

cites biblical teaching as support for slavery.

The plot gains romantic interest when Georgiana and Carlton

fall in love- Her first object, however, is his conversion to Chrisr

£janity, the initial step toward which is taken when she refutes her fathers contention that slavery has the divine approbation. She is

successful in helping her lover to achieve religious convictions and eventually becomes Carlton’s wife. After her father’s death, the two

£ggin a system of the gradual emancipation of their ninetyreight glayes, allowing them to earn money for their freedom while educating tfrem fpr the responsibilities that freedom will bring. And this idealism results in the slaves working with a dedication and industry

¥iii8u gpnfounds aH tkS neighboring slaveholders. Eventually, the liberation process is speeded up when Georgiana contracts a fatal jl|iiegs and on her deathbed arranges the slaves? immediate emgncipar tion and transfer to free territory. In her dying speech to the 16

slaves, she notes that she and her husband have ignored the behest of

the Colonizers: "We have been urged to send you to Liberia, but we

think it wrong to send you from your native land. We did not wish to

encourage the Colonization Society, for it originated in hatred of the

free coloured people."10 The last statement refers to a charge often made by Abolitionists against Colonizers.11

An Idealistic Liberal who does not actually appear in the book is Thomas Jefferson himself. One brief chapter (Chapter XVII) is given to a comparison of some of Jefferson’s liberal statements with the actual fate of his slave grand-daughter, Mary. In a speech made to the Virginia legislature Jefferson had said: "The whole commerce between master and slave is a perpetual exercise of the most boister­ ous passions; the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submission on the other. ... I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just. . . ."12 Although Jefferson is not a character in Clotel, as the purported father of the heroine, his spirit certainly is present. One can only reflect on what kind of book might have been written had Brown, or some better craftsman, tried a novel showing the liberal as slave owner and progenitor. Even as things stand here, in Jefferson, we have a hint of a character type which will be developed by subsequent writers, the "Ambivalent

Liberal."

One other liberal character to note is Henry Morton, the chivalrous Yankee physician who purchases and then weds Althesa,

Clotel’s younger sister. (Although the law did not recognize marriage 17

contracted with a slave, Morton considered himself legally married to

her.) This subplot is probably introduced so that the couple can die

and their educated, almost pure white daughter be sold to lecherous

southerners, thus permitting Brown to emphasize additional abuses of

the slave system. In our set of liberal characters, Morton might be

typed as the "Marrying Liberal."

In turning to the drama, the first thing to notice is that

Brown’s role as playwright is unique in this period. After Brown’s

efforts, there are no black plays until the work of Joseph Cotter

after the turn of the century. The only other significant black

contribution to the theatre in the nineteenth century is through the minstrel shows; and it is ironic that, though based on the perfor­ mances of plantation slaves, which were a form of self-parody designed

to please the master, minstrel troupes did not include black perfor­ mers until after the Civil War.13 One factor which prevented the development of black drama was the lack of a black audience until the

1920’s, "and it was a segregated one in most Broadway theatres until the early forties."11* These situations lend Brown’s lowly achievement in the drama a kind of status which it probably does not deserve for its dramaturgical merit.

Brown’s best known play is probably The Escape; or3 A Leap for

Freedom (1858). Another abolitionist work, its themes are very similar to those of CZoteZ. The central characters are two mulatto slaves, Glen and Melinda, who are in love and decide to run away together. If they do not go, Melinda will be unable to stave off the 18

advances of her master, Dr. Gaines. The play ends with a nick-of-time

flight across the Niagara River to Canada.

Only two types of white liberal appear in the play, both of

the Idealistic stamp. One is the Quaker Abolitionist, a worker on the

Underground Railroad, assisting the fugitives because of his Christian

principles. Another liberal appears in the person of Mr. White of

Massachusetts, who expresses his opposition to slavery in terms

reminiscent of the Rousseauistic tradition, i.e., the idea that

slavery stifles the natural potential with which every man is born.

Mr. White, apparently the apotheosis of white-ness, carries his idealism to the length of participation in the brawl with the slave- catchers which gives the fugitives time to make good their escape.

His are the last lines to be spoken in the play: "Why, bless me! these are the slaveholding fellows. I’ll fight for freedom!" Thus, the two white liberal types, represented by minor characters in the drama, conform to types already present in the novel written five years previously. Indeed, there is little in the way of situation or theme in this play which is not already contained in Clotel.

Brown’s literary style in both fiction and drama leaves much to be desired. Over-plotting, flat characterization, didacticism, melodrama, and sentimentality are probably his major offenses. His white liberal characters, uninteresting as people, are simply mouth­ pieces for approved points of view. There is little evidence of depth or complexity. Motivation, with which the present paper is chiefly concerned, is seen in terms of prevailing ideological stances of the 19

period, except in the case of the Marrying Liberal, Dr. Morton, who

can also ably express abolitionist doctrine when the occasion demands

it. The only white liberal with conflicting motivations is Jefferson,

who does not actually appear in the action of the novel. But the fact

that Brown finds it necessary to underscore Jefferson's ambivalence

4 toward slavery by introducing one of his speeches and contrasting it

with his behavior is a foreshadowing of later developments in white

characterization. Brown, the polemicist, was not interested in the

artistic possibilities presented by such a character. With the excep­

tion of the allusion to Jefferson, white liberal characters receive very favorable treatment by Brown; they bear the stamp of moral approval if not the tribute of high artistry.

After Brown, there was no black American literature until the

1890’s. In spite of the war, emancipation, and Reconstruction which intervened, the post-Reconstruction protest novelists still had a great deal in common, both in style and themes, with their predecessor

There were more of them, and their output was greater than that of the writers of the 1850’s, but the amount of work published was still minuscule. Twenty-eight black novels were published between 1890 and

1920, and fourteen of them were the work of five men: Sutton Griggs,

Paul Laurence Dunbar, Charles W. Chesnutt, W.E.B. DuBois, and James

Weldon Johnson.15

With few exceptions, the black fiction of this era was protest fiction, produced by members of the small black middle class. Most of these were professional men, to whom writing was a sideline, taken up 20

in order to further the cause of racial justice. They were protesting

the many social and legal injustices visited upon blacks at the close

of Reconstruction and the projected image of the Negro as vile and

bestial found in the work of the white writers of the "Plantation

Tradition," such as Thomas Dixon and Thomas Nelson Page.

The history of American blacks from the end of the Civil War

to World War I is largely the story of rights which were won and then

lost once again, a story which ends with some hope evidenced by

agonizingly slow but real progress toward equality. The fiction writers of the period were mostly concerned with the loss or denial of

rights, which occurred in many ways. As the desire to punish the

South or to act out egalitarian idealism waned in the North in the years following the Civil War, more and more control of the destiny of

American blacks passed into the hands of their former owners. With

the compromise worked out over the contested presidential election of

1876 (whereby southern Democrats acquiesced in the election of

Republican Rutherford B. Hayes in return for a promise that the South would henceforth be allowed to deal with blacks in its own way), the fate of the black man was sealed until the era of the Great Migration to urban centers in the North.

fThe chief injustices attacked by black protest fiction of this period are legal, economic, and educational, all of which are inter­ related. The prime act of legal discrimination was gradual disenfran­ chisement effected by such means as the "grandfather clauses," literacy tests, and poll taxes. In addition, there was a blatant 21

disregard for justice in the courts and in the penal system, where the

worst abuse was probably the practice of convict-leasing, a disguised

form of slavery. Finally, the Jim Crow laws gradually enforced a

social distance between the races which had probably not even existed

during the slave era.16

The worst form of economic discrimination was the sharecrop

system, which in practice was often a form of slavery in disguise,

which prevailed throughout the South. In both South and North,

economic progress was denied blacks by preventing their entry into the

professions and skilled labor market. And one bulwark of economic

discrimination was the inferior educational opportunity open to blacks.

Drawing upon the theories of Social Darwinism, it was said on the one

hand that blacks were of a lower stage of evolutionary development

than whites and could therefore not profit from equal education, and,

on the other hand, that since the struggle for existence is the truest

test of a man or a race, blacks must enter that struggle and try to

survive in it, however ill prepared they happened to be. The tacit assumption was, of course, that they would not survive!17

Along with these evils against which -they-triedTo"'protest,

the black fiction writers were also preoccupied with the black leadership struggle which hinged on the issue of how best to combat them. The question was whether to give allegiance to Booker T.

Washington or W.E.B. DuBois. Washington, the educator, advocated compromise with the white oppressor wherever possible. He believed that the solution of the race problem lay in the area of economic 22

progress.18 And he believed that the key to black economic develop­ ment was to provide industrial or agricultural training for as many blacks as possible.18 His educational achievement at Tuskegee was essentially the creation of a fine trade school. In order to continue his work and raise the necessary white financial backing, Washington was often guilty of tepid or ambiguous public statements on the subject of social justice, for which he was then—and still is— bitterly attacked. But, in fairness to his memory, it has to be said that the educational deficiencies of most blacks at the time were so deplorable that they probably could not have taken advantage of full social and political equality had it been thrust upon them. A Darwin­ ist in orientation, Washington believed that blacks needed training if they were ever to compete successfully with whites. One of his complaints about blacks was that they had lost many of the manual skills which had been acquired under slavery, for they had had

"practically a monopoly of the skilled labor in the South at the close of the Civil War."20 It is probable that Washington was quite sincere in the belief that, given time for black education and economic progress, white society would gradually accept blacks as equals, fully entitled to all the privileges of citizenship.

In contrast, the civil rightists around DuBois insisted that the Washington approach erred through telling blacks they had to

"earn" rights which were theirs under the Constitution. From this, came the NAACP approach which emphasized the struggle in the courts.

Like Washington, DuBois and his followers tried to work with and gain 23

the support of white liberals, but it is obvious that this brand of

militant activity would not appeal to all of those whites who could be

conscience-pricked or flattered into donating funds for educating

blacks to be better laborers or housekeepers.

In addition to his more militant stance, DuBois was also

famous for his idea of the "Talented Tenth," the notion that full

equality should immediately be accorded to that tenth of the black

population which by virtue of education and attainments was ready to

take its place in the mainstream of American social, economic, and political life. Discriminatory in itself (there was a very exclusive color-caste system among American blacks in this period), this idea implied that the educational task was more than just to bring all blacks up to the level of skills such as those taught at Tuskegee, a view which was at least acceptable to the majority of southern moder­ ates. DuBois was really saying that blacks should receive rewards and advancement just as rapidly as they could be trained up to the limits of their capacities to learn.21

When-law; "'social custom, and economic deprivation did not produce the desired subservience among the black populace, there was always the possibility of a resort to violence. The prevalence of lynching is the supreme scandal of the period, yet the data document­ ing its frequency are often omitted from the average "white" education.

In 1918 a blond, blue-eyed "black" man named Walter White became an

Assistant Secretary of the NAACP and began a study of lynching which resulted in a book on the subject ten years later.22 Attempting to be 24

as objective as possible in presenting the nature and incidence of the

practice of lynching in America, White makes his most telling points

by means of his carefully compiled statistics. Looking at the figures

for the three decades we are presently considering, we discover that

from 1890 to 1900 there were 1665 persons lynched; from 1900 to 1910

there were 921; and from 1910 to 1920 there were 840. The averages

for the successive periods are: 166.5, 92.1, and 84.0.23 White found

it impossible'to get reliable figures as to the race of the lynch

victims until 1904, but from then until 1920, the rather conservative

NAACP yearly reports reveal that of 560 Americans lynched between 1904

and 1910, 51 were white and 509 were black; of 840 lynched in the

succeeding decade, 88 were white (46 of these in 1915, leading one to

speculate that this abrupt increase from five whites the previous year had something to do with unrest caused by the World War), the other

752 were black.21* When White breaks his data down state by state, it is easily shown that the vast majority of lynchings occurred in the

South. With the passing of the frontier set of mind, very few lynchings took place even in the far West.

These figures speak for themselves, and they teach the student of literature invaluable lessons about the background of the creative consciousness of the black writers of the time—and, indeed, this knowledge has formed a part of the consciousness of every black writer since. With reference to the period that they cover, the statistics help to explain why protest was emphasized at the expense of art. But the numbers do more than merely underline the urgency behind the 25

protest motive. Coupled with the other facts about the racial situa­

tion, they give a truer sense of the emotional climate which must have

surrounded all black-white relations.

Probably because of the despair they must often have felt, the

protest novelists of the post-Reconstruction era who create white

liberal characters differ from Brown in one very obvious way: they

are much more explicit about what they think the white liberal ought

to be doing. For the Abolitionist writer, the supreme liberal act was

that which led to freedom for some slaves. Now that the slaves are

supposedly free, the problem—and the demands upon the white liberal—

are much more complicated. These novels still contain all the white

liberal character types created by Brown, but they have been further

developed, and new types have been added to the catalog.

The Idealistic Liberal is still present (and still sometimes

is the vehicle for long, didactic speeches), but we also meet two

interesting variations of the type. The first we have named the

"Utopian Planner," and the fullest example being Charles Chesnutt’s

Colonel French, the hero of The Colonel's Dream (1905). In some ways

this third and last of Chesnutt’s novels (it was also his last published book) is his most interesting, since all the leading characters are white.25 The novel is also one of two black works of

the time which fall in the Utopian Novel tradition which came into being toward the close of the nineteenth century as one of the most imaginative and reform-oriented responses to the theory of Social

Darwinism.26 Even more Utopian is Sutton Grigg’s Imperium in Imperio 26

(1899) which envisions a geographically separate black nation; in this

latter work, however, the utopian planners are all black.

Chesnutt’s Colonel French is a former Confederate hero who has

gone North after the Civil War and made a fortune in business. Now, a widower with a small son, he returns to his family’s home town in the

South determined to use his wealth to help old friends and to assist in the economic development of the region. But the Colonel’s dream is frustrated by racism, which makes society prefer a socio-economic system that will insure white dominance even though that same system also insures economic and cultural stagnation. The arch-enemy of the

Colonel and his dream is the former lower-class white, Fetters, who, having made money as a war profiteer, now has a political and economic stranglehold on the area. Getting rich himself, Fetters does nothing to build up the total economy. He is a parasite, getting fat and wealthy at the expense of others, and the worst example of his abuse of his fellow citizens is his brutal use of cheap convict labor in his various enterprises.

The Colonel realizes that the South must become industrialized if it is to fully recover from the effects of the war; therefore, he proposes to build a cotton mill so that the local raw cotton need not be shipped elsewhere for manufacture. This scheme, of course, is a direct challenge to Fetters’ economic dominance. The rest of the white citizens begin to side with Fetters when it becomes clear that the Colonel has no intention of leaving qualified blacks out of his plans for economic progress. The first evidence of his egalitarian 27

intentions comes when he promotes a black man to be foreman of the

gang which is making bricks for the new mill. The two white laborers

immediately quit, and public opinion about the Colonel quickly begins

to sour. The high wages that he pays his black workers also do not

endear him to local whites.

In the novel, Colonel French never expresses the idealistic basis on which his utopian plans are based. He does not discourse on democracy or Darwinism, but the influence of the latter is plainly seen in his efforts to upgrade the total environment of his old home.

Many of the Colonel’s ideas reflect the program for the region developed by famed Atlanta Constitution editor, Henry W. Grady, and other leaders of the so-called "New South Movement." Another part of his motivation seems to be the fact that he is the last surviving member of an old aristocratic family and thus seems to embody the doctrine of noblesse oblige. Along with this, comes the Colonel’s aristocratic distaste for Fetters and all that he represents.

The Colonel's dream fails, not because his scheme is frus­ trated, but because, after a series of personal shocks, the Colonel’s nerve fails. First, a convict whom the Colonel has helped escape from the brutal Fetters returns to shoot two white men and is subsequently caught and lynched. Then the Colonel’s small son dies because of an accident in which their faithful old black retainer (straight out of the Plantation Tradition) is also killed trying to save the boy. The final blow falls when the coffin of the old black man, who had been buried beside the lad he could not rescue, turns up on the Colonel's 28

porch one morning with a nasty note from the Kian attached. And here,

as in the case of several other liberal characters created in this

era, we begin to have warnings of the kind of price that the white man must pay for his liberalism.

Chesnutt does not condemn his Utopian Liberal for giving up

the struggle, and in his final comment upon him, absolves him of all blame: "And so the colonel faltered, and, having put his hand to the plow, turned back. But was not his, after all, the only way? For no more now than when the Man of Sorrows looked out over the Mount of

Olives, can men gather grapes of thorns or figs of thistles."27 This does not mean that the author has concluded that little real help can come from men like Colonel French. In his summation he says that other men have actually tried and succeeded in making many of the improvements of which his fictional hero dreamed. Here, again,

Chesnutt’s didacticism is showing.28

Another and more common kind of Idealistic Liberal found in these works is what could be called the "Pragmatic Idealist." Like the Utopian, the Pragmatic Idealist does not make lengthy speeches about the basis of his position. His views are shown by his deeds.

The earliest representative of this type is the Teacher of Blacks, and the fullest portrait by a black novelist is that of Miss Smith in

W.E.B. DuBois’ The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911). Since the author is so famous for his activities as a race leader, his literary work has tended to be ignored. This book, with its exposé of those who try to monopolize the cotton market and of back room wheeling and 29

dealing in Washington, certainly falls in the muckraking tradition of

writers like Norris and Sinclair. Nevertheless, in spite of the heavy

emphasis on social reform which characterizes all works of this kind,

The Quest of the Silver Fleece does have some genuine literary value,

particularly when it is viewed in comparison with the other black

novels of the period. The plot is interesting and suspenseful; the

realistic portrayal of the socio-political setting is very interesting;

the use of the classical symbolism of the fleece is not without merit;

and, above all, some of the characters have more than a little

interest and complexity.

Miss Smith is not the most interesting of DuBois’ white

characters, but she is certainly a fully developed example of the

Pragmatic Idealist. She has been a teacher of Alabama blacks for

thirty years, and the school she directs is again on the verge of

bankruptcy. Like most northern teachers of blacks in the black novel,

Miss Smith is a New Englander, fully endowed with Yankee common sense.

She will use all her wits and business ability in the attempt to save

the school, but idealism will not permit her to turn the policy-making apparatus of the institution over to a southern dominated board of

trustees in return for financial security. She is canny enough to realize that this will mean that her black students will be given only enough training to keep them in a usefully subservient position. (The attack on Washington's brand of black education is quite obvious.)

She expresses her educational philosophy very forcefully to a potential white patron of the school who confesses that she is "quite through 30

trying to turn natural servants into masters of me and mine."28 Part

of the reply goes: "I don't want us to be the only ones that count.

I want to live in a world where every soul counts—white, black, and •* yellow—all. That’s what I’m teaching these children here—to count,

and not to be like dumb, driven cattle. If you don't believe in this,

of course you cannot help us."30 (The school does not get the

donation!) Ultimately, the school is saved through the combined

efforts of the redoubtable schoolmarm and her beautiful black protege,

Zora.

There is another, and more human, side to Miss Sarah Smith.

This is shown in her relations with her students. Their problems

become her problems. The chief example of this is the reclamation of

Zora after the latter is deserted by her black lover when he discovers

that she once had had sexual relations with her white master. All

through the night after their parting, Miss Smith comforts the girl,

thinking after Zora has gone to sleep: "Poor child! here too was work—a strange strong soul [Zora enters the novel as a sort of child of nature] cruelly stricken in her youth. Could she be brought back

to a useful life? How she needed such a strong, clear-eyed helper in

this crisis of her work! Would Zora make one or would this blow send her to perdition? Not if Sarah Smith could save her, she resolved.

. . ."31 Am} save her is exactly what she does! The fact that later on Zora is active in helping to save the school underlines another aspect of the character of the Pragmatic Idealist. He is willing to work with and through anybody who shares his goals; he is never 31

patronizing, never assumes that help is something which only he (or

other whites) can dispense to presumably grateful and helpless blacks.

Sarah Smith is only one among a number of dedicated white

teachers in these stories, who are seen as morally excellent by their

creators. Another is Chesnutt’s Martha Chandler, one of those who

came immediately after the Civil War, "whose hearts went out toward

an oppressed race, and who freely poured out their talents, their

money, their lives,—whatever God had given them,—in the sublime and

not unfruitful effort to transform three millions of slaves into

intelligent freemen."32 Miss Chandler’s reward for her selflessness

is a miraculous reunion with her fiancé, a Union Army officer who had been presumed dead but actually has been an amnesia victim, living

among poor black freedmen since the southern surrender. The white northern teacher is also the subject of a Chesnutt story in which her school’s first all-black committee is faced with the decision of whether to rehire the lady who has given many years of faithful service or to fire her in order to hire a well qualified young black candidate for the job.33 (They keep her on.)

Not all of these teachers were noble Yankee ladies. Chesnutt, who incidentally, had been a teacher and principal in a southern black school, also credits the southern teacher in one of his short stories about an impoverished aristocratic lady who gains, the affection and respect of her pupils before her untimely death of a fever.311 And

Sutton Griggs mentions Rev. Samuel Christian, a retired minister of the M.E. Church who was the first person hired to teach the colored 32

children in his town. His description of Mr. Christian’s efforts

shows us his highly laudatory attitude toward the type as well as a

good deal that is wrong with the Griggsean style: "Tenderly he

labored, valiantly he toiled in the midst of the mass of ignorance

that came surging around him. But only one brief year was given to

this saintly soul to endeavor to blast the mountains of stupidity which centuries of oppression had reared. He fell asleep."35 Griggs notes that the minister had always opposed slavery but assumed it would be impossible to eradicate it; however, after emanicaption, the godly man was delighted to take up the educational work. It should also be noted that while most Pragmatic Idealists in these stories were teachers, some followed other lines of activity, such as the crusading southern newspaper editor in Imperiwn in Imperio. 36

Turning again to DuBois’ Silver Fleece, we discover that Miss

Smith is not the only northern teacher of blacks at the school. A far more interesting character is her young assistant, Miss Taylor, who is

DuBois’ version of the Ambivalent Liberal. She has accepted the job at the black school because it is the only one she can get, and because her wealthy businessman brother refuses to spend any more money on her. (Actually, he wants her in the area as a sort of spy on the local farming gentry, since he hopes to corner the cotton market.)

This young lady is moved by no lofty ideals or pragmatic schemes for betterment. (Whatever ideals she once may have thought she had are swiftly erased by the realities of her new situation.) Her ambiva­ lence arises when, in spite of herself, she comes to have some human 33

feelings for the students in her charge. Foremost among these is the

handsome young black man, Blessed Alwyn. Miss Taylor enjoys talking

to him, and, as DuBois hints, this attraction goes beyond the merely

platonic (although the teacher, of course, does not realize this).

Her dislike of Bles’s black sweetheart, Zora, is based on more than

disapproval of the girl’s past. More foolish than evil, Mary Taylor

is completely taken in by the charm of the white southerners she meets

and agrees to' marry the son of the local planter, who is also the

school’s chief enemy. Her worst action is persuading her friend, the

northern philanthropist, to endow Miss Smith’s school only on the

condition that the money be administered by a board composed of

southern whites, who will inevitably be opposed to equal education for blacks. By urging her friend to place such a condition upon the gift,

Miss Taylor believes that she will keep the approval of her aristocra­

tic southern friends. After refusing the money, Miss Smith passes judgment on her young colleague: "You have blundered into this life work of mine and well nigh ruined it."37 The punishment for ambiva­ lence is most severe. The southern "gentleman" whom Miss Taylor marries has little appreciation for her efforts to be a good wife; their child is born deformed in some undescribed but horrible way; and after he is tracked by her to a sporting house, her mate leaves her permanently.

Because of her internal conflicts and growth toward under­ standing her own feelings and the nature of others, Mary Taylor is a far more interesting character than Sarah Smith. She is by far the 34

most "round" white character in the book, and, indeed, in any of the

black fiction of the period.

In addition to the Idealistic Liberal and the Ambivalent

Liberal, post-Reconstruction black fiction contains a few examples of

the other white liberal type created by Brown: the Marrying Liberal.

An early example is Chesnutt’s Dr. Winthrop who discovers that his

"orphan" sweetheart has a mulatto mother.38 The doctor keeps his knowledge to himself and marries the girl.

Possibly the first female Marrying Liberal is the unnamed girl who marries the unnamed hero of James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912). The coloured man, like Brown’s Althesa and the Chesnutt heroine, is light enough to "pass" for white. Since no one knows the secret of his birth, the young lady has only to deal with her own feelings in the matter. Even so, upon learning his secret, she keeps him in suspense for a whole summer. (He manages to be hopeful on the basis of the fact that she has apparently not revealed his secret to anyone else.) Since she is seen only through his eyes, we never know what kinds of conflicts she undergoes, and a simple "I love you" is all that she says when the conflict is resolved and she is ready to marry him. (They have two children, one dark, one fair, neither having negroid characteristics.)

The facts of history tell us that most black-white love affairs do not result in marriage. In the Johnson book we are introduced to a new white liberal whom we shall call the "Sexual

Liberal," and of whom we shall hear a great deal in subsequent black 35

writing. Johnson’s character is simply known as "the rich widow."

She is a frequent patron of the night club where the hero earns a

living playing rag-time piano. The lady is "an exceedingly beautiful woman of perhaps thirty-five; [with] glistening copper-coloured hair, very white skin, and eyes very much like Du Maurier’s conception of

Trilby’s ’twin grey stars’."39 She is cultured, well travelled,

speaks French, plays the piano well, and always dresses in good taste.

Her "very young black fellow" owes his faultless tailoring and diamonds to her. Johnson’s hero does not go further in describing their relationship except to voice faint disapproval, but he does leave the complacent reader of his time with one unsettling comment:

"I learned, too, that he [the black gigolo] was not the only one of his kind."40 The affair ends when the pair quarrel about some unnamed matter and the forsaken black lover comes into the club one evening and pumps a magazine of bullets into the body of the beautiful lady.

Since Johnson is one of the forerunners of the Harlem

Renaissance, he avoids the kind of sermonizing which is prevalent in the works of the earlier black novelists—and even in the work of his contemporary, DuBois. Thus, he does not give a moral evaluation of the widow—or even of the white girl who agrees to marry the hero—as had been done in the descriptions of the other Marrying Liberals. Her bad end is the only clue to what the author thinks of her.

Finally, in practically all of black fiction and drama in which the Sexual Liberal appears, the character is female, and there are only a few minor deviations from this rule even in most recent 36

black writing. If we recall our definition of "liberal" as the person

who acts contrary to the prevailing standards for black-white rela­

tionships, it can readily be seen why this is so. The white male’s

unhindered sexual abuse of the black female began when slavery began

and continued well into the twentieth century. Psychoanalytic

theorists have made a good case for the position that the myth of the

pure white female who must be protected at all costs from the depraved

lust of the black male, is nothing more than the projected social

guilt of the white male. In any event, a part of this myth is the

notion of the black male’s unbelievable sexual prowess, which, pre­

sumably, is his chief attraction for the white female Sexual Liberal.41

In addition to the Sexual Liberal, another new character type

emerges in these post-Reconstruction works, which we shall call the

"Cynical Patron." He exists only in the writing of DuBois and

Johnson, and the wealthy "friend" of Johnson’s ex-coloured man is the

most interesting example. In many ways, the Cynical Patron is a kind

of forerunner of the white heroes of the literature of the lost

generation, except that his inner emptiness is not presented as quite

so devastating.

Johnson’s hero runs across this white liberal when the latter patronizes the same night club and then later hires him to play the piano for his own private parties. Their close relationship does not begin until after the murder of the rich white widow by her black lover. Having been the object of the lady’s advances after she has rejected the other young black man, and having been seated at her 37

table shortly before the murder takes place, our hero rushes out into

the night, fearful that he will somehow be implicated in the killing.

He meets the white man and tells him of his fears, whereupon the man

suggests that the hero accompany him the next day on a trip to Europe.

It is possible to look at the relationship of the black hero and the Cynical Patron as a variant of the Cinderella motif. All sorts of wonderful things happen to the black person after he is taken up by the wealthy and seemingly all-powerful white patron. The

Johnson hero is introduced to the wonders of all the great capitals of western Europe—indeed, all the cities of the world are open to him if he is willing to forsake his own private ambition and continue to accompany his patron. The hero is more of a companion than valet, and practically the only service which he must render in return for the luxury he enjoys is to play the piano, sometimes for parties and some­ times for the white man alone, particularly when the latter is unable to sleep at night—an activity which recalls the youthful David using his harp to lull the tormented, insomniac Saul.

It may well be asked how Johnson justifies his hero’s taking leave of his wonderful white friend in spite of the fact that the latter urges him to stay on for a projected jaunt to the Orient. The chief reason given is the hero’s ambition to return to the United

States to become a composer and thereby bring credit to his race. But it is also made plain that there is something very lacking in this life of leisured luxury. That something is a sense of purpose. The

Cynical Patron, in spite of his personal belief in equality, has no 38 commitment to action because he believes action would be futile. As

he tells the hero, "I have given more study to the race question in

the United States than you may suppose, and I sympathize with the

Negroes there; but what’s the use? I can’t right their wrongs, and

neither can you. . . . Perhaps some day . . . you will come to see

that evil is a force, and, like the physical and chemical forces, we

cannot annihilate it; we may only change its form."42 Thus, in a

sense, the Cynical Patron is really voicing the old Colonialist argu­ ment that since the prejudiced American environment cannot be changed for the better, blacks ought to go elsewhere (in this case, to Europe rather than back to Africa). When viewed against the background of an essentially empty life, this philosophy seems merely a rationalization and anticipation of the belief in nada which was to dominate the consciousness of so many of the white fictional characters of the next decade.

Of particular interest is the black hero’s response to this

Cynical Liberal. Although he leaves him in order to pursue his own career, he does not do so out of a sense of moral superiority.

Recalling his friend’s statement of his philosophy of life, he reflects that they have much in common: "Whatever was the soundness of his logic or the moral tone of his philosophy, his argument greatly impressed me. I could see, in spite of the absolute selfishness upon which it was based, that there was reason and common sense in it. I began to analyse my own motives, and found that they, too, were very largely mixed with selfishness. Was it more a desire to help those I 39

considered my people, or more a desire to distinguish myself, which was leading me back to the United States? That is a question I have never definitely answered."43 This is probably the most empathy that a black character is credited with having for a white character up to

that time. Here, of course, the analogy with the Cinderella motif breaks down; a fairy godparent should never be so fundamentally flawed! However, it is precisely the flaws in the characters of both the patron and the patronized which make them two of the most complex and interesting characterizations in this body of writing. Undoubt­ edly this is partly made possible because this novel goes well beyond the bounds of mere protest writing.

The other noteworthy Cynical Patron is Mrs. Vanderpool in

DuBois’ Quest of the Silver Fleece. In the beginning, more patron­ izing than patron, Mrs. Vanderpool refuses to donate to Miss Smith’s school because of an unwillingness to aid blacks to rise above the servant class.44 Later on, when she hires the beautiful and educated

Zora to be her maid, her attitude begins to change. Her feelings on the day she hires the girl are a forecast of what her later attitude will be: "In the depths of Mrs. Vanderpool’s heart something strange

—not new, but very old—stirred. Before her stood this tall black girl, quietly returning her look. Mrs. Vanderpool had a most uncom­ fortable sense of being judged, of being weighed,—and there arose within her an impulse to self-justification." She imagines herself in a setting a thousand years ago, "white, frail, and fettered,

[standing] before the dusky magnificence of some bejewelled barbarian 40

queen."*’5 Her response to this feeling is an invitation to the girl

to sit down—the first time Zora has received such a courtesy from a

white person outside the confines of the school.

Mrs. Vanderpool’s vision of the reversal of the traditional black and white roles is an example of another kind of white liberal motivation, which, while it is not expressed in a distinct literary

character type, frequently obsesses the white liberal characters of

later decades; particularly the twenties. This is the mind set that

Fredrickson refers to as ’’Romantic Racialism." Its beginning lies in the mid-nineteenth century interest in the diversity of nations and people, the desire to appreciate each race for its supposedly uniquely inherent gifts. This led to a view opposed to that of the "biological school" which "saw the Negro as a pathetically inept creature who was a slave to his emotions, incapable of progressive development and self-government because he lacked the white man’s enterprise and intellect. The [Romantic Racialists] who ascribed to the priority of feeling over intellect sanctioned both by romanticism and evangelical religion could come up with a strikingly different concept of Negro

’differences.' Whereas scientists and other ’practical’ men saw only weakness, others discovered redeeming virtues and even evidences of black superiority."1’6 Myrdal, also, takes note of this kind of white attitude toward the black man, reminding us that "All such favorable beliefs seem to have this in common, that they do not raise any question concerning the advisability or righteousness of keeping the

Negro in his place in the caste order. . . . They rather make it 41

natural that he shall remain subordinate."47 The point is, of course,

that this view always involves a measure of white condescension, since

the black is seen as lacking in the very gifts which are necessary to

achieve equality in American society.

We soon see that Mrs. Vanderpool is trying to escape the same

inner vacuum that threatens the ex-coloured man’s "friend." When she

offers to take Zora with her on her trip around the world, the girl

asks her what the world is basically like:

’Yes—but back of it all, what is it really? What does it look like?’ ’Heavens, child! Don’t ask. Really it isn’t worth while peering back of things. One is sure to be disappointed.’48

As the woman’s eyes grow "old and tired," Zora’s hand covers hers in a

gesture of sympathy. Like the Johnson cynical white, Mrs. Vanderpool has no inner core of purpose: "Essentially Mrs. Vanderpool was

unmoral. She held the code of her social set with sportsmanlike honor; but even beyond this she stooped to no intrigue, because none

interested her. She had all the elements of power save the motive for doing anything in particular. For the first time perhaps, Zora gave her life a peculiar human interest."49 DuBois’ attempt at analysis makes Mrs. Vanderpool, next to the ambivalent Miss Taylor, the most interesting white character in his book. In the foregoing passage he hints at a kind of white liberal motivation which even the perceptive

Johnson does not suggest: Help is given to blacks not on the basis of idealism or simple human affection but upon the much more complex need to attain some sort of meaning for one’s life by being the prime mover 42

in the life of another. For example, when white friends question her

taking time to improve Zora’s taste in books, Mrs. Vanderpool says,

"She’s a sort of intellectual sauce that stirs my rapidly failing

mental appetite."50

Eventually Zora leaves Mrs. Vanderpool after a religious

conversion which leads her to resolve to return to the Smith school

to work among her own people. When she leaves she takes along her patron’s ten-thousand-dollar check which eventually funds the success­

ful attempt to establish the school on a sound financial basis inde­ pendent of the influence of local southern whites. This is conscience money for the lady’s not having helped the black cause on another occasion when she could have.51

Three additional new white liberal types should receive brief mention. One is the "Patronizing Liberal." He looks upon the black man as a dull but more or less educable child whose condition demands a response of kindness. According to Fredrickson the Moderate

Liberalism of the early 1900’s was essentially a conservative doctrine:

"It constituted no real break with the fundamentals of racist ideology but attempted rather to bring that ideology into harmony with such conservative goals as law and order, social harmony, and rule by a benevolent elite.”52 It may have been partially influenced by the imperialism of the era, among the doctrines of which was the notion that whites must be benevolent toward "inferior races."53 It may be argued that this kind of "domestic colonialism" scarcely sounds

"liberal" but when we compare it with our definition of "liberal" as 43

that which is favorable to blacks in opposition to what the majority

of society says and does, we are relatively safe in making the

designation. This whole question of the veal motivation behind the

acts of the Patronizing Liberal is very much a part of his fictional

representation.

There are a number of Patronizing Liberals in the persons of

the northern white philanthropists in The Quest of the Silver Fleece.

Also, Paul Dunbar presents an ironic treatment of the type in one of

his short stories about a slave owner hiring out one of his blacks to

another white man who cheats on paying for the hired man's time.5U

Ostensibly the "benevolent" master is concerned because he knows the

slave is saving money for his freedom and, by prior agreement, will receive a small percentage of the wages paid to his master. In order

to stop the cheating of both of them, the master teaches the slave to write and to do simple arithmetic, even though it is "against princi­ ple." The slave secretly works to improve his new skills, forges a pass, and escapes, whereupon the master blames himself for being "too kind." Another example of the Dunbar irony is the description of old

Horace Talbot, a southerner "who was noted for his kindliness towards people of colour."55 In a novel which deals with the misfortunes of a black family whose husband and father has been falsely accused of theft, Talbot lays the blame for the man's supposed misdeeds on the northerners who "thought they were doing a great thing when they came down here and freed all the slaves." He excuses the blacks on the ground that they are not responsible because "they are unacquainted 44

with the ways of our higher civilization. . . .”56 There is no

extended description of the Patronizing Liberal in these works; the

mode of treatment when he is introduced is almost always irony.

Ironic portraiture is also accorded the character who might be

called the "Bumbling Liberal." One of the most delightful stories of

the period is Chesnutt’s "The Passing of Grandison" in which a

southern gentleman attempts to please his abolitionist ladylove by

trying to engineer the escape of a slave who does not cooperate. The

black is unwilling to make the try for freedom until he is in a

position to take his family with him. The determined lover even has

the slave abducted and taken to Canada, but the "loyal" servant gets

away from his liberators and returns to his delighted master. (He

does finally manage to escape on his own terms, taking the family.)57

One further type is that of the "Liberal Onlooker," the white

man of liberal sympathies who does not play an important role in the

story but who functions as a figure with whom the well-meaning white

reader can identify. The best example is Dr. Burns in Chesnutt’s The

Marrow of Tradition (1901). Through his eyes we watch his respected

colleague, the black Dr. Miller, forced to ride in a Jim Crow railroad

car—nor will the trainmen permit Burns to ride with his black

friend.58 Burns sees how Miller’s services are rejected by the

aristocratic Carteret family even though Miller is the physician best qualified to treat their sick son.59 He is also a horrified onlooker at the riot which has been stirred up by white leaders who are anxious

to cow the blacks into accepting disenfranchisement.60 45

The Liberal Onlooker serves the function of cuing the white

reader as to how he should respond intellectually and emotionally to

the fictional situation. In a sense, he can be said to serve in a

capacity similar to that of the chorus in Greek Tragedy, offering a

running commentary on the events which take place. The Liberal

Onlooker is a useful device in protest fiction because of the contrast

between his reactions and those of the perpetrators of injustice. In

black protest fiction, various other white liberal types can sometimes also serve the function of the Liberal Onlooker.

The foregoing catalog of character types should be sufficient

to demonstrate that the white liberal character has been very much in existence in black American fiction and drama from its earliest beginnings in the work of William Wells Brown. Since Brown's literary work was done before the Civil War, his liberals are all occupied in one way or another with the fact of slavery. His fullest white liberal portraits are those of Abolitionists, the beginning of the type we have named the Idealistic Liberal. Brown's idealists voice many of the theories about the relative inferiority or equality of the black man which were the object of raging controversy in his day. And it is ideas which appear to be the chief motivation of Brown’s liberals, with the exception of the Marrying Liberal who is a third type introduced in his work.

In the works of the nineties and first two decades of the twentieth century, all of Brown’s types are represented by the major black writers. Possibly because of the influence of Darwinian theory, 46

these later Idealistic Liberals are shown putting their emphasis on

changing the socio-political-economic environment so that blacks would

have the chance to develop their natural gifts. Thus, the new

Idealistic Liberals are very active people. The Utopian Planner, such

as Chesnutt’s Colonel French, attempts a total restructuring of the

social and economic system. The Pragmatic Idealist, a type most often

present in the person of the northern teacher of blacks, uses any

means available to help blacks make whatever gains are possible. Like

their Abolitionist forerunners, these characters are presented as

morally spotless; however, there is one factor which differentiates

them from their predecessors: they are more likely to be seen

cooperating with the blacks whom they serve rather than as all-giving

benefactors. For blacks, the movement is from dependence to

reciprocity.

The sense of a more genuine black-white dialogue is also present in the character of the Ambivalent Liberal, a type which was

given vague outline in Brown's discussion of the contrasting preach­ ments and practice of Thomas Jefferson. There is no question that

DuBois’ ambivalent Miss Taylor is considerably influenced toward liberal thought and action, not by doctrine she has learned in the

North, but by persons—especially black ones—she has met in the South.

The Ambivalent Liberal is one of the two most complex and therefore interesting white liberal types to be developed by these later writers.

The only circumstance which seems to differentiate the

Marrying Liberal from the earlier type is the fact that the later 47 breed seem to live happily ever after. There is a hint of true mutuality, but it still appears that any white person who is willing to marry one who bears the "taint" of Negro blood is conferring an almost priceless gift on his partner. This is so even though all the unions described are between persons who are visually white. A new but related type, the Sexual Liberal, is not seen as condescending.

The white woman pays for her black lover’s keep, and when the rela­ tionship breaks up, it is because they have quarreled. Finally, the black man takes the woman’s life. Had he been totally dependent he would surely be shown taking his own!

The most interesting of all the white liberal types from this later period is the Cynical Patron, a kind of forerunner of certain white characters in the literature of the twenties. Part of the reason we find this character interesting is that his liberalism is not his most striking quality. Particularly in the person of the

"friend" of Johnson’s ex-coloured man, we are finally confronted with a black writer’s study of a white man where the prime motive is neither to teach nor to protest but simply to develop a full and compelling characterization. In later black writing the type may become a stereotype, but Johnson's man is the first; therefore, his creator should not be criticized for being imitated. And, here, indeed, the stress is on a two-way relationship—despite the fact that, at least in a financial and cultural sense, the white man is conferring all the favors.

Three additional new white liberal types are the Patronizing 48

Liberal and the Bumbling Liberal, both just beginning to appear and

both generally treated with irony, and the Liberal Onlooker, intro- .

duced to guide the sympathetic white reader in his responses to the

racial situation. The latter is not very important to the working out

of the plot but is technically useful.

Two thematic developments are discernible as we trace the

progress in white liberal characterization through this early period.

First, there is a growing willingness on the part of the writers to

question the moral stature of the liberal character. Toward the end

of the period, in the work of DuBois and Johnson, we have the creation

of the Cynical Patron, the Sexual Liberal, and a fully adumbrated

portrait of an Ambivalent Liberal. All these types can be attacked on moral grounds; in particular, all of them can be accused of using

black people—or having questionable motivation—while seeming to want

to help them or to relate to them on a basis of equality. Secondly,

there is a decrease in the number of black-white relationships in which the black participant is shown in a subordinate or dependent position and an increase in the number of such relationships in which

there is a fair amount of give and take. Even the Idealistic Liberals of the later period are shown working together with their black charges.

According to Robert Bone, there are two reasons why "the early

[Negro] novel was an aesthetic failure." First, the writers never learned the art of rounded characterization. "Most of the early novelists fell between thé stools of buffoonery and counterstereotype." 49

(The latter was developed to combat the vicious image of the Negro in

the literature of the Plantation Tradition.) The second reason for a

lack of artistry, says Bone, comes from "an unsolved problem in

literary acculturation." What Bone means is that the early black novelists tried to write protest literature in the stylistic medium of the Genteel Tradition, that sunny brand of realism which ignored the crueler side of human experience. Bone concludes by implying that the

Genteel Tradition, as a one-sided realism, is, in fact, not realism at all, but a kind of homey romanticism. Until the Negro writer could find his path away from all forms of romanticism, says Bone, he would rarely be able to produce good art. "Unfortunately, the Negro novel­ ist did not break with Romanticism until the 1920’s. Meanwhile, the early novel foundered on the rocks of characterization and style."51

Some of these writers’ white contemporaries were already producing brilliant naturalistic fiction, but there could be no black naturalism until black writers would break away from the middle class belief in improvement as the inevitable result of effort. In short, until black writers were more afflicted with hopelessness.

Looking at the presentation of white liberal characters in the light of Bone's critique, it is certainly true that most of them are flat and mere vehicles for the author’s didacticism or protest.

Stereotypes are common.62 The roundest characters to be found are probably Miss Taylor, the Ambivalent Liberal of DuBois, and two

Cynical Patrons, DuBois’ Mrs. Vanderpool and the white "friend" of

Johnson’s ex-coloured man. The latter is particularly interesting 50

because the author's treatment makes him fully interesting in himself

rather than as one who is related to a black character. It would be a

mistake to over-praise the achievement represented by these few

characterizations; they are most noteworthy as portents of things to

come.

^Recognizing that there is a great controversy about the

relationship of protest and art, we can at least affirm that the two

are not mutually exclusive—and may complement each other. In these

works, though, it is plain to see that much that is protest is not good artj However, there is one hopeful sign that the black writers

were beginning to find their way out of the dilemma, even in spite of

being bogged down in the idiom of the Genteel Tradition. In terms of

the white liberal character, this new possibility is seen primarily in

the development of the characters of the Patronizing and Bumbling

Liberals. None of these characterizations are very lengthy or full; however, they are interesting as examples of a stylistic device which

is gradually beginning to be employed by black writers—and which will be used with such telling effect in the next decade—the device of irony. Much has been said about blacks’ use of humor in their art, but relatively little emphasis has been placed upon their skill in the use of irony—a strange critical lapse!

£ln conclusion, it is possible to say that the image of the white liberal in the earliest period of black American fiction and drama is interesting chiefly because of the insights it offers as to the nature of the society it helps to reflect—particularly in terms 51 of what it contributes to the picture of the racial situation of its time. It tells us that the black writers, all of them deeply involved in the struggle for freedom and equality, were hopeful that the white liberal would be of more than a little help in furthering the black cause. After Brown, the white liberal is viewed as something less than a saint, but his moral stock runs high. Although the stylistic limitations of all these early black writers prevented them from creating any great literary portraits, some of the white liberal characterizations are not without merit. Their best contribution, however, is what they show us about how sensitive black men thought and felt about some of their white fellow citizens. 52

FOOTNOTES

1The fullest treatment of Brown's achievement is probably to be found in W. Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown, Author and Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

2The other two novels are Martin Delaney’s Blake, or the Huts of America (1859), the story of a black insurrectionist, of which we have only a few serial fragments; and Frank Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), which prefigures the novels of the 1890’s in dealing with problems of caste and class among middle class mulattoes in the North.

3Geotge M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind. The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), pp. xii-xiii.

^Fredrickson, pp. 4, 16, et passim.

5Fredrickson, p. 28.

^Fredrickson, p. 29. Another useful discussion of the ideo­ logical conflict regarding the nature and potential of the Negro is found in Gunnar Myrdal, "Racial Beliefs," An American Dilemma, Part II, ch. 4 (New York: Harper and Row, 1944), pp. 83-112.

7William Wells Brown, Clotel (1853; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 90-91 •

8Brown, Clotel, PP . 91-

9Brown, Clotel, P- 89.

10Brown, Clotel, P- 186.

^Fredrickson, p. 27.

12Brown, Clotel, pp. 154-55. The italics are Brown’s.

13Doris E. Abramson, Negro Playwrights in the American Theatre 1925-1959 (New York: Columbia University Press, .1967), p. 7.

14Abramson, p. 21.

15Robert Bone, The Negro Novel in America, rev. ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1965), p. 29. 53

16The history of the relatively late post-Reconstruction development of these institutions is recounted in southern historian C. Vann Woodward’s The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 2nd rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966).

17Fredrickson, pp. 254-55 et passim.

18August Meier, Negro Thought in America 1880-1915 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), p. lOOff.

19Meier, p. 103ff.

20Meier, pp. 103-04.

21A brief but useful history of American blacks, frequently consulted in the writing of this paper is by Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America 1619-1964, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966). A summary of the contro­ versy between Washington and DuBois is found on pp. 274-87.

22Walter White, With Rope and Faggot (1928; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969).

23White, Rope and Faggot, p. 19.

2l*White, Rope and Faggot. Data taken from Appendix, Table I, p. 231.

25Chesnutt’s daughter says that her father ended his ten-year literary career—which saw the publication of five books and a number of short stories—partly because economics demanded that he devote himself entirely to his law office and partly because the almost all- white reading public of his time was unwilling to accept his picture of the racial crisis. For the fullest account of Chesnutt’s life and literary career, see Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt, Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952).

28Possibly the most famous work of this type is Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887).

27Charles W. Chesnutt, The Colonel's Bream (1905; rpt. New York: Negro Universities Press, 1970), p. 293.

28This work is undoubtedly the most tractarian of Chesnutt’s novels.

29W.E.B. DuBois, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911; rpt. College Park, Maryland: McGrath, 1969), p. 23. 54

30DuBois, p. 24.

31DuBois, p. 173.

32Charles W. Chesnutt, "Cicely’s Dream" in The Nife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1968), pp. 132-67.

33Charles W. Chesnutt, "The March of Progress," Century, 61 (Jan. 1901), 422-28.

34Chesnutt, "The Bouquet" in The Wife of His Youth, pp. 269- 90.

35Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899; rpt. New York: Ano, 1969), p. 24.

36Griggs, pp. 40-41, 46-47.

37DuBois, p. 180.

38Chesnutt, "Her Virginia Mammy" in The Wife of His Youth, pp. 25-59.

39James Weldon Johnson, The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man (1912; rpt. New York: Hill and Wang, 1960), p. 108.

40Johnson, p. 108.

41A perceptive but restrained discussion of the sexual dimen­ sions of the race problem is found in Calvin C. Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Doubleday, 1965).

42Johnson, pp. 145-46.

43Johnson, p . 147

44DuBois, p. 23.

45DuBois, p. 223.

48Fredrickson, p.

47Myrdal, p. 108.

48DuBois, p. 224.

49DuBois, p. 247. 55

50DuBois, p. 249.

51The middle section of DuBois* book, which is set in Washing­ ton, is in the best "advise and consent" tradition, the literature of how the decisions of government are really made.

52Fredrickson, p. 296.

55Fredrickson, p. 309.

5I*Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Ingrate" in The Strength of Gideon and Other Stories (1900; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), pp. 87-103

55Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods (1902; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), p. 53.

56Dunbar, Sport of Gods, p. 53.

57Chesnutt, "The Passing of Grandison" in The Wife of His Youth, pp. 168-202.

58Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901; rpt. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969), pp. 54-55.

59Chesnutt, Marrow of Tradition, pp. 70-76.

88This novel is based on an actual riot which took place in Washington, North Carolina in 1898.

81Bone, pp. 27-28.

82It should be noted, however, that the present paper's interest in various types of liberals should not lead the reader to conclude that all white liberal characters who can be "typed" are stereotypes. CHAPTER III

AMID AWAKENING

The first black American artistic and cultural movement centered in New York City during thé 1920’s and is usually called the

New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance. The literary critic is naturally more concerned with the Harlem consciousness than with the broad national picture of black life in the decade. Harlem is where the writers gathered. However, to concentrate on the Harlem mind and mood without some attention to the infinitely less attractive and unpromising nature of black experience in the rest of the land would lead to a distorted picture of the Harlem movement itself. The rising self-confidence and exuberance of the Harlem School must be set against the same background of widespread oppression which weighed on the spirits of earlier black writers. And only when we understand this, can we truly appreciate the toughness of spirit which underlay the black artistic achievement of the Twenties.

Here, we can cite only a few events in the American black community which are important to an understanding of the artistic flowering during the decade. The first of these is World War I and its aftermath. During the war, blacks, along with all other Americans, were asked to make sacrifices in the cause of Freedom. But the "great crusade for democracy" rhetoric which characterized the era only served to underline the blacks’ lack of freedom. The irony in the

56 57

situation added another dimension to the disillusionment with old

values and ideals which black artists and intellectuals shared with

their white counterparts of "the lost generation."

The war also accelerated the migration of rural southern

blacks to northern cities. About 6% of American blacks lived outside

the South in 1870; by 1910 the figure was nearly 10%, and in 1920 had

risen to about 13%. By 1930 roughly 20% of all black Americans lived

in northern ahd western states, with only a negligible number in the

West. Between 1920 and 1930 the black population outside the South

increased from about a million and one-quarter to two and one-quarter

million. Much of this trend is explained by the growing concentration

of blacks in cities.1 Myrdal has summarized the cause of migration,

saying, "For the average Negro, living conditions in the North have

always been more favorable than in the South. The North has—in spite

of considerable discrimination—offered him more economic opportuni­

ties (in relief if not in employment), more security as a citizen, and

a greater freedom as a human being."2

Although Myrdal is correct in his estimate of the relative

advantages of life in the North during the Twenties, it would be wrong

to infer that life was easy for blacks anywhere. The hollow promise

of a good life in the North is described by William Attaway in Blood on the Forge, the only novel about the black migration. In 1919,

Attaway’s heroes leave a barren Kentucky farm a few jumps ahead of a lynch mob only to find death, deformity, and demoralization in a northern mill town.3 Perhaps the most ironic picture of the blighted 58

hope of the southern migrant is found in a Rudolph Fisher short story

about a newcomer to Harlem who has been conned into peddling dope

which he has been told is "medicine." As the hapless hero is dragged

off to jail, his innocent soul is delighted by the realization that

the arresting officers are fellow Negroes! Fisher says "the grin that

came over his features had something exultant about it."4

While life in the North brought relief to some blacks, it also

presented a whole new set of problems; but in the Twenties, blacks

were discovering some new ways of combatting oppression in both North

and South. One example is the increasingly effective drive against

lynching, led by the NAACP. An important part of this campaign was

Walter White’s book, Rope and Faggot, with its grim statistical tables

showing the number of whites and blacks lynched in the U.S. every

year.5 Although a federal anti-lynching law was never enacted, the

NAACP was able to win other victories for blacks in the federal courts,

such as the verdict by which the "grandfather clause" was declared

unconstitutional (1915).5 / Important as was the contribution of the t- NAACP to the fight for justice, historian John Hope Franklin reminds

us that the appeal of such an organization was confined to only a

small number of blacks and whites: "Although they succeeded in

achieving ends that were beneficial to all Negroes, they failed to

capture the imagination and secure the following of the masses.

Negroes on the lower social and economic level were inclined to regard

such organizations as the agencies of upper class Negroes and liberal

'whites who failed to join hands with them in their efforts to rise."7 59

One effort which did capture the allegiance of lower class

blacks was the nascent black labor movement which developed because of

the exclusionist policies of the white unions. The most notable

achievement in this area was the organization of the Brotherhood of

Sleeping Car Porters and Maids by A. Philip Randolph in 1925. But the

greatest mass movement among blacks in the Twenties was the Universal

Negro Improvement Association led by Jamaican-born Marcus Garvey.

Today’s black nationalist movement owes a great debt to the ideals and spirit of Garveyism. Both of them arose out of the need to function in the midst of a hostile urban environment. Both have emphasized separatism and appealed to race pride. Franklin tells us that ("Garvey called upon Negroes, especially the ones of the darker hue, to follow ! him. He exalted everything black. He insisted that black stood for ! strength and beauty, not inferiority. He asserted that Africans had a noble past. . . C’’8 Membership in such auxiliary organizations as the

Black Cross Nurses, the Universal African Motor Corps, the Black Eagle

Flying Corps, and the Black Star Steamship Line, as well as citizen­ ship in the newly founded Empire of Africa, gave poor blacks a sense of purpose and identity which had been long denied them. The parallel with present-day black nationalist organizations is obvious. It is surely more than coincidental that one of Garvey’s middlewestern field organizers, whose "accidental" death was probably the penalty for his activities, fathered a son who would one day change his name to

Malcolm X.9

Nationalism, as preached by Garvey and others, undoubtedly had i

60

a great deal to do with the increased black retaliation against white

violence. The first evidence of this was a series of approximately

twenty-five race riots during what came to be called the "Red Summer"

of 1919.10 This summer of violence inspired Claude McKay’s militant sonnet, "If We Must Die":

If we must die, let it not be like hogs, Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,

If we must die, 0 let us nobly die. . . .

Like men we’ll face the murderous, cowardly pack, Pressed to the wall, dying but fighting back!11

Rioting continued for several years after 1919, although, as Franklin notes, most outbreaks never reached the proportions of those of the

"Red Summer. ’’12

Many other happenings could be mentioned to show that the

Twenties saw the development of a new pride, a new identity, and a new militancy among blacks. Among these must be listed the cultural blossoming which centered in Harlem. One result of the Great Migra­ tion was a high concentration of blacks in a delimited area of New

York City where a genuinely black culture could develop, not segre­ gated, but noticeably apart from the white milieu. Relative economic prosperity gave black artists and intellectuals a kind of leisure which only a few isolated individuals had achieved previously. Robert

Bone believes that much of the drive of the writers of the Harlem coterie came from the fact that they were members of a "second genera­ tion.” "The early novelists were loyal members of the middle class who desired only equal rights within the status quo. The younger 61 writers of the 1920’s were the second generation of educated Negroes; they were the wayward sons of the rising middle class. In psychologi­ cal terms, they were rebelling against their fathers and their fathers’ way of life."13 Bone’s view helps to explain the reason for the break with the old protest tradition despite the fact that the young black artists were very well aware that there was much to protest against.

I They would rebel against white oppression, as had their fathers; but their mode of rebellion would very often be much more subtle than a simple exposure of injustice coupled with a plea for rights. Their most powerful inspiration would come from a discovery of the worth of their own cultural heritage, both the African and the Afro-American.

This, as Bone says, led to "an unequivocal cultural dualism—a con­ scious attempt to endow Negro literature with a life of its own, apart from the dominant literary tradition.1,14

It is important always to remember that the Harlem writers are a part of the era’s rising black militancy. Too often the Renaissance is remembered for gaiety and exoticism without an accompanying recol­ lection that this was a serious cultural movement. Its exuberant aura can be partly explained by noting that it took place in an age of nationwide exuberance, but also by imagining what it must have meant to the young "New Negro" intelligentsia to realize that black life— even in its lower class manifestations—could and should be valued for itself. ^As Renaissance critic-theoretician Alain Locke noted, £tor generations in the mind of America, the Negro [had] been more of a formula than a human being," meaning a problem rather than a person, 62

an ’it' rather than an identity.1^] Locke continued, "By shedding the

old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation/^! In the vein of Locke’s chrysalis image,

one may recall that the winged creature which sheds it, has always

symbolized two things, the frivolous and the immortal. So it should not be strange that the emergence of the New Negro has a light as well as a sober side. It would distort our sense of what the Renaissance actually was,- to ignore or deemphasize either aspect.

We should also remember that there were some black writers during the Twenties who kept to the method and themes of the older generation. At least one of them, novelist Nella Larsen, achieved a fair amount of artistic excellence. But the real vigor lay in the

Harlem School, and it is mostly these writers who say something new about the image of the white liberal.

And concerning whites, there is another factor which may surprise us when contrasted to the generally poor quality of race relations nationwide. For while lynching and rioting continued, and courts moved glacially to restore rights, and whites looked apprehen­ sively at Garveyite parades, the same era saw black and white artists and intellectuals discovering and being stimulated by each other. The city, particularly New York, provided the opportunity for this. And in the city, interest in the Negro and things black began to spread among those whites who were always on the lookout for something new.

Of this development Lerone Bennett says: "At its outer edges, the

Negro Renaissance merged into the general giddiness of the age. 63

During this period, no party was complete without at least one Negro

intellectual. During this period, white America searched for the

Garden of Eden in the Harlems of America."17 A popular black form of

music (jazz) contributed one of the epithets applied to the age.

Critics and commentators differ in their estimate of the major

causes which motivated whites associated with the Harlem movement.

Some undoubtedly came because they were bored or curious and had

little understanding of the real significance of what they saw and

heard. Others came to patronize. But still others became involved because of a genuine appreciation of what black artists were creating.

They sensed that these black men were confreres.

In the epilogue to his survey of white racial thought through

1914, Fredrickson attributes the vogue of the Negro during the

Twenties to a revival of "romantic racialism." In this view, we recall, the black man is essentially different from the white; and thus, "The New Negro, as perceived by many whites, was simply the old romantic conception of the Negro covered with a patina of the cultural primitivism and exoticism fashionable in the 1920’s."18 This kind of fascination with the primitive or what is assumed to be the "natural" man is characteristic of a period when old values are being questioned and often dismissed. Since, in the past, the black man had frequently been perceived as a simple child of nature, governed more by impulse than reason, the renewal of romantic racialism in the Twenties was a logical outcome of the ideological flux of the times. Nor did the

Negrophiles stop with enjoying the writing and music of their black 64

associates. They began writing novels and plays of their own which

showed the black man as exotic primitive. The most influential of

these works was probably Carl Van Vechten's Nigger Heaven (1926) which

helped Harlem to become the focus of a large measure of national

attention and imagination.19 Other works which embodied a similar

picture of the black include Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones (1920),

Sherwood Anderson’s Dark Laughter (1925), and DuBose Heyward’s Porgy

(1925).

Romantic racialism also influenced the thinking of most black

Harlem writers. Their search for cultural emancipation inevitably led

them to embrace (at least partially) a theory which said that black

men are unique and possess a set of human abilities and sensibilities

which are keener than those of whites. But since the qualities which

romantic racialism set aside as specifically black traits—intuition­

alism, spontaneity, harmony with nature—were not those most highly

prized in the dominant Anglo-Saxon culture, it is easy to see why what

could be called a form of protest was seldom recognized as such.

Certainly protest which attempts to affirm the value of the protester

is just as valid as that which decries injustice. The definition of protest literature is limited to writing which performs the latter

function, and the present writer has no quarrel with that definition.

Our aim is simply to underscore the fact that because much Renaissance writing falls outside the protest tradition, this does not mean that it falls outside the protest spirit. This latter fact will be easy to see when we look at several of these writers* pictures of the white

liberal.

The white liberal type which has carried over from the

literature of the Protest Period into the Era of Awakening with the fewest alterations is the Sexual Liberal. So basic a motivation hardly permits significant alterations. The standards of the Twenties did allow for considerably greater freedom in the literary treatment of sexuality.' So, in Jean Toomer's sketch, "Bona and Paul," we have an attempt to probe the erotic awakening of an interracial couple.

The setting is—of all places—a basketball court. That any Chicago teachers college of the 1920’s would have permitted coed team sports is, of course, beyond belief; but if we can ignore this incongruity, we must see that the author paints a compelling picture of the young white girl who has begun to be aroused by the sight of Paul’s physique

"The dance of his blue-trousered limbs thrills her."20 The Freudian critic will pounce upon her reflection that "He is a candle that dances in a grove swung with pale balloons."21 Their growing physical awareness of each other takes place in the midst of the fast-paced game:

Bona begins to feel a little dizzy and all in. She drives on. Almost hugs Paul to guard him. Near the basket, he at­ tempts to shoot, and Bona lunges into his body and tries to beat his arms. His elbow, going up, gives her a sharp crack on the jaw. She whirls. He catches her. Her body stiffens. Then becomes strangely vibrant, and bursts to a swift life within her anger. He is about to give way before her hatred when a new passion flares at him and makes his stomach fall. Bona squeezes him. He suddenly feels stifled, and wonders why in hell the ring of silly gaping faces that’s caked about 66

him doesnt make way and give him air. He has a swift illusion that it is himself who has been struck.22

The foregoing will also serve as an introduction to Toomer's

artistry. His work is the most experimental as well as the best

produced by any of the black writers of the decade. His impressionis­

tic technique places him among the avant garde writers of the time who

labored to rid literary language of Victorian encrustations. The

sketches in Cane are frequently compared to Anderson’s in Winesburg,

Ohio. The spare, suggestive beauty of Toomer’s work is related to

that of the imagist poem. This same verbal sparseness is found in

Toomer’s other Sexual Liberal portrait, "Becky": "Becky had one Negro

son. Who gave it to her? Damn buck nigger, said the white fclks’ mouths. She wouldnt tell."23 (Neither does Toomer.)

Sex is also an important theme in McKay’s fiction. There are no white Sexual Liberal major characters in his work, but there are a few minor figures such as the expatriate Jake’s London "woman," who loses him in the first chapter when he is overtaken by homesickness for Harlem: "Jake’s woman could do nothing to please him now. She tried hard to get down into his thoughts and share them with him. But for Jake this woman was now only a creature of another race—of another world. He brooded day and night."24

The object of Jake’s longing is elaborated in sexual terms:

"Brown girls rouged and painted like dark pansies. Brown flesh draped in soft colorful clothes. Brown lips full and pouted for sweet kissing. Brown breasts throbbing with love."25 McKay proclaims the 67

superiority of black over white sexuality. Whites are guilt-laden and

inhibited; blacks are loving and liberated. The philosophy expressed

by Ray’s thoughts in Banjo seems to put McKay squarely into the

romantic racialist camp: ’’Even among rough proletarians Ray never noticed in black men those expressions of vicious contempt for sex

that generally came from the mouths of white workers. It was as if

the white man considered sex a nasty, irritating thing, while a Negro accepted it with primitive joy. And maybe that vastly big difference of attitude was a fundamental, unconscious cause of the antagonism between white and black brought together by civilization."26 Undoubt­ edly, this differing sexual vitality is why the white women who sometimes come to Madame Suarez’s buffet flat in Harlem appear "like faded carnations among those burning orchids of a tropical race."27

Nella Larsen, whose novels are psychological portraits of black women, adds another variety of Sexual Liberal in the "Permissive

Male." In Passing, her second novel in the tragic mulatto vein, the white writer Hugh Wentworth shows himself detached from the feelings the white male is ordinarily supposed to have upon seeing the white female socializing with the black male. Noticing an attractive white woman at a Harlem dance, he casually passes off the fact that he will probably be unable to have her for his partner: "And now, alas! the usual thing’s happened. All these others, these—er—’gentlemen of colour’ have driven a mere Nordic from her mind. ... ’S a fact, and what happens to all the ladies of my superior race who’re lured up here. Look at Bianca [his wife]. Have I laid eyes on her tonight 68 except in spots, here and there, being twirled about by some

Ethiopian? I have not."28 His discussion of this state of affairs concludes with the suggestion that the white women are attracted by the strange and different—even though it may be slightly repugnant to them.29

The work of Toomer, McKay, and Larsen represents beginning attempts on the part of black writers to deal in depth with the

^complex relationship between sexuality and race. We recall that James

Weldon Johnson never tried to describe his Sexual Liberal’s feelings for her black lover. He undoubtedly felt that enough risk had been taken in introducing her at all.30 Toomer's, of course, is the most important of the Sexual Liberal portraits of the Twenties. He is the first black writer to present an analysis of the feelings of a white c who is sexually drawn to a black. Bona’s reactions embody both attraction and the repulsion of which Nella Larsen wrote. Toomer shows them at the dance which marks the end of their brief courtship:

"She presses away. Paul, conscious of the convention in it, pulls her to him. Her body close. Her head still strains away. He nearly crushes her. She tries to pinch him. Then sees people staring, and lets her arms fall. Their eyes meet. Both, contemptuous. The dance takes blood from their minds and packs it, tingling, in the torsos of their swaying bodies."31 Finally, the pair agree to meet in the garden; however, Paul, the idealist, returns to tell the Negro doorman that this will be no sordid adventure: "I came back to tell you . . . that you are wrong. ... I came back to tell you, brother, that 69

white faces are petals of roses. That dark faces are petals of dusk.

That I am going out and gather petals. That I am going out and know

her whom I brought here with me to these Gardens which are purple like

a bed of roses would be at dusk."32 But when Paul hurries out to the

rendezvous, Bona is gone. As with Johnson’s "widow" who turns to new

lovers, this Sexual Liberal cannot be depended upon. Since the story

ends here, the implication is that Bona has not had to pay much of a

penalty for her dalliance with a black man.

The punishment of the Sexual Liberal in the fiction of the

Twenties varies, and in some cases there is no punishment at all.

Toomer’s Becky, having borne a second mulatto baby, is shunned by both blacks and whites and dies in her burning cabin. Toomer doesn’t say how the fire started, but its symbolic cause is the heat of taboo- rending lust which led her to the arms of a black man. The English woman who loves McKay's Jake simply suffers the loss of a lover when

Jake is impelled to return to his own people in Harlem. The white girls caught in a raid on a Harlem speakeasy in Banjo merely receive a tongue-lashing from the judge. But the Danish mother of the mulatto heroine of Larsen’s Quicksand suffers little because of her liaison with a black gambling man. She finds herself a white husband and begins life anew in his world. In this case, in keeping with the tragic-mulatto convention, the penalty of sexual liberalism is paid by the daughter, who is never able to find a place for herself in either race.33 In Larsen’s other novel, the Liberal Male does not become disillusioned as a result of his openmindedness. 70

What all the foregoing shows is that while the motivation of

the Sexual Liberal character has not changed, the treatment of the

type in the Twenties has changed a great deal. For one thing, he is

presented with greater frequency. And, in at least one work (Toomer’s

"Bona and Paul" in Cane), there is a serious attempt to explore the

nature of his feelings about the black partner. Finally, out of the

revived interest in the theories of romantic racialism, there is a

more searching analysis of the Sexual Liberal’s motivation. Most of

the episodes involving the Sexual Liberal result in loss or pain for

someone, but the penalty is not always severe. Finally, all of the

liberal characterizations, with the exception of Toomer’s Bona, are

brief, rarely going beyond the stereotypical.

Outside of the carry-over of the Sexual Liberal type, the

other white liberal types in the major black writing of the Twenties

are new creations. Most of them owe something to the efforts of

earlier authors and therefore cannot be said to have been created ex nihilo, but they are so much of their own time that they need to be viewed without undue emphasis on what they may owe to their forebears.

These new types chiefly include those whites who participated in the newly self-aware black milieu. And notable among them is the downtown white who comes up to take part in the Harlem fun times, the "Gaping

Liberal," the "Gay Ofay."34 He frequents what McKay called "That strange un-American world where colored meets and mingles freely and naturally with white in amusement basements, buffet flats, poker establishments."35 71

No writer gives a better picture of this swinging black world,

so far removed from the sedate Anglo-Saxon strictures, than Claude

McKay. Neither Home to Harlem nor Banjo is notable for plotting or

depth of characterization, but both.offer vibrant vignettes of that

exotic black milieu, as, for example, in this passage from Home to

Harlem: "The deep-dyed color, the thickness, the closeness of it.

The noises of Harlem. The sugared laughter. The honey-talk on its

streets. And all night long, ragtime and ’blues’ playing somewhere,

... singing somethere, dancing somewhere! Oh, the contagious fever

of Harlem. Burning everywhere in dark-eyes Harlem. . . . Burning now

in Jake’s sweet blood. . . .”35 The lower class expatriate black world in Banjo is portrayed in much the same way.

The Gaping Liberal appears in both of the McKay novels cited here, receiving only fleeting attention in Home to Harlem but figuring more importantly in the other novel. In Banjo, "six distinguished whites" enter a Marseilles cafe where Ray, a black writer, and other blacks are socializing. The whites have sought out the cafe because they have been told that it is a place where blacks gather.37 After an interracial night on the town, Banjo, the embodiment of black primitivism, tells Ray that he intends to leave the beach to accompany the whites to the "Meedy" (Midi). Ray warns Banjo not to go, telling him that the wealthy whites will not help with the latter’s project of forming an "orchestry." "You’ll get nothing but a drunken bath outa those people, and it’s better you get that way in the Ditch [area in

Marseilles inhabited by the beach boys] than where you’re going. They 72

can't help themselves, much less you. You can think about an orches­

tra, but they can’t think about anything."38 Despite Ray’s warning

that he is merely wanted as a "diversion," Banjo leaves, only to

return shortly declaring that he had refused to have any part of the

whites* "monkey business." Though sordidness is implied, it is never

specified. Pressed to explain his return, Banjo says simply: "I was

tiahed of it befoh stahting in. It wasn’t no real man’s fun with them

people like it was with that cracker that done blow me to such a swell

time in Paree. It was like a old conjure-woman business with debbil

fooling in hell that didn’t hit mah fancy right noneatall, so I just

haul plug outa it and here I is. If Ise gwine to be monkey business

it sure is moh nacheral foh mine in the Ditch."39

This picture of the Gaping Liberal as a jaded sensation-seeker

bears some relation to the Cynical Liberal portrayed by DuBois and

Johnson; but the earlier portraits, while containing that greater

degree of self-awareness which is the seedbed of cynicism, do not hint

of viciousness as do these McKay characterizations. The latter, in

his great zeal to promote the theories of black supremacy, is probably

the only black author of the time to present the white liberal as

actually degraded. But this is not always the case even with him as we shall see.

Langston Hughes, also, presents an image of the Gaping Liberal and does it with the delicious irony that characterizes much of his work. His short story, "Who’s Passing for Who?" tells of a group of whites who are brought up to Harlem by a black social worker, Caleb 73

Johnson. Johnson’s black writer friends do not want to fraternize

with whites who always seem to be coming up to Harlem for purposes of

observation and uplift. But when these whites offer to buy drinks,

the blacks join the party. Toward the end of the evening, when just

one white couple is left in the group, the blacks begin trying to

shock them with talk of how many blacks are passing for whites. But

the tables are turned when the "white" wife reveals that she and her

husband themselves have been "passing" for fifteen years. "Then

everybody laughed. And laughed! We almost had hysterics. All at

once we dropped our professionally self-conscious ’Negro’ manners,

became natural, ate fish, and talked and kidded freely like colored

folks do when there are no white folks around. We really had fun

then. . . ."40 But there is a further surprise in store for the black

writers. Just as the couple who are "passing" are about to taxi off

into the night, the wife leans out to say that they are really white

after all; they had just been passing for black the way so many blacks

pass for white. Hopelessly confused, the blacks decide "Whatever race

they were, they had had too much fun at our expense—even if they did

pay for the drinks."41 This lighthearted farce does yield one serious

observation about the Gaping Liberal: He is willing to go to unseemly

lengths to satisfy his curiosity about blacks. But here Hughes is

willing to treat this quality with only a gentle irony.

The Hughes rapier sharpens when he turns to the Gaping

Liberal’s first cousin, the "Faddist." The latter is personified in

Anne and Michael Carraway in the story, "Slave on the Block." This 74

couple "go in for the art of Negroes." We are told that "They owned

all the Robeson records and all the Bessie Smith. And they had a

manuscript of Countee Cullen's. They saw all the plays with or about

Negroes, read all the books, and adored the Hall Johnson Singers.

They had met Doctor DuBois, and longed to meet Carl Van Vechten."1*2

Anne, a painter, begins a portrait of a "marvellous ebony boy," Luther, her late cook's nephew. She poses him as a slave about to be auc­

tioned. Taken into the white household, Luther's duties as artist's model quickly supersede his domestic tasks. Besides neglecting his chores, the boy also makes free with his employers' liquor and cigar­ ettes and becomes the new cook's sleeping companion. But Michael and

Anne excuse it all, even when boy and cook begin to be quite open about their relationship. "Of course Anne condoned them. 'It's so simple and natural for Negroes to make love'."1’3 Only after the boy is impudent to Michael's visiting mother are the blacks told to leave the household.

"Slave on the Block" is one of the many Renaissance stories in which the white liberal is declared suspect and made to look ridicu­ lous. The Carraways are parasites on black culture: "They never tried to influence that art, they only bought it and raved over it, and copied it. For they were artists, too."1*1’ Unable to relate to

Luther as a human being, Anne frequently thinks of him "in terms of pictures." "He is the jungle," she gushes.1*5 Because the white couple do not accept Luther as a human being like themselves, they allow the supposedly benighted primitive to take advantage of them. 75

Thus, the plot is really an attack on romantic racialism. Hughes is

saying that two things are true of whites who insist on seeing the black man in this way. First, the conviction that Negroes are incap­

able of a very high standard of behavior will cause white liberals to allow themselves to be used. Second, such whites, although they may be "used” by blacks canny enough to exploit their misplaced idealism, are themselves using blacks to compensate for their own spiritual enervation. The Hughes light touch softens but by no means obscures this harsh judgment on the Faddist Liberal.

The Faddist’s fault is founded on his lack of understanding, which leads to inability to have normal human relations. McKay, though much more a romantic racialist than Hughes, also shows the

Gaping and Faddist liberals as uncomprehending. Whites who enjoy the

Harlem night life can only relate to its surface rather than to the jungle vigor which McKay insists is the true source of its excitement:

"And the white visitors laugh. They see the grin only. Here are none of the well-patterned, well-made emotions of the respectable world. A laugh might finish in a sob. A moan end in hilarity. That gorilla type wriggling there with his hands so strangely hugging his mate, may strangle her tonight. But he has no thought of that now. Simple, raw emotions and real. They may frighten and repel refined souls, because they are too intensely real, just as a simple savage stands dismayed before nice emotions that he instantly perceives are false."46 So, both Hughes and McKay say that the Gaping Liberal and his Faddist first cousin try to siphon off for themselves some of the black man’s 76

vitality without really understanding, that the.black shares their

common humanity»

This is even truer of the "Liberal Uplifter," so delightfully

caught in Rudolph Fisher’s portrait of Miss Agatha Cramp in The Walls of Jericho. This novel of comic realism reveals much about the life

and language of Harlem in the Twenties, as well as a great deal about well-heeled whites dabbling in liberalism and good works. Although not the heroine, Miss Agatha’s is the most fully developed characteri­ zation in the book. "Miss Cramp had, among other things, a suffi­ ciently large store of wealth and a sufficiently small store of imagination to want to devote her entire life to Service; in fact, to

Social Service on a large scale. And because Miss Cramp took very personal interest in her successive servants, it came about that this

Social Service was directed towards definite racial groups."47

Having assisted French, Polish, and Russian causes—when her current maid had been of each respective nationality—Miss Cramp hires black Linda and turns her attention to the darker races. After fifteen years of service to mankind, it has occurred to her that

"Negroes might be mankind too." So she embarks on a series of conversations with Linda in which her attempt to "understand" the blacks reveals not only her great lack of understanding but also her complete incapacity for it. Fisher’s considerable satiric gifts are evident in such passages as the conversation in which Miss Cramp tries to talk to Linda about black religion: 77

"Your people are very religious creatures aren't they?" "Well, some are and some not." "I thought—er—slavery, you know, would have made you very religious." "Maybe it did," said Linda. "I wouldn't know 'bout that." "But don't you have your own hymns? Spirituals, I believe they are called." "Not in my church," Linda said. "What church is that, Linda?" "Saint Augustine's," said Linda, "It's Episcopal." "Episcopal!" incredulously. "Why I’m an Episcopalian." The tone indicated clearly that there must be some mistake.1*8

The result of these conversations is that Miss Cramp decides

to devote herself to helping the G.I.A. (General Improvement Associa­

tion), Fisher's version of the NAACP. The white lady (and probably

Fisher) is disturbed because the chief G.I.A. activity seems to be a

study of lynching in the South. Linda tells her:

"They collect a dollar a year from everybody that joins, and whenever there's a lynching down South they take the dollar and send somebody to go look at it." "Whatever's the good of that?" "I don't know, Miss Cramp. Seems like they just want to make sure it really happened." "Well. Then what do they do?" "Well, by that time the year's up and it's time to collect another dollar. So they collect it.” "Why don't they turn their attentions to conditions here at home?" Miss Agatha wanted to know.1*9

Still wondering what might be done to improve "conditions here at home," Miss Cramp is welcomed to membership on the G.I.A. board of directors, whose middle-class black members she finds most congenial.

But the limits of liberalism appear when the lady attends the

G.I.A.'s Annual Costume Ball. "Never had Miss Cramp seen so many

Negroes in one place at one time. Moreover, never had she dreamed that so many of her own people would for any reason imaginable have 78 descended to mingle with these Negroes. She had prided herself on her own liberality in joining this company tonight. And so it shocked and outraged her to see that most of these fair-skinned visitors were unmistakably enjoying themselves, instead of maintaining the aloof, kindly dignity proper to those who must sacrifice to serve."50 And the final defeat of her liberalism occurs when she learns that Fred

Merrit, a middle-class mulatto lawyer, who is light enough to "pass" is about to move into a house only one door away from hers. Intro­ duced to him at the ball and thinking he is white, she welcomes him to the neighborhood. Her mistake discovered, the revelation sends her to bed for three weeks! (When Merrit’s home is burned, however, the perpetrator turns out to be a vengeful black against whom the attorney had won a damage suit.)

Miss Cramp is last seen recovering from the excitement of the fire and conversing with her new maid (Irish). (She has already begun to sound out the latter on conditions in her native land and manifests delight on hearing of the existence of an Irish Free State Associa­ tion.) The new maid is brought up to date on recent neighborhood happenings and warned that Negroes are "most extremely deceitful."

Forgetting that it was her own assumption that Merrit was of the white race, Miss Cramp tells the girl that he has "posed" as a white man.

(Merrit has already been shown to have no desire to identify white, indeed, to have an antipathy for whites whose abuse of the helpless black woman has resulted in pigmentation like his own.) And forgetting, too, that she had invited the charming young man she met 79

at the ball to call on her, she tells the Irish girl, "He even went so

far as to deceive white women in order to get into their homes—God

knows for what purpose."51 Miss Cramp not only does not understand

blacks; under her veneer of concern, she really holds all the racist

attitudes. She may not applaud a lynching, but dismisses the fire in

which Merrit lost all his possessions as "simply poetic justice,

that’s all."

In addition to Fisher’s Miss Cramp, the Liberal Uplifter also

receives extended treatment by Langston Hughes. Mrs. Dora Ellsworth

in "The Blues I’m Playing” is a Miss Cramp interested in the arts.

Mrs. Ellsworth’s time and money are given to struggling young artists and musicians whom she "collects" in place of the children she never had. She is definitely more interested in the young people than in their talent. Introduced to black pianist Oceola Jones, the white lady is "tremendously intrigued, . . . never having had before amongst all her artists a black one."52 Showering the girl with gifts, Mrs.

Ellsworth finances her career and attempts to manage her life. Oceola becomes the "most interesting" of all her protégées, possibly because

"Oceola really was talented, terribly alive, and . . . looked like nothing Mrs. Ellsworth had ever been near before."53

The relationship eventually sours because of Oceola’s sweet­ heart, a medical student, and Oceola's unyielding preference for her

"own people," the black community’s way of life, and especially for black music. The girl’s performance of classical music gets "the press notices all pianists crave," but she does not share Mrs. 80

Ellsworth’s feeling for white serious music. "Oceola enjoyed concerts,

but seldom felt, like her patron, that she was floating on clouds of

bliss.’’54 When the girl decides to marry, Mrs. Ellsworth drops her.

On her last visit to her patron’s apartment Oceola plays for her and

is warned that a man will "take all the music out of you." But Oceola

knows better; she and her young man have been lovers for a long time.

Her final answer to Mrs. Ellsworth is heard as she begins to play the

blues:

The flood of wild syncopation filled the house, then sank in­ to the slow and singing blues with which it had begun. The girl at the piano heard the white woman saying, "Is this what I spent thousands of dollars to teach you?" "No," said Oceola simply. "This is mine. . . . Listen! . . . How sad and gay it is. Blue and happy—laughing and crying. . . . How white like you and black like me. . . . How much like a man. . . . And how like a woman. . . . Warm as Pete’s mouth. . . . These are the blues. . . .55

Oceola’s next song has these words:

0, if I could holler Like a mountain jack, I’d go up on de mountain And call my baby back.

Mrs. Ellsworth responds, "And I would stand looking at the Stars."56

We may feel that the author is too obvious about making his point by ending the story in this way; however, the ending is memorable because of the sharp contrast between the spiritually sterile and personally unfulfilled Liberal Uplifter and her vital protegee.

The incomprehension and insensitivity of the Liberal Uplifter are also presented in the Hughes story, "Poor Little Black Fellow."

In it, we meet the Pembertons, an upstanding white New England couple, 81

"never known to shirk a duty." Thus, when their black maid dies of

flu, and her husband is killed in World War I, the white pair take on

the obligation of rearing their domestics’ son, "poor little black

Arnie."57 Arnie’s childhood is happy, even though he is the only

black in town; but with adolescence complications arise. All those

friends and neighbors who had been condescendingly "over-kind" to

Arnie the child, cannot accept the chance that he might participate in

normal boy-girl relationships. Suddenly, the old spectre of the super

potent, lascivious Negro arises. The Pembertons send the lad to a

camp for black children from the slums of Boston, but it is too late.

Arnie is miserable; he returns home "amazed and bewildered."

Gradually, the Pembertons seek ways to force Arnie into his

"proper" mould. He is to live in their garage apartment during his

remaining years of high school. He is enrolled at Fisk University.

But, as a token of their continuing regard, the Pembertons take Arnie

to Europe the last summer before he is to begin college. The boy

suffers a number of humiliations during the trip such as the fact that

the only accommodations for blacks traveling with whites are intended

for servants. But things change when the party reaches Paris and

Arnie meets Claudina Lawrence, a black American entertainer staying in

the same hotel. Arnie is invited to go about with Claudina and her friends. "For the first time in his life Arnie was really happy.

Somebody had offered him something without charity, without condescen­ sion, without prayer, [the Pembertons are very "good Christians"] without distance, and without being nice."58 Through associating with 82

Claudina's entourage, a new Arnie begins to emerge. The Pembertons

are so outraged by his hours, amusements, and companions (his favorite

being a white girl art student) that they decide to rush him back to

America. But Arnie has found his independence. "I don’t want to go.

[Attending Fisk University will] be like that camp in Boston. Every­

thing in America’s like that camp in Boston. . . . Separate, segre­

gated, shut-off! Black people kept away from everybody else. I go to

Fisk; my classmates, Harvard and Amherst and Yale ... I sleep in the

garage, you sleep in the house."59 Reminded that his soldier father had died for America, Arnie declares him a fool.

The Paris crisis finally brings to light the Pembertons’ true attitudes. Their feeling of having been very much abused by this ingrate are first voiced by Mrs. Pemberton’s sister Emily: "We’ve been talked about enough as it is—travelling with a colored boy. For our sakes, he might have been careful."60 As Mr. Pemberton tells

Arnie to take his things and go, "In the back of [the white man’s] mind was the word nigger. Arnold felt it."61

The major difference between the Gaping Liberal and the

Uplifter lies in what each expects to give and to get from the black- white relationship. For the Gaper, the relationship is mostly a brief surface encounter, sought in order to satisfy curiosity and stimulate jaded sensibilities. The Gaping Liberal gives very little—at most, his time, the "pleasure" of his company, and some free food and drink.

The Liberal Uplifter gives a great deal more: money (he is always wealthy), various kinds of assistance to groups and individuals, and 83

at least the semblance of genuine human concern. In return the

Uplifter expects a great deal more. He desires to use blacks to

satisfy important personal needs. Miss Cramp needs a "cause." Mrs.

Ellsworth is trying to compensate for the absence of offspring. (Per­

haps she also needs to discourage talented young women from choosing

marriage over career.) The Pembertons enjoy "doing their duty" and

find their social image enhanced by their role of benefactors to poor

black Arnie. ' The goal of the Uplifter is never to enable the uplifted

to achieve self-realization in freedom; rather, the goal is the

Uplifter’s self-enhancement at the expense of those served. Standing

in between, the Faddist is not so heavily ego-involved with blacks as

the Uplifter, but has more than the momentary interest of the Gaper.

Gaper, Faddist, and Uplifter also have several traits in

common. There is, first, the inability to understand black people.

Accepting the views of romantic racialism, McKay attributes this

incomprehension to hereditary differences, and then goes on to preach

the glories of blackness. Hughes and Fisher do not subscribe to this brand of reverse prejudice. Their white liberals are satirized for seeing the black man as innately different and therefore culturally inferior. While Hughes and Fisher give due credit to the values of black life and culture, they refuse to admit that black people are fundamentally another breed. For them, the reason whites cannot understand blacks is prejudice. The refusal to accept that a black is a man like any other builds walls of misunderstanding that mere good works can never surmount. Thus, in his inability to comprehend

BOWLING GREEN STATE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY 84 what blacks think and feel, the Uplifter has something in common with

the Bumbling Liberals of Charles Chesnutt’s "Passing of Grandison."

But, unlike those well-meaning souls, the Uplifters have serious moral flaws of prejudice and self-centeredness. Sometimes the Uplifters’ names are a clue to their bearers* moral failure. Miss Agatha is indeed ’’cramped" in her view of her fellow man and what she should be in relation to him. And Langston Hughes writes of a Mrs. Barr-Grant who encourages blacks to progress but not so far as to equality with herself!62

Unlike the Idealistic Liberal of a former time, the Uplifter always has an ulterior motive. The old Idealist was portrayed as motivated by Christian or humanistic convictions; for the Uplifter, idealism is a mask for selfishness. The Uplifter may be a Pygmalion seeking to make the black person over in a white middle-class image; or he may find satisfaction as an emotional parasite, feeding on the vigor of black life. The two modes of Uplift are often combined in the same characterization, the black person who is its object taking on the character of a pampered pet. In addition, the Uplifter who uses the Negro as a "cause" by which he is able to compensate for some personal void has something in common with the Cynical Liberal—there is the same inner emptiness, but not the same cynicism about the possibility of filling it. Indeed, the Uplifter is noted for the energy he expends trying to fill his life with meaning; and this is what makes him so much more possessive in personal relationships with blacks than the Cynical Liberals. 85

One Uplifter who sometimes does not have an ulterior motive is

the "White Writer." A good example of the breed appears in the person

of Campbell Kitchen in Wallace Thurman’s The Blacker the Berry: "He,

unlike many others, was quite sincere in his desire to exploit those

things in Negro life which he presumed would eventually win for the

Negro a more comfortable position in American life. It was he who

first began the agitation in the higher places of journalism which

gave impetus to the spiritual craze. It was he who ferreted out and

gave publicity to many unknown blues singers. It was he who sponsored most of the younger Negro writers, personally carrying their work to publishers and editors."63 According to Hugh Gloster, Kitchen is probably Thurman’s version of Carl Van Vechten.64 If so, the portrait balances the quarrel some other black writers have with the author of

Nigger Heaven, who, they said, gave whites a wrong impression of

Negroes. Kitchen/Van Vechten is praised, although, "His novel on

Harlem had been a literary failure because the author presumed that its subject matter demanded serious treatment. Hence, he disregarded the traditions he had set up for himself in his other [superficial] works, and produced an energetic and entertaining hodgepodge, where the bizarre was strangled by the sentimental, and the erotic clashed with the commonplace.65 The opposite of the "White Writer" who contributes to and draws inspiration from the black cause is Fisher’s

Noel Dunn, "the Nordic editor of an anti-Nordic journal. . . . Dunn’s readers gobbled up pro-Negro pieces, not because they were pro-Negro so much as because they were anti-White."66 Some middle-class black 86

friends are used by Mr. and Mrs. Dunn in order to make "several

profitable entrances" into black society. To white friends, the Dunns

explain their visits to Harlem in terms of the "wealth of material" to

be gathered there.67

All of the white liberal types of the Twenties cited thus far

—with the exception of the White Writer—can be said to have one

trait in common: All of them, in some way, believe that they will

gain something for themselves by their liberalism. That something may

be sex, amusement, mental and spiritual stimulation,, or the self-con­

gratulation of false philanthropy. Many of them delude themselves

about the nature of their real motivation. But there is one other white liberal type, appearing only briefly, which points to future

developments in white portraiture by blacks. This type includes those white characters who associate with blacks because they, too, are alienated and alone. Such are the two British friends of Ray in

Banjo, who "lived uptown, but were frequently down in the Ditch."68

Cultivated and gentlemanly, the pair made a living of sorts by panhandling—making their best touches by appealing to British tourists who could not stand to see well-bred Englishmen in need.

Both of them had been in World War I, "and, now that it was over, they either could not find a permanent interest in life or could not bring themselves to settle down."69 Although better off financially, they followed the same aimless pattern as the black Beach Boys. Bay tells

Banjo, "They’re bums just like us. . . ."70 In alienation and aimless­ ness they are reminiscent of the Cynical Liberal. There is no 87

indication that they seek black company for some kind of fulfillment.

It is more a case of like drifting toward like, outsiders finding one

another, as happened to members of the Lost Generation. From this,

perhaps the type can be most aptly named the "Lost Liberal."

It is only fair to say that the works just discussed represent

the best black writing of the Twenties, and that they embody the real

spirit of the Renaissance and the New Negro. However, the "Old Negro"

had not yet passed away. The period also produced a number of lesser

works which resemble the black writing of two or three decades before.

Calling these writers and their critical supporters the "Rear Guard,"

Robert Bone says that the black argument over the use of "low-life material" was "a recapitulation of an earlier contest between American naturalism and the guardians of the Genteel Tradition."71 The Rear

Guard were writers of the middle class who could not accept the con­ ventions of the Harlemites: "The storm of controversy which greeted the Harlem School in the mid-1920’s marks the beginning of a growing breach between the Negro writer and the Negro middle class. The early

Negro novelist, insulated from the impact of modern literature by a cultural lag, was firmly integrated into the social class which produced him. With the advent of the Harlem School, however, the

Negro novelist begins to develop that sense of alienation from bourgeois society which is the mark of the modern artist."72

The treatment of the white liberal image in the work of the

Rear Guard can serve as an example of how heavily these later middle- class novelists depended upon the pre-1920 ideas and techniques. One 88

sample of their work is Walter White’s The Fire in the Flint (1924) which falls in the protest tradition, telling the story of Dr. Harper,

a black physician who returns to Georgia to practice in the black

section of his home town. Skilled in his profession, he gradually

gains the confidence of blacks and even the respect of a few whites.

Mostly against his will, Dr. Harper is gradually forced to take a

stand on the race issue and is eventually lynched.

The white liberal characters in this book are typical of those created by black authors around the turn of the century. Dr. Harper’s college professors are Pragmatic Liberals, "men and women who had left comfortable homes and friends in the North to give their lives to the education of coloured boys and girls in Georgia."73 Three white

-leaders interested in helping the farm cooperative begun by poor blacks represent varying versions of the "New South" white liberal.

Each of the three, minister, businessman, and lawyer, has attained a modicum of liberalism involving some mixture of idealism and socio­ economic pragmatism. All of them are cautious about moving too fast; thus, their liberalism is also tinged with ambivalence.74 Dr. Harper meets the Patronizing Liberal in the person of a white medical colleague who only slowly realizes that he is the black physician’s professional inferior. There is something of the Utopian Liberal, like Chesnutt’s Colonel French, in old Judge Stevens, a lawyer who had returned home after the Civil War ready to forget the past, reconcile with the North and go forward on that basis. Denounced as a "Yankee- lover," the judge maintains his convictions but despairs of altering 89

the ideas or behavior of his fellow southerners. (We recall that

Colonel French suffered the same disappointment.)

In the Twenties, at last, there was a black theatre. Serious

drama by black playwrights about the realities of Negro life was

largely confined to production on black college campuses or by little

theatre groups such as W.E.B. DuBois* Krigwa Players, founded in 1923

to offer black "slice-of-life" plays. According to Abramson, "On

Broadway in the Twenties most successful plays about Negro life were

by white playwrights."75 These included plays in the folk tradition

such as Paul Green’s In Abraham's Bosom (1924) and realistic plays

about contemporary black problems such as Eugene O’Neill’s All God's

Chillun Got Wings (1923). Black commercial theatres such as the

Lafayette and Apollo in Harlem catered to the popular taste with

vaudeville and musical revues. This was the kind of entertainment, a

carry-over from the old minstrel shows, that both black and white

audiences expected from Negro performers.

The decade saw only two serious black dramas reach Broadway.

The first was Garland Anderson’s Appearances (1925), whose plot

involves a poor black boy’s escape from white injustice because of his

"faith." The year 1929 saw the production of a work of much greater maturity, Wallace Thurman’s Harlem, which pictured the degrading influence of city life on a black family newly arrived from the rural

South. White liberal characters do not appear in either.

In reflecting on the lot of most American blacks during the

1920’s, it seems hardly possible that an era which brought such 90

continuing violence and oppression could also have seen a black arts

flowering so exciting that it was called a Renaissance. Beyond the resiliency of the Black Spirit, there were two new elements in the black consciousness which led to this development: nascent national­ ism and burgeoning black pride. The latter, based on a growing appreciation for the black character and life style, was abetted by white romantic racialism, which some blacks accepted almost too uncritically.

The literary response to the racial situation was two-fold.

Some writers (middle class in temperament and values) still worked the old protest vein. The white liberal characters who appear in their pages are little different from those created by the earlier genera­ tion of writers. The second, and more important, group of writers avoided the protest form and attempted to celebrate the riches of blackness. Their work represents a solid artistic advance over what had preceded them. These are the writers who bring black literature into the twentieth century. They are the makers of the Renaissance.

And, among their many innovations, the picture of the white liberal represents an almost complete break with the past.

Recalling that the present catalog of white liberal character types is based upon motivation, we find that the only real carryover from the earlier tradition is the Sexual Liberal. But even here the portrait is often altered because there is a probing for motives subsidiary to the most basic one. The two additional motives given are a real or imagined black sexual superiority and a desire for new 91

kinds of experience. Also, in keeping with modern practice, inter­

racial erotic matters are treated much more explicitly than formerly;

and this is particularly true in the first in-depth study of the

Sexual Liberal, Jean Toomer's Bona.

Completely new to black writing is a subtype of the Sexual

Liberal, the Permissive Male who willingly permits the black male to

transgress the most binding of all racial taboos. That this daring

innovation occurs in the writing of Nella Larsen casts some doubt on

the judgment of Bone in placing her among the ranks of the rear

guard.76 Unfortunately for us, the Permissive Male's motivation and

the limits of his permissiveness are not explored.

As in the work of the earlier writers, the activity of the

Sexual Liberal practically always results in harm for somebody, the white liberal, the black partner, or their progeny. Though only once does the portrait of the Sexual Liberal rise above the level of stere­ otype, the important thing is that the type is beginning to appear with some frequency.

The principal new liberal types are based upon the whites who participated, in varying degrees, in the life of Harlem. The motiva­ tion of the Gaping Liberal lies in the romantic racialist view of the

Negro as exotic primitive and in the decade's tendency to savor the outré. The Gaper's response to black life and culture is unalloyed interest; he is the first white character to relate to the Negro on a basis other than oppression or philanthropic concern. This is also true of the Faddist, a variety of Gaping Liberal, who has involved 92

himself so intensely in black culture that it has become his center of

identity and vitality. In their desire to receive stimulation from an

alien people, the Gaper and the Faddist remind us of the old image of

the Cynical Patron, but the characters portrayed in these later works

are too shallow for the kind of inner void from which the Cynic

suffers.

Most Liberal Uplifters also are trying to fill empty lives

with interracial involvement and good works. Since the basic motiva­

tion is self-fulfillment rather than altruism, the Uplifter seems to

be more of a throwback to the old Ambivalent or Patronizing Liberal

rather than to the Idealist. There is always a moment of testing when his covert racism comes to the fore. Some Uplifters who appear

infrequently in the literature are sincerely interested in furthering

the black cause, but they are the exception rather than the rule.

The Lost Liberal is the blacks’ companion in alienation.

Reminiscent of the Cynical Liberal, his isolation is as much the product of the age as of personal acedia. Only alluded to in the writing of the Twenties, this type will be more significant in later black literature.

The most striking thing about the new white liberal characters of the 1920’s is that practically all of them are morally suspect.

The only exceptions to this would be the Permissive Male and the

Altruistic Uplifter, and these seldom appear. All the others have moral flaws. The Uplifter is generally marred by selfishness and, with the Faddist, shares an incomprehension of the black as a person, 93

based on a total insensitivity to him as a human beingThe black man

js simply there for him to use and control. Even the Gaping Liberal

uses the blacks; they afford him amusement or titillation. The Gaper

is a shallow fellow, the quality of his relationships too superficial even to give him the illusion that he understands the Negro. The Lost

Liberal drifts toward fellowship with the alienated blacks, but the reason for his alienation is not the same as theirs. The Lost Liberal, like the heroes of Fitzgerald and Hemingway, symbolizes the moral exhaustion of the white West.

Another clue to the moral failure of these white liberals may be found in the older types to which they bear some resemblance: the

Cynic or Cynical Patron, the Ambivalent Liberal, the Patronizing

Liberal. The echoes of older types, present in the new liberals of the Twenties, are morally off key. The white liberal is no longer idealized. Because of this, he is seldom seen as a source of help for blacks in the struggle for equality. However, the new black national­ ism and pride is beginning to cause the Negro to turn to another and more reliable source of assistance: himself. The literary expression of this trend is probably abetted by the alienation of all modern writers who, as Bone says, are unable to develop "an affirmative attitude toward contemporary society."77 In a society dominated by white values it is not surprising that the black artist who is in tune with the modern spirit would look at white characters with a jaundiced eye, particularly when practically all these characters were members of the value-decreeing middle class.78 94

As in the earlier writing, most of the white liberal

characters created in the Twenties are flat and stereotypical. One

reason for this is the fact that the dominant mode of treatment of the white liberal is satire, and satire depends on caricature. Indeed,

the preponderance of the black characters created during the Renais­

sance receive some measure of ironic treatment, but for them the irony is often tinged with bitterness rather than satiric mockery. This is not so for the white liberals where the satire is the gentle Horatian variety rather than the harsh Juvenalian. The promise of Chesnutt's

Bumbling Liberal is more than fulfilled in Fisher’s Agatha Cramp.

Except for some lengthy and very well executed satiric portraits, there is only one study of a white liberal which has some depth; this is Toomer’s white heroine who is sexually attracted to a young black male. Other white liberals appear only briefly and are superficially sketched.

When we consider the relatively large quantity of black writing during the Twenties, as compared with preceding decades, it appears that white liberal characters—indeed, white characters in general—are not so numerous as before. They do not figure so promi­ nently in the black artistic consciousness. We have described ten distinct white liberal types in the work of the post-reconstruction novelists, three of which were carried over from the prewar work of

William Wells Brown. In the work of the Harlem School of the Twenties there are but five white liberal types and one notable subtype (the

Permissive Male). Of these, only one (the Sexual Liberal) is taken 95

over from the earlier period. The smaller number of white liberal

types portrayed and the prevalence of satiric portrayal is another

reflection of the period’s nationalism. The use of Horatian satire

rather than the biting Juvenalian indicates that the writers did not

find involvement with whites so all-important a matter as had their middle class predecessors. Their preoccupation was with their own blackness, and the new self-confidence which arose out of this, permitted them to take whites less seriously and to see them with greater objectivity. This new objectivity on the part of the writers of the Harlem School was also founded on the fact of the interracial interchange—social and intellectual and artistic—which enriched the

Harlem milieu. 96

FOOTNOTES

^Myrdal, American Dilemma, p. 192, fig. 4.

2Myrdal., p. 191.

3William Attaway, Blood on the Forge (New York: Doubleday, Doran, 1941).

^Rudolph Fisher, "The City of Refuge" in Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (1925; rpt. New York: Atheneum, 1969), pp. 57-74.

According to White’s figures, between 1921 and 1927 (the last year of his study), twenty-two whites and 239 blacks were lynched. Appalling as these figures are, they represent a decisive improvement over the toll for the preceding seven-year period which was seventy- six whites and 484 blacks, cf. Walter White, Rope and Faggot, Appen­ dix, Table I, pp. 231-32.

60ne of the tools of legal disenfranchisement of blacks, this rule of voter eligibility stipulated that if a man’s ancestors voted on or before a certain date—set in the period when no Negro could vote—the man could escape other voter requirements such as poll taxes and literacy tests, cf. Bennett, Before the Mayflower, pp. 234-35.

7John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom, 3rd ed. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1967), p. 489.

8Franklin, p. 490.

9The story of the death of the Reverend Earl Little and the subsequent break-up of his fatherless family forms the poignant first chapter of his famous son’s autobiography. Malcolm X and Alex Haley, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965).

10A helpful source for study of the 1919 uprisings is Arthur I. Waskow, From Race Riot to Sit-In, 1919 and the 1960's (Garden City: Doubleday, 1966).

J1An ironic aftermath of the 1971 riot at the State Prison at Attica, New York occurred when a newsman found a copy of McKay’s poem amid the debris of the recaptured prison yard. He assumed it was the work of one of the inmates, and the story of the "convict poet" received national attention.

12Franklin, p. 481.

13Bone, Negro Novel, p. 56. 97

llfBone, p. 64.

15Alain Locke, The New Negro, p. 3.

18Locke, p. 4.

17Bennett, Before Mayflower, p. 297.

18Fredrickson, Black Image, p. 327.

19Van Vechten took the title of his novel from the term applied to the blacks-only balconies of segregated theatres.

20Jean Toomer, Cane (1923; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, 1969), p. 134'.

21Toomer, p. 134.

22Toomer, pp. 136-37.

23Toomer, p. 8.

24Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1928), p. 8.

25McKay, Home to Harlem, p. 8.

26Claude McKay, Banjo (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1929), p. 253.

27McKay, Home to Harlem, p. 106.

28Nella Larsen, Passing (1929; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 138.

29Larsen, Passing, pp. 138-40.

30Johnson did not acknowledge authorship until 1927, fifteen years after his novel’s first publication.

31Toomer, p. 151.

32Toomer, pp. 152-53.

33Nella Larsen, Quicksand (1928; rpt. New York: Macmillan, 1971).

31*No pun is intended. We must wait for James Baldwin to introduce us to the homophile liberal. 98

35McKay, Home to Harlem, p. 106.

36McKay, Home to Harlem, p. 15. All the punctuation in the quotation is McKay’s.

37McKay, Banjo, pp. 208-09.

38McKay, Banjo, p. 221.

39McKay, Banjo, p. 228.

40Langston Hughes, "Who’s Passing for Who?" in Something in Common (New York: Hill and Wang, 1963), p. 44.

41Hughes, Something in Common, p. 45.

42Langston Hughes, "Slave on the Block" in The Ways of White Folks (1934; rpt. New York: Random House, 1971), p. 19.

43Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 27.

44Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 19.

45Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 21.

46McKay, Home to Harlem, pp. 337-38.

47Rudolph Fisher, The Walls of Jericho (1928; rpt. New York: Arno Press, 1969), p. 59.

48Fisher, Walls of Jericho, p. 64.

49Fisher, Walls of Jericho, pp. 66-67.

50Fisher, Walls of Jericho, p. 104.

51Fisher, Walls of Jericho, p. 286.

52Langston Hughes, "The Blues I'm Playing" in The Ways of White Folks, p. 98.

53Hughes, Ways of White Folks, pp. 108--09.

"Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 111.

"Hughes, Ways of White Folks, pp. 119-20.

"Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 120. 99

57Langston Hughes, "Poor Little Black Fellow" in Ways of White Folks, p. 129.

58Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 142.

59Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 153.

60Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 151.

61Hughes, Ways of White Folks, p. 154.

82Langston Hughes, Not Without Laughter (1930; rpt. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), pp. 238-39.

63Wallace Thurman, The Blacker the Berry (1929; rpt. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1970), p. 192.

64Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948), p. 169.

65Thurman, The Blacker the Berry, p. 193.

66Fisher, Walls of Jericho, p. 99.

67Fisher, Walls of Jericho, p. 100.

88McKay, Banjo, p. 107.

69McKay, Banjo, p. 138.

70McKay, Banjo, p. 148.

71Bone, Negro Novel, p. 95.

72Bone, p. 96.

73Walter F. White, The Fire in the Flint (1924; rpt. New York: New American Library, 1969), p. 14.

74As Executive Secretary of the NAACP, White undoubtedly had considerable experience dealing with all three types.

75Abramson, Negro Playwrights, p. 26.

76Bone, Negro Novel, pp. 102-06.

77Bone, Negro Novel, p. 106. 100

78Most white liberal characters are of the middle class because the middle class has the time and money to become actively involved with the black cause and because middle class morality generally requires at least the giving of lip service to the idea of equality, although middle class mores often conflict with middle class morals. Undoubtedly, this conflict is what makes middle class white liberal characters interesting to black writers. CHAPTER IV

THE PERIOD BETWEEN "PRIDE” AND "POWER"

The Great Crash of 1929 signalled the end of the Harlem

Renaissance as well as the end of many of the economic and social

gains which American blacks had been making throughout the 1920’s.

Nevertheless, in spite of the privations of the Depression—so much

harder on blacks than whites—the Negro community could not be thrown

back into the state of confusion and helplessness experienced at the close of Reconstruction. For one thing there was a well established and highly articulate black leadership, including men like DuBois, A.

Philip Randolph and Thurgood Marshall. For the next quarter of a

century the NAACP continued its fight for equality in the courts, the high point of its achievement being the 1954 Supreme Court decision which outlawed segregation in the public schools. But even in the segregated schools which existed before the victory, thousands of young black men and women were gaining knowledge and skills which would propel them into middle class status and influence. Further­ more, southern blacks still continued to seek fortune and relative freedom in the urban North; and their concentration in cities even­ tually permitted them some political power. In 1929 Oscar DePriest of

Chicago was sworn in as the first black congressman in twenty-seven years. While the number of black representatives barely increased during the next quarter of a century—there were only three Negroes in

101 102

Congress in 1954—DePriest’s election indicates that political muscles

were being flexed. Lacking national representation, Negroes did

manage to begin electing minor local officials who responded to the

will of the black community.

The positive view of potential black progress was hardly

possible during the fall and winter of 1929-30. ”lt was a long cold winter. For Negro America, the Sun did not shine again until it came up in the wake of defense contracts spawned by the rising sun of

Nippon.’’1 Like everybody else in the country, the black writer was badly hurt by the Depression. Creative artistry cannot flourish amid severe economic privation. The gaiety and zestful self-assertion of the Renaissance was an early victim of the big bust. Black writers continued to write—many of them subsidized by the Federal Writers

Project—but their work was greatly altered in content and tone from what preceded.

While it is easy to date the beginning of a third major period in black writing with the start of the Great Depression, it is not so easy to give a closing date more exact than "somewhere in the mid-

Sixties." Nor is it very easy to succinctly characterize the black literary era which began in 1930. The two major themes in black

American writing are protest and the search for identity. The earliest period of black writing was obviously dominated by protest, while pride in blackness, a new sense of identity was the keynote of the Harlem Renaissance. After the Renaissance both themes, with varying degrees of emphasis, were present. The important historical 103

events of the three post-Renaissance decades were the Depression of

the Thirties, the World War of the Forties, and the Cold War of the

Fifties. Blacks participated in and were affected by all three. Yet

until the era of Civil Rights it is not possible to pick out the

events of a particular decade and say that they caused a monumental

change in most blacks’ perception of themselves or of their situation

in this country. In the period which began with the Depression these

perceptions were diffuse, just as the social roles played by blacks

became more and more diffuse. Individual blacks or groups of blacks

in this period did come to new levels of awareness, but it is not easy

to generalize about the consciousness and attitudes of American blacks—or a large segment of them—after 1929 until the civil rights

struggles began toward the end of the Fifties. In short, in this period of thirty to thirty-five years, for the first time, the black community began to be disparate in its values and attitudes, beginning more to resemble the total society. And this is reflected in the variety of its literature.

Therefore, after 1929 the context in which the White Liberal appears in black writing is as varied as the socio-cultural contexts out of which various black writers worked. Only three historical events affected a sizable amount of black literature. The first is the Great Depression of the Thirties. During the era social protest was a major theme in the work of all American writers, black and white.

This was also the period when a large number of black and white writers and intellectuals were affiliated with the Communist Party.

Particularly after the beginning of the trial of the Scottsboro boys 104

in 1932 the Party was able to seize the propaganda initiative and

challenge the NAACP’s claim to be the only real bastion against white

oppression.2 In 1932 and again in 1936 the Communist candidate for vice-president of the U.S. was a black, James Ford. Also, during the

thirties one of the most promising Communist popular front organiza­ tions was the National Negro Congress. And Communist journals such as

New Masses offered black writers an opportunity to see their work in print—so long as that work hewed to the party line.

Ultimately, the demand for strict ideological adherence—at the price of ideological consistency—led to the failure of the

Communist movement to attract large numbers of American blacks. As journalist Horace Cayton puts it, "The frequent shifting of the

Communist party position on ’the Negro question’ after 1934 . . . prevented the Communists from building a permanent base within the

Negro community."3 The most famous disenchanted former black Communist is, of course, Richard Wright. Like other blacks Wright had been attracted to Communism because its focus on economic forces as the fundamental source of human woe purportedly made it color blind. But this did not turn out to be true; blacks were welcomed into the Party because of their color so that their anger and energies and legitimate grievances could be made to serve the grand revolutionary design. In

1956 Wright wrote of "the sad fact that . . . the black victim discovered that he was not serving his own interests when he was caught in the Stalinist coils. Today nobody is more immune to the call of Communism than black men who found, to their bitter sorrow, 105

that they were being used for ends that were not theirs."4 Communists

and Democrats are all part of the oppressive white system; therefore

Wright concluded: "The Negro's fundamental loyalty is to himself.

His situation makes this inevitable. . . . The Negro, even when

embracing Communism or Western Democracy, is not supporting ideologies;

he is seeking to use instruments ... He stands outside of those

instruments and ideologies; he has to do so, for he is not allowed to

blend with them in a natural, organic and healthy manner."5 Wright’s

novel, Native Son (1940), represents the high point of his belief that

Communism is the only salvation for oppressed black men. Thirteen

years later, in The Outsider Wright would expose the Party as

patronizing, manipulative, and dedicated to no values other than its

own self-perpetuation. But the most devastating attack on the essen­

tial inhumanity of the Party is found in Ralph Ellison's description

of the "Brotherhood" (for "brother" read "comrade") in Invisible Man

(1952). Although Ellison has stated elsewhere that he did not

specifically identify the Brotherhood with the Communist Party, one would be hard put to think of any other organization which has numbered a good many blacks among its members and exhibited traits

similar to those of the Brotherhood.6

The Second World War replaced the Depression and Communist

influence as the major fact of life for Black America during the

1940’s. The wartime economy meant new job opportunities just as during the First World War. It took some time, plus the threat of a mass demonstration, before blacks got their full share of jobs in the 106

well-paying defense industries. According to John Hope Franklin, five million whites were unemployed at the war’s beginning. Employers were

therefore inclined to hire them first before taking on black workers.

(Blacks were, however, able to find some employment in civilian

industries whose white workers had moved on into war work.) But it was not until June, 1941, that discrimination in war plants ended.

When A. Philip Randolph and other black leaders threatened that one hundred thousand Negroes would march on Washington on July 1 to press their case, President Franklin Roosevelt issued the famous Executive

Order 8802 forbidding discriminatory employment practices in all plants holding defense contracts and setting up a committee to deal with complaints.7

One of the great ironies of American history is the willing­ ness of the black community to participate in every war effort up until the Vietnam conflict (which also was not supported by a large section of the white community). Blacks were greatly concerned, at the beginning of World War II, that they would not be permitted to serve in the armed services on an equal basis with whites. They were particularly determined to take part in combat rather than be relegated to behind-the-lines duties. Many black soldiers did participate in combat but did so in segregated units usually officered by whites. Some integration was inaugurated toward the end of the war, but it was not until the presidency of Harry Truman that the armed services were fully integrated.8 Undoubtedly, one of the reasons why blacks were eager to fight was the desire to prove their manhood over 107 against the still common stereotype of the superstitious, cowardly

Negro which dated back to the Plantation Tradition and beyond. Ralph

Ellison’s short story, "Flying Home," comments on the plight of a

Negro who has fulfilled his life’s ambition to be a pilot in the Air

Force but is denied the opportunity to go into battle. When he even­ tually is injured in the line of duty it is on a routine training flight. An ebony turkey buzzard (Ellison's symbol for black identity) has smashed into the windshield of the plane with such force that the shock momentarily causes him to lose control of the craft and crash.9

Again in World War I the second great war saw a considerable number of violent clashes between black and white servicemen. There were serious riots at five U.S. posts and numerous small incidents.10

Racial violence also took place on the home front. Lerone Bennett calls the riots of the summer of 1943 the worst outbreak since the summer of 1919. Mobile, Alabama, saw troops called out to quell violence which began because black workers had been upgraded at a local shipyard. In Detroit thirty-four people died in the bloodiest racial uprising of the summer. A smaller riot occurred in Harlem in

August.11 James Baldwin reflects on that Harlem riot in his essay

"Notes of a Native Son," where he tells how his father’s funeral procession made its way to the graveyard "through a wilderness of smashed plate glass." Baldwin says that racial tensions were almost inevitably heightened by the war through such things as unprepared people of both races being thrown together in defense plants and black troops, regardless of where they were born, being sent to be trained 108

in the South. Friends and loved ones at home became angry and appre­

hensive as they received reports of discrimination in the military and

harassment in the small southern towns where black soldiers spent

their free time.

That Baldwin can deal with the riot and the many legitimate

grievances which led up to it and meditate on his father’s life,

warped by racism into paranoia, and yet in the same essay condemn

black hatred of whites, is one sample of the mixed attitudes of blacks

toward whites in this period. Viewing the Negro’s relation to the

white American, Baldwin asserts that it "prohibits, simply, anything

as uncomplicated and satisfactory as pure hatred. In order really to

hate white people, one has to blot so much out of the mind—and the

heart—that this hatred itself becomes an exhausting and self-destruc­

tive pose."12 The Baldwin quotation typifies the attitude of most

black Americans after the war and through the Fifties and early

Sixties, an integrationism coupled with wariness. As never before,

blacks seemed ready for full participation in society. Despite

oppression and Depression there had been steady economic, political

and educational progress. Despite discrimination the Second World War

had enabled many blacks to broaden their personal horizons and attain

new levels of economic security. ^Bennett notes that after the war, I "Negroes had more money to spend, and they were demanding more for it."

The postwar growth of black business contributed to a new self-confi­ dence. An additional plus mentioned by Bennett is the growth of mass

media which put blacks in touch with the rest of society and also with 109

their own community’s achievements.13

In this atmosphere of new-found (but not naive) confidence and prosperity, the great Civil Rights Movement of the Fifties and Sixties was born. The decision of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1954 to declare

"separate but equal" schooling unconstitutional was the first signal that a major shift in race relations was on the way. The first White

Citizens Council was formed (in Indianaola, Mississippi) two months later. In a short time the institutions of racial segregation were being attacked all over the South, which responded with delaying tactics in the courts (based on the doctrine of "Massive Resistance") and violence in the streets. The school desegregation decision was won by the NAACP. Many of the succeeding civil rights victories were due to the efforts of racially integrated organizations inspired or headed by the Reverend Martin Luther King. The philosophy of Dr. King, combining Ghandian nonviolent resistance with black Christian spiritu­ ality, galvanized the Montgomery, Alabama bus boycott, freedom rides and sit-ins, marches, and voter registration efforts which eventually led to the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, dealing with public accommodations and fair employment, and the right-to-vote law of 1965. Probably the high point of the nonviolent civil rights movement was the great March on Washington of August, 1963. This event was notable for the large white participation and the broad support it received from many groups within society.

Although the Civil Rights Movement had enlisted the aid and sympathy of most of the black community there were some significant 110

non-participants. The most important of these groups was the Nation

of Islam (Black Muslims) which advocated total racial separation.

Under the leadership of Elijah Muhammed and the spell-binding oratory

of Malcolm X the Muslims pursued a program of bootstrap uplift based

upon the premise that the white man is the unalterable enemy. The

influence of Muslim ideas, particularly as articulated by Malcolm, far

exceeded the group’s numerical strength (conservatively estimated by

Franklin to be about 50,000 by the early Sixties).11* The separatism

proclaimed by the Muslims and other black nationalist groups became

more influential as the decade wore on.

Around the middle of the Sixties the black cry changed from

"Freedom Now," meaning freedom for full participation in an integrated

society, to "Black Power," a call for a very different kind of freedom.

A lengthy and often confusing debate over definition began as soon as

the Black Power cry was raised, and the results of that debate are

still inconclusive (almost as inconclusive as the result of the attempt

to define "white liberal"). But whatever "Black Power" means to the various people who use the term, one thing is certain: Its use was

one of the harbingers of another major shift in American race

relations. At present we are still in the process of understanding

the nature of that shift, and it will undoubtedly take a while before

its full import becomes plain. But one thing we already know to be

true. The old pattern of whites dominating the effort to achieve black rights has been totally broken. This is having a significant

and relatively easy-to-describe effect on the image of the White Ill

Liberal in current black literature, but it is not so easy to offer a summary of the image of the White Liberal in the three decades between the eras of "Pride" and "Power."

Several White Liberal types from both the earliest period and the Awakening are present in this third major era of black American writing, in both fiction and drama. The first great novel produced was Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and several White Liberal characters were central to its plot. There were also some White

Liberal characterizations in black drama, which had its first major success with the Broadway production of Langston Hughes's Mulatto in

1935. (.Mulatto had the longest run of any black play until Hans- berry’s A Raisin in the Sun was produced in 1959.) Possibly the first

White Liberal to appear in black American drama since William Wells

Brown's abolitionists is the young Jewish socialist who urges blacks to turn from Garveyism to Marxism in Theodore Ward’s Big White Fog ■

(1938), which was produced under the auspices of the Federal Theatre

Project.15 Undoubtedly the first major White Liberals to appear in black drama since Brown, did so when Native Son came to Broadway (with the help of Paul Green) in 1941.

In this third era, with Native Son and even before it, the

Idealistic Liberal returned to black literature after the Renaissance hiatus. The Liberal Uplifter, a pragmatic variety of Idealist was, of course, much in evidence during the Negro Awakening, but the more theory-motivated Liberal Idealist did not reappear until the Thirties.

The Renaissance writers, preoccupied with the question of their own 112

identity, were not much inclined to devote time to the philosophical

struggles of whites. But when protest reappeared in the Thirties so

did the Idealistic White Liberal.

The Democratic Idealists who appear in Arna Bontemps’ histori­

cal novel, Black Thunder (1936), are the heirs of Carlton, the

Rousseau-spouting Idealist of Brown’s Clotel. Some of them are French

Jacobins, members of the secret Amis des Noirs which supports slave uprisings. The plot deals with the abortive rebellion led by the majestic slave Gabriel in Henrico County, Virginia in 1800.16 The blacks’ surprise attack was delayed at the last moment by a terrific rainstorm and the conspiracy betrayed by one of the slaves. Gabriel and the other leaders were captured and executed.

Idealistic Liberals in the book include the Frenchmen and

Philadelphian Alexander Riddenhurst who gather at M. Creuzot's printing shop in Richmond. All of them sympathize with the slaves because of democratic idealism. As Riddenhurst says to the printer:

’’You had the filthy nobles in France. Here we have the planter aristocracy. . . . Liberty, equality and fraternity will have to be won for the poor and the weak everywhere if your own revolution is to be permanent. It is for us to awaken the masses.’’17 Bontemps, writing in 1936, sometimes makes the eighteenth century Riddenhurst sound more like a socialist than a democrat, as when the latter is shown thinking about the rise of the "American proletariat" as part of a world revolution that will abolish socio-economic classes.18

Although the Creuzot circle do little more than theorize and 113

sympathize they are considered highly dangerous by the native white

Virginians who fear that their slaves may attempt to emulate the

example of Toussaint l’Ouverture’s successful Haitian rebellion which

had begun in 1794. Thus, when the Idealists sense that something is

afoot among the slaves, they prudently decamp for Philadelphia. Their

only misfortune is the destruction of the print shop by a mob. But,

although they do not pay a very high price for their idealism, Bon-

temps does not appear to condemn them. When last seen they are busy

working for the underground railroad, still articulating revolutionary

rhetoric.

More powerful and prevalent than the Democratic Idealist is

the Communist who figures so importantly in the fiction of Richard

Wright. Max and Jan, the Communist lawyer and the party worker of

Native Son are depicted as almost Christlike in their dedication to

the hopeless case of Bigger Thomas, a young ghetto black who has been

the agent in the death of a white girl. Bigger had not set out to kill the daughter of his philanthropic white employers, but she easily became the target of his heretofore unfocused rage against whites.

Since the dead girl had been Jan's sweetheart, his concern for Bigger is all the more amazing. At the trial Max presents an eloquent defense for the doomed hero. (Unfortunately, the socialist rhetoric in the conversations and speeches to the jury in the novel’s third book weaken and dull the impact of an otherwise tremendously powerful work.)

Like Bontemps’ Democratic Idealists the noble Communists of 114

Native Son are unable to stand between the black protagonist and the

consequences of his futile attempt to strike out at the white world.

But in addition to trying to save Bigger’s life they also give him

genuine friendship, something he has never experienced. And Max tries

to help him believe that his wretched life has after all had meaning

in terms of the historical process which is pushing society toward

inevitable revolution. But this is impossible for Bigger to grasp.

Nor can he really reject the killing that he has done. In the end, in spite of the Communists’ concern, all that is left of Bigger is his hatred: "’What I killed for must’ve been good!’ Bigger's voice was full of frenzied anguish. ’It must have been good! When a man kills, it’s for something. ... I didn’t know I was really alive in this world until I felt things hard enough to kill for ’em. . . . ”'19 in spite of some heavy attacks on credulity in order to present Communism in the best possible light, Wright’s honesty forces him to admit that some victims of racism simply are unsalvageable in any human sense.

In The Outsider, written after his break with the Party,

Wright’s Communists cynically abandon blacks who can no longer serve

Party purposes. But probably the most powerful expression of disil­ lusionment with Communism is found in Ellison’s Invisible Man. White

Communists cannot comprehend the needs of black people, as shown through the character of the chief White Communist Liberal, Brother

Jack. Having recruited the unnamed hero of the book (he is just

"Invisible Man") because the young black has useful oratorical gifts,

Brother Jack indoctrinates him in the organization’s philosophy and 115

discipline—yet another instance of whites denying individual identity

to this black man. Jack’s favorite words are "science" and "history,"

and his aim is to force the hero to give blind dedication to the

Brotherhood’s carefully worked out scheme of historical process. No

dissent is permitted; "individual responsibility" is the cardinal sin.

Although, at first Brother Jack seems to be helpful and truly con­

cerned about the plight of blacks—when the Brotherhood is campaigning

against evictions in Harlem—he turns against Invisible Man when the

latter has been forced to "take the plunge outside history" (disregard

the Party line) because of grim black reality, in this case a wanton murder of a black by the police. During their final angry encounter

Brother Jack suddenly pops out his glass eye. "I lost my eye in the line of duty." Stunned, Invisible Man realizes the true meaning of

Party discipline, "sacrifice . . . yes, and blindness; he doesn’t see me. He doesn’t even see me."20 This same inability to "see" black members of the Brotherhood is exhibited by other whites such as

Brother Tobitt who thinks he knows all about Negroes because he is married to a "fine, intelligent Negro girl." The white women members who try to seduce the hero, also, do not really see him as a unique person who is actually timid around white females.

The inability of white Communists to see and commit themselves to the needs of blacks leads to the Tod Clifton tragedy. Clifton, a handsome giant whom the black militant Ras calls "a black king," leaves the Brotherhood, and though the reason for his leaving is never spelled out, it is implied that he has been undeceived about the 116

Party’s use of blacks and denial of their identity. This is clarified

in Clifton’s death scene after he has become a sidewalk vendor selling

little Sambo toys. ”A grinning doll of orange-and-black tissue paper

with thin flat cardboard disks forming its head and feet and which

some mysterious mechanism was causing to move up and down in a loose-

jointed, shoulder-shaking, infuriatingly sensuous motion, a dance that was completely detached from the black, mask-like face."21 Like the

southern white men who force young blacks to dance for their amusement

in the first ("Battle Royal") chapter of the novel, the Communists, too, want blacks to "dance" to an alien measure. They, too, want a

Sambo not a black man.

Important Idealistic Liberal portraits do not reappear after

Native Son until the 1960’s. One of the most complex and engaging of these is the hero of Lorraine Hansberry’s play The Sign In Sidney

Brusteln's Window (1964). It is impossible to attach a neat label to

Sidney's brand of idealistic liberalism. He might be called a

"liberal's liberal." Bohemian free spirit, impractical dreamer, eternal sophomore, romanticizer, Sidney appeals to the child in all of us. His friendship with a Negro, Alton, is merely part of his total openness. He is perfectly willing to accept Alton as his brother-in- law, reminding us of the old Permissive Male type. (Sidney's only reservations about the marriage stem from knowing that the sister-in- law Alton wants to marry is a high class prostitute.)

Sidney's openness is also his flaw. He does not want to take stands and become involved in the dirty, practical business of making. 117

the world better. His favorite fantasy is that he and his wife live

in a cabin on a mountaintop where the air is pure and the rest of the world is far away. Yet reality constantly encroaches on his dream:

His coffee house business fails. His wife threatens to leave him.

The ’’reform’' politician he has naively backed turns out to be the tool of drug traffickers.22 And when Alton, learning the true profession of Sidney’s sister-in-law, jilts her, the girl commits suicide in the

Brustein bathroom.

The climax of the play is probably its weakest part. Because of his sister-in-law’s tragedy Sidney suddenly decides that he must take positions and be involved in the real world—in a positive, liberal way, of course. He ringingly tells his former friend, the politician, that he will now work against him and will do so effec­ tively because he shall be "more seasoned, more cynical, tougher, harder to fool—and therefore, less likely to quit."23 The author has not really prepared her audience to believe Sidney capable of so radical a switch. This one thing detracts from an otherwise powerful portrait of a warm and well-meaning man who has not outgrown adoles­ cence .

There is cause for hope about the future of a flawed Idealis­ tic Liberal in another black play of the Sixties, James Baldwin's

Blues for Mister Charlie (1964). Primarily an essayist and novelist,

Baldwin has been attacked for his dramaturgy, particularly the episodic structure and the fact that the hero’s murder, occurring at the very beginning, becomes somewhat incidental to the plot. But the 118 play does present a series of fascinating studies of the kinds of

people, black and white, who were deeply involved in the southern

Civil Rights contests of the Sixties. Among these is the white liberal newspaper editor, Parnell James. Like Sidney Brustein,

Parnell is too complex a character for easy categorization, and like

Sidney, he is very human and believable.

Parnell’s major conflict is divided loyalty. A man of genuine warmth, he has made close friendships among both blacks and whites.

Indeed, friendship or close and meaningful human relatedness—to blacks and whites—is Parnell’s ideal. But, of course, he eventually must make a choice between black and white, and as he flounders toward it we recall the Ambivalent Liberal conflicts of the earlier Protest

Period. The son of the local Negro clergyman has been murdered by a poor white storekeeper, who goes on trial. Both minister and store­ keeper are Parnell’s friends. Testifying at the murder trial, even though he has often backed the blacks, Parnell is unable to speak against his white friend. Unlike the sophomoric Sidney who refuses to deal with practical reality, Parnell is all too aware of reality, particularly human reality. Empathy is his weakness. He knows the suffering of the blacks and their need for dignity, but he also knows and pities the struggles of the poor whites who have so much in common with the blacks (because of poverty) that they must oppress them all the harder. Thus, empathy turns out to be a curse, leading the “X____ perceptive black heroine to say: "It must be dreadful to be Parnell.

There is no flesh he can touch. All of it is bloody."24 The man 119 whose ideal is relatedness is finally alienated from everyone,

thereby fulfilling the promise of the title. This is indeed a blues

(sad, sad song) for Mister Charlie (common black term for the white man).

Baldwin suggests that there is hope for Mister Charlie-Parnell because of two things. First, Parnell confesses that his failure to testify against the murder is a terrible thing and accepts the guilt for his silence. And second, both blacks and whites still seem to want to relate to him in some way. When last seen, he is joining the blacks of the town in another rights march. Asking to join them, he has been told: "Well, we can walk in the same direction, Parnell.

Come. Don’t look like that. Let’s go on on."25 But again, as in the

Hansberry play, the hopeful ending seems a little too pat. One feels that Parnell’s confession is not enough for his redemption and that one who had so betrayed their cause on the witness stand would hardly be welcome to march with the blacks.

Parnell James is such an interesting character that to attach any label to his liberalism is to do him (and his creator) an injus­ tice; but because the exigencies of his situation force him to consciously betray relationships which he values above all else, he might be called a "Fallen Idealist." Such a character represents an important step in the black portrayal of the White Liberal, the attempt to provide a fictional answer to what must be an agonizing problem for all Negroes: Why do those whites whom we had begun to accept as our friends desert us when we most need them? 120

Another exploration of the problems of a white Fallen Idealist

is found in William Melvin Kelley’s novel, A Different Drummer (1962).

A contemporary black fable, the plot tells how Tucker Caliban, the

great-grandson of slaves, heads the exodus of the total Negro popula­

tion from a certain state in the Deep South.26 Caliban’s name under­

lines his uncanny likeness to a slave ancestor who escaped before he

could be tamed.27 The spirit of the long dead African lives again in

Tucker, causing him to burn his house, plow salt into his land, and

destroy everything his people have received from the white man.

David Willson, whose family had owned the Calibans as slaves

and then hired them for servants, leads a life soured by the fact that he deserted the black cause. As a Harvard undergraduate during the

-Thirties he had formed a close friendship and even roomed with a young black socialist. After graduating and returning to the South to work as a newspaperman, he sends articles to his black friend in New York, for publication in various leftist magazines. When his employers discover that he is the author of an article on "The Corrosive Effects of Segregation on Southern Society," he is fired and blacklisted so that he cannot get another job on a southern paper. By then his wife is pregnant and he fears moving her to New York City as his black friend urges. He moves to the family home and begins collecting rents for his father.

David’s decision to give up writing in favor of security causes him to live out his adult years under an uneasy truce with his conscience. And his wife (who had wanted to move to New York so that 121

he could continue his polemics against racism) loses ardor and respect

for him. Long afterward he writes in his diary: "She [his wife] told

me she would go to New York just as long as I was happy. And I can

see now that she meant it. But I did not believe her. She had the

faith in me I needed, and because I would not accept that faith, she

lost faith in her faith too; I cheapened it. It was too late when I

realized that, after all, she was actually a human being capable of

thought, not just a slave or a pet or a southern woman. I betrayed us

both."28 David’s tortured relationship with his wife and family is

Kelley’s parable of the way in which white betrayal of blacks

inevitably betrays the betrayer.

Not as complicated a character as Sidney Brustein or Parnell

James (since a figure in a fable does not have to be), David Willson’s salvation is more surely achieved. Its agent is Tucker Caliban. Once all thè blacks have left, the white people are set free to relate on a new level of warmth and respect. After twenty years David and his wife become lovers again.

The reappearance of the Idealistic Liberal after his absence in the identity-conscious 1920’s indicates that some major black writers were again preoccupied with the question of how whites theorize about blacks. There are some important differences between these Idealists and those of the Protest Period. The first is that, with the exception of democratic theory, the ideals are new; Communism and a secular creed of human love and respect (replacing Christianity) are the two most important idealistic motivations after 1930. Also, 122 unlike the old Idealists, the later ones are often flawed and even fallen and cannot or will not save the blacks who look to them for aid. And, because of this, their characterizations are often rich and interesting, this being particularly true of the two Idealists in the dramas of Baldwin and Hansberry. These later Idealists are not bitterly condemned for their shortcomings. A part of these black writers’ sophistication is their ability to create very human charac­ ters of mixed motivation.

A mixture of motives is also evident in a Liberal Uplifter characterization which is possibly the fullest portrayal of the White

Liberal in black American literature. He is Elgar Enders, the hero of

Kristin Hunter’s The Landlord (1966). This semi-absurdist farce deals with viscissitudes of Enders, a wealthy but neurotic man of thirty- four, who purchases a tenement so that he will have a concrete project to give meaning to his life. He has no intention of being an absentee landlord. In fact, he eventually moves into one of the apartments, where he comes in even closer contact with the fascinating assortment of occupants. There is Fanny, hair stylist and part time hooker, with whom Elgar has a brief affair, and her husband, a black nationalist who eventually is driven by hatred to "madness" (which takes the form of love for all whites). And there is Marge, onetime blues singer whose old records are classics, now gone to fat and making a living telling fortunes. (Among her household effects are "some distinctly

9 Q evil-looking bottles labeled Compelling Oil and Dispelling Oil.")

Another tenant is Professor P. Eldridge DuBois, former proprietor of 123

numerous money-making "churches" and "universities." Elgar asks,

"What’s the ’P. ’ stand for?" "’Professor,"' was the answer. "Former­

ly, in the days of a deep religious vocation now lost in antiquity,

’Preacher.’ But always and forever, suh, since my birth thirty years

ago in the upper reaches of downtown New Orleans, ’Proud’."30

Elgar is a Lost Liberal as well as an Uplifter. Like the Lost

Liberals of the Twenties, his personal dilemma reflects the predica­

ment of his time: alienation, guilt, and a great deal of Angst. (He

is in analysis.) He hopes to forge some kind of self-identity through

his role as a landlord, but the tenants have their own ideas about how

he will figure in their lives. Becoming both their patron and their

dupe, the landlord experiences alternate frustration and fury. Part

of his frustration arises because he experiences a belongingness among

them that he has never known—even while they refuse to pay their rent

and otherwise take advantage of him. Elgar tells his analyst that he

has for the first time begun to feel alive, probably because of the

possibility of taking on a black identity: "I just don’t nag them

about the rent anymore. It’s worth it. I'm happier than I’ve ever

been in my life. ... I feel better around these people than I ever

did with my family. I’m at home with them. I tell you, I’ve become a

colored man, at least inside."31 (There are overtones of the Liberal

Faddist here, but Elgar’s needs are much deeper than titillation.)

Eventually Elgar realizes that his being Santa Claus will cost him the love of the people he helps. Yet he is unwilling to withdraw

and assume the traditional distance of a white owner. Instead of 124

retreating from involvement, he works his way through, to a new

fruitful level of sharing and the beginning of trust. A new altruism

causes him to take greater account of his tenants’ needs rather than

of his own. So he sets Fanny up in her own beauty salon, which she

always would have preferred to prostitution; he gets Marge a contract

to cut a new record; and he endows a real college for Professor DuBois.

Most important of all, he fights off the forces of Urban Renewal

trying to condemn the building so that all the blacks will be moved

out of the neighborhood. But the only way he can accomplish this is

to begin his own program of neighborhood renovation, which will employ

all his talents and energies for the first time in his life. Elgar has found himself; his life has a purpose. He quits the analyst and

throws his tranquilizers in the trash.

Some of the most amusing parts of the story are Elgar’s exchanges with Fanny’s three small sons, for whom he babysits after she opens her "Beauty Saloon." (There is no one else available to sit; and since Elgar is there in the building all day, it becomes his job as a matter of course.) Hunter is obviously saying that the White

Liberal’s best hope for change is in the children who have not learned hate and hopelessness. But even the children take more than a little coping. Elgar writes to a friend about a babysitting mishap which sums up all that the book has to say about the inevitable problems and necessary stance for the White Liberal:

At that moment, the smallest unit of life in the room [Fanny’s baby son] began squirming. He also did something else. Like a man shot, I clapped my hand to my right eye. 125

"Man," Walter Gee [another son] said admiringly, "did you see that? If Landlord hadn’t got in the way, he’d of hit the moon." "You got to be fast," Willie Lee [oldest son] observed. "Once that diaper's off, you got to slap on the other one like lightning."

What is love . . .? You [to his friend] continue to in­ sist you don’t know. Marge, as she expresses herself in song, seems to feel it is a tragic emotion. Borden [the analyst] says it is something very rare, very difficult for human beings to achieve even under optimum conditions. But I say Y am making progress. If I can sustain the emotion even when its object pisses in my eye, there is hope for me. For us. For the world.32

Like Kelley’s A Different Drummer, Hunter’s novel is a fable

and also a plan for the resolution of racial strife. The plans differ

in that Kelley’s projects the action needed to be taken by blacks

(physical or spiritual exodus) while Hunter’s is a program for sincere whites. The works also differ in that Kelley’s fable proceeds by the

use of myth and image, while Hunter’s effect is muddied by overuse of

explanatory rhetoric. The item about the baby, just quoted, is a good example. It would be stronger artistically without commentary.

(Perhaps Hunter thinks that Liberals are too obtuse to get the point

otherwise.) But at least, like the older Protest writers, Hunter takes the white Liberal Uplifter seriously once again. Alone with the other Idealists of the time between Pride and Power, this Uplifter has weaknesses, but hope abounds for his success.

On balance, it is only fair to say that in most black works of this period, the Liberal Uplifter is more often an unworthy character as he is in the Harlem Renaissance. One thinks of Mr. and Mrs. Dalton, 126

the slumlord philanthropists of Native Son. Giving a well-paying

chauffeur job to Bigger Thomas hardly makes up for what they have done

to his people. But they are unable to see this—or to begin to under­

stand Bigger Thomas’ real needs. (In the novel Mrs. Dalton is blind; and when Bigger talks to her he has the feeling that he cannot see her either.)33 Also blind is Mr. Norton (Northern) in Ralph Ellison’s

Invisible Man. He takes pride in patronizing the southern blacks whose college he supports, but he is unable to realize how much he actually has in common with them. (In his case the outstanding human bond is incestuous desire. Listening to a poor black farmer describe incest that he has actually committed, the inhibited Norton is over­ come with what appears to be a cardiac seizure.)34

In addition to Idealists and Uplifters black writing after the

Awakening also presents us with a plethora of Marrying and Sexual

Liberals. The Marrying Liberal type, almost always male before the

Thirties (with the exception of the spouse of Johnson’s ex-colored, man), now includes men and women. The Sexual Liberal, always female

(except the Permissive Male) before the Thirties, now includes some males. What makes the white male a Sexual Liberal is not sexual activity with the black female, which society has always accepted.

What is "liberal" about him is a deep emotional commitment to the black woman. For a long time, black writers (who were mostly male) did not admit the possibility of such a relationship. Indeed, a few white writers stole a march on them in this regard.35 Parnell in

Blues for Mister Charlie is an example of a male Sexual Liberal. The 127

reason Parnell has never been able to have a permanent relationship

with a white woman is that he is still emotionally tied to the black

girl he had chastely loved in his youth.

Therefore, the motives of the Marrying and Sexual Liberals are

love or desire or a mixture of the two. Because of modern explicit­

ness, writers can describe interracial love and marriage in depth and

detail. Some writers of popular fiction, of course, use the same

stock plot devices to describe interracial love affairs that they

would use in picturing any romance. Frank Yerby, who has been called

"the prince of pulpsters," having written twenty-two historical novels

about whites, used the French student insurrections of the Sixties as

the background for a novel of miscegenation, Speak Now (1969). The

hero, a black expatriate jazz musician, falls in love with a wealthy

southern girl who is pregnant with an illegitimate child. She is

beautiful and pathetic; he is bitter but able to love the white enemy

when presented in such a guise. They meet, spar a bit, get over their

prejudices, have an affair, survive the riots, and start making

wedding plans. The whole Yerby formula, as outlined by Dairwin Turner,

is used: the strong but isolated hero, a beautiful woman of high

birth, villains, one close male companion, a period of Civil strife,

and eventual marriage between the hero and a member of the dominant

culture.36 Turner feels that because certain aspects of the Yerby

formula run counter to typical romance—such as his hero often winding

up living happily ever after with a lady who has had a shady past—his work is an illuminating attack upon unexamined culture myths. But one 128 might ask Turner whether it is useful to attack silly myths by

creating myths that are just as silly!

In the same category of pop fiction in blackface is John

Oliver Killens’ And Then We Heard the Thunder (1962) a Big War Novel about black troops in the South Pacific during World War II. Not a great work, Killens’ novel is as good as most of the "white” novels to come out of the war, such as The Young Lions and The Caine Mutiny. As everyone knows, it is impossible to have a "big war novel" without sex; and since there was a dearth of black women in the Far East, Killens’ hero, Solly Saunders, has a formulaic love affair with an Australian nurse. (But, in the end, he gives her up, hoping that a former black sweetheart will still have him. He has, however, arranged to turn the nurse over to a white buddy who is very nice and will make her a fine husband.)

There are numerous portraits of female Sexual Liberals which derive from those figures of the Harlem Renaissance who were capti­ vated by the mythical sexual prowess of the black male. One can cite characters ranging from a homely old maid librarian in Richard

Wright’s story "The Man Who Killed a Shadow" to Charlotte Ames, the white wife of a famous black writer in John A. Williams’ The Man Who

Cried I Am (1967). (The character of Harry, her husband, is modeled on Richard Wright, whose wife was white.) There is also Madge, the cracker bitch in Chester Himes’s If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945), who desires to be raped by black men and, homely as she is, believes she is totally desirable in their eyes. 129

As in several Renaissance novels the female Sexual Liberal is

often brought to grief by her lust. One thinks of Kriss in Chester

Himes’s The Primitive (1955) who is "solving the Negro problem in

bed." Her sexual involvements are a part of her sick identification with blacks: "Only when sleeping with a Negro could she feel secure

in the knowledge that she wasn’t dirt."37 She is killed by a black

lover during a drunken orgy. But a far more appealing victim is Leona

in Baldwin’s Another Country (1962). She and Rufus, a black jazz

drummer, are deeply in love, but in spite of his genuine feeling for her, Rufus is unable to overcome his hatred of all whites, particu­ larly the white female. Their first sexual encounter is prophetic:

"Under his breath he cursed the milk-white bitch and groaned and rode his weapon between her thighs. She began to cry. I told you, he moaned, .I’d give you something to ery about, and, at once, he felt himself strangling, about to explode or die. A moan and a curse tore through him while he beat her with all the strength he had and felt the venom shoot out of him, enough for a hundred black-white babies."38

The waif Leona is already a refugee from a husband who has brutalized her, and the tormented Rufus completes her destruction. Ophelia-like, she loses her mind and is committed to an institution where her family will see to it that she can never be visited by the repentant lover.

Rufus commits suicide.

Less sensational but in some ways more poignant are the penalties paid by Sexual and Marrying Liberals who come close—but never arrive at—true mutuality with black mates. This is the 130

experience of Margrit, the Dutch wife of Max Reddick, hero of The Man

Who Cried I Am. Though their relationship is good, external social forces pull them apart. She cannot understand what happens to his pride when she is insulted for being with him in public, nor why after they have been married for about a year, he buys guns and spends hours target shooting.

”Mox, [she speaks with an accent] what is it all about?" "What, Maggie?" "The guns, your touchiness, the target shooting." "I’m simply trying to keep my head, but these bastards are trying to make me lose it." "Your mind is closed to me. I feel so distant from you sometimes, as if I were one of them. I feel left out and that something terrible is about to happen. Let us return to Holland, Mox. I’m afraid."39

Ultimately, they separate and she returns to Holland. In the book’s last scene, Max, who has stumbled onto a U.S. Government plan for black genocide, lies dying by a Dutch roadside, shot by C.I.A. agents.

Margrit, as unaware of the intrigue as she had been of so many other realities of her husband’s existence, is waiting for him to come to her and hoping for a reconciliation.

One of the most searching portraits of black and white star- crossed lovers is in James Alan McPherson’s story, "Hue and Cry"

(1968). Highly praised by Ralph Ellison for his mastery of the craft of fiction and avoidance of sensationalism in favor of insight,

McPherson tells of black Margot and white Eric whose hope for happi­ ness is destroyed by idealism (hers and his). Having had relation­ ships with crude or insensitive men, Margot is attracted to Eric, not because he is white, but because she can have a total physical- 131

spiritual communion with him. Eric does not become aware of what she

means to him until it is too late. An Idealistic Liberal (with a

Quaker upbringing), he has participated in the various social protest movements of the Sixties and outgrown some of the worst white liberal

faults. "He had learned, through trial and error, to be less a do-gooder and more a genuine person."1*0 He senses the weaknesses of

Liberal Idealism when, working on voter registration, he realizes that many of the blacks he has come to help do not want him. "It was, he thought, not because he lacked sincerity, but because he had too much of it. When he realized this he had got angry at first; but then he also realized that there was an inverse relationship, in that town

. . . between the quality of goodness and the number of people contributing to it."1*1

McPherson describes the course of the love affair; the sleeping together only after he is sure he can convince her that sex is not all he wants, the painful visit to his parents, the suggestive comments his black roommate makes to Margot ("I can do better").

Tragically, by the time Eric is sure Margot is not just an object for his liberalism, not just a "cause," she cannot believe him—possibly because he still cannot be totally honest with himself. He is unable to escape the dilemma: "If he asked her [to marry him] again, he knew that she would think it was for the same old reasons that frightened her: the cause, his slightly paternalistic attitudes, his reaction against his family and his crusade against people over thirty-five.

She would refuse and he knew that he could never convince her that it 132

was the other way with him because he did not know himself what his

real motives were."42 Uncertainty about his true motives is under­

scored by his fear of making her pregnant. And so the affair ends with Margot giving herself to a series of unworthy black lovers and

Eric soothing himself with Librium.

"Hue and Cry," as the title indicates, tries to probe the painful nuances of black-white lovers. Much of the story’s power comes from the author’s restraint and from the fact that he shows the agonizing self-examination of each partner. By using a white male partner he avoids having to deal with all the mythology about the white female and the black male. He can simply describe two sensitive individuals who belong together but cannot because of pervasive racism which keeps them from trusting each other or themselves.

Although he has contributed much to the fiction of interracial sex, not even so noted a writer as James Baldwin comes up to

McPherson's ability to involve the reader emotionally as well as intellectually. Possibly this is because, as Bone has suggested,

Baldwin is still so busy working through his own sexual problems that he is unable to achieve a proper esthetic detachment.43 There is so much theorizing about sex in Baldwin’s later novels that one is reminded of the proselytizing passages of D.H. Lawrence (such as the droning debates about sex in Lady Chatterly's Lover). And, as

Lawrence became the prophet of a new sexuality, so Baldwin seems to set himself up as proclaimer of the glories of homosexuality. But, just as in Lawrence, sexual liberation is related to a genuine total 133

liberation of the human spirit, so, too, Baldwin’s praise of homo­

sexual experience seems to point to a great deal beyond mere sexual

fulfillment.

Most of Baldwin’s White Liberals are Sexual Liberals in

addition to whatever other kinds of liberalism they exhibit. Most of

them are familiar with—or actually live in—the Sidney Brustein type of Greenwich Village milieu. And aside from the ill-fated Leona of

Another Country, one of Baldwin’s female Sexual Liberals is a very interesting characterization. Barbara, the white actress who figures so largely in Tell me how long the train’s been gone (1968) is merely a stock figure, the beautiful white mistress of a famous black man.

And Baldwin does little to redeem the character from the commonplace.

Undoubtedly this is partly because Baldwin, by this time, is not much interested in portraying heterosexual relationships.

Baldwin’s innovative contribution to the image of the Sexual

Liberal is the addition of a homosexual dimension. His first homo­ sexual novel is Giovanni’s Room (1956) in which all the major characters are white. Here, for the first time, Baldwin begins to preach the liberating power of homosexual love, to which he gives fuller treatment half a dozen years later in Another Country. Bone calls the latter novel "a failure on a grand scale," and it is diffi­ cult to contest this judgment. Essentially the novel fails because theme is emphasized at the expense of art—"telling" at the expense of

"showing"—but, for our purposes, the themes used are very significant.

In several essays written before his return to writing fiction, 134

Baldwin has elaborated his theory of the source of the evil in whites.

It is not so much that whites are evil by nature, as the Muslims would

have us believe, or that they delight in oppression. Their real

problem is that they are "too complacent, too ready with gratuitous

humiliation, and, above all, too ignorant and too innocent. . . J'1*1*

Again he writes: "The things that most white people imagine that they

can salvage from the storm of life is really, in sum, their innocence.

... I am afraid that most of the white people I have ever known

impressed me as being in the grip of a weird nostalgia, dreaming of a

vanished state of security and order, against which dream, unfailingly

and unconsciously, they tested and very often lost their lives."1*5 It

is this "terrible white innocence" which, for a long time, prevented

the author from believing that white peoples’ troubles are real

troubles. "They put me in mind of children crying because the breast

has been taken away."1*6

Baldwin interprets white innocence in sexual terms, saying

that refusing to accept and deal with the shadowy, instinctual side of

their nature, including the sexual, whites have projected their

chaotic primal urges onto the black man. Every black man is "a walking phallic symbol." David Britt summarizes Baldwin's resulting

"fundamental moral condescension" toward whites:

Baldwin feels that the psychic well-being of the white man is currently predicated upon the unaltering inferiority of the black man. This attitude toward the Negro is an attempt to escape his own existence by projecting these exper­ iences onto the Negro. The white man is, therefore, fleeing from himself—from reality. This innocent disengagement from reality subverts the quest for identity in white people and 135

causes gratuitous suffering for the Negro. It is only through the Negroes’ forcing the white man, through love, to recast his relationship with black men that the whites can ever be made to see that their current pursuit is unrelated to reality and stifles the quest for identity.47

Thus, in Another Country homosexual encounter becomes a "felix eulpa

which can liberate the whole of American society. . . . ”48

This novel’s first book deals with the tragic love affair of

Rufus and Leona, ending with her madness and his suicide. The protag­

onist of Books Two and Three is Eric Jones, a white actor from Alabama

who is troubled by his bi-sexual inclinations. As a youth Eric had

homosexual relations with a black young man, and in New York a brief,

unhappy affair with Rufus. But living in France he finally is able to

form a fully satisfying homophile attachment with Yves, a street boy;

and in being able to accept this relationship without guilt or shame—

but rather with a sense of existential self-affirmation—Eric

establishes his identity in the teeth of his fears about the darker

aspects of his nature. Having been able to do this, Eric is then able

to return to New York as a sort of sexual Messiah, teaching the other white liberal characters—who had been so blindly unable to deal with

Rufus’ needs—how to find a new identity based upon the fall from

innocence.

As plot structure, the above tends to strain credibility. But

since the western world is in the midst of a sexual reassessment one must wonder whether the plot will seem so outré a few decades hence.

(One thinks of how tame, and even commonplace, some of the plots of

D.H. Lawrence seem by today’s standards.) Baldwin has often been 136

attacked for using homosexuality as a metaphor of the way to achieve

racial harmony, but many of these attacks can be discounted on the

ground that they betray the critics’ anti-homosexual bias. (The fact

that Baldwin is now open about his own bi-sexuality fuels their

antipathy.) The problem is whether homosexuality in Baldwin is to be

considered as metaphor or panacea. If metaphor is intended, an honest

critic must begin by saying that the artist must be allowed to pick

his own metaphors. And he must also admit that as a device for saying

that whites must face up to the painful and threatening aspects of

their nature—affirm their freedom over against old taboos—homosexu­

ality as metaphor has much to recommend it. If, however, the author

is actually saying that intimate relations with members of one’s own

sex will somehow liberate whites (and blacks) from racial malaise as

well as inability to deal with the total psychic reality, his premises

must be seriously questioned. The trouble is that he seems to be

saying both. Baldwin’s concept of white innocence is a brilliant

summation of much that black writers have tried to say about whites,

particularly about white liberals; but he is hardly justified in

asserting that the liberating fall can be accomplished only through

homosexuality. (Shall we assume that homosexual encounter will help

incest-prone Mr. Norton of Invisible Man or blind philanthropists like

Mrs. Dalton in Native Son'!') Baldwin has just not recognized that

there are other than sexual dimensions to the race problem. The big metaphor of racial reconciliation in Tell me how long the train's been gone is the successive bedding of the young black militant, 137

Christopher (note the name), with the black hero and his white mistress. Each accepts the other’s relationship to Christopher, and

the suggestion is that all three relationships will continue in an ( atmosphere of harmony and human growth. Baldwin’s theories have here been carried to absurdity.

The foregoing discussion of James Baldwin’s treatment of the

theme of race and sex and of the Sexual Liberal character should serve to clarify a trait of this particular white liberal type which becomes plainer as time goes on. When considering the literature of the periods of Protest and the Harlem Awakening it was easy to give only brief consideration to this character’s motivation, because the Sexual

Liberal was not very thoroughly described. At most the works suggested that white women are sexually attracted to black men because of the black stud myth or because of a desire for something different, related to the Faddism of the 1920’s. After 1930, because of the great American preoccupation with sex and increasing freedom of artistic expression, black writers joined their white compatriots in creating numerous interracial sex situations. Yet, did they write so much about interracial sex because it was a frequent part of black

American experience? Not in the view of Marian Musgrave, who believes

’’that interracial sex, in all of its manifestations, is a metaphor, the purpose of which is to enable a writer to handle emotionally loaded materials in an acceptable way."1*9 White writers' portrayal of interracial sex is an expression of white needs, such as the need to keep the Negro "in his place," which resulted in the stereotypes of 138

the Plantation Tradition. (Musgrave quotes Thurgood Marshall's dictum,

"The closer a Negro gets to the ballot box, the more he looks like a

rapist."50) "For the black writer in general," she continues, "the

interracial affair serves as a way of expressing negative feelings

towards white and white society. . . ."51 This judgment could apply

to a good many of the Sexual Liberal characters described in the present study. The writers of the Renaissance condemn the white women who come to Harlem in search of sexual kicks, and Toomer’s Bona is pictured as the temptress who promises what she will not deliver.

Post-Renaissance black writers give us a raft of lustful white females who wish to use the fabled sexual prowess of the black male, or who, like Kriss in Himes’s The Primitive, sleep with a black as a way of avoiding feelings of personal worthlessness. Marrying Liberals like

Margrit and Charlotte in The Man Who Cried I Am are condemned for their inability to really comprehend the world of their black partner.

And this incomprehension is also true of many of the Sexual Liberals in Baldwin.

Basing her theory on sound psychological evidence Musgrave insists that in the work of black writers interracial sex masks aggression against whites, and this is very often true. But it must be asked whether all that sex (in life or in literature) can mask is aggression. Are black writers so limited in their picture of the

Sexual Liberal? One has only to look at the work of James Baldwin to see that they are not. Interracial sex can be a hell (as it was for

Rufus and Leona) or it can be a heaven (after the saving homosexual 139

encounter). Also, one would be hard put to declare that the author of

"Hue and Cry" is using the interracial affair motif to express nega­

tive attitudes about whites. Both white and black characters receive

some criticism, but mostly what the author expresses is pain arising

from his characters’ being trapped into reacting in certain ways. And,

even when the white Sexual Liberal is condemned, the condemnation is

usually mixed with other things. Margrit cannot find her way into

Max’s black world, but she would if she could. When last seen,

sitting in the cafe waiting for the husband who will never come, she

is indeed a pitiable figure.

Musgrave’s idea is valuable, however, because, while oversim­

plifying the meaning of interracial sex in black writing, it does

point to a fundamental fact: The Sexual Liberal character, particu­

larly after the Twenties, is almost always a mixed type—sexual

liberalism is related to some other liberal motivation. Furthermore,

motivations in addition to the sexual one, are related to liberal

motives characteristic of the same period. Thus, the Sexual Liberals

of the Twenties have a great deal in common with the Faddists and the

Gaping Liberals. In the fiction of the Thirties and after there are a

number of Communist ladies whose ideology permits and even encourages

them to sleep with black men (such as the heroine of Chapter 19 of

Invisible Man). 52 Landlord Elgar Enders sleeps with Fanny because he

likes to but also because it is part of his idealistic attempt to relate to all other human beings. Leona is a lost soul needing a refuge, a victim of the Age of Alienation, before she ever becomes the 140

victim of Rufus. And, although his personal situation is less

desperate, this alienation is also true of Eric in "Hue and Cry." In

addition, Eric is a Liberal Idealist. And, above all, in Baldwin, the

Sexual Liberal stands for something else. He (or she) is the aching

void of white innocent ignorance, the eternal infant, lacking the

fulfillment which can only come from embracing inner blackness. In

the Baldwin schema, this is the Sexual Liberal’s motivation, whether

or not he is conscious of it. It comes out in Parnell James’s cri de-

coeur :

oh, Lord! driven half mad by blackness. Blackness in front of your eyes. Boys and girls, men and women—you’ve bowed down in front of them all! And then hated yourself. Hated yourself for debasing yourself? Out with it, Parnell! The nigger-lover! Black boys and girls! I’ve wanted my hands full of them, wanted to drown them, laughing and dancing and making love—making love—wow!—and be transformed, formed, liberated out of this grey-w’nite envelope. Jesus! I’ve always been afriad. Afraid of what I saw in their eyes? They don’t love me, certainly. You don't love them, either! Sick with a disease only white men catch. Blackness. What is it like to be black? To look out on the world from that place?53

In addition to the Idealist, Uplifter, Sexual and Marrying

Liberals, two other types carry over from earlier periods. They are the Patronizing and Lost Liberals, but they combine with other brands of liberalism in the same character. All the selfish Uplifters are patronizers and so are some of the Sexual Liberals. It has already been noted that Elgar Enders in The Landlord is a Lost Liberal in addition to being an Uplifter. It can also be said of Sidney Brustein and a host of others.

The Period between Pride and Power also saw the introduction 141

of at least two new white liberal types. The most important of these

is the white character who, because of some deformity of body or

spirit (or both), finds his most natural relationships with blacks.

Like them he is an outsider, the promise of his life never to be

fulfilled. And, as with the blacks, the fundamental reason for his

tragedy is society’s inability to confirm his being. The most obvious

name for such a character type is suggested by the characters of

Sherwood Anderson, the "Liberal Grotesque." The first well developed

portrait of him appears in Wright’s The Outsider (1953). District

Attorney Eli Houston is a hunchback who identifies with blacks. "I’m

profoundly interested in the psychological condition of the Negro in

this country, . . .My personal situation in life has given me a

vantage point from which I’ve gained some insight into the problems of

other excluded people."54

Houston is the white counterpart of the black hero, Cross

Damon. Both of them are outsiders, and this alienation goes deeper

than skin pigmentation and physical deformity. Both have that kind of

"double vision" which sees the emptiness of the laws and ideals by which society attempts to give meaning to experience. Sounding very much like Baldwin talking about whites’ inability to face the dark

side of human nature, Wright applies this to the whole human race when

Damon tells Houston: "Wouldn’t you say that maybe the whole effort of man on earth to build a civilization is simply man’s frantic attempt to hide himself from himself? That there is a part of man that man wants to reject? That man wants to keep from knowing what he is? 142

That he wants to protect himself from seeing that he is something

awful? And that this ’awful’ part of himself might not be as awful as

he thinks, but he finds it too strange and he does not know what to do

with it?"55 (Wright would certainly agree with Baldwin that blacks

have an inside track in being able to face up to the fearsome void,

but he would say that certain nonblacks can also be outsiders.) When

Houston asks Damon what man has to hide from himself, the black man

replies: "Maybe man is nothing in particular. . . . Maybe that’s the

terror of it. Man may be just anything at all. And maybe man deep

down suspects this, really knows this, kind of dreams that it is true;

but at the same time he does not want really to know it. May not

human life on earth be a kind of frozen fear of man at what he could

possibly be?"56 The existentialism here is simpler than in Baldwin,

because Wright’s presentation of the human condition does not include

sexual theories.

The deformed lawman feels himself very much in tune with

Damon’s existential view of life. Wright says that Houston has become a prosecutor out of a need to defend against cosmic disorder, a chaos mirrored in Houston’s inner being. "Houston was an impulsive criminal who protected himself against himself by hunting down other criminals!"57 We see, too, that Houston is more alienated than the old Andersonian grotesque. Anderson tells us that peoples’ promise can be blighted by a rigid and insensitive society; some later writers, black and white, begin to question whether peoples’ lives have promise at all (the existential terror of nonbeing). 143

Like Raskolnikov and Inspector Porfiry in Crime and Punishment,

Cross Damon and Eli Houston are bound together in a cycle of intimacy

and enmity. But the Americans are unlike the Russian pair in that

Damon does not need to confess (he is too much of an outsider to hope

for reintegration into society), and the District Attorney wishes that his spiritual counterpart will escape capture. (In spite of Damon’s having committed three murders that Houston knows about.) When Damon,

shot by vengeful Communists, lies dying in a hospital, Houston is more priest than prosecutor as he hears the black man's last confession.

Artistry in The Outsider is considerably marred by Wright’s polemics against Communism and his existential philosophizing; thus, the author does not make full use of the Liberal Grotesque character’s possibilities. William Demby, another expatriate, has used the characterization much more effectively in the novel, Beetleereek

(1950). Set in the West Virginia of the author’s boyhood, the plot centers around the relationship between an old white recluse, Bill

Trapp, and fourteen-year-old black Johnny who becomes his friend.

Trapp’s alienation, dating from an orphan childhood, is compounded by his physical appearance: "As a child, almost every thought he had was conditioned by his ugliness. . . . "58 As a young man, taking a job with a traveling carnival, he hopes to earn enough for eventual retire­ ment with his sister, the only person he is close to; but she dies of pneumonia and he is left "without someone who could confirm his own existence, into whose life he could sometime look."59 Eventually settling on a West Virginia farm "between the Negro part of town and 144

the white business section," he lives in limbo for fifteen years, his

only companion a reflection in the looking glass, "a silent ugly man

who could no longer tell whether he was inside the mirror or inside

himself."60

Demby’s existentialism comes out when, for no apparent reason,

Bill Trapp decides to take the risk of rejoining the human community.

Catching Johnny stealing apples, he invites him to stay and talk.

Painfully Trapp relearns how to establish relationships, mostly

through association with his Negro fellows in alienation. "He felt

vaguely that he was in danger. But dominating all that he was feeling

was the tremendous resolution not to go back to the lonely ways of

before."61 Trapp’s uneasiness is well-founded. As a kind of

unordained aspostle of relatedness, Trapp gives a picnic for black and

white children. After the event, there are rumors that Trapp is a

child-molester. Ironically, the first to circulate the tales are the

blacks, whose gossip about the old man who had befriended them

ventilates resentment toward whites: "Now you turn the tables of this

thing. Make like there was a colored man lived all by hisself in a white part of town and he gets it in his noodle to bring the races

together just like he’s Jesus Christ . . . and he starts all this monkey business with white girls mind ya, what do you think would happen to hirn'i You just pick up any newspaper from the last few years and read what happened to them Scottsboro boys and you can imagine what’d happen to him!"62 Eventually, Johnny participates in the burning of Trapp’s house as the price of initiation into a teenage gang 145

The Liberal Grotesque may be seen as some black writers’

effort to project black experience in terms of white characters—what

a white man would have to be like in order to know what it is like to

be black—or the type may reflect the writers’ realization that black

experience is part of the universal modern experience which is best

represented by the myth of the outsider. The fact that the major works in which this character type is introduced are novels of exis­

tentialism would support the second conclusion. In any event, the invention of the Liberal Grotesque is one example of the high degree of philosophical sophistication attained by black American writers by mid-century. Such evidence helps to refute those skeptics who believe that the only profound black writing is to be found in Invisible Man.

(Indeed the Liberal Grotesque is Invisible Man's white double.)

It is not easy to give a title to the second new class of white liberal characters to appear in this period. These are they who react with simple good will toward the blacks in their lives—good people who extend to blacks the same consideration and respect that they would to fellow whites. For want of a more definitive term this type will just be called the "Friend." There are varying kinds of white friendship. Captain Samuels who fights on the side of his black enlisted men during a race riot in And Then We Heard the Thunder may well be termed "friend in need." The term also applies to the elderly white couple who own the little neighborhood grocery in Ernest

Gaines’s touching short story "The Sky is Gray" (in Bloodline, 1968).

Realizing that the black mother is too proud to accept charity, the 146

old woman makes a point of needing chores done so that there will be

an excuse to offer food. Very often the White Liberal Friend comes

from the lower class like the father of little Mister Leland in A

Different Drummer. "Papa says to say SIR to anyone what’s older than

me, even nig—Negroes," runs through the boy’s mind as he greets

Tucker Caliban. When asked about the training he is giving his son in

matters of race, Harry Leland tells the boy "Your mama and me is

trying to make you a passable human being."63 Sometimes the Liberal

Friend is a member of the younger generation like Waldo in Gordon

Parks’s story of a black boyhood in Kansas, The Learning Tree (1963).

The friend can also be a middle class professional such as the fair- minded high school principal in the Parks book or the critic, Zutkin,

in The Man Who Cried I Am who tries to help the black hero find a job

—reminding us of the role played by the White Writer in the litera­ ture of the Renaissance. There are no extended portraits of the

Liberal Friend. Possibly in a more inhibited age there would have been more fictional renderings of black-white friendships and fewer portraits of black-white love affairs. But the fairly frequent appearance of the Liberal Friend emphasizes that many black writers saw whites as fellow human beings, a fact fleshed out in some of the more complex white liberal character types discussed in this chapter.

In the period between the Black Pride of the 1920’s and the

Black Power of the 1960's there was a considerable increase in the variety and complexity of white liberal portraiture in black fiction 147

and drama. This was partly due to the fact that all through the three

and a half decades the volume and variety of black literature was

steadily increasing. It also reflected the growing participation of

blacks in the total society—as other than victims—which presented

black authors with all sorts of plot possibilities. Continued

progress in many areas—despite ever-present opposition—was the

dominant fact in the black community's experience during this time.

It culminated in the 1955-1965 Civil Rights advances for which blacks were not chiefly dependent upon white leadership.

For the first time, black writers began to use all the

literary modes that were available to their white contemporaries.

There were no Negro naturalists until the Thirties produced Richard

Wright, but after his advent there was a whole Negro naturalistic

school, the most famous of whom is probably Chester Himes. Naturalism became the chief guise in which the old Protest Tradition was kept alive. But black writers also made, use of the inventions of the avant garde of the Twenties which had claimed only one black, Jean Toomer.

We find black symbolists, black expressionists, black surrealists—all of these modes gloriously evident in a work like Invisible Man. There are also black existentialists and black absurdists along with repre­ sentatives of much earlier traditions. A chief contender for Eudora

Welty’s title as the best contemporary southern regionalist is

Louisiana’s Ernest Gaines.

This period also saw a small but steady increase in the number of black plays, although with the exception of Mulatto, the 148

dramatization of Native Son, and A Raisin in the Sun, none of them

were box office successes. Nor do we find in the dramatic literature

the number and variety of white liberal types that abound in the

novels. The reason for this is probably the black playwrights’

continuing inability to find major producers who would take a chance

on using their work. Therefore, the black plays were most often

produced in little theatres or on campuses by all-black companies.

Undoubtedly the black dramatist also felt a loyalty to the struggling

black actor which led him away from creating roles for white actors.

Although some novelists like Ann Petry and Willard Motley—and even

Chester Himes—experimented with writing novels almost exclusively

about whites, no black dramatist did this until Hansberry wrote The

Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window in 1965.

A number of white liberal character types from the two preceding periods are present. The Idealistic Liberal from the

Protest Tradition, not much in evidence during the awakening, comes back with all sorts of orientations: Democratic, Communist, related- ness-centered. He is usually much more confused than his literary forebears and therefore much more interesting. In fallen form, he is most interesting of all. But the thing to note about the treatment of the Liberal Idealist is that, while he is never pictured as totally pure in dedication to his ideals (with the exception of the Communists described by Wright before he left the Party), he is not roundly condemned for his failings. Moral flaws make the Liberal Idealists real and believable, and this is also true of many of the Liberal 149

Uplifters who appear; although, as during the Renaissance, most

Uplifters are pictured as egocentric and blind to the real needs of

the blacks they are supposed to be helping. What is most notable

about the Idealists and Uplifters pictured is that, although they have

faults, they are often shown as capable of growth and change. In some

characters (such as Sidney Brustein and Elgar Enders) that change

takes place before our eyes.

The Sexual and Marrying Liberals are still present, and to

their ranks James Baldwin adds the Homosexual. In this later litera­

ture it is plain that the Sexual and Marrying types are often combined

with other forms of liberalism in the same character. Like white

writers, black authors have a great deal to say about sex, but much of

what they say points metaphorically to human realities much more

complex than the mere physical drive. Interracial sex between the

white female and the black male—much more frequent in fiction than in

fact—permits the black author to raise ultimate questions about the

possibility of black-white human mutuality. Most recently, with the

creation of the Sexual Liberal Male, whose liberalism lies in his

emotional commitment to the black female, black writers have been able

to raise these same questions without the distraction of the old

mythology of the black superstud and the pure white woman. Thus,

interracial sex and marriage provide a setting for the searching

exploration of idealism, alienation, and pain. And, with Baldwin’s

use of the metaphor of homosexuality, we are offered a myth of the white man’s fall and redemption into the liberating world of self­ 150

affirmation in the face of pain and despair. At the same time there

are echoes in the literature of other older liberal types such as

Patronizers, Lost Liberals, Cynics, and Ambivalent Liberals, but two new types are the Liberal Grotesque and the Friend. The most impor­ tant of these is the Grotesque, whose fullest development is in existentialist-oriented works. The Grotesque is a sort of white blackman, his estrangement a metaphor for the alienation experienced by Negroes in a white society. But the Grotesque is more than this; he is also an image of the predicament of modern man. His inability to communicate truly with or be accepted by the blacks, whom he is most like, shows that he is akin to the nonrelating, noncommunicating characters of the absurdist tradition. Like Baldwin’s homosexual myth, the Liberal Grotesque is an attempt to deal with the ultimate dread of existence.

Less important as a type is the Liberal Friend who appears briefly but with a fair frequency. (No black writer has created a great fictional black-white friendship such as could begin to match the evocative power of the relationship between Huck Finn and black

Jim.)

Like most of the liberals of the literature of the Twenties most of the white liberal types considered have moral flaws; but whereas, in the 1920's, the chief mode of exposing these flaws was satire, later writing approaches them in many different ways. Later black authors sometimes attempt sensitive and realistic explanations of white liberal motivation—a more difficult task than disposing of 151

them with satirical darts. This new complexity in black writers’

approach to white liberal characterization makes it much more diffi­

cult to use our method of describing a series of character types. But it is a method to which we would gladly say Farewell! The increasing difficulty in employing it indicates that stereotype is on the wane and artistry on the rise.

The three and a half decades after the Twenties seem to yield a fair number'of White Liberal characters—not so large a per cent as in the Protest Period, but certainly more than in the Harlem Renais­ sance. Black writers continued to explore the question of identity, but they also were interested in relations with whites. The new black-white relations were, however, far different from those described during the Protest time. As blacks came to have more confi­ dence in their own identity they had proportionately less heed to depend on whites, and this is proclaimed in the literature. In one of his essays James Baldwin talks about the fact that once a person begins to have done with hating and fear then he must deal with pain.

In works like "Hue and Cry" and Blues for Mister Charlie black writers are achieving a higher level of sensitivity in creating their white characters, and, of course, the chief white characters to benefit from it are the White Liberals. 152

FOOTNOTES

Bennett, Before the Mayflower, p. 299.

2The famous case involved the conviction of nine black Alabama youths for raping two white girls of doubtful reputation. The party was very active in behalf of the defendants, raising money for court costs and bringing the case to national attention. The defen­ dants were twice convicted and sentenced to death, but both convic­ tions were overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

3Horace R. Cayton, "Ideological Forces in the Work of Negro Writers" in Herbert Hill, ed., Anger, and Beyond (New York: Harper & Row, Perennial, 1968), p. 47.

**Richard Wright, "Foreword" to George Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism (New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1972), p. xxiv. A length­ ier treatment of Wright's break with Communism is his essay in Richard Crossman, ed., The God That Failed (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1949).

5Wright, "Foreword" to Pan-Africanism or Communism, p. xxiii.

6Nor does Ellison deny that the Brotherhood may be identified with the party. Apparently he is simply trying to avoid tieing his novel too closely to a narrow political-historical context, cf. Ralph Ellison in "The Art of Fiction: An Interview," Paris Review (Spring 1955), rpt. in Shadow and Act (New York: New American Library, Signet, 1966), p. 179.

7Franklin, pp. 577-79.

®Franklin, pp. 580-91, 608-09.

9Ralph Ellison, "Flying Home," in Edwin Seaver, ed., Cross Section (New York: L.B. Fischer, 1944).

10Franklin, p. 590.

^Bennett, p. 307.

12James Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son (1955; rpt. New York: Bantam, 1964), p. 93.

13Bennett, pp. 309-10. It should be noted that while the black community received little attention on TV or in national maga­ zines, it was, for the first time, well supplied with a number of periodicals devoted to and owned by blacks. 1942 saw the beginning 153

of the Johnson publishing empire which has given America Negro Digest (now Black World), Ebony, Jet, and other black-oriented magazines.

"Franklin, p. 621.

15The Federal Theatre Project like the Federal Writers Project was a Depression-inspired program, a sort of WPA for writers. Most of the major black writers participated in one of the projects. In addi­ tion to providing minimal financial support, the federal projects per­ mitted some continuance of the kind of interchange between black and white writers which had begun in the Harlem Renaissance. The projects were both eventually abolished by Congress because so many of the writers were Communists or Communist-sympathizers. Brief accounts of each are found in Bone, Negro Novel, pp. 113-14 and Abramson, Negro Playwrights, pp. 45-48.

16This slave is often referred to as Gabriel Prosser, the surname being that of his owner. I prefer the contemporary practice advocated by the Muslims of omitting the slave owner's name whenever possible.

17Arna Bontemps, Black Thunder (1936; rpt. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968), p. 21.

18Bontemps, p. 76.

"Richard Wright, Native Son (1940; rpt. Harper & Row, Perennial, 1966), p. 392.

20Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man (New York: New American Library, Signet, 1952), pp. 410-11.

21Ellison, Invisible Man, pp. 372-73.

22The title of the play comes from a campaign banner hung in the Brustein*s Greenwich Village living room window.

23Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun. The Sign in Sidney Brustein's Window (New York: New American Library, Signet, 1966), p. 316.

24James Baldwin, Blues for Mister Charlie (New York: Dell, 1964), p. 126.

25Baldwin, Blues, p. 158.

26A humorous treatment of the black exodus plot is found in Douglas Turner Ward’s one-act play, Day of Absence (1965). 154

27In Shakespeare’s Tempest Caliban is a malformed, bad- natured monster who represents the bard's concept of primitive Ameri­ cans such as he had seen brought to England by travelers.

28William Melvin Kelley, A Different Drummer (1962; rpt. New York: Doubleday, Anchor, 1969), p. 181.

29Kristin Hunter, The Landlord (1966; rpt. New York: Avon, 1969), p. 22.

30Hunter, p. 65.

31Hunter, p. 97.

32Hunter, p. 267.

33Wright, Native Son, p. 62.

34Ellison, Invisible Man, pp. 38-66.

35White author Lillian G. Smith shocked readers of the Forties with a novel in which a white male is deeply in love with his black mistress, cf. Strange Fruit (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1944).

38Darwin Turner, "Frank Yerby: Golden Debunker," Black Books Bulletin, 1, No. 3 (1972), 4-9, 30-33.

37Chester Himes, The Primitive (New York: New American Library, Signet, 1955), p. 86.

38James Baldwin, Another Country (1962; rpt. New York: Dell, 1963), p. 24.

39John A. Williams, The Man Who Cried I Am (1967; rpt. New York: New American Library, Signet, 1968), p. 293.

40James Alan McPherson, "Hue and Cry" in Hue and Cry (1969; rpt. New York: Fawcett, 1970), p. 188.

41McPherson, p. 189.

42McPherson, p. 202.

43Bone, p. 236.

44Baldwin, Notes of a Native Son, pp. 93-94.

45James Baldwin, "The Black Boy Looks at the White Boy" in Nobody Knows My Name (1961; rpt. New York: Dell, 1963), p. 172. 155

1+5Baldwin, Nobody Knows, p. 172.

l*7Britt, "The Image of the White Man in the Fiction of Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin and Ralph Ellison," p. 150.

u8Britt, p. 151.

^Marian E. Musgrave, "Triangles in Black and White: Inter­ racial Sex and Hostility in Black Literature," CLA Journal, 14 (June 1971), 445.

50Musgrave, "Interracial Sex," 446.

51Musgrave, "Interracial Sex," 447.

52The husband who looks in on his wife while she is in bed with her black lover and wishes her a good night’s rest is the most permissive of Permissive Males. But, here, permissiveness is used to ironically underline the black male's invisibility (lack of identity); even though he is in bed with a white man's wife, he does not count as a person, cf. Ellison, Invisible Man, pp. 360-64.

53Baldwin, Blues, pp. 140-41.

5i*Richard Wright, The Outsider (1953; rpt. New York: Harper and Row, Perennial, 1965), p. 128.

55Wright, Outsider, p. 135.

56Wright, Outsider, pp. 135-36.

57Wright, Outsider, p. 137.

58William Demby, Beetleereek (1950; rpt. New York: Avon, 1967), p. 41.

59Demby, p. 43.

80Demby, p. 7.

61Demby, p. 11.

82Demby, p. 123.

63Kelley, Different Drummer, p. 54. CHAPTER V

IN THE HANDS OF THE. MILITANTS

In the middle 196O’s the mood of a large segment of black

America began to change. This was particularly true of younger blacks,

many of whom had taken the bloody brunt of the Civil Rights confronta­

tions. They were no longer able to sustain their commitment to the

philosophy (for some, just the "tactic") of nonviolence which they had

learned from Dr. King. In his essay on the black movement of the

Sixties William O’Neill notes that there were actually very few revol­

utionaries in what has been called the Civil Rights Revolution. The

only truly revolutionary thing about them, he says, was their nonvio­

lent ethic. "This was so contrary to American customs as to be almost revolutionary. Though mainly Christian, Americans did not practice

turning the other cheek and loving their enemies. They believed in self-defense. They also believed, less firmly, in obeying the law.

Self-defense and respect for law did not go together very well, since to invoke the one was sometimes to violate the other. But this did not trouble many. People were used to applying one principle at a time as needed. Under Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement defied both these precepts."1 But blacks paid a heavy price for nonviolence, even when it aided them in making significant gains.

The cost was more than the long roll of the dead and injured; it also

156 157

included the intolerable demand that blacks suppress a very natural

rage.

The history of the black movement in the Sixties is the

history of a shift from nonviolence and integrationism toward violence

and militancy. After the 1963 March on Washington, the high-water

mark of the nonviolent campaign—it reminded some participants of a

Sunday School outing—the forces of moderate integrationism came under

increasing attack. There was the continuing attack from racists

without, but now there was also a challenge from within, from those

who had gradually become disenchanted with nonviolence. And certainly

there was a great deal happening to support their disillusionment. In

1963 James Baldwin published the prophetic The Fire Next Time in which

he warned that the dammed-up rage and frustration was about to break

loose: "The point here is that we are living in an age of revolution,

whether we will or no, and that America is the only Western nation

with both the power and, as I hope to suggest, the experience that may

help to make these revolutions real and minimize the human damage.

Any attempt we make to oppose these outbursts of energy is tantamount

to signing our death warrant."2 Baldwin urged black and white men of

good will to act while there was still time. "If we do not now dare

everything, the fulfillment of that prophecy, recreated from the Bible

in song by a slave, is upon us: God gave Noah the rainbow sign. No more water, the fire next time!"3 Two years later the Watts ghetto erupted with thirty-four killed and millions of dollars in property loss. After a year’s respite came the bloody summer of 1967 with 158

twenty-five killed in Newark, forty-three in Detroit and numerous

others in smaller disturbances across the country.

Civil disturbances in the urban centers of the North and West

were indications that the methods of Dr. King, which had worked so

well in the South, were not suited to combat the more insidious forms

of discrimination practiced elsewhere in the country. In northern

cities prejudice was expressed in a hundred "hidden" ways, mostly

through economic means. It is one thing to get the legal right to eat

in any restaurant (if one has the money for eating out); it is much

more difficult to get admitted to a union apprenticeship program,

particularly if one has received an education which did not prepare

him to meet the requirements for admission—and especially when one’s

admission is bitterly opposed by working class whites who have only

recently themselves gained a toehold on the ladder of upward mobility.

Furthermore, toward the close of the decade the country was so

embroiled in controversy about the Vietnam War that liberal energies

and funds once committed to the drive for racial equality were no

longer available. Also having met tougher resistance outside the

South, the cause of civil rights was becoming less fashionable.

The growing militancy of some blacks was also encouraged by a

series of murders. Whatever else can be said of the 1960’s, they were surely an Age of Assassinations. In 1963 the field secretary of the

Mississippi NAACP, Medgar Evers, was shot from ambush. In 1965

Malcolm X was slain while addressing a meeting in Harlem. (Malcolm’s death was all the more tragic because he had, by then, broken with 159

Elijah Muhammed and was moving away from strict separatism.)1* And

with the death of Martin Luther King in 1968—with forty-six persons

killed in the riots that followed the assassination—much of the most

effective leadership of the black movement seemed to be gone. In

addition, we might cite the deaths of the Kennedy brothers—President

John Kennedy in 1963 and his brother, Robert, in 1968—who had

embodied some of the best hopes blacks had about white America.

What was destroyed in the flaming ghettoes and by assassins’ bullets was a certain kind of hope. This hope was based upon two

things: first, the conviction that whites were rapidly becoming disabused of the old notions of black innate inferiority-, and second,

the feeling that most whites, once they understood how unfairly blacks had been excluded, would be willing to accord blacks a fair opportun­

ity to participate in the good American life. The passing of this hope was perhaps first embodied in the militant oratory of Stokely

Carmichael beginning with his introduction of the term, "black power," during the James Meredith march in Mississippi in the summer of 1966.

Integration, Carmichael said, means that the black man would take on the white culture without being able to keep and affirm the many positive elements in his own culture. It implied a patronizing dominance of whites over the Civil Rights movement. Whites who worked for it did so for "kicks," safe in the knowledge that they rarely had to pay the dues exacted from black co-workers. "I’m going to tell you what a white liberal is. You talking about a white college kid joining hands with a black man in the ghetto, that college kid is 160

fighting for the right to wear a beard and smoke pot, and we fighting

for our lives. We fighting for our lives."5 The black community must

therefore organize itself separately and develop a leadership that

"will recognize that its power lies in the unified and collective

strength of that community. This will make it difficult for the white

leadership group to conduct its dialogue with individuals in terms of

patronage and prestige, and will force them to talk to the community’s

representatives in terms of real power."6 In sum, Carmichael and many

other blacks had arrived at the position often expressed by the late

Saul Alinsky, father of the community organization movement: that

real power can never be given; it must always be taken. Oppression

can never be relieved by appealing to the intellect or the conscience

of the oppressor.

By no means did all black leaders come to this conclusion, and

those who did so reached it at different times. As early as 1961

Robert Williams was driven into exile after heading the only rifle-

toting NAACP chapter in the nation.7 Carmichael himself had been a nonviolent SNCC worker for several years. William O’Neill offers the

career of author-community-leader Leroi Jones (Imamu Amiri Baraka) as an example of one man’s growth toward militancy: "In 1960 Le Roi

Jones was a fairly typical Negro writer. In 1961 he was already sneering at ’white liberalism, ’ though it was not yet the fashion to do so. In 1963 he was still calling himself a Negro while attacking

Martin Luther King as an Uncle Tom. When the novelist Philip Roth criticised his play, Dutchman, Jones called him a racist. Later Jones 161

moved to Newark, divorced his white wife, and organized a community

Black Power organization. This did show sincerity. Jones became a

real force in the community."8 Jones’s militancy is increasingly

evident in his work from Dutchman—which many white critics didn’t

understand—until the present time.

In the work of Jones and his angry young cohorts the white

liberal comes in for a good deal of abuse. Indeed, so much attention

is devoted to exposing his devilishness that the racist, who was the

target of older Protest Literature, is almost ignored. Of course,

while noting this new anti-liberal strain in black writing, it is also

important to remember that several moving and sympathetic white

liberal portraits were being created at the same time. Sidney

Brustein, Landlord Elgar Enders, and Eric Carney of "Hue and Cry" are

all products of the mid-Sixties. At present it is impossible to say whether the militants are the wave of the future. They are young—the

thirty-nine-year-old Baraka is their elder statesman. And there are a good many of them, but the work of only a few has attained high aesthetic quality. But they have also had at least an emotional

influence upon some of the older writers of undoubted skill. James

Baldwin, in a television dialogue with young poet Nikki Giovanni, spoke of "how much you younger writers mean to me."9 And Gwendolyn

Brooks, the doyenne of modern black poets, has described her response to a first confrontation with the "New Black" (at a conference in

1967).

There is indeed a new black today. He is different from any the world has known. He's a tail-walker. ... By many

4 ‘ 162

of his own brothers he is not understood. And he is under­ stood by no white. ... I know this is infuriating, espe­ cially to those professional Negro-understanders, some of them so very kind, with special portfolio, special savvy. But I cannot say anything other, because nothing other is the truth. I—who have "gone the gamut" from an almost angry rejec­ tion of my dark skin by some of my brainwashed brothers and sisters to a surprised queenhood in the new black sun—am qualified to enter at least the kindergarten of new conscious­ ness now. New consciousness and trudge-toward-progress. I have hopes for myself.10

The literary influence of the new black spirit upon the older genera­

tion of writers, of course, remains to be seen. But if the militants

do turn out to be the dominant influence among contemporary black writers the situation will resemble the Harlem Renaissance when the younger writers like Cullen and Toomer and McKay struck out in a new

direction while a number of others (Walter White, Jessie Fauset, Nella

Larsen) continued to mine the Protest vein. It is just as possible that militancy will have a short life. It is interesting to note that while Brooks has begun to revel in the new angry consciousness,

Giovanni, one of the architects of that consciousness, has become much gentler in her more recent poetry. Perhaps this was to be expected of one, who, in the dialogues with Baldwin said of whites, "You’ve gotta hate ’em first before you can love ’em."

In the literature of militancy there are only three important white liberal types. Not surprisingly there are no Idealists or

Uplifters, but the Sexual and Marrying Liberal are much in evidence.

Always female in the militants' work, their essential function is to drain the black male's identity: both have become the "White Bitch."

For, as Phyllis Klotman says, "There is,only one role forbidden the 163 black male—that of man. The plantation slave stayed a boy until he aged to "uncle." Rights of passage were denied young black males; in fact, castration was the symbolic act of the lynching ritual intended to serve as a horrifying, sadistic admonishment."11 The White Bitch is in the tradition of all the seducer-betrayer females of myth and legend. The black male reacts to her with fear and fascination, and he must destroy her or she will surely destroy him. Her power comes from the mystique of purity and unattainableness with which the white male, guilty over his use of the black female, has clothed her. She is to be protected from the black male at any cost, yet, in a sense, she must test her sexual attractiveness by attempting to seduce the black male.12

The most stunning portrait of the White Bitch is probably Lula in Imamu Baraka’s play Dutchman (1964). The work, which shows a considerable expressionist influence, takes place on a train "in the flying underbelly of the city." Lula, a thirty-year-old white woman, alternately attacks and seduces Clay, a twenty-year-old Negro. Baraka underlines her relationship to the Eve-Circe archetype by having her eat an apple as she gets on the train. (Later she offers the fruit to the hero.) She tells him that she boarded the coach because she had seen him through the window. "I even got into this train, going some other way than mine. Walked down the aisle . . . searching you out."13

She is the eternal huntress, seeking prey.

As their conversation continues Lula makes Clay promise to take her to a party and promises him that she will take him home with 164

her afterwards. (She already seems to know about the party to which

he is going—in fact, to know a great deal about him though this is

their first meeting.) When they get to her place, she says, they will

"talk endlessly" about Clay’s manhood. And as other people (white)

begin to board the train she warns Clay that he should fear them

"’Cause you’re an escaped nigger. . . . ’Cause you crawled through

the wire and made tracks to my side."14 (This refers to his middle

class manners', dress and education.) Clay gradually begins to resist

her taunts and temptations until, refusing to join her sex dance, he

throws her back into the seat and asserts his black male identity for

the first time:

I’ll rip your lousy breasts off! Let me be who I feel like being. Uncle Tom. Thomas.. Whoever. It’s none of your business. You don't know anything except what's there for you to see. And act. Lies. Device. Not the pure heart, the pumping black heart. You don't ever know that. And I sit here, in this buttoned-up suit, to keep myself from cutting all your throats. I mean wantonly. You great liber­ ated whore! You fuck some black man, and right away you're an expert on black people. What a lotta shit that is. The only thing you know is that you come if he bangs you hard enough. And that's all. . . . Old bald-headed four-eyed ofays popping their fingers . . . and don't know yet what they're doing. They say, "I love Bessie Smith." And don't even understand that Bessie Smith is saying, "Kiss my ass, kiss my unruly black unruly ass." Before love, suffering, desire, anything you can explain, she's saying, and very plainly, "Kiss my black ass." And if you don't know that, it’s you that’s doing the kissing.15

Having refused to play the role assigned to him by the racial myth, Clay has become a threat. He has exposed the truth that there

is a fundamental wish in the heart of every black to rise and kill the white man. This wish is sublimated in all black music and all black 165

poetry. And if the white man teaches blacks all the tricks of western

logic, blacks shall still desire to murder while offering rational

explanations. Lula sees that the prey is strong enough to escape her

and stabs him as he is about to leave. White passengers drag the body

to the door and throw it out. As the train moves on Lula is sizing up

a new young black male passenger.

The enchantress archetype is not the only mythic formula in

the play. Its title indicates that Baraka will use Germanic legend, but he does so in an ironic manner. Possibly the best known treatment of the Flying Dutchman legend is the Wagner opera in which the ship and crew are condemned to an endless voyage as God’s punishment for the Captain’s presumption in swearing that he will round the Cape of

Good Hope even though it should take him an eternity to fulfill his oath. The only way in which the curse can be lifted is if the captain can find a wife willing to sacrifice everything for him out of love.

Hugh Nelson is probably correct in his view that the most likely

"Dutchman” figure in the play is not the Negro (cursed because of his race) but rather the white heroine who, in the end, is doomed to continue her lethal pursuit of black males.16 However, Nelson seems to go too far when he asserts that Lula wants Clay to be "someone who will commit himself to her until death with love and respect, someone whom she can possess and who will possess her, someone who will estimate her at her proper price, not as a sexual instrument but as a human being."17 This White Bitch is simply not tinged with pathos; there is no indication that she would prefer to receive Clay’s love 166

rather than steal his manhood. Thus, Baraka’s conversion of the old

legend into "modern myth," as he terms it, produces the story of an

accursed wanderer but no suggestion of any way that the curse can be

removed. Dutchman’s comment upon the prospects for relief from the

curse of racism is bleak indeed.

Violence and death involving the White Bitch also mark the

second Baraka play produced in 1964, The Slave. The setting for this

drama is night in a large city which is under attack by black revolu­

tionaries (a setting common to a number of black plays of the Sixties).

Walker Vessels, a militant black leader, has come to the home of his white ex-wife, Grace, who is remarried to a white liberal college professor. Upstairs, supposedly asleep, are the two children of Grace and Walker. The dialogue is a series of accusations and recrimina­ tions between the characters, with Grace attacking Walker’s militancy which had led to their divorce and Walker denouncing the phony liber­ alism of Grace and her husband. Walker is the only character left alive at the end, for he has shot the second husband and Grace has died in an explosion (Walker has already killed the children—possibly the only symbolic hope for racial reconciliation—before the play begins). Grace in The Slave receives the punishment deserved by Lula in Dutchman; the assertive black male has destroyed both the White

Bitch and the fruit of his union with her.

Cecil Brown’s novel, The Life and Doves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger

(1969), is another work in which the White Bitch is prominent. There is much of the picaresque in this story ,of the adventures of 167

twenty-year-old George Washington (the hero’s real name) in Copenhagen - * Indeed, picaro may be the closest synonym for "jiveass," that is, a person who lives by his wits, mostly telling lies.18 Needing funds,

George goes to the U.S. Embassy where he meets Miss Smith, an Oklahoma cracker who has risen to the rank of consul. She is pleased to offer him money in return for sexual services and finds him particularly exciting because "I am old enough to be your mother." The date of their first encounter is February 22, George Washington's birthday, and the hero has just heard that Malcolm X has been shot. But this consciousness fades as George copulates with the lusty onetime redneck. feeling "that he would like to fuck her forever." Nevertheless, not all of him is present in the act. "There was the numbness at the back of his head, just beneath the head, where the neck starts. It was as though he had been lobotomized.”19 Amid animal intensity George is still aware of the numbness. "There was something in it, some message, something written on a piece of paper and placed in a bottle and sent afloat."20 The meaning becomes clear only as he loses control and reaches the climax. "Malcolm, Malcolm. You white bitches done killed Malcolm. " The realization is too late. "He slept in Ruth

Smith’s arms all afternoon."21

The White Bitch’s supreme motivation of erasing black identity is emphasized in the scene where George, resigned to being Miss

Smith’s gigolo, asks her for money to help out a black sister who needs an abortion. The black girl, impregnated by a German, cannot bear the idea of giving birth to a white man’s baby. Learning that 168

the money is for a black girl, Miss Smith tears up the check.

Brown also makes clear that the fabled primitive violence of

the black male is no real threat to the power of the White Bitch. A

friend of George’s, Bob, is the typical superstud. The white girl he

slaps around in a bar can hardly wait to invite him to her bed. He

has been of service to most of Miss Smith’s friends—for a price. His

wealthy Danish wife, Mischa, whose father has paid for the castle in

which they live, puts up with it all. She hates Bob, but her hatred

is expressed by never permitting him to know her true feelings—which

keeps her in control of the relationship. "If I told him I hated him,

he would have found me out. ... I am kind to him; I have given him

a child, I have given him wealth, I make his friends envious of him, I

wait on him hand and foot. And all this because I do not need him."22

Against all reason she stays with Bob because she wills to. "The

quintessence of will! And it is this power of the will that makes my

life a happy one."

The revelations of Mischa force George to strike out (he gets

in a bad fight) and come to himself. In the hospital he tells his

friend Doc, "Everybody in this town, every black person, seems to be living off someone or something else. Everything but their insides.

Black men fancy themselves potent when they can flatter themselves to

be gigolos. But for me now it seems that that’s only an excuse for

not being able to live off their insides."23 George decides to return

to America to write a novel about the race problem "with a stick of

dynamite concealed inside it." 169

Affirmation of black male identity in opposition to the White

Bitch is also the theme of William Melvin Kelley’s third novel dem

(1967). "Dem" (them) are white folks, and in the epigraph the author

promises to tell how they live.21* Like A Different Drummer, the later

novel is a racial parable but distinctly more militant in tone. An

inventive plot depends upon the biological possibility of superfecun­

dation, "the fertilization of two ova within a short period of time by

spermatozoa from separate copulations. ... if the female has coitus with two males with diverse physical characters, each [will pass] his

respective traits to the particular twin he has fathered."25 When

Tam, the heroine, gives birth to twins, one turns out to have been

fathered by her husband, the other by their cook’s black boyfriend.

Tam blames her husband’s roving eye for the impulse which drove her to take a black lover. She does not want to give up the black baby, but her husband sets out to find its father in the unfamiliar world of Harlem. Since all blacks look alike to him anyway, he does not realize until afterward that the baby’s father has become his guide in the futile search. Thus in this novel the black male finally revenges the ancient wrong against his family life whereby he had to acquiesce in the use of his woman by the white master and accept the master’s children by her as his own. The black baby’s father speaks of settling "old scores from four hundred years ago."

Now it is the white man’s turn. "My turn? But why me?" says Tam's husband. The answer is simply "Why my great-granddaddy?"26

The final triumph of blackness is the death of the weaker 170

white infant, which means that the white couple will keep the black

survivor. The destructive power of the White Bitch has finally been

turned against the white male with telling effect. Tam herself is

unrepentant and unharmed, but though she is unaware of it, the reader

knows that she has been used by the black male whom she had thought

her prey both as sexual object and as a means of humiliating her

husband.

All the militants believe that in the black-white battle of

the sexes there can be no quarter. "Destroy or be destroyed" is the

rule. Thus, in George Cain’s Blueschild Baby (1970) the hero’s

liberation cannot begin until he walks away from his white mistress

and child and finds strength to overcome heroin addiction with the

help of a black woman. George and the white woman had been "two

racists living together, knowing only the myth of each other, speaking

a language of homonyms. From such different places with different ways, we offended and didn’t know we did. . . .”27 The sight of beautiful black Nandy brings him to reality, part of which is percep­

tion of the ugliness of all whites. His mind had betrayed his senses, but now the brainwash is finished. When a stranger mistakes the hero for Nandy’s pimp and tries to hire her, George vomits all over him, symbolizing the rejection of myth. Although here the rejected White

Bitch is much more pathetic than Kelley's Tam, it is clear that in

Cain’s moral universe, as in Baraka’s when he wrote The Slave, rejection of the White Bitch—at whatever cost—is the noblest act of self-affirmation for the black male. 171

Plainly, in the writing of the militants, the Musgrave thesis

of sex as mask for aggression fits the treatment of interracial

sexuality. This applies whether the relationship occurs in or outside

marriage. The white female is seen as the primordial temptress who

must be annihilated if the black male’s identity and black male-female

relationships are to be preserved. Thus, we have a complete reversal

of the old myth of the pure white female as prey of the lascivious

Negro male, [^evolution, for these militants, is more than economic and political freedom; it even means more than physical, geographical separation from white folks. '-^As Gwendolyn Brooks says in the passage cited above, the Black Revolution is an attempt to revolutionize black consciousness', ‘ to put an end to self-hatred and. feelings of inferior- ityTj This involves striking out against the old white-promulgated myths, and pre-eminent among these is the myth of the sacred white woman. Possibly only after this myth—and all the accompanying taboos—are destroyed can black writers be free to create in-depth portraits of interracial love affairs in their work. Indeed, one notable characteristic of all black literature is the relative rarity of the theme of romantic love, even between blacks. Perhaps this will become more common once the artistic guardians of the black conscious­ ness are fully persuaded that the White Bitch is dead.

Less important than the White Bitch figure in militant writing is a character type who is heir to many of the qualities of the

Uplifters and Patrons (and patronizers) of earlier black literary eras. Perhaps his most direct ancestor.is the old Bumbling Liberal of 172

the Protest Period who tried so hard to do the right thing for blacks

—and was so amusingly ignorant of their real needs and desires. But

the hardboiled militants do not treat his type so gently in their

work; if he is satirized, it is done with the brutal Juvenalian fist.

His main attribute is total unawareness, total inability to conceive

of the facts of black life. And so we call him the "Unhip Liberal."

The CR (civil rights) worker Harry Conrad in Nathan Heard’s

novel Howard Street (1968) embodies unhipness in every word and act

and serves as a white middle class counterpoint to the black lower

class reality portrayed in the surrounding chapters. Heard writes in

the Wright-Himes tradition of black naturalism; no ugly fact of ghetto

life is omitted from a plot which begins with a whore in the midst of

a trick and proceeds through a gang rape in which a boy inadvertently

molests his own mother, brutal beatings, violent death, and a series

of vilenesses practiced by a junkie pimp who will do anything in order

to secure the next fix. Into this world steps Harry Conrad, come to

the ghetto to get neighborhood people to join a demonstration. He has

suddenly realized that he never thought of blacks as fellow Americans;

guilt has led him into a bar to try to interest the wino Jackie in the

Cause. Harry has all sorts of sociological and psychological

explanations and answers for the problems of the people of Howard

Street., and he is all too eager to share them with Jackie (who just

as eagerly enjoys the white man’s free drinks and cigarettes). Jackie

and his friends warn him that their code is not the same as his: "A man can’t fool with the Golden Rule in a crowd that don’t play fair."28 173

But the CR worker keeps on trying to relate to people he does not

begin to understand.

This Unhip Liberal does not even understand the language of

the street. Jackie tells Conrad, "You ain’t really down—" only to

have the latter interrupt with, "Just because I’m white and not down

on my luck doesn’t mean—What are you laughing about?" They are

laughing because Conrad does not understand their use of "down."

Jackie enlightens him: "To be down is to be hip, with it—in other

words, to know what’s happenin’, see?" When Conrad apologizes for

having misunderstood, the bitter reply is, "That’s the whole thing

with you cornin’ here. You done misunderstood it all! Dig, you can’t

understand this hole . . . unless you was born and raised here in

it."29

As the conversation continues and the Liberal begins to sense

more of the flavor of street life—and as all his idealistic plati­

tudes are scorned by his hearers—he begins to drink more than he

should. And with drunkenness his real attitude surfaces. "This wino

and these people—who were they? They were out to destroy him." When he looks at the whores in the bar "all he could see was VD. They wanted to give him clap and syphilis. . . . They wanted him to carry

it to some nice white girl."30 Suddenly he has a word for his feelings about his companions—they are niggers'. The word fills his conscious­ ness as he stumbles out of the bar vowing to quit the CR organization.

The scene ends with the bartender summing up the situation: "We can’t fool around in their league and they ain’t got no business in ours."31 174

In Howard Street the Unhip Liberal serves to underscore the

depths of degradation reached by most who live in this worst of all

ghettoes. If the black characters get their kicks out of mocking the

white man’s ignorance, they do so while realizing that their life

holds no promise. Jackie tells Conrad that he may be able to better

the lot of the young people, but there is nothing for the older

generation but a "bitter end." Nowhere in the novel is street life

glorified. The prostitute heroine, Gypsy Pearl, a woman of great

vitality and strength, in the end is unable to resist the code which

makes her the virtual property of her pimp. The book closes with the

Howard Street dehumanizing treadmill grinding inexorably on. The same

all-pervasive hopelessness characterizes the interview between George

and his parole officer in Blueschild Baby. The white man is totally

unable to understand how his young black charge is thinking and

feeling, but in rejecting his help George does not turn to a better

solution. His only recourse is heroin.32 (The ultimate hope the book

holds out for George is tenuous at best—the chance that he will be

able to kick the habit on his own while developing a relationship with

black Nandy.)

A more positive future for the black man at the expense of the

Unhip Liberal is projected in Sam Greenlee’s pop novel The Spook Who

Sat by the Door (1969). Like Chester Himes, Greenlee is a good writer who was not making any money from his serious offerings and so turned

out a novel of black revolution which has had great popular success.

No American publisher would touch the novel—which deals with the 175

exploits of the first black C.I.A. man who later uses lawfully learned

skills to train young blacks for a racial uprising—and so it was

first published in Great Britain.

The career of the self-appointed double agent, Freeman, or the

"Spook" (a term used for blacks and also C.I.A. people) would be

inpossible without the cooperation of a number of Unhip Liberals. The

first of these is the Senator who needs some sort of issue in order to

make points with black voters and so complains that there are no black

operatives in the C.I.A. This forces the unwilling agency to recruit

blacks, one of whom is Freeman. Equally unaware of Freeman’s

dangerous potential is the general who is his boss at the Agency. But

the most extended picture of the Unhip Liberal is Stephens, the well-

paid director of the social agency for which Freeman works after he

leaves Washington. All the time that Stephens is praising his black worker for having gotten into the confidence of the toughest black

street gang in Chicago Freeman is training the gang, the Cobras, in

the techniques of urban guerilla warfare. When the uprising actually begins Stephens’ big worry is that he might lose his job because they have failed to prevent violence.

The image of the White Liberal does not fare very well in the hands of the young black militants writing in the mid-Sixties and afterwards. No really new liberal types are created; the three types which do appear are essentially based upon negative aspects of older types. Little attention is devoted by these writers to the liberals’ motivation. What is emphasized is the nature of their relating to 176

blacks which is always either harmful or irrelevant. Basically these

writers are saying that the question of liberal motivation is beside

the point. The White Liberal has much the same effect upon blacks as

the White Oppressor.

The Sexual and Marrying Liberals, always female, have been

subsumed under the White Bitch category. The militants' attack upon

her is part of the total revolutionary program of revising black self-

awareness and the destruction of old threatening myths. The attack on

the White Bitch is really an attack on the old mythology of the

sanctitude of white womanhood—and for the black male, it is an attack

on the old emasculating fears centering around lynching. In a larger

sense, the attack on the White Bitch is a lashing out at all the fear

and self-deprecation inspired by the white man.

The Unhip Liberal is a harshly treated version of the old

Bumbler, but he also is related to Idealists, Uplifters, Patrons, and

several other older types. It is sometimes suggested that he actually

does mean well toward black people, but since he is unable to under­

stand or relate to them his intentions are meaningless. The picture

of the Unhip Liberal seems a clear embodiment of the views of leaders

like Malcolm X who urged "sincere whites" to drop out of black

organizations and combat racism among their own people. "Generally whites’ very presence subtly renders the black organization automati­ cally less effective. Even the best white members will slow down the

Negroes’ discovery of what they need to do . . . for themselves."33

It is easy to see that the only.White Liberals present in 177

militant literature are there for purposes of propaganda. The White

Bitch is present as warning and as a challenge to forge a new black

mythology. The Unhip Liberal is a reminder that blacks must forge

their own destiny if they are to be truly free. And so, in militant

hands, the White Liberal has once again become a stereotype. But it

is important to say that a number of works in which these white

liberal stereotypes appear have real literary merit. The militants

are well able to use the wealth of stylistic modes which have been

open to black writers since the Harlem Renaissance. Baraka’s expres­

sionism, the absurdist elements in Kelley and Brown, the naturalistic

power of Heard, all testify that the new angry black writers can write well. But it is also probable that if these writers continue as they have begun, and become the dominant influence in black writing for the next decade or so, black writing will not produce much powerful or profound portraiture of whites. 178

FOOTNOTES

William L. O’Neill, Coming Apart: An Informal History of America in the 1960's (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1971), pp. 158-59.

2James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963; rpt. New York: Dell, 1964), p. 123.

3Baldwin, Fire Next Time, p. 141.

Vf. Autobiography of Malcolm X, chs. 16-19. Malcolm summed up his new open-mindedness: "I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I’m for justice, no matter who it is for or against. I'm a human being first and foremost, and as such I’m for whoever and whatever benefits humanity as a whole.", p. 366.

5From a speech delivered in Detroit, July 30, 1966, in Robert L. Scott and Wayne Brockriede, eds., The Rhetoric of Black Power (New York: Harper and Row), p. 91.

5From a speech delivered in Whitewater, Wisconsin, February 6, 1967, in Scott and Brockriede, p. 110.

7O'Neill, pp. 160-61.

8O’Neill, p. 168.

9The series of conversations between Baldwin and Giovanni has been shown several times on the PBS black culture program, Black Journal.

10Gwendolyn Brooks, "A Report from: Report from Part One," Ebony, 28 (April 1973), 120.

11Phyllis Klotman, "The White Bitch Archetype in Contemporary Black Fiction," Unpubl. Paper presented at Midwest MLA, Fall 1972.

12Hernton, Sex and Racism, p. 19.

13Le Roi Jones, Two Plays (New York: William Morrow, 1964), p. 7.

Jones, Two Plays, p. 29.

15Jones, Two Plays, pp. 34-35.

16Hugh Nelson, "LeRoi Jones' Dutchman: A Brief Ride on a doomed Ship," Educational Theatre Journal, 20 (March 1968), 55-57. 179

17Nelson, 57.

"Probably the archetypal black jiveass is Rev. Rinehart in Invisible Man, he of the many disguises—ghetto preacher, numbers runner, gambler, ladies' man, political force—whose world consists of infinite possibility.

19Cecil Brown, the Life and Loves of Mr. Jiveass Nigger (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1969), p. 103.

20Brown, p. 104.

21Brown, p. 105.

22Brown, p. 194.

23Brown, p. 203.

24Lower case letters where capitals are usually called for, as well as misspellings to approximate contemporary black dialect, are devices commonly used by militant black writers to declare some sort of independence from white literary conventions.

25Author’s introductory note, quoted from Alan P. Guttmacher, Pregnancy and Birth.

28Kelley, dem (1967; rpt. Toronto: Collier-Macmillan, 1969), p. 137.

27George Cain, Blueschild Baby (1970; rpt. New York: Dell, 1972), p. 93.

28Nathan Heard, Howard Street (1968; rpt. New York: New American Library, Signet, 1970), p. 153.

29Heard, pp,. 154-55.

30Heard, P- 163.

31Heard, P« 165.

32Cain, pp. 85-89.

33Malcolm X, p. 376. CHAPTER VI

CONCLUSIONS

White Liberal characters have been present in black American fiction and drama since their mid-nineteenth century beginnings.

While it must be acknowledged that the label of "white liberal" con­ notes varying attitudes and behaviors in the minds of those who use the term, an effective working definition involves his being more favorable or open in dealing with blacks than approved by law or custom. This study has not only demonstrated the presence of the

White Liberal throughout the history of American black writing but also the fact that this ever present image has been ever changing and that these changes are related to four significant eras of black

American socio-cultural experience. The major changes in the image of the White Liberal have been in terms of the types of liberal charac­ ters presented—the typing done on the basis of their apparent motiva­ tion in relating to blacks—and the mode of artistic treatment employed by the writers of different periods. An additional change has to do with the relative frequency of the appearance of the White * Liberal in the different periods.

In the Protest Period, which covers black writing from the beginning until 1920, the White Liberal is much in evidence and receives almost universally favorable treatment at the black artists’ hands. These writers were well aware of the involvement of many

180 181

whites in an ideological debate surrounding the nature of the Negro

and the question of whether he had yet attained full humanity. Their

works teem with questions about the Negro’s capacities and rights, and

lengthy answers favorable to blacks are placed in the mouths of White

Liberal characters who are used as a teaching device. They are

intended to serve as models for the behavior of white readers. (And

it must be remembered that in the early period, for economic and

educational reasons, practically the only readers of black writing

were whites.) Toward the end of the Protest Period some morally

suspect white liberal types appear, such as those who patronize or in

other ways make use of the Negro for purposes of personal satisfaction,

but, in general, until 1920 the White Liberal in black writing is a

noble and often heroic humanitarian figure. The sentimental realism

employed by all the black writers of the time was an appropriate vehicle for these portraits.

The black awakening known as the Harlem Renaissance of the

1920’s yielded a much smaller crop of white liberal characterizations,

relatively speaking. Although blacks were still victims of great

oppression, the young Harlem writers eschewed outright protest and began to seek and emphasize positive and vital elements in American black culture, and this emphasis was abetted by white contemporaries who had accepted the theories of romantic racialism. With the upswing in black self-confidence the image of the White Liberal in black literature came more and more under attack. The white uplifters and do-gooders were practically always self-serving, raising their own 182

self-esteem at the expense of "poor, ignorant black folk." Those who

did not seek to uplift were simply the curious, one more expression of

the 1920’s phenomenon of trying to pique jaded white western sensibil­ ities by turning to the rich, remote and strange. The dominant literary mode for treating the White Liberal was satire but not a harsh variety. Possibly satirical punches were pulled because it was an age gentler than our own; most probably it was because black writers were still quite dependent upon the good graces of the white liberal readership.

The next important period of black cultural expression comprised some three and a half decades between the Black Pride of the

Harlem Renaissance and the Black Power of the militant 1960’s. A great deal of black writing was produced during this time and it included a large number and variety of white liberal portraits. In addition to liberal do-gooders, the Idealistic Liberals, motivated by various theories about the human worth of blacks, who had disappeared during the Renaissance, now reappeared. Much of this idealism Was of a rather general American democratic sort, but a rather prominent new type was the Communistic Liberal who made his first appearance in the social protest writing of the Thirties. No general moral stamp can be placed upon the Idealists and Uplifters of this period. Many of their portraits are complex and, for the first time, show the black writers attempting to create a rounded picture of white liberal consciousness.

Motives are shown to be mixed and not always very well understood by the liberals who respond to them. In addition, a few liberals appear 183

who are simply shown to be the friends of blacks on an individual

basis without either fitting themselves to an idealistic scheme or

needing blacks for some selfish purpose. In short, in the Period

between Pride and Power, white liberal characterization makes its

greatest advance in the direction of deliverance from stereotype and

ideological stricture. One notable fact in the white liberal portrai­

ture of this period is the great number of sexual liberals who appear,

but by this time it has become apparent that what is significant about

the sexual liberal is not his transgression of the racial sex taboos

but that writers—possibly pandering to the American fascination with

sex—often use sex as metaphor expressing a variety of attitudes

toward whites and interracial relationships in general.

During this third era of black writing authors employed every mode of literary composition used by their white contemporaries. Not only did they have increasing interchange of ideas with American

colleagues, but after 1930 more and more of them were able to find

their way to Europe where their work began to be influenced by contin­ ental themes and styles. Black writing, with only a very few excep­ tions, did not embrace literary naturalism until the Thirties, but blacks produced significant naturalistic works after that time. And, particularly after the Second World War, American black writers took eagerly to symbolist, expressionist, and surrealist techniques which white writers had begun to develop during the Twenties. White liberal characterization benefited from all these developments. This period finally saw the creation of White Liberals who were fully rounded and 184

compelling. Most of these portraits involved the presentation of

pain, when, almost for the first time, black writers were able to

perceive that whites—at least the less threatening White Liberals—

are indeed their fellow human beings in every way. The presentation

of fully rounded liberal characters took place in a variety of

stylistic contexts. Thus, it happened with Elgar Enders in Hunter’s

absurdist farce, The Landlord, but also in McPherson’s much more

realistic "Hue and Cry" with Eric Carney, the idealistic Quaker whose

idealism trapped him into inability to declare love to the black woman he cared for.

Toward the end of the 1960’s the picture changes again as militant voices take over the old Civil Rights movement and seem in a

fair way of becoming the future major figures in black American

literature. These writers devote little space to white liberal

characterization, and their few characterizations may be divided into two classes, the White Bitch and the Unhip. The former is an attack on the old myths surrounding black-white sexuality, while the latter exhibits the current call for cultural or geographical separatism.

The moral valuation of the image of the White Liberal has now come full circle. In the writing of the militants he is projected as the absolute enemy, just as in the writing of the Protest Period he was shown to be a loyal friend. In both periods propaganda lessons were being fed to the readers. During the time of Protest the students were white, and black writers were trying to teach them that a good white man will work for black equality. For today’s militants the 185

students are black and the lesson to be learned is that "black folks

have to get their own thing together," because whites will not or

simply cannot be of real help to them. A major reason why black

writers today can write such things yet hope for financial survival is

of course, the large and growing black readership.1 The proliferation

of black periodicals in recent years, the appearance of black book

clubs, and the founding of several black-owned publishing houses all

attest that black writers are no longer dependent upon white patronage,

In analyzing the changes which have taken place in the image

of the White Liberal it is obvious that they bear a direct relation to

the^historical milieu in which the writers worked. The note of

protest is seldom absent from black literature, although this often

has not prevented the creation of artistically excellent work. Social

psychologist Thomas Pettigrew, in A Profile of the Negro American

(1964) has suggested that there are three ways in which blacks have

related to whites at various periods in this oppressive society:

moving toward the oppressor (accommodation), moving against the

oppressor (confrontation but not necessarily violence), and moving

away from the oppressor (physical or psychological separatism).2 An

additional focus in examining black-white relations would be to assess

the relative degree of dependence which blacks perceive that they must

place upon whites for physical or psychic survival in different historical periods.

Applying these two foci to the possible motivation of black writers in the description of racial relations in different periods 186

it is possible to understand some of the reasons that the image of the

White Liberal has changed. In both the Abolitionist and Post-Recon­

struction parts of the Protest Period blacks are shown moving toward

the oppressor as well as very dependent upon him. Thus the creation

of a series of benevolent and democratic-minded white liberal charac­

ters was part of the accommodationist strategy of the total black

leadership of the time. During the next two eras both the need to

accommodate and the need to depend declined. Beginning with the

Harlem Renaissance black writers could avail themselves of the option

of glorifying black values and the black life style, which inevitably

led to the depreciation of things white. In addition, as the worst aspects of oppression, such as lynching and abject poverty, began to

lessen, blacks began a steady drive toward self-betterment which less and less depended upon white assistance. Both of these culminated in

the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s when blacks began to take over total leadership responsibility and to assert independence of white values and strategies. The decades which saw this gradually quicken­ ing development saw the image of the White Liberal in black literature come more and more into question. Liberals’ motives were less than simon pure, and their personal shortcomings—particularly a blind insensitivity to the real feelings of nonwhites—often made well- meaning liberals unable to be of much real help. At the same time, as never before, some White Liberals received from their creators a vivid touch of humanity which had never been accorded their predecessors.

The fall from the pedestal is always the fall into being human. 187

In the writing of the militants of the late Sixties and early

Seventies the brutal treatment given to the white liberal image is

related to the shattered hopes of the Civil Rights era and a new

feeling that blacks must somehow affirm themselves apart from or over-

against whites. Any form of dependence upon whites, in the militant

schema, is spiritual suicide. Accommodation is out. Blacks must

either attack (though not always violently) or withdraw from whites.

And these ideas are reflected in the fact that the white liberal image

has become the revolutionaries’ favorite•tackling dummy if not their

arch fiend. It remains to be seen whether the militants or their more moderate contemporaries will carry the day in terms of community

leadership and in the literary arena. Possibly neither will win out but the two will exist side by side as political forces and literary

traditions. If this happens, one can predict some very exciting developments in the image of the White Liberal.

There is really only one period during which white liberal

characterization—and indeed all white characterization—has risen above the level of stereotype. Realism was the dominant literary mode employed by the black middle class authors of the Protest Period.

They were patently uninterested in character development but in stating the case for justice. Satire was the most prevalent tone in the literature of the Harlem Renaissance and resulted in some devas- tatingly funny white liberal characterizations, but, again, these were stereotypical because easily recognizable two-dimensional character types are fundamental to the creation of satire. Only in the era 188

following the Renaissance, and only toward the latter part of that era

did complex, rounded white liberal characters appear, only to disap­

pear again as their treatment began to pass into the hands of the

militants.

It is important to recognize, however, that because white

liberal characters have usually been stereotypes it does not necessar­

ily mean that the works in which they have appeared are uniformly low

in aesthetic merit. Certainly the writing of the Protest Period is

greatly inferior to what was to follow and does not attain the scope

and insight of the great white realists such as Howells, Twain and

James. Nor did the black realists occupy themselves much with the

question of the craft of writing which, thanks to Henry James, was beginning to dominate the consciousness of serious literary men. But

Renaissance satire, the context in which the White Liberal usually appeared, is a worthy addition to that genre and indicates that the coming generation of black writers will be much more artistically sophisticated than their predecessors. Black naturalists, expression­ ists and absurdists, while seldom creating in-depth, round white liberal characters, have placed their characters in highly polished artistic settings. It would be unfair to leave the impression that their works are to be condemned merely because the White Liberals they contain are stereotypes.

It should by now be obvious, however, that if the foregoing examination of the treatment of the White Liberal by black American writers of fiction and drama is to be taken as one index of the 189

ability of the most sensitive and perceptive blacks to have genuine

understanding and sympathy for their white fellow citizens, the test

shows that blacks seem to know whites as imperfectly as whites know

blacks. With the exception of a few fully developed white characteri­

zations from the Fifties and Sixties, the image presented of the White

Liberal shows him to be a part of the omnipresent ocean of whiteness

in which blacks are trying not to drown, that is, as a part of a force

to be contended with rather than as people. In this perspective there

is not so much difference between the virulent portraits created by

today’s black militant artists and the sunny Idealists produced by

Protest pens.

suggested above, one danger of a study like the present one is that it will lead to the conclusion that the validity of black literature is to be judged in terms of the focus of the study, in this case, the White Liberal. The most important innovation in today’s black writing is the emphasis on blacks writing for and about blacks

In 1968 an entire issue of The Drama Review was devoted to the new black theatre, and in introducing the issue the editor said, "These plays ... do not see black-white reconciliation as the first item on the national racial agenda. Rather their insistent (and I believe correct) theme is the definition of black consciousness. This involves much anti-white sentiment, some anti-semitism, and, as Saul

Gottlieb puts it, ’the dehumanizing effects of white society on

American blacks’."3 ^Clearly, most of today’s black writers are heavily involved in the process of consciousness definition, and just 190 as clearly this process involves attacks on or separation from whites.

But it also involves a purposeful attempt to discern what is good about being black. Today’s black art is even more concerned in fleshing out the definition of "Black is Beautiful" than in specifying why white is ugly?/ Once this is accomplished perhaps black writers will be free to imagine complex and memorable white characters. 191

FOOTNOTES

1The number of white readers, also, is growing, partly as a result of increased black literary excellence and partly because of reborn white interest in black culture. But, because black writers are less and less dependent upon white patronage, they are able to give a more authentic response to their own (black) experience.

2Thomas F. Pettigrew, A Profile of the Negro American (Princeton: D. Van Nostrand Co., 1964), pp. 27-55.

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