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Our Kind of People: Social Status and Class Awareness in Post -Reconstruction African American Fiction

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Our Kind of People: Social Status and Class Awareness in Post -Reconstruction African American Fiction OUR KIND OF PEOPLE: SOCIAL STATUS AND CLASS AWARENESS IN POST -RECONSTRUCTION AFRICAN AMERICAN FICTION Andreá N. Williams A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: William L. Andrews Reader: James W. Coleman Reader: Philip F. Gura Reader: Trudier Harris Reader: Jane F. Thrailkill © 2006 Andreá N. Williams ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT ANDREÁ N. WILLIAMS: Our Kind of People: Social Status and Class Awareness in Post -Reconstruction African American Fiction (Under the dir ection of William L. Andrews) Postbellum African American fiction provides an index to the complex attitudes toward social status and class divisions that arose within post -Civil War black communities. As I argue, African American narratives in the last quarter of the nineteenth century encode the discourse of class in discussions of respectability, labor, and discrimination. Conceiving of class as a concept that does not necessarily denote economic conditions, both well -known and largely ignored narrativ es of the period emphasize moral and ideological parameters for judging social distinctions. Writers theorize whether intraracial class stratification thwarts black sociopolitical advancement, fracturing black communities from within, or conversely, foster s racial uplift led by the black “better class.” Though the fiction variably delineates social classes, each of the texts under study in Our Kind of People imagines classification as an inevitable and useful means of reforming the turn -of-the-century Ameri can social order. Subverting the class disparity spurred by Gilded Age materialism, Frances E. W. Harper’s novels Trial and Triumph (1888-89) and Iola Leroy (1892) examine conventional social designations and supplant them with a morally -inflected langu age of class. The works of Katherine Tillman, Sutton Griggs and Paul Laurence Dunbar elucidate the problematic relation between labor and status, given black people’s proscribed access to diverse occupations. Stories from Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth (1899) explore the concept of “class -passing,” interrogating status as a social performance that antagonizes iii competing factions within African American communities. In The Marrow of Tradition (1901), however, Chesnutt highlights intraracial class divisions to foreground the similarities between middle -class whites and blacks, thereby challenging Jim Crow segregation by promoting class -based social relations. The study concludes by examining the concept of “The Talented Tenth” (1903), W. E. B. Du Bois’s articulation of the social and political saliency of intraracial stratification. “The Talented Tenth” aptly encapsulates the predominant class ideology reflected in post -Reconstruction African American literature. By underscoring class as an analytic al category central to historicized readings, Our Kind of People complicates critical approaches that heretofore have analyzed postbellum African American literature primarily in terms of race, gender, and religion. iv For my nephew, Dalerick Armand Willi ams (1980-2004) v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I extend a special note of gratitude to Dr. William L. Andrews, my dissertation director, and Dr. Trudier Harris, in whose seminar I first began to think about literary representations of intraracial class differenc es. I appreciate and hope to emulate their model of excellence in scholarship, teaching, and mentorship. I thank my committee members — Drs. James W. Coleman, Philip F. Gura, and Jane Thrailkill —who offered constructive criticism and support, as did my gra duate colleagues in African American literature (Kristina Bobo, Kimberly Burnett, Rachelle Gold, Pamela Hamilton, Jennifer Larson, and Mary Alice Kirkpatrick). Thanks also to Dr. P. Gabrielle Foreman and Dr. William Darity for their mentoring and friendship. My friends Elizabeth Harper, Dr. Melissa Meeks, Talithia Williams, Geniece Granville, Dr. Zakiya Leggett, Afiya McLaughlin -White, Yolonda Wilson, Monté (Adisa) Fowler, Alarie Tennille and Derrick Drakeford lent much needed encouragement and prayers. Du ring my graduate career, my mother, Mrs. Annie V. Williams, willingly indulged my scholarly conversations, learning more about nineteenth - century literature than she perhaps ever wanted to know; I appreciate her love and the support of my sisters (Vallory, Cheryl, Vanessa and Roslin) and other family members. My graduate education was funded by a multi -year fellowship from the Thomas H. and Caroline S. Royster Society of Fellows. However, all glory goes to God, without whom this project — and my maintained sanity —would not have been possible. vi TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. Nineteenth -Century African American Literature and Class Discourse: An Historio -Critical Overview ……………………………………………………… 1 II. The Language of Class and Respectability in Frances E. W. Ha rper’s Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy …………………………………………………. 33 III. Labor, Status, and Competing Myths of Class Mobility: The Fiction of Katherine Tillman, Sutton Griggs and Paul Laurence Dunbar …………………….. 72 IV. Class Performance and Discrimination in Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Wife of His Youth and The Marrow of Tradition …………………………….. 135 V. Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………189 Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………….210 vii CHAPTER I Nineteenth -Century African American Literature and Class Discou rse: An Historio -Critical Overview In the spring of 1878, the Philadelphia -based African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder featured an exchange of two letters to the editor debating the politics of social class stratification. In keeping with the newspaper’s objectives, the two letters expressed a fundamental interest in advancing African Americans as a race. But the pseudonymous writers disagreed about how social class divisions among African Americans affected racial progress. Criticizing what he considered inappropriate cross -class interactions, the subscriber known as “A Looker on in Venice” contended that ladies of “taste and refinement” had no business greeting chimneysweeps on the streets of Philadelphia. As he reasoned in his April 11 letter, “Think Well of Yourself,” those “refined and elegant in breeding” needed to separate themselves from “the company of the vile and illbred [sic]” in order to motivate the latter group’s educational, economic, and moral improvement (1). “There is too much of commonness pervading the colored people's society of this city,” the writer lamented. “Equality is taken to too great an extreme” (1). On May 9, 1878 the Recorder printed a reader’s caustic reply to “Think Well of Yourself.” Quoting heavily from the most objectionable lines of the previous letter, the respondent protested: That theory which draws a dividing line between the cultured and aristocratic on the one hand and the illiterate and common people on the other […] can only originate and continue bitt er antagonisms which are prejudicial to the interests of both classes. (2) Assuming the pen name “Plebeian” in sympathy with the city’s common laborers, the author reminded readers that “four fifths of the colored people […] just emerging from a moral, intellectual, religious and social darkness” in slavery hardly could attain the refinement that social propriety demanded (2). Breeding, occupation and proper speech should not determine one’s status, the author insisted: “Let the only lines drawn among us be those of purity of life, industry and patriotism. Possessed of these elements in their widest sense, we, and all other peoples will be rendered prosperous and happy” (2). Plebeian did not suggest that black Philadelphians dismiss all differences among them, but that they judge lines of social difference by other criteria. The contentious exchange published in the Recorder resonates with discussions of class that black and white spokespersons posed throughout the mid - and late nineteenth century. Ameri cans during the period were embroiled in what historian Martin J. Burke terms the “conundrum of class,” the problem of determining how class figured as a useful concept in the United States (Burke xi). During the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, most Americans accepted “class” as an uncontested or “relatively neutral” social descriptor: “Neither the reality of socioeconomic classes nor the utility of a language of class was an issue” (52). However as industrialization, capitalism, and other developments increased the social and economic chasm between different classes, “class” became a more debatable issue in nineteenth -century public discourse (Burke 52). What should be the relationship between different social classes? How were classes deter mined? How did class function in a democracy? Was class more than an economic category? In sermons, politics, economic theory and fiction, authors explored the conditions of those who lived in luxury 2 and those in lack. Newspaper headlines announced strikes staged by the discontented “laboring classes.” Advice manuals counseled how to be polished “gentlemen” or “ladies.” Reformers organized programs to support “the poor.” Yet despite much debate and the advent of social sciences devoted to analyzing constructs such as class, the idea of “class” and its attendant vocabulary —rich, poor, laboring class, working class, better class, lowly, elite and middling—remained unstable and variably defined.1 Nineteenth
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