The Pennsylvania State University the Graduate School College of the Liberal Arts the FOLK IMAGINARY in AMERICAN LITERATURE, 18

Home , Chitto Harjo, Emma Beard Delaney, John Marsh (pioneer), Mountain white, Olive Tilford Dargan, Rebecca Harding Davis

The Pennsylvania State University

The Graduate School

College of the Liberal Arts

THE FOLK IMAGINARY

IN AMERICAN LITERATURE, 1875 - 1925

A Dissertation in

English

William Kelley Woolfitt

Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

August 2012

The dissertation of William Woolfitt was reviewed and approved* by the following:

Linda Selzer Associate Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee

John Marsh Assistant Professor of English

Shirley Moody-Turner Assistant Professor of English

Daniel Letwin Associate Professor of History

Garrett Sullivan Professor of English Director of Graduate Studies, English

*Signatures are on file in the Graduate School.

ii ABSTRACT

In the first issue of the Journal of American Folk-lore in 1888, William W. Newell called for the scientific collection and study of the “fast vanishing remains” of the cultures of three American ethnic groups: African Americans, Native Americans, and Anglo-Americans (implicitly including Appalachians who lived in “the remote valleys of Virginia and Tennessee”). While arguing for the value and complexity of these folk cultures and mourning their demise, Newell also suggested that the folk were in need of reform, linking them to “witchcraft,” “superstitions,” “important psychological problems,” “much that seems to us cruel and immoral,” “rudeness,” and “licentiousness.” Newell’s call for the study of folk cultures points to the competing pressures for marginalized American ethnic groups to maintain their old ways and to modernize, to never change and to change at once. The Folk Imaginary in American Literature, 1875 – 1925 investigates the ways in which the competing tensions between preservation and reform circulate in the work of American fiction writers who represent the folk; who explore the ways in which the folk initiate and respond to social, economic, and political change; and who imagine folk culture as a resource that can enrich or revitalize national identity. The folk imaginary that American folklorists and fiction writers drew from and contributed to consists of an array of representations, attitudes, languages, symbols, myths, and stereotypes that was dynamic, evolving, fiercely contested, persistent, and potent, influencing the dominant culture’s conception of the folk and of race and ethnicity. The pressures for preservation and reform were negotiated by Alice Callahan, William Jones, and Zitkala Ša—the Native American writers considered in the first chapter—who could not argue for the continuation of Indian lifeways and worldviews without also contesting the government’s assimilation policies, allotment laws, vicious massacres, and bureaucratic corruption. The dominant society’s representation of Appalachian people as peculiar and primitive is analyzed in the second chapter, which claims that Rebecca Harding Davis and Olive Tilford Dargan portrayed mountain people not as dependent and backward, but as refuge-providers, reformers, tellers of history, and participants in modernity. As Native American writers reformulated programs of assimilation and Americanization, and as Appalachian writers critiqued similar “mountain work” campaigns, so African American writers like Frances Watkins Harper and James Weldon Johnson challenged uplift ideologies and initiatives. The third chapter considers Harper and Johnson’s claims about the roles that folk culture could play in strengthening African American communities and in securing full citizenship for African Americans. Extending the history of the folk imaginary through the New Deal era, the epilogue examines writers such as Dargan, Richard Wright, and Jesse Cornplanter, whose counter-histories and counter-representations of ethnic American communities interrogated the government and the dominant society’s emphasis on the functionality and the appeal of folk cultures. By examining the work of Native American, Appalachian, and African American writers who intervened in debates about the place of ethnic communities and their traditions in a modernizing nation, this study provides a literary and cultural history that has not yet been fully told.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgments…………………………………………………………………………v

Introduction: Imagining a Post-bellum Folk…………………………..…………………1

Chapter 1: From Anti-Assimilation to Mutual Americanization: Alice Callahan, William Jones, and Zitkala Ša………………………...... 23

Chapter 2: From Hill Work to Multiple Ways of Knowing: Rebecca Harding Davis and Olive Tilford Dargan………………..……..84

Chapter 3: From Popular Uplift to Integrationism: Frances Watkins Harper and James Weldon Johnson………………….135

Epilogue: “Anxious to Have You Know Our Myths and Legends”: Folk Cultures in the New Deal Era……………………………………..188

Works Cited …………………………………………………………………………..211

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Linda Selzer has again and again demonstrated her keen intelligence, tireless energy, and generosity of spirit in the making of this project. She provides an exemplary excellence in teaching and mentorship that I’ll do my best to emulate. John Marsh, Shirley Moody- Turner, and Daniel Letwin have also given me much insight, inspiration, support, and encouragement, which opened doors for me at the start and sustained me at the end.

Additionally, I have been fortunate to work with marvelous creative writing professors at Penn State: Robin Becker, Charlotte Holmes, Julia Spicher Kasdorf, and Todd Davis. And, too, this little life has been all the more joyful because of Chad Schrock, Kris Lotier, Ryan Hackenbracht, and Tyler Roeger: makers of collegiality, community, camaraderie, and then some.

Introduction

Imagining a Post-bellum Folk

“The true rendering of these ‘praise songs’… will by and by be lost, as the body of the colored people are elevated and removed from the associations of slavery.” —Rev. William H. Goodrich, “Slave Songs” (1872)

“Every well-appointed house might appropriately arrange an Indian corner. Here baskets, pottery, blankets, arrow-points, spear-heads, beads, wampum, belts, kilts, moccasins, head-dresses, masks, pictures, spears, bows and arrows, drums, prayer- sticks, boomerangs, katcina dolls, fetishes, and beadwork might be displayed with artistic and pleasing effect.” —George Wharton James, “Indian Basketry in House Decoration” (1901)

“In another generation or two, [the songs of our British ancestors] will be but a memory in the Kentucky Highlands; the clank of the colliery, the rattle of the locomotive, the roar of the blast-furnace, the shriek of the factory-whistle, and, alas, even the music of the school-bell, are already overwhelming the thin tones of the dulcimore and the quavering voice of the Last Minstrel of the Cumberlands, who can find scant heart to sing again the lays of olden years across the seas.” —Hubert G. Shearin, “British Ballads in the Cumberland Mountains” (1911)

In a remarkable constellation of texts published soon after the turn to the twentieth century, a figure whom I call the “community elder” passes on traditional lifeways and worldviews that play a decisive and vital role in forming (or continuing to form) the modern, politicizable American subject. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903), the elders invoked by W. E. B. Du Bois are his great-great-grandmother in particular, whose untranslated African song imparts to him history and meaning, and the “present-past” slaves in general, who have endowed the contemporary African American community with spiritual, cultural, and political resources (30). Du Bois recalls that his

“grandfather’s grandmother” came to “the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe… she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at

1 the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees” (254).

Transmitted among black families from one generation to the next, the music of Du

Bois’s ancestors (“the true Negro folk-song”) also expresses “the articulate message of the slave to the world;” functions as a unique and invaluable gift to the nation; and carries the hope that eventually “in this whirl and chaos of things…. America shall rend the Veil and the prisoned shall go free” (253, 263). In Indian Boyhood (1902), Charles A.

Eastman (Santee Dakota) argues that his elders—particularly his grandmother, his uncle, and Smoky Day (“a living book of the traditions and history of his people”)—gave him not only a “systematic education,” but also “the freest life in the world” (3, 49, 115). The war lullabies, hunting songs, wood-craft, myths, and true stories of past deeds that the elders typically teach “the Indian boy” prepare him to act as “the future defender of his people” (50, 51). Eastman himself fulfills this purpose through writing Indian Boyhood and other books which attempt to preserve, vindicate, and adapt traditional Dakota culture in modernizing America after the century’s turn. In The Spirit of the Mountains

(1905), the Appalachian elders who teach Emma Bell Miles are her neighbors on

Walden’s Ridge. Identifying them as her grandmothers and aunts, Miles describes these sociogenic kin as “old prophetesses” and “repositories of tribal lore—tradition and song, medical and religious learning. They are the nurses, the teachers of practical arts, the priestesses, and their wisdom commands the respect of all” (37). As Du Bois and

Eastman propose to harness the traditions of their community elders to secure freedoms and defend themselves from the incursions of the dominant society, so Miles argues that the lifeways of her Appalachian grandmothers and aunts should be maintained, that her community should respond to the ominous “tide of civilization” by taking on “work that

2 will make us better mountaineers, instead of turning us into poor imitation city people”

(190, 198). 1

For many literary writers, the textual inclusion (or diminishment and erasure) of community elders is often a telling indication of how they respond to the problem of a

“national culture” that renders “racial Others”—and, I would argue, ethnic Others—“the objects of fantasy, fear, and desire” (Lowry 55). These complex emotions contributed to the competing pressures for preservation and reform experienced by racial and ethnic

Americans, who in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were identified as storehouses of rich traditions that must not change, and also as carriers of social problems that must be changed at once. 2 Such pressures help explain why community elders may be nostalgic, irrelevant, static, antagonistic, antimodern, or absent in a given text.

However, for authors who attempt to balance between preservation and change, the community elder typically is not an obstacle to progress or a quaint remnant of yesteryear, but rather an agent of transformation who helps the community negotiate, survive, and challenge the national culture’s “folk imaginary”— an accretion of attitudes,

1 Other community elders in turn-of-the-century literary works include Almira Todd in Sarah Orne Jewett’s “The Foreigner” (1900); the Paiute basket-maker Seyavi in Mary Austin’s The Land of Little Rain (1903); the conjure women in Ellen Glasgow’s The Battle-ground (1902) and Pauline Hopkins’s Of One Blood (1902-03); the parents and grandparents in Daniel La France’s (Mohawk) “An Indian Boy’s Story” (1903) and Lee Chew’s “The Story of a Chinaman” (1906), several preachers in Paul Laurence Dunbar’s collection of short fiction The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904); and the title character of John M. Oskison’s (Cherokee) “The Problem of Old Harjo” (1907).

2 According to David E. Whisnant, “there were four profoundly important, interrelated processes going on in the mountains—and the South generally—at the end of the nineteenth century: economic colonization by northeastern capital; the rise of indigenous resistance among workers and farmers; the discovery of indigenous culture by writers, collectors, popularizers, and elite-art composers and concertizers; and the proliferation of (mostly Protestant) missionary endeavors.” I argue that the pressures for change and preservation can be mapped in the agendas of capitalists, missionaries, writers, and folklorists, who impacted the social and cultural formations of Native Americans and African Americans as well as Appalachian peoples. I also argue that our histories are incomplete if we do not account for what Whisnant calls “indigenous resistance,” whose supporters developed “progressive and radical social movements and institutions” among all three communities (6). 3 representations, discourses, symbols, myths, and stereotypes that was dynamic, evolving, fiercely contested, overdetermined, persistent, and potent—and that influenced the dominant society’s conception of race and ethnicity. As I will show, the deployment of community elders was one of several strategies for writers who critiqued the dominant society’s folk imaginary and argued that ethnic cultures could play a part in forming and reforming local communities and the modernizing nation.

The national folk imaginary helped sustain (and in turn was reinforced by) the dominant society’s negative feelings about “other” Americans and their resistance of its agendas. Native Americans experienced the late nineteenth and early twentieth century as the “assimilation period,” a time marked, as Robin DeRosa emphasizes, by “an increase in the US government’s articulation of its anxiety about the Native American presence in the country”—an anxiety demonstrated by the government’s support of

Native boarding and industrial schools, the Indian Religious Crimes Code of 1883, the

Dawes Allotment Act of 1887 that stripped Native Americans of their lands, and the

Wounded Knee Massacre in 1890 (DeRosa181). For African Americans, these decades were the post-Reconstruction nadir, a time when, as Dickson D. Bruce reports, “the majority was convinced that black people were inferior to whites and should therefore be consigned to a place of permanent social, economic, and political subordination” (1).

The various late-nineteenth-century campaigns to control, displace, and “civilize” Native and African Americans also targeted some Americans of European ancestry. The people who are called Appalachian today (and were called mountaineers in the nineteenth century, in addition to several less flattering terms) lived in remote and semi-remote mountain communities (such as Miles’s home on Walden’s Ridge, which she describes in

The Spirit of the Mountains). In The Folk Imaginary in American Literature, I argue that

Appalachian people came to be increasingly linked with African Americans and Native

Americans in the late nineteenth century anxieties, imaginations, and overlapping agendas of home missionaries, reformers, educators, writers, folklore collectors, anthropologists, philologists, industrialists, and capitalists.3 Mark Banker claims that in addition to “recently freed African Americans,” “newly defeated Indians,” and “new arrivals from abroad,” people who lived “in the Southern Appalachians” were identified as “others” and were affected by the “audacity, awkwardness, altruism, and anxiety” of the dominant society (135).4 By investigating the relationships of Native Americans,

Appalachians, and African Americans to the national folk imaginary, my dissertation seeks to explain why several so-called “folk” groups who experienced marginalization

(or worse) in their daily lives became centers of attention for reformers, researchers, and mainstream popular culture, which was saturated with caricatures, stereotypes, and other strategic representations of the folk.

As several critics have observed, fantasy and desire often accompanied the fear and disgust that shaped the dominant society’s imagination of “other” Americans; these

3 I do not to mean to suggest that the late nineteenth and early twentieth century experiences of these three groups were equivalent or interchangeable; white Appalachians, of course, possessed the legal status and citizenship rights that were enjoyed by the dominant white society, and that were denied to African and Native Americans. In fact, the relationship of each group to the national imaginary differed according to time period and geographical location. Even so, similarities can be discerned in African American, Native American, and Appalachian responses to the national folk imaginary and to what Chris Green describes as their respective experiences of “exclusion from and exploitation by the forces of American and international capital and government (18).

4 Banker’s formulation points to a lack in my dissertation that is due to the limits of space and scope. The relationship between the folk imaginary and “new arrivals,” particularly Chinese immigrants, certainly warrants further study. The American Missionary Association began working with the Chinese community in San Francisco in 1870; the Journal of American Folklore published “The Funeral Ceremonies of the Chinese in America” in 1888 and many other articles on Chinese and Chinese-American culture thereafter; Chinese immigrants appeared in short stories by Sui Sin Far (the first Asian American fiction writer) and in the regional writings of Mark Twain, Gertrude Atherton, Mary Hallock Foote, and Jack London, among others. 5 feelings of admiration sometimes complicated its agenda of attempting to assimilate or otherwise control non-dominant ethnic groups.5 The argument that racial and ethnic

Americans were less modern, less civilized, less educated, less Christian, and closer to nature could motivate reformers, missionaries, capitalists, and government officials to attempt to remake them in the image of the dominant society, but it could to also prompt members of the dominant society to collect, commodify, participate in, or otherwise appropriate the rich “folk” traditions that civilization, modernization, and Christianization had not yet removed from ethnic Americans.6 Thus, the dominant society pressured non- dominant Americans to change their cultures to make them more modern and “civilized,” but also pressured them to preserve their cultures to maintain their “authentic” traditions.

The dominant society’s complex emotions about ethnic cultures, as well as the energy it spent to both change and preserve them, can be partly attributed to what Darlene

5 For example, Philip J. Deloria argues that a “dialectic of simultaneous desire and repulsion” can be traced to “the familiar contradiction we have come to label noble savagery, a term that both juxtaposes and conflates an urge to idealize and desire Indians and a need to despise and dispossess them” (3-4). John Collier maintains that “the Indian has been… the centre of an amazing series of wonderings, fears, legends, [and] hopes” (152). On a similar note, Eric Lott claims that “cross-racial desire… coupled a nearly insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people and their cultural practices” and made “blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure” (6). Writing about Appalachian stereotypes, Anthony Harkins argues that “the continuous popularity and ubiquity of the hillbilly portrait stems from the dualistic nature of this cultural conception: it includes both positive and negative features of the American past and present, and incorporates both ‘otherness’ and self-identification.” Harkins further claims that the hillbilly portrait invited “‘the mainstream,’ or generally nonrural, middle-class white, American audience to imagine a romanticized past, while simultaneously enabling that same audience to recommit itself to modernity by caricaturing the negative aspects of premodern, uncivilized society” (6-7).

6 One section of the Meriam Report (1928), “Promoting Education as a Tool for Forced Assimilation,” observes that some whites sought to modernize Indians while others sought to maintain their status as a premodern people whose “mode of life” could provide a revitalizing alternative to modernity: “The object of work with or for the Indians is to fit them either to merge into the social and economic life of the prevailing civilization as developed by the whites or to live in the presence of that civilization at least in accordance with a minimum standard of health and decency…. Some Indians proud of their race and devoted to their culture and their mode of life have no desire to be as the white man is. They wish to remain Indians, to preserve what they have inherited from their fathers, and insofar as possible to escape from the ever increasing contact with and pressure from the white civilization…. Some [liberal] whites would even go so far, metaphorically speaking, as to enclose these Indians in a glass case to preserve them as museum specimens for future generations to study and enjoy, because of the value of their culture and its picturesqueness in a world rapidly advancing in high organization and mass production” (88-89). 6

Wilson calls “several severe social and economic traumas” experienced by mainstream white Americans (particularly city-dwellers) between 1880 and 1920: traumas that resulted from “labor conflicts, political scandals, and populist agitation for major economic reform,” and were associated with industrialization, urbanization, the migration of rural Southerners, and the immigration of Europeans. Wilson argues that white

Americans coped with “crises of identity and purpose” through “legislative remedies,”

“social control,” and attempts to “purge Americanism of any taint of otherness” (100).7

While John Dittmer suggests that “the Progressive Era was ‘for whites only,’” I argue that it was for some whites only (xi). Using legal and social tactics to maintain hegemonic and hierarchical advantage, and to cope with their anxieties about modernizing America, the dominant society attempted to displace, de-culture, educate, proselytize, and impose their version of civilization on Native Americans and African

Americans, as well as poor or marginalized whites—groups whose cultures the dominant society strategically mediated through what Stephanie Foote calls “the era’s most respected and elite periodicals,” and through the publications of missionary and folklore organizations such as the American Missionary Association and the American Folklore

Society (4). In this introduction, I begin to read literary texts by or about ethnic

Americans by analyzing the AMA’s The American Missionary, the AFS’s Journal of

American Folklore, and the regional writings that were prevalent in national magazines in the late nineteenth century. I investigate the commentaries (and sometimes the consensuses) of home missionaries, folklorists, and regional writers on ethnic Americans

7 James Smethurst also characterizes the late nineteenth century as a time of upheaval and anxiety for the dominant culture: “racialized consolidation of the modern United States Society [in the 1880s and 1890s] produced great economic growth and technological advance, but also enormous conflict, turmoil, and fears of fundamental and unbridgeable division…. Heightened debate about race and immigration… fed into deep anxieties about the bifurcation of the United States into race and capital” (6-7). 7 and the place of their cultures in a modernizing world. I consider reports, letters to the editor, reprinted articles and travelogues, mission statements, ethnographies, and regional writings to provide a literary and cultural history that has not yet been fully told.

Many important elements of the national folk imaginary—including its strategic mediation and representation of ethnic Americans, its tangled emotions and motives, and its pressures for change and preservation—can be traced in the 1872 issues of The

American Missionary, the official publication of the American Missionary Society

(AMA). 8 The AMA, along with other Protestant home missionaries and reformers of the nineteenth century, worked to evangelize and educate African Americans and Native

Americans (and later, Chinese immigrant and Appalachian communities)—a project that often demanded the diminishment of folk cultures. Uplifted and assimilated, these other

Americans—who were typically described as “the poor” in The American Missionary— would supposedly function more successfully as “fellow-citizens” of a modernizing nation if they were equipped for a “practical Christian life” of farming or industry (13,

88).9 Reverend E.P. Smith, government agent for the Chippewa of Minnesota, called for

8 Founded in 1846 by abolitionists, Christian reformers, and missionaries who targeted American Indians, the American Missionary Association (AMA) sought to educate and evangelize African and Native Americans, and to secure for them some rights of citizenship. The AMA assisted runaway slaves; sent teachers and ministers to Indians in the West and freedmen in the South; founded many schools and colleges for African Americans, including Hampton Institute in 1868; was among the missionary societies that helped President Grant pursue his so-called “Peace Policy” by choosing Christians to serve as Indian agents in 1870; and supported the General Allotment Act in 1887. Under Grant’s Peace Policy, Indians could avoid warfare and extermination by agreeing to settle on reservations where they would practice farming and other white-approved occupations, surrender Indian lifeways and worldviews, and embrace Christianity and other white cultural traditions.

9 As one editorial affirmed, “it is not for ourselves that we plead, but for Christ and the poorest of the poor…. If the next ten years shall be as prolific in wondrous events, as the past, we may hope to see the Freedmen largely in homes of their own, their schools dotting the South, purer and more intelligent churches guiding them into a higher plane of practical Christian life, their educated mechanics and farmers developing a new industry, and a large class of cultivated professional men leading the whole people up the heights of a Christian civilization” (12-13) 8

“a colony” of exemplary white tradesmen to be “established on every reservation;” modeling a Protestant work ethic, these tradesmen would “gradually win [the Indians’] confidence and induce them to begin to labor for themselves. Then farms are opened

[and] houses built…. If the [Indian] children can be kept at school, and this process continued two generations, barbarism is cured” (129). Reverend S. G. Wright, Indian superintendent at Red Lakes, praised his charges for planting crops and building relatively “commodious” “log houses,” but complained about “the utter disinclination of

[some Indian] men to labor, to take the hoe and the axe and cultivate the soil, and provide another place of abode other than the birch bark wigwam, which the women could build without calling upon the men for assistance” (35). For Wright, gendered labor roles, apparent indifference to agriculture, wigwams, and other aspects of Chippewa culture function as obstacles to progress and civilization, rather than resources that can contribute to a Chippewa version of modernity and Americanism.

Several writers in the 1872 issues of The American Missionary suggested that

African Americans and Appalachian people (variously described as “native whites,”

“mountain men,” “a people quite by themselves” in the Kentucky “hill-country”) must also be educated and transformed into workers who meet the dominant society’s standards of industriousness and productivity (5, 52, 254). Sharing with readers “a rare treat,” the editors reprinted the letters of newspaper reporter Charles Nordhoff that recount “his journey in West Virginia—a region not often explored” (13). Nordhoff found that “poor white” railroad workers in the Kanawha Valley were inferior to their

African American counterparts: “the shanties in which the whites sleep are not more neat or comfortable than those of the blacks.” Further, the black workers are “obliging, quiet,

9 sober, good-tempered; they do not shirk hard work; are reasonably intelligent;” they are more “respectable and valuable” and less ignorant than the “road-side white people, who do not stir out of their woods” (1, 4). Arguing that the local blacks are more industrious than the local whites, Nordhoff’s patronizing appraisal is rather benign when compared to other representations of African Americans in The American Missionary. Worried that the AMA was spending too much money on Chinese immigrants and Native Americans,

Mr. H.S. Beals argued that only “mission efforts” could cultivate “a wilderness of noxious weeds,” prevent “the Freedmen[from] sinking in intemperance and licentiousness,” and provide “the youngest, (in freedom) those in tottering infancy... the hand to lift them up.”10 Beals, the superintendent of Tougaloo University in Mississippi, metonymized and feminized the African Americans he wanted to uplift as “Ethiopia… the neglected one. Her skin is too dark, her sands too hot, her degradation too deep.

White men hate her, and call her uncomely and ill odored, and from this field of five millions… missionary effort is being withdrawn or diverted to other fields” (50-51). In

Beals’ imagination, African Americans are objects of both sympathy (freedmen, tottering infants) and revulsion (noxious weeds, unattractive Ethiopia). In representing “other”

Americans not only as potential Christian converts but also as efficient farmers and railroad workers, the AMA sought to strategically broaden the appeal of its reform programs.

10 While American Missionary writers in the 1870s frequently discussed the living conditions of poor white Southerners, the AMA did not significantly invest its money and workers on poor white communities until after 1883, when AMA teacher Ellen Myers coined the derisive term “mountain whites” to describe the farmers she and her husband worked among in Kentucky. Myers argued that mountain whites were needy and uncivilized like the three groups on whom the AMA spent most of its resources (“the red man of the forest,” “our brother in black,” and “the Chinese”), and that the purpose of the “Christian brotherhood” was “to make men of these degraded classes” (12, 13). For further discussion of Myers and the campaign of “mountain work” that she initiated, see Chapter Two. 10

While urging Native Americans to build cabins instead of wigwams, poor whites to adopt the work ethic of their industrious black neighbors, and African Americans to let missionaries uplift them, The American Missionary occasionally suggested that the lifeways of ethnic Americans were valuable and would be missed after AMA programs and other forces of civilization had caused them to vanish. In an article first published in the New York Evangelist and reprinted in The American Missionary in 1872, Reverend

W. H. Goodrich argued that the spirituals, such as those performed by “eleven pupils” from Fisk University, “will by and by be lost, as the body of the colored people are elevated and removed from the association of slavery” (18, 22). Anticipating claims later circulated by Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others, Goodrich affirmed that the spirituals had “[sprung]… out of [the] people’s early history,” and that “[the slaves’] wrongs and their longing fitted them to produce a rude, but really original, musical utterance, in their broken English speech” (18). In addition to their own “praise songs,” the Fisk Singers had sung “choruses from the operas, familiar English and Scotch ballads, and occasionally a Sunday school hymn” (19). Goodrich emphasized the “absolute novelty,” “pathos,” originality, emotionality, incoherence, and irregularity of their performance, as well as their non-standard English:

Everything becomes new under the charm of their un-English voices. Their tones

are molten sound, and their expression is quaint and instinctive…. The most

remarkable part of their singing… is in the “Praise songs” which they bring out of

their old slave life. Born of ignorant emotion, uncorrected by any reading of

Scripture, they are confused in language, broken in connection, wild and odd in

suggestion, but inconceivably touching, and sometimes grand. At first you smile

or laugh out at the queer association of ideas, but before you know it your eyes fill

and your heart is heaving with a true devotional feeling (18, 19).

Goodrich suggested that the Fisk students could stir in the audience a range of emotional responses, from delight at the “novelty” of their songs to “pathos,” from amusement and ridicule at queerly associated ideas to release and catharsis (expressed by filling eyes and a heaving heart). While some AMA contributors focused on the potential of ethnic

Americans to contribute to the modernizing economy through agricultural and industrial work, Goodrich took a fairly complex position, in which he tempered his praise of the

Fisk students’ musical labor with hints that their songs came from a people who were uneducated, mentally inferior, and primitive.

Although AMA missionaries and other reformers did not always appreciate ethnic

American cultures (and sometimes actively opposed them), these cultures increasingly caught the attention of regional writers, entertainers, collectors, folklorists, and other researchers who for various reasons claimed that folk artifacts and practices should be valued, salvaged, collected, and analyzed.11 While the reformers tended to think of folk lifeways and worldviews as an obstacle and the writers and researchers tended to think of them as relics that could enrich the dominant society, both groups imagined and represented “other” Americans as strange, backward, dependent, naïve, violent—as less modern, less civilized, less educated, and less Christian. The representations of African

Americans, Indians, and Appalachians found in the Journal of American Folklore (JAF),

11 George Wharton James revealed some of the complexity of these arguments when he suggested that Americans of “culture, refinement, and fine sensibilities” could commodify Indian spirituality and even gain self-knowledge by decorating their homes with Indian baskets and pottery: “It would be a misfortune to our advancing civilization to lose sight of that which meant so much to those of a dying civilization. We know ourselves better when we know what stirred the hearts, moved the emotions, and quickened the higher faculties of the races of the past. These baskets, thus looked at, become the embalmed mummies of the mentality and spirituality of ages that are past—of a civilization that would soon otherwise be lost” (620). 12 for example, are often similar to those found in the American Missionary and the publications of other home mission societies. While AMA worker William Ward Hayes claimed that degenerate mountaineers could be found in “the mountain valleys of Eastern

Kentucky and Tennessee,” William Newell in the inaugural issue of JAF (1888) claimed that “relics of old English folk-lore,” including the “belief in witchcraft,” had persisted among the people “in remote valleys of Virginia and Tennessee” (132, 3-4).12 AMA worker Miss D. E. Emerson would have at least partly agreed with Newell; in 1889, she described Appalachia as “a section of our country where there have been in hiding, in the ravines and on the mountain sides, two or more million of our American people, in gross ignorance and superstition” (45). While Newell and other JAF writers generally appreciated the cultures of “other” Americans and sought to preserve them, they often reached the same conclusions as American Missionary writers: traditional cultures had no place in modernizing America, and sooner or later Americans who practiced them would have to assimilate.

12 JAF published at least twenty articles and notes on Appalachian folklore between 1888 and 1914. In the first of these, James Mooney claims that the “mountaineer of western North Carolina” is a “peculiar type… distinctively American and yet unlike anything to be found outside of the southern Alleghanies.” Lacking large farms, slaves, roads, schools, literacy, and industries, “the mountain ‘tarheel’ [has] gradually drifted into a condition of dreary indifference to all things sublunary but hog and hominy” (95). He lives in a log cabin; his wife has a spinning wheel, a loom, and a Dutch oven; they are Christians who tell riddles, use herbal medicine, and believe in love charms. Mooney suggests that his report is preliminary and incomplete, that “the industrious collector may yet gather [much information] among this primitive people, as yet unchanged by immigration and uncontaminated by the modern civilization” (97). In an 1894 article, J. Hampden Porter provides a broader survey of “mountain whites,” who live between “Georgia and the Pennsylvania line” (105). While Mooney characterizes Appalachian people as peculiar and primitive, Porter characterizes them as degenerate and “unevolved.” The poor health of Appalachians, Porter claims, can be attributed to their “utter disregard of the laws of health” and to “indulgence in excesses to which they are prompted by the monotony of a life devoid of intellectual resources or pleasurable distractions of a harmless kind.” While Mooney reports that the Carolina mountaineers are Baptists and Methodists, Porter reports that the mountain whites are nominal Christians who also believe in “magic and sorcery, witchcraft, shamanism, and fetishism.” Porter also argues that Appalachian people have not been “been materially affected by [the outside world’s] influences, that “survivals and reversions present themselves here,” and that Appalachian culture is in a stage of development normally found “only in foreign countries and among alien races” (106). 13

The Journal of American Folklore was published by the American Folklore

Society, which had been founded by Newell, Franz Boas, and Francis James Child, among others, in January 1888. In the inaugural issue’s mission statement, Newell calls for the Journal to have “a scientific character,” and to focus on the “collection” and

“study” of the “fast-vanishing” cultures of African Americans, Native Americans, and those people who still practice “Old English” oral traditions (3).13 Newell suggests that adherence to tradition makes each group a cultural treasure but also a social problem, valuable to the nation but also less modern and less civilized. All too soon, Newell believes, folk cultures will be absorbed and lost to the uniformity of the modern world.

In Newell’s formulation (which is much like the AMA’s), the modern supersedes and even consumes the traditional. Traditional ethnic groups “should be allowed opportunities for civilization;” their cultures are at once a “natural food” for the imagination of the dominant American society and a cause of the psychological deficiency and mental backwardness of the people who practice them (6). The group that

Newell describes first and at greatest length includes people of “the English-speaking race” who have descended from the “early settlers,” have “clung” to the “oral traditions of the mother country,” and have maintained “relics of old English folk-lore” such as

“ballads, tales, superstitions, [and] dialect” (3, 4). English oral traditions and other cultural forms may be found “not only in remote valleys of Virginia and Tennessee, but in the neighborhood of Eastern cities;” variants of English traditions have been maintained by “Scotch and Irish ballad-singers [who] have emigrated to this country” (3).

The many superstitions of this pre-literate group, Newell suggests, are worthy of the

13 Newell also briefly mentions a fourth area of interest—the “lore of French Canada, Mexico, etc.”—a subject which “consists of fields too many and various to be here particularized, every one of which offers an ample field to the investigator” (3). 14 attention of psychologists. Newell’s descriptions of people of English, Scotch, and Irish descent in the remote valleys of the eastern United States are certainly congruent with contemporary accounts of Appalachian mountaineers, although he does not designate them as such. Newell’s second group consists of “negroes in the southern states of the union;” their beliefs and practices, Newell claims, “need attention, and present interesting and important psychological problems, connected with the history of a race who, for good or ill, are henceforth an indissoluble part of the body politic of the United States”

(5).14 Newell’s third group includes “the Indian tribes of North America;” he claims that collectors may still reap a plentiful “harvest” of Indian lifeways, including “myth, rituals, feasts, sacred customs, games, songs, [and] tales” (5).15 While their “habits and ideas” may at first appear “cruel and immoral,” a thorough study would reveal “the savage mind in its rudeness as well as its intelligence, its licentiousness as well as its fidelity” (6).

Affirming that traditional culture has afforded Native peoples “a “picturesque and

14 Between 1888 and 1914, JAF published “over one hundred entries on African Americans” which revealed what “could be expected in an interpretive formation that worked the tensions between testimonies and artifacts: a neoromantic and sentimentalized framework that operated in tandem with… [a] matter-of- fact, category-driven, and taxonomically inspired spirit” (Cruz 179). Some entries aligned with the racialism and racism of the national folk imaginary more than the scientific collection and study that Newell had envisioned. In an 1889 article, Fanny D. Bergen reports that she “was not a little surprised to find how far back in the history of civilization one turns on entering into the state of mind of the country negro. [A] disorderly host of ghosts and spirits, [along with] witchcraft, charms, spells, and conjuring [can be found] here within a half-day’s ride of one of our foremost American universities” (296). In 1890, Louis Pendleton claims that his “own experience” validates a “thoughtful and interesting book, The Plantation Negro as a Freeman,” in which Philip A. Bruce reports that “the Virginia tobacco-plantation negroes, living at a convenient distance from churches, schools, and railroads, are found to have as firm a belief in witchcraft as those savages of the African bush who file their teeth and perforate the cartilage of their noses” (204-205). In 1892, Octave Thanet describes the homicidal anger he felt when he encountered two black laborers who refused to kill an injured cat: “I was worked up, past toleration of negro superstition, into a genuine Southern feeling about shooting the negro; and I relentlessly made that man and brother pick up the little mangled thing and throw it into the river, which he did, shaking all over with fear, — for it is the worst of signs to touch a dead cat” (123).

15 As W. K. McNeil notes, “during the more than three decades that Boasian folklorists were editors of the Journal of American Folklore… virtually every issue of the quarterly contained at least one article or collection of [Native American] myths or tales, all following the Boasian model whereby texts are presented with little or no attention given to the informants, context, or style…. The net effect was to reinforce a view held by many that folklore existed only in places and among peoples outside the mainstream of civilization” (35). 15 wonderful life,” and has also given southern African Americans and some Anglo-

Americans a valuable set of beliefs and practices, Newell suggests that traditional culture should live on in collections and studies, in imagination and history, but not in the daily lives of marginalized ethnic Americans (6).

If folklorists in the late nineteenth century wanted to preserve the cultural forms of ethnic Americans before they vanished, then many contemporary regional writers pursued a similar goal—preserving or perhaps appropriating the customs, dialects, and beliefs of regional Americans before they were erased by modernization and industrialization. Much as Goodrich was fascinated by the “un-English voices” and broken language of the Fisk Singers, some regional writers portrayed the speech patterns of their local characters as uneducated or old-fashioned—a sign that the locals were

“socially and intellectually inferior,” that they were “at best, aberrant, and at worst, bizarre” (Harris 332-333). The term “dialect story,” in fact, was a common name for regional writing, as were “local color” and “sketch” (Foote 183). Folklorists were apt to find the fast-vanishing folk—and home missionaries to find the less civilized poor—in the colorful localities that regional writers depicted: “unassimilated and unstandardized territories” and “zone(s) of backwardness where locally variant folkways still prevail”

(Foote 3; Brodhead 115). Like folklorists and home missionaries, the regional writers might find ethnic Americans to be attractive, repellent, or both; their stories and essays frequently romanticized, dehumanized, or otherwise stereotyped them accordingly.

Regional writers elegized vanishing ethnic cultures and thus created “a mentally possessable version of a loved thing lost;” simultaneously, some also implicitly endorsed the marginalization or vanishing of ethnic culture through their “attempts to imagine and

16 manage the threats of social change… by constructing differences… that are safely contained within the dominant narrative of national progress” (Brodhead 120, Cho 522-

523). Stated another way, regional writing could serve to put ethnic Americans in their place, to assert hierarchy and hegemony based on ethnic Americans’ less developed or less modern localities, to situate them in narrowly imagined and rigidly constructed categories.16

In the late nineteenth century, when differences of all kinds (social, economic, cultural, ethnic, religious) both fascinated and worried the dominant society, stories and essays that highlighted regional difference were consumed by a wide audience. The popularity, visibility, and influence of regional writings surged in the 1870s; they filled a wide range of the dominant society’s favorite magazines, as I discuss below, and even those writers who imagined ethnic Americans in highly restrictive, demeaning, and virulent terms enjoyed much mainstream success. In some ways both a predecessor and an offshoot of post-bellum regionalism, the plantation romance (often a vehicle for nostalgia, paternalism, racism, and the lost cause myth) circulated black stereotypes in the many short stories and travel sketches that appeared in Scribner’s, Harper’s, the

Cosmopolitan, Godey’s Lady’s Book and other popular magazines (Wells 2). The prolific fiction writer Mary Noailles Murfree, who specialized in Appalachian local color, emphasized and helped calcify what she called the “primitive customs, dialect, and

16 Not all regional writing was hegemonic and hierarchical, of course. As Tom Lutz suggests, a key characteristic of much regional writing was “its attention to both local and more global concerns, most often achieved through a careful balancing of different groups’ perspectives…. The competing cultural views voiced by [urban/ outsider and rural/ insider characters] mirror and contend with one another. Even when the distance between [outsider] and implied author is slight, the implied author and implied reader meet in an understanding broader than, more cosmopolitan than, that of the characters” (30).

17 peculiar view of life” of Tennessee “mountaineers” (qtd. in Martin 47)17. In Roughing It

(1873), Mark Twain jettisoned the romantic conception of Indians that he had gleaned from James Fennimore Cooper when he declared that the Goshutes he observed in the mountains of Nevada were “treacherous, filthy, and repulsive, ” and that “wherever one finds an Indian tribe he has only found [more Goshutes]” (149). In his popular magazine illustrations and essays of the 1880s and 1890s, Frederick Remington often linked Native

Americans with savagery, bestiality, and the myth of the vanishing Indian.18 Regional writers, home missionaries, reformers, folklorists, and other researchers, then, played an important part in determining how ethnic and “other” Americans—the folk, the poor, the colorful locals—would be represented, imagined, and controlled; they often reinforced the notion that ethnic Americans were limited in their ability to articulate their concerns and improve their communities.19

In The National Folk Imaginary in American Literature, I examine the responses of African American, Native American, and Appalachian writers to the dominant society, which all too often insisted that thorough and non-negotiable assimilation and acculturation were the only means by which ethnic and marginalized Americans—that is, the folk—could become fit for the modernizing world. That insistence was expressed by home missionaries, reformers, educators, writers, folklore collectors, anthropologists,

17 Between 1878 and 1899, Murfree published almost thirty short stories (many in The Atlantic Monthly) and eight novels “in serial and book form,” all set in Appalachian Tennessee (Satterwhite 36).

18 Between 1885 and his death in 1909, Frederick Remington published “more than 2,700 illustrations in 41 journals,” including Harper’s, The Century, Outing, and Scribner’s (Valente 542).

19 As Hsuan L. Hsu observes, “much of the color in ‘local color’ writing has been supplied by voiceless and marginal racialized characters: Mexican subplots in The Awakening and O, Pioneers!, Twain’s speakers of black dialect, Kate Chopin’s eroticized mulattas, Austin’s Indians, Bret Harte’s Chinese laundrymen, and Jack London’s idealized kanakas” (231).

18 philologists, industrialists, and capitalists, who articulated and advanced a common agenda of educating, Americanizing, modernizing, and civilizing the folk.20 In this scheme, the folk would remain largely voiceless, passive, and apolitical while the dominant society trained them for industry and agriculture, harnessed their labor, reduced their land holdings, and commodified their culture. The writers I examine deployed a range of strategies to counter the dominant society’s manipulative or stereotypical representations, to negotiate its competing pressures for preservation and change, to survive its agenda of progress, and to debate the national folk imaginary’s construction of ethnic Americans as people whose lifeways and worldview were incompatible with modernity and civilization.

In the first chapter, I consider a range of Native American responses to the national folk imaginary, which intensified the dominant society’s determination to educate and Christianize Indians until no trace of their cultures remained.21 In Wynema: a Child of the Forest (1891), Alice Callahan’s wavering position on assimilation prompts her to assign very different roles to her community elder figures: the medicine man in the first half of the novel is an object of scorn and suspicion, while the massacre survivor in the second half of the novel prophesies, asserts the value of Native lifeways, and denounces the abuses of the dominant society. Better known as an anthropologist,

William Jones published several essays and short stories in the late 1890s that oppose

20 Deborah Vansau McCauley maintains that “for home missionaries in the Appalachian region to modernize was to uplift, to uplift was to Christianize, to Christianize was to Americanize;” I would additionally argue that home missionaries who targeted Native and African American communities advanced a similar agenda (398).

21 In an 1884 report in The American Missionary, Mrs. A. L. Biggs argued “that an Indian woman’s aspirations for herself are limited, but she wants her child to grow up in the white people’s way. Now, if we are to elevate the Indian nation, let us… gather the children as fast as they are old enough to leave their mother’s care into Christian training schools…. We hear of people who wish to get rid of the Indians; the surest way to do it is to educate and Christianize them” (11). 19 land allotment, critique Frederic Remington for his misrepresentations of Indians, and argue that the Sac Indians’ dance of peace is a politically resonant means of addressing present concerns (and not just a relic of the past). In the plan of mutual Americanization that Zitkala-Ša articulates in American Indian Stories (1921), Native communities would secure cultural sovereignty while accepting limited assimilation; in return, the dominant society would honor its financial and cultural debts to Native Americans, as well as extend to them legal and educational reforms. Callahan, Jones, and Zitkala Ša suggest that Native communities will suffer cultural and other losses if they accept the dominant society’s agenda of assimilation, and that they will suffer even harsher consequences if they refuse it; in their fictions and essays, these writers explore different strategies for surviving the pressures for preservation and change.

The second chapter examines several Appalachian writings by Rebecca Harding

Davis and Olive Tilford Dargan that question the representations, the agendas, and the authority of home missionaries, local colorists, and popular writers. Davis’s short story collection Silhouettes of American Life (1892) as well as several of Dargan’s short stories

(published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1919) intervene in the increasingly widespread and vitriolic debates about the place of non-dominant cultures in modernizing America.

Davis critiques the prejudices and condescensions of the dominant society that prompt it to treat “the negro [as] a domestic animal, and the Indian [as] a savage animal” and to dehumanize poor whites (“Qualla” 583). By calling attention to the voices, concerns and experiences of the “commonplace folk” and “the poorest poor,” Davis moves them from marginality to the center, and from voicelessness to subjectivity and agency. Dargan’s short stories highlight the capacity of Appalachian people to use oral traditions to tell

20 their own history and assert values that differ from the dominant society’s. By characterizing mountain people as tellers of history, interpreters of history’s meanings, and participants in both history as well as modernity, Davis and Dargan counter the stereotypes of Appalachian primitiveness and peculiarity.

The third chapter investigates the ways in which Frances E. Watkins Harper and

James Weldon Johnson resist the national folk imaginary, which viewed the freedpeople and the African Americans of the succeeding generation as philanthropic projects and social problems—as dependent, inferior, immoral, degenerate, and subhuman. Harper and Johnson represent African American subjects as agents of change who labor to bring about a new or modern era; their cultural and intellectual work improves their relationships with local, national, and even international communities, and thus has the potential to bring social and political gains. In Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted

(1891), the freedpeople reclaim African American histories that the dominant society overlooks and misrepresents, repurpose white Christianity, critique southern agribusiness, and take other actions to prepare for the future. In Johnson’s The Autobiography of an

Ex-Colored Man (1912), the music that the anonymous narrator learns from his formerly enslaved mother and from a pianist in an urban club contributes to his argument that the artistic achievements of African Americans prove their humanity and their readiness for full citizenship. While Harper envisions the formation of all-black communities that resist the rise of persecution in the South, Johnson calls for the mixing of black and white cultural forms to ease the integration of black America into the dominant society.

In the epilogue, I extend the history of the folk imaginary to the 1930s and 1940s while analyzing Dargan’s From My Highest Hill: Carolina Mountain Folks (1941),

Richard Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices: a Folk History of the Negro in the United

States (1941), and Jesse Cornplanter’s Legends of the Longhouse: Told to Sah-Nee-Weh, the White Sister (1938). Dargan, Wright, and Cornplanter employ textual as well as visual strategies to contest the aesthetic, historical, and political representations of ethnic

Americans. The documentary photographs that accompany Wright’s Black Voices and

Dargan’s From My Highest Hill, as well as Cornplanter’s pen and ink drawings in

Legends of the Longhouse, challenge the dominant society’s marginalizing of ethnic

Americans through pervasive stereotypes, rigid categorizations, and reductive or unidirectional historical narratives. In unprecedented ways during the Depression era, the appeal and the usefulness of folk cultures were recognized by the dominant society and the federal government; nevertheless, folk cultures were still vulnerable to “othering,” primitivizing, and pathologizing, and were still susceptible to the competing pressures for assimilation and preservation. This study examines such pressures, as well as the tactical mediations and representations of writers who contested the national folk imaginary and intervened in debates about the place of ethnic and folk cultures in modernizing America.

Chapter One

From Anti-Assimilation to Mutual Americanization:

Alice Callahan, William Jones, and Zitkala Ša

In this chapter, I consider a range of Native American responses to the national folk imaginary in the first decades after the Dawes (General Allotment) Act of 1887, which forced Native communities to form nuclear families and settle on individually- owned properties, thereby trying to accelerate the assimilation of Native lifeways and worldviews to white formulations. In Wynema: a Child of the Forest (1891), Alice

Callahan ultimately endorses assimilation, but not before incorporating several forms of discourse through which Native characters assert the value of their traditional cultures and protest the invasive changes that are being imposed upon them. Although largely unknown, out of print, and critically neglected, the literary writings of William Jones would appeal to those disappointed by the limited tribal or nationalist discourse in

Wynema. His resistance to the national folk imaginary is exemplified by the 1899 article

“Frederic Remington’s Pictures of Frontier Life,” and also by the 1899 tale “Anoska

Nimiwina,” which represents the Sac Indians’ dance of peace not as a quaint custom of yesteryear, but as a viable, dynamic, politically resonant means of responding to allotment and standing against assimilation. In American Indian Stories (1921) and other writings, Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, also known by her pen name of Zitkala-Ša, offers a broad plan of mutual Americanization, in which the dominant society at long last honors its financial, moral, and cultural debts to Native Americans and extends to them legal and educational reforms. Rather than furthering assimilation, these reforms would help

Native Americans maintain their culture; the mutual Americanization articulated by

Zitkala-Ša thus creates a productive tension between preservation and change.

* * *

“It Will Do Very Well for the Civilized Tribes”

Callahan and Jones, whom I will discuss before turning to Zitkala-Ša, were near contemporaries. Jones was born in 1871 and raised on the Sac and Fox Reservation in

Indian Territory by his Meskwaki grandmother Kitiqua.22 Born in 1868 and raised in both Texas and Indian Territory, Callahan was probably also influenced by her relationship with her Muskogee (Creek) grandmother, who was a survivor of the forced removal of her nation from Alabama in 1837. 23 In her late teens and early twenties,

Callahan would teach for six years at schools in Okmulgee, Muscogee, and Wealaka— towns about sixty miles east of the Sac and Fox Reservation.24 The Creeks had been removed to Indian Territory in the 1830s; the Fox had been resettled several times, most

22 At an earlier time, the Meskwaki had been misnamed the Fox; the nations they share with the Sac (in Oklahoma and elsewhere) are still called the Sac and Fox nations. According to Robert Dale Parker, “the French mistook a clan name for a tribal name and thus dubbed the Meskwaki the Fox, a name that stuck to them against their preference (207).

23In identifying Callahan and her family as “Muskogee (Creek),” I take my cues from Craig Womack, Cari M. Carpenter, and Robert Dale Parker. Alice’s grandmother, Amanda Doyle Callahan Davis, was one- fourth Muskogee (Creek). Christine Cavalier reports that Callahan’s grandmother “arrived in the new Muscogee Nation a widow, her white husband having died of ‘privation and exposure’ along the way, and relied upon the charity of a fellow member of Cussetah Town in order to support herself, her four-year-old son Samuel, and her one-year-old daughter” (28). While some critics have suggested that “the extent to which [Alice Callahan] was culturally Creek” must have been limited (Womack 118), Cavalier strongly defends what she calls the “Creek authenticity” of Callahan (46). Cavalier argues that “the members of the Callahan clan were migrating between the Muscogee Nation and Texas for nearly two decades, and were doing so because of [Alice’s father Samuel’s] abiding commitment to his family’s Creek heritage.” These frequent relocations, according to Cavalier, suggest that Alice and her family were “migrating across the border of their ostensible ‘white’ and ‘red’ identities,” “keeping abreast of current events in Indian Territory,” and “actively participating in Muscogee political life” (29-30).

24In fact, the Sac and Fox lands in Indian Territory were adjacent to and had formerly been owned by the Creek Nation. In 1866, the Creek Reconstruction Treaty penalized the Creeks for their support of the Confederacy by forcing them to cede “to the United States the western half of their country, containing some 3.4 million acres” (Burton 16; see also Womack 34 -35). 24 recently in Indian Territory in the 1860s. The federal census in 1880 reported 15,000

Creeks in the Creek Nation; the Fox and Sac, a much smaller group, numbered about four hundred that same year.25 Generally speaking, the Fox were more traditional, while many of the Creek were more acculturated and progressive. Jones’s grandmother refused to speak English and taught him to gather medicinal plants; Callahan’s father was a slaveholder, merchant, hotel owner, newspaper editor, school superintendent, and interpreter for three principal chiefs. The Creeks were one of the so-called Five Civilized

Tribes (along with the Cherokees, the Choctaws, the Chickasaws, and the Seminoles), many of whom had already begun to assimilate before their forced removals in the

1830s.26 Callahan and Jones were young adults in 1890 at the time of the Wounded Knee

Massacre; despite their cultural differences, it is likely that the massacre profoundly influenced both of them (as it did Native Americans of many nations), and that it intensified their misgivings about the dominant culture and its determination to “civilize,”

Christianize, and modernize Native communities. Allotment was forced on the Sac and

Fox in 1891; the Five Tribes were able to resist allotment until 1898.

Callahan has often been identified as the first Native woman to write a novel. In

Wynema: a Child of the Forest (1891), Callahan seems to undermine her authenticity and

25 See May 172, Gittinger 219.

26 Tanis C. Thorne reports that “a literate mixed-blood planter elite” was influential in leading the Five Tribes to implement “certain aspects of the dominant political culture in order to preserve their homelands” (20). W. David Baird argues that contemporary scholars and anthologists tend to overlook the Five Tribes peoples or question their authenticity because they have a long history of welcoming rather than resisting assimilation: “In their southeastern homeland, they early adapted alien economic and social patterns to their own unique needs. As is well known, this meant participation in a market economy, inauguration of educational systems patterned after Euro-American models, [and] receptivity to Christianity…. After removal to Indian Territory (now eastern Oklahoma) in the 1830s, these adaptations quickly became “traditional.” Tribal economies revolved around the production and marketing of corn, cotton, cattle, and coal. Educational programs featured both boarding schools with classical curriculums and weekend Sunday schools with goals of national literacy in the vernacular. Christianity served as a true faith and as a civil religion, but also as a vehicle of cultural revitalization” (7 -8). 25 to commit an embarrassing ethnographic blunder in the very first sentence: “In an obscure place, miles from the nearest trading point, in a tepee, dwelt our heroine when she first saw the light” (1). While tepees were used by Plains Indians, the heroine

Wynema is apparently a Muskogee (Creek). The Muskogee had never dwelled in tepees

(as Callahan surely knew); in the late nineteenth century, the more traditionalist

Muskogee lived in “windowless cabins of unhewn logs,” while the more progressive or acculturative Muskogee lived in “ranch houses or comfortable town residences” (Debo

185, 302).27 Although Callahan never directly identifies the tepee-inhabiting Wynema or any other character in her novel as a Muskogee or a Creek, her descriptions of food, dancing, healing practices, and burial customs, as well her own ethnicity, suggest that she is writing about the Muskogee. Critics have offered several explanations for Callahan’s depiction of tepee-inhabiting Muskogee. LaVonne Ruoff calls Callahan’s description

“more romantic than accurate,” suggestive of “Edenic life in a virgin landscape;”

(“Notes,” 105; “Editor’s Introduction,” xxv); by romanticizing the Muskogee, perhaps

Callahan meant to appeal to the national folk imaginary’s Indian stereotypes and its civilizationist and primitivist ideologies. Detecting “intentional misrepresentation” and

“propaganda,” Craig Womack suggests that Callahan was playing to the dominant society’s desire to Christianize the folk, and had realized that a population of tepee- dwellers would be more enticing for home missionaries than Creeks who were “living in log cabins, farming, and attending Methodist and Baptist Creek churches” (115 – 116).

27 I use the terms “traditionalist” and “progressive” in pursuit of a more nuanced reading of Wynema than some critics have offered, although I realize that these terms themselves may still be too simplistic. As Tanis C. Thorne explains, “dualisms like progressivism and conservatism dissolve in the dynamic synthesis of Creek culture and identity…. The Creeks held to ancient philosophies, institutions, and a staple food, sofkey (or boiled corn), while seamlessly integrating European clothing and tools, domesticated animals, and African-American slaves into their society…. [The Creek] displayed a remarkable ability to absorb new peoples, ideas, and technologies to strengthen their economy, culture, and confederacy” (18). 26

By beginning her novel with juxtapositions of obscurity and light, of the heroine’s tepee village near a “dark, cool forest” and the distant “trading point,” Callahan seems to agree with the national folk imaginary’s representation of Native Americans as backward people who need to be enlightened and modernized through education, religious conversion, and capitalist transformation.28 Modernization and the relinquishment of traditional culture, Callahan suggests, may be necessary strategies for Indians who want to survive “the rough, white hand that will soon shatter your dream and scatter the dreams” (1). In short, Indians must realize “the necessity of becoming educated” (2).

This is not to say, however, that Callahan welcomes assimilation in all its guises.

Callahan argues that although allotment is supposedly intended to civilize Indians and ready them for citizenship, it will instead expose vulnerable Indians to the more ruthless parts of civilization—land graft, legal chicanery, white greed, and white refusals of charity. The “rough white hand”—exemplified in the novel by allotment, unjust laws, denial of rations to starving Indians, and other acts of violence—seems all the more unjust, inhumane, and ultimately uncivilized because it is directed against “poor, defenseless, untutored savages” (84). Ultimately, one of Callahan’s main reasons for portraying Indians as backward and primitive seems to be a desire to protect them from the worst of assimilation and modernity; her endorsement of the national folk imaginary

28 Callahan’s juxtaposition of the natural (forests), the premodern (tepees), and the modern (the trading point, the “light” of assimilation) anticipates similar juxtapositions in the writings of Zitkala-Ša. According to Kathleen Washburn, Zitkala-Ša’s “texts consistently juxtapose natural images and forms with markers of an artificial or disembodied modernity: stars and artificial lights, trees and telegraphs, ‘natural’ Indian bodies with pencils, documents, and consumer goods. Her work illustrates this national project to release ‘the Indian’ from the past into the present and illustrates how the mechanics of modernity produce both anxiety and nostalgia about this supposed progression—or fall— from nature into culture…. [This progression or fall] alternately romanticize[s] images of pre-contact Indian life and pathologize[s] native people as anachronistic and incapable of adjusting to modern life” (276). 27 argues not for, but against the allotment of tribal lands and other abuses perpetuated by white civilization.

Callahan was certainly not the only Native writer to use ambiguous symbols or to undertake complex negotiations in representing Indian culture; she was not even the only

Muskogee (Creek) writer to associate people of her nation with dwellings they historically had never lived in. Like Callahan, the storeowner and Indian Journal columnist Charles Gibson (1846 – 1923) sometimes seems to write about Indians in general and at other times to portray a specific tribe. In “The Indian—His Past” (1902),

Gibson describes the Muskogee naming ceremony, the corn festival, and hunting practices at a time when “he [the Muskogee? the generalized Indian?] subsisted on the fat of the land… [and could] stretch his tepee where he pleased” (115 - 116). Much as the log cabin figures as a potent and nostalgic (if ahistoric) symbol in the origin myths that held strong appeal for various nineteenth century whites (including presidential candidates, Walt Whitman, and bourgeois vacationers), the tepee also figures in the origin myths put forth by Muskogee intellectuals who sought to elicit strong emotional responses and rally support for their positions on land allotment.29 Like Callahan, Gibson was an opponent of land allotment policies; in “The Indian—His Present” (1902), Gibson suggests that these policies have caused great havoc in Indian communities, and will lead to foolish spending, materialism, pauperism, and the neglect of “poor kinfolks” (114 –

115). The other side of this argument is reflected in the writings of Gibson’s younger friend and fellow columnist Alexander Posey (1873 – 1908), who disagreed with him about traditional Muskogee culture and allotments; unlike Gibson, Posey believed that

29 David E. Nye argues that log cabins were rare in the early colonies, and that “historical fiction” is the basis for many nineteenth century narratives of American foundations and self-sufficiency that centered on the log cabin (47). 28 allotment policies would accelerate a favorable series of political, economic, and lifeway changes (Kosmider 15, 24). In addition to his work as a land speculator and partner in the

Posey-Thornton Oil and Gas Company, Posey edited the Indian Journal and published the Fus Fixico letters in several Oklahoma newspapers.30 These dialect letters dealt with the economic, political, and cultural upheaval in Indian Territory (present-day Oklahoma) that was a result of the Dawes Act, which required Native Americans to settle on individually owned properties.31 The thirty-fifth Fus Fixico letter (1903), for example, considers the possibility that someday the anti-allotment activist Chitto Harjo (Muskogee/

Creek) will change his politics and find that he “druther [would rather] lived on his allotment in a box shack with a side room to it than lounge on his buffalo hide in the corner a the wigwam and nothing to do but make his toilet and had a good time on the reservation” (144).

Like Callahan and Gibson, Posey appears to place a traditionalist Muscogee in a home (in this instance, the wigwam commonly used by many northeastern Indian nations) that does not make sense in ethnographic terms. In each case, what seems to matter more to the writer who evokes a dwelling widely recognized as traditional (the tepee, the wigwam) is not conforming to a strictly factual realism, but rather supporting various arguments about land allotment and Native culture. Posey seems to have believed that Muscogee lifeways were incompatible with and could contribute little to the modernizing world; his image of Harjo contentedly lounging in a wigwam corroborates

30 Samuel Benton Callahan, Alice’s father, had also been editor of the Indian Journal (1886-1888). Jaime Osterman Alves suggests that the Indian Journal, which was founded by men from all of the Five Civilized Tribes, reflects “how thoroughly the tribes had come to understand the need to join forces and present a unified media campaign that would defend and protect their common interests” (156).

31 Daniel Littlefield describes the Fus Fixico letters as “a literary reaction to the dramatic transformation of the Indian nations of Indian territory” and as “a response, in part, to the shift in land tenure from common tribal or Indian national title to private ownership” (3). 29 the dominant society’s imagination of Indians folk as lazy, simple, and backward.32

Gibson opposed land allotment because he believed it would diminish Muskogee customs and values; his evocation of a time when the Indian could “stretch his tepee where he pleased” also serves to denounce white land theft, and may gesture toward pan-Indian solidarity by speaking to the concerns of tribes other than the Muskogee.33 Callahan’s position represented a third stance: she shared with the more progressive Posey an eagerness for many of the changes that modernization would bring, but aligned with the more traditionalist Gibson in her opposition to allotment. Callahan believed that the

“western tribes” (i.e., the Plains nations) in Indian Territory were not prepared for such a change and would suffer terribly, and that the Five Tribes could positively influence them through their example of progress and acculturation (52). What critics have not yet recognized is that support of Christianity, English education, and other forms of white culture, such as Callahan demonstrates in Wynema, was not new or abnormal among many Five Tribes Indians;34 Callahan’s novel often invokes the complex relationships between progressive and traditionalist Indians, and between the Plains Indians and the

Five Tribes in Indian Territory, as I will discuss below (104).

The first and main part of Wynema centers on the courtships and educational experiences of white missionary teacher Genevieve Weir and Wynema Harjo, her

32 While I am suggesting that Posey favored assimilation, I also want to recognize the complexity of his politics. As Siobhan Senier points out, Craig Womack “persuasively reads Posey as a Creek literary nationalist” in Red on Red (438).

33 Mingling cultural markers could also be a gesture of sympathy, as Christine Cavalier suggests: “exercising a significant degree of poetic license… [Callahan] engages in a most fundamental sentimental convention: that of sympathetic identification. That is, she blurs the lifeways of the ‘wild [Plains] tribes’ with the linguistic and ceremonial signifiers of traditionalist Creek full bloods, thereby making her idealized unassimilated Indians basically interchangeable” (218).

34 W. David Baird suggests that at some point the assimilative changes adopted by the Five Tribes themselves become “traditional;” further, we should not assume “that assimilation and ‘being Indian’ are mutually contradictory” (6, 7). 30

Muscogee protégé and future sister-in-law. The novel’s last seven chapters—which mainly focus on the Wounded Knee Massacre, and often sideline Wynema and

Genevieve—seem like a jarring divergence. By featuring two heroines who initially are not similar to one another, Callahan explores a series of oppositions pertaining to Plains

Indian, Five Tribes, and white cultures that are central to her project. These oppositions—which include familiar or strange, civilized or wild, and right or wrong— propel Callahan’s investigations of mediation, culture, and morality.35 In the first few chapters, with a speed and ease that might seem to defy credibility, Wynema learns

English and “the better ways of [her] pale-faced friends” that the missionary Gerald

Keithly has urged “his dusky brethren” to adopt” (2). Although Wynema is at first described as a child who “spent many happy hours hunting with her father,” her hunting knowledge seems quickly forgotten, and her traditionalist father is absent from most of the novel. In short order, Wynema becomes a teacher in Genevieve’s school, which itself is transformed from “the little log-cabin, chinked with mud” to “a large frame building, constructed from the most approved modern plan and furnished with every convenience”

(34). The teepees, of course, are replaced by “neat residences” (34). It almost seems as if Callahan rewrites and collapses the long history of Muskogee acculturation by staging it in Indian Territory rather than the Southeast and by shrinking it to the few years during which Genevieve educates Wynema. Later, when discussing suffrage with Genevieve’s brother Robin, Wynema tells him that “the women of my country… are waiting for our more civilized white sisters to gain their liberty, and thus set us an example.” In

Callahan’s formulation, a Five Tribes traditionalist like Wynema proves herself to be a

35 The twenty-first chapter of the novel is titled “Civilization or Savage Barbarity;” the twenty-second chapter of the novel is titled “Is This Right?” 31 quick and obliging study; Gerald and Genevieve model and teach “better ways,” modern ideas, and “more civilization” to Wynema, preparing her to teach these values of the dominant society to Five Tribes traditionalists and perhaps model them for other Indians as well.

Although Callahan’s characterization of Wynema as a multilingual book-loving prodigy may counter some Indian stereotypes of the national folk imaginary, Callahan also emphasizes how vulnerable the “poor, ignorant, improvident, short-sighted” Five

Tribes traditionalists and Plains Indians will be if they lose their lands because of allotment and the machinations of “boomers” and “U.S. Senators” (50, 52). While expressing concern and sympathy, Callahan also tends to reinscribe the notion that

Indians are backward, lazy, and primitive, and to voice these diminishments through both

Genevieve and Wynema, who initially take different positions on allotment. Appearing to forget her own traditionalist childhood, Wynema at first voices an opinion that was common among some Five Tribes progressives: “there are so many idle, shiftless Indians who do nothing but hunt and fish…. if the land were allotted, do you not think that these idle Indians… would have pride enough to cultivate their land and build up their homes?”36 Genevieve disagrees with Wynema’s smug evaluation of traditionalist

Indians; she suggests that some progressive Indians have become too selfish or too easily deceived, arguing that “even the part-blood Indians are in favor of allotment; and if the

Indians do not stand firmly against it, I fear they yet will be homeless” (50). Callahan’s use of the term “part-blood” probably indicates Five Tribes Indians who were culturally

36 Womack also suggests that the stereotype of Indian shiftlessness circulated among progressives in Indian Territory in the late nineteenth century: “What whites and progressive Indians interpreted as laziness in the full-bloods was not laziness at all; it was a communal spirit whites did not comprehend” (162). 32 progressive or bicultural, rather than those with a non-Indian ancestor.37 Thus,

Genevieve seems to call for a pan-tribal alliance when she suggests that “the Indians”— progressive as well as traditionalist, Five Tribes as well as Plains Indians, must join to

“stand firmly” against allotment.

Genevieve then explicitly contrasts the Five Tribes with the Plains Indians, claiming that allotment “will be the ruin of the poor, ignorant savage. It will do very well for the civilized tribes in general, but they should never consent to it until their weaker brothers are willing and able…. Do you think the western tribes sufficiently tutored in the school of civilization to become citizens of the United States, subject to its laws and punishments?” (52) Wynema at first asserts that traditionalist Indians are a lazy folk who would be improved by allotment; Genevieve convinces her that traditionalist Indians— particularly “the western tribes” (i.e., Plains Indians)—are an uncivilized folk who would be devastated by allotment, citizenship, and other legal measures that would increase the power of the rough white hand, that would give the inhumane federal government greater authority over Indian Territory. (By calling the Plains Indians “savage,” Genevieve echoes many whites and some Five Tribes progressives who described them as “wild

37 Later in Wynema, Callahan identifies culturally progressive Indians as “half-bloods” in a letter that Gerald Keithly writes to Genevieve: “this measure [allotment] would be best for the half-bloods and those educated in the ways of the world, able to fight their own battles, but it would be the ruin of the poor, ignorant full-bloods” (57). The Five Tribes traditionalists were sometimes called full-bloods, while the progressives were sometimes called mixed-bloods. “By the late 1800s,” Mary Jane Warde argues, “the terms ‘full-bloods’ and ‘mixed-bloods’ had much less to with blood quantum or ancestry.” It was common to refer to “three ‘classes’ of Creeks—mixed bloods, full-bloods, and freedmen…. these terms [were used] to categorize Creek citizens according to their life-style, political views, and perspective on what was best for the Creek people: Full-bloods clung to the old ways, mixed-bloods were more amenable to innovations, and freedmen were the Creeks’ former slaves, reluctantly tolerated as Creek citizens.” In addition to categorizing their own people, the Five Tribes also distinguished between themselves the Plain Indians: “Creeks held that there was a clear difference between the members of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’… and the ‘wild Indians’ (xi). Among the Cherokees, “the difference between [full-bloods and mixed-bloods] came to include many aspects of lifestyles, values, and norms…. Full-bloods kept as many of their old ways and norms as they could” (McLoughlin 190). As early as 1801, the Choctaws used “half-breed,” which “described or personified departures from traditional ways of doing things rather than identifying particular individuals by race” (Perdue, Mixed Blood 90). 33

Indians.”38 The association of Plain Indians with savagery and wildness has important implications later in the novel, as I discuss below.) While some critics have berated

Callahan for depicting a white character (Genevieve) rather than an Indian character

(Wynema) as the more outspoken and articulate opponent of allotment, we should not miss the subtle critique that Callahan directs to her own bicultural and Five Tribes progressive contemporaries by suggesting that condescension toward traditionalists and

Plains Indians lacks compassion, foresight, and solidarity.39

We also should not miss Callahan’s attribution of Indian poverty to white greed and inhumanity (rather than the essential inferiority of Indians), which Genevieve voices to Wynema through her denunciation of white land grabbers, white politicians, white newspaper editors, and whites in general: “None of [the Indian’s] white brothers, who so sweetly persuaded away his home, would give him a night’s shelter or a morsel of food”

(52). Through claims like these, Genevieve teaches Wynema to believe that uncivilized

Indians must be tutored in the ways of civilization as practiced by the dominant society, so that Indians can better cope with its unjust, uncharitable treatment of Indians and avoid

38 David La Vere argues that “from where [the Five Tribes] sat in eastern Indian Territory, they saw the Plains Indians as [their] antithesis… violent, nomadic, savage, heathen, hunters—Indians who must be ‘civilized’ just as the Southeastern tribes had been ‘civilized’” (27). The Five Tribes had long identified themselves as different from the Plains Indians of Indian Territory. Arguing against removal, Elias Boudinot (Cherokee) “denounced violent acts by plains Indians, referred to as the ‘American Arabs,’ who prided themselves on their relative independence from white culture…. [Boudinot claimed that] removal would subject ‘civilized’ Cherokees to similar attacks” (Cherokee Editor, Perdue 18). Wendy St. Jean states that “the Chickasaws’ fear of property losses and personal harm, as well as American society’s stereotypes of Indian savagery, worked together to shape the Chickasaw government’s increasingly intolerant stance toward the Comanches and other western Indians…. [The Chickasaws] were civilized, not ‘wild’ Indians, a point they emphasized in the Treaty of 1866 by demanding that they be referred to as ‘nations’ while the western Indians were called tribes” (41).

39 Cavalier argues that “Wynema was most certainly and primarily read by Callahan’s bicultural social circle of mixed bloods as well as evangelical whites,” and that “[the novel’s introductory] dedication definitively extends the critical contours of her intended audience beyond Euro-American readers” (204). 34 becoming “homeless outcasts.”40 Wynema, ever eager to please Genevieve, recants her earlier opinion about allotment: “I was so foolish…. It is always the way with me, and I dare say I should be one of the first to sell myself out of house and home [if I had to allot]” (52 – 53). While Wynema’s tone may be too obsequious, she also seems to remind Genevieve of her own nation’s history; the Muskogee (Creeks), defrauded of their properties in the Southeast during the 1830s removal, had indeed lost their homes well before many tribes in Indian Territory. Earlier, the text describes Wynema’s childhood village as “like unto the one your forefathers owned before the form of the white man came upon the scene and changed your quiet habitations into places of business and strife” (1). An elderly Muskogee (Creek) man describes those quiet habitations as “the dear home in Alabama” that was lost when their delegate tricked them: “He promised that he would… listen to no terms the United States should make in regard to buying our land; but after he came back we found that he had acted treacherously and that we were homeless” (32 – 33). Equipping Wynema with the lessons in “civilization” that

Genevieve teaches her and a deepening mistrust of the white government, as well as what seems to be at least a rudimentary knowledge of Muskogee (Creek) history, Callahan mobilizes her to educate, evangelize, and acculturate Five Tribes traditionalists and

Plains Indians.41 In short, Wynema, an Indian of the Five Civilized Tribes, is mobilized

40 Genevieve’s worries about Indian homelessness may echo the concerns of Callahan’s colleagues at the schools where she taught. Presbyterian missionary Robert M. Loughridge had long attempted to defend Creek lands from white encroachments; in the 1850s, he “warned the Federal officials that the destruction of their land tenure would reduce them to homeless wanderers and pleaded for time for education and undisturbed development” (Debo 139). Loughridge may have been acquainted with Callahan; he was superintendent at Wealaka Mission School from 1880 until 1892; she taught there in 1892 and 1893.

41 It is important to note that Wynema’s function as a teacher is similar to that of Callahan and other Five Tribes educators. As Devon A. Mihesuah reports, “The progressive Cherokees certainly did not believe themselves ‘primitive’ and were determined to prove it by making their tribe a model of white society. 35 to do the work of what I call “a civilizing tribe”—that is, a group of acculturated Indians who help prepare traditional Indians for the modernizing world and “the white man’s strife.”42

* * *

The Limits of Mediation and Assimilation in “the Indian’s Story”

What is especially surprising about Wynema is that Callahan reconsiders the novel’s early arguments for educating and civilizing traditionalist Indians—arguments which often confirm the dominant society’s rationale for missionizing, subduing, and controlling Native peoples.43 This reconsideration unfolds in the latter portion of the novel as Callahan more strongly questions the dominant society’s representation of

Indians, suggests that its agenda might be not only uncharitable but dangerous and corrupt, and portrays Native peoples who make complex choices about which survival

These progressives wanted an educational system in order to ‘uplift’ the entire tribe, including poor fullbloods and some mixed-bloods, whom they considered to be ‘unenlightened’ and ‘uninformed’” (21).

42 The Plains Indians who clashed with the Five Civilized Tribes, as David La Vere notes, included the Wichita, Comanche, and Kiowa. In Indian Territory, people of the Five Tribes sometimes believed that they should play the part of civilizing tribes, as La Vere suggests: some progressives “saw themselves as the achieved goal of what all Indians should strive to be: peaceful, settled, acculturated Christian farmers…. taking a page from the government’s ‘civilization’ book, often with a paternalistic attitude and certain in the rightness of their own ways, the Five Tribes undertook their own program to ‘civilize’ the Indians of the Southern Plains. Through diplomatic measures, economic activities, missionary efforts, and often outright violent retaliation, the Five Tribes tried to halt the Southern Plains Indians’ raids and persuade them to settle down and accept ‘civilization’” ( 26 – 27). While the progressives of the Five Tribes typically had political power in Indian Territory, there were significant numbers of traditionalists who “refused to recognize the authority of the progressives or participate in the market economy but remained subsistence farmers and committed to the ancient ways as best they could” (25).

43 In addition to schools and churches, the International Indian Fair held at Muskogee was thought to be a powerful means of “civilizing” the Plains Indians, an opportunity for them to be positively influenced by Cherokees, Creeks, and other more acculturated nations. Agent John Q. Tufts argued, “Here the wild [Plains] Indians meet other tribes of the Territory—they mingle with, and learn the habits, manners, customs, and laws of their more civilized brethren, and adopt them…. I know of no greater civilizer than their annual meeting” (qtd. in Warde 101). Claiming that the Plains Indians could be more easily subdued if the lives of the Five Tribes seemed more appealing to them, agent John B. Jones wrote, “One of the strongest motives which can be brought to bear on the wild Indians to induce them to adopt a civilized life would be for the civilized Indians to point to their condition of elevation and comfort and to testify to the wild Indians that the Government and people of the United States fulfill all obligations to the civilized tribes and secure them in the enjoyment of all their rights and immunities” (qtd. in McLoughlin 371). 36 strategies they will adopt. Before the novel shifts to accommodate Callahan’s change of perspective, Wynema and Genevieve mostly resolve their sentimental plots lines.

Genevieve breaks up with the racist Maurice Mauran, who objects to her missionary work in Indian Territory. She and Wynema have become proficient bilingual speakers, which enables Genevieve to better support Muskogee causes and to develop a familial bond with Wynema, while equipping Wynema to teach at Genevieve’s school—and to demonstrate for the Muskogee (and perhaps other Indian pupils) the values of a

“civilizing tribe.” 44 Both women are engaged to men (Wynema to Genevieve’s brother

Robin, Genevieve to the missionary Gerald Keithly) who approve of their teaching aspirations and their positions on Indian reform, temperance, and women’s suffrage; each is about to become, as the text suggests, an “intelligent, happy, beloved wife” (104).

To realize this happiness, however, one of the women must change much more than the other and give up a larger part of her worldview and lifeways. By the end of the novel’s first part, Wynema seems to have been thoroughly assimilated; although she becomes a defender of some Muscogee rights, Genevieve’s changes have been much more modest.45 While she may have learned to see the Muscogee “as fellow human beings with rich cultural traditions, rather than Christian projects” (Mollis 121),

Genevieve believes that those traditions ultimately must give way to English,

44 Callahan herself was a supporter of temperance and women’s suffrage; as Cari M. Carpenter notes, she belonged to the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Indian Mission Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South, taught at the affiliated Harrell Institute, and also wrote “a regular column on temperance” in Our Brother in Red (35). This newspaper was published by the Indian Mission Conference; its motto was “Christian Education, the Hope of the Indians.” Such a motto, of course, would also seem to describe much of Wynema.

45 Genevieve seems much like white missionary-teachers in the Creek Nation who were “successful in identifying themselves completely with the Creeks. They were of course unsympathetic toward the native ceremonies and ‘superstitions,’ but they instilled a patriotism that was purely Creek, and unlike the government officials, who constantly schemed to bring the Indians under subjection, they encouraged them to protect their own interests. They had no desire to ‘Americanize’ their charges except in the way of fitting them economically and intellectually to cope with the white man” (Debo 121). 37

Christianity, and the other subjects that she teaches in support of civilizationism. Thus,

Genevieve’s convictions dovetail with those of the national folk imaginary, and Wynema seems all too eager to imitate her. Genevieve’s ethnocentric beliefs serve as a model for the residents of the town (named for Wynema at Genevieve’s suggestion) that grows up near the school where they teach—a town where everyone will soon embrace the white version of civilization (Christianity, assimilation, railroads, telegraphs, and other forms of modernization).46 At the end of the novel’s first part, Wynema seems to have much in common with some Five Tribes bicultural progressives. Her enthusiasm for English and

Christianity, her adherence to what Christine Cavalier has called “a sentimental pedagogy of female nurture in the home and classroom,” her apparent relinquishment of Muskogee culture, and her commitment to civilizing work are largely unchallenged (254). Her parents and other Muskogee are minor characters who say little, and thus the reader might assume that Wynema’s pro-assimilation opinions are representative of the

Muskogee community.

The novel then appears to shift dramatically as it leaps to a time “some years after the events recorded in the [preceding] chapter” (71). Mainly focused on the Wounded

Knee Massacre, often sidelining Wynema and Genevieve, the latter part (comprising roughly one-quarter of the novel) introduces several Lakota Sioux characters, including the warrior Wildfire and Chikena, an elderly woman who prophesies in the final chapter.

The novel’s first part mixes romantic plots with quasi-ethnographic descriptions of

Muskogee communities in Indian Territory; these descriptions at times seem ahistoric

46 Although Christianity among the Muskogee sometimes incorporated their own lifeways and worldviews, although Baird claims that Christianity sometimes “served” the Five Tribes as “a vehicle of cultural revitalization” (8), there seems to be little or no Muskogee inflection in the Christianity that Wynema and her community practice. See Debo 297, Womack 119 – 120. 38 and free-floating. The latter part shifts to discussions of the massacre in Dakota Territory that happened a few months before the novel was published. In the first part, Wynema learns to protest allotment but seems uncritical of other means of assimilation introduced to her by Genevieve and Gerald Keithly. In the latter part, Wynema, the Lakota characters, the Keithlys, and other white missionaries join together to denounce the

Wound Knee Massacre and other violent measures used in support of assimilation by the white government and land developers; Wynema sympathizes with but finally disregards the anti-assimilation discourses she and the missionaries access through newspaper editorials and through the testimonies of Wounded Knee survivors.

The shift in the concluding chapters of Wynema has not gone unnoticed by critics, who account for its narratological disruptions in several ways. In short, the Wounded

Knee Massacre appears to have deeply shocked Callahan, and to have prompted her to reexamine the conclusions about culture, mediation, and morality she reached at the end of the novel’s first part.47 While some critics note that the latter part of Wynema disrupts the narratives of assimilation and sentimentality, and that it amplifies the novel’s disorganization (a move that resembles the “formal self-fracturing” at work in Harper’s

Iola Leroy, as I will discuss in Chapter 3), there are several thematic elements in the final chapters that add cohesion to the novel as a whole. In the opening chapter of Wynema, as

47 LaVonne Ruoff believes that the final part of the novel is “such an abrupt departure from the earlier romance plot that it was probably added to an almost completed novel” (xxvi). Karen L. Kilcup claims that for several Native American authors in the nineteenth century, one important strategy is an “organizational ‘disruption’” that is achieved through “rejection of Western norms of structural ‘coherence’ and cumulative organization” (4). Cari M. Carpenter argues that the latter part of the novel departs not only from Wynema, Genevieve, and the Muskogee, but also from “conventional sentimentality” in order to express anger, and that to accomplish this, Callahan herself had to depart from “the narratives [she] lived,” to depart “from scripts of temperance and Indian reform in order to voice indigenous anger” (24). Similarly, Lisa Tatonetti reads the last part of the novel as “a response to writing and living at a certain historical moment” that compelled Callahan to move away, if only briefly, “from the prescriptive conventions of the Western romance and assimilation narratives to tell a different story” (7). 39 mentioned above, the narrator warns of “the rough, white hand” that will bring strife to

“your quiet habitations;” the themes suggested here—white violence, white greed, Indian dreams, and Indian homes—recur throughout the novel, although they become more pronounced in the latter part (1). Jaime Osterman Alves suggests that the novel is unified by its consideration of education and literacy, that the whole novel traces the development of Wynema from an illiterate small child “to a wide-eyed reader who trusts entirely the printed word, to a more skeptical and discerning consumer of texts, and finally to a kind of translator, comparing the representations of narratives and facts across newspapers and verbal tales” in multiple languages (99). While Genevieve prepares

Wynema in the first part of the novel to carry out the work of a civilizing tribe and to call for neighboring nations in Indian Territory to change, in the latter part of the novel

Wynema uses the critical skills she has learned to suggest that the dominant society must change its violent and immoral ways.

What prompts Wynema to question her civilizing work, and to read texts and scrutinize the dominant society more critically, is the Wounded Knee Massacre. David

Martinez calls the massacre “a turning point… for all of Indian Country, which mourned the death of what once was before the reservations” (9). Even acculturated Natives like

Callahan who may not have mourned for traditional lifeways seem to have been stunned by the massacre; 48 it certainly challenged Callahan’s assumptions about the dominant society, Indian reform, and assimilation, as the latter part of Wynema reveals. The

48 Callahan’s reaction to the Wounded Knee Massacre in some ways resembles that of other Native writers. Susette LaFlesche (Omaha), a correspondent for the Omaha Morning World-Herald, published “Horrors of War” on January 4, 1891, just a few days after the massacre. “If the white people want [Sioux] land and must have it,” LaFlesche wrote, “they can go about getting it in some other way than by forcing it from them starving them or provoking them to war and sacrificing the lives of innocent women and children.” Charles Eastman (Santee Sioux) would later recall that the massacre “was a severe ordeal for one who had so lately put all his faith in the Christian love and lofty ideals of the white man” (From the Deep Woods 114). 40 massacre also caused Callahan to question her investment in the national folk imaginary, which sometimes marked Natives as apart not only from civilization and modernity, but from humanity as well. One factor that makes Wynema a critically important novel, I argue, is its unique position as a text begun before the Wounded Knee Massacre and evidently finished soon afterward, which thus conveys how the massacre immediately impacted one writer’s worldview: after the massacre, Callahan could no longer offer a straightforward and idealized endorsement of assimilation, progress, and civilizationism.

The conversation of Genevieve and Gerald in the chapter “Turmoil with the

Indians” foreshadows the massacre and introduces the concerns that are explored in the remainder of the novel. It soon becomes clear that Callahan’s questions about white encroachments on Indian land, and about the place of Indian cultures in modernizing

America, have in fact not been resolved by the Muskogee community’s receptivity to

English, Christianity, and intermarriage (a receptivity that Wynema demonstrates with fawning enthusiasm). Genevieve’s mother and sister, who have moved to Indian

Territory, join Genevieve and Gerald in discussing the starvation of the Lakota Sioux on reservations, the Ghost Dance, and a scathing letter by Masse Hadjo (perhaps a Quapaw) that had been printed in the Chicago Daily Tribune.49 While Genevieve and Wynema have generally endorsed assimilation, Hadjo’s letter radically opposes it, condemns the violence of white Christians, and defends the rights of Indians to worship as they choose.

49 Critics have not yet correctly attributed Hadjo’s letter; some even suggest that Callahan must have misspelled the Muskogee surname “Harjo.” With the title “An Indian on the Messiah Craze: John Daylight Says His Religion Is Far Better Than That of the Whites,” Hadjo’s letter was published in the Tribune on December 5, 1890. The letter’s author is identified as “Masse Hadjo or John Daylight;” the place he is writing from is identified as “Quapaw Mission, I.T.” The Quapaw Mission operated a boarding school on the Quapaw Agency, which was home to the Quapaw, the Eastern Shawnees, the Peoria, and several other tribes. Callahan refers to the letter’s author as “Masse Hadjo,” but does not mention his affiliation with the Quapaw. It is also interesting to note that the Quapaw were one of the tribes “whom the Five Tribes has often characterized as one of the most uncivilized” (La Vere 219). 41

The missionary Carl Peterson seems to agree with much of Hadjo’s letter; rather than defending white Christianity, he denounces “the United States Government” for its plan to “starve and slaughter this defenseless people;” Peterson declares that the mistreatment of Indians is “a shame, a crime for which the American people will yet be punished.”

Carl then announces his plan “to go among these troubled people and do all I can for them” (74). While Genevieve has often employed Christian rhetoric to promote the assimilation of Indians, in the latter part of the novel Carl and other characters increasingly use Christian rhetoric to critique the federal government and to protest white aggression against Indians.

Along with opinions about assimilation, the oppositions of familiar/ strange, civilized/ barbarian, and right/ wrong are also reconsidered in the novel’s latter part. In the first part, it is Muscogee culture, especially when embodied by the medicine man of

Wynema’s village, that Genevieve initially perceives and repeatedly describes as weird, curious, savage, picturesque, queer, and strange, a source of terror and awe. In the latter part, when the focus shifts from marriage plots and tentative (or guarded, or inept) ethnography of the Muskogee (Creek) to the current survival concerns of the Lakota, it is often white religion and white government that the Lakota and even some of the white characters perceive as strange—in fact, as an example of “Savage Barbarity,” as the title of a later chapter suggests. Stated another way, the novel’s missionaries begin to worry less about Indian bodies and more about how the dominant society represents, perceives, and governs Indians; it is the image of the civilized Indian that Callahan finally offers her

42 readers, partly by insinuating that some parts of white society are comparatively uncivilized.50

In the novel’s first part, Genevieve’s ethnographic curiosity centers on the strangeness and savageness of Muskogee bodies, demonstrated by their food, dress, movements, and burial customs; Callahan signals her agreement with the dominant society by suggesting that assimilation through education and Christianity can alleviate the strangeness of the Muskogee. In the aftermath of Wounded Knee, the novel’s proponents of assimilation—the Keithlys, Robin, and Wynema herself, among others— become less concerned with managing the strangeness of Muscogee bodies and more concerned with contesting the national folk imaginary’s representation of Indians as dependent and uncivilized—images that have been distorted and manipulated by newspapers, American agribusiness, and what Chikena calls the “great and powerful

Government” (95). Thus, Callahan signals her disagreement with the dominant culture, as well as her growing skepticism of its representations of Indians. Chikena recalls that white developers used coercion to push Indians “very far away from our fertile country” and relocate them on reservations, where “our crops failed and we were entirely dependent on the Government rations.” It was then that the Lakota medicine man “told us to gather together and dance the holy dance and to sing while we danced, ‘Great

Father, help us!’” When Chikena says that the government “sent out troops to stop” the dances, Robin (Wynema’s white husband) replies that he finds it “strange the Great government did not hear of your starving too, and send troops to stop that” (95 – 96,

50 This shift reveals a change in the historical preoccupations of the dominant culture after Wounded Knee described by Lee D. Baker: “controlling Indian bodies after the massacre at Wounded Knee was not as pressing as controlling their image.” Anthropologists, entertainers, and educators offered such images as the “authentic, ‘real’” Indian; the “dramatic, romantic” Indian; and the “civilized, assimilated” Indian (97). 43 emphasis in original). In Wynema, “strange” designates a person or thing—the medicine man, the American government—that is too threatening to be trusted, that must be observed carefully, and then evaluated by Christian principles. While Genevieve thinks the medicine man is a “strange” heathen, Chikena and Robin imply that some other damning label would be fitting for a “strange” government that robs, starves, and massacres Indians.

While Callahan sometimes agrees with the national folk imaginary’s portrayal of

Indians as strange and backward, she also claims that it has a tendency to exaggerate, that it has “grossly misrepresented” the so-called “barbaric customs” of Native peoples (21 –

22). One of the important lessons that Genevieve teaches Wynema is that she must be critical of “the view many congressmen and editors take” (51). Views like these help shape and are also shaped by misrepresentations; they are the views which demand assimilation—and also instigate and then excuse horrific acts such as massacres. The misrepresentations of traditionalist Muskogee implied by Genevieve may not be so different from misrepresentations of Lakota, which sway “public opinion” and inform fast-spreading stories about “the brave (?) deeds of the white soldier. They are already flashed over the world by electricity…. It is not my province to show how brave it was for… civilized soldiers to slaughter indiscriminately Indian women and children” (92, 93; emphasis in original). Countering these claims about who is civilized and who is savage, the narrator offers “my story! It is the Indian’s story—his chapter of wrongs and oppression” (93). Here, Callahan again calls for a pan-tribal solidarity that bridges the differences between Five Tribes and Plains nations, between Indian progressives and traditionalists. Importantly, the final page of the novel describes the Plains Indians as

“the so-called wild Indians,” thus qualifying and undermining the stereotypes expressed by Genevieve and Wynema in their earlier debate about allotment (104).51 While

Callahan may ultimately concede to or endorse some romanticized parts of the national folk imaginary (the myth of the vanishing Indian, the myth of the march of progress), she also interrogates Buffalo Bill’s exploitation of show Indians, the dominant culture’s obsessive fear of Native hostility, and also its fascination with Native cultures (which it is unable to know fully and represent accurately).

Callahan’s problematizing of the dominant culture’s attitudes about Native

Americans is at work in both parts of the novel. In the opening chapter, although

Wynema is described as a “little savage,” the rough hand of the white man seems to indicate that a kind of savagery is also characteristic of the dominant society. In the closing chapter, the assimilation-eager community in the town of Wynema has

“extend[ed] a welcome to all churches of God” and also to “railroads and telegraphs;”

Callahan predicts assimilation’s triumph through Chikena’s prophetic statement that “the

Indian will be a people of the past.” But the community’s remembrance of Chikena’s prophecy suggests that they are keeping some part of Indian culture, some part of the

Indian dreams that have been shattered by white aggression. The narrator reports that

“long after her death were treasured the words she said on the ‘border-land.’ Opening her eyes and looking far way, she [prophesied]” (103). The passive voice the narrator uses in

“long after her death were treasured the words” creates the possibility that Chikena’s

51 Callahan, of course, was not the only Native writer of the Progressive Era who sometimes used the trope of wildness to describe more traditional modes of Native life. Zitkala-Ša describes hers younger self as “a wild little girl of seven. Loosely clad in a slip of brown buckskin, and light-footed with a pair of soft moccasins on my feet, I was as free as the wind that blew my hair, and no less spirited than a bounding deer. These were my mother's pride,—my wild freedom and overflowing spirits” (8). In the introduction of Indian Boyhood, Charles Eastman claims that “the Indian no longer exists as a natural and free man…. I have put together these fragmentary recollections of my thrilling wild life expressly for the little son who came too late to behold for himself the drama of savage existence” (n.p.). 45 prophecy in the Lakota Siouan language is valued not only by the Muskogee, but also by the white community members. According to Guy E. Gibbon, “prophecy permeated the very infrastructure of Sioux society,” and “attempted to maintain order in a disruptive world through the use of conventional explanations” (155). While Wynema is probably the translator of the prophecy, she does not interpret its ambiguous images for the community (just as the narrator does not interpret them for the reader). The “cool forests” and “running streams” that Chikena sees in the “prosperous, happy land of the

Indians” recall the “great, dark, cool forest” and river that were the habitation of the

Muskogee (Creek) before the arrival of white business and strife. Does Chikena see the past or the afterlife? She speaks of a place where she and other Indians “may rest our wearied bodies and feast our hungry souls” (103). Is her soul hungry because the white missionaries have taught her to believe that it is, or because she witnessed the massacre at

Wounded Knee and has had her dreams disrupted by the rough white hand? Does

Chikena’s vision reflect the Lakota worldview, or the Christian religion, or a kind of syncretism?

There is much about Native culture and survival that Callahan’s novel does not say—or perhaps cannot say. Throughout Wynema, the Indian characters are associated with alternative perceptions and realities that refuse assimilation. These include the shattered dreams of the opening chapter, the cage described by Wildfire that is

“threatened by death on all sides,” and the border-land Chikena inhabits when she speaks her dying prophecy (81). This border-land seems to serve as a place between life and death (perhaps between Lakota, Muskogee/ Creek, and white cultures) that enables

Chikena to look “far away” in a vision that encompasses the past, the future, a home in

America, and a home in the afterlife (103 – 104). In choosing not to explain Chikena’s prophecy, the novel ensures that some part of Indian culture remains un-transparent and unavailable. Thus, Callahan seems to test the limits of mediation, which James Ruppert defines as a stance through which dominant and Native cultures “illuminate and enrich each other” (3). While mediating some aspects of Muskogee culture (such as healing practices, burial customs, and the Green Corn ceremony), Callahan also portrays mediation “as vexed, as arrogant, and often failed” (Senier 424). For example, when

Wynema brings the medicine man to cure Genevieve’s fever, he utters “an incantation in a low, indistinct tone” whose words “could not be told by any of the Indians” (13).

Genevieve can gain partial knowledge about Muskogee healing practices, but the medicine man’s incantation—and the Indians’ inability or reluctance to translate for her—ensure that some Muskogee do not participate in “catering for the white outsider in commodifying Indian culture” (Murray 81), that some part of Muskogee culture remains unmediated.

While suggesting that Indians are unwilling to share all parts of their culture,

Callahan also tests the limits of mediation by portraying white characters who are unable to receive or to respond to the experiences of brutality that the Indian characters do choose to communicate. As the novel’s white mediators are always teachers and missionaries, the limits that Callahan associates with mediation also seem to point to the limits of white education and evangelism. In Masse Hadjo’s defense of the Ghost Dance, which Gerald Keithly reads aloud, Hadjo counters a newspaper writer who has called for the extermination of “a few thousand or so” Ghost Dance participants.52 Hadjo describes

52 It is quite possible that Hadjo is not merely imagining the Lakota ghost dance, as some critics have suggested, but also drawing on his firsthand experiences. During the 1890s, multiple versions of the ghost 47 the Ghost Dance as a “better religion” that is “adapted to our wants,” is much less violent than Christianity, and has a better “code of morals.” Christianity, whose adherents “burn innocent women at the stake, or pull men to pieces with horses,” is not an attractive option because the only reward it offers to Indians who “obey the ten commandments” is permission “to sit upon a white rock and sing praises to God for evermore, and look down upon our heathenly fathers, mothers, sisters and brothers in hell.” Genevieve

Keithly does not reply, while Gerald’s unhelpful comment reveals his limits as a mediator: “the poor things are starving to death and are praying to their Messiah to relieve them, as nobody on earth will.” While their practice of mediation has sometimes enabled them to appreciate Indian cultures, here the Keithlys seem unable to receive information about the Ghost Dance because of the context that accompanies it—a denunciation of Christianity for its history of torture and its promise of a “white man’s heaven [that] is repulsive” (73 - 74). The Keithlys’ limited response to Hadjo’s letter suggests that their educational, evangelistic, and assimilative agendas are unable to answer what Lisa Tatonetti calls a “challenge [to] the very core of the Christian cosmology that undergirds most of Wynema” (12), and are powerless to relieve the Ghost

Dance participants from newspaper misrepresentations and military threats.

Whether or not white missionaries such as the Keithlys and Carl Peterson are willing to confront images of tormented and massacred Indians and to respond in ways that demonstrate the usefulness and relevance of their Christianity, the novel suggests that these images do have the power to communicate, and that like Chikena’s prophecy, they will continue to be meaningful even in assimilating communities. The Lakota

dance and peyotism were practiced among several nations in the Indian and Dakota Territories, including those who lived at the Quapaw Agency. 48 warrior Wildfire describes to Carl his perception that he is like a caged bird, harassed by

“strange, free birds that gather round its prison and peck at its eyes,” and then describes his discovery of the murdered bodies of Few Tails and his hunting party: “those bleeding, gaping wounds, those eyes glaring in death, those stiff bodies lying where they fell, told a story—a story far more eloquent and impressive than human lips could have uttered…. they told me to fight the pale-faces until they or I lie bleaching in the sun” (82 – 83). It is important to note that through Wildfire, Callahan mobilizes a character whose name suggests the reputed wildness and savagery of Plains Indians, and thus voices a militant protest that might have seemed unavailable or inappropriate to her as a Five Tribes progressive and teacher in a Christian mission school. Wildfire’s firsthand account of bodies that tell stories and eyes that glare even in death silences any narrative of the dominant white culture that Carl might offer, as the narrator suggests: “What could Carl say in answer to this…. How could he reason with this greatly wronged people whose very oppression rendered them unheeding?” Realizing that he has nothing to communicate, Carl instead asks the warrior Great Eye to share his perspective. Carl is also at a loss for words when Chikena describes her interventions after the massacre at

Wounded Knee: “The wolves came to take [the bodies] but I lighted a fire and kept the wolves at bay. Then the wounded groaned with their wounds and the cold, and I dragged as many of them together as I could and covered them with my blanket” (91 – 92). Carl gives no reply, but follows Chikena’s example in helping to organize aid for the wounded and burials for the dead. Thus, Callahan problematizes mediation not only through

Indians who refuse to divulge their lifeways, but also through white missionaries who

49 become inarticulate when hard lessons are offered to them by Indians who criticize

Christianity, and also when they encounter the massacred bodies at Wounded Knee.

While Callahan endorses the main implements of assimilation (Christianity and white education), the many images of dead Indians in Wynema suggest their ideological flaws. Although Craig S. Womack dismisses the novel as “a document of Christian supremacism and assimilation,” I argue that such a judgment implies a condemnation and disqualification of many Five Tribes Indians, and that contextualizing Callahan as a Five

Tribes progressive offers a more nuanced reading of Wynema. Callahan is keenly aware that the stories the dominant society tells differ from hers, that white education and

Christianity cannot easily be reconciled with the violence and injustice described by

Wildfire and Chikena. In addition to these oral testimonies and Harjo’s editorial, further examples of resistance to assimilation can be traced in the novel’s prefatory dedication and in Callahan’s project of telling what she calls “my story,” “the Indian’s story,” and the “more eloquent and impressive” story of murdered Indian bodies.53 Callahan’s is the story that the dominant society won’t tell, a story that she implies is unsimilar, perhaps unassimilable. In writing her story, she seeks to fulfill the purpose she describes in the novel’s dedication: “to issue into existence” what the dominant society has failed to give

“our more oppressed brothers” (despite its supposedly superior civilization)—“an era of good feeling and just dealing” (v).

Unlike Wildfire, who argues that “the freedom of death” is better than the captivity of peace, Wynema concedes in many ways to assimilation and acculturation.

For some Indians, such options seemed the only way to survive what Wildfire denounces

53 Siobhan Senier also finds that “[if] read carefully, Wynema does in fact register the existence of viable tribal institutions and Indian protests against assimilation” (424). 50 as “a Government whose only policy is to exterminate my race” (81). Wynema’s motives for supporting assimilation are suggested when she paraphrases for her husband

Robin a pro-genocide editorial that she has read in the St. Louis Republic:

“this writer… recommended that the dead bodies of the savages be used for

fertilizers instead of the costly guano Mr. Blaine has been importing. He said the

Indians alive were troublesome and expensive, for they would persist in getting

hungry and cold; but the Indians slaughtered would be useful, for besides using

their carcasses as fertilizers, the land they are occupying now could then be given

as homes to the ‘homeless whites’” (97).

While Wynema’s resolve to assimilate seems to be reinforced her knowledge of the violence done to Indians who do not conform, this rationale for Indian change also calls attention to the aggressive, corrupt dominant society, and implicitly argues that it, too, much change. Her subsequent conversation with Robin exposes the inherent violence in the myth of progress. Robin does not comment on the disrespectful treatment of Indian bodies that the Republic editorial supports. Like Carl, he responds not by referencing his own religion and education, but by deferring to an Indian voice—a commentary on the massacre printed by the Cherokee Telephone (a newspaper published in Tahlequah,

Cherokee Nation). This commentary claims that “for every acre the United States government holds to-day, which it acquired from the Indians of any tribe, from the landing of Columbus, it has not paid five cents on average” (98). Earlier in the novel,

Genevieve’s one-time suitor Maurice reveals the Euro-American greed for Indian land that often lurks behind the desire to educate and civilize; he links Indians (“a people whom no amount of civilization could cultivate”) to the lands they inhabit (“which white

51 people might be cultivating”) by describing both as worthless unless white people develop them (95). The Republic editorial that Wynema reads suggests that that Indians must take drastic actions in order to survive the racist agendas of progress and acquisition that would commodify their culture, their land, and even the bodies of their dead.

In the first part of the novel, Geneva teaches her Muskogee students Shakespeare,

Dickens, “ancient and modern languages,” and “higher mathematics” (9, 23). In the latter part, as drastic actions become more necessary, the uses of education shift as

Wynema and Genevieve become increasingly skilled in analyzing American military, economic, and racial policies, in contesting the national folk imaginary’s misrepresentations of Indians, and in forming critiques that have been significantly influenced by Indian discourses that resist or problematize assimilation (Hadjo’s editorial, Wildfire and Chikena’s oral testimonies, and the Cherokee Telephone editorial).

The values and wisdom of traditional Indian culture (exemplified by the Green Corn ceremony and Chikena’s prophecy) could perhaps enable the community in the town of

Wynema to analyze and resist some aggressions of the dominant society, could perhaps shape its vision of the future. Callahan ultimately suggests, however, that it may be necessary to let more traditional forms of Indian culture, which she perceives as already beleaguered and crumbling, continue to disintegrate in order for the assimilating community to receive strength and sustenance from white religion, white education, and white economic development. Callahan finally represents Indians as simple, needy, dependent people who are eager to shed their backward traditions and embrace white missionaries, white teachers, telegraphs, and railroads—and whatever else will swiftly bring them the more benevolent forms of modernization. William Jones takes a quite

52 different tact in his literary writings, which portray traditional culture not as an obstacle to modernization, but as a valuable alternative through which Native Americans can form pan-tribal alliances that promote survival and resistance.

* * *

Veering from the White Man’s Road: the Anti-Assimilation Writings of William Jones

In the legend “Anoska Nimiwina” (1899), William Jones suggests that the strength and sustenance pan-tribal communities need to survive the modernizing world can be derived not from the dominant culture (which often opposes and misrepresents

Indian communities), but from their own worldviews and lifeways. From his grandmother Kitiqua, Jones learned the Fox language, as well as a significant body of traditional knowledge about herbal medicines, rituals, and other Fox customs. 54 He was later sent to White’s Indiana Manual Labor Institute in Wabash, Indiana (where he may have met Gertrude Simmons, who was later known as Zitkala-Ša); Jones also studied at

Hampton Institute, Philips Andover Academy, Harvard College, and Columbia

University. He published several short stories, Indian tales, and articles in the Harvard

Monthly in 1899 and 1900 before turning to anthropology. Jones’s work as a collector and translator resulted in significant publications such as Fox Texts (1904) and Kickapoo

54 Henry Rideout reports that Fox’s grandmother raised him following the death of his mother: “for nine years, she took care of her little charge. Katiqua could understand English, but would have nothing to do with the speaking of it; and so they two used always the Indian tongue. Their wigwam was of bark, with raised platforms along either side, on which were spread gay blankets or bright-colored mats of woven rushes…. It was in the ancient order, the prairie faith, and the old vanishing tradition that his grandmother nurtured him. She was an Indian of the highest Fox clan—the Eagle—was a chief’s daughter born to lead, and with all the force of a strong character clung to the legends and customs of her tribe.” Rideout also quotes at length from notes written by one of Jones’s friends: “this grandmother had the gift of healing, was what is known as a medicine woman…. She knew the medicinal values of many roots and herbs, and could brew from them remedies for various disorders external and internal. These things the child sought in the woods and on the prairies by his grandmother’s side, attended her while they and queerer potions were being compounded at home, heard and remembered much of the lore connected with them, and saw them applied at the sick bed or administered at the dance. Preparations for the feasts and various tribal functions became a matter of familiarity to him” (10 – 12). 53

Tales (1907). As a writer and anthropologist, Jones sought to challenge the national folk imaginary. In his article “Frederic Remington’s Pictures of Frontier Life” (1899), Jones complains that Remington interchangeably represents all Indians as Sioux, including the

Algonquians of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha,” and that

Remington’s “grotesque, exaggerated” illustrations erase the distinctions among Indians who differ in “languages, customs, beliefs, and to a very marked degree, in physical type.” While Jones does not directly refer to Remington’s written and illustrated accounts of the Ghost Dance and the Wounded Knee Massacre that had appeared in

Harper’s Weekly, he suggests that these too would have been unsatisfactory, and “on the border of caricature.” Although Remington “saw a great deal of the Sioux, and got to know them so well” that it limited his ability to draw Indians who weren’t Sioux, Jones believes Remington is generally “out of sympathy with Indians” and in sympathy with soldiers: “he is the one man who knows how to tell the people over there in civilization how disagreeable and thankless it is [for soldiers] campaigning against Indians on the arid alkaline plains” (187 – 188).

In addition to rebuking Remington, Jones also counters the dominant society’s folk imaginary with his representations of the customs and beliefs of the Sac Indians in the legend “Anoska Nimiwina.” In the opening frame, Jones describes “a dance of peace” that spread from the Plains Indians to the Indians of the Rocky Mountains.55 The interior myth is about how the Indian woman Shaskasi carried the spirit of peace from

Gisha Munetoa to the men of two warring nations; according to the narrator, “this version

55 According to Littlefield and Parins, “Jones probably had first or second-hand knowledge of the Ghost Dance among the Sac and Fox. In 1890, for instance, J. Y. Bryce, a Methodist circuit rider, witnessed a dance on his first visit to the reservation. During that visit, his interpreter was Henry C. Jones, William's father” (25). 54 of the myth… has probably never before appeared in print” (105). While commodification, expropriation, and romanticization have often surrounded the publishing of Indian myths, Jones complicates those tendencies by using the frame to historicize and contextualize the myth of Shaskasi. The frame also challenges the national folk imaginary’s representation and naming of the Ghost Dance. Insisting that although “some have scoffed at and have branded [the ceremony] with such scornful epithets as the ‘Ghost Dance’ and the ‘Messiah Craze,’” the narrator reveals that it is called by another name among Indians: to the Sac “and those who join with them in singing its songs, in dancing its dance, and in praying its prayers, it is the Anoska

Nimiwina, a dance of peace” (104).

In the frame, the narrator participates in the dance, hears its origin myth from the chieftain, and suggests that the values and spirituality embodied by the dance (which “did not begin to subside till the winter of 1890; and not yet has it spent its force”) have been tools of resistance that can continue to serve Indian communities in the future. While the

Ghost Dance was often perceived as a violent threat to the dominant culture, Jones argues that it should be understood as a dance of peace that has united a number of Plains Indian tribes and gives them a viable way of coping with their many injustices and frustrations: broken treaties, loss of land due to allotment, the outbreak of disease, the failure of the crops that Indians had been forced to plant, and corrupt reservation officials.

The narrator suggests that the dance of peace is a powerful spiritual response to these injustices and to “the little joy there was in being shut up on a reservation like a wild steer in a corral” (102). Here, Jones reformulates the trope of wildness to contrast life in Native communities before white encroachments with the diminished freedoms

55 brought by assimilation, allotment, and the reservation system. The dance of peace provides “help and consolation” for the Indian of the late nineteenth century who “veer[s] from the ‘white man’s road,’ and turn[s] with all his soul and body to Gisha Munetoa”

(103). Men, women, and children from the Sac, Kiowa, Comanche, Caddoe, Shawnee,

Delaware, and Kickapoo nations come to a Sac village on the Canadian River, where they join together in ceremonial dancing, singing, praying, drumming, and pipe-smoking. The

Sac chieftain asks Gisha Munetoa to “help us to stand together in the moons and in the winters to come,” and prays “that there shall be no more war among the nations.” While

Callahan and numerous writers claim that the Ghost Dancers danced themselves to exhaustion, frenzy, or death, the participants in the dance of peace that Jones describes are orderly, attentive, and hospitable: “whenever a dancer sat down in his place to rest, there stepped before him [a Sac] young man [to give him] a long peace-pipe” (104).

The folk culture practiced here may incorporate the traditions of an older time, but it is represented as dynamic and relevant, not static and timeless. Just as Jones has prepared a version of the Shaskasi myth that can be printed for an English-reading audience of the late nineteenth century, the contemporary dance in the frame adapts the dance initiated by Shaskasi in an earlier time. Gisha Munetoa gave the dance to Shaskasi as a means of communicating “the spirit of peace” and of stopping the conflicts between

“two nations in the North” (105). Similarly, the Sac chieftain uses the dance to give his community and their neighbors “a vehicle for preserving Indian culture and an opportunity… to regain some of their lost dignity” (Littlefield and Parins 25). Through the dance of peace, the newly formed pan-tribal community responds to the problems

56 caused by allotment and other white interferences, while also enacting the cohesion they will need to survive in the future.

Shaskasi is a fitting heroine for the tale because she possesses social, spiritual, environmental, and cultural intelligences. She is “loved by all her nation;” the elders

“whisper good reports of her.” While the tale’s narrator may feel like a wild steer penned in a corral, Shaskasi seems “buoyed up by the strength of a mysterious power” as she outruns the enemy’s warriors and completes the tasks that Gisha Munetoa has assigned her (105, 107). The unfenced prairie and butte that Shaskasi travels over contrasts with the land around the Canadian River as the narrator knows it—land which is being changed by what Jones later describes as “a disfiguring ugliness—windmills, oil wells, wire fences, go to so and so for drugs, go to another for groceries” (qtd. in Rideout 120).

Guided by Gisha Munetoa, Shaskasi plucks the grasses that are transformed into drum sticks, then enters the enemy’s village to retrieve the wooden vessel that is transformed into a drum. As she nears her village, she listens carefully and interprets a coyote’s

“laughing, crackling yelp,” a gray wolf’s “prolonged moan,” and “the screeching of rattle-snake owls.” Although she worries that the animals are “signal[ing] her home- coming as a danger to the village,” she is able to remember “her mission” because she keeps “hearing the words of Gisha Munetoa.” Inside the village, she beats the drum and sings the song that Gisha Munetoa gives her. Although it sounds like an “old war song,” in this context it takes on the function of making peace between two warring nations. As

Shaskasi sings and drums, her people begin to sing and dance. Hearing “the great chorus” and “the whoops and the yells of the dancers,” the enemy nation returns. They, too, participate in the dance, and then the warriors of both nations “while smoking

57 together the pipes of peace, [listen] to the words of Shaskasi, the young woman, telling them that war between them was over” (108 – 111).

Like Shaskasi, the Sac chieftain in the tale’s frame possesses multiple intelligences; through the tale and the dance of peace, he passes these intelligences to and helps sustain the narrator, the Sac, and the other Indian nations. “Anoska Nimiwina” appears to have been one of Jones’s better-known fictional works; after appearing in the

Harvard Monthly, it was reprinted in the Southern Workman and partially reprinted

(without the opening frame) in the Journal of American Folklore. Unlike Callahan, who suggests that Indians may need to surrender any Indian lifeway or worldview that hinders assimilation, Jones suggests that traditional culture can play a vital role in helping the Sac and other Indians survive the dominant society, its misrepresentations of Indians, and its greed for land. Jones and Zitkala-Ša both depict Indians in ways that contest the dominant society’s folk imaginary, suggest that traditional culture can contribute to the survival of Native communities, and call for tribal land rights. While the broad program of reforms that Zitkala-Ša advocates has sometimes been simplistically labeled as assimilationist or integrationist, in the next section I argue that it is better understood as a plan of mutual Americanization.

* * *

Zitkala-Ša: Mutual Americanization

In the 1921 pamphlet “Americanize the First American: a Plan of Regeneration,” the Yankton Sioux writer Gertrude Simmons Bonnin gives a nightmarish and partly surreal account of the 1918-19 influenza epidemic that struck the Pine Ridge Reservation

58 in South Dakota. Bonnin, often known by her pen name of Zitkala-Ša, reports that 7,500

“widely scattered” Oglala Lakota Sioux were living in “low log huts,” that over half of them became sick, and that they were mostly neglected by “Government physicians” who preferred not to “vie with the [winter] wind” (242). According to some estimates, four hundred Oglala died (Britten 154). Zitkala-Ša describes the Oglala prairie-lands during the epidemic as “a profoundly silent sea” where the huts appear to be houseboats. She imagines that “a captain on one of these strange crafts wirelessed to me an ‘S.O.S.’” and also sent to her a grim update: “Many of these houseboats are set adrift with a funeral pyre for burial at sea” (242).

In several ways, “Americanize the First American” is typical of the writings that

Zitkala-Ša published over a twenty-four year period56. A Yankton Sioux who participated in Dakota intellectual and literary traditions and sometimes wrote in the

Dakota dialect of the Siouan language, Zitkala-Ša sometimes wrote about other tribes as well, especially after joining the Society of American Indians (a pan-tribal advocacy organization) in 1914.57 Appealing to the “womanhood of America,” she protests the silencing of Indians (whom she calls “a voiceless people”) and the marginalization of their communities (which have been forced onto “small remnants of land not shown on our maps”). A long-time critic of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Zitkala-Ša charges the federal government with “inefficiency and criminal neglect” for failing to help “the sick and dying Sioux.” She also argues that Indians must be given “American citizenship,”

56 Zitkala-Ša’s first national publication was “Impressions of an Indian Childhood” in Atlantic Monthly in 1900; her final publication appears to have been Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians: An Orgy of Graft and Exploitation of the Five Civilized Tribes, Legalized Robbery, a report that she co-authored in 1924.

57 In identifying Zitkala-Ša as a Yankton Sioux who wrote about the Dakota, I take my cues from Hafen (“Introduction” 32), James H. Cox (194), and Penelope Myrtle Kelsey (13)—and from Zitkala-Ša herself, who identifies many characters in Old Indian Legends (1901) and American Indian Stories (1921) as Dakota. 59 claiming that “a prolonged wardship… has had its blighting effect upon the Indian race” and that “Indians are virtually prisoners of war in America” because the reservation system has placed them in “solitary isolation from the world” (243 – 244). Zitkala-Ša’s call for Americanization should not be mistaken for an endorsement of total assimilation or acculturation; rather, her call functions as “a request for re-entrance into a democratic world destroyed by Europeans” (Cox 189), and as a response to the conditions of voicelessness and wardship.

Calling for legal (rather than cultural) Americanization, Zitkala-Ša argues that

Indians must be offered naturalization, “educational advantages,” and “American opportunities,” as well as “freedom to do their own thinking… and to manage their own personal business” (“Americanize” 244, “Bureaucracy” 246).58 While she brings up

Junior Red Cross activities, refers to the wireless and “the defense of democracy,” and makes other references to postwar modernity, Zitkala-Ša resists the national folk imaginary’s assumption that traditional Indian culture is outdated and unsuitable for contemporary times. Reporting that Indians love their children greatly and respect them because they are “spirits from another realm, come for a brief sojourn on earth,” Zitkala-

Ša affirms that such a child-rearing philosophy demonstrates “humanitarian[ism]” and

“progress,” and that it “place[s] the Indian abreast with the most advanced thought of the age” (243 – 244). In “Americanize the First American,” and in many of her writings,

Zitkala-Ša affirms Native primacy and argues for a kind of mutual Americanization, in which European Americans return the legal rights they took from Native Americans and

58 As it is usually understood, the term “Americanization” refers to “a cultural phenomenon rather than a legal one…. It represents a conservative social pressure, exerted on individuals or groups who are (or are perceived to be) culturally marginalized, to become integrated into ‘mainstream culture,’ whatever that may be at any given time…. Americanization [has often been] the process of becoming more like, or more accepted by, the Protestant dominant culture” (Mazur 62). 60 both groups appreciate the cultural benefits they have gained from one another.59 In doing so, she suggests that European Americans should continue to improve themselves through the reverse assimilation of Native worldviews and lifeways.

* * *

The Oral Tradition of Woyakapi

Zitkala-Ša’s first book, Old Indian Legends, was published in 1901. These legends feature the trickster Iktomi and other mythological characters, and are adaptations of the Dakota oral tradition of ohunkakan, which Ella Deloria (Yankton

Sioux) characterizes as “tales” that are distant “from the events of every day life of the

Dakota people,” that may be thought of as “a sort of hang-over… from a different age, even from an order of beings different from ourselves” (xxv). These tales, Zitkala-Ša claims in the preface, are “relics of our country’s once virgin soil” that now “belong quite as much to the blue-eyed little patriot as to the black-haired aborigine.” She also asserts that English is a “second tongue” that America has gained “in the last few centuries,” and that the “study of Indian folklore… strongly suggests our near kinship with the rest of humanity and points a steady finger toward the great brotherhood of mankind” (vi). In her second book, American Indian Stories (1921), while Zitkala-Ša continues to argue that “all are akin,” she is less inclined to describe traditional culture as a historical relic

(104). Instead, she offers many examples of the ways in which traditional culture

59 In “Indian Gifts to Civilized Man,” Zitkala-Ša praises the government’s decision not to segregate Native American and white soldiers, which has made possible “a close companionship [that] promises mutual benefits” (185). Gary Totten suggests a Native American expectation of mutuality from Euro-Americans in his reading of Zitkala-Ša’s “Americanize the First American” and her 1919 “Editorial Comment.” By extending hospitality to the first European immigrants, Native Americans made it possible for them to achieve self-determination; Zitkala-Ša informs her audience that “it is the American Indian who now desires the same self-determination” (110). 61 demonstrates not only relationship “with the rest of humanity,” but also improves humanity in the present.

Blending “personal, cultural, sacred, literary, historical, and political discourses”—and, I would add, bureaucratic discourse—American Indian Stories is a generically ambiguous collection of ten pieces that elude easy categorization (Spack 39).

Zitkala-Ša seems to incorporate and sometimes fictionalize personal and tribal experiences in at least seven of the “stories;” throughout the collection, she interweaves elements of oral and written traditions with observations of self and community, drawing on the forms that Hertha Dawn Wong names “communo-bio-oratory (community-life- speaking)” and “auto-ethnography (self-culture-writing)” (6). Thus, the pieces could be said to adapt the Dakota oral tradition of woyakapi, defined by Ella Deloria as “stories which are accepted as having happened to our people in comparatively recent times” as well as “simple accounts of events that took place in the local band” (xvi).60 These true stories, according to Luther Standing Bear (Oglala Lakota Sioux), “are told by the older ones in the tribe to the younger… [and include] many main events and historical happenings of the tribe” (ix). The woyakapi were sometimes used to “entertain guests or introduce visitors to the way of the community” (Martinez 30 - 31). The adapted woyakapi of American Indian Stories reveal Zitkala-Ša’s complex relationship with her local band and tribe, and reflect on her life as a girl in what she later calls “the open

Indian country,” as a boarding school student and teacher, and as an activist and reformer

(“Letter to the Chiefs” 199). Employing several aspects of woyakapi, Zitkala-Ša introduces the readers of American Indian Stories to the traditional lifeways of her

60 Critics have not yet read American Indian Stories as a collection of woyakapi. For critics who claim that Old Indian Legends should be read as a collection of ohunkakan, see Agnes Picotte (xi – xvi), Ruth Heflin (115 – 123), James Cox (189), and Jeffery Myers (115 – 122). 62 community, analyzes important recent events, and offers an expanded vision of the role of traditional culture in the modernizing world. While Old Indian Legends represents traditional culture as a “relic” of the past that affirms Native primacy, humanity, and kinship with all other peoples, in American Indian Stories Zitkala-Ša argues that traditional culture is a present and potent resource that bolsters the arguments of indigenous peoples for naturalization and immediate civil rights, including enfranchisement and tribal land rights.

Between 1900 and 1902, Zitkala-Ša studied music in Boston. During this time, she published the first seven woyakapi of American Indian Stories in magazines such as

Harper’s and Atlantic Monthly. Zitkala Ša then returned to Indian Country to work among the Sioux at the Standing Rock Agency in South Dakota. She did not write the final three woyakapi of American Indian Stories until after she moved to Washington,

D.C., in 1916. In the intervening years, she had married Raymond T. Bonnin (also a

Yankton Sioux); they primarily lived at the Uintah and Ouray Agency in Utah, where she taught, did community service, and in 1913 collaborated on The Sun Dance (an opera that adapted traditional Sioux music and featured Ute performers). After moving to

Washington, Zitkala-Ša worked as the secretary of the Society of American Indians (SAI) and later edited its quarterly magazine, The American Indian; Raymond studied law, worked in the Army Quartermaster's office, and served overseas during World War I.

Zitkala-Ša expressed her activism during these years through her involvement with SAI causes, through her participation in the Red Cross and women’s clubs, through lecturing and pamphleteering, through campaigning against peyotism, and through her return to autobiographical, polemical, and political writing. This return yielded several poems,

63 editorials, and public letters that appeared in The American Indian, as well as what would become the final three woyakapi of American Indian Stories (1921): “A Dream of Her

Grandfather,” “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman,” and America’s

Indian Problem.”61

Tending to disregard the last three woyakapi of American Indian Stories, many critics have made imprecise or faulty assessments about Zitkala-Ša and her body of work.

Some suggest that the woyakapi “Why I Am a Pagan” (published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1902 and later revised, probably in the late 1910s) was her last autobiographical writing or even her final literary work; others periodize Zitkala-Ša as a turn-of-the- century or a nineteenth century writer; many avoid reading American Indian Stories as “a continuous (if nonlinear) narrative” (Davidson and Norris 67).62 Such assessments, I argue, have circumvented a fuller and more nuanced reading of American Indian

Stories— a reading that accounts for Zitkala-Ša’s autobiographical persona becoming not only a boarding school teacher but also an activist and reformer, while also considering the broader context of her involvement with the SAI. Founded in 1911 by Charles

Eastman, Arthur C. Parker (whom I discuss further in the epilogue), and others, the SAI gave Zitkala-Ša and the “Red Progressives” a platform for critiquing the Bureau of Indian

61 According to Susan Rose Dominguez, these “post-World War I stories” were probably written “very close to the date of [the] publication [of American Indian Stories] in 1921 (xvi).

62 Although Hafen observes that “few critics consider the full range of [Zitkala-Ša’s] writing beyond the initial publications during the first decade of the twentieth century” (“Zitkala-Ša: Sentimentality and Sovereignty” 32), Hafen herself seems to give little attention to the final three pieces in American Indian Stories. Roumiana Velikova claims that “Why I Am a Pagan” is “the last known installment in Zitkala- Ša’s autobiographical series” (62). More dramatically, Molly Crumpton Winter claims that “Zitkala-Ša’s literary career ended when she married Raymond T. Bonnin [in 1902]” (22). Essay collections that obscure Zitkala-Ša’s literary activities in the 1910s and early 1920s include Wielding the Pen: Writings on Authorship by American Women of the Nineteenth Century; In Her Own Voice: Nineteenth-century American Women Essayists; and Tricksterism in Turn-of-the-Century American Literature: A Multicultural Perspective. Zitkala-Ša was born in 1876, the same year as Sherwood Anderson and Susan Glaspell; Olive Tilford Dargan was born in 1869; James Weldon Johnson was born in 1871. 64

Affairs; for promoting legal, political, and educational reforms; and for adding their voices to contemporary debates about traditional culture, pan-Indianism, peyotism, assimilation, self-determination, tribal sovereignty, humanitarianism, education, and citizenship.63

The front matter of American Indian Stories (1921) suggests that Zitkala-Ša is bicultural and bilingual, that she is a progressive New Woman seeking a broad audience of like-minded women, and that she is an authority on a number of contemporary issues

(and not merely an outspoken denouncer of Indian boarding schools, as recent critics have typically remembered her). After the half title comes an advertisement for autographed copies of Old Indian Legends and an endorsement from Helen Keller, who praises Zitkala-Ša for her “folk tales… translated into our language in a way that will keep them alive in the hearts of men.” The frontispiece includes a photograph of Zitkala-

Ša in traditional dress and the caption “Zitkala-Ša (Gertrude Bonnin), a Dakota Sioux

Indian.” The title page repeats her Dakota pen name, her married name, and her ethnicity, and further identifies her as “lecturer; author of Old Indian Legends,

‘Americanize The First American,’ and other stories; Member of the Woman's National

Foundation, League of American Pen-Women, and the Washington Salon.”

Another reason to read American Indian Stories as a book that repurposes the folk imaginary of the dominant society in the postwar Progressive Era—as a text that attempts to attract and radicalize female readers (especially clubwomen and suffragists) by

63 According to Todd Leahy and Raymond Wilson, the SAI called for “better relations between Indians and non-Indians, improved economic and educational opportunities for Indians, and U.S. citizenship for all Indians” (156). Through advocating for these and other reforms, the SAI reshaped “the ideals of the Progressive Era to include Indians” (156). Joy Porter compares the SAI to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People; she argues that the SAI “was run by and for the emerging educated Indian middle class had the same essential goals as non-Indian reform associations,” and that its goal, like that of non-Indian reform associations, was “final detribalization and the individual absorption of Indians into American society as patriotic citizens” (847). 65 teaching them to value many aspects of Dakota culture—is that Zitkala-Ša revises the

1902 woyakapi “Why I Am a Pagan” and re-titles it “The Great Spirit.” Although the new title seems to indicate that Zitkala-Ša is less opposed to Christianity, both versions emphasize her traditional worldview and her appreciation of the prairie’s “natural garden,” where she “love[s] to roam leisurely among the green hills” (101, 107). This description of Zitkala-Ša roaming the prairies as an adult recalls similar experiences narrated elsewhere in American Indian Stories: as a child Zitkala-Ša was “wild with surplus spirits, and found joyous relief in running loose in the open” (21). Zitkala-Ša suggests that her Dakota beliefs restore to her the sensations of embodiment and “wild” movement in open spaces that the boarding school had tried to eradicate; running over the prairies is one of her ways of refusing “the new superstition” of her Christianized mother and the “bigoted creed” of the Dakota man who is now a Christian preacher (105, 106).

While the 1902 version concludes with Zitkala-Ša claiming rather defiantly that “at present, at least, I am a pagan,” the 1921 revision deletes that assertion and ends much more ambiguously by sharing a visionary experience: “I am awakened by the fluttering robe of the Great Spirit. To my innermost consciousness the phenomenal universe is a royal mantle, vibrating with His divine breath. Caught in its flowing fringes are the spangles and oscillating brilliants of sun, moon, and stars” (107). As the Great Spirit is an amorphous symbol that can be traced to “early Christian influence” on Indian worldviews and that went on to enjoy widespread appeal, it is hard to tell if the 1921 revision is Zitkala-Ša’s move toward accommodation or toward a more stealthy subversion (Bell 64).64

64 Some whites believed that “ethical worship of the Great Spirit” could be “a variant form of Protestant Christianity” (Jenkins 14). 66

While some critics have detected allusions to the American flag in the “spangles” and “stars” of the last sentence, we should also consider the meaning of the sun, moon, and stars in traditional Dakota cosmology, as well as the importance of the star imagery that recurs throughout American Indian Stories.65 Zitkala-Ša describes stars as guardians, and as witnesses to prayers to the Great Spirit; they are frequently mentioned as part of the setting on the nights when “the neighboring old men and women” and her mother share ohunkakan and woyakapi, as well as “sacred knowledge” about Dakota lifeways

(13, 134). In “The Trial Path,” a grandmother tells an ohunkakan about the stars to her adult granddaughter: “the legend says the large bright stars are wise old warriors, and the small dim ones are handsome young braves;” the granddaughter replies that the star

“peeping in at the smoke-hole yonder is my dear old grandfather” (127). Like other

Sioux intellectuals, Zitkala-Ša suggests the profound connections between the Great

Spirit, grandparents and other ancestors, and celestial objects.66 Although Christianity has distanced her from her mother, although the Dakota preacher speaks against “the folly of our old beliefs,” Zitkala-Ša’s final vision seems to affirm the close bonds that connect her to the Great Spirit, her ancestors, and the elders from whom she learned ohunkakan and woyakapi.

* * *

65 Roumiana Velikova finds that the mantle of the Great Spirit suggests “a naturalized version of the American flag” and an “eclectic poetic abstraction” (61), while Gary Totten believes that “the symbols of the American flag are caught in the fringes of the Great Spirit's mantle” (113).

66 According to Vine Deloria, the Dakota “reverenced” and “prayed to” the sun, moon, and stars, among other natural objects (94); Black Elk addressed the Great Spirit as grandfather, as do the Dakota in Ella Deloria’s ethnographic novel Waterlily. 67

Never Made for Relics

In the woyakapi of American Indian Stories, Zitkala-Ša asserts the importance of traditional culture by employing what Penelope Myrtle Kelsey calls “tribal forms of self- narration” (68). According to Kelsey, the opening woyakapi of American Indian Stories draw on tribal forms (including the landscape narrative, the educational tale, and the dream narrative) to create “a firmly resistant narrative of Dakota history in [Zitkala-Ša ’s] self-fashioning” (68). In the three concluding woyakapi of American Indian Stories,

Zitkala-Ša similarly uses several tribal forms of narration that account for the comparatively recent history of the Dakota and reveal the ways of her community.

Countering the national folk imaginary, Zitkala-Ša represents the Dakota in particular and the “American aborigine” more generally as makers of culture, initiators of reform, humanitarians, and hospitable hosts who are fit for and deserving of immediate citizenship and enfranchisement (185). Critics have offered varying and sometimes conflicting classifications of the multiple “forms and genres of Western, or first world literature” that Zitkala-Ša mixes together in American Indian Stories (Krupat 214).67

These classifications might be more satisfying or more useful if they more fully acknowledged American Indian Stories as a work of “indigenous literature,” which

Arnold Krupat defines as “a type of writing produced when an author of subaltern cultural identification manages successfully to merge forms internal to his cultural

67 For example, Ruth Spack claims that American Indian Stories is comprised of three fictional sketches, an essay, five stories, and a polemical article (25 – 42). Vanessa Holford Diana offers a divergent classification, reporting that it includes three autobiographical stories, an essay, three “fictional short stories,” another essay, a short story, and a final essay (154 -173). Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris describe the book as containing “an autobiographical narrative” and “a series of three stories centered around a female hero,” but do not classify the final three woyakapi that I focus on in this chapter (67). According to Susan Rose Dominguez, the contents include “autobiographical sketches, romantic fiction, legends, a dream-story, an allegory, and an essay” (v). Gary Totten suggests more homogeneity when he refers to the “essays and fiction” of American Indian Stories (86). 68 formation with forms external to it, but pressing upon, even seeking to delegitimate it”

(214). American Indian Stories by Zitkala-Ša shares key affinities with the oral tradition of woyakapi described by Ella Deloria, with what Kelsey calls tribal forms of self- narration, and with the cultural formations of indigenous literature as described by

Krupat. Paying attention to these affinities, in both Zitkala-Ša ’s woyakapi from the early years of the twentieth century and in the last three that she wrote after she moved to

Washington in 1916, can open important new perspectives for understanding her body of work.

For example, Zitkala-Ša repurposes the traditional forms of the dream narrative and the educational tale for her project of contemporary activism and resistance not only in the earlier (and more obviously autobiographical) woyakapi “The School Days of an

Indian Girl,” but also in “A Dream of Her Grandfather.” This brief post-1916 woyakapi offers a glimpse of a Dakota woman who follows her grandfather’s example of

“humanitarian work” by traveling to Washington, D.C., where she concerns herself with

“problems for welfare work among her people” (156). The woman, whom I refer to as a

Dakota activist, often seems to be Zitkala-Ša’s public persona and appears in each of the last three woyakapi—first as the granddaughter of a humanitarian medicine man, then as an “American woman” who works in Washington and is a friend of Chief High Flier, and lastly as a first-person narrator who quotes from—and effectively authenticates—a negative report on the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Zitkala-Ša contextualizes the Dakota activist’s work as part of the history of the Dakota (and of Native Americans more broadly), and as a continuation of their efforts to negotiate with and resist those who seek to delegitimize Native communities, including the first English and Spanish colonizers,

69 white treaty-breakers of the nineteenth century, land grafters, reservation officials, and bureaucrats.

In “A Dream,” the Dakota activist’s grandfather was a medicine man, renowned healer, and member of a delegation that journeyed to Washington “in behalf of peace among men;” he had been part of “the first band of the Great Sioux Nation to make treaties with the government in the hope of bringing about an amicable arrangement between the red and white Americans” (155). It is important to note that in Zitkala-Ša’s writings, the term “American” includes people of both European and Native descent.

The grandfather’s values of peace and mutual amicability reflect what Penelope Myrtle

Kelsey calls “Dakota principles of right relationship and reciprocity” (25).68 During the

Dakota activist’s childhood, her bicultural education gave her fluency in “the white man’s tongue” as well as an appreciation for her community’s woyakapi about her grandfather’s healing abilities. She also learned about the importance of traditional culture when she was scolded because she “coveted [her grandfather’s] medicine bags, beaded and embroidered in porcupine quills, in symbols designed by [him]. Well did she remember her merited rebuke that such things were never made for relics. Treasures came in due time to those ready to receive them” (156 – 157). Here, Zitkala-Ša suggests that her understanding of traditional culture has deepened since her description of it as

“relics of our country’s once virgin soil” in the preface to Old Indian Legends. The

68 As expressions of their Dakota worldview and lifeways, the grandfather’s humanitarianism and the granddaughter’s welfare work differ importantly from the humanitarianism of the dominant society, which is William M. Morgan defines as “a style of moral reasoning characterized by a secular concern for the conditions of others.” During Reconstruction, this secular humanitarianism diminished among the middle class due to their “fears of labor strife, immigration, and racial difference and mobility;” late in the nineteenth century, secular humanitarianism was revived and “bureaucratiz[ed] by a new professional class with aspirations toward scientific management, social control, and imperial conquest” (7). While some techniques of scientific management and social control may be useful to the Dakota activist in her career as a professional welfare advocate, it is her Dakota culture that sustains her and provides her with alternative ideals and ways of knowing. 70

Dakota activist in “A Dream” learns that traditional culture should be valued not as a relic of the past, but as a resource of the future that, “in due time,” will become useful to those who are “ready to receive.”

In Washington, the Dakota activist is reminded of the difference between a relic and a treasure when she dreams that her grandfather sends her a cedar chest that is “clean, strong and durable in its native genuineness.” Although at first she hopes that the chest contains “regalia or trinkets,” she soon realizes that it contains something far more meaningful: a lightweight material that is “dream-stuff, suspended in the thin air, filling the inclosure of the cedar wood container. As she looked upon it, the picture grew more and more real, exceeding the proportions of the chest. It was all so illusive a breath might have blown it away; yet there it was, real as life,—a circular camp of white cone- shaped tepees, astir with Indian people” (157). The people in the camp include the chieftain’s Dakota-speaking crier, who urges his listeners to “rejoice” and to believe that

“help is near.” As the Dakota activist receives this vision and gains “new hope for her people,” her humanitarian work is strengthened by her bond with her deceased grandfather and by her affiliation with traditional culture (158).

* * *

“A Piece of Earth Is My Birthright”

While the Dakota activist’s work for Indian welfare in “A Dream” may call to mind Zitkala-Ša’s career as a progressive reformer in Washington, the land allotment conflict in “The Widespread Enigma Concerning Blue-Star Woman” seems to have been inspired by Zitkala-Ša ’s knowledge of Ellen Bluestone, who attempted to secure an

71 allotment from the Yankton Reservation in 1920 (Smith 58).69 In “The Widespread

Enigma,” Zitkala-Ša adapts the landscape narrative to reveal not only how “the entwining of land and community [contributes to] the formulation of [the] self” (Kelsey 69), but also how the loss of land and community results in the deforming of the self. Because her parents died when she was young and because she lacks the necessary legal documents, Blue-Star Woman is ineligible for a land allotment of her own; she depends on the resources of her generous neighbors, who perform some of the benevolent work that had been done by benevolent White-Horse-Riders in “bygone days.”70 Although she believes that “a piece of my earth is my birthright,” although “friendly spirits, the unseen ones” direct her to the home of a neighbor who gives her food, Blue Star Woman further damages her connection to the land and her relationship to the community—and thus her own self-concept—when she takes unethical measures to satisfy the requirements of the allotment laws (159, 161, 169 -170). Unable to “establish the facts of [her] identity” and convinced that her “individual name seems to mean nothing,” the question of “‘Who am

I?’ [has] become the obsessing riddle of her life” (159, 163, 168). Stated another way,

Blue-Star Woman’s inability to claim an identity, to answer the question of who she is, seems to be both cause and effect of her inability to claim part of the land as her own.

The allotment that Blue-Star Woman secures—through the duplicity of two young

Native men who are fluent in English and who dress like “would-be white men”—may gain land for her, but this acquisition diminishes her standing in the community and her

69 According to LaVonne Ruoff, Zitkala-Ša “successfully fought [Ellen Bluestone’s] petition” (“Early Native American Women Authors” (111).

70 Blue-Star Woman later gives this account of “the order of the White-Horse-Riders”: they were “brave young men [who[ sought out the aged, the poor, the widows and orphans to aid them, but they did their good work without pay. The White-Horse-Riders are gone. The times are changed” (169 – 170). 72 self-integrity (165). She agrees to give half of her allotment to the young Native grafters who aided her; Chief High Flier suggests that Blue-Star Woman and others like her are

“the pitifully weak [who sell] their lands for a pot of porridge” (174). Chief High Flier believes that Blue-Star Woman belongs to a different tribe, that the federal government

[which he personifies as “Washington”] should “give her some of his land and his money,” and that her allotment will cause “little children of [his] tribe” to lose land and go hungry. The breaking of “ancient laws,” Chief High Flier believes, has resulted in “a slow starving race [that is] growing mad.” In Chief High Flier’s formulation, self, community, and land are profoundly interconnected; right relationship and reciprocity must be maintained among all three. Describing the federal government’s allotment laws as a display of “autocratic power in disposing of the wards’ property,” the text suggests to readers that Native Americans must be given cultural sovereignty and full citizenship (not wardship) in order to cope with “madness”—the disintegration of identity and community that has been caused by land theft, treaty violations, the corruption of bureaucratic government, and the denial of “human rights” (172 – 174, 178).

To protest Blue-Star Woman’s fraudulent allotment, Chief High Flier initially plans to mail a letter to a “prominent American woman” (i.e., the Dakota activist) that he had dictated to his granddaughter. On his way to the post office, an “inner voice” tells him that mailing the letter will accomplish nothing. Stopping near the home of the reservation superintendent, Chief High Flier chants “a bravery song” and burns the letter, believing that the Dakota activist will nevertheless receive “his message [sent] on the wings of fire” (172-173, 175-176). The Indian police arrest him; although they try to

73 delegitimize his public assertion of a Dakota worldview and lifeways, these continue to be a source of encouragement for him in jail.

As Zitkala-Ša seems to have a vision that affirms her spiritual identity in “The

Great Spirit,” and as the Dakota activist in “A Dream” has a vision of a traditional tepee camp, so Chief High Flier has a vision that empowers him, helps him “to serve his jail sentence with a mute dignity which baffled those who saw him,” and gives him the hope of greater freedom for his community (180). For many Native American Plains peoples, dreams and visions confirm “the reality and power of [Native American] cosmologic structures” while strengthening the individual (Irwin 28). In “The Great Spirit,” the vision is more individual; in “A Dream,” it is more communal; in “The Widespread

Enigma,” it is more cross-cultural:

Lo, his good friend, the American woman to whom he had sent his

messages by fire, now stood there a legion! A vast multitude of women, with

uplifted hands, gazed upon a huge stone image. Their upturned faces were eager

and very earnest…. The myriad living hands remained uplifted till the stone

woman began to show signs of life. Very majestically she turned around, and, lo,

she smiled upon this great galaxy of American women. She was the Statue of

Liberty! It was she, who, though representing human liberty, formerly turned her

back upon the American aborigine. Her face was aglow with compassion. Her

eyes swept across the outspread continent of America, the home of the red man.

At this moment her torch flamed brighter and whiter till its radiance

reached into the obscure and remote places of the land. Her light of liberty

penetrated Indian reservations (179 - 180).

In Chief High Flier’s vision, Zitkala-Ša juxtaposes “home” with “reservations,” liberty’s light with obscure places, the earnest multitude of female bodies with the initially lifeless stone figure. The injustices and corruptions of American modernity are represented here by the stone figure (a meaningless symbol until the activists empower it), the Indian reservations, and the obscurity (darkness, un-enlightenment, and remoteness) that has been forced on them. Zitkala-Ša, however, does not represent Indians as a backward folk who are in some way antithetical to America and modernity. Mobilized by the Dakota activist, the “galaxy of American women” (that is, a group that may include both white and Native women) animates the stone figure, which is lifeless because it ignores the plight of “American aborigines.” Here, the “light of liberty” originates with Native

Americans; as white women join the Dakota activist in support of liberty, its light becomes “whiter” and reaches Indians who have been “obscured” by the reservation system and other diminishments of liberty. Thus, Zitkala-Ša ’s juxtaposition of light and obscurity does very different work from Callahan’s (as I discussed earlier in the chapter).

As portrayed by Callahan, Indians are often an untutored folk awaiting the light of modernization and assimilation. As portrayed by Zitkala-Ša, Indians (such as Chief High

Flier and the Dakota activist) initiate and sustain reform movements; refusing passivity, dependence, and marginalization, they identify home not as the reservations, but as “the outspread continent of America.” As the Dakota activist plays an important part in resuscitating the Statue of Liberty, so liberty and other Indian values should play an important part in Americanizing modern Americans. These values—the truthfulness, mercy “to the poor,” and “moral cleanliness” that Chief High Flier prizes, the “good work” of the White Horse Riders—can provide the foundation needed for the

75 humanitarian and progressive reforms that Zitkala-Ša and her readers will continue to pursue in postwar America (170, 174).

In some ways delegitimized, cut off from his family and his community, apparently unable to communicate in English, the jailed Chief High Flier becomes “the voiceless man of America”—as silenced as the “voiceless” Oglala flu sufferers that

Zitkala-Ša later describes in “Americanize the First American”—and thus he too seems to be in need of Zitkala-Ša ’s version of Americanization (178). Critics have reached different conclusions about whether Zitkala-Ša is calling for change or preservation in

“The Widespread Enigma.” Karen E. Beardslee claims that Zitkala-Ša is promoting “the ancient customary beliefs of the [Dakota]” that have given Blue-Star Woman “her notion of self,” while insisting on “the possibility of wholeness via community involvement and cultural engagement” (114, 116). Jeanne Smith recognizes that the ability of the Dakota to preserve their traditional culture is dependent on their readiness to adapt in “The

Widespread Enigma,” which “presents knowing English as a dubious but necessary power” and as “the only means of preserving” the Dakota community (53). Zitkala-Ša’s idea of Americanization, I argue, creates a productive tension between preservation and change, in which legal and educational reforms are used to help the Dakota maintain their worldview and lifeways (and not to enforce the assimilative changes that would erase all things Dakota).

In “The Widespread Enigma,” Blue-Star Woman represents the dangers of too much change. As a child, she learned “to read the primer and to write her name;” since then, she has learned “to progress in the white man's civilization;” finally, she compromises her Dakota values, loses her integrity, and follows the deceitful example of

76 the “would-be white men.” Chief High Flier, on the other hand, represents the dangers of not enough change; although his adherence to traditional Dakota culture gives him empowering visions and enables him to live according to the values that Blue-Star

Woman abandons, his monolingualism and his “mute dignity” limit his capacity “to defend his own or his people's human rights” and to argue for cultural sovereignty

(180).71

* * *

What Your Bureau of Indian Affairs Really Is

Zitkala-Ša extends her project of drawing on Native American culture to persuade her audience to support Indian citizenship, treaty rights, land ownership, water rights, improvements in education, and other reforms in “America’s Indian Problem,” the final, most obviously polemical, and most experimental woyakapi of American Indian

Stories.72 Editors and critics have not yet adequately contextualized “America’s Indian

Problem” or correctly attributed its authorship to Zitkala-Ša and also to Norman B. Wood and Frederick Cleveland. The first three pages, mostly written by Zitkala-Ša, includes some materials that she quotes and also paraphrases from Wood’s Lives of Famous

71 While Zitkala-Ša generally favors Native cultural sovereignty in American Indian Stories, her work as an activist, lecturer, and editor of The American Indian suggests a more ambivalent stance. According to Kathleen Washburn, Zitkala-Ša “promoted English, often at the cost of native languages, campaigned against the increasingly popular discrepancy Native American Church as a dangerous “peyote cult,” and advocated for U.S. citizenship in place of tribal affiliation and sovereignty” (271). One factor contributing to the inconsistency between Zitkala-Ša’s book and her activism, between her theory and her practice, seems to have been her bias for Sioux cultures. Deborah Welch remarks that “throughout her life, [Zitkala- Ša] had continually promoted the ongoing viability of Indian societies. But Zitkala-Ša had defended those cultures as she defended her identity—within the narrow parameters of Sioux tradition. In speaking of Indian cultures, Zitkala-Ša invariably meant Sioux society” (44).

72 Zitkala-Ša’s “America’s Indian Problem” serves a function within American Indian Stories that resembles the function of “passages that read as if they are from… political pamphlets” in Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored. Political discourse is used by Johnson to “exhort white people to recognize the full humanity, the achievements, and the civil rights of black people” (Smethurst116), and by Zitkala-Ša for similar purposes on behalf of Native Americans. 77

Indian Chiefs (1906). This portion serves to introduce and validate eight pages of subtitled excerpts from Cleveland’s unfavorable report on the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which comprises the remainder of “America’s Indian Problems” and thus concludes

American Indian Stories. “America’s Indian Problem” was also published in the

December 1921 Edict (the “official magazine” of the Illinois Federation of Women’s

Clubs), where it shared space with a photograph of Zitkala-Ša , advertisements for the

Judd Co. Appliance Store and Sally-Smart Frocks, and a blurb that describes the General

Federation Council held the previous June. At this meeting, the clubwomen created a

“Division of Indian Welfare,” listened to Indian music, and heard “Mrs. Bonnin,” “an eloquent speaker,” deliver a speech calling for the Americanization of “the First

Americans… [through] legislation, better education, a voice in their own affairs, and eventually citizenship.”73

In the opening of “America’s Indian Problem,” Zitkala-Ša (as I will call the

Dakota activist, since the two seem inseparable in this woyakapi) includes an interjection that echoes the Dakota oral tradition and suggests that Norman B. Wood might be thought of as a teller of woyakapi: “The hospitality of the American aborigine, it is told, saved the early settlers from starvation” (emphasis added, 185).74 Through the materials

73 In the Penguin Books edition (2003), Cathy N. Davidson and Ada Norris incorrectly claim that “parts of [“American’s Indian Problem”] were culled from an article [Zitkala-Ša] wrote for Edict Magazine, with her own added commentary” (67). In the Bison Books edition (2003), Susan Rose Dominguez likewise omits any mention of Cleveland, but does offer some important details, noting that the essay “grew out of Zitkala- Ša’s impassioned appeal to American women in June 1921… [at] the national convention of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs in Salt Lake City” (xx). No editor or critic has identified Wood’s Lives of Famous Indian Chiefs as an additional source for Zitkala-Ša’s “America’s Indian Problem.”

74 According to Ella Deloria, the woyakapi have conventional endings spoken by the teller and then the listeners: “each [story regarded as true] closes with sk‘e’, it is said; and keya’pi’, they say” (xxvi). 78 on Chief Powhatan and Cofachiqui75 that she adapts from Wood, Zitkala-Ša fiercely condemns the violence, greed, disrespect, and deceit that have been characteristic of

European Christianity for almost four centuries; this condemnation continues and broadens her critiques of Protestant creeds, missionaries, boarding schools, and newspapers in the earlier woyakapi of American Indian Stories.76 The hospitality and sympathy displayed by Chief Powhatan and Cofachiqui were not returned; instead, the

Jamestown colonists “erected ‘a cross as a sign of English dominion’” over Chief

Powhatan and his people, while the conquistadores stole pearls from the graves of

Cofachiqui’s ancestor so that they could make rosaries. Wood’s biting comment on the

Spanish grave-robbers that Zitkala-Ša quotes in full—“We imagine if their prayers were in proportion to their sins they must have spent the most of their time at their devotions”—complements the rhetoric of moral outrage that Zitkala-Ša wields in much of American Indian Stories (185).

After contrasting the hospitality of Chief Powhatan and Cofachiqui with the

“legal disability” and “legal victim[ization]” that the federal government imposes on

Indians, Zitkala-Ša solicits “the help of the women of America” in carrying out her plan of Americanization. As in many of writings and speeches, Zitkala-Ša again links

Americanization to the conditions of voicelessness and wardship, which she declares is

“no substitute for American citizenship.” In order to help the “voiceless people within our midst,” Zitkala-Ša’s readers must provide the Indian with “American opportunity,”

“encourage him to find his rightful place in our American life,” “remove the barriers that

75 Current historians identify her not as “Cofachiqui,” but as the unnamed female chief of Cofitachequi, a town located in what is now South Carolina.

76 See especially “The School Days of an Indian Girl,” first published in Atlantic Monthly in 1900. 79 hinder his normal development,” and “do away with the ‘piecemeal [Indian] legislation’… which has proven an exceedingly expensive and disappointing method”

(186 - 187).

Zitkala-Ša then takes “America’s Indian Problem” in a surprising direction. So that “you [will] know what your Bureau of Indian Affairs , in Washington, DC, really is”

(187, emphasis in original), she quotes extensively from Cleveland’s document, which itself is a report on unpublished reports: “in the remaining space allowed me I shall quote from the report of the Bureau of Municipal Research… published by them in the

September issue, 1915, No. 65, Municipal Research.”77 Zitkala-Ša makes it clear that she is quoting from a government report, but she does not identify its author (Frederick

Cleveland, the Bureau’s director). The eight pages of excerpts chosen by Zitkala-Ša emphasize the suppression and unavailability of government reports, including a 1913 digest on legal issues concerning Indian treaties and funds that “found its way into the pigeon-holes,” as well as a 1912 analysis on the organization of the federal government that “found repose in a dark closet” (188, 190). The excerpts of Cleveland’s text conclude “America’s Indian Problem” and bring American Indian Stories to a close.

While it might seem puzzling that Zitkala-Ša relies significantly on Wood and Cleveland, and in effect gives Cleveland the last word, it is important to remember that she and other

Native writers of her era were faced with “dominant cultural and governmental misrepresentations of Indianness as primitive, barbaric, wasteful, irresponsible, impractical, and defeated” (Pfister 103). Cleveland’s report must have seemed to be a fairly accurate and authoritative representation of the so-called “Indian problem”—one that would strongly impress Zitkala-Ša’s audience of progressives and clubwomen.

77 This report was also published in The American Indian Magazine in 1916. 80

Zitkala-Ša strategically quotes from Cleveland’s report (itself a governmental document) to counter governmental misrepresentations, just as she describes bead and quill work, attitudes toward children and elders, dreams and visions, the telling of ohunkakan and woyakapi, and other aspects of Dakota beliefs and lifeways to counter the dominant society’s cultural misrepresentations.

Further, the excerpts of Cleveland’s report chosen by Zitkala-Ša resonate with and amplify keywords and concepts that she has developed throughout American Indian

Stories—particularly sham, dark, treaty, fraud, law, wardship, and machinery. As a child, when a white man threatened to deprive them of their water source, Zitkala-Ša’s mother described him as “a sham,—a sickly sham” (9). Zitkala-Ša now suggests that a government run by such men must also be sickly and deceitful; she endorses Cleveland’s claim that the white man’s government offers Native Americans “sham protection” to deceive and mollify the public while it exploits “Indian funds” and also “valuable lands, mines, oil fields, and other natural resources” that rightfully belong to Indians (192). As a boarding school student, Zitkala-Ša described the school’s methodical indoctrination as

“the civilizing machine” and as “the day’s harness;” American Indian Stories substantiates Cleveland’s assertion that “all the machinery of government has been set to work to repress [Native Americans] rather than to provide adequate means for justly dealing” (66, 195). The “would-be white men” in “The Widespread Enigma” claim that

“prairie fire is [fought] with a back fire,” that they use illegal methods to fight the illegal acts that have been done to them (169). In “America’s Indian Problem,” Zitkala-Ša also fights fire with fire by adapting a report from the Bureau of Municipal Research to

81 protest the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which has a long history of imposing wardship and voicelessness on Native Americans.

* * *

Assimilation—the process of modernizing, Christianizing, re-educating, and controlling Native Americans and their communities—was enforced by the Dawes Act of

1887 and fueled by the dominant society’s folk imaginary. Alice Callahan, William

Jones, and Zitkala-Ša negotiate the terms of possible Muskogee, Meskwaki, and Dakota subjectivities within and against this folk imaginary. These writers grapple with the competing pressures for social reform (whose rhetoric sometimes describes Indians as pathetic or pathological) and for cultural preservation (whose rhetoric sometimes represented Indians as primitives or relics). In other words, Indians must change if they are to cope with modernity, and must not change if modernity is to commodify their customs, their supposed vitality and naturalness. Callahan endorses the rapid change prompted by the national folk imaginary as perhaps the only way for Indians to survive the rough white hand; Jones insists that too much assimilation will deprive Native communities of the storytelling, dances, and other cultural forms that will help sustain them as they respond to modernity; Zitkala-Ša offers a plan of mutual Americanization, in which legal reforms grant Indian nations at least some cultural sovereignty. The national folk imaginary’s pressures for reform and preservation have often converged in the portrayal of nomadic tepee-dwelling Indians and the trope of wildness, which

Callahan, Jones, and Zitkala-Ša confront, reformulate, and differently deploy. Callahan briefly accesses the militant outrage of Wildfire to denounce the federal government;

Jones equates wildness with the freedoms lost to allotment and assimilation; Zitkala-Ša

82 reclaims some of the wildness and “overflowing spirits” that the boarding school tried to erase as she inhabits “the natural garden” of the prairie. Countering the stereotype of the backward, passive, degenerate savages perpetuated by the dominant society, the Indian personas and characters imagined in the texts of Callahan, Jones, and Zitkala-Ša possess multiple intelligences. Callahan, Jones, and Zitkala-Ša argue that Indians are articulate, savvy, resilient, adaptive, skilled at both changing and preserving their ways, as demonstrated by Wynema’s speedy absorption of English and sentimental pedagogy, by the Sac chieftain’s passing of oral traditions to Jones, and by Zitkala-Ša’s woyakapi about the Washington-based Dakota activist. As this chapter suggests, Native American writers, teachers, ethnographers, and intellectuals employed a range of discourses, adapted Native cultural formations, and advanced Native agendas as they participated in the Progressive Era’s heated debates about allotment, assimilation, and modernization.

Chapter Two

From Hill Work to Multiple Ways of Knowing:

Rebecca Harding Davis and Olive Tilford Dargan

“Their tools and utensils are the same as their great-grandparents used, and they are content with them. We never worked harder and saw less result in the conversion of sinners than while in Kentucky…. Unless these people have help they will prove a fretting leprosy in our nation.” —Ellen Myers, “Mountain White Work in Kentucky”78

“Mountain work,” as the American Missionary Association (AMA) named its campaign to deploy home missionaries who would spread literacy, religion, and modernization among the so-called “mountain whites” of Appalachia, was shaped by and in turn helped shape the national folk imaginary.79 In the May 1884 issue of The

American Missionary, William Hayes Ward opened his report, “Our Southern Mountain

Work,” with a literary anecdote: “Seventy-five years ago Washington Irving said that the tumble-bug was the only bit of activity to be found in Virginia.... [similarly,] the descendants of those Virginians and Carolinians who... [moved] into the mountain

78 Myers’s report on “mountain white work” was first published in The American Missionary in 1884.

79 Ellen Myers appears to have coined the term “mountain white. In 1881, she and her husband Arthur moved to the village of Williamsburg in the Cumberland Mountains of southeastern Kentucky. Sponsored by the American Missionary Association, the Myers would found forty-four churches and schools in the mountains (Hess 12). Ellen was appalled by the poor farmers she met there. To name this “unnoticed class of people dwelling almost in the very centre of the settled portion of the United States,” the title of Myers’s article coined a new term—“mountain white”—that suggested that the people of Appalachian Kentucky were ethnically different from middle-class northern white Protestants. According to Myers, the typical mountain white man owns plenty of land but is too lazy to farm it; instead, he frequents the general store, where he tells “low stories.” The mountain white woman is “a doll or a drudge” who gives birth to at least twelve children; the mountain white child has an unwashed face, never bathes, and uses tobacco and whiskey “almost from the cradle.” Despite the local preachers who are “great barriers in our way” and despite “the protests of [mountain white] parents,” Myers reports a measure of success in “getting [the] hearts” of the children: “our hope of this people centres largely in the young. If it were not for them, we could not feel it right to stay among them.” Myers claimed that even mountain white churchgoers lacked “morality and sobriety;” that the mountain whites were unconnected to the modern world, unhygienic, unhealthy, illiterate, “unstable, thriftless, improvident, and ignorant;” and that the AMA should intervene on behalf of this “class [which is] as needy perhaps as any.” 84 valleys of Eastern Kentucky and Tennessee… [until recently] appear to have made absolutely no progress since the time when they put up their first log cabins” (132).

Many other articles in The American Missionary repeatedly commented on the dwellings of the groups they targeted, suggesting that the cabins of “mountain whites” and African

Americans, along with Indian wigwams, were symbols of resistance to progress and civilization. According to Chris Green, The American Missionary published forty-nine articles on “mountain work” between 1884 and 1895 (23). Elizabeth S. D. Engelhardt connects mountain work to “the Progressive Era’s fervor for social uplift,” which brought to Appalachia “social crusaders,” many of them women who were “well educated and from middle-class backgrounds” (61). These uplift workers, home missionaries, and other reformers came to the mountains so that they might educate the illiterate, heal the unhealthy, promote industrialism and bourgeoisie values to the peasantry, and (oddly enough) proselytize the Christians of Appalachia.80

In this chapter, I argue that several short stories and essays by Rebecca Harding

Davis and Olive Tilford Dargan that are set in or near Appalachia contest the national folk imaginary; question the authority and motives of mountain workers, home missionaries, popular writers, and folklore collectors; and suggest to readers that careful self-reflection may unsettle their easy conclusions about the inferiority, strangeness, and backwardness of people who live in Appalachia. Davis articulates what Jean Pfaelzer calls “an alternative vision” (21 – 22) to both northern and southern cultures while

80 Home missionaries typically believed that Appalachian Christianity was nominal and insufficient; they based this judgment on their observations of simply constructed churches, preachers who had little or no formal education, the apparently ignorant worshippers, and the alleged lack of manners during religious services. In 1921, a significantly different claim was made by John C. Campbell; he argued that “in no part of our country will one find a more deep and sincere interest in matters of religion than in the Southern Highlands,” where the people listen to sermons with considerable “critical faculty” and also enjoy “theological debate” (176 – 177). 85 implicitly challenging the condescension, prejudices, and other premises of mountain work. Dargan’s short stories, which reflect her experiences as owner of a tenant farm in the mountains of North Carolina, highlight the capacity of Appalachian people to use oral and other traditions to tell their own history, assert their values, critique the dominant society, and adapt to modernity. By characterizing mountain people as tellers of history, interpreters of history’s meanings, and participants in both history as well as modernity,

Davis and Dargan counter the stereotypes of Appalachian primitiveness and peculiarity.

The short works by Davis (first published in 1861 and culminating in her collection

Silhouettes of American Life in 1892) and by Dargan (published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1919) that I examine in this chapter intervene in the increasingly widespread and virulent debates about the place of non-dominant and folk cultures in modernizing

America—debates often charged by the primitivist assumptions that Appalachian people had failed to evolve or had degenerated, and thus were a social problem, or that they were apart from history and modernity, and thus could offer renewal and vitality to the dominant society.

Davis (1831 – 1910) lived in Wheeling, Virginia (later West Virginia) for much of her life until her marriage and move to Philadelphia in 1863. Davis’s writings reflect her ongoing interest in “the commonplace folk [whom] I saw everyday”—an interest which she traced to reading Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales as a child; early in her career, Henry James described Davis (rather dismissively) as “the poet of poor people—laborers, farmers, mechanics, and factory hands” (Davis, Bits of Gossip, 30;

James, qtd. in Glazener 127). In Davis’s well-known novella “Life in the Iron-Mills”

(1861) and many of her later writings, there are frequent examples of benevolence,

86 reform, and education that complicate the AMA’s notion of mountain work. Although

“Life” is set in a grimy industrial city, it concludes with a Quaker woman taking the

“deformed” millworker and ex-convict Deborah to her home in “the hills,” where “the light lies warm” and “the winds of God blow all the day” (17, 62). These hills are where the Quaker “[begins] her work,” which is exposing Deborah to “the long years of sunshine, and fresh air, and slow, patient Christ-love, needed to make healthy and hopeful [her] impure body and soul” (63).

Variations of the work the Quaker woman carries out in the hills—what I call

“hill work”—appear throughout Davis’s writings. Hill work is a cross-cultural encounter in which the people of Appalachia and sometimes the land itself take on the benevolent roles of refuge-provider, reformer, teacher, and spiritual guide. Engelhardt claims that mountain work stems from the beliefs “that the mountains and the people living in the mountains needed to be worked on” and “that social values from elsewhere could improve society in Appalachia” (62). In hill work, Appalachia and the people who live there also work on outsiders, and it is also the values of Appalachian communities that improve societies outside Appalachia. While Davis’s poor rural characters may be ignorant, dirty, and ugly in one way, in other ways they display wisdom, purity, and beauty. Hill work harnesses their multiple intelligences to offer outsiders shelter, healing, alternative ways of knowing, and spiritual sustenance.

Through the hill work in her writings, Davis also seeks to improve her readers and to challenge their preconceptions. In the short story “David Gaunt,” the narrator sketches the life of Dode Scofield and her father Joe, whose “house and barn and hill lie up among

87 the snowy peaks of the Virginian Alleghanies.”81 Critics have not yet credited Davis for offering through the Scofields an important early literary representation of Appalachian people, perhaps because Davis does not characterize Dode and Joe as peculiar or primitive, or in ways that confirm prevalent stereotypes.82 Importantly, Davis states that the Scofields’ story is “a modern story,” that the Civil War affects not just the nation but rural and remote communities “up in these Virginia hills” (257). Davis acknowledges that the life of a mountain farmer may seem limited, that Joe Scofield’s “world [consisted of] the farm, and the dead and live Scofields, and the Democratic party, with an ideal reverence for ‘Firginya’ under all.” While Joe attends “the Methodist church on

Sundays” and cheers “for the Democratic candidate,” he seems to know little about “the

Otherwhere, outside of Virginia;” he believes that “it was rather vague there: Yankeedom

81 “David Gaunt” was first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1862.

82 Nineteenth century primitivists, as Kimberly K. Smith explains, wanted “to discover an art produced through an untutored, almost instinctual process free of culture, history, and tradition; an art that was virtually organic, the product of nature itself” (135). Some influential travel local color writers, such as Will Wallace Harney (1832 – 1912), Edward King (1848 – 1896) and Mary Noailles Murfree (1850 – 1922), represented Appalachian people as peculiar and primitive. Henry Shapiro argues that Harney and his editors at Lippincott’s “‘discovered’ Appalachia” by affirming the “‘otherness’ which made of the mountainous portions of eight southern states a discreet region;” Shapiro further argues that “the process of reification, by which the perception of Appalachian otherness became… a conception of Appalachia as a thing in itself… occurred when it did… largely as a result of [Murfree’s popular short stories and novels]” (4, 18-19). In the travelogue “A Strange Land and Peculiar People” (1873), Harney describes the “marked peculiarities” of Appalachian people’s anatomy, dialect, and culture (48). Overlooking the numerous Appalachian short stories that Davis published in the 1860s, Cratis D. Williams (the so-called “Dean of Appalachian studies”) suggests that Davis and Murfree, among others, were trend-following local colorists trying to cash in on the success of Edward King's articles on the Southern mountains, which had appeared in Scribner's Monthly during the early 1870’s and were included in The Great South (1875). The success of King’s work, Williams argues, “doubtlessly attracted the attention of Rebecca Harding Davis, Constance Fenimore Woolson, Frances Hodgson Burnett and probably Mary Noailles Murfree to the e possibilities of the socially retarded mountaineer as a subject for short stories” (117). Murfree helped to popularize Harney’s claim that mountain people were “peculiar” and “other”—and to embed it in the national folk imaginary— while additionally emphasizing their primitiveness. Murfree stated that the stories in her collection In the Tennessee Mountains (1884) were about “the mountaineer and mountains of East Tennessee, and apart from any value which they may possess as fiction they give together a pretty accurate picture of the various phases of life among an interesting, primitive, and little known people in a wild and secluded region” (qtd. in Hsiung 176). The stories of In the Tennessee Mountains frequently describe the mountaineers and their culture as simple, primitive, peculiar, and strange. Shapiro reports that Murfree’s In the Tennessee Mountains “was used as a first mission-study text by [members of northern churches] who wished to understand conditions [in Appalachia]” (57). 88 was a mean-soiled country, whence came clocks, teachers, peddlers, and infidelity; and the English,—it was an American's birthright to jeer at the English” (258).83 Joe is satisfied with what he knows; he possesses some intelligence if not education; he cares about his property and his family, as well as politics, religion, and history. Davis characterizes his unmarried daughter Dode, on the other hand, as a woman who hungers for knowledge, who chooses her own politics and religion. Dode believes that her purpose in life is “to learn and not to teach… to pick the good lesson out of everybody: the Yankees, the Rebels, the Devil himself [who]… must have some purpose of good, if she could only get at it” (260). While refusing to stereotype or generalize about the lives of poor rural white farmers, the narrator also urges readers to resist condescension and instead to consider the limits of their own perspectives. Assuming the stance of a cultural relativist, the narrator instructs readers: “you shall not sneer at Joe Scofield…. How wide is your own ‘sacred soil’?—the creed, government, bit of truth, other human heart, self, perhaps, to which your soul roots itself vitally,—like a cuttle-fish sucking to an inch of rock…?” (258) Davis suggests that Appalachian characters like Dode and Joe Scofield can reflect the limits and predilections of her readers, and that a relativist response may be better than smug condescension.

* * *

“The Best of Good Company”

Davis’s rural communities can also model for readers the virtues and values that are essential for forming and reforming the nation. In “The Yares of the Black

83 Like the Quaker woman in “Life in the Iron Mills,” Joe Scofield also engages in hill work. The itinerant preacher David Gaunt, who came from “old [tidewater] Virginia,” was “penniless, untaught, [and] ragged” when he first arrived in the Alleghanies. Joe Scofield “had given [Gaunt] a home, clothed him,” and affectionately wondered if Gaunt would “turn out an eagle or a silly gull” (261, 421). 89

Mountains: a True Story,” Davis describes Mrs. Denby, a mother who brings her sick baby to Appalachia, as “a woman like the rest of us.”84 Davis thus identifies the readers of this story as city-dwellers like Mrs. Denby: conventional in their habits, anxious to gain their neighbors’ approval, likely to believe that the members of an Appalachian family are “desperate character[s]” and that the mountains are a place of “frightful solitudes” (253). Ultimately, as she learns to widen her sympathies and sensibilities, as the Yares shelter and adopt her, Mrs. Denby develops a sense of kinship that replaces her alienation and that connects her to the land and to the Yares, despite their class and regional differences.

The kinship between the Yares and Mrs. Denby deepens when she hears Mrs.

Yare tell the “terrible history” that has “turned the people of Asheville” against the

Yares—the “true story” of her family (259, 260). Davis typically uses the phrase “true story” in her fiction to signal that she is working with folklore, especially the conventions of the legend, which functions as “a type of folk history” that counters formal history with its unique “presentation, emphasis, and purpose” (Harris and Callawader xxiv).

Telling how the Yare sons (who are tall, well-built and seem like giants) join neither the

Union nor the Confederacy during the Civil War, and how Appalachian communities have been degraded during Reconstruction, Davis’s short story differs sharply from those told by the dominant society.85 Davis divides the story’s narrative among three

84 When “The Yares of the Black Mountains” first appeared in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1875, it had no subtitle; however, when Davis republished the short story in her 1892 collection Silhouettes of American Life, she added the subtitle “a True Story.”

85 I argue that to some degree, Davis believed that she was apart from the dominant society. In her autobiographical Bits of Gossip (1904), Davis often claims that her home in Wheeling, where she lived for over thirty years, was in the “hills” or on the “border.” These terms suggest that she thought of herself as a person from a distinct and peripheral region, not an urban center. Davis remembers that she and other children in Wheeling “never left home” and believed that “the world outside of our encircling hills was a 90 successive focal characters: Miss Cook, a journalist whose presumptiveness, arrogance, and primitivist beliefs make her unlikely to challenge the national folk imaginary or to benefit from hill work; Mrs. Denby, who has left New York in search of a cure for her sick infant son and is herself improved by the folk history and folk culture that she learns from the Yares; and Mrs. Yare, the Appalachian mother who narrates the history of how her sons aided many outsiders (both Confederate deserters and Union prisoners of war) by guiding them to safety during the Civil War.86 Miss Cook, a writer for the Herald, seems more erudite and formally educated; Mrs. Denby has read “little beyond her cookery-book and Bible;” Mrs. Yare is a storyteller who speaks in dialect (255). Davis challenges primitivism and destabilizes the evolutionary scale of progress suggested by these different educations and literacies as the story shifts from Miss Cook’s journalistic

“generalizations” to the “conventional paths” of Mrs. Denby’s perceptions and finally to

Mrs. Yare’s folk history (251, 253).

vast secret” (5). Before Davis met Emerson in 1862, she heard that he was “anxious to know what kind of human beings come up from the back hills of Virginia” (35). In Parlor Radical: Rebecca Harding Davis and the Origins of American Social Realism, Jean Pfaelzer comes closer than most critics in suggesting that Davis to some extent may have had a non-dominant perspective and identity. Pfaelzer argues that Davis “anticipated the close observation of southern botany, geology, and language of such later regional writers as Mary Murphy [sic] and Constance Fenimore Woolson. As early as the 1860s, Davis began to explore an alternative vision to the culture of northern industrialism…. Rooted in her childhood in the mountains of West Virginia… are tales of rural life that depict the tensions between Jeffersonian agrarianism, the conventions of pastoralism, the popularity in fiction and drama of comic folk figures, and the economic realities of rural life ” (21 – 22). I would qualify several parts of this claim: it is Davis’s close observations of Appalachia, her alternative vision to the culture of the South as well as the North, and her critique of popular mountain folk figures that comprise her Appalachian perspective and that critics often overlook. Surprisingly, Pfaelzer seems unaware that the Appalachian region exists or that it differs from the South; there are no references to Appalachia in Parlor Radical. There are also no references to Appalachia in Sharon M. Harris’s book-length study Rebecca Harding Davis and American Realism.

86 The three-part structure of “The Yares of the Black Mountains” resembles what Harris calls “the three- tiered narrative structure” that Davis uses in “Life in the Iron Mills.” Miss Cook functions much like the narrator of “Life,” who serves as an “initial guide, one whose language and social status are familiar and comfortable to Davis’s reading public.” Mrs. Denby functions much like Deborah in “Life,” who does the work of “a translator, moving [readers] from the narrator’s frame down to Hugh’s underworld.” Mrs. Yare is both like and unlike Hugh in “Life;” while she does not embody devolution and animality (as does Hugh), Mrs. Yare is a poor artist (like Hugh), and through her Davis “question[s] old forms [of art while] creating new” (Harris 28 – 29). 91

“The Yares of the Black Mountains” begins during the early years of

Reconstruction, “in the middle of an unploughed field” where the Western North

Carolina Railroad ends. This train has brought Miss Cook, Mrs. Denby, and other tourists from Salisbury in the Piedmont, but does not yet reach Asheville; those who wish to continue traveling must take the stagecoach. They have reached the place where

“civilization stops,” according to a tourist named Nesbitt.87 Nesbitt, Miss Cook, and Mrs.

Denby, part of “a group of Northern summer-tourists, with satchels and water-proofs,” joined together in Richmond, but now decide to go their separate ways at the edge of

Appalachia—a place where the “unploughed” land has not been cultivated and the people also appear to lack cultivation. The civilized South is behind them; wild Appalachia is ahead of them. Several beliefs about civilization and the value of the land are expressed by these travelers, for whom “the South [had been] unexplored ground” (239). Nesbitt’s definition of civilization is particularly unstable; at first the lack of a railroad and the unreliability of the “mails [that] come, like the weather, at the will of Providence,” suggest to him that he has left civilization and that he should “explore no farther” (239 –

240). Later, he is disappointed by the dinner served at the bar-room—“civilized beastliness” instead of the more primitive “campfire, venison, [and] trout cooked by ourselves” that he had envisioned. Nesbitt both wants and does not want independence from a human community that provides food, mail, and transportation. Because the edge of Appalachia is too uncivilized for Nesbitt to continue exploring and too civilized for him to “rough it,” he returns to the Piedmont (241).

87 While Stephen Knadler describes the Civil War as a “civil-izing war” which identified the white Southerner as both “Anglo-Saxon” and “a barbarian Other in need of civilization,” Davis’s story suggests a post-bellum shift in the popular imagination that occurs as Northerners and elite Southerners reconstitute the dominant culture and rank themselves as more civil than Appalachians—the folk in need of mountain work and uplift (70). 92

The speculator from Detroit sees the land only in terms of economic potential, and decides to return because there is no profit he can make from the low-grade “balsam timber spongy as punk” (240). Mrs. Denby, on the other hand, believes that the balsam air will cure her sick son, and so she continues traveling to Asheville. Miss Cook accompanies them because she still hopes to see grand scenery, as well as quaint

Appalachian people who are beyond her “usual rut” and who will provide interesting subject matter for her newspaper articles (242). Riding in the coach, she complains that the hills, farms, and “glassless huts” give her “nothing to make note of,” and she asks the driver if there is some “business” or “stir of any sort in this country” (243). The driver tells Miss Cook that the local mica mines and a former railroad have closed. Knowing that a new railroad is being built to connect the Piedmont to Appalachia, Miss Cook should conclude that this part of Appalachia is between waves of industrialization.

Instead, she persists in believing that she has traveled “two hundred years from New

York” (245). Here, Davis both reinforces and departs from what Wilma A. Dunaway calls “cultural stereotypes, agrarian myths, and romantic generalizations” that have distorted the history of industrialization and modernization in Appalachia. According to some agrarian myths, Appalachia is the home and last stronghold of the contented yeoman farmer and his pioneer traditions, a place outside of progress and frozen in time

(Dunaway 1 – 22). AMA writers circulated agrarian myths in the mid-1880s to support their claims of Appalachian dependency and backwardness; other versions of agrarian myths about Appalachia would endure through much of the twentieth century. While

Davis’s short stories and essays describe Appalachian communities as drowsy and

93 suggest that Appalachian people are complacent, she typically makes these points to critique urban values, not to argue that Appalachia is degenerate and outside of history.

Miss Cook, who has previously experienced spectacular scenery in the White

Mountains of New Hampshire, now has eyes only for more of the same, and can appreciate the land only in aesthetic terms. Because she has uncritically read texts that support the dominant culture’s imagination of Appalachia as primitive and uncivilized, she is unable to learn the different history that its people might embody and communicate. Miss Cook has read that Appalachia is “inhospitable,” frequented by

“beasts of prey,” and “almost unexplored, although so near the sea board cities;” she expects Appalachia to be inhabited by people “little raised above the condition of Digger

Indians” (246).88 And what Miss Cook expects largely shapes what she finds, comments on, and writes down: a “queer tribe” of people, “quaint decaying houses” and “the whole drowsy life of the village.” She spends one day walking in Asheville, talking to its inhabitants, and “pumping [them] dry of facts” (245, 250, 252). She collects “a sheaf of notes” for the Herald and for the book she is writing on the “Causes of the Decadence of the South” (251).89 When Mrs. Denby says that Miss Cook will need a summer to gather the facts needed for such a book, Miss Cook quickly dismisses her. She brags to Mrs.

Denby that she needs only a day to master, commodify, and consume the land and the

88 “Digger” was a pejorative term used to describe the Indians of California in the nineteenth century. This “handy rubric” summed up “all the qualities of extreme primitiveness that European travelers had… attributed to California Indians” (Rawls 49).

89 Miss Cook’s writings on the “queer tribe” of mountain people in and near Asheville, of course, corroborate the arguments put forth by supporters of mountain work. In The Mountain Whites of the South (1893), John Hall claimed that the people of Appalachia had “greatly deteriorated, industriously, socially, mentally, morally and religiously” because of poverty, hunger, isolation, “bad roads,” “want of education,” and “want of educated ministers,” and also because “slave labor [had] deprived them of all participation in remunerative industries” (14). Hall believed that mountain people should receive some of the charity that had contributed to “the improvement and elevation of the negroes,” and that they could be assimilated, like immigrants and like Native Americans, who were being “induced[d] … to forsake their savagery and be fellow-citizens with us” (17 – 19). 94 culture of Appalachian people: “I can evolve the whole state of society from half a dozen items.... I've done the mountains and mountaineers.... humanity has reached its extremest conditions here. I should not learn that fact any better if I stayed a week.... I go to Georgia to-morrow morning. This orange I have sucked dry” (251 -252). That night, Miss Cook copies the innkeeper’s photographs so that she will have more illustrations for the Herald. Here, Davis suggests that some nineteenth century writers who represent folk culture are hacks, that their lazy recycling of old materials makes them little better than intellectual plagiarists. Fed by the texts and images of the popular imagination, the hasty generalizations of Miss Cook’s literary and artistic output feed them in return.

While Miss Cook travels with narrow aesthetic expectations and preconceived cultural assumptions, Mrs. Denby is more willing to stray from the dominant society’s perceptions of nature and folk culture. Unable to restore the health of her dying husband,

Mrs. Denby has the “dry, sapless, submissive look which a woman gains” from caring for the sick (246). Her desperate hope that the balsam air of the mountains can heal her ailing baby causes her to believe that their benevolence will be greater than their dangers.

The “wild beasts” and “wild people” that Miss Cook describes to Mrs. Denby cause her no worry; to her, they are “no more than the shadows on the road” (247). Even before she reaches Asheville, Mrs. Denby begins to question some of the stereotypes of uncivilized Appalachia, to believe that “if life here was barbarous, it was at ease, unmoving, kindly” (248). When she reaches the inn at Asheville, Mrs. Denby finds that the train conductor had sent ahead word of her and her ailing son, and that a room and a fire have already been prepared so that she can warm him. While the Appalachian region

95 of North Carolina is in some ways disconnected from what Eric Sundquist calls “the national network of modernization” (it does not yet have a reliable mail service or a railroad that connects its interior to Salisbury), Mrs. Denby finds a network of care in

Appalachia that contrasts with national and modern values, and that is demonstrated by the continual acts of kindness done for Mrs. Denby’s baby, as well the informal delivery of the conductor’s request on her behalf (501).90 The sympathy, community, and kinship offered to Mrs. Denby in Appalachia differ from the alienation of New York, a city where she and her husband had lived for five years, where they “came strangers, and were always strangers” (248). Miss Cook has been quick to conclude that the sparsely populated land beyond Asheville is wild and that its few inhabitants “live like wild beasts;” Mrs. Denby will more slowly decide that the land is companionable and that the people she meets there are “the best of good company” (258). While Miss Cook decides to leave Appalachia after one day in Asheville, Mrs. Denby travels thirty miles further, reaches the Yares’ remote home, and stays there for the summer, demonstrating her capacity to turn away from “the conventional paths to church, to market, to the shops”

(253).

Mrs. Denby becomes the story’s second focal character when she hires Jonathan

Yare to drive her further into the mountains. Worried because Miss Cook has told her that the Yares have a “terrible history,” Mrs. Denby concentrates on the natural world that she sees from the cart, as well as the Swannanoa River, to which she “talk[s] and

90 Sundquist argues that “realism from the 1870s through the early 1900s [can be judged] as a developing series of responses to the transformation of land into capital, of raw materials into products, of agrarian values into urban values, and of private experience into public property.” While describing the experience of assorted travelers (each with different motives) in a remote part of Appalachia, “The Yares of Black Mountain” highlights what Sundquist calls the “complex aesthetic, social, and economic entanglements” which connected regions and cities in a “national network of modernization [that was] actualized as much by the ties of language and literature as by new railroad lines and telegraph wires.” (“Realism and Regionalism,” 501). 96 listen[s]” (253, 254). She experiences the vines, flowers, and birds not as “game or specimens for the naturalist”—not as objects that can be dominated or classified by formal systems of knowledge— but as “God’s creatures [that come] close to her;” the mountains seem like “one of the secret places” where God lives, and she feels that she has been “taken” in by the mountains (255, 256). What Mrs. Denby sees when she first looks at the Yares’ home is much like what Miss Cook would focus on: “a low log house,” a barefoot old woman “in dirty calico;” a pig that runs into the kitchen— evidence, Mrs. Denby thinks, that they live in the “depths of squalor and ignorance”

(257). Jonathan and his family welcome Mrs. Denby as a friend; Mr. Yare, Jonathan’s blind father, examines her baby’s “skin, muscles, and pulse, asking questions with shrewder insight than any physician had done.” As she dines with Jonathan, his parents, and his sister Nancy, Mrs. Denby’s vision is transformed. While she still sees that the

Yares are “clothed and fed as the very poorest poor” and doubts “whether one of them could read or write,” she cannot “rid herself of the conviction that she [has] now, as never in her life, come into the best of good company” (258). Mrs. Denby feels that she and her baby are “at once adopted into the [Yare] family,” that the Yares do not see “social position or clothes or education” as barriers between people, and that they “go straight to something in her beneath all these things” (259). While her baby becomes “strong and rosy,” Mrs. Denby is also restored and strengthened by her developing kinships with nature and the Yare family (268).

Mrs. Yare becomes the story’s third and final focal character when she tells Mrs.

Denby the “terrible history” of the hill work her family carried out, which counters the formal histories of the Civil War. When the war began, the Yare brothers refused to

“turn agen the old flag” and join the Confederate Army, but also refused to join the

Union Army after Union soldiers shot their neighbor and his eight-year-old son (268).

From then on, the Yares were hunted by their other neighbors “as if they war wolves”

(261). Their kinship with the caves, gullies, and other features of Old Craggy and the

Black Mountains enabled the Yare brothers to shelter many desperate and vulnerable outsiders who came to the mountains. Nancy later tells Mrs. Denby, “the mountings

[mountains] is always company;” while refusing to join a company of Union or

Confederate soldiers, her brothers chose the company of the mountains and the different kind of work that the mountains allowed them to do (267). “My sons’ work in them years,” Mrs. Yare says, “was to pertect and guide the rebel deserters home through the mountings… an’ to bring the [escaped] Union prisoners… safe to the Federal lines in

Tennessee.” Some of the deserters and escapees spent the night at the Yares’ cabin, where Mrs. Yare and Nancy prepared meals for them. Mrs. Yare suggests that her cabin also provided a spiritual refuge to the men, who told her they felt “as ef they’d come back to their homes out of hell” (262). Eventually, the Confederate Army sent guards to watch the mountain passes and the Yares’ cabin. No longer able to escort the runaway soldiers, the Yare brothers hid in the mountains and couldn’t come home; Mrs. Yare says that for almost a year, she wondered “ef my lads was safe an’ well up thar or lyin’ dead and unburied” (263). The Yare brothers surrendered only after their father and sister were arrested. Imprisoned at Salisbury, the Yare brothers again refused to join the Confederate

Army, even when threatened by the guns of “a company drawn up” outside the prison

(266). In this history, Mrs. Yare emphasizes the brutality of soldiers from both the North and the South, the trauma and fear that has made “a different woman” of her daughter

Nancy, and the inhumanity of neighbors who hunted the Yares as if they were animals, continue to misrepresent them, and will not reconcile with them (261).

According to Jean Pfaelzer, Davis’s writings of the 1870s (which include “The

Yares of Black Mountain: a True Story”) challenge the “self-congratulatory tone of popular images of nationhood” and reveal “the profound national anxiety that accompanied the collapse of Reconstruction, the rise of European immigration, pressures for women’s suffrage, and the genocide of Native Americans” (167). Pfaelzer reads “The

Yares of the Black Mountains” as a story that figures the southern mother as a “unifying cultural symbol” and “the industrial North [as dependent] on the rural South for healing and political renewal” (190, 204). I argue that the Yares are not only a Southern family but an Appalachian family, some of the “commonplace folk” and “poorest poor” who are a central concern of Davis’s writings and activism. 91 As such, the Yares may indict the nation rather than unify it; the healing they offer may represent not a reconciliation between South and North, but rather the capacity of “the poorest poor” and the folk to challenge, correct, and revitalize the dominant society.92 In “The Yares of the Black

91 Kenneth W. Noe also argues that the Yares are Appalachians, and that Davis’s story critiques the North’s treatment of marginalized people as well as the national folk imaginary: “Northerners had to return to the mountains and provide their noble former comrades with protection, education, and better lives. Unionist mountaineers were the Jonathans to the North’s Davids, beloved friends who deserved thanks, and not the animals depicted by the Miss Cooks of American letters” (79).

92 This is not to say that Davis endorses primitivism. Kimberly K. Smith argues that primitivists and regionalists overlapped with one another and even with scientific racists in their sharing of “a common goal: to revitalize western civilization by creating a more ‘natural’ culture, a culture that would grow organically out of a community’s direct experience with the natural environment.” I argue that regionalists like Davis differ significantly from primitivists, who valued folk communities because they were “less fully developed psychologically and therefore more childlike and emotional than civilized peoples,” and from scientific racists, who believed that folk communities were “evolutionary cul-de-sacs—examples of arrested cultural development” (Smith 131, 132, 135). Davis often positions her “commonplace folk” close to nature not to demonstrate their primitivism, but to support her project of investigating value systems that are alternative to (and in some cases, less corrupt or harmful than) the dominant society’s. Michele L. Mock makes a similar argument when she asserts that “Davis frequently conflated indigenous cultures, women, and nature in her challenge to the imperialist practices imposed upon them all” (61). 99

Mountains,” Davis emphasizes gaps between the privileged bourgeois tourists and the workers who serve them, between nation and region, between dominant and traditional folk cultures, and between the Yares and their politically estranged neighbors who speak against them. Davis argued that while the Civil War in some ways made the nation “a homogenous people, which we had never been before,” it also contributed to national anxiety and class tensions in the 1870s by causing “the birth of the millionaire among us, and the disease of money-getting with which he has infected the nation” (Bits of Gossip

138). In order to diagnose and to suggest cures to her “diseased” readers, Davis portrays the commonplace folk whose cultures point to alternative values and priorities. Before she and her healed baby depart from the Black Mountains, Mrs. Denby attempts to convince the Yares that they should be compensated for heroically saving “hundreds of men;” she suggests to them that if they move from the mountains, these grateful former soldiers will use their “influence and distinction” to spare them from lives of “hard drudgery” and “danger” in the mountains (267). In this formulation, the poorest poor would be helped not because they are dependent and backward, but because their hill work—aiding vulnerable men during the war and offering hospitality to all they meet— has indeed improved communities outside their own.

* * *

“Nothing Could Be Falser Than the Sketches Which Have Been Given of Them”

“Qualla,” published in Lippincott’s four months after “The Yares of Black

Mountain: a True Story,” is the first of Davis’s nonfiction accounts of her summer travels in the Appalachian Mountains in North Carolina. The similarities between “Qualla” and

“The Yares” are readily apparent. The descriptions of Asheville, the surrounding ridges,

100 and the “mountaineers” or “mountain-woodsmen” of Buncombe County that Davis provides in “Qualla” are much like those in “The Yares.” The Yare family, for example, has “exceptionally strong intellects” and “the grave self-control of Indians;” the mountaineers in “Qualla” are “of honorable, devout habits of mind, and [bear] themselves with exceptional tact and delicacy of feeling and the dignity and repose of manner of

Indians” (259, 567). It is only in “Qualla,” however, that Davis reveals that her comparisons of white mountaineers to Native Americans are based partly on her firsthand observations of the Eastern band of Cherokees. Davis visited the Cherokees while traveling by mule in North Carolina, and attempts to describe them with the unflinching honesty, humane sympathy, and appreciation that are characteristic of her portrayals of white mountaineers. Although both groups seem dirty and ignorant to Davis, she finds that the Cherokees are “clean-minded” and “grave, thoughtful, and self-possessed,” and that the white mountaineers are “full of shrewd common sense and feeling” (577, 583).

Davis also finds that the slow-paced and non-materialistic lifeways of Appalachian communities are a refreshing alternative “to the hurry and anxious gnawing care which have made the men of the Northern States lean of body and morbid of mind, and the women neuralgic and ill-tempered.” After meeting an Appalachian family who sleeps in hollow logs instead of beds and a Cherokee mother who owns only a cook-pot, Davis questions “the actual value of government bonds or bric-a-brac or Meissonier’s pictures and whether it really ‘paid’ to toil a life long to secure such goods in advance of our neighbor” (577). Davis claims that she and her traveling companions have been improved by their visit to Appalachia, that for them “the journey [was] an actual lapse out

101 of the nervous strain, the bodily daily sense of wear and exhaustion” that they experienced in their professional lives in Philadelphia (578).

“Qualla” also differs from “The Yares of the Black Mountains” in that it makes more apparent Davis’s activism, which Michele L. Mock describes as “a spiritual activism that attempts to embrace difference and enact transformation” (49). While “The

Yares” subtly points to needed transformations, “Qualla” ends with Davis directly calling for “the establishment of schools” in the Cherokee community, as well as the recruitment of “unmarried or childless women” who have “the real missionary spirit” to work as teachers (586). Such a call is the most obvious but not the only evidence that Davis is writing something that goes beyond what Engelhardt dismissively classifies as “the literature of the tourist,” in which “tourists rarely notice or speak for the well-being of people and places in Appalachia; they pass through and on, leaving Appalachia as soon as it has been useful and used” (57). The respectful tourist who is significantly improved by the people and places in Appalachia and then passes through (without trying to instigate change) is not necessarily problematic, and in fact may be appreciated by local communities because she did not urge them to assimilate the values of the dominant society, as suggested by the hill work in Davis’s writings. In “The Yares” and “Qualla,” much of the well-being comes from within mountaineer and Cherokee communities, not from outside them; when Davis does call for the interventions of outsiders, she often is acting only to amplify what the community itself has already requested. In “Qualla,” many Cherokees discuss the coming of schools with “breathless eagerness” and gather around Davis’s mule, “asking a hundred questions, and explaining how little money it would take, and how hard they would study” (587). What Engelhardt overlooks in “The

102

Yares”—the change of the traveler’s attitudes that can prompt the change of the reader’s perceptions—is more pronounced in “Qualla,” in which Davis and her companions gain what Davis hopes her readers will gain: a deeper sympathy for and appreciation of the

Appalachian Mountains and the white and Cherokee communities who inhabit them.

While the speculator in “The Yares” believes that the Appalachian balsams aren’t worth his investment, his counterpart in “Qualla” actually has a change of heart. “The shrewdest business-man of the party,” he realizes that if the mountains “should be bored and tunneled and cut up by Novelty mica-mines and iron furnaces worked by New York capitalists…. a good beyond their money value would be lost to the country” (577 -578).

While the business-man gains a new understanding of the value of the mountains,

Davis also suggests that her writings can serve to correct some misrepresentations of and stereotypes about white and Cherokee Appalachians and make them more accurately known; the text of “Qualla” notes that “until within the last two years Western North

Carolina, with its white and red inhabitants, was an almost unknown region to the rest of the country” (582). In “Qualla,” Davis recounts her interactions with several Cherokees: a mother named Llan-zi, the “hard at work” head-chief and his sons, several adults who

“read and write in Cherokee,” a Baptist minister, and a young man who believes that

Cherokees should be sent north to become teachers (583, 584). These meetings challenge what Davis calls the “usual notions” of the dominant society, and prompt her to question whether “agents and commissioners [who are] church members” are morally fit to carry out their plans to “civilize and Christianize” Indian communities (581, 583, 584). Davis argues that the Cherokees are “placable, industrious, eager for knowledge—not savages, but men living perforce like brutes,” and that the white merchant Colonel Thomas and the

103

Irishman Tallalla (Thomas’s “deputy ruler”) have been brutal in their dealings with the

Cherokees (580, 585). In his “unlicensed dictatorship” that lasted thirty years, Thomas was “judge, business-agent, pastor and master” to the Cherokees, who trusted him and became landless because of his fraud, and who were now suing him (582). Davis suggests that Thomas’s efforts to civilize and Christianize the Indians lack the real missionary spirit because he followed an uncivil and unchristian “creed,” which Tallalla articulates to her: “the negro was a domestic animal, and the Indian a savage animal… the man who dealt with them as human beings was a fool, and would reap folly for his pains” (583). Because a creed like this is “an accepted one in this country” and because

“white squatters and [white suppliers of] whisky” arrive in Indian communities “more promptly than… schools or model farms,” Davis believes that missionary teachers very different from Thomas should be recruited, that “strong and kindly men and women, reading these pages, may suddenly perceive that [the Cherokees] are their own kinsfolk needing their help, who have so long lived forgotten among the mountains” (583, 586).

In Davis’s writings, social transformation becomes possible when readers recognize the ties of kinship between urban and rural peoples, between humans and nature, and between the dominant society and the commonplace folk— Indians, African Americans, and white mountaineers.

Although some critics overlook important regional differences and believe that

Davis’s mountaineer characters represent Southern culture, Davis clearly identifies

Appalachia and the South as separate and discrete regions in her fictionalized travel essays of the 1880s. Reworking some of the North Carolina materials used in “The Yares of the Black Mountains” and “Qualla, the three-part essay “By-paths in the Mountains”

104 distinguishes the white mountaineers of North Carolina from other Southerners while countering some literary misrepresentations.93 Mrs. Polly Leduc, a white mountaineer who lives in the vicinity of Qualla, implicitly provides through her “gossip” what the text describes as “a very accurate glimpse” of her neighbors—a glimpse that the text uses in support of its own analysis: “[the mountaineers] are, as a rule, wretchedly poor and ignorant…. They are hospitable, honest, and, in their ignorant way, God-fearing….

Nothing could be falser than the sketches which have been given of them that confound these uncouth but decent people with the Pikes or swaggering thieves and ruffians of the

West” (535).94 In addition to Mrs. Leduc’s home in the mountains of North Carolina,

“By-paths in the Mountains” describes other sections of Appalachia visited by Sarah

Davidger and Dr. and Mrs. Mulock, including the Blue Ridge of Georgia, the Alleghany

Mountains of West Virginia, and the Nittany Mountains of Pennsylvania. Although “the

Pennsylvania spurs of the Alleghanies are tame compared with those of Virginia or the

Carolinas,” Davis suggests that the hilly terrain and rural culture of central Pennsylvania can also be classified as Appalachian (354). The experiences of Davis’s outsider characters in Appalachian Pennsylvania—a region not usually associated with the

South—are similar to their experiences elsewhere in Appalachia, and to Mrs. Denby’s experiences in the Black Mountains near Asheville, North Carolina. Sarah Davidger

93 In Davis’s five-part fictionalized essay “Here and There in the South” (Harper’s Magazine, 1887), the Northern narrator describes the South as a region that is unlike Appalachia; it is a “three-cornered segment of [the Northerners’] country, which had a climate, history, and character of its own,” a place imagined by the Northerners as “a vague tropical stretch of sugar and cotton and rice fields, peopled by indolent, arrogant men and haughty, languid women, their feet still firmly set on the necks of the negro race” (235, 236).

94 In 1862, Bayard Taylor described the Pike as “a native of Missouri, Arkansas, Northern Texas, or Southern Illinois…. He is the Anglo-Saxon relapsed into semi-barbarism. He is long, lathy, and sallow; he expectorates vehemently; he takes naturally to whisky… he has little respect for the rights of others, [and] he distrusts men in ‘store clothes’” (51). 105 travels with the Mulocks to the Nittany Mountains, where they board at a farm-house “in a gorge between two mountains.” Despite differences in class, culture, and education, the outsiders (Sarah and the Mulocks) form friendships with the local farmers that emphasize commonality and reciprocity; when they visit the store and post-office, “the feeble gossip of these lonely hill farms found universal tongue and ears” (355). Sarah fishes for trout, hunts for woodcock, and goes riding on horseback “through the Nittany, Gray Eagle, and

Muncy hills,” where she sees “much delight and beauty” (355, 356). When Sarah is caught in a rainstorm, a charcoal burner who lives as a hermit on a mountain ridge shares his “hut of logs” with her (356). After the storm ceases, and after he leads her and horse through an area made treacherous by iron-mining holes, Sarah offers to pay him for his hospitality and the knowledge he has shared with her. The charcoal burner refuses, insisting that her kindness has been pay enough. In this relatively brief encounter, the character of the Appalachian is evaluated, but so is the character of the urban outsider.

Each appreciates the benefits of knowing the other. Later, after hearing about Sarah’s encounter with the charcoal burner, Dr. Mulock is impressed by the honor and respect he showed her, and remarks that “one needs to come into such by-ways as this to find out the real character of the American” (358).

With five short stories set in or near the hills of Appalachia, the collection

Silhouettes of American Life (1892) continues Davis’s project of examining the mutual exchanges that are made possible by hill work and other cross-cultural encounters, and that can improve both the nation and its by-ways. In addition to “The Yares of the Black

Mountains,” the Appalachian stories in Silhouettes include “Walhalla,” which describes a

German village in the mountains of South Carolina where woodcarving and other

106 traditions are still practiced. “The End of the Vendetta” portrays a haughty young woman from Connecticut who travels to the mountains of Virginia to become a teacher.

In “A Wayside Episode,” Emily Wootton and her husband also journey from the North to

“a gap in the mountains in Southwestern Virginia.” 95 Emily describes the confining society she has left as “one of those glass boxes” in which “goldfishes and minnows swim round and round, eying each other year in and year out;” her encounter with the mountains makes her wish that she was “some wild creature that could go up that path into the woods and stay there” (150, 152).

Other than “The Yares of the Black Mountains,” the only story in Silhouettes of

American Life in which an Appalachian character plays a major role is “At the Station.”96

That character is the community elder Miss Dilly, whose neuralgia has nearly disabled her, and who lives in the inn at Sevier Station, a tiny hamlet along the railway in the valley. Miss Dilly is a “Carolinian mountaineer,” and she believes that returning to her former home in the mountains would strengthen her bond with the land and her deceased family, and would heal her: “ef I was in the old place, facin’ old Craggy, ’n the

Swannanoa [River] a-runnin’ past the door, ’n could go set by [the graves of] father ’n mother every mornin’… I’d get young agin ’n lose this torment.” While some of her beliefs may seem superstitious (she thinks her neuralgia may result from being

“‘overlooked’ by some who has an evil eye”), she is also a devout Christian whose charity and desire for reconciliation extend even to the “poor soul” with the power to curse her, which she considers an unfortunate burden (2, 4). Because she frequently talks

95 “Walhalla” was first published in Scribner's Monthly in 1880. “The End of the Vendetta,” originally titled “A Silhouette,” was first published in Harper’s New Monthly in 1883. “A Wayside Episode” was first published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1883.

96 “At the Station” was first published in Scribner's Magazine in 1888. 107 about her religion and because there is no church in Sevier Station, Miss Dilly functions as an informal minister, “the only messenger sent to show [her community] how to live and die” (5). While Miss Dilly is responsible for much of the hill work in Sevier Station, she also seeks to improve the lives of train passengers who stop at the inn. She cares for the sick among them, treats them as “dear good folk who had come up from the world to talk to her awhile,” and listens appreciatively to them describing their travels. Her friendliness, curiosity, and receptiveness impress all the travelers she meets—“women, children, and men”—and they show her “a tender kind of respect” (6). The train passing through Sevier Station is the Western North Carolina Railroad, the same train that had

Mrs. Denby had used in her journey to reach Asheville, the Yares and the Black

Mountains; the section between Salisbury and Asheville has been finished since 1880.

For the travelers aboard this trans-regional train who have never been to Appalachia before and for her Piedmont neighbors, Miss Dilly functions as a kind of mediator who introduces them to her cultural traditions, enriches them by her way of living and values, and is in turn enriched by theirs.

Thus, “At the Station,” like many of Davis’s stories and essays, counters the image of the dependent, primitive, and peculiar mountaineer that circulated in the

American Missionary and the Journal of American Folklore and that would be perpetuated by the folk imaginary of the dominant society in the twentieth century as well. Like Davis, Olive Tilford Dargan also challenges the stereotypes of Appalachian peculiarity and primitiveness in her short stories, which she began publishing in 1919.

Dargan’s stories examine the ongoing cross-cultural encounters between a landowner in the Unaka Mountains of North Carolina and her tenants, whom she describes as

108

“highlanders.” As in Davis’s works, the Appalachian characters in Dargan’s stories often take on the roles of social critic, teacher, mediator, and guide. While Davis explores multiple and alternative ways in which dominant and folk societies can improve one another, Dargan emphasizes the multiple and alternative epistemologies, cultural practices, temporal forms, and value systems which become available to those who can understand, appreciate, and learn from both traditionalism and progressivism, both regional and modern societies.

* * *

Olive Tilford Dargan and Multiple Ways of Knowing

Although she did not live in Appalachia proper as a child and owned no land there until she was thirty-seven, Olive Tilford Dargan (1869 – 1968) apparently identified herself as a person with a lifelong connection to hill and rural cultures. Dargan’s biographical note in A Study in Southern Poetry (1911) reports that she was born in “the hill-country of western Kentucky on the borders of the blue-grass region.” Dargan moved to Missouri at ten; from fourteen to eighteen, she taught school near “Warm

Springs, a health resort in the Ozark foothills of northern Arkansas.” After attending college and teaching school in several states, Dargan, along with her husband Pegram, chose as a second home “a beautiful mountain place in western North Carolina, two miles from the village of Almond” (339 – 340). That place was a thousand-acre farm on Round

Top Mountain, which Pegram and Olive Dargan bought with the earnings from Olive’s second volume of plays, Lords and Lovers (1906). Olive Dargan made Round Top her full-time home in 1916 after Pegram died, and for a time shared a cabin with a tenant

109 family that included seven children. Although she sometimes suffered from poor health,

Dargan helped with manual labor when she could.97 To keep up with farm expenses,

Dargan turned to writing and selling short stories about the complex relationships between a non-Appalachian landowner and her Appalachian tenants and neighbors.98

Sharing the collective title of “Highland Annals,” Dargan’s first three stories appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in 1919.99 Dargan’s use of the of word “highland” in her title, as well as the specific details she uses to delineate her characters (Unakasians, or highlanders who live in the Unaka Mountains), resonate with a broader intellectual project that played out in Progressive Era Appalachia as several writers and reformers attempted to re-conceptualize the region and its people, sometimes challenging and sometimes rearticulating the stereotypes, caricatures, and condescensions of the national folk imaginary. The terms highland and highlander were contested and somewhat overdetermined during this time; they were variously used to indicate that the region was geographically different from adjacent regions, or to claim that it was similar to the

Highlands of Scotland, or to suggest that its people were descendants of Scottish

Highlander immigrants and similar to them in ethnicity, individualism, and pioneer

97In a 1916 letter to Alice Blackwell, Dargan reported that she had been “mending fences, digging ditches, carrying rock, cutting poles, and other incredible things;” she also had “inoculated bushels and bushels of peas for planting, and helped build a pig-proof fence down a perpendicular hillside, besides mulling early and late over schemes to keep my tenants from starving while I am away” (qtd. in Ackerman 16).

98 According to Virginia Terrell Lathrop, Dargan found that the “farm she couldn’t make pay with plows and mules, she was… supporting with her typewriter” (qtd. in Ackerman 23). Elfenbein also states that Dargan sold short stories to help pay for farm debts (xvi).

99 In The Atlantic Monthly, “Highland Annals” is almost always the title given on the contents page and on the first page of the story. “I. About Granpap and Trees” appears as the subtitle of the story in the May 1919 issue; “II. Coretta and Autumn” is the subtitle in the June 1919 issue; “III. Serena and Wild Strawberries” is the subtitle in the September 1919 issue. The Atlantic Monthly published the fourth, fifth, and sixth of the Highland Annals in 1924; the seventh appeared in The Reviewer in 1925 as “Serena Takes a Boarder (a chapter from ‘Highland Annals’).” Dargan included these seven annals, along with a previously unpublished eighth, in the collection Highland Annals in 1925. 110 spirit.100 The Southern Highland Division of the Russell Sage Foundation had been created in 1912; with its support, John C. Campbell extensively surveyed Appalachian communities, schools, churches, and philanthropic programs. In The Southern

Highlander and His Homeland (1921)—arguably the most progressive and pluralist study of Appalachia at the time—Campbell names the region “the Southern Highlands” based on its geographic features; for Campbell, it logically follows that the people should be called “the Southern Highlanders.”101 Importantly, Campbell suggests that “Southern

Mountaineer” is a less preferable name since historically “the term… has been made to suggest a peculiar people, with peculiar needs” (20).102 In addition to arguing against

Appalachian peculiarity, Campbell also argues against the claim that Appalachian people are essentially primitive. The culture of the southern highlanders is more heterogeneous than monolithic, Campbell argues; is not strange or inferior, but a product of history, a reason for local and national pride, and a useful resource that can play a part in improving the region.

The extent to which Campbell and Dargan sought to recuperate the term highlander becomes clearer when we consider some of its other connotations. Horace

100 Henry Shapiro claims that the earliest use of the term ‘highlander” in Appalachian discourse was probably the 1892 speech “The Debt of Our Country to the American Highlanders during the War,” which Charles Jackson Ryder delivered to the American Missionary Association. By linking the mountaineers to the highlanders of Scotland, Ryder “reinforced the sense of them as a romantic people, and located them securely in the heroic past.” This identification also helped to “[legitimize] benevolent work among the mountain whites by asserting that they were not only worth the trouble but were also, like earlier avatars of the pioneer race, capable of self-improvement and willing participants in the progress of the nation” (89 – 92).

101 Shapiro argues that “the designation of the region as ‘the Southern Highlands’ by John Campbell and others in the early twentieth century not only recognized the independent existence of the region (and hence the normality of Appalachian otherness), but suggested that the disparity between mountain life and life in the rest of America was merely another instance of the normal disparity between life among highlanders and lowlanders so familiar to the readers of Walter Scott” (68).

102 In 1932, Dargan herself expressed a similar opinion: “I don’t like the way some writers picture the mountain people as a peculiar type, for they are not” (qtd. in Mantooth 211 – 212). 111

Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders (1913), for example, repeatedly describes

Appalachian people as “a strange race, ” as primitive, peculiar, childlike, and “[near] to a state of nature” (204, 212).103 Thus, Kephart confirms rather than challenges the primitivism of the national folk imaginary.104 Believing that they share both the virtues and the flaws of the highlanders of Scotland, Kephart identifies Appalachian people as

“southern highlanders.” While Kephart suggests that the influential and best-selling novels of Murfree and John Fox, Jr., have to some extent distorted and misrepresented

Appalachia, he himself employs many stereotypes.105 The men of the southern highlands, Kephart claims, resemble “the gillies of the Scotch Highlands. Generally they are lean-faced, sallow, level-browed…. Gray eyes predominate, sometimes vacuous, but oftener hard, searching, crafty—the feral eye of primitive man” (214). Samuel Tyndale

Wilson’s position on Appalachia falls between those of Campbell and Kephart. In The

Southern Mountaineers (1914), Wilson notes that “we call ourselves ‘southern

103 For example, Kephart claims that “the average mountain man prefers his native hills and his primitive ancient ways,” and that “[the mountaineers] resent every exposure of their peculiarities” (16, 206). In one striking passage, Kephart even suggests that mountaineers have learned some antisocial and “feral” customs from animals: “perhaps no white race is nearer a state of nature than these highlanders of ours.... Primitive society is by no means a Utopia or a Garden of Eden. In wilderness life the feral arts of concealment, spying, false ‘leads,’ and doubling on trails, are the arts self-preservative. The native backwoodsman practices them as instinctively and with as little compunction upon his own species as upon the deer and the wolf from whom he learned them” (205).

104 Mark T. Banker maintains that “Kephart’s Appalachia was, in many respects, more like that of the local colorists…. Kephart wove colorful phrases from the distinctive mountain dialect into tales of moonshining, bear hunts, and feuds, which echoed Murfree and [John Fox, Jr.]” (150 – 152). Denise Giardina argues that Kephart “helped foist ridiculous stereotypes of Appalachia on the larger public,” including “the mountaineer as mentally and physically defective” and “the twin stereotypes of the lazy mountaineer and his hag of a wife” (170).

105 Like Murfree, John Fox, Jr. (1862 – 1919) represented Appalachia as “the opposite of America” and characterized its people as peculiar and primitive (Shapiro 5). Darlene Wilson claims that Fox’s novels and “alleged true essays” emphasize the “dirt, deception, darkness, drunkenness, defiance, and all-around moral degradation” of Appalachian people, who desperately need “a benevolent outsider or narrator [to act] as mediator or interpreter…. [because they are] so bereft of hope and bewildered by modernity…. For the mountaineers’ own sake and in the interests of rapid assimilation and speedy acquiescence to the new order of aggressive capitalism that had seized the southern Appalachian coalfields, Fox declared himself ready for the role of interpreter” (102, 109-110). 112 mountaineers’ or ‘highlanders,’ and of that name we are humbly proud” (25). Like

Campbell, Wilson generally avoids describing Appalachian people as peculiar or primitive. While Wilson echoes Kephart in his analysis of some aspects of what he calls

“the Appalachian Problem” (inertia, lack of ambition, devolution, belatedness), he also concurs with Campbell in his discussion of factors that contribute to what he calls

“Appalachian Power” and “Appalachian Promise” (strength of body, strength of mind,

Americanism, spirit of independence, religious nature).

In favoring “highlander” over “mountaineer,” Dargan, Campbell, and other

Appalachian intellectuals may also have been countering the novels of Murfree and Fox, as well as William Goodell Frost’s influential essay “Our Contemporary Ancestors in the

Southern Mountains,” published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1899.106 The mountaineers, as Frost describes them, are primitive, anachronistic, “pathetically belated,” somewhat

“rude and repellent” in external characteristics, archaic in their oral traditions, degenerated in their religion, and in danger of “melt[ing] away like so many Indians”

(313 – 319). In light of Frost’s essay on southern mountaineers and many other writings about Appalachia in the early twentieth century, we may assume that for Dargan and

Campbell, among others, “highlander” carried less baggage than “mountaineer.” Dargan takes a quite different tact from Frost, Kephart, and other primitivists in her representations of the highlanders as people who are aware of and curious about modernity, and who respond to the dominant culture in a variety of ways that reflect the needs of their families and communities.

106 Murfree and Fox usually identified their characters as “mountaineers” and only occasionally identified them as “highlanders.” “It is telling that Kephart’s book quotes Frost several times, and that Kephart attributes to Fox and Murfree’s fictions “just enough to truth… to give it a point that will stick” (12); it is equally telling that Campbell’s book omits Frost, Fox, and Murfree altogether. 113

By writing the “Highland Annals,” Dargan directly engages and refutes Kephart’s

Our Southern Highlanders, which reportedly sold ten thousand copies between 1913 and

1921.107 Dargan’s farm on Round Top was about twenty miles from the cabin on Hazel

Creek where Kephart made his home during the three years that he lived in rural

Appalachia.108 In addition to contrasting Kephart’s personal knowledge of his neighbors and surroundings with her own first-hand experiences, Dargan also seems to allude to

Kephart’s book several times in the “Highland Annals.” For example, Kephart claims that “The great mountain masses still await their annalist, their artist, and, in some places, even their explorer” (27). Kephart elaborates that claim and emphasizes Appalachian primitiveness in the chapter “Who Are the Mountaineers,” in which he argues that the mountaineers have “no [political] coherence among themselves as would come from common leadership or a sense of common origin and mutual dependence. And they are a people without annals. Back of their grandfathers they have neither screed nor hearsay”

(355). Dargan, on the other hand, would have her readers believe that while the highlanders may lack political power at the state and national levels, their family and community formations facilitate their coherence, identity, and interdependence. And while they may lack formal records and written accounts, they have alternative annals, a vibrant folk history that circulates through their oral traditions—a history that they may

107 Elfenbein believes that “Horace Kephart was one of the outsiders whose views Dargan was most eager to challenge.” Dargan particularly disagreed with Kephart’s representation of mountain women as “downtrodden and victimized by abuse.” Elfenbein suggests that Kephart was more accurate on subjects that interested him, including “such activities as bear hunting and moonshining.” Dargan, unlike Kephart, “had known mountain women well, and she therefore understood them much better than he did. This deeper understanding allowed Dargan to create women characters who demonstrated independence, self- reliance, intelligence, wit, and creativity…. In populating [the “Highland Annals”] with such women, Dargan refuted Kephart’s account of mountain women point by point” (xx – xxii).

108 Kephart moved to Hazel Creek in 1904, began traveling through southern Appalachia in 1907, and settled in Bryson City, North Carolina in 1910. 114 or may not share with people outside their community as they see fit. Like Davis’s “The

Yares of Black Mountain: a True Story,” Dargan’s “Highland Annals” examines the capacity of Appalachian people to tell their own stories, to evaluate their audiences and decide what is appropriate to tell them, and to represent themselves in ways that counter the histories, artistic renderings , and explorer/ traveler accounts that have been circulated by the dominant society.109

In each of the three “Highland Annals” that Dargan published in 1919, a conflict develops between Miss Dolly, the well-educated, well-read landowner, and one or more of the Merlins, an extended family of highlanders who work as tenant farmers. Miss

Dolly’s modern values, typically expressed through her ideas about farm-work, house- work, gender roles, and nature, invariably clash with the Merlins’ lifeways and worldviews. More often than not, Miss Dolly carefully considers the lessons that the

Merlins offer her, and then adapts or even discards her former ideas and perceptions.110

In these “Highland Annals,” the Merlins and their neighbors also are carefully considering national and global events (the rise of mill towns, movies, the influenza epidemic, the World War); they are affected by modernity and the dominant culture as

Miss Dolly is affected by their oral and cultural traditions.111 Over a period of several

109 In the eighth of the annals, “A Proper Funeral,” the highlander community attends the funeral of Nathe Ponder and refuses to discuss Nathe’s life in the presence of outsiders such as Lawyer Jenkins. At the funeral dinner, after the lawyer leaves, the community confers a measure of insider status on Miss Dolly and agrees to allow her to hear the stories told by Uncle Ranz, who “thinks his tongue’s got a mortgage on ever’thing abody could say about Nathe Ponder” (Highland Annals 240).

110 Elfenbein suggests that Dargan’s correspondence with Alice Stone Blackwell reveals that she had a similar attitude about her tenants when she first moved to Ridge Top. Partly quoting from one of Dargan’s letters to Blackwell, Elfenbein notes that “Dargan planned to transform her tenants in various ways. She wanted them to abandon their ‘old-fashioned wasteful way of farming,’ for example, and to adopt ‘better methods’” (xv).

111 Although Elfenbein claims “references to the outside world play a negligible role” (xxxv) in the “Highland Annals,” I contend that these references significantly contribute to Dargan’s project of 115 years, as Miss Dolly increasingly comes to understand, respect, and even participate in highlander culture, her relationship with the Merlins becomes more complex. While continuing to own the land that the Merlins work, Miss Dolly’s position shifts from an intrusive neighbor to a tolerated neighbor, and from an opinionated outsider to a friend who is starting to develop an insider’s perspective.

* * *

“A Wind-Shake Starts at the Heart”

In the first of the annals, “About Granpap and Trees,” Miss Dolly speaks of her farm in the Unaka Mountains as an “inheritance”—that is, something she receives from unspecified predecessors. She would like to believe that Granpap Merlin, the oldest of the tenant farmers, has “accrued” to her—that she has acquired his support through periodic gains (608). What Miss Dolly seems reluctant to admit is that Granpap, in turn, has been subtly winning her support for his concerns as well, that she has been compelled to gain a working knowledge and perhaps even an appreciation of his lifeways and worldview. Miss Dolly’s success as manager of a tenant farm in the highlands will ultimately depend not on imposing her values and customs, but on blending hers with those of her tenants. In short, Miss Dolly learns that if she is going to live in the highlands, she must know the highlands and its culture.

Romanticizing the land, imagining nature through the poetry of Spencer and

Sidney Lanier, Miss Dolly at first seems to believe that Granpap’s self-sufficiency and ability to grow his own food confirm her picturesque expectations. When she meets

challenging the national folk imaginary, which emphasized ignorance of Appalachian people, who were apart from the nation and modernity. Horace Kephart, for example, maintained that “Appalachia [is] one of the great land-locked areas of the globe… encompassed by a high-tensioned civilization, yet less affected to-day by modern ideas, less cognizant of modern progress, than any other part of the English-speaking world” (380). 116

Granpap, he is eating corn-pone and pickled beans; her first words to him—“did you grow the corn”—must sound naïve or slightly ridiculous to Granpap, as if she is ignorant of basic agriculture—or perhaps calculating, as if she wants to determine what profit she can extract from him. Granpap tells her, “It growed itself; I planted it.” Miss Dolly finds herself unable to read his response, to determine if he is “simply, or contemptuously, laconical.” Trying to speak in “the tone of ownership” (now that the land he has planted is hers), to demonstrate the knowledge she has gained from reading issues of Farmers’

Bulletin, Miss Dolly remarks that the farm “seems rather high for corn-land” (608).

Surprisingly, Granpap seems to respond favorably to Miss Dolly’s assertiveness; he shares with her a memory of his deceased wife, a woman who had “proper spirit” and wouldn’t let him come home for supper when he neglected to supply her with stove- wood. In representing Granpap as a considerate and respectful husband and his wife as a spirited woman who insists that he do his part in fueling the stove, Dargan alludes to and counters Kephart’s portrayal of Appalachian men as neglectful and Appalachian women as drudge-like.112

Miss Dolly soon realizes that in order for her to help “Granpap’s toleration of

[her] [pass] into liking,” she must learn the values, customs, and rhetorical strategies of the highlanders (609). She finds that “in the least matter of business, the Unakasian expects to be approached by polite indirection” rather than “a straight march to the

112 In Our Southern Highlanders, Kephart reports that “the mountain farmer’s wife is not only a household drudge, but a field-hand as well…. It is the commonest of sights for a woman to be awkwardly hacking up firewood with a dull axe. When her man leaves home on a journey he is not likely to have laid in wood for the stove or hearth: so she and the children must drag from the hillsides whatever dead timber they can find…. There is no conscious discourtesy in such customs; but they betoken an indifference to woman’s weakness, a disregard for her finer nature, a denial of her proper rank, that are real and deep-seated in the mountaineer” (257 – 258). In this passage, Denise Giardina claims that Kephart reveals his “ignorance of the physical labor required by all parties to maintain a mountain farm, and sexist assumptions of his time and place about the ‘nature’ of women and the work that suited them” (170).

117 point.” To win Granpap’s favor, Miss Dolly convinces his daughter-in-law Coretta to stop calling her son by his “furinner” name, his “sissy name” (Cecil), and to instead call him “Richard,” the name he shares with Granpap’s brother and father.113 Miss Dolly accomplishes this not by giving Coretta blunt advice, but suggestively discussing with her the “many famous men… named Richard” (610). By the end of the story, Miss Dolly has also realized that “practical argument[s]” are usually more effective with Granpap than romantic or aesthetic language. When helping Granpap select a “board-tree” that will provide materials for mending her roof, Miss Dolly first anthropomorphizes a white oak that she doesn’t want him to cut. Hoping that another line of appeal will be more persuasive, she next points out to Granpap that the tree also provides mast for the hogs, and thus has utilitarian value. Stated another way, Miss Dolly has learned to argue that what she wants will serve Granpap’s interests too. A white oak “on duty here as… a sentry,” Granpap may have no use for; a source of acorns for the farm’s hogs, he may value highly (612).

The relationship between Miss Dolly the property owner and Granpap the tenant farmer is complex; the trees and the need for a new roof may be hers, but the knowledge of which tree will yield good boards and the skill of splitting them are his.114 Although she is the landowner, Miss Dolly suggests that her financial resources are limited; she needs the new roof because she “could not spend another winter with the snow driving in

113 The adult tenant farmers on Miss Dolly’s farm include Granpap, his sons Sam and Lem, Sam’s wife Coretta, and Lem’s wife Serena.

114 Elfenbein finds that the owner-tenant relationship between Miss Dolly and Granpap raises a provocative question: “Who really has the stronger claim to the mountains and the stories of the people who live there, newcomers with deeds and typewriters like Miss Dolly, or families like the Merlins, who have lived on the land for a century or more?’ (xlii). I believe that Dargan also raises related questions: Who should write the annals of non-dominant ethnic groups—the newcomer with a typewriter, the family who lives on the land, or both? What new kind of annals could be made by harnessing the written and the oral, the formal and the informal, the modern and the regional? 118 on [her]” (612). Granpap ultimately cuts down a tree that she had wanted him to spare, that had prompted her to engage him in lengthy verbal negotiations. Although it looks

“purty and straight,” the tree proves to have been “desaptive.” Surprisingly, Granpap reveals that he also personifies the trees in a way that expresses his imagination and his appreciation for the natural world: “You oughter seen him fall! Just ate up those little chestnuts and poplars as he went down.” Granpap shows Miss Dolly the tree’s unexpected scars, knot-holes, and “snirly blocks;” he explains to her that trees can also be altered by “a wind-shake [that] starts at the heart an’ twists round and round, gettin’ bigger and bigger an’ breakin’ the wood as it goes…. If I’d a’ listened at this tree in a high wind it couldn’t a’ fooled me.” Granpap’s interpretation of the wind-shake and other “events” in the life of the tree suggests his ability to interpret and pass on folk histories that require careful listening and that have been omitted from official annals.

Miss Dolly asks him is some people are broken inside like the tree; he confesses that his wife “was like that after Ben got killed” (613 – 614). Miss Dolly may invite Granpap to share his bee song (“which an old, old man had taught his grandfather when a boy”) and tree lore because she appreciates highlander culture, because it facilitates communication between them, or because she wants to be liked and not just tolerated; he may share his traditional knowledge with her because doing so allows him subtle ways to advance his interests or to claim a measure of authority (613).115 In any case, Dargan represents

115 Miss Dolly and Granpap’s disagreement about which tree to harvest is one of many struggles in the “Highland Annals” that plays out as Miss Dolly tries to assert her authority and hegemony over the tenants. While Miss Dolly may be fairly benevolent, sympathetic, and open-minded, she also confesses her own petty and sanctimonious tendencies, her use of bribes and other manipulations. In her study of Dargan’s later novel Call Home the Heart and other novels by “female modernists,” Janet Galligani Casey finds that “rurality [serves] as a cultural construct that galvanizes [the writers’] class- and gender-oriented social analyses.” Dargan deploys rurality for a similar purpose in “Highland Annals.” Casey further claims that Dargan, Edith Summers Kelley, and Josephine Johnson figure “the iconic American farm [as] not a dream realized but a promise broken, a dystopian locale made all the more disillusioning by the relentless rhetoric 119 traditional culture as a powerful resource, not as an obstacle that prevents Granpap and his family from becoming civilized, educated, and modernized.

* * *

A Broken Day / a Time for Breaking Off

By the opening of “Coretta and Autumn” (the second of the “Highland Annals”),

Miss Dolly believes that she has been transformed in the perceptions of her tenants from

“a mere outsider occasionally invading my own territory” to a neighbor whose visits “by their fires” they welcome. Coretta Merlin has even said that “she did not care how long

[Miss Dolly] ‘stayed in’” (731). While suggesting that Miss Dolly and her tenants share a deeper level of amiability, Dargan soon turns to examining the reasons why Miss Dolly utterly fails in her efforts to synchronize her tenants to her sense of time. Miss Dolly at first wants to use her time eccentrically by keeping a writer’s hours (staying up late, sleeping all morning). Later in the story, as I will discuss below, she wants to use her time methodically and efficiently so that the vegetable garden she raises will serve as an

“example of thrift” and will contribute meaningfully to the war effort (736). In both cases, Miss Dolly is continually frustrated by her tenants’ understanding of time, which reflects their own traditional lifeways and worldview. Miss Dolly wants to believe that moving to the mountains to write has brought her “release from the clock” and from

“worldly schedules.” Nevertheless, Coretta frequently stops by early to borrow an item

playing up its alleged superiority to corrupt urban cultures. For the sharecropper, white or black, and especially for the female, the farm is not the wholesome setting that more privileged proponents declared it to be. On the contrary, its pleasant surfaces hide a violent politics of exclusion” (126 – 127). In “Serena Takes a Boarder,” the seventh of the “Highland Annals,” the farm becomes more dystopian when Miss Dolly forces Serena to change her farming and housekeeping practices and thereby causes marital, familial, and communal tension and unhappiness; ultimately, Miss Dolly decides to retract the changes she has forced. Generally speaking, however, the politics of exclusion in the “Highland Annals,” are somewhat mitigated by Miss Dolly’s relatively limited resources and her sometimes poor health, as well as by her increasing appreciation for highland culture and identification with her tenants. 120 she needs so that she can fix a “mountain breakfast” for her family and her visitors, and thus gives Miss Dolly “the violent waking” that causes “a broken day” (731). It soon becomes clear that Coretta lives by a mountain clock, a mountain schedule. Gradually,

Miss Dolly learns to value rather than despise the broken days that result from conceptualizing time as the highlanders do.116

While examining Miss Dolly’s appreciation of highland time, Dargan also complicates the dominant society’s imagination of Appalachian people as appealingly unsophisticated folks, as relics of an earlier century, and as simple souls who are detached from and blissfully unaware of the modern world.117 Dargan at first seems to invite readers to believe that Miss Dolly confirms much of the dominant society’s view

(which in the 1910s is much the same as it was in the 1880s). Miss Dolly apparently writes letters to her old friends that romanticize the land and the labor that is necessary for farming it; one friend replies, “your last [letter] filled me with a veritable nostalgia for your mountain. The odor of ripened grains and fruits and new-cut wood overcomes me whenever I think of it” (737). This “veritable nostalgia” appears to erase the grain- planting and wood-cutting work of the Merlins, who differ from Miss Dolly in dialect,

116 The conflicts between Miss Dolly and her tenants to some extent result from what Leigh Anne Duck describes as “the potentially unsettling experience of modernity’s multiple temporal forms: the progressive linear time of the capitalist market and the workplace; the cyclical or contemplative time of tradition and ritual; the temporal disjunctions of uneven development; the fixated, spasmodic time of post-traumatic experience; and the idiosyncratic time of individual consciousness” (8).

117 In 1913, for example, Kephart claimed that “no one can understand the attitude of our highlanders toward the rest of the earth until he realizes their amazing isolation from all that lies beyond the blue, hazy skyline of their mountains. Conceive a shipload of emigrants cast away on some unknown island, far from the regular track of vessels, and left there for five or six generations, unaided and untroubled by the growth of civilization. Among the descendants of such a company we would expect to find customs and ideas unaltered from the time of their forefathers. And that is just what we do find to-day among our castaways in the sea of mountains. Time has lingered in Appalachia. The mountain folk still live in the eighteenth century. The progress of mankind from that age to this is no heritage of theirs” (17 -18). In 1914, Samuel Tyndale Wilson described southern mountaineers as are “our belated brethren” who are “behind the times” and who have “thus far missed the twentieth-century train (43). 121 education, and class, and also in their understanding of modernity.118 Coretta, as Miss

Dolly at first describes her, is as an oblivious mother who never plans ahead or keeps her home tidy, who grinds her own sausage but doesn’t serve her husband his meals on time, who possesses an ignorant contentment and “a bluebell prettiness that never failed in any light or under any stress.” We soon find out, however, that Coretta does have plans for the future (plans that Miss Dolly does not anticipate), that her brother is participating in the war overseas, and that she is not as oblivious to the passing of time as prevalent stereotypes suggest. Dargan characterizes not only Miss Dolly but also Coretta as a woman who feels stymied by her experience of time. While Miss Dolly resents the interruptions to her writing schedule that make a broken day, Coretta also reveals that she is unable to use her time as she wishes when she remarks, “If I could skip a year ’thout

[giving birth to] a baby, I b’lieve I could ketch up with my work” (732).

Just when it seems that Miss Dolly is poised to educate and modernize Coretta with “crumbs of wisdom” on how to better manage her home, her time, and her life, Miss

Dolly reports that there is a “subversion,” a “reversal of our roles” (732, 733). It is

Coretta who teaches Miss Dolly “signs and portents and conjurations,” who provides her with “a banquet… a store of folk-wisdom.” Coretta tells Miss Dolly that she has seen “a great white cloud with red streaks like blood runnin’ through it, and they ’most made letters. Sam said he guessed it was Hebrew, like the Bible was first wrote in” (732).

Unlike the stereotypically simple mountain characters of the national folk imaginary,

118 Thus, Dargan plays Miss Dolly’s modern chronotope against the Merlins’ rural chronotope. As Susan Gal notes, the concept of a chronotope comes from Mikhail Bakhtin; chronotopes are “cultural categories identifying a nexus of space-time and person. ‘Modernity’ is one such chronotope, usually associated with standards.... By contrast with the standard language's modernity, regional and “non-standard” forms are assigned a chronotope of rural distance and historical past, sometimes inflected as authenticity and old- fashioned simplicity, at other times as country bumpkin ignorance. Hence the supposed discovery of ‘Elizabethan English’ in the mountains of Appalachia” (39). 122

Sam, Coretta, and the other Merlins prove themselves to be aware of the world beyond the mountains, surprisingly intelligent, and resourceful. While Sam knows that the Bible had been originally been written in Hebrew, Coretta seems to refer to the World War when she wonders if the cloud was a “warnin’ to them people to stop fightin’ us” (732).

Coretta also believes that she can stop her daughter’s nosebleed by reading aloud a particular Bible verse, that Miss Dolly will have bad luck if she plants sage in her garden, and that tea made from fodder can cure fevers. Miss Dolly does more than just listen to the folk-wisdom that Coretta shares with her; she assists Coretta and Granpap in curing a mule of “the swinney.” For the first time in the story, Miss Dolly uses the pronoun we instead of I: “we poured cold water on the mule’s shoulder, then rubbed it with a flint- rock until it smoked” (733). Here, the “invisible doors” that separate Miss Dolly from the highlanders open a little wider; here, Dargan moves Miss Dolly into the complicated position of teacher-learner, outsider-insider, and observer-participant—a position that was presumably informed by Dargan’s own experiences as the owner of a tenant farm in the mountains of North Carolina (731). Importantly, Dargan also extends a complex subjectivity to Coretta and the other Merlins as well; Coretta sometimes feels

“exasperation over [Miss Dolly’s] failure to get her point of view;” when she convinces

Miss Dolly to observe one of her folk beliefs, she approvingly remarks, “I knew you wasn’t so unbelievin’ as you let on” (734).

Later in the story, when Coretta announces to Miss Dolly that she and her husband are moving to a mill-town, Dargan further asserts for highlanders the subjectivity, ambition, and desire for progress denied them by the national folk

123 imaginary.119 Miss Dolly describes the summer before Coretta’s announcement as “a war summer,” and remembers that she planned “by personal effort and example to swell the national harvest” (734). Through her war garden, Miss Dolly seeks to impose her values on her tenants, to persuade them to use time methodically and efficiently. She leaves the mountains later that summer; when she returns in the autumn, Miss Dolly finds that

Coretta and her family have let weeds and pigs spoil part of Miss Dolly’s garden, and that they also are planning to leave the mountains. Wanting Coretta to help her preserve her vegetables (and thus increase her productivity), Miss Dolly mentions the store-bought hat she gave her, tells her “mottoes of the period. Every mouthful we save, and so forth,” and reminds her that “your brother is over there” (735). Miss Dolly’s appeals, as usual, are meant to persuade to Coretta to live not according to personal, communal, and traditional values, but according to Miss Dolly’s standards, which bear the marks of what

Leigh Anne Duck calls “dominant national time” (5).120 Rather than earning her loyalty and gratitude, the hat that Miss Dolly gives Coretta increases her desire for more store- bought goods. While Miss Dolly hopes to motivate Coretta through the lure of manufactured goods, the rhetoric of the war effort, and the concept of collapsing distances (not just between region and metropolis, but between nation and nation), she is caught off guard by when she learns that Coretta has set on her sights on a mill job, that

119 In The Carolina Mountains (1913), Margaret Warner Morley reports that “the mountaineer is … so old- fashioned that he believes progress to be a menace against his personal freedom, a thing to be combated at every point” (145 – 146).

120 As Duck notes, “after the Civil War, the dominant national time was understood to be that of capitalist modernity—a linear, progressive temporality allowing new mobility and opportunity; thus the United States was represented as chiefly as an administrative or economic unit rather than as a collective based on shared customs…. [This] collection of temporally coded traits was positioned against those of regional cultures, which were understood to be shaped by tradition” (5). 124

Coretta has her own ambition to collapse distances and participate in dominant national time.

Busy with sewing dresses for her daughters and preparing for the move, Coretta has no time for Miss Dolly’s garden. Coretta tells Miss Dolly that she wants to live in a

“good house” and buy furniture on the installment plan, that she’s “worn out workin’ on the farm like a man, an’ in the house, too. We’ll never git a start here.” Miss Dolly knows that Coretta is right, that she has been complicit in keeping Coretta and her husband Sam from “getting a start.” Although she once considered “making Sam the legal owner of that part of the farm he was supposed to till,” Miss Dolly changed her mind after talking to “the village wise man,” who helped her realize it would be more advantageous and convenient for her to keep Sam as a tenant and to require that he maintain the property on her terms (735). When Coretta says, “I want everything like that hat,” Miss Dolly realizes that “success had defeated me.” By imparting the dominant society’s values to Coretta, Miss Dolly has helped to facilitate Coretta’s flight from tenant farming (736).

While Coretta may discard some parts of highlander culture if she moves to the mill town, Miss Dolly continues to distance herself from national culture and to adopt the ways of the highlanders. At first, she tries to keep up with her conservation project; she sets aside President Wilson’s “fourteen points” and finds that my “New York daily

[newspaper]… served excellently for wrapping winter stores.” Although she still

“look[s] at the [nation’s] labor horizon,” it is the urgency of Miss Dolly’s own work that consumes her (736). Aunt Janey—a neighbor who lacks “a knowledge of the alphabet” but has a “mind [that] sometimes reveal[s] a glitter”—convinces Miss Dolly to abandon

125 her conservation ambitions (737). Commenting on Miss Dolly’s overgrown garden, Aunt

Janey sarcastically suggests that Miss Dolly could help with the influenza epidemic:

“There’s enough [mullein weeds] for Europe an’ Ameriky too in your new ground, an’ it’ll shore cure that winter cough people has.” Aunt Janey suggests that Miss Dolly should collect sunflower seeds, noting that “they eat ’em in Rooshia,” and also offers to help Miss Dolly “fix up some good yarb [herb] medicines” for the soldiers.” When Miss

Dolly complains that she has “so much to do,” Aunt Janey gives her a bit of advice that she takes seriously: “There’ll always be something to do, gal. If we lived till we finished up, the world ud be full of Methuseleys, an’ no room for the young folks. Nobody finishes off. They got to break off” (738). And indeed, that is just what Miss Dolly does: she breaks off from her chores, from her determination to “swell the national harvest;” she goes into the woods and finds a vista from which she can see “the river miles away, smooth, effortless, winding to some hidden land, safe and far from the malefic spirit of industry” (734, 739). Miss Dolly’s experience at the vista allows her to sense “the autumnal spirit,” to believe that she has learned “how [the highlanders] feel, and to understand “why protracted meetings are held in the fall” (739, 740).121 Deciding that industry can have malignant tendencies, that her conservation project has been “absurd,”

Miss Dolly becomes more open to living by the traditional and contemplative time of the highlanders (740).122

121 Victor I. Masters describes the protracted meeting as a religious event which lasted “one or two weeks” and happened “during the period of comparative leisure after the crops were ‘laid by.’” In many Appalachian communities, the protracted meeting was so significant that it functioned as “an establishment by which the time of other events was reckoned” (qtd. in Campbell 183).

122 As Miss Dolly’s understanding and appreciation of highlander lifeways and worldviews continues to deepen, she implicitly supports John C. Campbell’s claim that “many things that have been pointed out as indicative of a ‘peculiar people’ are, on better acquaintance, perceived to be only wise or necessary adaptations of means to ends in an exceedingly rural section” (149). 126

* * *

“Some Folks Knows One Thing and Some Another”

“Serena and Wild Strawberries,” the third of the “Highland Annals,” focuses on the development of what Miss Dolly describers as her “friendship” with her tenant Serena

Merlin, and on what they learn from their shared experiences, including a strawberry- picking expedition and a visit from a city woman named Marie Brooks. Serena, like

Coretta, is one of Granpap’s daughters-in-law, and while she seems as untidy and stubborn as Coretta, she proves to be more mischievous and more resistant to those who criticize her lifeways.123 When Miss Dolly “sermonize[s] on the merits of discontent and the virtue of ambition,” Serena insists, “I’ve four beds, and bread on my table. What more do I want?” (346)124 Serena and her husband Lem, as Miss Dolly soon learns, have their own definition of ambition, and a more egalitarian (if unconventional) marriage than

Miss Dolly might have guessed. In Lem and Serena’s agreement, either spouse can put off chores, leave home, and return only when he or she is ready.125 Miss Dolly hears

Lem boasting that he values Serena not for her labor in the fields and the house, but

123 It seems that Coretta’s house is messy because she is overworked, while Serena’s house is messy because she is a nonconformist. Coretta helps her husband with field work and tries to take on several household projects at once; Serena, on the other hand, insists on having the freedom to do what she wants.

124According to one common stereotype, Appalachian people historically lacked ambition, and continued to have no ambition in the early twentieth century. In 1913, Morley claimed that “the more enterprising of the North Carolina mountaineers… went West… leaving behind the conservative element, another fact rich in explanation of the people here to-day, and leaving also the less ambitious natures, as well as the weaker ones” (141 ). In 1914, Wilson described “the folding away of the human ambitions petrified in the strata of Appalachian existence. In these hills nature yields to a man’s utmost endeavor hardly more than enough to keep body and soul together…. So the mountaineer yields to the ordering of fate, and throws away ambition, and contents himself with raising what is absolutely necessary for common existence” (63).

125 In the sixth of the Highland Annals, “My Wild-Hog Claim: a Dubious Asset,” a neighbor named Ag Snead and his wife Serry have a similar arrangement. Snead tells Miss Dolly about the conversation he had with Serry when she was dying: “[Serry] says, ‘Ag, you’ve been square. You’ve come as you wanted an’ gone as you wanted, an’ so’ve I, bless Jesus.’ ‘Yes, Serry,’ I says, ‘you've never been tied to the meat- skillet or wash-pot.’ She laffed then an’ says: ‘I reckon you knowed that string would ’a’ broke anyhow, Ag’” (153). 127 because she is easy-going, sensible, not one for “naggin’ yer strength out.” Serena, who

“keeps no time” on Lem, doesn’t seem to mind his habit of coming home late. Almost anyone in need can give Lem a reason to stop and help: a neighbor with an ox-yoke to fix, workers putting in church windows, a man who is “out o’ heart” about his sick wife.126 Lem even tells Miss Dolly that he has been delayed by talking to “Tim Frizbie about the best way to grow fat corn an’ lean cobs, ’cause I know you want me to git all the new idies I can” (347). Better able to appreciate Serena after learning how Lem sees her, Miss Dolly may also realize that Lem and Serena’ sense of ambition includes communal good as much as personal gain, and that Lem is receptive to the so-called New

Agriculture and other progressive ideas.127

While it might seem that Lem’s delays leave Serena solely responsible for their seven children and limit her mobility, it is important to note that she too spends time on pursuits outside the home.128 Lem says that Serena has been “powerful to be a-goin’” to visit her relatives ever since he married her, and that she argues with him if he suggests

126 Wes Mantooth claims that “the nonmaterial aspirations and the prioritizing of community over self and family that the Merlins intuitively exemplify and embrace (and that Miss Dolly as naïve narrator comes to appreciate)… anticipate ideologies that Dargan’s later radical novels envision in the scope of labor solidarity and post-revolutionary socialist society. That [the Merlins], despite poverty and even malnutrition, freely share songs, stories, and material resources within their community provides a striking indication of preexisting cultural values primed to embrace a more advanced and far-reaching socialist mentality” (127 - 128).

127 William Conlogue describes the New Agriculture as a form of agrarianism that prioritized agricultural industrialization and that resulted from developments in science and technology at the end of the nineteenth century. The New Agriculture drastically changed the lives of subsistence farmers because it valued profit over “a family’s continuance on the land, its quality of life, or its relations to the larger community.” In many ways, Miss Dolly exemplifies “the new farmer,” who disparages “the privileging of inherited farm practices, the recognition of immanent value in work and property as opposed to their exchange value, [and] the noncommercial networks of exchange within a community” (16).

128 In “Coretta and Autumn,” Miss Dolly explains that Serena is in the habit of going on “sudden journeys” to visit her family. As Serena tells Miss Dolly, “A jaunt always helps me” (734). In “A Proper Funeral,” Miss Dolly and Serena spend the night with friends in Silver Valley; Miss Dolly reports that “Len and the daughter, Lonie, were to return that evening to look after the children, the cows, and the chickens” (235).

128 she do otherwise (348). Serena sometimes goes to be with Miss Dolly “not so much for the help she [gives]” as for companionship; she also acts as Miss Dolly’s guide to the terrain outside the farm, including the Old Cloud field where strawberries are plentiful

(352).

For Miss Dolly, going with Serena to pick strawberries means that she turns away from the post office and “the distant maelstrom called progress” (348). In the Old Cloud field, as Serena demonstrates her own kind of ambition, intelligence, and wisdom, Miss

Dolly continues to reshape her modern attitudes with the values she learns from her contact with and participation in highlander culture. Miss Dolly pays careful attention to the wisdom Serena offers her through a series of comments that sometimes sound like rebukes.129 When Miss Dolly runs ahead and loses her breath, Serena remarks, “I always take the gait I can keep.” When Miss Dolly indulges in gazing at the mountain scenery before she works, Serena tells her, “I never take my look till I’ve filled my bucket” (349).

When she sees that Miss Dolly picks berries with the caps on, Serena offers to teach Miss

Dolly her more efficient method of capping while she picks. Instead of sermonizing, she

“add[s] kindly” that “O’ course you didn't know. Some folks knows one thing and some another” (350). Importantly, Serena implies that she believes in a kind of relativism, and that she already understands a truth that Miss Dolly has been slow to realize: dominant culture and highlander culture are each valuable in their own ways, each capable of equipping a person with useful knowledges and skills.

When a rainstorm threatens them, Serena uses her knowledge of the land to lead

Miss Dolly to the cave where Uncle Sim Goforth was tormented and killed during the

129 Miss Dolly often finds that she is persuaded by the determination, values, and rhetoric of the tenant farmers. Elfenbein claims that Dargan “portrays [the highlanders] as more adroit speakers than [Miss Dolly], whose banal comments often seem mere pretexts for their vital texts” (xxxix). 129

Civil War. Like the Yare brothers in Davis’s story, Uncle Sim was persecuted because he did not clearly ally himself with either the Union or the Confederate Army. Serena assures Miss Dolly that Uncle Sim was “a good man” and that if he were to return as a ghost, he would be harmless (350). When Serena shares with Miss Dolly a family story about Uncle Sim, she passes to her part of the highlanders’ alternative annals.

Countering the notion that highlanders live in the past or are disconnected from modernity, Serena contextualizes the story about Uncle Sim; she connects it to both the contemporary World War and to the rattlesnake that she and Miss Dolly encountered earlier that day:

“They say they’re doin’ awful over the sea, but they’d never be so mean as

they were to Uncle Sim. He hid here, an’ brought his wife an’ children. But they

found him….

“I’ve heard Granpap tell about [Uncle Sim] many a night. The men, when

they found him, cut down a tree and hewed out some puncheons fer a coffin, and

made Uncle Sim sit on it and play his fiddle…. They kept him playin’ till near

daylight; then they shot him, an’ his wife an’ children lookin’ right on. I used to

cry, hearin’ Granpap tell it, but it don’t make me feel bad now, ’cause I know

folks are so much better. When snakes won’t bite you, men are shorely a

changin’ too.

Traditional storytelling, as Dargan represents it here, is not static and timeless, but flexible and applicable to Serena’s understanding of the modern world. While the fighting overseas is a reason for despair, Serena chooses to believe that people have the capacity to become more humane. She also seems to hope that Miss Dolly will want to

130 be counted among those who those who are “better” and “a-changin’,” to suggest that

Miss Dolly should adapt the highlander’s values of living in greater harmony with the natural world and one’s neighbors—which surely would be beneficial to Serena, her family, and her community.

At the end of “Serena and Wild Strawberries,” Miss Dolly surprisingly finds that she may be emotionally closer to and culturally more like Serena than Marie Brooks, her old friend from Chicago. Serena comes to Miss Dolly’s house “to save the feelings of”

Marie, who worries that Miss Dolly is not healthy enough for the rigors of country living and believes that she needs assistance. Miss Dolly (working to collect firewood) and

Serena (doing nothing to help) both enjoy a cardinal’s song, which makes the “air and earth” seem delightful. Not one for cross-class harmony, Marie comments on what seems to her an unusual division of labor and mistakes Serena for a servant when she tells

Miss Dolly she should let “your woman… pick up brush.” Marie continues to irritate and insult Serena and Miss Dolly; she complains about the “soggy weather” and won’t try

Serena’s jam because she has “cut out sweets.” Failing to see that she has made Miss

Dolly “dumb, bewildered, bereft” through her condescending attitude, Marie proceeds to give Miss Dolly advice on writing about the highlanders:

“If you wish to memorialize a passing folk, you will find material more worthy of

your pen in the twilight of the bourgeoisie. They have lived in the main line of

evolution, and will leave their touch on the race. These mountain people will not

have even a fossilized survival. They live in a cul-de-sac, a pocket of society.

131

Your mind has an epic cast, and will never fit into its limits” (352, emphasis in

original).130

Marie’s “monologue” suggests that the highlanders are vanishing, unevolved, primitive, cut off from the modern world, unworthy of epics, unworthy of history (352). What

Marie is too arrogant to realize is that the highlander culture has the capacity to challenge and improve bourgeoisie culture (as it has challenged and improved Miss Dolly), and that highlanders like the Merlins are quite capable of honoring and transmitting their own memories, as expressed through their oral traditions and other lifeways. To discourage

Marie and bring her visit to a quick end, Serena claims that they may have a month of rain. Serena then gives Miss Dolly a reason to avoid Marie, reporting that a neighbor’s daughter is gravely ill and suggesting that Miss Dolly pay them a visit. In expressing her disapproval of Dolly’s choice to abruptly change her plans to accommodate a neighbor’s needs, Marie echoes Dolly’s earlier disapproval of Lem and Serena, while Dolly herself now seems to value communal good over personal interests. In a very immediate and personal way, the mouth-puckering foods that Serena gives Marie to eat while traveling back to Chicago—“pickled beets, an’ turnip-kraut, an’ ’tater-salad made with that blackberry vinegar”—refutes Marie’s claim that highland culture will not “leave a touch” on the human race (352). Miss Dolly finds that she cannot “reproach” Serena for her treatment of Marie, partly because she has been changed by gaining some of Serena’s knowledge, by her participation in highlander culture, and by her increased understanding of their history.

130 Marie’s demeaning evaluation of highlander culture echoes Colin Rhodes’s description of nineteenth century primitivism: “tribal societies were often not even credited as emerging civilizations, but as evolutionary cul-de-sacs, arrested at some nebulous point in the past, at once contemporary and ancient… and viewed as the sociological ‘missing link,’ preserved, living examples of ‘the childhood of humanity’” (qtd. in Krasner 59). 132

* * *

The national folk imaginary concerning mountain people changed slowly during the Progressive Era. In this chapter, I have argued that writers and intellectuals like

Rebecca Harding Davis, John C. Campbell, and Olive Tilford Dargan sought to dismantle the stereotypes of Appalachian primitiveness and peculiarity by countering them with the rhetorics of historicism and relativism, and by refusing to characterize Appalachian people as helpless, dependent, impaired, and detached from history and modernity.

Nevertheless, many reformers, folklorists, and popular writers continued to perpetuate the same old misrepresentations and essentialisms. In his review of Campbell’s The

Southern Highlander and His Homeland in the July 1921 issue of The American

Missionary, A. F. Beard obscures Campbell’s critique of home missionaries and includes some of his own pontificating that Campbell certainly would not have endorsed: The mountaineers continue to need “civilizing and Christianizing,” and are “a vanishing people, though they will doubtless always have their representatives, for there will always be those who are degenerate” (156, 157). In Kentucky Superstitions (1920), Daniel L.

Thomas claims that industrialization and education in Appalachian Kentucky have progressed slowly in the “combat” against “instinctive and deep-rooted” folk beliefs

“from a more primitive age.” The obstacles to progress are the mountaineers themselves, who continue to be “ignorant and timorous,” to disregard “the explanations of both science and religion,” and to “find life and the universe largely inexplicable” (3, 7). The writers I examine in this chapter contest such representations. Rather than linking mountain people with degeneracy, Davis argues that is the dominant society that may deteriorate because of its war-making, insatiable materialism, alienation, and treatment of

133 the poor and the working class. The mountain people in Dargan’s “Highland Annals” explicate their lives, historicize their experiences, and insist on the value of multiple and alternative epistemologies. While investigating traditional Appalachian culture, Davis and Dargan argue that it is not degenerate or defective, but indeed has the capacity to enrich, challenge, and correct national and modern culture.

134

Chapter Three

From Popular Uplift to Integrationism:

Frances E. Watkins Harper and James Weldon Johnson

Philanthropists and uplift workers often suggested that the former slave cabins that some rural African Americans continued to live in after Emancipation were the material signs of their degradation and degeneration. In his best-selling autobiography

Up from Slavery (1901), Booker T. Washington emphasized the “poverty and ignorance,” violence, disdain for work, drunkenness, untidiness, and lack of Christianity that he found in the 1880s among the people dwelling in cabins on plantations near Tuskegee (134). In

1890, Alice Bacon, organizer of the Hampton Folklore Society, reported that the poor black residents of “little slab cabins with their mud chimneys” were more “savage” than civilized, although some were “by degrees moving upward… [and thus] lift[ing] themselves a little above the merely animal life of the roughest plantation hand” (124).

To some extent, Washington and Bacon both agree with parts of the national folk imaginary; believing that outside intervention is the key element in changing the folk,

Washington praises the community outreach and education offered by Tuskegee, while

Bacon hopes to bring the folk the medical care they need as well as the “healing gift of

Christian civilization” (124).

In this chapter, I argue that Frances E. Watkins Harper and James Weldon

Johnson make very different arguments about the achievements of African Americans who live in humble rural dwellings and about the place of the folk in the modernizing world. Harper and Johnson counter the ideologies, literary representations, and

135 ethnocentric religion of the national folk imaginary by portraying the freedpeople and the

African Americans of the succeeding generation not as immoral and degenerate, not as a philanthropic project, but as intelligent, resourceful, productive cultural workers whose religious practices, beliefs about the land, music, dance, and other lifeways improve their relationships with local, national, and even international communities and thus have the potential to bring them social and political gains. In Harper’s Iola Leroy, the freedpeople play a vital role in reclaiming distorted and suppressed histories, re-envisioning and revising white Christianity, challenging the inequitable practices of southern agribusiness, and taking other actions that will equip themselves and their children for the future. 131 In Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912), the spirituals that the anonymous narrator first learns from his formerly enslaved mother figure importantly in his argument for African American citizenship and humanity based on artistic achievement, and in his plan to help integrate black America into the white mainstream by blending black and white cultural forms. In Harper’s writings, cabin visits are occasions for what John Ernest calls “mutual uplift” (206)—for the freedpeople to function as cultural ambassadors who (explicitly or implicitly) critique the dominant society, and for the formally educated, more genteel teacher to access knowledge, manners, and lifeways that are beyond her experience. In Johnson’s novel, the narrator’s firsthand encounters with the African American folk are more vexed and problematic.

The narrator of The Autobiography would like to believe that the cultural achievements

131 Investigating in Iola Leroy the black community’s use of history and culture to prepare for the future, Harper takes up what Carla L. Peterson describes as a central concern of African Americans in the late nineteenth century: “Under the pressure of the present, of post-Reconstruction politics that were rapidly eroding the promises of citizenship made by Reconstruction, African Americans understood that they needed to ‘remake their past’ and supply themselves with a group tradition that would enable them to confront the dilemmas of the present and successfully enter the future as modern American subjects” (“Modernity” 164). 136 of folk communities can demonstrate their humanity and bolster arguments for citizenship; more often than not, however, the narrator suggests that the poverty and lack of education he finds in folk communities may render them unfit for integration with the dominant society.

How we read Iola Leroy—and how we position Harper in relation to the national folk imaginary—largely depends on how we contextualize the novel’s subtitle, Shadows

Uplifted. The term “uplift” has historically been associated with “mixed meanings,” as

Kevin K. Gaines points out, and its various iterations have resulted in sometimes overlapping but often divergent agendas for white conservatives like Bacon, black elites and non-elites, nationalists such as Alexander Crummell, accommodationists like

Washington, liberals such as W. E. B. Du Bois, and members of the black women’s club movement like Harper (Uplifting the Race 1-5).132 For example, black elites promoted many of the same values that are embraced by both folk and non-folk characters in Iola

Leroy, including thrift, industriousness, temperance, “manners,” and “purity in women and uprightness in men” (254, 275). But affirming that Harper supported such values does not therefore mark her as an advocate of elite uplift, as these were also the values of popular uplift and the women’s club movement. 133 If title character Iola is a Northern- educated, standard-English-speaking mulatto whom critics have singled out as a proponent of elitism, Harper’s project of aesthetic and political resistance in Iola Leroy

132 Marlon B. Ross explains that “there was deep controversy, especially from the 1880s through the 1930s, over how to achieve racial uplift – in fact, over what exactly an uplifted race would look like” (“Racial Uplift” 151).

133 Gaines argues that for women such as Anna Julia Cooper, Ida B. Wells Barnett, and Harper, uplift meant “an evangelic mission of mercy [that] was the antithesis of Anglo-Saxon dominance and brutality”—one that counters what Ross calls “the dominant Western notion that only a patriarch can represent (lead, speak for, govern) a race” (Gaines, “Black Americans’ Racial Uplift” 438; Ross, “Racial Uplift” 158).

137 also depends on folk culture as well as elite culture, on vernacular as well as standard

Englishes.134

Michael Stancliff argues that Harper’s “neo-immediatist uplift” interrogates the

“alleged social dependency” of poor black laborers through “humaniz[ing] and reinterpret[ing] African Americans’ daily economic and social struggles” and through

“articulating the political claims and needs” of the freedpeople (131 – 132).135 The neo- immediatist, grass roots, mutual uplift that Harper calls for contrasts sharply with the accommodationist uplift of some elites and conservatives, which emphasizes assimilation, compromise, and what Gaines describes as “a limited, conditional claim to equality, citizenship, and human rights” (Uplifting the Race 4). In Iola Leroy, the neo- immediatism of more bourgeois characters like Iola works in concert with the popular uplift of folk characters like the community elders Uncle Daniel (a preacher) and Linda

Salters (an organizer of prayer meetings). According to Gaines, popular uplift grew out of “the antislavery folk religion of the slaves;” throughout Reconstruction and the Jim

Crow era, the supporters of popular uplift continued to advocate “a personal or collective spiritual—and potentially social—transcendence of worldly oppression and misery.”

134 George B. Handley also points to the novel’s fusing of aesthetic and political resistance; he suggests that we should “read the aesthetics of narration as the politics of narration, since how the history of slavery is told plays an important part in establishing an understanding of both the implied reader and the implied author’s’ ideological position vis-à-vis slavery’s legacies” (32).

135 Stancliff claims that Harper’s “neo-immediatist uplift… brought the anti-state ethic of radical antislavery rhetoric into the Gilded Age” (131). Kevin D. Pelletier, on the other hand, suggests that Harper’s antebellum immediatism yielded to apocalypticism as she witnessed the repeated failures of Reconstruction: “while many believed that the Civil War was going to be the final apocalyptic ‘overturning’ that would emancipate the slaves and provide them with the liberties and opportunities that come with full citizenship, for Harper, postwar history is itself a series of apocalyptic overturnings, thresholds, and ruptures that characterized slave life prior to the war and that will continue to define black life…. Whereas antebellum abolitionists confidently announced that the Civil War was going to transform America from a sinful into a fair and just nation, Harper cautiously leads her characters (and readers) into the Reconstruction period in order to show how the postwar project of black Americans—establishing a black modernity and reuniting black families… is unlikely to occur, even though the Civil War has liberated the nation’s slaves” (125, 137). 138

While seeking spiritual and social transcendence, Uncle Daniel, Linda Salters, and other folk characters in Iola Leroy, I argue, meet Gaines’s definition of popular uplift workers by expressing “group aspirations for emancipation, land-ownership, literacy, legal marriage, equal rights, federal protection, and the suffrage” (Uplifting the Race, Gaines 1

- 4). Often ignored or dismissed by critics, Harper’s dialect-speaking folk characters typically have worked all their lives to uplift themselves, and to critique and reform the

Christianity of whites who do not support abolition or the civil rights of African

Americans. In Harper’s formulation of popular uplift, the folk are not helpless and backward; rather, they are agents of change working to improve not only their own local communities, but the dominant society as well.

* * *

The Negro’s Grandly Constructive Mission

Like Washington and Bacon, Harper revealed her attitude about the folk and her stance on uplift in her writings about the freedpeople, whose cabins she had visited while touring the South in the 1860s and 1870s.136 Although she lectured wherever she went,

Harper’s letters suggest that she had some sense that she was learning, too, that her work included “picking up scraps of information” and “listen[ing] to heart-saddening stories of

136 Harper had left her native Baltimore in 1851 due to the Fugitive Slave Law, and did not return to the South until 1864. During the intervening years, she became an accomplished poet, sketch writer, and orator on the abolitionist circuit. She delivered her first public speech, “The Education and the Elevation of the Colored Race,” in Massachusetts in 1854, and published her collection Poems on Miscellaneous Subjects that same year. Harper began a seven-year lecture tour of the South in 1864; according to Williams Still’s The Underground Rail Road (1872), Harper “traveled very extensively through the Southern States, going on the plantations and amongst the lowly, as well as to the cities and towns, addressing schools, Churches, meetings in Court Houses, Legislative Halls, &c.” (Harper, Brighter 134 – 135; Still, The Underground Rail Road 767). The themes of Harper’s lectures included “education, temperance, and good home building, industry, morality, and the like;” her audiences at various times were comprised of freedwomen and freedmen, white women and white men, the young and the old (Still, “Introduction” 2). 139 grievous old wrongs” (Brighter 123, 124).137 As Frances Smith Foster has noted, these years of southern travel for Harper were “a period of physical danger, intellectual challenge, and intense self-discovery” (134). While the national folk imaginary suggests that the freedpeople were a folk in need of education, civilization, and modernization,

Harper represents them as teaching her by sharing with her their invaluable personal experiences. In 1870, in a letter from Eufaula, Alabama, Harper writes, “what a chance one has for observation among these people [who live in the former slave cabins], if one takes with her a manner that unlocks hearts” (Brighter 128). Welcomed into the everyday lives of those she visited, Harper develops a complex position that is part participant and part observer; she portrays the freedpeople as materially poor but generous in spirit, lacking formal education but not useful life experiences, sharing with her their personal histories and a warm welcome.

Harper’s travels in the post-bellum South, not only as a lecturer but also as a participant-observer in the local cultures of newly freed African Americans, appear to have motivated her to write her first novel.138 These travels also sharpened her critique of the national folk imaginary and what she described in 1867 as “the unreconstructed

States;” instead of representing the freedpeople as dependent and degenerate, she claims that their support of neo-immediatism and popular uplift could help reform and revitalize the dominant society (Brighter 124). While Harper more fully develops these arguments in Iola Leroy (1892), they inform her earlier novels as well, beginning with Minnie’s

137 Harper’s letters about her southern travels were published in Northern newspapers and later in Still’s The Underground Rail Road.

138 Harper’s motives for writing a novel are also suggested in Iola Leroy by Dr. Latimer, who tells Iola that she should write “a good, strong book which would be helpful” and would “inspire men and women with a deeper sense of justice and humanity” (Iola Leroy 262). 140

Sacrifice (serialized in the Christian Recorder in 1869). Examining Harper’s earlier writings about uplift, in addition to her own reform activities, can open new perspectives for understanding the interactions between the folk and non-folk characters in Iola Leroy.

Minnie (like Harper herself) has been educated in the North, moves to the post-bellum

South, and is profoundly influenced by stories her mother tells her about female slaves and by her own developing relationships with the freedpeople. Equipped with scribal literacy and the “oral folk culture” her mother passes to her, Minnie is prepared, as Sarah

Robbins suggests, to participate in “a new kind of literature- and experience-centered literacy” that has the capacity “to reconstruct African American family life and the nation” (183); engaged in mutual uplift, Minnie not only instructs but also learns from her students and from the freedpeople, who “refresh” and “strengthen” her (Minnie’s

84).139 Visiting the former slaves in their rough cabins, Minnie listens to “beautiful stories of faith and trust…. [that] were grand inspirations to faith and duty.” When she listens to “some dear aged saint,” Minnie recognizes her own inadequacy and tells herself, “I can't teach these people religion, I must learn from them” (84). While

Minnie’s formal education and literacy might seem to align her with the values of the dominant society or elite uplift, she also gains experience-centered intelligence because she is able to appreciate and learn from the folk culture of the freed slaves.

It is this process of exchange, enrichment, and encouragement between the formally educated and the folk , and also between dominant and non-dominant societies,

139 When Iola becomes a teacher in Iola Leroy, she also realizes the importance of “literature- and experience-centered literacy.” While Iola teaches her students reading and “the foundation of good character,” Harper suggests that her recently emancipated students teach her a history that is based on their own personal experiences. When a visiting speaker asks Iola’s students to explain the achievements of the white race such as steamboats, the students argue that “[white people have] got money,” and that “they took it from us” (147). 141 that Harper contemplates in her Reconstruction letters and continues to investigate in

Minnie’s Sacrifice—and that critics have often overlooked or misunderstood in Harper’s final, best-known, and most ambitious novel, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted (1892).

Overlooking the importance of reciprocal uplift and folk religion in the novel, some critics question the agency and intelligence of Harper’s folk characters, especially in their interactions with Iola Leroy, and charge Harper with using gentility, Christianity, and civilizationism to highlight the inferiorities of the freedpeople and African American culture.140 Such readings seem incomplete or misguided. While Iola does finally become a Sunday school teacher who visits impoverished people in their “lowly homes and windowless cabins,” she and other members of the community that forms at the end of the novel are also committed to many of the goals of popular uplift, including full and immediate citizenship, land ownership, equal rights, and suffrage (279).

Harper also signals her support for neo-immediatism and popular uplift in her third novel, Trial and Triumph (serialized in the Christian Recorder in 1888-89), in which she emphasizes the interconnectedness of spiritual and social transcendence. At the commencement exercises of the normal school where she has trained to be a teacher, the protagonist Annette addresses a race-mixed and gender-mixed audience that includes black listeners who are still affected by “the poverty, ignorance and social debasement of

140 Arguing that “all the folk characters [demonstrate] their deference to Iola's opinions and their respect for her access to knowledge beyond their experience” and also that the dialect of the folk characters “was based on an authorial sense of error and deviation from an assumed norm,” Hazel Carby suggests that Harper portrays the folk characters as inferior, unable to lead or uplift themselves and dependent on the intervention of Iola and other elite characters (Reconstructing 78). Barbara Christian finds that what culture means to Iola is “Western Christian civilization at its best. She becomes, then, a cultural missionary to the ignorant, the loudmouthed, the coarse but essentially good-natured blacks, who need only to be shown the way” (29). Kathy L. Glass claims that the novel’s main characters, including Iola, “adhere to the civilizationist model of human development common among intellectuals, black and white, in the postbellum era,” and that the novel “argues for blacks’ capacity to develop from an uncivilized stage of barbarity to a European-like state of civilization” (109). 142 the past” (239). In an important but often overlooked passage, the narrator attributes the economic, social, and psychological hardships of this portion of Annette’s urban African

American audience to several factors: first, “[although] they were of African descent, they were Americans whose thoughts were too much Americanized to be wholly free from imbibing the social atmosphere” of the dominant society; second, “the literature they read was mostly from the hands of white men who would paint them in any colors which suited their prejudices or predilections;” and lastly, “the religious ideas they had embraced came at first thought from the same [white] sources” (239 – 240).141 The narrator’s powerful indictment of the national folk imaginary—expressed through

Americanization, white narratives, and white religion—is heightened and complicated by

Annette’s composition and delivery of a speech on “The Mission of the Negro.”142 By reclaiming history, Annette attempts to Africanize “the too much Americanized” worldviews, culture, and religion of her audience:

At first she portrayed an African family seated beneath their bamboo huts and

spreading palms; the light steps of the young men and maidens tripping to music,

dance and song; their pastimes suddenly broken upon by the tramp of the

141 Harper’s writings constitute a resistance literature that opposes the “prejudices and predilections” that are typical of the writings of “white men.” Harper and other black writers in the late nineteenth century, according to James Smethurst, responded to “the establishment of Jim Crow as a national system;” understood Jim Crow as an “ideological, political, economic, spatial, and cultural event [that] deeply marked American notions of modernity;” and “came to feel a need for the creation (or recognition) of a distinct African American literature representing, channeling, and serving some notion of a black ‘people’ or ‘nation’” (2).

142 Although the term “Americanization” more commonly refers to the acculturation of immigrants in the early twentieth century, it has also been used to describe programs of “national homogenization” in the nineteenth century. William W. Freehling characterizes the antebellum era as a time when “Washington authorities were spending millions of dollars to [remove] Native Americans and bestowing millions of acres on railroads to expedite white dispersals,” and as “an age of forced exoduses, forced Americanization, and massive movements of people.” In this context, proposals for African American emigration suggested “a purifying federal migration experiment with blacks [that] looked as pragmatically American as a Trail of Tears” (154, 269). 143

merchants of flesh and blood; the capture of defenceless people suddenly

surprised in the midst of their sports, the cries of distress, the crackling of flames,

the cruel oaths of reckless men, eager for gold though they coined it from tears

and extracted it from blood; the crowding of the slaveships, the horrors of the

middle passage, the landing of the ill-fated captives were vividly related….

Then the scene changed, and like a grand triumphal march she recounted the

deliverance of the Negro, and the wondrous change which had come over his

condition; the slave pen exchanged for the free school, the fetters on his wrist for

the ballot in his right hand. Then her voice grew musical when she began to

speak of the mission of the Negro. “His mission,” she said, “is grandly

constructive.” Some races had been “architects of destruction,” but their mission

was to build over the ruins of the dead past, the most valuable thing that a man or

woman could possess on earth, and that is good character. That mission should be

to bless and not to curse. To lift up the banner of the Christian religion from the

mire and dust into which slavery and pride of caste had trailed it, and to hold it up

as an ensign of hope and deliverance to other races of the world, of whom the

greater portion were not white people (241).

Written, voiced, and embodied by Annette, this bold and remarkable critique of dominant white culture suggests that anyone who wants to carry out reform and popular uplift (in local, national, and global contexts) must begin by remembering history, its effects on social difference and cultural identity, and its lessons of survival. That history is more likely to be transmitted by folk culture than by official white-authorized narratives.143 In

143 Trudier Harris argues that African American oral tradition offers “as much of the truth, that is, the history, of African American lives as researched study. We can therefore speak of the factual history of 144

Annette’s speech, it is not African but Euro-American culture that is degenerate and less civilized—particularly Euro-Americans who will do anything for gold, who burn African villages, destroy African families, and transport them to America to experience “ages of bondage” (241).144 While Annette may suggest that poor African Americans need a helping hand, she much more directly calls for the reform and uplift of the Christian religion, which has been degraded by slavery and racism. Annette herself, who has been formally educated and wants to become a teacher, has “received more encouragement from her honest-hearted but ignorant and well meaning [friends], than she did from some of the most cultured and intelligent people” (239); she is as likely to be lifted up by the black majority as by the elites.

In the history of “trials and triumphs” that Annette envisions and narrates, the dignity and refinement of the African family contrasts with the crass materialism, bloodthirsty violence, and uncivil aggression of the white merchants (241). Annette’s evaluation of the present is more guarded (and understandably so); while stressing that historical knowledge, education, and voting rights are valuable and necessary for the contemporary black community, she implies that they continue to be threatened by the dominant society’s folk imaginary, destructive tendencies, prejudices, unsatisfactory character, and defiled Christianity. Folk culture transmits the past, promotes survival tactics for immediate use, and provides Annette with a “musical” voice for declaring the

tradition as persuasively as we speak of the factual History of researches/ recorded/ written traditions” (451).

144 In Iola Leroy, several characters echo Annette in questioning the claim that African Americans are less civilized than white Americans and in denouncing Euro-American culture for its supremacism, materialism, cruelty, and lack of compassion. Iola, for example, tells Dr. Gresham, “I believe the time will come when the civilization of the negro will assume a better phase than you Anglo-Saxons possess. You will prove unworthy of your high vantage ground if you only use your superior ability to victimize feebler races and minister to a selfish greed of gold and a love of domination” (116). 145 mission of black Americans—a voice that echoes the “music, dance and song” of her

African ancestors. Invigorated with folk culture and resistant to the “prejudices and predilections” of white literature, Annette’s address challenges white ideologies, white narratives, and white religion by fashioning a narrative about the harmonious lives of her

African ancestors and the devastating consequences of the slave trade. Claiming for

African Americans a “mission” that is “grandly constructive,” that will deploy them in teaching good character and rebuilding civilization, Annette infuses her speech with millennialist authority and the sense that African Americans may be God’s chosen people.145 Articulating the history of slavery, which the national folk imaginary distorts and obscures, Annette argues for the necessity of the present (and implicitly future) mission that she envisions for her mixed audience: a reversal of the destruction caused by the Middle Passage, in which African Americans salvage and uplift the religion that whites have corrupted so that they can offer deliverance to oppressed people overseas, to

“other races of the world.”146

* * *

145 The millennialist worldview that Harper expresses in her many of her writings echoes that of Frederick Douglass. As David W. Blight notes, “Douglass’s God was the God of black Christianity: benevolent and loving, but also a deliverer with a special concern for the oppressed. In general religious outlook, Douglass was nineteenth-century millennialist…. By the 1850s, his thought exhibited virtually all the religious and secular tenets of millennialism… [including] the American sense of mission as a ‘redeemer nation’…. Douglass garnered long-range hope for the cause of black freedom from faith in an apocalyptic God who could enter history and force nations, like individuals, to chart a new course” (8).

146 Harper’s commitment to articulating and recovering African American history in Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy aligns with what Peterson describes as the work of black intellectuals in the late nineteenth century, who realized that “African American history could be seen [as a disruption to] the dominant national historical narrative, a disruption that was repeatedly rationalized by a negative positioning of Africans and their descendants: romantic racialists held them to be incapable of progress because of an immutable nature that fixed them in the stage of childhood; Hegel asserted that Africans lacked any awareness of an objective existence outside of themselves, hence had created no culture and possessed no history; finally, in the 1890s, men like Frederick Hoffman located African Americans on the darker side of progress—on the side of degeneration” (“Modernity” 163).

146

The Prophetic Visions of Linda Salters

In Iola Leroy, Harper challenges the national folk imaginary by arguing that

African American folk culture is not an obstacle to progress, that it strengthens the freedpeople’s commitment to popular uplift and informs their critique of the dominant society’s efforts to “civilize,” de-culture, and marginalize not only African Americans, but also Native Americans and poor rural whites. Such a reading counters many critics who argue that in Iola Leroy, Harper utilizes the title character’s genteel refinement and the dialect of the folk to emphasize the ignorance and backwardness of the freedpeople.147 In accounting only for the voices and perspectives of the more bourgeois characters such as Iola and her husband Frank, critics have diminished the importance of vernacular-speaking characters like Aunt Linda Salters and code-switching characters like Robert Johnson.148 While lecturing in the South, Harper communicated with a diverse audience; in Iola Leroy, Harper also attempts to appeal to a diverse readership by

147 Not all critics claim that the use of dialect is a flaw in Iola Leroy. Henry Louis Gates Jr., for example, finds that Iola Leroy features “the richest and fullest representation of black dialect to be found in the nineteenth-century novel” (xiv).

148 Many critics appear to base their judgments of Iola Leroy on Hazel Carby’s introduction to the 1987 edition of the novel, or Frances Smith Foster’s introduction to the 1988 edition. Foster gives much attention to negative assessments of the novel by W. E. B. Du Bois, Hugh Gloster, Robert Bone, Vashti Lewis, and Barbara Christian; Foster associates the novel with sentimentalism, suggests that the character Iola Leroy is a version of the tragic mulatto, and says little about other characters in the novel (xxvii – xxxviii). Carby analyzes Harper’s use of the “narrative strategies of [nineteenth-century] women’s fiction” (xvii). Following the example of Carby and Foster, Hollis Robbins’ introduction to the more recent 2010 edition of Iola Leroy also emphasizes the tragic mulatta plot and gives little attention to the folk characters, claiming in the new introduction that the novel is “the story of a beautiful young daughter of a wealthy planter who is sent north to be educated. Kidnapped from boarding school, she learns that she has Negro blood and is sold into slavery. It is not surprising, then, that critics routinely identify Iola Leroy as the sole focal character, as she shares some characteristics with the heroine of a melodrama or romance. There are other critics, however, who have claimed that Robert Johnson “in some sense rivals Iola as the novel’s ‘center,’” or that Lucille Delaney is “the second heroine,” or that Linda Salters and other folk characters are “the central protagonists” and that perhaps the novel should “have been titled Linda Salters” (Peterson, “Further” 107; Warren 164; Koolish 160, 179). It is also worth noting that Carby does discuss Harper’s representation of the black folk community in Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro- American Woman Novelist (1987).

147 using a mix of forms, by portraying not one but multiple focal characters, and by challenging the ideologies of the dominant society through several strategies and through not one but multiple counter-narratives.149 Although some non-folk characters in Iola

Leroy might seem to endorse civilizationism, I argue that Harper importantly deploys other characters to challenge what Patricia Rae calls “the teleological model of progress” and to take a stance that anticipates Boasian cultural relativism, which affirms that history, rather than biological or racial differences, causes the differences in progress that can be found between people of different ethnicities and nations (Rae 94). The history of

African Americans during slavery that the national folk imaginary romanticizes or elides is powerfully reclaimed by Robert, Linda, Uncle Daniel, and other folk characters; their interpretive skills, historicizing capacity, and subversive activities challenge the dominant society’s imagination and representation of the folk as passive, foolish, and dependent.150

149 P. Gabrielle Foreman helpfully explains that Harper seeks through Iola Leroy to reach an audience of “overlapping communities and readers” who are situated in “different socio-ideological contexts” of the 1890s and who approach Iola Leroy with “various needs, desires, and interpretive capacities” (73 – 74). Elizabeth Ammons suggests that Iola Leroy undergoes “formal self-fracturing,” and that it incorporates many “inherited forms—melodrama, journalism, adventure fiction, slave narrative, abolitionist fiction, the realistic novel, oral tradition, [and] the romance [in order] to reach toward a new form” (27).

150 Susan Donaldson claims that “Harper’s ex-slaves… learn how to define blackness and race, not according to the criteria of white society but according to their own standards and needs, and above all how to tell stories that are black…. The key to that task lies in seeing beyond the white gaze and learning how to reinterpret white narratives of blackness. Accordingly, Iola Leroy features one slave after another who recounts visions of approaching freedom and of retribution for cruel slaveholders, and these visions, the [novel] emphasizes, enable them to receive white narratives skeptically and offer instead their own narratives in opposition” (91). While Donaldson claims that the folk characters in Iola Leroy resist the white gaze and white narratives, Susan S. Lanser argues that Iola Leroy as well as Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces portray folk characters who counter the “association of authority with privileged-class English culture…. The novels rely heavily on dialogue, and both extend ideological authority to unlettered former slaves. This polyvocal dialogue among characters and their ‘contending’ ideologies… presents textual authority much less as individual construction than as the collectively created consensus (or nonconsensus) of a community” (125).

148

In Iola Leroy, it is antislavery folk religion that informs, animates, and sustains the black community as it uplifts itself and deals with the injustices of modernizing

America.151 The novel’s folk characters carry out popular uplift and subvert the agendas of their masters by attending illicit prayer meetings, demanding equality and citizenship, questioning the myth of dependency, and fusing spiritual transcendence to social reform.152 Iola Leroy also furthers Harper’s project of reinterpreting and repurposing education, religion, and language in order to empower the black community and to counter the deceits and condescensions of white ideology, white religion, and white literature.153 The popular uplift supported by Harper’s folk characters honors and incorporates what Lawrence W. Levine calls the “expressive arts and sacred beliefs” of folk culture, which function as “instruments of life, of sanity, of health, of self-respect”

(80). Prayer meetings, ecstatic worship, prophetic visions, slave songs, and storytelling are among the forms of folk culture that connect Robert Johnson, Linda Salters, Iola

Leroy, and other characters to the resources of the past, provide them with communal and

151 At the conversazione in Chapter XXX, one character affirms that “the new machinery of freedom” will lead to “a far higher and better Christian civilization than our country has ever known;” another character suggests that “modern civilization” can be reached when African Americans and the rest of humanity “outgrow slavery, feudalism, and religious persecutions” (255). Eric Foner also links Emancipation, Reconstruction, the remaking of Christianity, and modernity: “In the severing of ties that had bound black and white families and churches to one another under slavery, the coming together of blacks in an explosion of institution building, and the political and cultural fusion of former free blacks and former slaves, Reconstruction witnessed the birth of the modern black community” (102). On a similar note, M. Giulia Fabi claims that Harper transforms the meaning of blackness from “a signifier of inferiority and oppression” to “a cultural force of social change, a grand social mission to construct a new, more egalitarian civilization” (60).

152 While I concentrate on Linda Salters and Robert Johnson, Harper portrays many folk characters in Iola Leroy who play an important part in resistance activities, including Linda’s husband John Salters, their grandson Job, Uncle Daniel and his wife Aunt Katie, Jinny, Jake, Aunt Polly, Tom Anderson, Ben Tunnel, several unnamed black soldiers, Uncle Jack, and Harriet. See Lynda Koolish’s essay “Spies in the Enemies’ House: Folk Characters as Tricksters in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy.”

153 Dwight N. Hopkins describes the intellectual struggles of African Americans in the nineteenth century as a “battle of beliefs and meanings of existence in the New World, [to which] black people added their own interpretation, understanding, and truth” (108). 149 personal strength in the present, and prepare them for resistance in the future. In addition to defying the laws of the plantation system, the prayer meetings that figure prominently in the novel’s first three chapters and elsewhere in the novel highlight the resourcefulness of the African American community during slavery, as well as its capacity to reinterpret and reform the beliefs and practices of the dominant society that were intended to dehumanize and pacify them. Through prayer meetings, the novel’s black community establishes “the necessary space between [themselves] and their owners” and develops the lifeways and worldviews that enable them to refuse the internalization of slavery

(Levine 80). With Uncle Daniel as preacher, Linda as organizer, and Robert as sharer of military news, the prayer meetings before Emancipation are held secretly and at night—

“the sundown to sunup time” when slaves “recreat[ed] themselves” by gathering in the woods and swamps (Hopkins 108). Here, the slaves can continue to “affirm their sense of self through their interactions with the natural world” (Smith 67). Here, the slaves gain not only opportunities to worship as they choose and to “pray for freedom,” but also opportunities to analyze the moods and behaviors of white people, to exchange advice on how to outsmart cruel masters and menacing patrollers, and to plan “to desert to join the

Union army” (IL 181).

Although enslaved and lacking formal education, although pretending to be contented and compliant, Robert and Linda, the only characters who appear in both the first and last chapters of Iola Leroy, take active roles in refashioning the language and religion of the dominant culture to ensure the survival of the black community.154

154 Robert and Linda are also linked by their utterance of a phrase that emphasizes their work in the novel as community leaders. Robert uses the phrase “if we would be a people” to call for racial solidarity; Linda suggests her moral authority when she varies the phrase: “I beliebs we might be a people ef it warn’t for dat mizzable drink” (34, 160). 150

Robert, the “pet” slave of Miss Nancy, and Linda, her cook, work at Miss Nancy’s boarding-house in “the city of C——, North Carolina,” and at every opportunity “use the machinery [Miss Nancy] had put in [their] hands to help overthrow the institution [of slavery]” (7,16). Miss Nancy has taught Robert “to read and write, and to cast up accounts [because] it was so handy for her” (46). Robert uses his literacy skills to read about the progress of the Union army in the newspaper, to code-switch between vernacular and standard Englishes, and ultimately to become a successful farmer who practices land reform for the benefit of his poor black neighbors. The novel opens with

Robert and another slave walking home from the market, speaking in dialect as they publicly discuss with the slaves they meet the freshness of the butter and eggs; they seem to be “very light-hearted and careless, chatting and joking.” One slave has “a broad smile;” another has “a glad accent in his voice” (7 – 8). While their dialect and happy mannerisms suggest the popular images of minstrelsy and the plantation romance, the novel soon reveals the capacity of slaves to remove from dialect, as Karla Holloway suggests, its function as a “reminder of black folks’ cognitive disabilities” and to use minstrel-like performances for their own subversive purposes (133). Robert and his fellow slaves, the narrator explains, have “invented a phraseology to convey in the most unsuspected manner news to each other from the battlefield.” When Robert reports to

Linda that “the eggs and the butter’s mighty fresh,” he means “Secesh routed. Yankees whipped ’em out of their boots” (9).

In replying to Robert that she has already detected the news in the sad expression on “ole Missus’ face,” Linda reveals her emotional intelligence and interpretive capacity, which serve as a kind of alternative literacy (9). Linda also possesses significant

151 spiritual, moral, cultural, geographic, and environmental intelligences. As an organizer of illegal prayer meetings, Linda knows the remote locations outside the city where the meetings may be held in probable safety (Gibson’s woods, “de old cypress swamp,”

McCullough’s woods); as an ecstatic worshipper, she believes that God’s spirit fills her and even her physical surroundings (12). Harper’s characterization of Linda supports

Levine’s claim that the slaves were able to “‘read’ the phenomena surrounding and affecting them,” to reconstitute the African ethos, and to perceive that “Man was part of, not alien to, the Natural Order of things, attached to the Oneness that bound together all matter, animate and inanimate, all spirits, visible or not” (58). The text juxtaposes

Linda’s vision of freedom with millennialist foreboding, and also her multiple intelligences with the cognitive disabilities of those whose support slavery:

For the slaves, hope survived all [the] disasters which gathered around the fate of

their unfortunate brethren, who were remanded to slavery…. But slavery had cast

such a glamour over the Nation, and so warped the consciences of men, that they

failed to read aright the legible transcript of Divine retribution which was written

upon the shuddering earth, where the blood of God's poor children had been as

water freely spilled (14).155

The citizens of a country bewitched and morally warped by slavery, Harper suggests, have lost their intelligences and become unable to correctly read or interpret the workings of God, the earth that shudders because of the suffering of the slaves, and the misery of the slaves themselves. Contrary to white ideologies, white narratives, and white religion, the slaves are children of God and are intimately connected to God—and as Harper had

155 As Blight notes, “The only certainty in millennial thought seems to have been its capacity to sustain dichotomies of belief and emotion. Prophecies of gloom and doom coexisted with ideas of national mission; unbounded promise mixed with dreadful threat; anxiety marched with hope” (103). 152 implied in Minnie’s Sacrifice and Trial and Triumph, may also be the true teachers of religion.

In Iola Leroy, Linda Salters, Robert Johnson, and the black folk community practice what Dwight N. Hopkins calls a “syncretized religion” that has been assembled from “remnants of African indigenous religion, everyday common folk wisdom, and a reinterpreted Christianity” (135). In speech and in practice, they counter the religion of the dominant culture, whose ministers misinterpret the Bible, abuse female slaves,

“preach to please de white folks,” and throw coldness “ober de meetin’” with their lack of warmth (21 - 22 ). As do verbal critiques like these, the prayer meeting that Linda describes in the opening chapter also demonstrates the black community’s capacity to

“knock down, break up, and jump over the structures, forces of habit, worldview, and theological constructs” of the dominant white religion and culture (Hopkins 147). After deciding that the next meeting will be held in McCullough's woods, and before instructing Robert to spread the word to the slave preacher Uncle Daniel and to bring the encouraging news about the “butter and eggs” when he comes, Linda gives him a remarkable account of the previous meeting, which had been held in Gibson’s woods:

“Las' Sunday we had a good time. I war jis' chock full an' runnin' ober.

Aunt Milly's daughter's bin monin all summer, an' she's jis' come throo. We had a

powerful time. Eberythin' on dat groun' was jis' alive. I tell yer, dere was a shout

in de camp.”

[Robert replied,] “Well, you had better look out, and not shout too much,

and pray and sing too loud, because, 'fore you know, the patrollers will be on your

track and break up your meetin' in a mighty big hurry….”

153

“Oh, we looks out for dat. We's got a nice big pot, dat got cracked las'

winter, but it will hole a lot o' water, an' we puts it whar we can tell it eberything.

We has our own good times. An' I want you to come Sunday night…. Mark my

words, Bobby, we's all gwine to git free. I seed it all in a vision, as plain as de

nose on yer face.”

“Well, I hope your vision will come out all right….”

“Now, Bob, you sen' word to Uncle Dan'el, Tom Anderson, an' de rest ob

dem, to come to McCullough's woods nex' Sunday night. I want to hab a sin-

killin' an' debil-dribin' time” (12 – 13).

Linda’s account functions as a brief ethnography on the practices and beliefs of nineteenth-century African American folk religion—many of which served as forms of resistance to oppression. These include the infilling of the spirit, the conversion experience of mourning (or moaning) and coming through, shouting, praying, singing, the symbolic use of a pot or other vessel during prayer meetings, prophetic visions, typological discourse, the blurring of temporalities, and beliefs in the oneness or connectedness of things, in sin that can be killed, and in a devil that can be driven away.156 Many slaves believed a “drum-like” pot could offer protection to their illicit meetings by serving as a receptacle that would collect or muffle their songs and shouts and thus prevent whites from hearing them (Hopkins 117, Levine 57).157 In Iola Leroy,

156 In Slave Religion: the “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South, Albert J. Raboteau describes many of these practices at length. He reports, for example, that “each sin-laden ‘mourner’ had to experience [trials] before ‘comin’ through’ to conversion” and that “the most common device for preserving secrecy was an iron pot or kettle turned upside down… then slightly propped up to hold the sound of praying and singing from escaping” (215, 253).

157 Robert’s “invented phraseology” that repurposes the slaveholders’ language, Linda’s revision of white religion, and the cracked pot all exemplify the expressive strategy that Houston Baker calls “deformation of mastery.” As explained by Arlene R. Kizer, deformation of mastery “deliberately disrupts the traditional 154 the prophetic visions of Linda Salters, her ecstatic worship, and the cracked pot in the woods become powerful symbols for the black community’s work of remaking and repurposing the manipulative and unusable narratives, religious practices, and economic systems of the dominant society.158 The phrase “shout in the camp” alludes to a passage in 1 Samuel, which describes “the people of Israel encamped for battle, shouting in response to the presence of the Lord” (Taves 115). In this example of typological discourse, Linda and the other participants in the prayer meeting perceive the woods and swamps as permeated with “moral and spiritual significance” (Smith 38); they identify with the people of Israel as they prepare for conflict with the devil and with their oppressors.159 While drawing on the Old Testament stories and African traditions of the past, Linda also addresses the immediate needs of the present through prophesying, which strengthens the community with the promise of freedom and also allows her to subtly advance her own political goals.160 Throughout the novel, Linda proves herself to

form by introducing other elements into it, elements drawn from other contexts, or by using the instrument in a significantly different manner from the way it has been used in the past” (46). While scholars typically assess Iola Leroy for the non-folk characters’ “mastery of form” (to borrow another term from Baker) as demonstrated by their Standard English and formal educations, the folk characters’ deformation of mastery has often been overlooked.

158 The recurrence of prayer meetings in the novel counters Jennifer C. James’s assertions that Harper’s vision of uplift calls for the disorderly black body to be “rehabilitated into behaving according to the social codes of the dominant order,” and for “disadvantaged African Americans [to be rushed] on the evolutionary trajectory—morally, spiritually, and economically.” James even suggests that Harper shares with Thomas Dixon a desire for “the implementation of controls over the disruptive [black] body” (68 – 72). The spirituality of Linda, Uncle Daniel, and the other folk characters reflects their African American worldview, enables them to survive and defy the dominant white religion, and functions as their contribution to the novel’s reciprocal uplift. “Advantaged” characters like Iola may offer education, but Linda, Uncle Daniel and other folk characters offer wisdom, experience, and alternative history.

159 Levine claims that the slaves “extended the boundaries of their restrictive universe backward until it fused with the world of the Old Testament, and upward until it became one with the world beyond” (32 – 33).

160 Chanta M. Haywood, in her study of African American women preachers in the nineteenth century, defines prophesy as “the appropriation of a perceived mandate from God to spread His word in order to advance a conscious or unconscious political agenda” (17). 155 be an intelligent, resourceful, productive cultural worker and community elder whose lifeways and worldview contribute to popular uplift’s project of resisting slavery—which after Emancipation (as I discuss below) is reconfigured as the project of transforming the freedpeople into modern citizens. In Harper’s formulation, African Americans are “a ransomed people [on whom] God poured the chrism of a new era” and also “a race newly anointed with freedom;” as a chosen and anointed people, they will play a key role in transforming, modernizing, and reforming the nation (138).

* * *

The Environmental Ethos of Robert Johnson

Folk culture, as Harper portrays it, proves to be adaptable and durable; while the beliefs and practices of the freedpeople change during Reconstruction, they continue to play a part in helping African Americans reclaim their histories, reconstitute their families, and survive the racism and violence of modernizing America.161 Furthermore, folk culture is not rejected or denigrated by the novel’s more bourgeois characters such as

Iola Leroy. Its importance is demonstrated in Chapter XX, when Robert and his mother

Harriet are reunited at a prayer meeting that reminds Linda of “dem meetins we used to hab in de woods.” Although held in “a neat, commodious, frame building” instead of an outdoor setting, although led by a preacher who dislikes “too much hollerin,’” the meeting in Chapter XX includes many of the features of pre-emancipation prayer meetings; this indoor service provides its participants with opportunities for spiritual renewal through “tell[ing] of their hopes of heaven,” and for social critique through

161 As Kevin D. Pelletier claims, “the novel generally and Iola in particular [and the folk characters, I would also argue] are both aware of the realities of postwar life in America, realities that endanger ambitions for a black modernity and political projects of racial uplift” (139). 156

“relat[ing] their experiences (IL 162, 179). En route to the meeting house, Linda, Robert, and Iola pass through the woods and see the broken pot that marks the site of the last secret prayer meeting that Robert had attended during slavery. Importantly, Linda has continued to function as a community elder and respected source of wisdom on religion and other topics as well; for example, she tells Iola and Robert that “it does rile me ter see dese mean white men comin' down yere an' settin' up dere grog-shops, tryin' to fedder dere nests sellin' licker to… hard workin' culled people” (159). Linda, Robert, and Iola also discuss the current problems of vote-selling and bribery that threaten to undermine

Reconstruction, as well as the strategies that black women can use to persuade their husbands to vote against the Democrats who oppose Reconstruction and the rights of freedmen. Linda, for example, declares that if her husband sells his vote, she will “whip him and leave him” (176). As James Smethurst argues, such political, cultural, religious, economic, and educational concerns (expressed by many folk characters in Iola Leroy) reflect the determination of the African American community during Reconstruction to formulate and secure for themselves “modern ‘American’ citizenship” (5).162

At the meeting in the frame building, an old woman named Harriet testifies to the traumatic experience of having her child sold away; her testifying initiates a ritual of call- and-response: “some of her hearers moaned, others rocked to and fro, as thoughts of similar scenes in their own lives arose before them” (180). Harriet’s testifying prompts

Robert to testify about being separated from his mother; soon, he realizes that he is

162 Smethurst also claims that “the problem of how the modern United States would be constructed was superseded in the 1880s and 1890s by the answer of Jim Crow segregation and the mass disenfranchisement of African Americans in the South” (5). 157 indeed Harriet’s son.163 In the “joyous excitement” that ensues as the worshippers celebrate the reunion, Iola evidently is a participant: “the young people caught the infection of the general happiness and rejoiced with them that rejoiced. There were songs of rejoicing and shouts of praise” (182). In fact, Iola has appreciated and participated in folk culture since her childhood (she was raised as the white daughter of a wealthy planter); while tending a dying black soldier, she sings the spirituals he requests (“Over

Jordan” and “We’ll Anchor Bye and Bye”)—songs she probably learned from the slave children who were her playmates when she was “a harum-scarum girl… laughing, dancing, and singing from morning until night” (195).

In the final chapter of Iola Leroy (which happens some time after the reunion of

Robert and his mother), several indicators suggest that folk culture, in one form or another, will continue to be influential in the new community that has been constituted by the novel’s main characters. Linda has continued to worship ecstatically and to use her gift of prophecy, while Robert’s beliefs about nature and the stewardship of land challenge southern agribusiness and peonage. It is telling that the folk characters who are named or whose presence is implied by the text (Linda, her husband John Salters, and their grandson Job; Robert and his aged mother Harriet, who is Iola’s grandmother; and

Uncle Daniel) outnumber the so-called “elite” characters (Iola, her husband Frank

Latimer, and her mother Marie). As Carla L. Peterson points out, the novel ends with the

Leroy family “centered on Harriet, and we sense that if she must soon pass on, her memory will survive in future generations to provide the core values of African

American modernity” (“Modernity” 170). Harriet and many of the other folk characters

163 Robert and Iola have already learned that they are uncle and niece; thus, Iola also realizes that Harriet is her grandmother. 158 act function as community elders and as conduits of wisdom, history, and tradition; they are also committed to uplifting, sustaining, and empowering any neighbor who is in need.

In fact, they are already doing so before Iola and Frank join them: the Salters have bought part of the Gundover plantation (which seems to be several miles outside of the city of

C——) and dream that Job will go to college and become a preacher, while Uncle Daniel lives on his own land on the nearby Thurston plantation.164 After living in a Northern city, the Latimers return to the South and settle in the city of C——, where Iola plans to serve “in the Sunday-school as a teacher, and in the church as a helper.” Linda already knows that Iola is going to return because she has “seed it in a vision;” she tells Iola,

“wen I yered it war you [who was returning], I larffed and jist rolled ober, and larffed and jist gib up” (275, 278). While Iola gives no comment on Linda’s report of ecstatic laughter, rolling over, and prophecy, she does try to persuade Linda to wear glasses and learn to read. Martha J. Cutter suggests that the contrast between Iola’s mainstream education and Linda’s prophecy, between Iola’s scribal literacy and Linda’s experience- centered intelligence, amounts to a contest over “whose vision of the world will dominate—Iola’s or Aunt Linda’s, the intellectual or the folk, the hegemonic or the nonhegemonic”—a conflict that can be “resolved through hybridity,” through the folk adapting some of the modern practices that they have learned from the dominant society,

164 While the text does not directly name Job Salters as one of the characters who forms the new all-black community in the novel’s final chapter, readers may assume that he is present and that his grandparents are continuing to raise him. Harper positions Job to become an educated, militant preacher and community leader, but uses implication and indirection to make him less threatening to her diverse readership. Just as Job’s presence in the new community is implicit, earlier in the novel his suggestion of armed retaliation for violence against blacks during Reconstruction comes not in a direct statement, but through the secondhand report of his grandfather John: “one night arter some ob our pore people had been killed, an' some ob our women had run'd away 'bout seventeen miles, my gran'son, looking me squar in de face, said: ‘Ain't you got five fingers? Can't you pull a trigger as well as a white man?’ I tell yer… dat jis' got to me, an' I made up my mine dat my boy should neber call me a coward” (171). 159 and through the dominant society adapting some traditions that they have learned from the folk (158).165

It is arguably Robert who best represents the possibilities of learning to speak with “a multi-vocal, boundary-blurring subaltern/ bourgeois voice” and to “function effectively in a number of social matrixes” because of his ability to incorporate multiple perspectives, intelligences, and traditions into his identity (Christmann 14, Cutter 158).

Robert’s multiple intelligences have been shaped by the black folk community and the rudimentary education he received from Miss Nancy, from books of history he finds in her boarding-house, from newspapers, and from the white officers he befriends while serving as a lieutenant in the Union army. Through a remarkable conversation between these officers and Robert in Chapter XV, Harper historicizes the connections between land development, racial / ethnic oppression, and loss of culture. Harper even suggests that Native Americans, African Americans, and “poor white men, who, like the negroes, are victims of slavery,” should work together to resist the rapacious materialism, violence, and manipulation of the “aristocratic slaveholders” of the South (130).

In this context of speaking frankly about injustice and the failures of white

Christianity, Robert argues with Captain Sybil that Uncle Jack, a slave he had known,

“was religious, but he would steal” from the slaveholder Gundover. Switching to Uncle

Jack’s vernacular English and perspective, Robert reports that when “Jack com'd down

[to the future plantation], dis place war all growed up in woods. He go ter work, clared up

165 W. E. B. Du Bois suggests that both educators (like Iola Leroy) and church leaders (like Uncle Daniel and Linda Salters) played a crucial role in helping African Americans survive Reconstruction: “through establishing public schools and private colleges, and by organizing the Negro church, the Negro had acquired enough leadership and knowledge to thwart the worst designs of the new slave drivers. They avoided the mistake of trying to meet force by force. They bent to the storm of beating, lynching and murder, and kept their souls in spite of public and private insult of every description; they built an inner culture which the world recognizes in spite of the fact that it is still half-strangled and inarticulate” (Black Reconstruction 667). 160 de groun' an' plowed, an' planted, an' riz a [crop], an' den wen it war all done, he hadn't a dollar to buy his ole woman a gown; an' he jis' took a bag ob wheat” (136). Robert’s recirculation of Jack’s story adds to the white officers’ denouncement of slavery as “a serpent which we nourished in its weakness,” as “a cancer eating into the life of the nation… [and] cast[ing] such a glamour over us” (130, 131). Their denouncement echoes the text’s claim that slavery charms or enchants the nation and causes its citizens to incorrectly read the shuddering earth. Throughout the novel, the black community also testifies to the capacity of reputedly Christian slaveholders to consume every last part of the people they commodify and control. Uncle Daniel laments that “Slavery's done got all de marrow out ob dese poor ole bones;” the defiant Linda Salters remembers that “we women had ter keep 'em from whippin' us, er dey'd all de time been [living] on our bones

(18, 159). Combining the heterogeneous discourses of Robert, the Union officers,

Daniel, and Linda, the novel points to the need for reforming agricultural systems that treat the woods, the land, and black workers as mere resources, valued only for profit and consumption, and empty of all other meanings.

Robert’s code-switching, his conversation with the Union officers, his empathy for Uncle Jack, and his critique of southern agriculture reveal his discursive, emotional, and environmental intelligences—all of which he will need for the project of land reform he undertakes in the conclusion of the novel. Robert and his mother Harriet have settled not far from the city of C——. He has purchased “a large plantation, which he [has] divided into small homesteads, and sold to poor but thrifty laborers, and his heart has been gladdened by their increased prosperity and progress. He has seen the one-roomed cabins change to comfortable cottages” (280). For Robert, his mother, Uncle Daniel,

161

Linda, and other members of the rural community, the natural settings at the margins of the white-controlled properties have long provided physical, spiritual, and aesthetic sustenance. Uncle Daniel used the woods to “hunt squirrels, an' rabbits, an' ketch fish, an' set traps for birds;” when Robert travels to the church where he is reunited with his mother, he passes through the countryside and enjoys “quaffing the beauty of the scene and thinking of his boyish days, when he gathered nuts and wild plums in those woods; he also indulged pleasant reminiscences of later years, when, with Uncle Daniel and Tom

Anderson, he attended the secret prayer-meetings” (25, 175).

Robert’s experiences in the woods and swamps provide him with the resources that African Americans obtained from the environment, that he seeks to share with the members of his community during Reconstruction. According to Kimberly K. Smith, such resources often included “production practices,” “the basis of an attachment to place,” and “a potential source of selfhood and power” (38). In tracing Robert’s complex and empowering relationship with nature, Harper complicates the national folk imaginary’s primitivism and romantic racialism, which portrayed rural African American workers as unsophisticated brutes and lazy children of nature. As do Linda’s prophetic visions and Iola’s visits to the “lowly” laborers in their cabins, Robert’s project of land reform serves to uplift and empower the community, and to satisfy its immediate needs.

Robert’s self-realization and empowerment are intricately connected to the lifeways and worldview of the folk, which he practices in the woods while gathering foodstuffs, worshipping with his community, and evading the white mistress who tried to make him her pet. In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, the anonymous narrator also draws from folk culture (at least temporarily) a sense of

162 freedom, power, and selfhood. Harper and Johnson both complicate the dominant society’s folk imaginary, which frequently treated the traditional cultural forms of

African Americans as obstacles to uplift, reform, modernization, and integration. In Iola

Leroy, folk culture is conducive, not antithetical to, Harper’s version of uplift, in which the values of the freedpeople are necessary tools for surviving and constructively challenging white ideologies, white narratives, and white religion. In Johnson’s

Autobiography, folk culture is also instrumental—a key component of the narrator’s integrationism, which harnesses the mainstream fascination with ragtime, the cake-walk, and other folk arts to bolster his arguments that African Americans must be regarded as fully human and given full citizenship rights so that they may integrate on an individual level (that is, within the self), as well as legally and socially with white America.166

* * *

James Weldon Johnson, Integrationism, and the Art Approach

In James Weldon Johnson’s novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man

(1912), the anonymous narrator crosses lines of color, class, and ethics several times as he migrates between the North and the South, tours Europe, and wrestles with what it means to live by the “enlightened and humanitarianized thought” that he associates with

166 The term integrationism, like uplift, has been associated with a variety of meanings. The integrationism that Johnson supports in The Autobiography is much like the integrationism articulated by Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk: “One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife,—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use his best powers and his latent genius” (3-4). 163 modernity (114). When he collects African American folk songs during his second visit to the South, for example, he sometimes assumes the identity and comforts of a white middle-class traveler; at other times, he attends religious meetings among rural black laborers as if he were one of them. The narrator’s racial and class identities fluctuate, and so does his ethical position: he wants to work with folk culture partly so that he can help alleviate “the hopeless struggle of the black people of the United States,” but also so that he can fulfill a “desire to distinguish myself” (30, 89). The narrator criticizes the national folk imaginary and yet finally capitulates to it.167 While he realizes that the dominant society’s representation and imagination of African Americans contributes to the injustices they face, he tends to objectify them as a folk treasure, a source of vital energy, or a reform project, and to emphasize their inferiority in order to prove his own sophistication and modernization.168

While many critics have linked the narrator of The Autobiography with Booker T.

Washington, the narrator’s political philosophy and his position on the national folk imaginary reveal that he has been significantly influenced by W. E. B. Du Bois.169

167 Smethurst finds that Johnson’s characterization of the narrator draws on “the trope of the mixed-race individual to embody a sort of dualism.” The narrator never succeeds in “reconciling his disparate cultural selves;” even when he feels pride “in the cultural achievements of the black folk,” his perspective is “more one of an engaged but alien folklorist than of an intimate insider.” The dualisms that Johnson, Du Bois, Washington, and Charles Chesnutt (among others) investigated in their writings, Smethurst affirms, became “one of their most-lasting contributions to American culture;” their various dualisms also served as “models for writers to engage the divided and often contradictory elements of popular culture in ways that foregrounded those divisions and paradoxes, anticipating the representations of fragmented subjectivities that became standard operating procedure of much U.S. modernism” (62, 64).

168On a similar note, Marlon B. Ross argues that “the New Negro’s nervousness amid the black mass bespeaks his plight as a modernizing subject,” and that New Negroes could lower themselves “if they identified too closely with the folk, whose identity is still burdened with a primitive, enchained backwardness” (Manning 17).

169 Gene Jarrett, for example, claims that “the sentiments of the narrator of The Autobiography of an Ex- Colored Man [are]… that the success or failure of racial uplift results from how well African American leaders, especially Washington, attracted white political leaders, patrons, and philanthropists” (94). Lawrence J. Oliver claims that Johnson compliments Washington in the novel’s conclusion (211). Gayle 164

Although the narrator does seem to praise Washington in the novel’s closing paragraphs, elsewhere he summons “the future Negro novelist and poet to give the country something new and unknown”—something that counters the national folk imaginary—through

“depicting the life, the ambitions, the struggles, and the passions of those of their race who are striving to break the narrow limits of traditions.” Johnson explicitly ties this art activism to Du Bois, pointing out that “a beginning has already been made in that remarkable book by Dr. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk” (102).170 Extending Du

Bois’s project through his portrayal of a narrator who insists on integrationism and full citizenship, Johnson takes a quite different stance from Washington; the narrator’s praise of Washington’s “earnestness and faith” implicitly critiques accommodationism for its passivity and servitude, as I discuss below (127). Unlike Washington, Johnson argues that African Americans should be given opportunities for geographical and social mobility; that all Americans must follow ethical and humanitarian principles; and that intellectual and creative work should be properly valued, thereby contributing to the integration of African Americans with the dominant society. Johnson’s incorporation of

Du Boisian ethical and political positions in his approach to folk materials complicates

Wald believes that “[the narrator’s] admiration for Washington makes a certain sense…. Like Washington, [he] fashions his ambitions according to… ‘the Gospel of Work and Money,’ and like his idol, he predicates his survival within a racially divided society on his submission to the values of the marketplace” (40 – 41). According to Daphne Lamothe, Johnson’s narrator “compare[es] himself negatively to Race Men like Booker T. Washington who choose to stand up for principles of equality and democracy” (89).

170 The narrator also makes frequent use of the Du Boisian keyword “struggle;” recasts double consciousness as “a sort of dual personality;” and echoes Du Bois’s description of the South as a place where “outside of written history and outside of printed law, there has been going on for a generation as deep a storm and stress of human souls… as ever a people experienced” (181).

165 any simplistic understanding of the narrator’s position as pro-Washington or pro- accommodationism.171

* * *

To Catch the Spirit of the Negro in His Relatively Primitive State

In The Autobiography, the narrator’s decision to collect songs in order to help struggling African Americans conveys Johnson’s integrationism, which Sarah Wilson characterizes as “a formal campaign for equity on behalf of black America” that called for “the construction of a racially egalitarian American state and culture” (91, 92).172

Thus, The Autobiography affirms that artistic work can perform a kind of political work, that African Americans can alter their national status and international standing through musical and other cultural achievements, and that the narrator’s commitment to folk culture could prepare him to become not just a great artist but also a race leader.173 “Race

171 As William L. Andrews argues, Washington valued deeds over words, biographies and newspapers over novels, black farmers over black preachers and teachers, “black power” that moved “from act to word” over the kind that moved “from performing word to reforming act” (82 – 87). In Up from Slavery, Washington claims that “the actual sight of a first-class house that a Negro has built is ten times more potent than pages of discussion about a house that he ought to build” (154). In The Autobiography (which we might think of as “pages of discussion” pointing to the prejudice-free and integrated society that ought to be built), Johnson’s narrator strays from Washingtonian pragmatics at nearly every turn. He likes reading and music but dislikes most “outdoor exercise” and manual labor; he values and trusts novels and Du Bois’s writings more than newspapers; at a young age he begins to question the folk imaginary that Washington sometimes upheld (30).

172 According to Sarah Wilson, Johnson importantly argued that integration on a cultural level was already taking place, and thus Johnson was “concerned with whether or not African Americans would receive credit for their ongoing contributions to cultural mixture, and whether they ought to intervene in, and change the nature of, the process of cultural mixture…. His work in imagining and promoting a shared civic culture resonates with melting-pot efforts like those of Jane Addams and John Dewey…. Johnson’s melting-pot modernism is most distinctly registered in his decision to advance his political and cultural agendas through sustained experimentation at the level of expressive form” (emphasis in original, 92).

173 Critics who overlook the subtle yet important connections the narrator makes between cultural and political work tend to judge him harshly for his ragtime-playing and song-collecting. Harilaos Stecopoulos, for example, condemns the narrator’s “desire to steal gloatingly the folk rhythms and melodies of the black rural people for his own professional ambitions” (71). James C. Davis suggests that the narrator “traffic[s] in racialized culture as a commodity,” and that he anticipates what Sherwood Anderson would describe as 166

Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” which Johnson published in Harper’s in 1928, more explicitly describes the interconnections between cultural and political work that Johnson had formulated in The Autobiography—and also points to the limits in Johnson’s integrationism. To provide a compelling answer to “the question” of “whether or not the

Negro shall be accorded full and unlimited American citizenship,” Johnson recommends

“the art approach,” which emphasizes the “intellectual and artistic achievement” of

African Americans. Just as “the Negro’s folk-art creations” have combated prejudice and

“change[d] the national attitudes toward him,” now the “contemporary individual Negro artist” can also make “distinctive contributions to our common cultural store,” and thereby change “his condition and status as a man and citizen.” The art approach,

Johnson argues optimistically, may be more effective in combating racism and inequality than “religious, educational, political, industrial, ethical, economical, [and] sociological

[approaches].” While Johnson places great faith in what the art approach can accomplish, he offers a relatively narrow and implicitly primitivist set of parameters for valuing the art itself: contemporary African American artists, Johnson affirms, “are bringing something fresh and vital into American art, something from the store of their own racial genius: warmth, color, movement, rhythm, and abandon; depth and swiftness of emotion and the beauty of sensuousness” (Writings 751 – 765).174

“some white artist [who] could go among the Negroes and live with them [so that] much beautiful stuff might be got” (166).

174 Rachel Blau DuPlessis finds that “primitivism summarizes a contradictory set of assumptions and attitudes inflecting modernist practice…. In some modern works, positive primitivist tropes provide a simply irresistible mythology about [the] convenient Others…. This interested encomium for (apparently) simple peoples, peasants, closeness to the land and to nature, folk sweetness or special wisdom could pass into fear-laden pejorative tropes of tribal mystery, preternatural strength or perception, the thicker, resistant nature represented by the ‘jungle,’ unusual sexual prowess, lurking rites, and so on” (65). Importantly, Robert A. Coles and Diane Isaacs point out that African American writers and artists employed primitivism as well: “For some American blacks, primitivism was strongly tied to the Africanization of the American 167

In The Autobiography, the narrator as a boy becomes curious about the artistic, intellectual, and political achievements of African Americans, through which they can shape the common cultural store, insist on their humanity, and argue for citizenship.

Those achievements, along with the integrationism that would mobilize them, are frequently undermined by the narrator’s primitivism. Even after his final choice of an elite white identity, the narrator still advances a somewhat compromised argument for integrationism, not accommodationism; he ultimately suggests that it is through artistic creations (not through loyal service or the meek acceptance of limited opportunity) that

African Americans can alter the attitudes of the national folk imaginary. Because he keeps the songs that he collected in a box rather than incorporating them in cultural or political work, because the songs represent the “relatively primitive state” of the African

American folk that he has renounced, they seem to him like “a “vanished dream” and an unused “birthright” (105, 127). 175

Although the narrator dreams of carrying out the kinds of cultural and political work that counter the national folk imaginary, he is at times unable to extricate himself from its ideologies. His primitivism and elitism become especially pronounced as he travels in the South and as he imagines the laboring class as stereotypes, not as citizens who are capable of practicing the mobility, adaptability, humanitarianism, and artistic

Negro and the search for a more remote, naturally good, and uncorrupted Africa—free from the white racism manifested in Western civilization…. This [often] meant denying one’s own Western orientation in order to locate alternatives in an African past” (5-6). According to Smethurst, “the same sort of northern Protestant racialist primitivism… is displayed by both black and white writers in which African Americans are seen as possessing special spiritual gifts they can provide to America in exchange for the gifts of freedom and self-consciousness” (71).

175 J. Martin Favor suggests that the narrator’s longing for a birthright indicates “a desire for a genetic boundary that would greatly simplify his aesthetic and political actions, that would make [African Americans] (and him) easily categorizable.” Favor believes that Johnson anticipates Stuart Hall, who observes that “when we naturalize historical categories… we fix the signifier outside of history, outside of change, outside of political intervention” (51). 168 achievements that are among his integrationist ideals. For example, he believes that folk culture is worth preserving, but thinks that his main challenge is “trying to catch the spirit of the Negro in his relatively primitive state” (105). While he wants to help rural African

Americans, he also suggests that too many of them resemble the “dialect-speaking

‘darkies’” of the national folk imaginary, whose “literary ideal of the American Negro constitutes what is really an obstacle in the way of the thoughtful and progressive element of the race” (102). And while the imagination of rural preacher John Brown seems “free and daring” to the narrator, and while the song-leading of the character Singing Johnson unites “people from different communities,” the narrator generally thinks of the rural folk as “dull,” “simple,” and “primitive” (103, 106, 108).176 In fact, Brown’s “free” imagination and the “tone pictures” uttered by him affirm to the narrator the primitiveness of African American music and religion, as does the tear-inducing emotionality he experiences when he hears the spirituals sung by the “Negro congregation under the spell of religious fervor” (106, 110). Although he considers himself a “sophisticated and non-religious man of the world,” the narrator finds that “the torrent of [Brown’s] words, moving with the rhythm and glowing with the eloquence of primitive poetry, swept me along, and I, too, felt like joining in the shouts” (107). The spirituals may have sizable audiences in America and Europe, as the narrator affirms, but his emphasis on their “primitive” qualities insinuates that African Americans are less civilized and less modern.

176 While Johnson claims that freeness and emotionality are characteristic of African American folk culture, Du Bois suggests that folk culture is close to nature (“like all primitive folk, the slave stood near to Nature's heart”), as well as true and uncorrupted: (“the Music of Negro religion is that plaintive rhythmic melody, with its touching minor cadences, which… still remains the most original and beautiful expression of human life and longing yet born on American soil. Sprung from the African forests, where its counterpart can still be heard, it was adapted, changed, and intensified by the tragic soul-life of the slave, until… it became the one true expression of a people's sorrow, despair, and hope”) (191, 257).

169

The limits of the narrator’s integrationism can also be seen in his demeaning descriptions of urban African Americans as a folk whose lifeways contribute to national stereotypes, or whose artistic abilities mark them as primitive rather than fully human.177

While touring Washington, D.C., with a black doctor, the narrator finds that the city

“shows the Negro not only at his best, but also at his worst.” The doctor’s comments about urban folk echo those expressed by the narrator about rural folk: “You see those lazy, loafing, good-for-nothing darkies; they're not worth digging graves for; yet they are the ones who create impressions of the race for the casual observer…. they ought not to represent the race. We are the race, and the race ought to be judged … by the best it has been able to produce, not by the worst” (94 – 95). Even the narrator’s evaluations of the supposed “best” urban folk—those who achieve intellectually and artistically—are problematic. When he first hears ragtime at the Club in New York City, he is impressed by its “barbaric harmonies” and its ability to provoke “physical response, patting of the feet, drumming of the fingers, or nodding of the head” (61). The narrator characterizes the Club’s ragtime player as an untrained “natural musician” who plays and composes

“by ear alone,” who possesses “a lavish natural endowment” (63). Ragtime itself, according to the narrator, “was originated…. by Negro piano players who knew no more of the theory of music than they did of the theory of the universe, but were guided by natural musical instinct and talent” (62). Later, when the narrator entertains “a party of

177 Kimberly K. Smith argues that “for many black writers, primitivism became (somewhat paradoxically) a vehicle for exploring the problem of constructing a viable racial identity…. [Johnson] depicted southern blacks as a people whose daily interaction with the natural world gave them access to nature’s vital, creative energy. But Johnson also rejected racial essentialism and the biological concept of race” (141- 143). While I tend to agree with Smith, I would point out that the narrator of The Autobiography locates primitive energy not only in rural southern African Americans, but also in their urban and northern counterparts. Although he rejects essentialism for himself, he comes close to essentializing many African American black folk artists when he describes their cultural achievements as natural, free, and based on instinct. 170 ladies and gentlemen” at the millionaire’s apartment, he reports that his performance of a ragtime song causes his listeners to lose their inhibitions: “the whole company involuntarily and unconsciously did an impromptu cake-walk” (71, 73). While ragtime

“appeals universally” and is known throughout “the civilized world,” the narrator undermines the political efficacy ragtime might have as an argument for the humanity and citizenship of African Americans by linking it with instinct, innate essence, barbarism, and uninhibited physicality (62).

The narrator’s suggestion that his mother also taps into primitive energies when she plays African American folk music is particularly surprising because she has raised him to resemble people he later calls “genuine Yankees” in dress, values, speech, socialization, and education (93).178 She gave birth to him in Georgia while she worked for his paternal grandmother as a “sewing-girl” (28). With the financial support of the narrator’s white father, she moves him (while he is a small child) to Connecticut, where the two of them live in a “cottage which seemed… to be fitted up almost luxuriously” (7).

Crossing class lines as well as geographic lines, the narrator’s mother acquires a job as a self-employed seamstress and allows him to acquire a different racial status. His mother does not tell him that he had been black in Georgia; because of his appearance, he will be identified as white—in effect, ex-colored—during his sheltered childhood and his first few years at school. The narrator’s mother attempts to instill in him a sense of humanitarian responsibility by forbidding him to use racial slurs or to harass his black classmates. While his mother believes that he will enjoy greater freedom if people believe that he is white, the narrator emphasizes how free his mother was while

178 The narrator remembers that “my mother dressed me very neatly, and I developed that pride which well- dressed boys generally have. She was careful about my associates, and I myself was quite particular. As I look back now I can see that I was a perfect little aristocrat” (7). 171

“play[ing] simple accompaniments to some old Southern songs (i.e., spirituals and other

African American folk songs). With these songs, “she was freer [than with the formal hymns of the white church] because she played them by ear” (7). Later, he recalls that he first “learn[ed] the piano by trying to reproduce the quaint songs which my mother used to sing, with all their pathetic turns and cadences,” and that “often when playing I could not keep the tears which formed in my eyes from rolling down my cheeks…. I would jump from the piano, and throw myself sobbing into my mother's arms. She, by her caresses and often her tears, only encouraged these fits of sentimental hysteria” (19).179

Here, the narrator suggests a complex series of oppositions between the modern white citizen and the primitive black other.180 He may be juxtaposing the legal “white” freedom that his mother tried to acquire for him by migrating to the North with the emotional “black” freedom that she exuded when she played the spirituals by ear. He may also be contrasting the narratives of the dominant society that seek to narrowly script his mother’s life with the authority she accesses through African American folk songs.181

Finally, he may be alluding to the primitivist belief that over-civilized white degeneracy

179 Katherine Biers argues that “the racial repressed returns in the contemporaneous language of [the narrator’s] nervous automatism…. By describing his mother’s complicity with his loss of emotional control, the narrator attempts to distinguish himself from her position, and also to distinguish his childish state of mind from his own as an adult in the present tense of the narration…. his inarticulate sobs seem to proceed from the spirituals, which hum unacknowledged in the background as the true inspiration for his [later] performances” (114)

180 As DuPlessis notes, “[multiple] attitudes [about primitivism] were not necessarily separated in texts, arguments, and oeuvres but played out dialectically in a perpetual oscillation. Descriptive terms that are idealizing, and sometimes admiring… can at the same time be disparaging and dismissive” (66).

181 Stated a somewhat different way, the narrator may be contrasting his mother’s private embodiment of black folk culture with her implicit performance or emulation of whiteness in public. Donaldson suggests that The Autobiography exposes the instability of racial categories and the white gaze, both of which are “vulnerable… because race itself, whether whiteness or blackness, is merely a matter of performance, requiring faithfulness to the scripts determined by white American culture. The relative ease with which the narrator changes back and forth between racial identities, according to Donaldson, reveals that “whiteness in general is a masquerade, an elaborate performance that must be bolstered by subterfuge, deceit, and violence to maintain itself apart from blackness” (82 -83).

172 could be alleviated by black vitality.182 These oppositions point to the shortcomings that will hinder the narrator’s integrationism; able to view the folk only in terms of limitation, difference, and primitivism, the narrator ultimately chooses to reduce not only his aesthetic investment in folk culture, but his political commitment to the folk as well.183

Throughout the novel, the narrator alternatively feels alienated from and connected to the folk; we may attribute this tension at least partly to the competing pressures of the national folk imaginary, which suggests that the narrator must abandon folk culture so that he can become a modern citizen, and that he must also preserve folk culture so that he can harness its primitive energies and freedoms.184

The narrator’s first passing ends when he is “about eleven years old” and experiences a “radical change” (17, 15). After his teacher says that he may not stand with the white students, the white boys decide that he is black and mock him. When the narrator asks his mother for clarification, she insists that he is not inferior: “You are as good as anybody; if anyone calls you a nigger, don't notice them.” His mother admits that she is “not white,” won’t say what his race is, claims that his father is “one of the

182 This formulation of primitivism recurs in several of Johnson’s later writings. In “The Lynching at Memphis,” Johnson reports that the murder of a white girl “did not bear the earmarks of a ‘Negro’ crime,” and that the mutilation of her body “was not a crime of primitive lust, but of over civilized [i.e., white] degeneracy” (“The Lynching” 29). In his autobiography Along This Way (1933), Johnson claims that he has seen whites who were “dancing to a Negro band in a Harlem cabaret” and “attempting to throw off the crusts and layers of inhibitions laid on by sophisticated civilization; striving to yield to the feel and experience of abandon; seeking to recapture a taste of primitive joy in life and living; trying to work their way back into that jungle which was the original Garden of Eden; in a word, doing their best to pass for colored” (Writings 496).

183 As Michael North argues, “Johnson seemed unaware of how easily the art that was supposed to demonstrate the full independent humanity of the race could, in a state of [integration], demonstrate just the opposite. The art that was supposed to mark the arrival of African America at the pinnacle of civilization could be seen instead as nothing more than the sort of emotional and spiritual baggage that white civilization had had to jettison in its march toward the top” (170).

184 In Along This Way, Johnson reports that while teaching in rural Georgia, he also felt connected to and yet alienated from his students and their parents: “I found myself studying them all with a sympathetic objectivity, as though they were something apart; but in an instant’s reflection I could realize that they were me, and I was they; that a force stronger than blood made us one” (265). 173 greatest men in the country,” and refuses to tell him anything else (14). While J. Martin

Favor argues that the narrator’s mother “instructs him in his difference from African

Americans,” she may also be attempting to teach him that African Americans are not what the national folk imaginary says they are (36). The radical change of finding out that others think he is black reveals to the narrator that the American racial system and the folk imaginary have the power to subject him to “the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence” that compels every African American “to take his outlook on all things, not from the viewpoint of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man.” Believing that the racial system seeks to diminish black citizenship and humanity, the narrator becomes keenly interested in the factors which explain why

“the race has progressed so broadly as it has.” Those factors include the creative and political achievements of African Americans, as well as their values and beliefs—which he will realize have the power to counter the dominant society’s folk imaginary and to unsettle white assumptions. African Americans, he theorizes, are “a mystery to the whites. It is a difficult thing for a white man to learn what a colored man really thinks”

(15). This mysterious and difficult thing—what the narrator should feel and think now that he has been identified as black—will preoccupy him throughout much of The

Autobiography, and will in turn prompt him to consider what cultural and political work he should do, as well as what arguments he should make about the citizenship and humanity of African Americans.

For his first tentative answers to these questions, the narrator turns to music and books for the consolations and narratives they provide. The narrator decides that the

Bible is like many “modern” books, in that parts of it seem written by authors who

174 became “exhausted or careless” (17). Newspapers are also unsatisfactory, while his book of history is “told in such a condensed and skipping style” that it offers “very little real information” (27). These narratives—shopworn, sloppy, brief, and incomplete—do not answer his questions about African American identity and citizenship, about “my mother’s and my position, and what was our exact relation to the world in general” (26).

For what he calls “my first perspective of the life I was entering”—for lessons in ethics, humanitarianism, and African American folk culture—the narrator looks to Uncle Tom’s

Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe (which was, of course, a powerful influence on the national folk imaginary). Although he will later learn that the novel has been dismissed by some readers as “a direct misrepresentation,” he suggests that the novel is more informative and less disorienting than the history he has read: “it opened my eyes as to who and what I was and what my country considered me; in fact, it gave me my bearing”

(27). Kathleen Pfeiffer claims that Uncle Tom’s Cabin facilitates the narrator’s

“questioning [of] the reliability of distinctions among fact, fiction, history, and autobiography” (417); Stowe’s work enables the narrator to realize how the national folk imaginary represents African Americans, and to separate that representation from his own developing concept of who he is.

* * *

To Reflect Credit on the Race

Stowe’s novel also helps the narrator continue to devise “a theory of what it was to be colored” by prompting him to critique African American accommodationism and servitude (as represented by the character of Uncle Tom) and to talk more openly with his mother (47). Hearing her account of slavery, “of things directly touching her life and

175 mine and of things which had come down to her through the ‘old folks,’” the narrator finds that he has “a strong desire to see the South” and to continue filling in what has been omitted from his history. The narrator’s efforts to theorize blackness and to reclaim his history contribute to “newly awakened ideas and thoughts [that] took the form of a definite aspiration on the day I graduated from the grammar school” (28). At the graduation ceremony, the audience gives his black friend Shiny much “sympathy and admiration” for his stirring recitation of Wendell Phillip’s speech on Toussaint

L’Ouverture; from then on, the narrator claims that his aspiration is “to be a great man, a great colored man, to reflect credit on the race and gain fame for myself” (29-30). In other words, he hopes to achieve something exceptional so that he can change national attitudes by “reflecting” credit or creative contribution rather than deficit or emptiness on

African Americans.185 The alternative education the narrator acquires—from the oral accounts of the old folks that his mother shares with him, from Shiny’s speech on

L’Ouverture, and from his independent reading of the Bible and authors such as Stowe and Frederick Douglass—nurtures his commitment to African American culture and humanitarianism; strengthens his desire “to reflect credit on the race” and to migrate; and influences the black identities he later adopts, including music teacher, ragtime pianist, gambler, paid companion of a millionaire, and collector of folk songs.186

185 In “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist,” Johnson juxtaposes the stereotype of African American emptiness with his claim of ample contributions: “there is a common, widespread, and persistent stereotyped idea that regarding the Negro, and it is that he is here only to receive…. The common idea is that the Negro reached America intellectually, culturally, and morally empty, and that he is here to be filled—filled with education, filled religion, filled with morality, filled with culture…. Through his artistic efforts the Negro is smashing this immemorial stereotype…. He is impressing upon the national minds the conviction that… he has given as well as received, that he is the potential giver of larger and richer contributions” (Writings 764 – 765).

186 The credit the narrator seeks to achieve, according to Tom Nissley, consists of “acknowledgment of the black race as a valuable cultural contributor to the national marketplace;” in this formulation, the narrator 176

After high school, the narrator settles in Jacksonville, Florida, where he goes about “getting the practice” of the black identity he has theorized and has now temporarily chosen (47). In fact, he gets different kinds of practice from participating in two culturally distinct communities; thus, the narrator demonstrates how “integrate-able”

African Americans are—or, as he later puts it, “what an adaptable creature the Negro is”

(93). One community consists of the black and white workers (many of whom are Cuban

American) at the cigar factory where he works. The community that “really” facilitates the narrator’s “entrance into the race,” however, is comprised of “the best class of colored people in Jacksonville” (46 – 47). While the narrator’s identity as a music teacher affiliated with the Jacksonville black bourgeoisie may be incompatible with his identity as a worker in the Cuban cigar factory, it does inform his classification of the city’s black residents into three groups based explicitly on “their relations with the whites” and implicitly on their capacity to discredit the national folk imaginary (48). Reiterating that

“the colored man looked at everything through the prism of his relationship to society as a colored man,” the narrator alludes to his earlier claim that the American racial system diminishes the colored man’s ability to perceive the world as a citizen or human being would do (emphasis in original). He also repeats his claim that it is “to be wondered at that [the colored man] has progressed so broadly.” Such a system also warps the imagination of the Southern white man, whose “mental efforts run through one narrow channel; his life as a man and a citizen [is] impassably limited by the ever present ‘Negro question’” (47). In the narrator’s evaluation, the “best” of the three classes, “the advanced element of the colored race” in Jacksonville, includes “independent workmen

functions as the credit-giver or “the authenticator [whose work is] collecting and collating [black] productions and making them understandable as valuable and characteristic Negro art” (130). 177 and tradesmen” and also “the well-to-do and educated.” The best class is “well- disposed” but not subservient to the whites; because of limited relations with the whites, they have “a little world of their own.” Their broad progress has enabled them to gain the

“money, education, and culture” that the national folk imaginary suggests they may be unfit to acquire; their progress asserts their humanity, as well as their exemplary use of the limited citizenship that whites have permitted them. 187 Because of their resources, sense of responsibility, and achievements, they are the best equipped to take political action, to deal with “the race question” and to resist “injustice or gross discrimination”

(49 – 51).

In addition to the best class, the narrator analyzes the servant class and also the desperate class of manual laborers and ex-convicts.188 The servants’ close relations with white employers have done little to help them progress or to argue for their citizenship and humanity. Describing them as “simple, kindhearted and faithful,” the narrator implies that they are too accepting of inequality, and thus unlikely to strive for full citizenship (47). Importantly, the simple (and perhaps wasted) faithfulness of black servants anticipates the narrator’s later association of Washington with an “earnestness and faith” that is limited in its potency. Like the servant class, the desperate class of laborers and ex-convicts has also been warped by their relations with whites, who treat

187 In the sociological textbook Essentials of Americanization (1923), Emory S. Bogardus supports the stereotype of African American emptiness and suggests that many African Americans have a limited capacity to acquire “money, education, and culture.” Bogardus argues that “the Negro in America” has descended from “the unambitious and mediocre;” he recommends “wholesale education along agricultural, industrial, and trade lines for the mass of the Negro race, and higher educational provisions for members of the race who are fitted to undertake advanced studies. This educational program must include instruction in the fields of personal worth and social responsibility” (157, emphasis added).

188 Johnson’s evaluation of the three classes of African Americans in Jacksonville closely parallels (and apparently even borrows some language from) Du Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899), particularly the section entitled “Social Classes and Amusements” (309 – 321). 178 them like a “vicious mule” and have made them hostile to “the requirements of civilization” (48). The narrator suggests that the three classes of African Americans correspond to three stages of civilization, that they do not interact or cooperate with one another, and that the dominant white society misunderstands, misrepresents, and marginalizes all three classes.

While the narrator claims that a class stratification like Jacksonville’s “appl[ies] generally to every Southern community,” he uses few markers of class or race in his descriptions of the dances that he attends with his friends from the cigar factory (48).

The dances, including the quadrille and especially the cake-walk, draw “a great variety of people,” such as hotel guests and waiters. Their appeal to cross-class, interracial, and global audiences suggests the capacity of folk culture to promote integration and to change national as well as international opinions about African Americans; the narrator reports that the cake-walk is “now known all over the world,” and that some critics in

Paris have called it “the acme of poetic motion” (53, 54). The narrator goes on to argue that several forms of African American folk culture—including the cake-walk, the folktales collected by Joel Chandler Harris, the spirituals, and ragtime music—“refute the oft-advanced theory that [the colored people] are an absolutely inferior race;” these cultural forms “demonstrate that they have originality and artistic conception, and, what is more, the power of creating that which can influence and appeal universally.” African

American folk culture should be a source of pride, the narrator asserts; the cakewalk has impressed “European royalty and nobility,” while ragtime has been called “American music” in Europe (54). The narrator suggests that the proper appreciation of African

American folk culture could widen the “narrow channels” of white opinion about black

179

Americans, affirm their value as citizens of the nation and the world, and alter their relations with the dominant society.189 While the black bourgeoisie of Jacksonville demonstrate their fitness for citizenship through financial and educational progress and through their resistance to segregated train cars, Johnson recognizes (in The

Autobiography and especially in “Race Prejudice and the Negro Artist”) that black folk communities have a long history of using their creative achievements to argue for their humanity and citizenship.

Even when arguing that folk culture can refute claims of African American inferiority, however, the narrator reveals the primitivist, elitist, and civilizationist attitudes that weaken integrationism. In his estimation, the cake-walk and other forms of folk culture are “lower forms of art, but they give evidence of a power that will some day be applied to the higher forms” (54). When the narrator decides to again identify himself as black and returns to the South to collect African American folk songs, he intends to harness the power of a lower culture to invigorate a higher culture, “to voice all the joys and sorrows, the hopes and ambitions, of the American Negro, in classic musical form”

(89). By doing so, the narrator hopes to realize his ambition of “reflecting credit on the race” through personal achievement and through the development of an egalitarian culture that contests the national folk imaginary. As he “strike[s] out into the interior of

Georgia,” however, the limits of his integrationism become apparent. The narrator feels frustration instead of sympathy for “rural colored people” who are living in poverty; he explains that there is no need for him to portray the all-too-familiar “log cabins and plantations and dialect-speaking ‘darkies’ [which] are perhaps better known in American

189 Nicholas M. Evans argues that both Du Bois and Johnson set “millennial goals… for African American music, believing that it could contribute to “unifying the nation and fulfilling the promise of a liberal- democratic society” (83). 180 literature than any other single picture of our national life” (101 -102).190 In choosing to deny poor rural African Americans an aesthetic representation, the narrator also seems to deny them political representation and to acquiesce to mainstream white opinions. Later, he characterizes the black farmers he travels among as “submissive, faithful, and often affectionate, negatively content with their lot;” he again anticipates his later association of Washington with the ambiguous qualities of “earnestness and faith” (103). Seeing what the national folk imaginary has conditioned him to see, the narrator comes close to blaming the rural poor for confirming the “already overworked and hackneyed descriptions… [that constitute] what is really an obstacle in the way of the thoughtful and progressive element of the race. [The American Negro’s] character has been established as a happy-go-lucky, laughing, shuffling, banjo-picking being.” Bothered by what strikes him as an aesthetic problem, the narrator offers an aesthetic solution by calling on the

“the future Negro novelist and poet” to follow the example of Du Bois’s The Souls of

Black Folk (102). Here, the narrator’s desire for personal advancement, for

“distinguishing himself,” seems to eclipse any humanitarian or ethical consideration.

Implying that their traditions have limited them, he suggests that some parts of African

American folk culture may not be so valuable, and that his true interest is not alleviating the struggles of African Americans, but rather “drink[ing] inspiration firsthand” through consuming and commodifying their folk music (86). The narrator accuses the folk imaginary of spreading one kind of propaganda (the image of the rural black laborer) and wishes that instead it would disseminate another kind (the Talented Tenth success story).

190 Eric J. Sundquist suggests that the narrator’s comments on rural Georgia may be read as “half-ironies and abrupt revelations of class- and color-bound prejudice” that are indicative of his “self-aggrandizement” and “[internalized] racialism” (Hammers 34). 181

While the narrator appreciates the emotionality and exuberance of the “big meeting” led by John Brown and Singing Johnson, he soon must confront the outcomes of classifying the folk as “primitive” and “other.” The lynching he witnesses shortly thereafter demonstrates the “dwarfing, warping, distorting influence” of the national folk imaginary’s ideologies taken to their dehumanizing and murderous extreme (15).191 The narrator could choose to announce that he is black, thereby identifying himself with the victim and inviting the mob to view him as someone who is other, who has “degeneracy stamped upon his countenance.” Instead, he chooses to say nothing; thus, he implicitly integrates himself with the mob, whose violence changes “human beings into savage beasts” (113). His cowardice and shame contradict the wisdom of his mother, who had taught him to treat others kindly and to believe that he was “as good as anybody” regardless of his racial classification (14). After leaving the horrific scene, the narrator suggests that the lynch mob itself is degenerate, that it acts according to “ideas [that] hark back to a former century, some of them to the Dark Ages” rather than living by

“humanitarianized thought” (114 - 115). Integrationism now seems dangerous, impractical, and even impossible to the narrator. He remembers that after the Atlanta

Riots, even the men who appealed to “justice and humanity” undermined integrationism by referring to “the Anglo-Saxon's superiority” and “the ‘great and impassable gulf’ between the races.” While the evidence of “three or four million [Americans] with the blood of both races in their veins” might be used to argue against such a gulf and to shore up the narrator’s eroding commitment to integrationism, he suggests that the lynching has

191 As Smethurst suggests, we may find in Johnson’s portrayal of the lynching “a kind of demonic minstrel staging, or the logic of the ‘coon song’ taken to its furthest degree, as the burning victim, degraded by terror into the figure of a menacing and degenerate ‘coon,’ is watched with bestial cheers and yells by many (though not all) in the white audience (63). 182 the power to make him lose blood, to erase his black identity and to undo the progress he has made toward integration (114). After the lynching, the narrator feels faint and reports that he is “as weak as a man who had lost blood;” indeed, he will soon choose to abandon his black identity, much as if he had literally relinquished his mother’s bloodline in addition to her values and the birthright of folk culture that she has passed to him (115).

Although it is relatively easy, at least on a practical level, for the narrator to make his final choice and become an ex-colored man (partly because he has relatively little history as a man of color to erase), he continues to suggest that integrationism is superior to accommodationism. The narrator’s final descriptions of himself suggest that, in spite of his decision to assume a white identity, he is unable to completely turn his back on integrationism and on the plight of the African American folk. In the novel’s conclusion, he portrays himself as an “ordinarily successful white man,” earner of money, and father of two children. And yet he admits that “when I sometimes open a little box in which I still keep my fast yellowing manuscripts, the only tangible remnants of a vanished dream, a dead ambition, a sacrificed talent, I cannot repress the thought that, after all, I have chosen the lesser part, that I have sold my birthright for a mess of pottage” (127). The narrator implies that the white man disinherits himself as the Biblical character Esau did by working for the ordinary successes offered by materialism and capitalism, while the

African American man fulfills a higher destiny by becoming what Priscilla Wald calls

“the heir to Jacob, progenitor of a nation, a literal founding father,” a representative of

“God’s chosen people” (Wald 229; see also Evans 81 -82). The yellowing manuscripts probably hold the “themes and melodies” of the spirituals he wrote down in Georgia while traveling among the folk prior to the lynching; this is the music that he would have

183 used in his project of transforming the nation (105). It is also worth noticing the intangibles that the narrator may be unwilling or unable to abandon: the memory of his mother’s death, which he earlier describes as one of the “sacred sorrows of my life,” and the “cries and groans” of the lynching victim, which he claims he will “always hear” (32,

113).

In our last glimpse of the narrator, then, he is the keeper of a collection of spirituals (which may remind him of his mother, his dream of integrationism, and his last trip to the South); he is a man haunted by a horrific lynching; and he is the soon-to-be author of The Autobiography. The novel’s final paragraphs, which take place “several years ago” at the Tuskegee fundraiser and then at some time after that, circle back to the novel’s first paragraph, in which the narrator refers to “the secret which for some years I have guarded far more carefully than any of my earthly possessions” (126, 5; emphasis added). During the years when he attends at least one fundraiser in support of African

American education and keeps a box of spirituals, the narrator guards the secret of his black mother and former black identities; he is also preparing to write The

Autobiography, which gives a compelling account of people who support African

American causes, and who take part in various forms of folk culture (including the spirituals, speechmaking, balls, cake-walks, ragtime, and preaching).

Thus, it would seem strange if the narrator has decided that some interest in folk culture and commitment to racial justice—which will be among the subjects of his

Autobiography—are now unavailable or unsuitable simply because he has decided to live as an elite white New Yorker. His writing of the autobiography—his “playing with fire”—fulfills (if imperfectly) the “definite aspirations” he has pursued since finishing

184 grammar school (5, 28). While the folk culture and humanitarianism of his “almost brown” mother play a key role in shaping him, the narrator is also influenced by people who are of various classes and ethnicities, including his “black as night” childhood friend

Shiny, Cuban American cigar-makers, “the great variety of people” at the dances in

Jacksonville, “admirers both white and colored” who frequent the Club on Sixth Street in

New York, the millionaire and other white “slummers,” the Union soldier he meets on a train, and the black doctor whom he considers a genuine Yankee (13, 11, 53, 65, 71).

Each of these people practices at least a limited form of integrationism, and figures in the narrator’s dream of using artistic and intellectual achievements to bring about significant social change, to reflect credit on individual races as well as contributing to the common cultural store. Finally unable to disentangle himself from the ideologies of the national folk imaginary, unable to reconcile his humanitarian ideals with his objectification of the folk and the lynching he has witnessed, the narrator romanticizes the spiritual freedom and power of the folk, but fails to contribute to their material freedom or political power.

While he felt that his life as a black man was dwarfed and warped, the narrator finds that even his life as a successful white man in New York still seems to be “the lesser part”

(127). Thus, all members of the dominant society, and not just Southern white men, may find themselves restricted to “narrow channels” while the so-called “Negro question” remains unresolved.

* * *

Many reformers, educators, missionaries, folklorists, and literary writers of the

Progressive Era participated in the dominant society’s imagination of African Americans as folk in need of uplift—that is, a range of educational, religious, and economic

185 programs that would civilize and modernize them. Frances E. Watkins Harper and

James Weldon Johnson countered the national folk imaginary by arguing that African

Americans were capable of leading and reforming their communities on their own terms, and by critiquing the untruths, prejudices, and supremacist beliefs that were circulated by white ideologies, white narratives, and white religion. Both writers suggest that African

Americans may be a chosen people with a mission of strengthening the nation and revitalizing civilization. The mission that Harper envisions for the freedpeople becomes increasingly radical over the course of her novels— from the teaching of religion by dear aged saints (Minnie’s Sacrifice), to the building of good character and uplifting of mired

Christianity (Trials and Triumphs), to the reforming of a slavery-corrupted nation by anointed African Americans (Iola Leroy). The version of uplift that Harper articulates in

Iola Leroy seeks to incorporate, not eliminate, African American lifeways and worldviews, as exemplified by Linda’s prophetic visions, Robert’s efforts at land reform, and Iola’s cabin visits. While Harper suggests that African Americans may need to form all-black communities in order to survive the rise of lynching and persecution in the

South, Johnson argues that the “art approach” may succeed where religious, educational, political, and other tactics have failed. In The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,

Johnson attempts to change national attitudes by claiming that African American folk culture is fast evolving into American culture, and that the resulting artistic mixtures can contribute to arguments for social and political integration. Johnson’s project is complicated by the shifting positionality of the narrator of The Autobiography, and by his own primitivist interpretation of African American art. While the narrator finally seems to abandon any ambition of uplifting the folk that would jeopardize his comfort and his

186 white identity, his adroit crossings of class and color lines, as well as his denouncement of white ideologies that culminate in lynching, offer a powerful refutation of the national folk imaginary.

187

Epilogue

“Anxious to Have You Know Our Myths and Legends”:

Folk Cultures in the New Deal Era

“This is... in the case of the Indian, the Negro, and the Southern Highlander (who of all Caucasian stocks in the United States comes nearest to being, like the other two, an elemental and atavistic folk, exotic in difference) the Golden Age of primitive art and ritual, of pagan fantasy and mysticism, with taboos and symbols embedded in the folk consciousness.” —B. A. Botkin, “The Folk in Literature: an Introduction to the New Regionalism” (1929)

“For the past few years, there has been a fairly determined search for the folk principle in American life. Writers and painters have gone on the track of the primitive among Negroes, the Indians of the Southwest, and the Southern hill-billies…. For even Americans know, as an abstract idea, that the folk element in any national life is the root of its aesthetic traditions.” —Ruth Suckow, “The Folk Idea in American Life” (1930)

“…these [World’s Fair] concessions will be the night spots for American folk lore.... the most important among them [include] a Negro honky-tonk and a mountain square dance hall.... What I propose... is to set up a series of strategically placed open air stages throughout the Fair Grounds and there to present at crowd level, folk singers, banjo players, balalaika orchestras, Indian medicine shows, spasm bands from New Orleans, Haitian voo-doo dancers and what have you....” —Alan Lomax, letter to Olin Downes (1938)

This study begins with three writers (Du Bois, Eastman, and Miles) who claim that folk cultures can contribute significantly to the formation of ethnic subjectivities and communities in turn-of-the-century America; I will end with a discussion of three later writers who rearticulate or complicate such a claim while extending the history of the folk imaginary through the New Deal Era. Jesse Cornplanter (Seneca, 1889 - 1957),

Olive Tilford Dargan (1869 – 1968), and Richard Wright (1908 – 1860) employ textual as well as visual strategies to challenge the aesthetic, historical, and political

188 representations of ethnic Americans in books they published at a time when, as Ray Allen suggests, writers and artists who used the term “folk” in their titles or otherwise evoked folkness were participating in a “crucial moment when the country was struggling to define who its folk were and how folk heritage(s) could form the foundation of a common American identity” (256). Although Dargan’s From My Highest Hill: Carolina

Mountain Folks (1941) and Wright’s 12 Million Black Voices: a Folk History of the

Negro in the United States (1941) reach very different conclusions about the place of folk cultures in modernizing America, both books stage verbal as well as photographic interventions to challenge the dominant society’s “othering” and marginalizing of ethnic

Americans through pervasive stereotypes, restrictive categorizations, and static or triumphalist historical narratives. Documentary books of the Depression era, as Jeff

Allred suggests, often “[represent] social others in ways that arrest or interrupt, rather than confirm, dominant ideologies” (7). With its blend of history and photography,

Wright’s Black Voices obviously advances the project described by Allred—as do two variants of the documentary book, the fictional From My Highest Hill by Dargan and

Cornplanter’s self-illustrated Legends of the Longhouse: Told to Sah-Nee-Weh, the White

Sister (1938). Wright, Dargan, and Cornplanter interrogate dominant ideologies while offering alternatives to the national folk imaginary, eloquently described by Wright as “a fiat buttressed by popular and national tradition, and written down in many state and city statutes; a fiat which artificially and arbitrarily defines, regulates, and limits in scope of meaning the vital contours of our lives” (30). The shifting of the national folk imaginary and its traditions during the Depression—documented and analyzed by Wright, Dargan, and Cornplanter—became more pronounced as the previous calls for preservation and

189 change took on new economic and cultural forms, as the federal government created agencies to provide the poor with economic assistance and to record the sights and sounds of the folk, and as the public developed new awareness of the poor and fresh appetites for commercialized folk products.

While these shifting priorities, attitudes, and sympathies did not always benefit ethnic Americans in the 1930s, the ensuing reformulation of the relationship between the dominant society and the folk was profound. Previous to the 1930s, a number of early twentieth century reformers, intellectuals, scholars, and other progressives argued that ethnic Americans should be totally assimilated, or that they should be trained to work and to function as the permanent subordinates of the dominant society. In the former argument, the folk surrender cultural and perhaps other differences; in the latter, the folk are trapped by their cultural, ethnic, and/ or racial differences, and must live according to the dictates of the dominant society. The sociologist and eugenics advocate Emory S.

Bogardus even attempted to argue for both possibilities; in his textbook Essentials of

Americanization (1920), Bogardus envisions an America that is largely “folk-free” (or free of folk culture) and yet still stratified by difference. Because Essentials of

Americanization exemplifies many attitudes about the folk that were typical for the dominant society in the early twentieth century, discussing it as some length can help us better understand the extent and the importance of the shift in the national folk imaginary in the 1930s. To de-culture and homogenize the folk, Bogardus calls for

Americanization: “an educational process of unifying both the native-born and foreign- born in perfect support of American principles. It selects and preserves the best qualities in our past and present Americanism… [it also] singles out and fosters such traits of the

190 foreign-born as will contribute” to American democracy (13). All native-born

Americans, Bogardus argues, “must become clear-headed, socialized personifications” of

Americanism, and must model its best traits for immigrants (20). To that end, before devoting a chapter to each of six immigrant groups, Bogardus assigns a chapter to each of four native-born groups who have lagged in Americanization, and thus require special attention from the dominant society. In addition to the unpatriotic or avaricious citizens who had not supported the World War, there are several groups who differ from the

“average American”: “the red Indian, the black African, and the white mountaineer—all native Americans—must be given an education which will enable them to understand and to translate twentieth century Americanism into normal attitudes and activities” (23, 90).

Holding the dominant society partly responsible for the incomplete Americanization of

Native, African, and Appalachian Americans, Bogardus argues that their assimilation has been delayed because of “[the Indian’s] indefinite status in regard to property and other rights,” the race prejudice and lynchings that affect African Americans, and “the exploitation of the natural resources of [the Appalachian] homelands” (114, 143). The

“race prejudice” and “class scorn” that lead to the legal, social, economic, and environmental exploitation of “less Americanized” African Americans, Native

Americans, and Appalachians, Bogardus suggests, are themselves indications that some members of the dominant society—those who are insufficiently democratic or “public- minded”—are also in need of further Americanization (19, 91).

Although Bogardus claims that each “native-born” and immigrant group possesses virtues that can further the Americanization project, his discussions of those virtues resort to the egregious and dehumanizing forms of the national folk imaginary

191 that I have examined throughout this study: the essentialism, primitivism, ethnocentrism, racialism, and racism through which ethnic Americans are marginalized, consigned to narrow categories, and associated with rigid differences.192 In Bogardus’s formulation, folk essences (rather than cultural heritages) help found a common American identity.

According to Bogardus, the Native Americans’ “best qualities” include love of nature, generosity, and the highest type of “physical courage, inherited physique, and endurance;” the African Americans’ virtues include their “refreshing sense of humor” and their “affectionate, teachable, willing” demeanors, which they possess “by nature;” the Appalachian can infuse Americanism with “physical endurance, neural solidity, moral courage, and indifference to enervating luxury” (115, 134, 146). Bogardus’s comments on the social problems and character flaws of the three groups strongly echo the opinions of reformers, scholars, and regional writers from fifty years earlier: Appalachians are

“two centuries [behind] on the dial of American civilization,” if not “degenerate;” Native

Americans may have the tendencies of “savagery” and “shiftlessness;” African

Americans may not be “prepared to use [the ballot],” and may display a “haughty, boastful, or superior attitude” as they make social and “industrial” advances (115, 131,

134, 139, 145). The early twentieth century writers I have examined in this study —

Zitkala Ša, Dargan, and James Weldon Johnson—imagined ethnic Americans in ways that differed radically from Bogardus’s taxonomy of native- and foreign-born Americans

192 Bogardus’s appendix of “Selected Readings” suggests some of the texts that presumably shaped his imagination of the folk. For the American Indian, he includes a report by Theodore Roosevelt and Helen Hunt Jackson’s A Century of Dishonor; for the Negro, he lists three books by Booker T. Washington, William Hannibal Thomas’s infamous The American Negro, and also The Negro: the Southerners’ Problem by Thomas Nelson Page (author of many plantation romances); and for the mountaineer, he recommends Fox’s fiction, Frost’s “Our Contemporary Ancestors,” and Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders.

192 and his scale of Americanization.193 While Bogardus suggests that ethnic Americans should “contribute to Americanism” certain racialized physical and temperamental traits

(as well as agricultural and industrial labor), his contemporaries Johnson, Zitkala Ša, and

Dargan argue that ethnic Americans significantly contribute to (or productively challenge) the dominant society with their values, worldviews, artistic achievements, and other cultural forms. Johnson’s integrationism, Zitkala-Ša’s mutual exchanges between the dominant society and Native Americans, and Dargan’s endorsement of multiple epistemologies all implicitly critique Bogardus by insisting on the value of folk cultures, and by suggesting alternatives to total assimilation and stratification based on difference.

Over the next twenty years, other critiques would be leveled against the monism, de-ethnicizing Americanism, and complete assimilation called for by Bogardus and other social activists. The Meriam Report with its call for Indian policy reform (1928), the publicity campaign that was waged for (or that benefitted from) the Scottsboro Nine

(1931), and the somewhat similar campaign for the striking miners at Bloody Harlan

(1931) were all emblematic of the shift in the national folk imaginary.194 These

193 Similar in some respects to Bogardus’s Essentials of Americanization, the book Americanization: Principles of Americanism, Essentials of Americanization, Technic of Race-Assimilation was edited by Winthrop Talbot Julia E. Johnsen and published in 1920. Talbot’s Americanization was a compendium that included articles and excerpts by Washington, Roosevelt, and Kephart, among others.

194 The many narratives about the Scottsboro Nine and the Harlan miners that were produced by communists, popular front strategists, and journalists challenged newspapers such as the Huntsville Daily Times, which described the Scottsboro defendants as “beasts unfit to be called human,” and also writers such as Malcolm Ross, who suggested that the striking “Kentucky mountaineer[s]… possessed the violent emotions of a people innocent of civilized restraints” (qtd. in Acker 7; qtd in Batteau 206). James A. Miller, Susan D. Pennybacker, and Eve Rosenhaft argue that “the mythic power of the [Scottsboro] case… depended on the way the case was publicized—and its outcomes shaped—by the campaign on behalf of the defendants organized by the international Communist movement. At the height of the campaign, workers and activists rallied in [many parts of the world], in an unprecedented attempt to create sympathy for the victims of racial injustice—and, at the same time, to oppose imperialism and foster interracial solidarity on a global scale” (388). Allen W. Batteau reports that Louis Stark’s articles about the Harlan strike for the New York Times were remarkable for their “absence of humor or hillbilly-baiting. [They mark] the first time [in almost twenty years] that the Times acknowledged that labor conditions in the mine fields per se were a serious matter” (119). Like reportage on the Scottsboro incident and the Harlan strike, 193 arguments for social justice often paralleled or worked in concert with the Indian New

Deal and the so-called “new regionalism,” which was advanced by many scholars and intellectuals who worked for New Deal agencies.195 The cultural pluralist John Collier became commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, championed the Indian

Reorganization Act (and thus attempted to reverse the Dawes Act), and promoted the preservation of Indian cultures. Howard Odum, a sociologist at the University of North

Carolina, also supported pluralism with his vision of America not as folk-free or difference-stratified, but as a “homogeneity of varying regions” (39). With John Lomax and later B. A. Botkin serving as director of folklore, the Federal Writer’s Project of the

Works Progress Administration (WPA) produced a series of guidebooks on each of the forty-eight states; each book typically contained a chapter on folklore, which described the customs and beliefs of the African Americans, Native Americans, Appalachians, and/ or other folk groups who lived in a particular state.196 Sterling Brown, the director of

Negro affairs for the FWP, was guided by the belief that the African American was “an integral part of American life… a participant quite as much as a contributor” (qtd. in the Meriam Report also changed the perceptions of the dominant society. According to Tom Holm, the Lake Mohonk Conference of Friends of the Indian, which had advocated assimilation and Christianity since 1883, was profoundly influenced by the Meriam Report. When it convened in 1929, the Conference advocated changes in the allotment laws and criticized the Bureau of Indian Affairs but not the Meriam Report. Remarkably, one missionary even argued against “the innate Anglo-Saxon snobbery which is convinced that anybody that does not look and talk just like us must therefore be inferior” (qtd. in Holm 188).

195 The new regionalism, according to Lauren Coats and Nihad M. Farooq, “worked at the intersections of government, academia, politics, literature, and nationalism. Regionalists of the 1930s… explored the possibilities of transforming social theory into social action, whether through scholarly research, literary production, or research. Self-proclaimed regionalists of the time used the idea of regionalism to confront the problems of the Great Depression” (74).

196 It is important to note that B. A. Botkin, folklore director for the Federal Writer’s Project, argued that the folk could be found in the city as well as the country, that “the Negro street cries of Harlem are work songs, just as surely as are the Southern Negro's songs of the cotton, cane and tobacco fields, road- construction, sawmill and turpentine camps, and chain gangs. And they have social significance” (Treasury, 8). Richard Wright, as I will discuss, made a somewhat different argument about urban African Americans and folk culture. 194

Hirsch 120 -121). Cornplanter, Wright, and Dargan were quite aware of the varied interests in the folk expressed by the federal government and the dominant society.

Cornplanter carved ritual masks (like those used in healing ceremonies) and other traditional Seneca objects while employed by the WPA; Wright researched African

Americans in Chicago and Illinois while working for the WPA, and also worked with

Edwin Rosskam, a photographer for the Farm Security Administration (FSA), to choose photographs for Black Voices; Dargan kept her eye on campaigns by the National Park

Service (NPS) and the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) to control Appalachian land and to manipulate the dominant society’s perceptions of Appalachian people. In their different formulations of pluralism and relativism, Cornplanter, Wright, and Dargan sometimes endorsed and sometimes critiqued common the federal government’s efforts to both preserve ethnic cultures and to promote the modernization and development of ethnic communities.

* * *

“Get Into the Stroke and We Will Both Be Successful”

During the 1930s, the federal government in unprecedented ways began to recognize what Zitkala Ša, Frances Harper, Rebecca Harding Davis, and other writers I examine had long insisted: that ethnic culture can function not as a social problem, but as a valuable resource. Accordingly, the FSA, the TVA, the WPA, and other agencies sought to document, publicize, market, and commodify the cultural products of ethnic and folk groups; through these efforts, Christine Bold argues, the government sought to

“[map]… American identities—national, regional, and local—onto the landscape” and to control “the struggles over cultural ownership, dispossession, and citizenship provoked

195 by that process” (xiii).197 For example, the WPA-funded Seneca Arts Project hired roughly one hundred artisans, including Jesse Cornplanter, to create approximately five thousand “artworks and reproductions” of traditional Seneca crafts that would be exhibited at the Rochester Municipal Museum (McLerran 85 - 86). Located at the

Tonawanda Reservation in western New York, the Project was directed by Arthur C.

Parker (Seneca), who wanted to revive what he called “the almost extinct arts and crafts of the New York Indians” by tapping the knowledge and skills of Cornplanter and other

“native experts” (qtd. in Hauptman 144; see also McLerran 84-93). As an illustrator and informant, Cornplanter (1889 – 1957) had been using his artistic and storytelling expertise to support the research of writers, anthropologists, and other scholars since

1903 (Fenton 199 - 222).198 Nameé Henricks (a community activist and the “adopted” white sister of the Tonawanda Senecas, as Cornplanter called her) encouraged him to use his expertise to create a book of his own (Cornplanter 45). The book that resulted—

Legends of the Longhouse: Told to Sah-Nee-Weh, the White Sister (1938)—consists of seventeen letters that Cornplanter sent to Henricks between October 1936 and June

1937.199 In these letters, Cornplanter writes and draws the Seneca legends he has known

197 According to Jane Becker, “The potential of handicrafts as a means of rural revitalization and relief engaged [many federal agencies]... who designed programs aimed at bringing the benefits of progressive and rational planning to rural America; they strove to heal the nation's depressed agrarian communities by introducing not only the machine, but also the structures, methods, and goals of corporate capitalism” (93).

198 Cornplanter’s drawings had been collected and privately published by Frederick Starr in 1903, and had appeared in anthropological works such as Harriet M. Converse’s Myths and Legends of the New York State Iroquois (1908) and Parker’s Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923), among others.

199 The longhouse is the traditional dwelling of the Senecas and the other five nations of the Iroquois Confederacy; it is also an important cultural symbol. Bruce E. Johansen notes that “[the Iroquois’] own names for themselves [is] Haudenosaunee,” and that “Iroquois” [is] a French name for the Haudenosaunee.” The name ‘Haudenosaunee’ means ‘People of the Longhouse,’ and refers to “the Haudenosaunee geographical metaphor that styles their confederacy as a traditional longhouse, with the 196 since boyhood. By evoking longhouse traditionalism in the title of his book, Cornplanter signals that he is less assimilated than the Christian Senecas; the difference between traditional and Christian Senecas is roughly analogous to the difference between

Muskogee (Creek) full-bloods and mixed-bloods that Alice Callahan explores in

Wynema.200 Connecting himself to the longhouse and affirming several times that “long time ago… my people lived more close to nature and were able to converse with animals,” Cornplanter harnesses the dominant society’s fascination with traditional

Indian dwellings and Indian “naturalness”—and thus uses strategies like those taken up by the Native American authors whose reformulation of tepee and wildness tropes I analyze in Chapter 1 (46). Challenging the authority of “students” (ethnographers?) and

“Newspaper writers [who] ridicule,” Cornplanter reveals the history, political capacity, and alternative modernity of the Tonawanda community and its “ways and beliefs” (44 -

45). In the first letter, Cornplanter explains to Henricks that along with his written version of “Legend of the Sky-Woman,” he is sending her a drawing of Sky-woman

“falling through the hole of the upper world…. This is to be your illustration to the legend, as I am anxious to have you know our myths and legends of olden days” (20, 24 -

25). Through admitting his anxiety, Cornplanter suggests that he is eager, at long last, for his versions of the legends to be known—but also uneasy, perhaps because he wants the legends to be “as authentic as I can make [them]” (19).

Mohawks guarding the ‘Eastern Door,’ the Senecas at the ‘Western Door,’ and the Onondagas tending the central council fire” (xv –xvi).

200 Barbara A. Mann claims “that those who attended Longhouse rites reviled the Christian Senecas as imitation Euros” and that “belonging to the Longhouse Religions became an act of political resistance” (310). 197

Although he links the legends to the “olden days,” Cornplanter does not present them as timeless and decontextualized relics. Instead, he dates each letter; incorporates in each his own pen-and-ink drawings (also dated); and brackets each letter’s legend with opening and closing comments that include notes on the legend’s sources and versions,

Seneca words and phrases (which he does not always translate), personal asides to

Henricks, and/ or descriptions of how his community has continued to “maintain social life,” which includes some traditional lifeways and worldviews (67). Cornplanter also includes his clan identification in some letter closings and some drawings. As I argue in

Chapter 1, the contextualizing frame that William Jones uses as the introduction of

“Anoska Nimiwina,” complicates the commodification, expropriation, and romanticization that are sometimes directed at Native cultural products; Cornplanter’s frames serve a similar purpose.201 Further, Cornplanter reminds Henricks several times that the legends in his letters are fluid versions, not static forms, and have been told in

“many and different ways” by local story-tellers, his father, and men of other clans, towns, and tribes; he also claims that the legends are disappearing because they are largely unwritten and because “only few of us… carry on [the legends] in our very limited knowledge” (80, 205). Other Seneca cultural forms, however, seem less likely to disappear, partly because they have been adapted. As Cornplanter tells Henricks, she may “recognize something [in the legends] that is still done at the present time” (137).

Stated another way, many cultural forms (ritual feasts, medicine bundles, secret societies, ceremonies, speeches, songs, dances, and worldviews) that Cornplanter describes throughout the book may have changed, but have not vanished; versions of them, we

201Indeed, the contextualizing details that are characteristic of Cornplanter’s frames seem to have discouraged anthologists; they have rarely excerpted or reprinted his work. 198 might say, are still part of contemporary Seneca life.

And while he and the community may continue to lose the old legends,

Cornplanter suggests that the Seneca still have the ability to craft new legends that reclaim history and critique the dominant society, much as Zitkala Ša adapts the Dakota oral tradition of woyakapi to articulate her vision about the place of her community in the modernizing world. Cornplanter identifies the legends in three of the letters as “modern in… scope” or as from “more of a modern date”—that is, the time when “the white-man” first supplied the Seneca with rifles and rum (167, 189). In addition to these modernized legends, Cornplanter’s drawings contribute importantly to his project of adapting Seneca cultural forms for a future generation.202 Through the textual and visual components of the legends, Cornplanter invites Henricks (and his white audience as well) to conceptualize and cosmologize the world as the Seneca do; in the book’s preface, he urges the reader to “drift along in [the writer’s] Canoe of Thoughts, but don’t back- paddle; get into the stroke and we will both be successful” (18). While some Senecas in the 1930s wore Plains Indian war bonnets and were making tourist crafts, Cornplanter’s drawings portray Senecas who wear the traditional “gus-to-weh” headdress and have maintained other traditional practices (154).203 His drawings promote Seneca ways of

202 In arguing that the Senecas’ legends are fluid, that some of them are relatively modern, and that many versions of Seneca lifeways are still practiced, Cornplanter offers a perspective on the Senecas that contrasts significantly with the views of Arthur C. Parker, Cornplanter’s supervisor at the Seneca Arts Project. In Seneca Myths and Folk Tales (1923), Parker suggests that the proper way to understand the legends is to “journey backward into the forgotten yesterday” and imagine “the closing year of the Eighteenth Century” (37). Parker also suggests that although the contemporary Seneca is powerless, defeated, and mostly acculturated, “he still tells the folk-tales that his ancestors loved, and these remain unaltered to this very day” (emphasis in original, 55).

203 Prior to the Seneca Arts Project, as Laurence M. Hauptman maintains, “Iroquois art was in a state of crisis…. The Senecas had nearly lost their knowledge of certain art forms or had adopted Plains Indian- styled traits…. On public occasions most Senecas of the period donned Sioux war bonnets instead of the Iroquois Gastoweh, the traditional cap as well as symbol of their unique Indianness. Furthermore, Iroquois 199 seeing, thinking, and knowing; in his drawing of the origin of food plants, for example,

Cornplanter portrays the Good-Minded, who is sitting on his mother’s burial site and watching his grandmother cook corn soup (31). Although his mother is dead and buried, the drawing shows that only a thin layer of soil separates her from the Good-Minded, who is about to eat a soup made from one of the foodstuffs that grows from her body. As the mother of the Good-minded remains close to him after her death and offers him sustenance, Cornplanter argues that the ancestral dead are “separated [from us] by the thickness of a maple leaf” (182). Because it is impossible to “go back to [the ancestors’] days” and to be “free from the everlasting slavery from the all-mighty dollar, and the computation of time into minutes, seconds and hours,” Cornplanter implicitly argues that the Seneca community and even his white audience must actively remember the ancestors, whose customs and wisdom suggest alternatives or correctives to the materialism and temporality of modernity (183).

* * *

“That Highway, Monstrously Magical”

Some members of the dominant society—primitivists like Collier and regional planners like Odum, for example—were more explicit than Cornplanter in their calls for the adoption of the alternative lifeways and worldviews of ethnic and rural Americans— particularly those cultural aspects that they perceived as authentic, pioneer-like, or close to nature and the soil. Through such perceptions, the dominant society sometimes

“othered” the ethnic Americans it meant to befriend, reconstructed the hegemony and hierarchies it meant to tear down, and circumscribed the freedoms and humanity of ethnic

art had not only changed under influences from other Indians but also declined in quality to meet the less- than-artistic demand of the tourist” (138). 200

Americans.204 As Cornplanter seeks to correct the omissions and distortions of earlier writings about the Senecas (some of which had used his information and illustrations),

Olive Tilford Dargan also responds to numerous writers who influenced the mainstream imagination of Appalachian people. Cornplanter, Dargan, and other writers examined in this study argue that the values of ethnic Americans can function as an alternative or corrective to those of the dominant society, especially when they are articulated by ethnic

Americans themselves, rather than reformers, writers, and others who have good intentions but less complete understandings. In Chapter 2, I argue that Dargan’s

Highland Annals (1925) refutes the stereotypes of Appalachian peculiarity and primitiveness exemplified by Kephart’s Our Southern Highlanders. Like Rebecca

Harding Davis, Dargan refuses to characterize Appalachian people as helpless, crude, violent, uncivilized, anachronistic, and detached from history and modernity. In 1941, as she continued to combat the misrepresentations of the national folk imaginary, Dargan published a new version of Highland Annals, which she re-titled From My Highest Hill:

Carolina Mountain Folks. In addition to significantly revising the earlier text, Dargan included a new short story and fifty photographs. From My Highest Hill appears to be

Dargan’s response to Muriel Earley Sheppard’s widely read photo-documentary book,

Cabins in the Laurel (1935), and to the cultural manipulations perpetuated by the developers of the Great Smoky Mountains National Park—including Kephart.205 While

204 Philip J. Deloria argues that “the antimoderns… imagined a radical break in history and posited a desirable Indian on the far side of societal, racial, and temporal boundaries,” and that Indians also “participated in the making of Indian others,” sometimes for political purposes. For example, Arthur C. Parker helped found the Society of American Indians, “one of the first inter-Indian political and cultural lobbying organizations,” but also was adept at “play[ing] with primitivist notions of Indianness, liking them to premodern leisure, child raising, and the escape to the past that helped define modernity” (115, 124, 125).

201

Sheppard’s text (and the photographs that she and her editor chose) emphasized that

Appalachia was a place where “yesterday has not yet left off,” park boosters likewise believed that “the picturesque southern highlanders [and] their ancient log cabins” would appeal to tourists (Sheppard 313, qtd. in Pierce 155). Like Kephart, Sheppard characterized the Appalachian as a moonshine-drinking, snuff-using “mountain man who chafes at… [work] that involves no individual effort;” the National Park Service’s promotional literature also exaggerated the individualism of Appalachian people by quoting Kephart’s description of their “strong and even violent independence… that makes them forsake all the comforts of civilization” (Sheppard 32, qtd. in Martin

152).206 To reinforce her thesis that yesterday had not left Appalachia, Sheppard and her collaborator, the photographer Bayard Wooten, apparently preferred to work with elderly

Appalachians, whom they asked to pose with heirlooms and homemade items, and to wear their oldest outfits. Desiring a similar effect, the NPS relocated several thousand farmers from the park lands it had acquisitioned, demolished contemporary houses and schools, and left standing the log cabins and other buildings that seemed sufficiently

“ancient” and apart from civilization.207 Anna Shannon Elfenbein reports that Dargan

205 Kephart served as the chairman of Great Smoky Mountains, Inc., a group of “Asheville boosters” who launched “a statewide promotion and fundraising campaign on behalf of the park” (Pierce 85).

206 According to its dust jacket, Cabins provided “intimate glimpses of life in the Toe River Valley of the Carolina Blue Ridge, where lovemaking is a pastime that can engage a mountain man's undivided interest; where food is cheap and affairs are not pressing; where the women and children dip snuff and the men chew; where the quality of corn wiskey [sic] is good, although sometimes the distiller puts in too much lye to hurry up his mash” (Watkins 219). Ralph E. Lentz maintains that “the majority of portraits in [Cabins] depicted older men and women,” and that “much of [Sheppard’s] narrative was concerned with life in the mountains between the 1860s and 1900. In fact, many of the mountain residents she quoted were in their nineties…. Sheppard presented the mountain man as one with nature. She even went so far as to allude to some of the hill people’s bestiality” (75, 76).

207 John Ehle reports that Sheppard and Wooten “traveled into the [Appalachian] coves, seeking evidence of historic lore, old-fashioned styles and customs, stories told in families.... They sent mountain people back into their houses to change into homespun or linsey, should they appear in store-bought clothes. They 202 had hoped From My Highest Hill would be available and for sale when the Great Smoky

Mountains National Park opened in 1940; I would add that Dargan probably hoped that people who were interested in the park would glean from her book a perspective on

Appalachia that differed from those offered by Kephart, Sheppard, and NPS brochures

(xxviii).

While preparing From My Highest Hill, Dargan convinced Wooten to work as her photographer and to provide visual evidence that partly countered the romanticism of

Wooten’s contribution to Cabins. According to Dargan, some of her own neighbors agreed to let Wooten photograph them in contemporary attire and (as Dargan put it) “at work and in every-day moods, without posing, hair-combing, or pulling off aprons” (qtd. in Morrow 223). In addition to arranging photographs that she hoped would be more realistic and less nostalgic than those in Cabins, Dargan also chose subjects that emphasized the communality and the proximity to modernity of her Appalachian neighbors (rather than their individualism and apartness). Interdependent labor and shared traditions can be seen in the photographs captioned “Neighbors came to help” and

“Len and Sister Vallie cutting cane,” as well as in a series of photographs which feature an intergenerational community working together to make sorghum. The photographs in

From My Highest Hill also complement Dargan’s textual claim that the highlanders are not separated from modernity. A veteran of the World War who has returned to his home in the mountains is depicted in the photograph captioned “Six hours he’d set there, like he was tryin’ to see what they had for dinner in Ireland.” It is the veteran’s overwhelming

sent mountain women to find their hand-thrown pots, to replace the store-bought ones in use” (10). C. Brenden Martin reports that “after the land in Cades Cove [one of the most popular sections of the park] had been purchased, the NPS systematically razed dozens of modern frame houses and stores, but carefully restored the primitive log cabins, barns, and churches that captured the pioneer image they sought to project” (151). 203 experience of modernity as a captain in the war that has made him hide in “solitary places,” not the reputed individualism of Appalachian culture. The book’s final photograph, which shows “that highway, monstrously magical,” reinforces Dargan’s concern that unchecked progress is already “obliterating the [Unaka Mountains],” along with the highlanders’ “ways and customs” (220). “Carolina mountain folks,” as Dargan and Wooten portray them, are not uncivilized and ancient individualists who dwell in a bygone era, but a multigenerational people whose familial and communal ties enrich their culture while helping them cope with the demands of tenant farming and the pressures of the modernizing world.

* * *

“The Death of Our Old Folk Lives”

In From My Highest Hill, the proletarian novel Call Home the Heart (1932), and other writings, Dargan endorses a belief that Wright’s Black Voices examines but discards—namely, that the traditional lifeways and worldviews of ethnic Americans can help form modern, politicizable American subjectivities. This divergence in opinion is all the more interesting, given the socialist leanings of both Dargan and Wright. Janet

Galligani Casey reports that although Dargan “allowed her mountain cabin to be used as a meeting place for the local Communist Party, she never became an official member….

Dargan was linked to a variety of social and political movements, and rurality was at the center of her adult experiences” (140, 141). Wright believed that rural and folk cultures could empower the poor, however, he seems to have lost such a belief “with the turn to the 1940s,” as William L. Maxwell claims: Wright relinquished “hopes for an African-

American folk Communism strong enough to battle the Great Migration” (176). As I

204 argue in Chapter 3, Frances Harper attributes African Americans’ survival of slavery to their reinventing of the masters’ language and religion, and further suggests that African

American folk culture can contribute importantly to the forming of new and politicized communities. Wright, on the other hand, argues that black folk culture has lost its efficacy in the modern era, and that African Americans must also extricate themselves from the white ideologies, white narratives, and white religion that Harper and James

Weldon Johnson sought to dismantle. For Wright, moving beyond the fear of whites and

“awaken[ing] in [them] a desire to work with us,” as well as “the death of our old folk lives,” become necessary steps for creating “new organs of action and expression” (144,

145). Such a death—which Wright also describes as letting “the sands of our simple folk lives run out on the cold city pavements”—is the change that has “enabled us to cross class and racial lines” so that “sturdy minorities of us, both black and white… [could band] together in disciplined, class-conscious groups” (136, 145).

Each of the four chapters in Black Voices begins with a borderless (full-page bleed) photograph; the second page of each chapter positions a smaller photograph above the beginning lines of the textual history, which is written from a first-person plural perspective, or what Jeff Allred calls “a collective narrative voice” (134). The first chapter of Black Voices begins with a full-page photograph of a sharecropper’s hands and then a smaller photograph of a possibly blind sharecropper; the visual suggestion here— that a sharecropper is no more than the body parts that he needs to perform agricultural labor—powerfully extends the history of Harper’s claim that slavery consumed African

American bodies part by part, down to the marrow and the bones. In conjunction with these photographs, the narrative voice in the first sentences implies that the national folk

205 imaginary continues to position rural and exploited African Americans as the quintessential black folk: “Each day when you see us black folk upon the dusty land of the farms or upon the hard pavement of the city streets, you usually take us for granted and think you know us, but our history is far stranger than you suspect, and we are not we seem” (10). Even urban African Americans such as “the black elevator operator” are so marked by their history as an enslaved and then a sharecropping folk that “our outward guise still carries the old familiar aspect which three hundred years of oppression have given us.” Wright’s project in Black Voices, then, is to not only trace the “folk history the Negro,” but also to interrogate the anxieties, presumptions, and asymmetries of power that distort the dominant society’s attempts to see, know, and historicize African

Americans.

The second chapter of Black Voices begins with more photographs of sharecroppers and a white plantation owner, followed by the same collective voice declaring that “we black folk” experience “the word ‘Negro’” as “a psychological island”

(30). Although Wright reports that folk language and repurposed Christianity had been useful to African Americans in the past, the photographs that follow these textual evaluations suggest that folk culture offered temporary relief, but ultimately could not change the American racial system. The photograph “Cotton buyer and Negro farmer discussing price” portrays a sharecropper stooping over a cotton bale in the presence of an authoritative buyer; it follows Wright’s assertion that “we stole words from the grudging lips of the Lords of the Lands.… we charged this meager horde of stolen sounds with all the longings and emotions we had…. we polished our new words, caressed them, gave them new shape and color, a new order and tempo, until… they became our words,

206 our language” (emphasis in original, 40; 42). While the folk refashioned the language of

“the Lords” so that they could “speak of revolt” and expand their “understanding of what slavery meant,” they found that they were defined, regulated, and limited by the “mighty artists” of the national folk imaginary: “the movies, the radio, the newspapers, the magazines, and even the church” (35, 40). The people responsible for these institutions have painted (and implicitly have seen and known) only “one picture” of the lives of slaves and sharecroppers—a picture that is “charming, idyllic, [and] romantic,” that encodes limitations much like the “log cabin and plantation” picture that James Weldon

Johnson attacked (35). In Wright’s estimation, the church has been complicit with the national folk imaginary; it has also failed to strengthen “the casual ties of our folk families,” and to prepare African American children to lead their communities. Wright finds that “our children[,] influenced by the movies, magazines, and glimpses of town life… lack the patience to wait for the consummation of God’s promise as we do” (75).

In the foreword of Black Voices, Wright argues that the folk are “debased” and “feudal;” now, he charges them with passivity based on a religion that bids them to choose inaction and to wait for divine intervention (5).208

The third chapter begins with a photograph of a Chicago tenement and another of several worshippers at a church service, followed by the same narrative voice crying out,

“Lord in Heaven! Good God Almighty! Great Day in the Morning! It’s here! Our time has come! We are leaving…. We take one last furtive look over our shoulders to the Big

House—high upon a hill beyond the railroad tracks—where the Lord of the Land lives,

208 Leigh Anne Duck suggests that Wright's portrayal of African American folk was influenced by “Marx's depiction of nineteenth-century peasants.” According to Duck, “Marx's own ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’... argued that nineteenth century French ‘small peasants,’ because of their poverty and isolation, developed ‘no unity, no national union and no political organization’ and rather, remained in ‘stupefied bondage’ to the ‘old order’” (187). 207 and we feel glad, for we are leaving” (92). The conflation of the Christian god (Lord in

Heaven) and the exploitative Southern upper-class white male (Lord of the Land) in this passage is telling; Wright finds that “Christianity is intimately linked to the dynamics of oppression,” as Colleen McDannell notes, and that like other tools of action and expression used by the folk, it cannot bring about political and economic transformations

(217). Wright does acknowledge that “our churches are centers of social and community life,” and that “religion is the form in which America allowed our personalities to be expressed” (131). However, the photograph on the following page, “Mother and son,

Chicago, Ill.,” depicts a woman cooking in a run-down kitchenette while her son stares at the camera; their impoverished living conditions indict black folk churches for their inadequate response to poverty and inequality.

The collective narrative voice and the visual rhetoric shift significantly in the final chapter of Black Voices, which begins with a full-page photograph of a steel worker and a smaller one of the Negro National Congress picketing the sidewalk in Washington, D.C., to protest the discrimination of black workers at the Glenn Martin plant. 209 While such militant activity would seem certainly seem uncharacteristic for the complacent folk

Wright has described in the preceding chapters, the reader soon learns that the narrative voice has also changed. While the earlier chapters come from the perspective of “us black folk” and “we black folk,” the final chapter begins with the declaration, “we are the children of the black sharecroppers, the first-born of the city tenements” (142). The

209 As Erik S. Gellman reports, “Martin openly vowed to never have anyone but white, male workers employed at his aircraft manufacturing plant… [which] received an unprecedented $375 million in U.S. military contracts.” National Negro Conference leaders “staged a mass meeting in Washington’s Mt. Carmel Baptist Church and planned a second ‘jobs conference’ in Baltimore for the end of the month. The NNC demanded 7,000 jobs for blacks at the Martin factory and vowed to keep sending qualified applicants… until they were hired” (135, 136). Wright participated in conferences of the National Negro Congress in 1936, 1937, and 1940; his article on the first conference, “Two Million Black Voices,” was published in New Masses in 1936. 208 collective children of the folk also signal a break from the past (perhaps the end of folk history?) by announcing that “as we shed our folk swaddling-clothes, so run our lives in a hundred directions” (143). By joining (and even socializing with) “white workers [who] were eager to have us in their organizations” because of the hardships of the Depression, the children of the folk were able to confront the national folk imaginary: “we encountered for the first time in our lives the full effect of those forces that tended to reshape our folk consciousness.” The children of the folk then “stepped forth and accepted… the death of our old folk lives… a death that made us free” (144). The new culture that Wright envisions will be urban, interracial, cross-class, cross-ethnic; unlike the old black folk culture, it will promote solidarity with poor white workers and equip city-dwelling African Americans with more effective ways of expressing themselves and taking action. Wright’s analysis of the fading importance of the folk is therefore related to but clearly distinct from the positions of Cornplanter and Dargan, and reflects the range of responses mounted to changes in the national folk imaginary in the 1930s.

Throughout The Folk Imaginary in American Literature, 1875 – 1925, I have traced the multiple strategies deployed in ethnic American writings as ways of critiquing, refusing, and dismantling the imaginative, representational, social, political, and other hierarchies and hegemonies asserted by the dominant white society. The national folk imaginary, as I have argued, marked ethnic American communities as folk groups whose rich traditions should be collected and salvaged, and also as backward people who were apart from or unfit for civilization, modernity, Americanism, history, and politics.

By positioning the folk as the bearers of treasure to be harvested and as the carriers of problems to be solved, the dominant society furthered its own political, economic,

209 cultural, and class interests; managed its complex emotions about ethnic Americans; and attempted to control, modernize, and “civilize” ethnic American communities. The writers I have examined in this study countered the dominant society’s stereotypical representations, scrutinized its motives, and intervened in debates about whether the cultures of regional and ethnic Americans were a resource or an obstacle for national progress. The resurgent interest in all things folk (and all things regional) in the 1930s was concretized not only by the dominant society’s desire to know the folk (through seeing, hearing, and possessing their cultural objects), but also by a wave of programs and policies enacted by the federal government. Despite historical, geographical, religious, racial, and legal differences, Native Americans, Appalachians, and African

Americans continued to be linked by the imaginations, fascinations, and anxieties of folklorists, field collectors, public works employees, reformers, regional planners, social scientists, and eugenicists. As they responded to the shifts in the national folk imaginary in the 1930s that were triggered by rising class identifications, economic upheaval, and changing patterns of migration, ethnic American writers and intellectuals imagined a folk who resisted narrow definitions, regulations, and limits, and who made their own choices about whether to maintain, adapt, or discard traditions based on the emerging needs of their respective communities.

210

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Vita

William Kelley Woolfitt

EDUCATION:

2012 Ph.D. The Pennsylvania State University (English) 2009 M.F.A. The Pennsylvania State University (creative writing) 2003 M.A. Hollins University (creative writing) 1999 B.A. Fairmont State College (secondary education)

PUBLICATIONS:

I. Scholarly Nonfiction

“’Oh, Catfish and Turnip Greens’: Black Oral Traditions in the Poetry of Marilyn Nelson,” African American Review (forthcoming).

II. Chapbook Publication

The Salvager’s Arts (chapbook), Seven Kitchens Press, forthcoming June 2012.

III. Fiction

“Glady Run,” Michigan Quarterly Review (forthcoming). “Wax Museum” and “Crow,” New Ohio Review (2012). “Sons with Apples in Their Hands,” Ninth Letter (2012). “Bellboy,” Sycamore Review (Summer/ Fall 2008). “The Companions of Our Dreams,” Weber Studies (Winter 2007).

IV. Creative Nonfiction

“Creaturely” and “The Boarder,” Indiana Review (forthcoming). “Bessie Harvey’s Visions,” Mid-American Review (forthcoming). “Part Miracle” and “Altared There in a Darksome Place,” Gulf Coast (2012). “Meditation on Betye Saar’s ‘View from the Palmist Window,’” Shadowbox (Spring 2011).

PRESENTATIONS:

“Bayous, Caves, and Sand-Hill Country: Nature and Culture in the Short Stories of Charles Chesnutt and Alice Dunbar-Nelson.” Ninth Biennial Conference of the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, Bloomington IN (2011).

“Kneel on a Sidewalk Singing: Marilyn Nelson and Patricia Smith’s Poetry of Witnessing and Testifying.” 24th Annual MELUS Conference, Scranton PA (2010).

“This Is No Book of Fables: Diasporan and Christian Myths in J. California Cooper’s Wake of the Wind.” Fifth Conference of the Penn State African American Tradition Series, State College PA (2009).