Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem African American Literature and Culture, 1877 -1919 EDITED BY Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard New York University Press NEW YORKn AND LONDON MX 5|■^.3 'X006 NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS New York and London www.nyupress.org © 2006 by New York University All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Post-bellum, pre-Harlem : African American literature and culture, 1877- 1919 / edited by Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN-13:978-0-8147-3167-3 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN-io: 0-8147-3167-8 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-8147—3168—0 (pbk.: alk. paper) ISBN-io: 0-8147-3168-6 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. African American arts—19th century. 2. African American arts—20th century. I. McCaskill, Barbara. II. Gebhard, Caroline. NX512.3.A35P65 2006 306.4'708996073—dc22 2005037589 New York University Press books are printed on acid-free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durabihty. Manufactured in the United States of America c 10 987654321 p 10 987654321 Contents Acknowledgments Introduction i Caroline Gebhard and Barbara McCaskill PART I : Reimagining the Past 1 Creative Collaboration: As African American as Sweet Potato Pie 17 Frances Smith Foster 2 Commemorative Ceremonies and Invented Traditions: History, Memory, and Modernity in the “New Negro” Novel of the Nadir 34 Carla L. Peterson PART II : Meeting Freedom: Self-Invention, Artistic Innovation, and Race Progress (iSyos-iSSos) 3 Landscapes of Labor: Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister 59 Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw 4 “Manly Husbands and Womanly Wives”: The Leadership of Educator Lucy Craft Laney 74 Audrey Thomas McCluskey vii viii Contents Contents ix 5 Old and New Issue Servants: “Race” Men and Women Weigh In 12 War Work, Social Work, Community Work: Barbara Ryan ^ Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Federal War Work Agencies, and Southern African American Women 197 Nikki L Brown 6 Savannah’s Colored Tribune, the Reverend E. K. Love, and the Sacred Rebellion of Uplift Barbara McCaskill 13 Antilynching Plays: Angelina Weld Grimk^, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and the Evolution of African American Drama 210 PARI : Encountering Jim Crow: African American Literature Koritha A. Mitchell and the Mainstream (1890s) 7 A Marginal Man in Black Bohemia: 14 Henry Ossawa Tanner and W. E. B. Du Bois: James Weldon Johnson in the New York Tenderloin n? African American Art and “High Culture” Robert M. Dowling at the Turn into the Twentieth Century 231 Margaret Crumpton Winter and Rhonda Reymond 8 Jamming with Julius: Charles Chesnutt and the Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem Blues 15 The Folk, the School, and the Marketplace: Barbara A. Baker Locations of Culture in The Souls of Black Folk 250 Andrew J. Scheiber 9 Rewriting Dunbar: Realism, Black Women Poets, and the Genteel Topical List of Selected Works 269 Paula Bernat Bennett ^ About the Contributors 281 Index 285 10 Inventing a “Negro Literature”: Race, Dialect, and Gender in the Early Work of Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, and Alice Dunbar-Nelson ' Caroline Gebhard part IV : Turning the Century: New Political, Cultural, and Personal Aesthetics (1900-1917) 11 No Excuses for Our Dirt: Booker T. Washington and a “New Negro” Middle Class Philip J. Kowalski Chapter 3 Landscapes of Labor Race, Religion, and Rhode Island in the Painting of Edward Mitchell Bannister Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw From his arrival in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1869, until his death there in 1901, Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) painted the landscape of southern New England in a style that has often been described as deriva­ tive of the Barbizon school. However, unlike the Barbizon painters, who sought to create pastoral scenes of idyUic peasant life in the French coun­ tryside, Bannister frequently depicted farms and other rural locations that evoke the history of Rhode Island chattel slavery. He first emigrated from New Brunswick, Canada, to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1850, and his life exemplifies many of the challenges and achievements that creative African Americans faced and attained during the second half of the nineteenth century. Similar to the paintings of Henry Ossawa Tanner, or the neoclas­ sical sculpture of Edmonia Lewis, Bannister’s compositions provide a win­ dow on the intellectual and creative terrain that socially concerned artists of the period confronted. In a short catalog entry on the undated painting The Haygatherers (c. 1893), art historian Corrine Jennings suggests that “the presence of Black figures, relatively uncommon in Bannister’s work, has raised speculation that the painting stands as an oblique reference to the plantation system of Rhode Island’s past and to its role in the slave trade.” ^ Indeed, paintings such as The Haygatherers and Workers in the Fields (c. 1890) reveal a space in which the artist could explore a legacy of racial oppression within a contemporary international artistic language of landscape and noble peasantry. In this way Bannister was able both to commemorate the rapidly disappearing evidence of Rhode Island’s plan­ tation history and to elevate the labor of its stiU disempowered black folk. m-a 59 60 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 6i Bannister accomplished this radical move in two ways: first, by refer­ encing the African American religious tradition; and second, by subvert­ ing the visual vernacular of French landscape painting and its then current vogue for semirealism and the rural picturesque. His status as a privileged artist allowed him to negotiate these issues of class and race. In his work he identifies with the social issues facing former slaves while simultane­ ously escaping them via his own fi-eeborn status and through the patron­ age of both the black and the white bourgeoisie. We witness this paradox in the rectangular canvas of Haygatherers, within whose borders a large, green-and-brown hay field set beneath a low-lying horizon opens before the spectator. The field is framed from below by a bit of wild grass that sprouts wildflowers and dandelion puffs, and on the left by a group of three trees that anchors the composition by extending all the way to the top margin of the painting. The third tree, at the far left of the canvas, is only partially visible, giving the effect of the continuation of the imaginary space beyond the picture frame. In the middle ground and to the right, within the yellow-brown of the hay field, two dark-skinned women labor at what appears to be the work of gather­ ing hay to place atop the large hay wain at the back of the composition. Their presence in the middle ground rhymes nicely with the two trees at Edward Mitchell Bannister. The Haygatherers, c. 1893. Oil on canvas. 171/8 x 23 left, and is further emphasized by the placement of two smaller trees 1/8 inches. Private collection. directly above and behind them in the far distance. With this twinning, the two women make up the lower corner of a pyramidal arrangement that finds its apex in a third group of treetops that rises behind the hay wain if not overcome or transcended. He renders a world in which crossing and its minute attendants. over, the action of moving from one reality to another, from labor to The women are lost in the space of the hay field, which swirls about leisure, can be achieved by fording a river of grass as though it were the their knees, truncating them and blocking their forward progress. There is River Jordan. He shows these black bodies as analogous to the Israelites, no visible path behind them to indicate the direction from which they who wandered in the wilderness for forty years waiting for the ultimate have come, nor is there any sign that they have cleared the crop and are reward of the Promised Land, yet still within the control of the plantation now gleaning the remains. As their right arms reach forward in tandem, system that had enslaved their ancestors, still within Pharaoh’s reach. This toward the pastoral field of wildflowers and the stand of trees that borders ability to depict an unpopular reality in a popular mode makes Bannister’s the two spaces, they appear to be swimming across a great sea of grass, the work in general, and Haygatherers in particular, some of the most dynamic trampled blades that surround them arching like waves. This swimming landscape painting of the late nineteenth century. motion moves them apart from the other figures, as though they have The post-bellum-pre-Harlem period when Bannister completed his strayed fi-om the distant harbor of the hay wain and the life of labor that it mature work brought great changes to the American art world. This represents, and are now approaching the pastoral promise that rises in the important half-century saw the exponential expansion of national inter­ foreground. ests, as the barely reunited country promoted industrialization at home In Haygatherers, Bannister creates for the spectator a world in which and new-found imperialist opportunities abroad. It also witnessed the size the drudgery of daily life and the curse of humble birth can be challenged. of the artisan class retract as the professional and working classes grew. 62 GWENDOLYN DUBOIS SHAW Landscapes of Labor 63 Just as those who practiced crafts felt the increasing competition of the his immediate community during the mid-nineteenth century was also mechanized workplace, so did critical changes occur in the demographics crucial. By the late 1840s Bannister had settled in Boston with his brothers of those who were able to produce so-called fine art. With the rise of pho­ and had begun working as a hairdresser while painting on the side.