Race and Ethnicity in Literature
Race and Ethnicity in Literature
The Melting Pot. “What then is the American, this new man?” asked Michel Guillaume Jean de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813), a French immigrant whose Letters front an American Farmer (1782), introduced American folk and folkways to curious readers on both sides of the Atlantic. “I could point out to you a family whose grandfather was an Englishman, whose wife was Dutch, whose son married a French woman, and whose present four sons have now four wives of different nations,” Crèvecoeur ob-served. “Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labours and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world.” Crèvecoeur’s imagery suggested a phrase, melting pot, that gradually passed into public parlance. Yet despite the ideal of the melting pot, barriers to assimilation remained. Racial and ethnic tensions ran particularly high in the United States during the late nineteenth century. Unprecedented levels of immigration, coupled with the recent upheavals of the Civil War and Reconstruction, fragmented American society. In the literature of the period many authors asked anew, “What then is the American?”
Crossing the Color Line. Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), born in Cleveland to free black parents, devoted his career to issues of race and race relations. He published two collections of short stories, The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, in 1899, the same year in which his biography of the African American orator Frederick Douglass (1817-1895) appeared. In the title story of his second collection, first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1898, Chesnutt tackled the thorny issue of intraracial prejudice. His protagonist, Ryder, an upper-class mulatto, makes plans to marry a light-skinned black woman. Yet he is haunted by the dark-skinned Liza Jane—the “wife of his youth” who reappears on the ève of his wedding. In this and other stories of racial identity Chesnutt questioned the moral foundation of the assimi-lationist “ideal.” White writers also surveyed the “color line” dividing American society. In 1865 Albion W. Tourgée (1838-1905), fresh from service as an officer in the Union army, moved to North Carolina, where he practiced law and engaged in Reconstruction politics. In the opinion of his North Carolina neighbors, Tourgée was a carpetbagger: a term applied, with venom, to Northerners who came to the South after the close of the Civil War. Tourgée’s southern sojourn—he returned north in 1878, following the demise of Reconstruction—provided him with abundant literary material. Figs and Thistles (1879) and Toinette (1874; revised as A Royal Gentleman, 1881) are tales of the Civil War era; his most notable works, A FooFs Errand (1879) and Bricks Without Straw (1880), are set in the South during Reconstruction. An outspoken advocate of African American civil rights, Tourgée emerged as one of the more sensitive writers on race relations during the period.
PECULIAR SAM
Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930) was just twenty-one years old when, in 1880, her musical drama Slaves Escape premiered in Boston, with Hopkins herself singing a lead role. A romance of the Underground Railroad, in which a band of slaves flees a Mississippi plantation, Hopkins’s musical combines dialect, humor, and pathos. She revised Slaves Escape slightly in later years, renaming the play Peculiar Sam (after its protagonist) to distinguish it from the popular William Wells Brown drama The Escape. The following excerpt, from the first act of Peculiar Sam, describes Sam’s reaction to the news that his beloved Jinny (“the plantation nightingale”) has been forced to marry the unscru-pulous black overseer Jim.
MAMMY: (breathing hard) For de Lor’s sake boy do you kno’ what dey’s gone an’ done up to de big house? Dey’s gone an married dat dear chile, dat lamb ob a Jinny, to dat rascal ob an oberseer Jim.
SAM: (excited, grasps her arm) Mammy, tell me agin! You don’t mean it! Tell me dey haint done dat!
MAMMY: (astonished) Hey yar boy, lef be my arm. You mean to scrunch me to a jelly? (He drops her arm) Yes, deys bring dat gal up like a lady; she neber done nuthin’ but jes wait on Marse fambly an’ now ole Marser’s dead dey’s gone an’ married her, their way to Jim an’ de gal can’t bar de sight ob him. It’s de meanes’ thing I eber seed. . . .
SAM: (sorrowfully) Po’ Jinny, po’ little gal (sings):
Ah! Jinny is a simple chile,
Wif pretty shinin’curls,
An’ white folks love her best, of all
The young mulatto girls;
Tell her to wait a little while,
Tell her in hope to wait,
For I will surely break the chain,
That binds her to the gate.
Sam resolves to spirit Jinny, Mammy, and the rest of the plantation slaves to freedom on the Underground Railroad. After an occasionally comical journey (during which Sam disguises himself as a “gentleman overseer” and steals $100 from the slow-witted Jim), the band reaches freedom in Canada. As the final scene opens, years have passed: the former slaves are happily settled in their new lives, with Jinny a “singist” and Sam’s sister Juno a “school marm.” Sam has undergone the most radical transformation. Recently elected to the U.S. Congress, he returns to the family hearth to share the good news and claim his beloved Jinny:
PETE: Jes’ teli us one thing cap’n, Tore you goes eny far-ther, is you lected?
VIRGINIA: Yes, Sam do relieve our anxiety.
SAM: I think you may safely congratulate me, on a successful election. My friends in Cincinnati have stood by me nobly.
MAMMY: Praise de Lord! Chillern I hasn’t nuthin’ lef to lib fer.
Hopkins’s decision to contrast dialect and “proper” speech (the latter indicating Sam’s “success” and Jinny’s educated status) may strike to-day’s readers as crude. At the time, however, the play’s happy ending (complete with Sam and Jinny’s Hnguistic transformation) spoke to many African Americans. The political experiment of Reconstruction had encouraged, if briefly, a belief in social and political integration. Not only might former slaves shed their chains, Hopkins sug-gested, they might also shed their slave dialect and gain a permanent place in the national power structure.
Source: Leo Hamalian and James V. Hatch, eds., The Roots of African American Drama: An Anthology of Early Plays, 1858-1938 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1991).
Taking the National Stage. A medley of African American voices achieved national prominence during the second half of the nineteenth century. William Wells Brown (1814-1884), born a slave in Kentucky, escaped to freedom and flourished as an abolitionist lecturer, practicing physician, and literary jack-of-all-trades. With Clotel: or, The President’s Daughter (1853), Brown became the first African American to publish a novel in the United States. Brown was also an active presence in American theater through the turn of the century be-cause of the lasting popularity of his antislavery dramas Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone (1856) and The Escape (1858). Brown’s writing served as inspiration for Pauline Hopkins (1859-1930), a New England writer whose early plays Aristocracy (1877), Winona (1878), and Slaves Escape (1880) foreshadow her later work as editor of Colored American magazine and author of Contending Forces (1900), a politically charged sentimental novel. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963), after earning his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1895, embarked on an illustrious career as an author, editor, and social reformer. Du Bois’s sociological study The Philadelphia Negro (1899) was followed by his masterpiece, The Souls of Black Folk (1903)—and, in subsequent years, by an array of historical and literary treatments of race in America. Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906), dubbed the “poet laureate of the Negro race,” published his verse in popular collections such as Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), Lyrics of the Hearthside (1899), Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903), and Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow (1905). Although best known for his poetry—which he read, to packed lecture halls in the United States and abroad—Dunbar also composed sentimental stories, novels, and plays before his death at age thirty-four.
A Nation of Immigrants. Questions of ethnic as well as racial identity engrossed American authors during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Lafcadio Hearn (1850-1904), part Irish and part Greek, immigrated to the United States in his late teens and found work as a journalist first in Cincinnati and later in New Orleans. Hearn published books on Negro-French proverbs and Chinese legends before moving to Japan in 1890 and devoting the rest of his career to the study of Japanese culture. H. H. Boyesen (1848-1895), a native of Norway, arrived in America in 1869 to pursue an academic career. Boyesen’s scholarly essays are largely forgotten, but his later novels— The Mammon of Unrighteousness (1891), The Golden Calf (1892), and The Social Strugglers (1893)—remain noteworthy examples of realistic fiction. Abraham Cahan (1860-1951), a Russian Jew who moved to the United States in 1882, captured the flavor of immigrant life in works of fiction such as Yekl:A Tale of the NewYork Ghetto (1896), The Imported Bridegroom and Other Stories (1898), and The Rise of David Levinsky (1917). Cahan wrote in Yiddish as well as English and served for decades as editor of the Yiddish-language Jewish Daily Forward. The Yiddish vaudeville theater also reflected the cross-ethnic influences discernible in Cahan’s fiction: one popular play of 1895, by the Yiddish playwright H. I. Minikes, was titled Tsvishn indianer (Among the Indians). The literature of the late nineteenth century is consumed by issues of inclusion and exclusion. American novels, stories, poems, and plays reveal a multicultural, multiracial society both enriched by, and yet resistant to, the allure of the melting pot.
Sources
Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986);
Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1993).