Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

1. The Language of Class: Taxonomy and Respectability in Frances E. W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy

25 1 the language of class Taxonomy and Respectability in Frances E. W. Harper’s Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy In Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), a former bondswoman’s speech draws attention to the criteria African Americans use to judge intraracial differences and the problematized vocabulary through which they express them. The affectionately known “Aunt” Linda Salters describes the social relations in her neighborhood for her genteel auditors, the title character, Iola, and Iola’s uncle Robert Johnson: “Dere’s some triflin’ niggers down yere who’ll sell der votes for almost nuffin. . . . Dey’s mighty small pertaters an’ few in a hill.” “Oh, Aunt Linda,” said Robert,“don’t call them niggers. They are our own people.” “Dey ain’t my kine ob people. I jis’ calls em niggers, an’ niggers I means.” (176) Emphatic about her word choice, Aunt Linda displaces “niggers” from its usual moorings as a racist epithet and uses it to classify relative social esteem. For Robert and Iola, a linguistic misunderstanding arises because the term “niggers” seems odd or imprecise here: it inadequately stands in the temporal and conceptual gap between the moment when Aunt Linda distinguishes herself from black folks who would sell their votes and when, seconds later, she searches for an apt word to articulate the distinction . While Robert and Iola remain preoccupied with racial solidarity and propriety, Aunt Linda redefines her immediate community to exclude politically apathetic African Americans. She proposes dividing lines to distinguish her “kine ob people” within the broader black population. The jarring language Aunt Linda uses to disaggregate black Ameri- 26 dividing lines cans points to a broader crisis of classification in post–Civil War America . Following emancipation, terms that conveniently (and reductively) had categorized African Americans into broad groups as either “slave” or “free” proved inadequate to the shifting sociopolitical and economic climate. And yet, in a nation preoccupied with policing “the color line” between blacks and whites with a range of terms to note race and racial admixture (i.e., “mulatto/a,” “quadroon,” “octoroon”), American phraseology generally offered less nuanced labels for categorizing African Americans by their wealth, occupation, or social values. As existing vocabularies became outmoded, lagging behind the postbellum relations the terms aimed to describe, observers like Aunt Linda and literary artists alike grappled for fittingly descriptive language for the emergent black social structure. Verbal exchanges such as the one between Aunt Linda and her listeners become primary narrative devices for interrogating and revising existing social categories in Frances Harper’s fiction. In Iola Leroy and Trial and Triumph (1888–89), Harper’s two postbellum novels that most clearly foreground black-identified communities, characters actively debate about who and what constitute the “triflin’ niggers,” “the poor,” “better class,” and “elite.”1 Such conversations respond to, but also reproduce, class anxiety in the form of what I call the fear of misclassification, a fear of not being recognized by one’s self-identified social class. These textual contestations over class categories are significant because African Americans’ ability to lay claim to class-inflected labels such as “lady” and “gentleman,” “Mr.” and “Miss,” or “rich” was part of a larger sociopolitical argument: if American society realigns along lines of class identification rather than racial division, upwardly mobile black Americans may gain opportunities denied them on the basis of race. By deconstructing turn-of-the-century classifications that privileged wealth or genealogy, Harper posits an alternative taxonomy in which moral respectability— enacted through temperance, sexual purity, thrift, modesty, work ethic, polite manners, and other attributes—is the non-pecuniary basis of status .2 In this way, she aims to mobilize economically disadvantaged but striving black Americans for advancement within intraracial and interracial contexts. The patterns of classification in Harper’s works demand that when assessing class distinctions in postbellum black literature, readers should look beyond African Americans’ economic circumstances to also interrogate the language that conveys class. Harper’s novels are striking be- the language of class 27 cause they relocate class from a market economy to a moral economy in which class identifications relate indirectly or inconsistently to material conditions. For Harper, respectability is an ostensibly value-free trait accessible to all. But as she does not fully acknowledge, respectability is always already classed, often in bourgeois terms, so that the discourse of respectability cannot entirely transcend either elitism or economic inequalities. The limits of Harper’s...