Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

2. Working through Class: The Black Body, Labor, and Leisure in Sutton Griggs’s Overshadowed

53 2 working through class The Black Body, Labor, and Leisure in Sutton Griggs’s Overshadowed May the work I’ve done speak for me, May the work I’ve done speak for me, When I’m resting in my grave, there is nothing that can be said, May the work I’ve done speak for me. —African American spiritual1 Most memorably and soulfully rendered by twentieth-century singer Mahalia Jackson, the song “May the Work I’ve Done Speak for Me” asserts that work constitutes one’s legacy after the body ceases its labor and nothing more can be said.2 While this spiritual’s sentiments may refer to deeds performed in pursuit of heavenly reward, I invoke these lyrics because when considered in the context of nineteenth-century African American labor history, they raise questions about work, social status, and the legacy of racial uplift: How much is a person’s work a reflection of him or her? How much could or should black work, in its various iterations , convey social status, thus serving as the basis of intraracial distinctions ? In this chapter, I examine how postbellum African American fiction anxiously takes up these questions, especially as authors address how hiring discrimination and limited educational opportunities complicate the extent to which black people’s labor can “speak for them” in shaping their class identifications. Recent scholarship in class studies has traced the literary representation of work in late nineteenth-century America, noting how struggles over the modes and compensations of labor often emerged through the pages of Gilded Age newspapers, religious tracts, and novels. Yet studies less often have examined how African American writers vied for cultural influence to shape readers’ attitudes toward work and class. As Xiomara 54 dividing lines Santamarina has observed in Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood, critical approaches have tended to underestimate the significance of labor and class to early black literature and, in effect, to reproduce “the erasures of laboring subjectivity and contradictions common to nineteenth-century reform discourses on race and gender” (23). Yet some of the frequently addressed novels that are discussed elsewhere in my study—Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892), Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), and Charles Chesnutt ’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901)—in fact belie their authors’ fuller engagement with labor issues. These authors summarily address labor in their now canonized novels but were more vocal about matters of fair wages, labor unrest, hiring discrimination, and occupational hierarchies in their lesser-known fiction and nonfiction.3 In order to recover a discourse of labor in African American literary history, this chapter turns to Sutton E. Griggs’s second novel, Overshadowed (1901), which underscores the centrality of work. The novel’s title unintentionally has prophesied its critical neglect. Even as emerging scholarship aims to restore attention to Griggs’s oeuvre, his second novel has been overshadowed by critical attention to his first, best-known fiction , Imperium in Imperio (1899).4 In each of his five novels, published between 1899 and 1908, Griggs highlights how African Americans pursue and interpret their work, particularly within racially proscribed labor markets. But Overshadowed places work at its center by following Erma and John Wysong, siblings who must forego their life of relative comfort to seek self-sustaining work after their parents’ death. Focusing primarily on Erma’s precarious work conditions as a housekeeper, the novel examines the employment prospects for African Americans who perform a range of domestic and manual labor, skilled industrial work, imprisoned labor, homemaking, and trained professions. The text repudiates occupational hierarchies within black communities that stigmatize physical labor (industrial, service, and manual) in favor of professions or conspicuous leisure. Ultimately, Overshadowed highlights how intraracial class tensions and white prejudice often work in tandem to inhibit even the most diligent black workers from advancing. Analyzing the generic form and rhetorical argument of Overshadowed reveals how Griggs responded to the high stakes of representing work in turn-of-the-century racial uplift fiction for black readers . Griggs printed many of his works through his financially strained publishing company, Orion, in Nashville, Tennessee, peddled them working through class 55 door-to-door, and attempted to gain the literary endorsement of black leaders to increase sales (Coleman, Sutton E. Griggs, 21). His audience included middle-class as well as working-class black readers, a sector of the population less often accounted for in reception...