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Part II: The Black Cosmopolite
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77 Pa r t I I The Black Cosmopolite In William Huntington Wilson’s short story “The Return of the Sergeant” (1900), inhabitants of the South Carolina village Possum Hollow inflate with pride only to be crushed by disappointment. Their downfall is rendered comic with minstrel-style humor: Possum Hollow’s solely African American inhabitants glory in one of their young men returning wounded from military service in Cuba, then learn that they are being deceived. It turns out that “de Sargent” has not been to Cuba at all but invented the story after stealing a white officer’s uniform at a Charleston hotel where he worked as a bellboy. Stock characters like the earnest, simple Uncle Mose and the refined mulatto Lincoln Carter plan festivities in honor of the Sergeant, declaring that “de ’casion may go vibratin’ down in hist’ry ez de granduss an’ proudess an’ biguss ’casion which de Holler has ebber knowed!” They learn the truth during the celebration and chase the Sergeant from the church hall, only to have their banquet feast stolen by sneaky “country niggers” while the Sergeant escapes. The story concludes with Uncle Mose collapsing into loud sobs and an angry cry: “‘Oh, Gawd: Gawd!’” he sobbed, “hab pity on me! Ma heart is full ob murder fur de Sargent an’ dem country niggers, an’ ma stummick’s emptier’n a dry well! An’ dat roas’ peeg! An dat possum! An dat jelly cake! Oh Gawd! Gawd! I cyan stan’ it no-how!”1 Wilson’s story, published in the widely circulating Harper’s Weekly, offers clumsy reassurance to white readers anxious about the “weak spot” that troubled Theodore Roosevelt in Mr. Dooley’s quip, “Take up the white man’s burden an’ hand it to the coons.” Heroic black masculinity is revealed as a pose underneath which a comic minstrel always lurks, so that the deceived patriarch Uncle Mose regrets the loss of his dinner more than the loss of a community hero, holding murder in his heart but lacking the manly will to get justice or revenge. For Wilson, African American patriotism is the opportunity for a devastating, clichéd joke invoking the local types of the black South: the simple, ignorant village elders, the 78 part ii uppity mulattos in ostentatious dress clothes, the lazy “country niggers,” and the cunning but cowardly trickster who almost pulls a fast one. While Amy Kaplan has shown that whites responded to black heroism on the battlefield in Cuba by writing accounts that “reestablished the reassuring order of the domestic color line in a foreign terrain,” Wilson’s story goes one step further in denying black heroism by mocking the very idea that blacks could even leave home, replacing them spatially and temporally back into the South—in Possum Hollow, a mythical village untouched by modernity.2 The chapters in the next section demonstrate that this emphatic placement of African Americans in local, domestic, and vernacular spaces rather than on “foreign terrain” was a rhetorical strategy for configuring race and empire in the turn-of-the-century United States, and that African American writers both adapted and inverted this strategy. At stake in these relocations is an important symbolic battle. Since the Civil War, African American military service had provided an important argument and representational field for claiming or limiting black manhood and national belonging, but participation in a world mission at the turn of the century signified more than a means to prove equal citizenship within the United States.3 Such participation was also a claim to civilization and cosmopolitanism , forms of authority won by claiming a dominant position in global contests and hierarchies. Wilson’s story laughingly demonstrates the impossibility of an African American military hero by insisting on his immobility outside South Carolina and the generic local space of Possum Hollow, a strategy of shoring up Roosevelt’s “weak spot” that I return to in the chapters in part II. In contrast, representations of black cosmopolitanism countered such moves by making global mission a route to progressing beyond outmoded and local racial hierarchies at home and abroad. These chapters examine the Colored American Magazine (hereafter CAM) as one source of this construction of the black cosmopolitan. I chose this periodical based on its relatively wide circulation, its emphasis on fiction as an element in racial politics, and its editorial conflicts surrounding internationalism, a topic I say more about in chapter 4.4 The years I have selected follow from the...