Contesting the Past, Reconstructing the Nation: American Literature and Culture in the Gilded Age, 1876-1893

1. “He Wouldn’t Ever Dared to Talk Such Talk in His Life Before”: Dialect, Slavery, and the Race Question

1 “He Wouldn’t Ever Dared to Talk Such Talk in His Life Before” Dialect, Slavery, and the Race Question On May 30, 1885,Alexander Crummell delivered the commencement address to the graduating class of Storer College, a freedmen’s college located in Harper’s Ferry. Despite that West Virginia town’s singular importance in the histories of slavery and African Americans, “thrilling memories” that Crummell could not entirely ignore, he nonetheless argued that the era’s blacks too often“settle[d] down in the dismal swamps of dark and distressful memory.” In response to that tendency, he used the occasion to advocate a “shifting of general thought from past servitude , to duty and service, in the present.” That argument’s presentist and progressive focus exemplified Crummell’s overall role, as Wilson Moses describes it, “as the philosopher of uplift in post-Reconstruction America”; and that emphasis and role overlapped with the progressive historical narrative’s increasing national dominance by a decade after Reconstruction’s end. In fact, as Moses notes, the years between 1873 and 1898—the same period in which the millennial national narrative was consolidated and then extended onto the world stage—were for Crummell “characterized by attempts to adapt his Christian nationalism to an American environment.” But Crummell’s 1885 attempt, like the national narrative, did not go unchallenged; present in the audience at Storer was Frederick Douglass, who lodged what Crummell called an “emphatic and earnest protest” to the presentist position and instead “urge[d] his hearers to a constant recollection of the slavery of their race.”1 24 Chapter 1 Crummell and Douglass’s 1885 debate was on one level simply another salvo in a long series of exchanges between these two philosophical and political African American leaders. But the debate and the divergence in thinking it revealed also illustrate a complex historical question at the heart of the period’s explorations of African American issues and identity : what emphasis should be placed upon the African American past in general, and on slavery in particular? Both Crummell and Douglass were in many ways progressives, practical-minded men who believed that African Americans must focus on gaining rights in the present and equality in the future.2 Yet the Storer College debate highlighted the deeply distinct roles that the past could play in such otherwise similar philosophies: depicted as an earlier, lesser stage of life to be moved past and triumphed over, in Crummell’s articulation; or as a critical element in the formation of African American identity to be remembered and even stressed in the current debates, in Douglass’s reply. Many of the literary texts that explored the race question between 1876 and 1886 engaged with precisely this historical issue, analyzing and attempting to answer two connected questions: what vision of the African American past in general, and slavery in particular, texts should construct; and what was at stake in that decision. Not so effectively represented by Crummell’s and Douglass’s highly educated and articulate voices, but inextricably intertwined with the period ’s historical debates, was the issue of African American speech, and particularly their use of or progression past nonstandard,dialect English. To give two examples of such interconnections: unreconstructed white Southerners often made African Americans’ continued use of dialect central to their paternalistic arguments about slavery’s benefits and the need for related postbellum forms of racial hierarchy, as George Frederickson argues; while Wilson Moses and David Howard-Pitney analyze how African American messianic thinkers used the Anglo-American jeremiad’s linguistic and rhetorical sophistication for their own racialist, progressive purposes.3 And the decade’s literary texts likewise explored issues of voice: how texts should represent the way in which many African Americans talked, their unique dialect (if indeed they had one); what importance texts should place on both that style of speech and its literary representations; and how the African American voice related to other (particularly white) American voices. As was the case with Crum- Dialect, Slavery, and the Race Question 25 mell and Douglass at Storer College, for many authors, including four of the five analyzed in this chapter, engaging either the historical or vocal question in a complex way that challenged existing definitions and national narratives seems to have required flattening the other question : on the one hand, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus and Nights with Uncle Remus and Mark...