We Wear The Mask: Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Politics of Representative Reality

10. “We Know de Time Is Ouahs” The Power of Christmas in the Literature of Paul Laurence Dunbar

Graphic Illustration in Dunbar’s Short Fiction 133 coop and out beyond that is the rind of the “dervastat’d watah million.” These cartoons have done no little toward increasing our persecutions and enemies. The time has come when we must have real live cartoonist amongsts [sic] us to make sentiment. We have the material for the making of any kind of man but after the fellow is made where is he to find encouragement and how is he to live[?]43 “The time has come,” Adams writes in the fall of 1906—less than six months after Dunbar’s death—for an African American cartoonist to reverse hateful traditions of exaggeration and stereotypes in pictorial representations. If so, Kemble’s representations of Dunbar’s short fiction would constitute one of the last cases in which an African American writer had to turn to a white artist for graphic illustrations. Soon after Kemble and Dunbar’s unequal, uneasy collaboration , Adams suggests, a black visual artist could begin to validate a black writer’s artistry and counter the distortions of cartoonists like Kemble. Indeed, Figure 9.10: John Henry Adams’s rendering of a matronly figure to adorn Dunbar’s verse. To view this image, please refer to the print edition of this book 134 Adam sonstegard Dunbar’s work originates at the pivotal moment Adams indicates: it survives from one of the last intervals in which black writers had to turn to white artists to give their stories visual expression even as it looks forward to a day when black cartoonists could earn their living illustrating black writers’ works. Authorities such as John Wheatley, Lydia Maria Child, and William Lloyd Garrison had long lent their authority to works by African American writers. They penned introductions that prepared readers to receive a black person’s words, attested to the writer’s reliability, and took responsibility for any extravagance in a former slave’s work. Kemble’s work similarly assures white readers of the supposed familiarity of Dunbar’s settings. It neutralizes any perceived threats from Dunbar. It licenses readers to find the minstrel humor in what would otherwise be sober subjects. If an authenticating document is “a black message in a white envelope,”44 these short-fiction collections show editors enclosing Dunbar’s message in the envelopes that Dodd, Mead’s packaging and Kemble’s caricatures provided. The Voice of the Negro, the Colored American, and other vanguard venues had also begun their own efforts to free messages like Dunbar’s from envelopes like Kemble’s. The Voice’s editorial cartoons visually ridiculed Theodore Roosevelt’s maneuvers in foreign policy. Its caricatures decried Mississippi governor James K. Vardaman’s advocacy of lynching. Its illustrations reduced Thomas Dixon Jr., author of the racist tract The Clansman (1905), to a bestial “snake in the grass.” In the same issue in which Adams mused about the truth value of cartoons, the magazine printed three of Adams’s images, including a rendering of an African American matron, accompanying a line of Dunbar’s verse (figure 9.10). The matron beams with sentient intelligence and eschews conventional signifiers such as corncob pipes, jolly chuckles at “massa’s” jokes, and unthinking subservience. She strikingly contrasts with Kemble’s somnambulant mammy (figure 9.4). She does not permit whites to impose minstrel masks or passivity on her but demonstrates blacks authorizing written and visual imagery. Adams’s image helps initiate a tradition of “counter-caricature,” an appropriation of Dunbar’s work, not for cartoons of Kemble’s ilk, but for a new and proudly black artistic tradition. “The time ha[d] come” for black art for black literature—six months too late for Dunbar. Dunbar’s folk exhibit the marks of his rhetorical ploys to outstrip Kemble’s caricatures, in part because too few contemporary African American caricaturists were empowered to leave their own mark on Dunbar’s work. On the one hand, his publishers believed that the visual authorization of artists like Kemble was needed to market an African American comic aesthetic successfully. On the other hand, Dunbar, who clearly did not need these caricatures to succeed, began in these stories to prove his illustrator and white Graphic Illustration in Dunbar’s Short Fiction 135 publishing establishment wrong. Kemble’s images originated in a tradition of white authenticating documents for black literature; they have survived into a time that instead inspires counter-caricature, a visual...