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The Power of Christmas in the Literature of Dunbar 149 initially appear to reinforce the untruth that African Americans were content when enslaved. But ’Liza Ann’s nostalgia for the “feast-days,” themselves a recreation of past traditions, is partly due to the expense of food in the city, and the story quickly shows the irony in her “tears of memory and longing” after she hears through the window a man’s voice singing “The Old Folks at Home,” with lines such as “Still longing for the old plantation, / An’ for the old folks at home.”89 By the time ’Liza Ann hears the voice again singing at the end of the story, she has learned a hard lesson about the forms of unfreedom experienced by African Americans at the turn of the century, a reminder of how much more changewasstillneededtoredresseconomicandsocialinjustices.OnChristmas Eve’s day, Jimmy, who sells newspapers on the streets of New York, is arrested by a police officer for penny gambling and jailed. The new forms of oppression faced by the mother and son are reminiscent of situations faced under slavery. With the unhappy ending, the tale subverts conventions of Christmas stories. Because “Her Christmas treasure[,] added to what Jimmy had, paid his fine,” the price to get Jimmy out of jail is reminiscent of costs to liberate the enslaved from their masters a half century prior, as well as the system of peonage, under which African Americans who could not pay fines for crimes for which they were convicted were incarcerated.90 The true meaning of Christmas is dishonored in such a world. The police sergeant alleges that the newsboys are gambling away the pennies tossed to them in charity, undermining the importance of benevolence.91 The judge refuses to show any leniency, though he has done so for others recently. Far from bringing justice, the judge gives a “stern lecture upon the evil of child-gambling” when the much larger evil is poverty: the mother and son retreat to a home with no coal, no fire, and almost no food.92 The injustice exposed in the story “An Old-Time Christmas” is symptomatic of the “new and more dastardly slavery” that Dunbar identifies in “The Fourth of July and Race Outrages.”93 In this 1903 article in the New York Times, Dunbar exposes the evils of lynchings in and beyond the southern states; of disenfranchisement, or the denial of voting rights through such means as poll taxes and literacy tests; and of “industrial prejudice,” which narrowed employment and economic opportunities for African Americans.94 Dunbar writes that “For the sake of reenslaving the Negro, the Constitution has been trampled under feet, the rights of man have been laughed out of court, and the justice of God has been made a jest and we celebrate.”95 The ironies of Independence Day had been revealed in Frederick Douglass’s 1852 lecture “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?” National holidays such as the Fourth of July and Christmas draw attention to political inequalities behind celebrations and to the insufficiency of changes since 1865. Between 150 Amy Cummins 1889 and 1932, more than 3,745 persons were lynched in the United States; in 1892 alone, 235 people were lynched, 155 of them African American. From 1901 to 1972, there were no African Americans representing the South in the United States Congress. Dunbar uses the phrase “new slavery” in a poem describing conditions at the turn of the century. Addressing the South and accusing the entire nation of being complicit in the perpetuation of inequalities, Dunbar’s long poem “To the South, on Its New Slavery” from Lyrics of Love and Laughter (1903) insists that “not for this, a nation’s heroes bled.”96 Dunbar castigates the “newer bondage and this deeper shame” of miseries such as the “crime” of a workingman made “almost too brutish to deplore his plight.”97 This degradation, distinct from the absence of freedom under chattel slavery, denies the full humanity of the African American as citizen, worker, and neighbor. Christmas was an entry point for Dunbar’s social criticism. He evokes the historical reality of winter holidays for enslaved persons as a short interval of illusory cheer and liberty, in the light of impending sales and hiring out of slaves on New Year’s Day, and he reveals that the true meaning of Christmas is dishonored by slavery and white supremacy. Dunbar’s literature exposes the enduring history and repercussions of...

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