"One Important Witness": Remembering Lydia Brown in Thomas Dixon's The Clansman

One important witness has not yet been heard from.¹

The emancipation of the Negro race came about at the entrance to that which has been aptly termed the Woman's century . . .²

Hundreds of such cases might be cited, but enough have been given to prove the assertion that there are white women in the South who love an Afro-American's company even as there are white men notorious for their preference for Afro-American women.³

It may seem surprising to begin an essay on Thomas Dixon's 1905 bestseller The Clansman with epigraphs by three female African American authors, contemporaneous with his novel: Anna Julia Cooper, Mrs. N. F. Mossell, and Ida B. Wells-Barnett. Surely, many current scholars read the plot of The Clansman as simple and racist⁴—so much so that the activist work and political writings of African American women should have no context within Dixon's self-proclaimed accounts of the historical enactment of Reconstruction and of "the true story of the 'Ku Klux Klan Conspiracy.'"⁵ Seemingly inspired by the racial paranoia that tormented early twentieth-century America, the text prides itself upon the narratives of miscegenation and lynching that inspire the textual climax: the alleged rape of Marion Lenoir by former slave, Gus, and the attempted rape of Elsie Stoneman by "mulatto" activist, Silas Lynch. The story finds its redemption when these miscegenous attempts are thwarted by the Ku Klux Klan. As a consequence, the story ends with the triumphant lynching of Gus and ultimately the preservation of southern womanhood.

Nonetheless, I begin with these epigraphs because Dixon, as he "preserve[s] in this romance both the letter and the spirit of this remarkable period," seems to engage textually with each.⁶ Dixon's version of the "chaos of blind passion that followed Lincoln's assassination" is mobilized in part by the confluence of a raced and feminized domesticity with a white, politicized masculinity. The deployment of this domesticity recognizes the discourses that seek to mobilize politically the home space and the domestic agency of black women as mothers and wives. During the first half of this "historical romance," Dixon writes of a home space that is inhabited by Radical Republican, Austin Stoneman, and his servant who is described as "a mulatto, a woman of extraordinary animal beauty and the fiery temper of a leopardess."⁷ Though the narrative voice leaves no clues about her significance as of yet, the effects of her domesticity become realized when the South loses political power yet again to the Reconstruction Acts. This domesticity emerges as it confronts Dixon's imagined history. As such, Stoneman's housekeeper becomes the witness to and enabler of this version of American history.

It is in this way that Cooper's words call forth her important witness, the black woman, to testify to the existence of a racial and gender conflict and to the domestic authority of womanhood. There appears also a black woman who operates textually as an important, literal witness and catalyst to the movement of Dixon's plot. Additionally, the final epigraph from Ida B. Wells-Barnett recognizes the reality of a miscegenous preference that ultimately underscores much of Dixon's text. According to Wells-Barnett, this preference is more often a white man's attraction to a black woman even though the social anxiety is directed toward relations between white women and black men. Though Dixon never explicitly names the relationship between Stoneman and his "mulatto" housekeeper, it is clear that there is a sexualized tension that underscores their relationship. Their relationship frames the political actions that mobilize the passage of the Reconstruction Acts, which in turn continues the conflict between northern and southern legislators.

Moreover, Dixon's emphasis upon the historical accuracy and his claim to "have merely changed their names ['historical figures'] without taking a liberty with any essential historic fact" suggests that there is a textual awareness of the social transactions and political engagements of actual figures. His use of the pamphlet name Southern Atrocities (a possible revision of Ida B. Wells-Barnett...