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3 Between the Wars:The Genteel Novel, Counterstereotypes, and Initial Probes
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c h a p t e r 3 Between the Wars The Genteel Novel, Counterstereotypes, and Initial Probes RELIGION, ROMANCE, AND RACE Before the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s only the folk seem to have made anything of the violent side of black life. Black novelists avoided the subjects of intrablack violence and the violent man. The four novels known to have been written by blacks before Emancipation—William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or The President ’s Daughter (1853), Martin Delany’s Blake; or The Huts of America (1859– 62), Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends(1857), and HarrietE. Wilson’s “Our Nig”; or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859)—were far more concerned with violence done to blacks by whites than with that which they did to each other. As for sheer violence, Brown and Delany depict a good deal of whipping and Brown recounts the horri¤c burning of a slave at the stake. At the heart of Webb’s novel, a race riot erupts in Philadelphia when a mob of unruly Irish immigrants , egged on by an envious white real estate lawyer, attacks a group of upright and stalwart blacks who give as good as they get in protecting their own. And in “Our Nig” the strident, hateful shrew of a New England mistress works the black heroine from dawn to night and beats her repeatedly when the girl displeases her. Similarly, the authors of the antebellum slave narratives focused upon interracial rather than intraracial violence, with slaveowners and their deputies turning the lash into a ¤endish instrument of abuse and employing everything from sharp ¤ngernails to bon¤res for torturing, maiming, and killing disobedient slaves. But there is little mention of blacks attacking each other. 26 | “BORN IN A MIGHTY BAD LAND” William Wells Brown presents the ¤rst ¤ctionalization of Nat Turner’s revolt in his ¤rst version of Clotel; or The President’s Daughter (1853), but Nat receives only a couple of pages and is a distinctively minor note in the main story, about Clotel and her daughter. Brown comes close to a depiction of the violent “bad nigger” in Nat Turner’s lieutenant, the ¤ctional bloodthirsty Picquilo. He is a “full-blooded Negro,” an African prince enslaved by whites, treasuring his home-made sword and drenching “his hands in the blood of all the whites he could meet.” But Picquilo is more an “avenger” than a “bad nigger,” for he uses Nat’s liberation crusade to retaliate against whites as an equal. As African royalty , he does not need to assert his self-respect.1 Martin Delany’s Henry Blake, in the course of his failed attempt to arouse the southern slaves to rebellion, kills a pack of slave-chasing bloodhounds, a cruel black overseer, and a white cracker who attempts to capture him. But Blake is far too aristocratic (and political) to bear any resemblance to the conventional badman.2 In the sixty-six years between the appearance of the last known chapter of Blake in 1862 and Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem (1928), some eighty or so novels were published by African Americans, and of these just three depict intrablack violence. Oddly, when 90 percent of African Americans still lived a rural life in the South, the violence of all three was set in northern cities.3 There are plenty of reasons so few novelists wrote of intraracial violence or of the badmen who committed it in these years. For one thing, not many blacks could read and write well enough to produce a novel, and those who could tended to gravitate toward the city. For another, the class to which literate blacks belonged had its own interests and agenda, and by and large those did not include exploring the black demimonde. The concerns this group expressed in its novels were enormously various. Half of the eighty works I refer to defy all classifying. They are eccentric and individualistic, and show little storytelling ability or understanding of novelistic technique. This is perfectly understandable, since most of these writers were not novelists as we understand the term, but earnest advocates of racial uplift, active in organizations working to educate lower-class African Americans and advance the fortunes of the race, or just people with a single story to tell. Writing a novel or two for them was a way of carrying out their agenda. Mrs. A. E. Johnson, for example, the wife of the Reverend Harvey...