The Slave's Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature

3. Reverse Abolitionism and Black Popular Resistance: The Marrow of Tradition

50 3 Reverse Abolitionism and Black Popular Resistance The Marrow of Tradition Nikki Giovanni describes Charles Chesnutt as “the zero” figure in African American fiction because his novel The Marrow of Tradition repudiates popular conventions of representing black characters in nineteenth-century American writing. Some of the leading characters gently defy attempts to subordinate them without a legitimate warrant. A few others are outright belligerent in their protest. Giovanni, herself an accomplished poet and maker of symbolic images, measures the literary significance of Chesnutt’s novel by the daring actions of these characters: “The old mammy dies in the [race] riot. The Black folks fight back. The crackers are milling around smoking their cigars, deciding which Black folks will have to die, while we are preparing for a siege” (104). Chesnutt, Giovanni believes, paid a very steep price for his audacity because the vicious backlash provoked by his innovative characterization snuffed out his fledgling fame. Of course, things are not as straightforward as Giovanni’s reading suggests: not all victims of the “race” riot morally deserve suffering or dying, and the plot resolution raises conundrums rather than state a clear stance on racial nationalist militancy. Nonetheless, Giovanni’s spirited endorsement of the novel reflects the just Adeeko, Slave's Rebelion 5/5/05 3:56 PM Page 50 satisfaction a sympathetic reader can derive from the willful counter-violence of the slaving classes against their tormentors. Chesnutt’s story demonstrates that after Emancipation the character of the relationship between the slaving class and the master class takes on radically new guises, at least in theory. In the American Reconstruction context of the story, the new “master” class includes descendants of slaves who have taken advantage of the political and economic advancement avenues opened up by Emancipation. In this milieu, because older definitions of “slavery” and “mastery” fail to apply exactly, they become materials for metaphor making . In Marrow, white supremacists cast themselves as “slaves.” The consequence of the steady ideological and socioeconomic changes going on in the American southern Reconstruction society is marked most visibly in Marrow in the defeat of the Democratic Party in statewide elections by the Fusion alliance consisting of Republicans, Populists, and the black voting bloc. To regain power, leaders of the Democratic Party invent an abolitionist discourse to mobilize white racialist sentiments against the ruling alliance . Using the fear-inducing slogan of “nigger domination,” this discourse portrays white people as victims of a racial social structure that must be razed so as to make room for the reemergence of the natural order of things. Chesnutt ’s main plot narrates the tragic consequences of the inabilities of the emergent black bourgeoisie in Wellington, a fictional North Carolina town clearly modeled on Wilmington, to formulate an adequate response to the black inferiority (which is also a white supremacy) campaign. To many literary critics, the referential parallels between key events in the novel and the 1898 Wilmington race riot make the story a historical fiction.1 I want to locate the significance of Chesnutt’s observations not in the relationship of the content of the story to actualities contemporary to the time the novel was published but in the way its reinterpretation of the values of subaltern protests reflects the fundamental sociopolitical changes going on in the country as a whole. In historical slave societies, Chesnutt shows, postEmancipation developments complicate the meaning of identities inherited from the old relations of slave and master. Since political struggles in this era of “universal” freedom are not aimed at bringing about a new “heaven” and a new “earth,” terms based on the relations of “Lordship” and “Bondage” function mainly as metaphors. Marrow is different from American antebellum stories of political rebellion in the crucial respect that the revolt occurs onshore. But that is not even the most striking feature of the story. Compared to the novels discussed in the last chapter, the oddest feature of this novel is that bourgeois white supremacists mobilize support for their cause by speaking and acting like black antebellum abolitionists seeking to free themselves from bondage. In their reverse abolitionism and black popular resistance 51 Adeeko, Slave's Rebelion 5/5/05 3:56 PM Page 51 war of “liberation” (against black Emancipation), well-placed white men plot, without any self-conscious sense of irony, to free their city by destroying black professionals and by compelling working-class blacks...