Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

4. Blood and the Mark of Class: Pauline Hopkins’s Genealogies of Status

105 4 blood and the mark of class Pauline Hopkins’s Genealogies of Status The reason we are held in so low esteem by the world is due not so much to our poverty nor our previous condition either as to the fact that the world knows little about any other than the lowest class of Negroes. . . . if we cannot bring our best people into contact with the world socially, then let us talk to the world from printed pages. Let us develop a race literature; let us give to the world some of the grand thoughts, noble sentiments, profound feelings which go to make up the subjective life of the high-type Negro, than whom there is no truer aristocrat, no more gallant gentleman, no keener scholar in all the world. —Common Sense, column in the Christian Recorder, 1889 Writing in the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder on January 31, 1889, a contributor argues that African American literature needed to increase the public visibility of the “high-type Negro” as distinguished from the black “lowest class.” Taking the pseudonym “Common Sense” to recommend his or her approach as pragmatic, the unidentified columnist envisions “race literature” as a proxy that can circulate beyond the color line that bars black Americans; their words, in bold black letters slashed across the white page, ideally could speak for the race by infiltrating spaces and places where racially determined black bodies remained unwelcome. As outwardly facing propaganda, race literature could refute notions of black inferiority by representing “high-type” African Americans’ class attainments and respectability. But apart from informing “the world,” race literature also had a social purpose within African American communities: to present a mirror for the “best people” to authenticate themselves against poseurs. As Common Sense adds, “A parvenu with wealth, who tries with money to 106 dividing lines make up for a lack of gentility, who seeks to hide his vulgarity behind robes of costly stuff, is about as contemptible an object as one might wish to see” (“Don’t You Lazy Fellows,” 4). While invalidating wealth and apparel as faulty, external signs of class, the writer instead locates class onto and into the body, displayed in traits of intelligence and gentility assumed to be essentialized. By using “type,” as in “high-type Negro,” as nearly interchangeable with “class” throughout the essay, Common Sense’s observations about intraracial stratification share in the concurrent late nineteenth-century discourse of classification. In fields ranging from biology to political economy and sociology, intellectuals classified humans into groups and analyzed how such groups came into being, whether through environmental conditions, genetics, personal agency, or some combination of them all. In Common Sense’s terms, “high-type Negroes” constitute not only an economic class but also a biological type whose gentility is inimitable by parvenus. Turn-of-the-century novelist Pauline Hopkins shares Common Sense’s prerogatives for race literature to highlight African Americans’ “high-type” character. Echoing the language of Common Sense’s 1889 appeal more than a decade later, Hopkins prefaces her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), with a call for new fiction to intervene in the public representation of black Americans: “No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro” (14, original emphasis). According to critic John Gruesser, Hopkins’s fiction, and her serialized novel Of One Blood (1902–3) in particular, contributes to race literature by offering “an Afrocentric Fantasy for a Black Middle Class Audience” (Gruesser, “Pauline Hopkins’ Of One Blood,” 74). In focusing his essay on the Afrocentric and fantastical plot elements of Hopkins’s novel, however, Gruesser delves less into the latter part of his observation— that Hopkins writes for the tastes of a “black middle class audience.” Yet rather than accepting the middle-class status of Hopkins’s audience as a settled or secondary matter, I want to contemplate how the author contributes to the literary formation of a class that, as Common Sense perceives , needed to look to African American literature for a sense of its boundaries, responsibility, and authenticity relative to the “lower class” and “parvenus.” For detractors who would misclassify the “high-type Negro” by disregarding intraracial distinctions, Hopkins’s novels Contending Forces and Of One Blood trace the biological and social formation of the black blood and the mark of class 107 middle class...