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Contending Forces of the Slave Past
- University of Georgia Press
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ContendingForcesoftheSlavePast T he engraving of the whipping scene at the beginning of Contending Forces (1900) offers an excellent opening for a discussion of Pauline Hopkins’s fiction. In addition to the contrast between the female victim and the two male torturers, there is a subtle play of colors in this black-and-white engraving. The whiteness of the woman on the floor stands out in contrast to the dark attire of the man looking down upon her, while the white shirt and trousers of the man occupied with the whip are repeated by the white color of the whipping post and the trunks of the trees in the background. The only horizontal figure in the picture is that of the woman, and this horizontal line is also reflected in the snakelike curling of the whip. The scene reveals, literally in black and white, Hopkins’s concern with the contending forces—political and social—of the slave past. The whipping of Grace Montfort—and her powerlessness as a victim— must be seen as representing slavery in all its cruelty, and it forcefully refutes any historiography of the plantation past as an idyll of benevolent master and contented slave. According to Richard Brodhead’s study of corporal punishment in antebellum America, whipping is the central image of slavery. Brodhead points out the “embodiedness of whipping” and “the perfect asymmetry of power expressed in the whipping scenario” (14). Depictions of scenes of lynching take up the role of whipping in the period after the Civil War. Jerry Bryant calls lynching the “synecdochal image of the post-Reconstruction condition of the freedperson” (76). Hopkins was clearly aware of the power such images had in the popular mind. In her preface to Contending Forces, she contends: “The atrocity of the acts committed one hundred years ago are duplicated today, when slavery is supposed no longer to exist” (15). More than any of the other novels, Contending Forces shows the continuing concern with the past in a respectable middle-class African American family representative of Hopkins’s Boston. The choice of character, setting, and political content reflects the author’s deeply felt need to explain the present, especially the terror of mob violence, as a product of the past. The decidedly 155 156 Negotiations in Literature middle-class home, the role of women combining homemaking with race work, and the emphasis on the political speeches of the main male characters reflect Hopkins’s general passion for negotiations in gender, race, and class that is also evident in her journalism. The novel’s opening in 1790 on the island of Bermuda illuminates the international dimension of slavery. The well-meaning but naïve slaveholder Charles Montfort decides to transfer his entire estate with family and slaves to the United States to escape the imminent abolition of slavery on the island. Although the narrative voice does not condone slavery in the West Indies, it puts it into perspective by comparing it to the exceptionally cruel and harsh form of slavery in America. On the day that Charles Montfort lands on Pamlico Sound near Newbern, North Carolina, this side of slavery is personified in the novel’s archvillain, Anson Pollock, and the two scoundrels, the burly Bill Sampson and the cruel Hank Davis. They are jealous of the wealth of the family and spread the rumor that Grace Montfort, Charles’s beautiful wife, possesses black blood. Throughout the novel, however, the real racial background of Grace and Charles is never revealed. It is the rumor that matters, not the real drop of black blood. Both Bill and Hank are poor whites working as overseers and slave traders. They are uneducated and possess no ameliorating character traits. Yet the system of slavery gives them the power to satisfy their vile intentions, while all the refinement and gentle instincts of the Montfort family do not save them from their tragic end. Anson Pollock, who has sold his land to Montfort, is suave, educated, and handsome but thoroughly evil. Being the widower of a wife who died under mysterious circumstances, he develops an “unlawful love” for the beautiful Grace (45). He masterminds the burning down of the Montfort house and the killing of Charles Montfort and enslaves their young sons, Charles and Jesse. When the tragic events take their inevitable course, we see that the system of slavery has engendered corruption, greed, unlawful passion, cruelty, and inhumanity. The “Committee,” a Ku Klux Klan–like association, is presented...