Hemingway, Race, and Art: Bloodlines and the Color Line

Chapter Four: Killin’ ’Em with Kindness: Hemingway’s Racial Recognition in “The Porter”

| 91 Be not deceived, for every deed you do I could match—out­match. —Claude McKay, “To the White Fiends” I want you to overcome ’em with “yeses,” undermine ’em with grins, agree ’em to death and destruction, let ’em swoller you till they vomit or bust wide open. —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man Ernest Hemingway had seen the world in shades of black and white long before his first African adventures of 1933–34. As a boy, he’d dreamed of following in the footsteps of Theodore Roosevelt on a trek to the African continent. A few years later, he had watched with great interest as a young African American boxer named Jack Johnson captured America’s heavyweight crown and forever rewrote the rules of the (race) game. Not long afterward, and perhaps with great anxiety, he watched as his beloved city, in the still-new century, experienced one of the nation’s worst race riots to date. As a social realist of sorts, and as a young white man, Hemingway imbibed and, in some sense, wrote what he saw. What he saw was a changing American sociological landscape and the unsettling of a nation; what he wrote were stories brimming with that tension. His black-and-white stories demonstrate this beautifully, and “The Battler” and “The Light of the World” work as wonderful precursors to what we find in one of Hemingway’s least-known works. “The Porter” brings us one step closer to the nightmarish maelstrom plaguing white America’s collective imagination during those first formative years of the twentieth century, when whiteness and blackness collided and racial chapter four Killin’ ’Em with Kindness Hemingway’s Racial Recognition in “The Porter” 92 | hemingway, race, and art definitions conflated. Hemingway’s piece about a young white boy, his father, and the African American porter who serves them on an overnight train trip is an exploration of twentieth-century American race relations. Hemingway gives us few character details, very little plot, and a narrative that is deceptively simple: a father and son ride the rails together, unaccompanied by wife, mother, or siblings, without a specified destination, and without, it seems, much of a bond between them. We learn little about any of the primary characters . However, that fact only works to underscore the author’s overall intentions in this segment: to illuminate the world in which they live. Hemingway pushes the reader, initially, to see the world through the young boy’s eyes, through the bifurcated lens of racial stereotype; but then, through the skillful handiwork of the black porter, the reader soon recognizes that that lens is imperfect—faulty even—and that notions of white supremacy and the line separating the races are illusions. Befriending the young boy—whose name is the only one the author does not withhold—and temporarily acting as his custodian while the father sleeps is the train’s primary porter. In the father’s absence, he has the boy join him on his rounds as he visits with the train’s staff; he then proceeds to give the boy a mini-lesson in razor fighting between his assigned duties. So ends the fragmentary tale. This apparent absence of plot point forces the reader into an existential posture, to make something from (apparently) nothing. But, with his iceberg principle squarely in mind, Hemingway gives us so much more than what this bare-bones plot suggests. In “The Porter,” Ernest Hemingway pushes us to the razor’s edge—of race war—before skillfully pulling back from the color line and demonstrating its illusory nature (see Strong, Race and Identity).1 Through the exchange between a young white boy and a black Pullman porter , Hemingway dissects the complexities of identity, demonstrates his belief in the socially constructed nature of race, and explores the seething violence that both works to maintain and threatens to erase America’s color line. Surprisingly, over the past two decades, the fragment has garnered very little critical attention. While Hemingway scholarship is rife with critical analysis of Uncle George from the Nick Adams stories, virtually nothing exists on Hemingway’s other George character, his other “uncle” figure. Initially conceived as part of a novel that Hemingway never finished, “The Porter” was finally published in 1987, some twenty years after the author’s death, as part of The Complete Short Stories of Ernest Hemingway.2 Like The Garden of Eden and a handful of other unfinished pieces, this one does not come with [3...