The Negro in American Fiction
9781465684066
213 pages
Library of Alexandria
Overview
The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice. Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters. I swear their nature is beyond my comprehension. A strange people!—merry ’mid their misery—laughing through their tears, like the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they! They tread life’s path as if ’twere strewn with roses devoid of thorns, and make the most of life with natures of sunshine and song. Most American readers would take this to refer to the Negro, but it was spoken of the Irish, in a play dealing with one of the most desperate periods of Ireland’s tragic history. The Jew has been treated similarly by his persecutors. The African, and especially the South African native, is now receiving substantially the same treatment as the American Negro. Literature dealing with the peasant and the working class has, until recently, conformed to a similar pattern. The blind men gathered about the elephant. Each one felt the part of the elephant’s anatomy closest to him, the trunk, tusk, eyes, ear, hoof, hide and tail. Then each became an authority on the elephant. The elephant was all trunk, or all hoof or all hide, or all tail. So ran their separate truths. The single truth was that all were blind. This fable, pertinent to our study, might be continued to tell how some of the blind men returned to their kingdoms of the blind where it was advantageous to believe that the elephant was all trunk or tusk. We shall see in this study how stereotypes—that the Negro is all this, that, or the other—have evolved at the dictates of social policy. When slavery was being attacked, for instance, southern authors countered with the contented slave; when cruelties were mentioned, they dragged forward the comical and happy hearted Negro. Admittedly wrong for white people, slavery was represented as a boon for Negroes, on theological, biological, psychological warrant. Since Negroes were of “peculiar endowment,” slavery could not hurt them, although, inconsistently, it was their punishment, since they were cursed of God. A corollary was the wretched freedman, a fish out of water. In Reconstruction, when threatened with such dire fate as Negroes’ voting, going to school, and working for themselves (i.e., Negro domination), southern authors added the stereotype of the brute Negro. Even today much social policy demands that slavery be shown as blessed and fitting, and the Negro as ludicrously ignorant of his own best good.
