Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860-1930 (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

RACE, WORK, AND DESIRE IN A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E , 1860–1930 Race, Work, and Desire analyzes literary repre...

Author: Michele Birnbaum

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RACE, WORK, AND DESIRE IN A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E , 1860–1930

Race, Work, and Desire analyzes literary representations of work relationships across the color-line from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century. Michele Birnbaum examines interracial bonds in fiction and literary correspondence by black and white authors and artists – including Elizabeth Keckley, Frances E. W. Harper, W. D. Howells, Grace King, Kate Chopin, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten – exploring the way servants and employers, doctors and patients, and patrons and artists negotiate their racial differences for artistic and political ends. Situating these relationships in literary and cultural context, Birnbaum argues that the literature reveals the complexity of crossracial relations in the workplace, which, although often represented as an oasis of racial harmony, is in fact the very site where race politics are most fiercely engaged. This study productively complicates current debates about crossracial collaboration in American literary and race studies, and will be of interest to scholars in both literary and cultural studies. m i c h e le b ir n b au m is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of Puget Sound, where she has also served as Director of Women’s Studies. She is currently a Hewlett Fellow at the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University. Her work has appeared in journals such as American Literature and African American Review, as well as in several edited collections of essays on race and culture in the United States.

c a m b r idg e s tudies in amer ican l i teratu re and c u ltu re Editor Ross Posnock, New York University Founding editor Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Advisory board Sacvan Bercovitch, Harvard University Ronald Bush, St. John’s College, Oxford University Wai Chee Dimock, Yale University Albert Gelpi, Stanford University Gordon Hutner, University of Kentucky Walter Benn Michaels, University of Illinois, Chicago Kenneth Warren, University of Chicago Recent books in this series

137 ric h a rd g rus in Culture, Technology and the Creation of America’s National Parks 136 ra l ph bauer The Cultural Geography of Colonial American Literatures: Empire, Travel, Modernity 135 m a ry esteve The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature 134 pet er s toneley Consumerism and American Girl’s Literature, 1860–1940 133 eri c h a rals on Henry James and Queer Modernity 132 w il l ia m r. handley Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West 131 w il l ia m s olomon Literature, Amusement and Technology in the Great Depression 130 paul dow nes Democracy, Revolution and Monarchism in Early Modern American Literature 129 a n drew taylor Henry James and the Father Question 128 g reg g d. cr ane Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature 127 pet er g ibian Oliver Wendell Holmes and the Culture of Conversation 126 ph i l l i p bar r is h American Literary Realism, Critical Theory and Intellectual Prestige 1880–1995 125 rac h el b l au dup les s is Genders, Races and Religious Cultures in Modern American Poetry, 1908–1934 124 k evin j . hayes Poe and the Printed Word 123 j effrey a. hammond The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study 122 c a ro l i n e dores k i Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric and the Public Sphere

RACE, WORK, AND DESIRE IN A M E R I C A N L I T E R AT U R E , 1860–1930 MICHELE BIRNBAUM

p u b l i s h e d by t h e p re s s s y n d i c at e o f t h e u n i ve r s i t y o f c a m b r i d g e The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom c a m b r i d g e u n i ve r s i t y p re s s The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge, cb2 2ru, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, ny 10011–4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, vic 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org C Michele Birnbaum 2003

This book is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 2003 Printed in the United Kingdom at the University Press, Cambridge Typeface Adobe Garamond 11/12.5 pt.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Birnbaum, Michele. Race, Work, and Desire in American Literature, 1860–1930 / Michele Birnbaum. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0 521 82425 7 1. American literature – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Race in literature. 3. American literature – 19th century – History and criticism. 4. Interpersonal relations in literature. 5. African Americans in literature. 6. Race relations in literature. 7. Friendship in literature. 8. Whites in literature. 9. Desire in literature. 10. Work in literature. I. Title. ps228.r32b57 2003 810.9 355 – dc21 2003043934 isbn 0 521 82425 7 hardback

This book is dedicated to my sweet and marvelous daughter, Claire Elise

Contents

List of illustrations Acknowledgments

page viii ix

Introduction: working relations and racial desire

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1 Dressing down the First Lady: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind The Scenes, Or Thirty Years A Slave And Four Years In The White House

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2 Off-color patients in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells’s An Imperative Duty

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3 “Alien hands” in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

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4 “For blood that is not yours”: Langston Hughes and the art of patronage

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Epilogue: “co-workers in the kingdom of culture” Notes Index

146 152 191

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Illustrations

1. Kara Walker. Detail from ‘Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K. E. B. Walker, Colored’, 1997. Cut paper and adhesive on wall. Complete installation 12 × 155 feet. Courtesy Brent Sikkema, New York City. 2. “William Dean Howells: Demonstrator of the American Girl” (Tidbits, May 1, 1886). With permission from the General Research Division, The New York Public Library; Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations. 3. Untitled charcoal sketch of Langston Hughes by Amy Spingarn. With permission from the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Yale University.

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page 2

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Acknowledgments

This work could not have been completed without both institutional and personal support. A National Endowment for the Humanities summer grant and a fellowship to the Dartmouth School of Criticism and Theory allowed me time to develop the early ideas for this work, and a Hewlett Fellowship at the Research Institute of the Center for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University provided a stimulating environment at the conclusion of the project. I would like to extend particular gratitude to the University of Puget Sound for ongoing and generous research support. Thanks to Holly Jones, Theresa Duhart, and Maurice Davis for technical support. A version of Chapter Three is published as “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race,” in American Literature 66 (June 1994), 301– 23, and reprinted in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from “Oroonoko” to Anita Hill, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Michael Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). A version of Chapter Four has appeared as “Racial Hysteria: Female Pathology and Race Politics in Frances Harper’s Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells’s An Imperative Duty,” in African American Review 33 (Spring 1999), 7–23. Thanks to Johnnella Butler, Terry Cooney, Cathy N. Davidson, Shelly Eversley, Sander L. Gilman, W. J. Hardiman, Priti Joshi, Amy Kaplan, Lisa Marcus, Dana Nelson, Hans Ostrom, Ross Posnock, Hortense J. Spillers, Paul C. Taylor, and Kenneth Warren, for support and/or suggestions on various parts and versions of the manuscript. I am also very thankful for the telephone conversations with and written correspondence from Amy Spingarn’s daughter, Honor Tranum, who, calling and writing from her residence in the Virgin Islands, was always helpful and forthcoming. The artist Jacob Lawrence passed away before the completion of this book, but I would like also to note gratitude to him for kindly granting me two lengthy telephone interviews in 1997 from his home in Seattle, and for his warm interest in and support of this project. I am indebted also to another artist, ix

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Acknowledgments

Kara Walker, for her very generous permission to allow me to reprint the image that opens this book. I must also acknowledge the late Jadine Davis Harper, who will always remain a living presence and inspiration for me. My parents, Sarah Michele and Mark David Birnbaum, gave me both freedom and opportunity, and I thank them most especially for all the blessings they have brought me. For his intellectual generosity and insight, Harry J. Elam, Jr. deserves my deepest gratitude. Our extended conversations brought the edge of excitement and play into the writing and thinking of this book for me. As both a collegial and challenging audience he reminded me that writing, at its most fulfilling, is a social act, and that it is in the exchange of our ideas that they come most alive. His daily support came in forms both spiritual and practical and they were of immeasurable importance in bringing Race, Work, and Desire to fulfillment.


“How can this image contain for you all the secrets of the re-enactment of history in the arena of Desire?” Kara Walker1

history in the arena of desire In a 1997 exhibition of Kara Walker’s black-paper silhouettes, one of the lifesize cutouts features a woman leaping joyfully through a field (see Figure 1). Antebellum dress billowing, body aloft in the stylized abandon of dance, the woman seems a picture of innocent pleasure. Yet the graceful lift of one arm directs us to the decapitated head perched atop her own like a trophy. We come belatedly to the realization that the image is not sentimental but gothic, the postponement of horror made possible by the way the head’s shape and significance emerge slowly, reluctantly, out of our disbelief. Its meaning arises as from a Rorschach blot, the head assuming all sorts of shapes – the figurehead of a ship’s prow or an elaborate bonnet. Or perhaps, most convincingly, it seems to bloom like a strange flower from the woman below it, her own head nodding gently under the deadweight of the other’s, precisely as the grass stalks at her feet bow under the heavy pods topping them. With the organic symmetry between plant and person, Walker naturalizes a most unnatural sight: decapitation seems as ordinary and inevitable as grass gone to seed. This kind of subtle aesthetic conspiracy invites us to forget for a moment the violence necessarily preceding the dismemberment – for who gives up one’s head willingly? Or should we ask: what, perhaps, had the woman who lost her head done to warrant losing it? In short: on whose head rests the burden of violence? Walker’s silhouette begs such questions about the how and why of this racial parting of ways. But it also, even in this image of violence’s aftermath, suggests the centripetal as well as centrifugal forces of interracial intimacy. Because the profiles are both silhouetted black (even as only one woman 1

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Race, Work, and Desire

Figure 1 Kara Walker. Detail from ‘Presenting Negro Scenes Drawn Upon My Passage Through the South and Reconfigured for the Benefit of Enlightened Audiences Wherever Such May Be Found, By Myself, Missus K. E. B. Walker, Colored’, 1997. Cut paper and adhesive on wall. Complete installation 12 × 155 feet. Courtesy Brent Sikkema, New York City.

appears phenotypically “black”), the image creates the illusion of corporeal continuity between the two women – we cannot tell where one body begins and the other leaves off; they are yoked as one black image laid against, in both spacial and political senses of the word, an almost oppressively boundless white backdrop. Yet these women are clearly sisters neither in body nor in spirit. The seamless blending of their bodies works against what emerges in profile as their distinct racial identities: the thin lips and sharp nose of the dead woman imply she is white, the broad nose and


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full mouth of the leaping woman suggest she is black. But within the terms of the image, the validity of these visual cues is thrown into question even as they are thrown into relief, because they make sense only in context and by comparison: one woman’s nose looks “rounder” here only as much as the other woman’s looks “straighter,” and one appears white only as much as the other’s blackness seems apparent. In other words, we can describe one only in terms of the other – a kind of Heisenberg principle of race in which racial difference is situational, provisional: it depends on who is looking and who is next to whom. And, as I suggested, who and whom in this image are always already joined; black and white are mirror and tain. In effect, then, Walker’s profile both performs and burlesques racial profiling. Thus even as we attribute race to each woman, the act of attribution itself becomes questionable, reminding us that racial difference does not exist a priori, but arises out of the collision of expectation and circumstance – or, put another way, out of desire and history. So just how, in Walker’s terms, is history enacted in the arena of desire? In part, it is enacted in the way this individual portrait of raced identities also reveals, more generally, the historical face of race relations. That is, their specificity as women is not the sum of their relationship; we are invited to identify them further as “slavegirl” and “mistress,” and thus to place them among the racial types emerging from the literal prison and figurative prisms of slavery. We are familiar with the genre, its tropes, its working scripts: the white woman as a mistress of the Big House for whom the slave was forced to labor; the slavegirl, the probable object of not only abuse but lust and jealousy. The decapitation becomes the denouement of a narrative in which white mistresses and black slave women appear as generic characters in their working roles. Walker’s scene, therefore, is not simply a crisis of individual desire, the result of what one woman would or would not be to the other, needs and expectations requited or not – a so-called “crime of passion.” Desire and its discontents seem exclusively personal, a function of the affective and local rather than the political and historical, but this image of a black woman carrying a white woman’s head gains full significance only when understood as both emotional climax and historically significant gesture. In fact, we might consider history best represented as the accumulation not of dates but of acts of desire. Walker explains: “It’s as though the life of a living breathing moment were best suited to rearticulation via historical romances . . . beginning with slave narratives and abolitionists’ testimonies which established the cast of characters, and subsequently reduced all truths to a language best suited to the readers . . . Living

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becomes romance, History-adventure . . . the boundaries are drawn” (16). Racial history writ in the arena of desire means recognizing both that desire has a literary-historical context, and conversely, that the narration of history itself reflects a form of collective desire. In Walker’s image we see this latter sense of history – as a complex of social fantasy and desire – functioning both as reflective memory and as imaginative projection. Walker retrieves the history of race relations only to propose simultaneously a revised story. She resuscitates this antebellum plot in less obvious ways, as well: the image creates, and then plays on, audience reluctance to let go of the initial impression of the image as a black woman dancing in the field – the default preference for the pleasant rather than the painful replicates the pull of white nostalgia for the “happy darkie,” regardless of the racial identification of the audience. Arguably, then, audiences in this sense find themselves unwittingly, if only momentarily, drawn into the fantasies of the Old South. Yet even as Walker proposes the outlines of the historical relations of slave and mistress, she reverses the symbolic content filling in those lines. The reversal reminds us that this symbolic content consists of attributions of certain gender and class characteristics based on race, and through its reapportionment of those same racial characteristics, the image reminds us, too, of their arbitrariness. The fingertips exquisitely poised before the mistress’ still lips, for example, suggest the white woman is merely inhaling the delicate fragrance of her own living flesh. In that frozen moment the representative gesture of white refinement seems forever counterpoised to the careless motion of the black woman bounding beneath her, a classic bust of white composure apparently set against – and literally above – black animation. But, in fact, the sensitive touch belongs not to the white corpse but to the triumphant black woman. The historical signature of the white woman’s sex and superiority – her brow smooth and complacent, her countenance serene – marks only death’s rigor mortis. Instead it is the black woman here who owns the feminine grace and gentility considered the racial possession of her white mistress. As Hazel Carby and bell hooks have argued, the pedestal on which the white woman in the nineteenth century rests is balanced on the laboring backs of black women, and further, that “true womanhood” itself is determined by these work relations.2 Black and white women’s roles under slavery were structured both by the physical work they performed (or not) in relation to each other, and by the cultural work that each performed in determining gender itself. By fashioning the black woman as “wearing” her mistress’s head – the synecdoche of white women’s


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status – Walker reiterates these historical racial and sexual hierarchies only to creatively refigure them in her two-headed creature. The nineteenth-century popular culture that Walker’s art engages offers some curious precedents for this racial Hydra. Her image’s double head, for instance, is curiously akin to the double hips of the antebellum TopsyTurvy doll, which also give (mis)shape to the twinned desires of white and black. The doll is racially reversible: two girls joined at the crotch so that children could play with the stuffed “Dinah” or, if one flipped her skirt over, with her forbidden counterpart, the white “Miss.” Created within slave communities as a response to slaveholders’ ban on black children possessing “white” dolls, the paired forms of Topsy-Turvy offered a way of possessing and manipulating that which was denied – namely, the privileges and power associated with those they served.3 Ironically, in the postbellum era the Topsy-Turvy came to represent not an uncomfortable reminder of racial separatism but rather, for white collectors of Americana, a symbol of national unification. Its commercial success depended on the image of joined bodies as an idealized vision of interracial harmony. The symbols of racial desire, therefore, are not historically fixed, but rather continuously obliging, accommodating – even, as in this case, reversible. Race, Work, and Desire suggests that these and other fictions of close relations across the color-line are attempts to fulfill various narrative goals in writing the history of race relations. If we lift the skirt to peer at the seams of the Topsy-Turvy doll, at the knit and purl of black and white, we glimpse the obscene embodiment of highly racialized desires, what I would like to call more simply “racial desire.” Racial desire is that suspended – and thus perpetually renewable – moment of antipathy and attraction on the color-line that is at once personal and historical. This desire, arguably, is realized and acted out most forcefully in “intimate” relations, by which I mean one-on-one relations; it mimics and seems confined to the patterns and gestures of the purely personal. But such private moments do not exist unto themselves; they form part of a crowded gallery of black-white portraits in which mutual need and fascination cannot be explained merely in terms of domination and abjection. Ralph Ellison offers us an opening salvo and perhaps the most compelling language with which to explain white investment in blackness. Against their white backdrop, Walker’s silhouettes deepen to three-dimensionality, for example, suggesting the limitless black field of white fantasy and projection that, as Ellison put it, “forms the stage and the scene upon which and within which” the drama of “American life” is acted out.4 But the projectionists can be both white and black: racial desire is not only what

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George Frederickson has called the black image in the white mind nor what Mia Bay sees as the white image in the black mind,5 although this study is indebted to both their work. Neither does racial desire only concern the white “love” and “theft” of black expressivity or white “racial masquerade.”6 As I argue in this study, the racial desire at the core of Ellison’s American drama goes beyond both a black investment in whiteness – what Langston Hughes in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” critiqued as a will to whiteness – and white investment in blackness – what Toni Morrison identifies in Playing In The Dark as the “metaphors; summonings; rhetorical gestures of triumph, despair, and closure dependent upon the associative language of dread and love that accompanies blackness” for whites.7 Racial desire, as intended here, is not pathological, psychological, or unilateral but instead, as I will explain, is a tandem negotiation of the historical differentials informing black-white affective relations. racial desire in the workpl ace Part of my rationale for selecting texts that represent some form of working relation across the races is based on the fact that racial desire arises perhaps most frequently, if almost counterintuitively, in the context of work relations. The races share the most extended and close contact – routine, cumulative, mundane – in the workplace. Just as early nineteenth-century black wet-nursing of white babies or black domestics’ washing and dressing white persons involved an extreme familiarity that was also nonetheless predicated on racial distance, so the postbellum workplace can create a familiar “intimacy” of sorts that paradoxically both collapses and sustains racial dissociation. A New York Times 2000 front-page series on late twentieth-century race relations makes a case for this focus on working relations that I would argue can and should be applied much earlier in the century: “Race relations are being defined less by political action than by daily experience, in schools, in sports arenas, in pop culture and at worship, and especially in the workplace.” Thus, note the Times reporters, we must examine “these encounters – race relations in the most literal, everyday sense . . .”8 Their distinction between “daily experience” and “political action,” on the one hand, is useful in suggesting that it is in the less noticeable everyday, as well as in the more public civil rights alliances or national political gestures, that blacks and whites meaningfully engage each other. But we see in Booker T. Washington’s 1895 Atlanta Exposition speech the way in which “daily experience” in the workplace is also, historically, political:


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Washington calls for those on either side of the color-line to interlace “our industrial, commercial, civil, and religious life” in the name of “mutual progress” while keeping “all things that are purely social . . . as separate as the fingers.”9 Washington’s famous image metaphorically resolves white racial anxiety about the risk of social contact that laboring side by side might inspire by suggesting that just as the hand’s digits share fraternal proximity without friction, as it were, so can the races. Indeed, the workplace, he says further, justifies close interracial contact in the name of national “progress.” But since the advancement of national interest was one of several passing justifications for slavery, and since slavery is the birthplace of labor relations between blacks and whites in the United States, the workplace remains often symbolically fraught and historically freighted.10 The workplace for this reason can be both banal and volatile, for some a possible refuge, for others the very reason to seek one. Race, Work, and Desire suggests that the relations developed under the aegis of “work” represent a particularly charged subset of daily communication between races. The “work” in my title concerns work environments and protocols, and, even more importantly, how interracial relationships are themselves “worked out,” “worked over, “worked up” within those contexts. Rather than a social history of labor, this book is an exploration of literary representations of working correspondences as they acquire intellectual and imaginative leverage. It is essential to point out that the variety of working relations these texts represent makes for certain asymmetries – domestic servants’ relations with their employers are distinct from patients’ relations with their doctors and from artists’ with their patrons. Those distinctions are many and apparent; my interest is in the subtler but more compelling resemblances, the way these relations afford and regulate interracial contact through some “intimate” dimension. The intimacies that I refer to in the texts include representations of the modiste’s or bonne’s knowledge of the white household’s dearest secrets and lies, the physician’s access to patients’ every physical nook and psychic cranny, and the artist’s participation in his or her patrons’ deepest artistic and civic ambitions. I must emphasize that my aim is not to reify taxonomies of the public or private, nor to account for some slippage between the two; rather, my point is that in these representations of professional relations, affective discourses are both textually defined against, and then subtly imbricated with, workplace discourses such that business partners or colleagues function at times simultaneously as lovers, friends, intimates. My interest is not in the ability of a character to inhabit multiple roles, but in analyzing the political and rhetorical effects of this shifting between discursive

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registers, a shifting that often goes undocumented but is neither innocent nor accidental. As the later-era slavery’s trope of the family gave cover for economic exploitation and black “social death,”11 for example, so Mary Todd Lincoln can call her dressmaker Elizabeth Keckley her very dearest friend (for whom insistence on payment would too grossly commercialize their companionship) and on that basis justify bankrupting her. Such an instance makes clear that my references to intimacy in the workplace should not be mistaken for unfettered closeness, though it may be represented as such by a particular character in a novel; intimacy is qualified, conditioned, and continually adjusted by the shifting terms of their professional arrangements. This does not always mean that such forms of intimacy are always exploited for nefarious ends. Of particular interest to Race, Work, and Desire are representations from around Reconstruction through the Harlem Renaissance in which both African and Anglo Americans also make professionally usable or politically significant this variable dimension to “laboring” relations. In the writings of the black authors Elizabeth Keckley, Frances E. W. Harper, and Langston Hughes, and in the work of whites such as Grace King, Kate Chopin, William Dean Howells, Amy Spingarn, and Carl Van Vechten, the symbolic boundaries of racial conjugation become a compelling site for the arbitration of Anglo- and African-American interests. My selection of literary works produced between the 1860s and the 1930s is more historical than literary: three of the most dominant venues for interracial exchange after slavery – the service industry, medical practice, and arts patronage – developed during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Apart from military service and marriage, the professional relations increasingly institutionalized during these decades have provided recurrent frameworks for close contact across the color-line. These both historically situate the works and thematically link them within this study, loosely grouping the individual chapters: domestic service (Chapters One and Three), doctor-patient negotiations (Chapter Two) and artistic collaborations (Chapter Four). Chapter One, “Dressing down the First Lady: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind The Scenes, Or Thirty Years A Slave And Four Years In The White House,” analyzes Keckley’s 1868 exposé of her white employers – most especially Mary Todd Lincoln – in the context of postbellum work relations. Keckley’s narrative was received with great hostility by whites; this chapter argues that much of that controversy arose from her historically untested and vexed status as self-employed ex-slave. Her narrative emerges as the nation as a whole made its troubled move from slavery to “free” black labor, from


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compulsory relations to putatively consensual work arrangements. This move disrupted (largely late antebellum) arguments that proposed slavery as a civic good rather than a necessary economic evil. In the service of this particular pro-slavery argument, whites characterized black servitude in terms of family obligation. In the manifestations of enslavement on plantations (though it persisted in urban slavery as well), “uncles,” “aunties,” and “boys” were expected to show filial loyalty, and white slave owners “owed” their slaves the reward of paternalism. As many have noted, the language of debt and recompense for forced labor was familial rather than monetary; the “peculiar institution” was coded as just another form of filial allegiance. Much more critical attention needs to be brought to bear on the way emancipation ended slavery’s law but not its languages. To that end Chapter One attempts to trace slavery’s word into the postwar era, arguing that racial discourses of family and filiation subtly fuse with emerging workplace codes of interracial conduct. I argue that the power in and the protest over Keckley’s Behind The Scenes, lie in its exploitation of the overlapping rhetorics of family and work that were imported from domestic slavery to domestic service at mid-century. Keckley’s narrative was in no small measure banned because of its suggestion that after the Civil War interracial intimacy would not come cheap. The ban signaled labor pains in the birth of a new nation, and, with them, the painful reconstruction of personal and social exchange between the races. Chapter One’s coda, “Servicing Marie in Grace King’s Monsieur Motte,” offers a brief analysis of the largely unexamined role of affective relations in these political reconstructions. Meant as suggestive rather than exhaustive, this section examines the way King uses “love” to keep working black women in their place – and in Monsieur Motte (1888) that place is beside white women (as their guardians and, as importantly for King, their hairdressers). A New Orleans native, King interpreted postwar conditions as nothing less than an assault on what she called the “Kingdom of Womanhood,” perceiving them as such, the coda argues, because the new economic tensions in domestic arrangements specifically affected the rites of female adolescence dependent upon black women’s services. Translating duty into desire, the novel represents the devotion of the servant as the ardor of the lover; the bonne’s faithful service thus becomes as binding as sexual fidelity. In this sense the homoerotic interest between the mistress, Marie, and the emancipated slave, Marcélite, functions to reinstitute slaveholding bondages and, by implication, to preempt further apostasies such as Keckley’s. In its urgent longing to conjure once again the antebellum order, Monsieur Motte offers not simply nostalgic

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reflection but historical hallucination. Contemporaneous with the rise of Jim Crow legislation, novels such as King’s suggest that “separate but equal” rulings to keep black and white apart existed alongside and in conjunction with no less reactionary “intimate but unequal” propositions keeping black and white yoked. Historically, domestic service both enables and adjudicates interracial contact, particularly between women. The medical industry, newly organized through the American Medical Association at the turn of the nineteenth century, provides another regulatory model for race and gender relations. Chapter Two, “Off-color patients in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty,” considers to what ends race politics and theories of female pathology merge in the literary tropes and medical terminology of the period. Both published in 1892, Harper’s and Howells’s narratives seek to transplant the “tragic mulatta” from the dusty pages of abolitionist literature to the modern clinic. The literary type is made a patient: the sentimental angst of her “condition” is scrutinized, diagnosed, and finally cured (though quite differently in each novel) by marrying the doctor treating her. Thus, monitored simultaneously by medical and marital institutions, race loyalties and desires represented as warring within, the mulatta proves the means to control the race wars without. Kate Chopin’s famous 1899 novel illustrates another form of racialized “female trouble,” but hers cannot be cured by either marriage or the good Doctor Mandelet. “‘Alien hands’ in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening” explores Edna Pontellier’s investment in the manual and sexual services of ethnic or racial Others, “alien hands” who are important to her because, in her employ, they do all her domestic labor but, even more so, because she can employ their alterity. In them she locates a “warm-blooded world,” new shores that she then claims for herself. In short, she makes possible an erotics that capitalizes on the serviceable equation of color with sex provided by the novel’s darker and less fortunate women. Their literal and figurative work goes remarkably unacknowledged: those who serve receive no narrative payback – once used, they are effectively written off and out of the story. Whereas Marcélite’s alias, Monsieur Motte, at least assumes titular status and memorable presence in King’s novel, The Awakening involves a white woman’s forgetting of figures precisely like Marcélite. Her “Marcélites” are “let go,” to use the polite euphemism; they are hired for jobs that are unmentionable and therefore go unmentioned, and then discreetly shown the door once their literal and figurative resources have been exploited. Chapter Three examines this as a significant variation in the politics of


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domestic service as the operations of racial desire devolve into ever more complex and less accountable forms. If Keckley represents a potentially strong black presence in postwar domestic relations, that insurrectionary presence is subordinated in King, medicated in Howells and Harper, and colonized in Chopin. Like domestic and medical services, artistic patronage functions as yet another forum for racial negotiation that occurs in the putatively unofficiated private sphere under its aegis. Patrons, like employers and physicians, also establish quasi-personal relations occurring through economic exchange and based on a trust negotiated within a professional hierarchy. During the Harlem Renaissance the “business” of patronage was often patterned after and increasingly merged with changing social arrangements – black artists and their white financiers, despite usually widely divergent class and racial backgrounds, often socialized as part of their “work”: the dinners for donors to grant literary awards and stipends, and the exhibitions and auctions passing for toney parties, were often “mixers,” social sites for professional matchmaking between patrons and artists. The white patronage system has been much critiqued, but too often the subtler crossracial negotiations of the participants, and especially the artistic productions emerging from those exchanges, have been overlooked or oversimplified. Chapter Four, “‘For blood that is not yours’: Langston Hughes and the art of patronage,” repositions some of these debates over the uses and abuses of patronage in its consideration of one of Langston Hughes’s least-studied patrons, Amy Spingarn, and its reconsideration of one of his most notorious patrons, Carl Van Vechten. My aim here is to show that the respective correspondence between Hughes and these two lifelong white patron-friends of his, as well as all the creative labors they shared, fairly revolutionizes the way we have traditionally understood the racial politics of artistic sponsorship. Spingarn and Van Vechten periodically funded Hughes, but between the “people’s poet” and these two patrons was also a complicated but productive artistic tension, one that Spingarn took advantage of in her graphic art and poetry and which Van Vechten largely funneled into his prized James Weldon Johnson Collection. Chapter Four argues, too, that Hughes works that tension. His Broadway play, Mulatto, first produced in 1935, is often interpreted as a racial drama about fathers and sons; but I also suggest that it is deeply concerned more generally with the relationship between black dependents and white benefactors. I claim that, recurrently focusing on a son’s demands for familial recognition, the play represents an extended meditation on patronage, radically revising traditional assumptions about white patronage

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of the black arts in part by making it the subject of art rather than simply the condition for it. the power of af fect All these works remap public racial conflict as private phenomena. This strategy informed the sometimes contradictory late nineteenth-century debates about the relationship between so-called private and public spheres. For instance, George Washington Cable and Booker T. Washington eschew questions of “intimacy” in interracial relations as a political red herring. As we see in Cable’s complaint about the confounding of “social choice” with “civil rights,” social segregationists had already sought legal protection of private boundaries: The South will never adopt the suggestion of social intermingling of the races. So [the segregationists] beg the question of equity, and calling it “social intermingling”; thus claiming for it that sacredness from even the law’s control which only social relations have.12

Cable thus found the argument about the so-called “sacredness” of private relations simply another justification for racism, for in seeking legal confirmation of the extralegal character of social exchange, it sanctioned political inequities in the name of free “choice.” Supreme Court decisions regulating contact across the color-line, including the infamous 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson, were compensatory responses to these concerns; in effect they construct personal choice (in this case the choice of a white person not to share public facilities with a person of color) as both something above the law and as a legal prerogative.13 Ironically, it becomes law that racial antipathies and preferences cannot be legislated. Legislation offered a way of controlling race relations in the flux of racial and political representation following Federal troop withdrawal, offering a conservative resolution of tensions coinciding with and to some extent resulting from the emergence of new millennial identities such as the New Negro, the New Woman, and the New South. The writers in this study appeal in various ways to the “sacredness” of social intercourse, not for the sake of legislating race separation but as a way of bypassing the juridical altogether. In doing so these writers pose alternative coordinates on a social and racial grid that function in lieu of official legal mandates structuring race relations. An individual’s right to define and regulate his or her own intimate associations with others elevated personal rule above civic order. In this sense the tacit rules, expectations,


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etiquette, conventions, and modes of interpersonal conduct amounted to an alternative paradigm and mode of governance for white-black relations. The interpersonal in the workplace, then, functions rather like Pierre Bourdieu’s view of manners, of systems of etiquette, as the webbing of socio-political regulation: “the concessions of politeness,” as he puts it, “always contain political concessions.”14 This politicized web of civility, and more generally of the informal rules governing affective relations, have historically been, and continue to be, represented as an opportunity for racial amelioration – usually because personal relations appear to offer transcendence of history, politics, race itself.15 Popular and literary culture offers a long history of such propositions, from Lydia Maria Child’s interracial marriages in Hobomok (1824) and Romance of the Republic (1867) to the movie classic Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner (1967), from Rodney King’s 1992 plea that we all “just get along” to the social reform advocated in Warren Beatty’s film Bulworth (1998): “procreative, racial deconstruction. Everybody fuckin’ everybody else till you can’t tell the difference.” In all we repeatedly witness the renewed call and promise that tête-à-tête we can step outside history to inaugurate a new and racially harmonious world. Benjamin DeMott, in his social critique of twentieth-century film, television, and literature, terms this the “friendship orthodoxy,” the sense that “racism is nothing but personal hatred, and when hatred ends, racism ends. The sweet, holiday news is that, since hatred is over, we – blacks and whites together, knit close . . . have already overcome.”16 DeMott convincingly argues that “narrative-dramatic forms” communicating this message “strip experience of its social context, and delete history and politics; their focus is upon the course of personal relationships between particular blacks and particular whites,” and expository forms that “aspire to educate” merely allude to social context, “suggesting that social influences on individual lives have been exaggerated and arguing that friendship is indeed the master key to peace, harmony and justice” (The Trouble With Friendship, 24–5). This approach “miniaturizes, personalizes, and moralizes the large and complex dilemmas of race, removing them from the public sphere. History and social forces seem more or less beside the point, feelings become decisive, and the fate of black Americans is seen as shaped in no negligible part by events occurring in the hearts and minds of the privileged . . . as they enter into one-on-one interracial encounters” (27). This popular miniaturization and personalization is keyed more generally to a larger scholarly struggle between the proper place of history in relation to racial identity. Frantz Fanon concludes in Black Skin, White

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Masks that the “body of history does not determine a single one of my actions,” asking instead: “Why not the quite simple attempt to touch the other, to feel the other, to explain the other to myself?”17 Fanon’s signal refusal to be overdetermined by history’s claims must be complemented by James Baldwin’s reminder that history motivates and animates our respective experiences: “If history were past, history wouldn’t matter. History is the present . . . You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history.”18 Baldwin’s comment does not suggest that history is merely the indiscriminate instrument of fate or that people are doomed to be, as Fanon puts it, a “prisoner of history” (Black Skin, White Masks, 229), for Baldwin, too, insists we must not and need not live out history’s will and its inheritance: the racial roles and interracial dynamics that history’s momentum would seem to prescribe. Quite the contrary: he argues that one must “enter into battle” with that self that is a “historical creation.” And yet, Baldwin warns, we attempt to dismiss, jettison, or underestimate the “great force of history” at the risk of never truly escaping it: the “great force of history comes from the fact that we carry it within us, are unconsciously controlled by it in many ways, . . . history is literally present in all that we do. It could scarcely be otherwise, since it is to history that we owe our frames of reference, our identities, and our aspirations.” Only by engaging history – sometimes in “great pain and terror” as the individual “begins to assess the history which has placed one where one is and formed one’s point of view” – can a person attempt to “recreate oneself according to a principle more humane and more liberating,” only then can one “attempt to achieve a level of personal maturity and freedom which robs history of its tyrannical power, and changes history.”19 Interracial intimacy has often posed as the answer to history’s negative power by claiming to be above or outside it altogether. But as Albert Memmi’s 1965 preface to The Colonizer and the Colonized states frankly, the interracial pair can afford no sanctuary: My hopes . . . rested on the “couple” . . . But I discovered that the couple is not an isolated entity, a forgotten oasis of light in the middle of the world; on the contrary, the whole world is within the couple.20

As Memmi suggests, powerful emotional compacts between individuals promise a kind of synergism, a consolidated “oasis.” The talismanic appeal of the “couple” – and more generally of interpersonal relationships – derives in part from a belief in the near-mythic inviolability of human fellowship, of bonds that seem to both precede and transcend culture. But interracial union is, Memmi later reluctantly concludes, at best a sentimental and


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defensive solution to post-1957 Algeria – and, by extension, to international race relations. He concludes with dismay that no alternatives can exist because “the world is within the couple” (vii), that the private sphere is also always social microcosm. Fanon perfectly understood that the world was within the couple,21 yet he still hoped for the salvific possibilities of interracial fraternity and sorority. But lived experience and literary art alike suggest brotherhood and sisterhood are no haven from racism. In fact, the rhetorics of affinity and amity themselves can become a tool of enslavement. Saidiya V. Hartman points out in Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in NineteenthCentury America, that “kindness and affection undergirded the relations of subordination and dependency” under slavery, and became “an elaboration of a racial and sexual fantasy in which domination is transposed into the bonds of mutual affection.”22 Hartman is particularly interested in “the qualities of affect distinctive to the economy of slavery” (21). Race, Work, and Desire suggests that the workplace is the postbellum site of affective engagement across the color-line, in which the language of feelings is perhaps more muted but just as potent in professional discourses related to the governance of personal conduct, codes of behavior, and protocols of racial civility. As Hartman and others point out, discourses of intimacy can serve and have served reactionary ends, particularly in the way, ironically, affection’s domination is enabled by humanist notions of care and concern. And yet, notions of interracial affinity are politically malleable. Race, Work, and Desire takes as its focus fiction that employs these same discourses, what we might call the “paradigm of the interpersonal.” The texts examined here take advantage of the fictive notion of private relations as apolitical sanctuaries, posing an alternative cultural, and implicitly political, dynamic to post-Reconstruction race relations. In that sense they exploit the cultural transcendence associated with romantic or Platonic union, sometimes to reestablish traditional hegemonies but, as frequently, to propose more complex and potentially progressive transformations. This alternative dynamic engages what Claudia Tate in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire (1992) terms “the politics of desire.”23 Tate, in her readings of African-American women’s post-Reconstruction fiction, cogently argues that couched within traditional romance plots lie narrative strategies of political reclamation. While the subtler operations of “racial desire,” as I have defined it, do not neatly correspond to plot structures or explicit political ends, Tate’s study is illuminating in that her analysis of the allegorical “depictions of the desire for racial equality and prosperity” (110) in the novels’ marriage plots offers a model of interpretation that views “cultural description as symbolic

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representation, not transparent presentation” (101). Thus, even in explicitly politicized fiction, fiction with political as well as narrative stakes, we must, as Nancy Bentley argues, “preserve the real uncertainty and mutability in fiction’s relation to the social world it represents.”24 Fiction’s relationship to its referent is in part identified by what Mary Poovey calls the “ideological work” of literature, that is, texts’ “ability to mobilize fantasies without legislating action,” to “provide the site at which shared anxieties and tensions can surface as well as be symbolically addressed.”25 Similarly, for the writers studied here, the novels’ work – in this case recasting race relations as interpersonal drama – is not sociological but does mobilize historical, and at times political, fantasies. Tate’s Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (1998) similarly moves away from the “materialist or sociological analyses that constitute the familiar racial paradigm.”26 But in Psychoanalysis she seeks to explain the “curious relationships” between “unsocialized desire” and “racial politics” (9) – that is, between “personal desire and the social conventions – protocols – of race” (6) – by arguing that desire need not be reduced to “political prerogative” or “aspiration for black civil rights,” and instead can be appreciated as the “performance of existential freedom” (10). In order to resist what she sees as prevailing critical “protocols of racial identity and subsequent codes of black artistic expression” (11), Tate seeks to explain the critical separation of individual fantasy from racial protest agenda by drawing “on Freudian and post-Freudian theories about the roles of the conscious and unconscious in the creative process”: in order to suggest that “unconscious discourses or implicit narrative fragments that fulfill latent wishes, much like dreams . . . accompany the novels’ social meanings. Although contiguous with the writer’s intentional social story, the unconscious discourses are generally ex-centric to the story . . . [but] are so pervasive that they refuse to remain subordinated to the intentional story. Their repressed and unspoken desire forms the surplus meaning that unsettles the sanctioned social plot . . . [The] tension between the intentional social story and the unconscious discursive fragments make the novels appear both reactionary and revolutionary because the unconscious discourses in each work partly support and ultimately abandon the public argument in exchange for a solitary and forbidden fantasy . . .” (12)

As this extract suggests, Tate views “personal longings” as outside of and sometimes at odds with racial narratives of “public conflict” (Psychoanalysis 8). Desire, as she defines it, is a function of the author’s “deep emotional meaning” (8), forming part of the “implicit, private psychological effects of narrative subjectivity” (10). This “individual and subjective experience


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of personal desire” (10) creates what she calls unconscious “residual surplus,” an “enigmatic presence” (9), sites of freedom uncontained by and yet complicating a novel’s social message. Her attempt to avoid repeating the “popular racial story [that] calcifies our roles in the prescriptive racial plots” (20) is an important one, although to the degree that she positions psychological notions of textual desire and of the novel as analogous to psychic structures (13) there is some risk that desire is ahistoricized. This language of the “enigmatic,” the “existential,” the “ex-centric,” the “subjective,” the “private,” the “individual,” the “unsocialized,” and of “preconscious” and “unconscious discourses” (13), implies that desire exists in a realm beyond the pale of race and history. For Tate this is a liberating move, representing a step away from historically conventional plots of racial oppression and victimage, both for the authors she examines and for scholarly inquiry. And perhaps it can be at certain times and in certain places. My argument here is that while certain texts may represent desire as “transcendent,” desire is always racialized and historicized, and further, that this recognition need not automatically deny individual subjectivity, specificity, and agency. We see in the racial desires at play in Keckley, King, Chopin, Howells, Harper, Hughes, Spingarn, and Van Vechten, for example, dramatic narrative experiments in constructions of identity and agency that are neither crudely bound to political agenda nor require the recovery of a psychological model of the subject or novel. Desire, as I mean it here, is an interracial and interpersonal dynamic, a kind of synapse on the color-line rather than an individual site of intention, hopes, dreams, wishes – conscious or otherwise. af f ected bod ies As I have suggested, the constellation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century black and white American writers here bring into relief languages of affect inhering within the pecuniary or contractual obligations of postslavery relations. But what of these “entanglements of sentiment and subjection” (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 164), when the captive body is no longer a commodity, “an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values” (21)? Not surprisingly, the physically emancipated body is quickly caught up in postbellum entanglements of racial desire. It is true that, unlike the minstrel figure in which biraciality becomes corporeal performance, the intimacy represented in the fiction studied here seems on the surface to resist what Lindon Barrett calls the profound “fleshliness” of the African-American image.27

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The relative absence of the body in fin de siècle and early modern literature by African-American authors has led some, mistakenly I believe, to perceive it as a retreat from physical reality; the “lost body” is thus variously characterized and criticized as a sentimental or genteel or otherwise thwarted response to African-American selves enslaved and sexualized.28 However, the lack of bodily emphasis in many ways only foregrounds the “haunted realm of racial fantasy” (Lott, Love and Theft, 4) that spooks not only the cultural imagination but, one must also note, political representation, with its dependence on what Karen Sánchez-Eppler calls “the fiction of a bodiless body politic.”29 The interracial alliances and connections in the work of Keckley to Hughes, therefore, may then seem, in one sense, bloodless; but “blood” is physical proxy for the often unarticulated or unrecognized “structure[s] of racial feeling” (Lott, 6) that drive social and political agenda, agenda that may or may not invoke the body directly but nonetheless participate in what Robert Reid-Pharr calls a “conjugal union, the tying together of black bodies, black domesticities, and black (bourgeois) notions of universalism.”30 I am particularly indebted here to recently advanced theoretical connections between corporeality and nation that cogently trace the continuity between the “social and political structures of the ‘body politic’” and “the fleshy specificity of embodied identities” (Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty, 1).31 The texts studied here seem to save their narrative specificity for the symbolic realms separating rather than uniting bodies, but we cannot dismiss the fact that even the oblique hint of crossing the color-line in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries signaled a recognition, if not necessarily an acceptance, of a physical other systematically denied and purged, particularly in the case of African Americans. Interracial alliances often countered what Trudier Harris characterized as “rites of exorcism in which [white Americans] sought to eradicate the black ‘beast’ from their midst . . . to eradicate thousands of black bodies from their communities by lynching, burning, and otherwise killing them.”32 Some writers of color did make a political case for what Charles Chesnutt called “amalgamation.”33 The fact that, for instance, W. D. Howells’s representation of a liaison between a white man and an octoroon was enough to make his reading public “queasy”34 makes clear whites’ visceral reaction to the politically provocative suggestion of physical interaction between the races. Yet white nausea comes not from any graphic representation of miscegenation or its genetic legacy, the mulatto/a. In fact, An Imperative Duty figures no physical connection at all between black and white characters – not even innocent hand-holding nor a chaste kiss – and only stylized


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descriptions of the woman’s “mixed” features. Chapter Two argues that Howells, in fact, finds the mixed-race woman most significant as disembodied racial Geist, as a spirit salubrious for the modern age.35 Though forms of physical joining across the color-line appear in altered form in King’s Monsieur Motte, Howells’s An Imperative Duty, and Harper’s Iola Leroy, this study intentionally focuses on literary representations of racial desire that, even when occasionally erotic, are not conventionally resolved through sex or matrimony but rather through the subtler mechanics of intimacy of the workplace.36 In fact, Keckley, Hughes, and Spingarn, in particular, focus on platonic “bonds of affection” (86), finding in them possibilities for literary insurgence. Even in King’s, Howells’s, Harper’s, and Van Vechten’s works, where racial desire operates more on a continuum of both heterosexual interest and what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls “homosocial desire,”37 the relationship is not simply about the “couple” represented. That is, the texts do not represent workplace intimacy as an end in itself; rather, they provide the means to professional ambition and/or political dreaming – whether it be Keckley’s wish to “tailor” the historical record or Van Vechten’s desire to be remembered for a nationally recognized library collection. In other words, the racial body is implied but not necessary for racial desire to function. Indeed, absenting the dark racial presence is a reflex in the white imaginary, a kind of Black Hole, a point of immense gravitational pull that, though invisible, only magnifies white “dread and love.”38 I am not arguing that it is the only reflex but, as Chapter Three suggests, it is an important and not easily traceable one. Edna in Chopin’s The Awakening, for example, desires not a relationship with the New Orleans or Grand Isle natives, but, triangulated through the libidinous zone they represent for her, a heightened relationship with her own sexual identity. It is a narcissistic relationship to the racial other, who is only a means to her own, putatively unraced, self. It is also a relationship that gives the appearance, in René Girard’s terms, of desiring no one but oneself, and thus Edna seems “to possess that radiant self-mastery,” the flattering “myth of [her] own selfmastery.”39 Intimacy has its own style of power, if you will: The Awakening’s Edna does not overtly oust the native element; she embraces it, possesses it, colonizes the other as a territory of self. As Chapter Three argues, desire thus mediated in effect absents the “dark” body altogether. literary realism and literary affectation These manifestations of racial desire assume narrative shape and texture within literary history, loosely enacting what Van Wyck Brooks called

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“tendencies” rather than chronologies within the American literary tradition, or perhaps, even less tendentiously, what Eric Cheyfitz calls a flexible “dramatic structure” of resonating moments in literary history.40 To borrow Amy Kaplan’s definition of realism, the literary works operate as “part of a broader cultural effort to fix and control a coherent representation of a social reality that seems increasingly inaccessible, fragmented, and beyond control . . . [Realism] cannot be understood only in relation to the world it represents; it is also a debate, within novel form, within competing modes of representation.”41 In this sense Keckley, King, Chopin, Harper, Howells, Spingarn, Van Vechten, and Hughes employ realist strategies in their attempts to manage the fictive possibilities of interracial intimacy. Attempting to manage a world that appeared to some fragmented by racial violence and racial chaos (we are “now so crossed and intertangled that there is no definite and unbroken direction any more in any of us,”42 as Howells’s Dr. Olney laments), these writers find possibility in affective but, I should emphasize, not necessarily affectionate bonds. The novels, in other words, do not share in a sentimentalist ethos that, as Joanne Dobson recently defined it, “celebrates human connection, both personal and communal, and acknowledge[s] the shared devastation of affectional loss.”43 Certainly writers such as Elizabeth Keckley and Frances Harper, in particular, writing out of the respective slave narrative and racial uplift traditions, share some of the thematic elements of a sentimental narrative, but both lack the characteristic idiom of histrionic appeal and redemptive pathos. Indeed, Keckley – unlike Mary Todd Lincoln, who seems to be uncontrollably weeping throughout Thirty Years A Slave – is perfectly dryeyed in her search for financial stability and national recognition. Her close relationship with the President’s wife is developed through the collecting and giving of private secrets (letters, conversations) and personal things (gloves, dresses, cloaks), which in turn are then narratively marketed in order to buy herself a place in history. In Harper’s Iola Leroy Iola rejects the swooning, the fainting, the paralyzing tears of those – male and female – around her upon discovering that she has been remanded to slavery. In that sense Harper’s ailing women are both symptomatic of, and yet a sober tonic for, an ailing society. Similarly, in William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty the “tragic mulatta” Rhoda is not allowed her tragedy despite herself. An Imperative Duty and Iola Leroy both reject the neurasthenic’s exaggerated display of feeling as warranted or useful either to the woman herself or to a nation recovering from the Civil War. Instead, these texts offer images of an intimacy that


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reconstitutes the personal as a site of social redemption – or, in Howells’s case, even paternal absolution. As Chapter Four argues, his fictional “nervous child” is a dark resurrection of his daughter, Winifred, who died only two years’ before the publication of the novel owing to complications related to her so-called “hysteria.” His grief emerges not as hyperbolic emotionalism, though, but through a therapeutic narrative administered with the calculation of a prescription. Howells’s realist aesthetic, his famous call for the “light of common day,” extends then also to the shadowy domain of intimate relations, for it is there that these writers seem to find the most political and imaginative prospect. I have been broadly placing the cultural and literary work of imagining racial intimacy within the frame of literary realism. But, clearly, the way representations of racial desire poach other discourses challenges traditional generic distinctions between literary realism and sentimentalist, racial uplift, and modernist texts. In that sense my project participates in the desegregation of Anglo- and African-American literary histories by Kenneth Warren, Michael North, George Hutchinson, and others.44 However, as these chapters suggest, the complexity of the writers’ different racial and literary agendas studied here – the ways that work relations provide the context and catalyst for a subtler sponsorship of authors’ respective political and private ends – refuses any easy conclusions about the hybridity of, or “repressed kinship” (Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance, 31) between, literary traditions. In fact, as the epilogue, “Co-workers in the kingdom of culture,” suggests, this notion of literary kinship, though advanced in the name of historical accuracy, may inadvertently reproduce the kind of personal and personalizing paradigmatic that Race, Work, and Desire explores and critiques. My intent in the following readings, then, is to acknowledge the literary specificity, even idiosyncrasy, of each work’s imaginative trajectory even as I trace those arcs within the scope of a capacious sense of realism. We can better appreciate the creative work of these texts if we recall that their realist moments are not simply an attempt to be “realistic”; that is, they do not narratively express or document “truths” of racial experience. Certainly, to the degree they engage rarely addressed interracial dramas, they in some sense “make real” what Ellison identified as the willed “un-visible,”45 and what Morrison calls the “unspeakable unspoken.”46 But as Vincent Crapanzano reminds us in Waiting, his anthropological study of whites in South Africa, race is at once unspeakable and yet continually, compulsively, being spoken. In apartheid South Africa, he notes:

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[tales] of banning, detention and imprisonment, torture, forced suicide, and murder, of dispossession, banishment, and the breaking up of families were common. They appeared daily – as scandals in the English-language press, with caution in the Black and Coloured press, and with moralistic pretension in the Afrikans press. They were talked up, especially in the cities where in the “liberal” circles they produced a sort of hysterical heat. They were loudly denied in conservative circles, or somehow justified, and as such acknowledged. They were a sort of living folklore, genre tales really, which, like tales of war and terrorism, render the unsayable sayable, and thereby, if not real, then at least more manageable.47

His is a caveat against a certain kind of “heat” in critical assessments of racial representation. Moral indignation, Crapanzano makes clear, can become a kind of narrative code, an indulgence in a readerly as well as racial positioning. It may make intolerable race relations “manageable” but generic narrations of race can just as easily become simply another “symptom of the ‘system’” (Waiting, 23).48 My point here is that literary realism always depends on narrative convention, caricature, cliché, and affectation in its effort to “make manageable” an unmanageable world. Within this perspective on realism, narrative conventions and clichés surrounding race relations are formal rituals rather than moribund forms, finding in “tired” antebellum tropes and racial plots ritualistic potency, the ability to perform social commentary and social change. Ralph Ellison reminds us that, in fact, ritual is at the heart of the representational, perhaps the more so in literary forms that lay claim to mimetic racial representation, for, as he points out, “the moment criticism approaches Negro-white relationships it is plunged into problems of psychology and symbolic ritual.”49 Ritual acts engage the wider community, both confirming its affective structures and reconfiguring them for audiences. As Harry J. Elam, Jr. argues, rituals can function in both a “consecrative and conservative mode” to simultaneously “reinforce existing values and belief systems” even as they may imagine “new social orders.” Citing Jean and John Comaroff, Elam emphasizes the “productive capacity” of ritual, its ability to work as a “‘vehicle of history-in-the-making’.”50 To begin, then, to answer Kara Walker’s question in the epigraph to this Introduction – “How can this image contain for you all the secrets of the re-enactment of history in the arena of Desire?” – I suggest that history is conjured in the arena of desire through representation’s symbolic rites. These literary rites are at once social and intensely personal, participating in what Ellison calls “obscene witchdoctoring”: the manipulation of stereotypes that spring “not from misinformation alone but from an inner need to believe . . . upon an inner craving for symbolic magic . . . which justify


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[a person’s] emotional and economic needs.”51 Thus the racial types and conventions in literary realism are not, he insists, simple “clichés introduced into society by a ruling class to control political and economic realities.” Theories of social hegemony alone, Ellison warns, cannot explain their “tenacity [that] springs exactly from the fact that [their] function is not less personal than political” (“Mask of Humanity,” 85). In other words, the “race problem” cannot be solved by any Marxist analyses of inequities or by similar projects claiming to right wrongs by unmasking false stereotypes under the noble banner of realism. Ellison reminds us that ritual’s “personal” domain – inner craving and obscene need – is at the very heart of realism. work and ritual violence The interracial narratives of “personal” alliances collected here may seem to offer a palliative to the violent imagery that opens this Introduction. But Ellison’s warning that racial desire is “not less personal than political” and Kara Walker’s politicized image, stand as a reminder of the history behind and within relationships on the color-line. What is striking in the beheaded image in Walker’s silhouette is not simply the violence but the violence as a response to the institutional violence of the everyday. That is, although such extreme acts of racial violence stand out like great tears in the fabric of the everyday, there exists also a kind of banal workday violence, small acts of institutionalized injuries to the person and spirit, built into race relations after slavery. Violence forms the historical basis and emotional backdrop of many everyday relations between races and, as suggested, most everyday contact has been and continues to be within the workplace. For clarification of what is at stake in the working relationships across the color-line that this book explores, let me also return to the Topsy-Turvy doll for a moment. It is worth noting that even in this innocent plaything, violence is implicit. After all, their lower bodies have been amputated, their top halves sutured under the skirt, in a sense putting the lie to a central fiction of this “plaything”: the presumption of free association, of blacks and whites playing and working together for mutual benefit. Slavery’s history of compulsory relations is hidden; the actual point of contact and incision between black and white, after all, is fully cloaked, for in most known variations of the doll its miscegenated hips are discreetly sewn together under skirts, the presence of one race tucked under the clothes of the other.52 As I suggested, the doll proposes not only that intimacy on the color-line can be given familiar shape, but also that this form can be commercialized and taken for granted as a given. Walker’s silhouette takes that given and

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gives it back in a gesture both violent and liberating. In both Walker’s portrait and the Topsy-Turvy doll, beneath the dainty skirts is the killing knife. The postmortem moment of Walker’s image recalls other celebratory rites of black refusal in which personal deed is political drama: for instance, Bigger Thomas’s fraught sense of “terrified pride” (101) following his beheading of Mary in Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), and Joe Christmas’s sense of release following his murder of Joanna Burden in William Faulkner’s Light in August (1932) – Joanna’s severed “head turned clean around like she was looking behind her.”53 It is essential, I think, to see the way these literary representations of interracial bonds and bondage are cast as personal rites of historical revenge. The black men are in sexual relations with white women, but their intimacy is always informed by historical racial and class differences. As her chauffeur, Bigger shares “seesaw” relations with Mary, a debutante and political dilettante, in Native Son: “never were they on a common level; either he or she was up in the air” (72). In Light in August Joe is Joanna’s lover but symbolically turned into a “slave” serving (and servicing) his “mistress” (247), who eventually leaves meals for him in the kitchen like “food set out for a nigger” (263) and sends notes no longer of “rich and unmentionable delights” but with orders “more terse than commands” (263). Both Mary and Joanna try to control the actions and define the identity of those they view as their inferiors in need of “uplift” – Mary forcing Bigger to eat publicly with whites as a fellow “comrade,” Joanna scripting Joe’s future for him as a “negro” activist. Importantly, in both novels, the chauffeur and the day-laborer, respectively, not only feel themselves to be captive subjects of white manipulation and kill the women they desire and obey; their killings are the enactment of many previously imagined acts of violent emancipation in the novels. As Bigger concludes: “He had killed many times before, only on those other times there had been no handy victim or circumstance to make visible or dramatic his will to kill” (101). Joe, musing even before the killing that “I had to do it . . . I had to do it. She said so herself,” sees himself as the “volitionless servant of . . . fatality” (264). In other words, their personal deeds are also conceived as historical actions. The killing does not stand alone for the “murderers” as an isolated act; the men see themselves in some sense as historical agents – to both characters the killings are understood less as individual criminal deeds as the inexorable climax of relationships marked by generations of obligation, black-white bonds that can apparently end only in mutual destruction.


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So emotionally intense are these relationships, so predicated on cycles of racial animosity and attraction, that neither participant can yield. As the narrator describes Joe and Joanna (who would have shot her lover first but for a jammed pistol): “Yet neither surrendered; worse they would not let each other alone; he would not even go away. And they would stand for a while in the quiet dusk peopled, as though from their loins, by myriad ghosts of dead sins and delights, looking at another’s still and fading face, weary, spent, and indomitable” (264).54 These personal relations become the crucible for what are certainly larger historical cycles of interracial love and loathing; the iterated images of decapitation of the powerful offer an iconographic shorthand for generations of “dead sins and delights.” Indeed, such images of decapitation and liberation assume an archetypal quality, which is precisely what Walker captures in her silhouettes. The ironic use of the black paper cutouts, most popular in the mid-nineteenth century as a mannered middle-class art, heightens the contrast between grotesque content and polite style, between slavery’s obscenity and social façade.55 Her work is, as one reviewer explains, “the more horrific because of its cartoonlike presentation . . . Her imagery is part dime-store bodice-ripper, part nightmare. This is ‘Gone with the Wind’ gone amok; the perverse flip-side of the mythology of slavery and racial stereotypes”56 in which white and black happily live side by side. This is not violence personalized but, rather, violence ritualized. desiring history Thus the legacy of white-on-black violence is always implied – if rarely explicit – in the literature examined here, with the notable example of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto. I wish to foreground rather than ignore the fact that it does not appear in so many of the texts because the literary sublimation of racial violence can too easily be mistaken for its absence and too easily lead to its denial. The intensity behind white condemnation of Keckley’s narrative, the profound hostility of King’s characters toward disloyal “mammies,” the willed failure of Chopin’s protagonist to recognize her debts to women of color, the vulnerability of black and mulatta women to white rape in Howells’s and Harper’s novels, the fact that Spingarn’s economic and artistic power put Hughes’s “head in her hands,” in Arnold Rampersad’s words, all bespeak a silent backdrop of violence. That such violence is often tacit or half-exerted makes it perhaps even more threatening, especially because the violence is exponentially multiplied and realized in the legal and cultural landscape of Jim Crow, which cannot and should

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not be separated from these writers’ literary constraints and choices. The violent ending of Hughes’s play, that “harrowing orchestration of Hughes’s prophetic fear that the great house of America would be brought down by racial bigotry,”57 therefore, hollers where the other texts murmur. In sum, although working intimacies across the color-line remain artistic sites of potential resistance and transformation in Hughes’s play as well as in the other texts in which violence is only lurking, they are not a consistent escape from the history of racial violence. In fact, many of the writers and artists examined here sometimes simultaneously subscribe to and yet struggle with the fiction that intimacy trumps history. Countee Cullen perhaps most sweetly sketches for us this fiction when he offers us the vision in “Tableau” (1925) of the “black boy and the white,” “Locked arm in arm they cross the way . . . The golden splendor of the day/ The sable pride of night.” The two in their innocent affection – “oblivious to look and word” – serve to “blaze the path”58 for racial, and perhaps even same-sex, harmony. The couple, in fact, apparently by virtue of their romantic self-sufficiency alone, become political exemplars and trailblazers. Race, Work, and Desire seeks to return history to this otherwise timeless tableau of “arm in arm” – not to suggest that people remain isolates because of race or class or convention, or that we should not sympathize, as we are encouraged to do in the poem, with the couple facing neighbors’ hostility,59 but because I believe it behoves us as both readers and social critics to reflect on those seductive images of affective relations across the color-line, especially when represented as self-evident solutions. This is certainly not a new “history lesson.” In Ellison’s Invisible Man characters also try “living outside the realm of history” (441), but stepping “out of historical time” (440) does not lead to an elevated perspective on the human condition or a shared sense of universal humanity. His novel is in some sense a realization of the grotesque possibilities of Memmi’s lament for an “oasis of light” in the middle of the world and outside history: the Invisible Man’s well-lit basement, illuminated by no fewer than “1,369 lights” (7), is both private oasis and personal entombment. Ellison explores the rich and violent possibilities of this historylessness – of being outside or without history – in order to return us to history itself. The peculiar gift of novels, he points out in “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” is that even as they are, as he puts it, “time-haunted,” literary texts enable exploration of timelessness: “If the symbols appearing in a novel link up with those of universal myth they do so by virtue of their emergence from


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the specific texture of a specific form of reality . . . [of] the specific literary forms involved.”60 The fiction of Keckley, King, Chopin, Harper, Howells, Hughes, Spingarn, and Van Vechten returns the transcendent interracial embrace to the novel’s haunt of time, linking “universal myth” with “specific literary form,” and thus challenging the transcendent by foregrounding the act of literary mythmaking itself. That is, the myths and “necessary fictions” created by the half-dozen texts studied here may seem to provide literary strategies for racial absolution and reconciliation through a partnership above or beyond history, but the literature also contains its own critiques of the historical amnesia and political na¨ıvety too often informing representations of the color-line. With that in mind, Race, Work, and Desire offers no model advocating intimacy as the means for social amelioration or national therapy, but rather finds in these texts creative gestures toward a racial alembic.

chap t e r 1

Dressing down the First Lady: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind The Scenes, Or Thirty Years A Slave And Four Years In The White House Lizabeth, you are my best and kindest friend, and I love you as my best friend. Mary Todd Lincoln to Keckley, Behind The Scenes1

My association with Mrs. Lincoln . . . clothed me with romantic interest. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind The Scenes

“I have been her confidante, and if evil charges are laid at her door, they also must be laid at mine. To defend myself, I must defend the lady that I have served. The world have judged Mrs. Lincoln . . . and through her have partially judged me, and the only way to convince them that wrong was not meditated is to explain the motives that actuated us” (xiv). With her remarkable, brief invocation of “us” in the Preface to Behind The Scenes (1868), seamstress Elizabeth Keckley (1824–1907) unites her reputation with that of the President’s wife in order to stage their narrative separation. More interested in defending her own honor rather than her “imprudent” (xiii) lady’s, Keckley must at once claim identification with Mary Todd Lincoln to establish her prestigious place in the White House-hold as modiste and intimate, yet distance herself from the widow’s fall from social grace. When Mrs. Lincoln sold her presidential finery and clothes in 1867 in order to pay off her notorious debt of $70,000 to seamstresses, milliners, and shopkeepers, Keckley – as her dressmaker – risked appearing vicariously responsible for the scandal. Readers of Keckley’s exposé, it turned out, did not hold her responsible for her patron’s weaknesses; nevertheless, her narrative had a unanimously hostile reception on all political sides. Attempting to explain why both erstwhile abolitionists and secessionists alike condemned her, James Olney has limned the complex rhetorical angling involved in “writing within, and simultaneously against”2 the literary tradition of Southern apologism in the postbellum era. William Andrews and Frances Smith Foster persuasively situate Behind The Scenes, particularly the first third of 28

Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind The Scenes

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the work that recounts her enslavement by the Burwells in Virginia and then by the Garlands, in the tradition of the slave narrative, and to some extent explain her rise and fall as a function of generic constraint.3 Yet, given Keckley’s tempered representation of slavery, the public anger suggests Behind The Scenes was provocative not simply for discussing her “thirty years a slave” but for exposing the last “four.” The genre of the exposé engages the realist impulse to uncover truths, implicitly enjoining criteria of authority and validity; the attacks on Keckley’s claim to represent what “really” happened engage these criteria, suggesting what she breached is not literary form but the shape of social reality. The National News in New York, for instance, quickly published a coarse parody entitled Behind the Seams: By A Nigger Woman Who Took in Work From Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis, with a preface signed with an x (her mark) by “Betsy Kickley.”4 In its insistence that the “mulatto” author’s close relationship with these famous women warrants her no more than an epithet, that her employment as seamstress deserves no name beyond ad hoc “work” “took in,” the dismissive title betrays a frustrated recognition of the latent power of “nigger” women. Similarly, the National News and the other condemnatory reviews of Keckley’s account focus less on her accounts of mistreatment as a slave and almost exclusively on her revelations about the Jefferson Davis and Lincoln families, in whose service she was serially employed after moving from St. Louis to Washington D.C. in 1860. Clearly, many felt Keckley had “taken in” those whose work she had taken up, and which by its nature had allowed her into the inner sanctum of their households. The New York Citizen charge is representative, accusing Keckley of being “grossly and shamelessly indecent,” and the book “an offence of the same grade as the opening of other people’s letters, the listening at keyholes, or the mean espionage which unearths family secrets with a view to blackmailing the unfortunate victims.”5 The book’s publisher, G. W. Carleton, finally recalled Behind The Scenes under pressure by Robert Lincoln, the Lincolns’ oldest son. As the Citizen’s pique suggests, indignation at (and fear of ) what was perceived as Keckley’s near-criminal indiscretions is tied most specifically to her betrayal as a trusted employee, for clearly the writer of the article had in mind a grade of offenses associated with domestic servants, those putatively most in a position to open letters, peer through keyholes, or unearth family secrets – were they to bother. Keckley’s apostasy lay not simply in pointing to white precedents of exposé, although she insists that “[i]f these ladies [in the Washington circle] could say everything bad of the wife of the President, why should I not be permitted to lay her secret history bare” (xv). Nor was the furore simply over

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violations of caste, over “a slave girl who has forgotten her place . . . [and trespassed] across the racially defined social, class, and behavioral barrier that legalized slavery had reinforced.”6 Keckley, after all, had purchased herself in 1855; she was no longer a slave when employed by Mrs. Davis or Lincoln. Her relatively novel status before national emancipation as self-employed ex-slave becomes a crisis, apparently, only after the War. The book’s publication – and with that, Keckley’s capitalization on her past employment for her own ends – marks a shift from enslaved to “free” labor, from commodity to producer. The supposedly simple prepositional character of what are, in fact, profound transitions (“from” enslaved and “to” wage laborer) does not occur at the moment Keckley buys herself in 1855 but rather when, in 1868, she writes a book for others to buy. That is, her move from object to agent does not occur by fiat at the moment of her purchase with borrowed funds, nor even when she pays back her white sponsors years later. And the exercise of her sovereignty is not damned simply because she is somehow a “free agent,” “master” of oneself, as Frederick Douglass puts it in Narrative of the Life (1845) when he purchases himself. Indeed, the supposedly radical language of self-possession appears less provocative when one considers that the right to possess “selves” made slavery possible – one reason why Harriet Jacobs, if not Douglass and Keckley, rejects the transaction altogether when, in Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), her Northern benefactor first offers to buy her freedom. Rather, the problem for reviewers appears less Keckley’s position as her own person, editorial peer, and “white observer” (Foster, Written By Herself, 121) than that this “self-reliance” (Keckley, Behind the Scenes, 20)7 interrupts the social and economic reliance between black and white women institutionalized by slavery before, and now threatened by, the War’s aftermath. Keckley’s Behind The Scenes is seen as victimizing her employers not because she is acting as an independent but because she tries to profit from white dependency on black “help.” In that sense Keckley’s narrative is less a refusal of the continued commodification of her body and labor after emancipation as an attempt to make white people’s lives the desirable commodity to be circulated and sold in this new free market. fickle d ames and angry servants Keckley can lay claim to her employers’ lives in part through the imbricated rhetorics of family and work imported from slavery to a postwar domestic service industry. If Southerners had long invoked domestic metaphors to


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sanction slavery (master as pater, mistress as mother, slaves as extended family – children, “uncles” or “mammies”), similar terms of obligation and affiliation underwrote postbellum domestic service. As Mary Todd Lincoln’s biographers confirm, and Keckley makes clear in her Preface, she was one of Mrs. Lincoln’s best friends, her “confidante,” and “intimately associated with that lady in the most eventful periods of her life” (xiv).8 Yet Keckley also insists that she is certainly not the “special champion of the widow of our lamented President” (xv), that Mrs. Lincoln is a woman of “jealous freaks” (124) and “the most peculiarly constituted woman” (182) she has ever met. By the end of the narrative, financially ruined by Mrs. Lincoln’s broken promises of support and the widow’s depleted means after her husband’s death, Keckley complains that “fortune, fickle dame, has not smiled upon me” (330). No dame is more fickle in Keckley’s narrative than Mrs. Lincoln, but Keckley insists the book was “not written in the spirit of ‘the angry negro servant.’”9 Her defense, however, no doubt incited critics’ worst fears, for her comments imply there already exists a type (suggested by the quotation marks bracketing “the angry negro servant”) and a genre (“written in the spirit” of that type) which she confirms through her very disavowal. In fact, Keckley herself is one of the first writers, if not the inaugural one, in the tradition to which she refers – a tradition of “negro” servants writing (“angrily” or not), a tradition of “servant narratives” emerging from the slave narrative.10 Coined “women’s work,” domestic service is most typically and specifically a “female-female relationship,”11 and the most common arrangement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries between white women and those of another class and race. With the standardization of domestic service (which included cooking, housekeeping, sewing, governess duties, and sometimes wet-nursing) in the 1850s came the rise of “housewives’ manuals, training schools for domestics, and regular articles on the subject in popular magazines” (Rollins, Between Women, 53). As a mode of control, formal instruction of both employers and employees preserved social distance in the face of emancipation and black, Irish, and German migration in the North; but, though in the South the racial composition of the servant class changed little until World War I, free-wage labor posed a threat to the antebellum character of service relations in both regions (51). Both acceding to and exploiting this anxiety in an effort to advance his platform for economic uplift, Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Normal Institute, which emphasized the industrial arts – including, for women, nursing, teaching, and domestic service – began graduating a generation of “New Negroes.”12

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Domestic service has been praised as a kinder and gentler form of labor, yet what historically makes this trade, regardless of social or racial context, according to Judith Rollins, “an occupation more profoundly exploitative than other comparable occupations” are the personal relationships between employee and employer. What might appear to be the basis of a more humane, less alienating work arrangement allows for a “level of psychological exploitation unknown in other occupations” (156). Intimacy in these work relations is not so much fraudulent as coercive because it is dependent on a tacit distance renewable, ironically, with each gesture of confidence between employee and employer: Using a domestic as a confidante may, in fact be evidence of the distance in even the closest relationships. Employers can feel free to tell domestics secrets they would not share with friends or family precisely because the domestic is so far from being socially and psychologically significant to the employer. As physically close as the domestic may be, she is so existentially distant in the mind of the employer that the employer does not even entertain the possibility of the domestic’s divulging secrets to those within the employer’s social universe. (167)

Keckley’s sharing of Mrs. Lincoln’s private letters to her with James Redpath, her literary counselor, and their subsequent publication in the Appendix to Behind The Scenes was a scandal precisely because it violated not just public decorum but the existential absence of the employee to which Rollins refers. Whether or not Keckley herself authorized the printing of the letters, whether she was intentionally misled or simply incompetently served by Redpath, seems moot.13 The appended letters, coupled with Keckley’s reconstructed conversations between the pair, legitimated her claims of intimacy, but that intimacy was a function of Lincoln’s certainty that their relations were illegitimate within her own racial and social sphere. Thus, although clearly there would have been outrage at any servant who broke faith, as it were, the nature of the public attacks, and Keckley’s own rhetorical negotiations within her text, are emphatically and distinctively racialized. Publishing her memoir, whose subject (in no small part) and intended audience was within “the employer’s social universe,” was taken, in this particular historical instance, as a breach of the very conditions for women’s interracial relations. As Jean H. Baker astutely notes, Keckley no doubt became Mrs. Lincoln’s “closest friend” “despite or perhaps because of the inequality between an ex-slave, mulatto seamstress and a President’s wife.” Keckley was, “in the First Lady’s view, ‘although colored, . . . very industrious . . . very unobtrusive and will perform her duties faithfully,’” a reminder of Mrs. Lincoln’s “Mammy Sally” (230).14


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This post-War obtuseness to white emotional and epistemological investment in black unobtrusiveness is exposed as early as Herman Melville’s “Benito Cereno” (1855), with its prescient anticipation of narrative insurrections like Keckley’s. Captain Amasa Delano’s insistent misapprehension of the relationship between the Spanish captain, Don Benito, and his servant Babo leads him to mistake relations on the mutinied ship for a reassuring “spectacle of fidelity on the one hand and confidence on the other.” Delano envies Don Benito “such a friend; slave I cannot call him.”15 As his praise suggests, Delano refuses the possibility of economic or physical coercion in what he self-interestedly reads instead as a genteel and fraternal arrangement. Delano misinterprets Babo’s plea that he “is nothing: what Babo has done was but duty” (“Benito Cereno,” 16) because it reinforces his desire that the good servant never imposes upon white largesse by assuming he or she is “something.” Babo is in fact “nothing,” for what he “has done” is an empty performance of servile duty (although in another sense “duty” refers to his obligation, and that of the others enslaved on board, to dissemble), designed to fulfill Delano’s fantasy of the servant who labors for nothing. And the devaluation of his labor is indexed to his lesser existential status under slave law as three-eighths of a person. Keckley similarly exploits whites’ commitment to the economic and ontological hierarchies embedded in domestic labor practices. If, for their respective attempts, Babo’s head ended up on a spear and Keckley was skewered in the press, Behind The Scenes nevertheless reveals what material advantage Keckley creates within the terms of her position. As Rollins notes, servants do not have to barter their own secrets in exchange for their employers’ because the latter are, as a rule, uninterested in the private details of their servants’ lives (Between Women, 156). Keckley, in fact, makes Mrs. Lincoln begin paying for the intimate license the latter assumes. When Mrs. Lincoln breaks with their usual arrangement to meet at her own residence and drops in unannounced at Keckley’s apartment one day in 1864, she pointedly remarks that “I never approved of ladies, attached to the White House, coming to my rooms. I always thought it would be more in keeping with their dignity to send for me, and let me come to them” (152). Her insistence on the tradition of servile etiquette derived from “associations of her early [slave] life” (133) allows her to condescend to the very woman to whom she caters. When Mrs. Lincoln twice visits Keckley in her own chambers, she is actually indebted to her for the inconvenience, for both parties recognize the visits as an encroachment upon Keckley’s privacy requiring additional payment of some kind. After the first visit Keckley asks for and receives a “special favor”: a “present of the right-hand glove that the

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President wears at the first public reception after the second inauguration” (154). The second time Mrs. Lincoln commits this faux pas, Keckley obtains permission for herself and a “friend” to hear President Lincoln speak at the White House (175). In both cases Keckley uses Mrs. Lincoln’s personal visits as a way to barter social benefit. fashioning the masculine Such examples illustrate the way Keckley negotiates female kinship altogether within the narrative, refiguring the affective work on which sentimental fiction depends. One of the clearest examples of her partition from women appears in her alignment with men. In her grieving for the tragic death in battle of Keckley’s son, her only child (unnamed in the text), we learn only that it is a “sad blow” (105) to her, but when Willie, the Lincolns’ youngest son, dies of fever, Mrs. Lincoln is “inconsolable” (104), a “mater dolorosa”16 so subject to such “paroxysms of grief” (104) that the President says he will send her to the “lunatic asylum” (104) if she does not control herself. Refusing to allow her eldest, Robert, to enter the military, Mrs. Lincoln is chastised by her husband for elevating maternal propriety over national need: “The services of every man who loves his country are required in this war. You should take a liberal instead of a selfish view of the question, mother” (122). Keckley’s self-presentation is fashioned along these less “selfish” lines of masculine restraint rather than feminine display, as I will explain. Identifying more with Mr. Lincoln’s solemnity, she is more moved by the “grandeur as well as . . . simplicity” (104) of the silently weeping President at his child’s deathbed than by Mrs. Lincoln’s conspicuous distress. When the President is murdered, Keckley silently turns away with tears in her eyes and a “choking sensation” (191) in her throat. She is “awed into silence” (192) like another surviving son, Tad, who mourns his father quietly. Mrs. Lincoln, on the other hand, makes an ungodly “scene – the wails of a broken heart, the unearthly shrieks, the terrible convulsions, the wild, tempestuous outbursts of grief” (192). No such narrative convulsions mark the death of Keckley’s own son. In fact, her emotional restraint extends to the omission of the “golden words of comfort” in “the kind womanly letter” that Mrs. Lincoln wrote when she heard of her “bereavement” (105), though she seems to have little compunction about publishing verbatim from some of their other private letters, and it might have placed her employer in a better light. James Olney suggests that Keckley’s withholding of vital personal information regarding her ex-husband and only son, a Wilberforce student,


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while devoting extensive space to the death of William and President Lincoln, grants white lives an importance she cannot claim for herself (xxxiv). But within that substitution of white for black operates also a shift in gender identification that effectively, if unconventionally, lets Keckley claim not only personal but also historic importance for herself. Just as she gains material and rhetorical advantage through preserving distance from Mrs. Lincoln – and from the archetypal feminine that her “hysterics” (200) represent – she also gains by associating herself with the Lincoln men, and briefly with Jefferson Davis. Unlike Mr. Lincoln, who speaks with fraternal generosity of the “soldierly qualities of . . . brave Confederate generals” (137), Mrs. Lincoln apparently has not the proper sororial feelings toward her own brothers in the Confederate army: “How can I sympathize with a people at war with me and mine?” (136). Keckley says at first she is “relieved” that Mrs. Lincoln has “no sympathy for the South,” but then compares her with her husband, whose “soul was too great for the narrow, selfish views of partisanship” (136). Keckley’s own efforts at what Olney insightfully calls an “alien apologetics” (xxx) – in which she reunites with her previous owners at Rude’s Hill (once occupied, she notes, by General Stonewall Jackson for his headquarters) in a spirit of reconciliation (252) – represent, in William Andrews’s terms, revisionism “indicative of a historical truth . . . a truth emerging in something the writer faces in the present” (“Reunion,” 15). In this case her “present” (i.e. postwar) reconciliatory stance creates for her an emotional “truth” akin to Mr. Lincoln’s presidential condescension to the national brethren. She even claims she can hail the defeated Jefferson Davis, whom she characterized as “a thoughtful, considerate man in the domestic circle” (69): “Peace!” she writes, “You have suffered! Go in peace” (74). Ironically, this attitude, shared by Mr. – but pointedly not by Mrs. – Lincoln is the basis by which Keckley can also reinvent the bonds between women across the color-line. If her Northern friends, she says, could have witnessed her reunion, in which she is literally “carried to the house in triumph,” “they would never have doubted again that the mistress had any affection for her former slave” (250). It is worth noting that it is the attitude Keckley shares with Mr. Lincoln, in opposition to that of his wife, that makes possible the erasure of “doubt” about the love of mistresses. This doubt, of course, is one she herself creates in her earlier critical accounts of her mistresses Burwell, who had her beaten (32), and Garland, whose family she almost single-handedly supported at the expense of her health (50). Her narrative suggests that her heart, like the Great Heart, inspires women’s love across the color-line.

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The rhetorical and economic inversion of mistress and slave in Behind The Scenes makes the First Lady a symbolic substitution for Keckley’s subjugated position. In Fleischner’s perceptive psychoanalytic analysis, Keckley’s narrative, “a story of accumulation and debts, the narrator/ dressmaker/restrained mourner and the narrated subject/dress buyer/ unrestrained mourner Mrs. Lincoln are secret sharers, doubles in mourning and emotional valuation of possessions” (Mastering Slavery, 102). Keckley both projects the “Otherness” ideologically associated with African Americans on to Mrs. Lincoln, “while at the same time, in light of the two women’s interdependent relationship, [retaining] the phantom presence of the Other in her conception of herself . . . [in order to] give linguistic relief to her conflicted sense of self and achieve a narrative reconciliation with her own traumatic past” (102–3). The function of this process of displacement and projection becomes most clear, I would suggest, if we further consider not only the opposition between the women but the triangulation of desire between the two women and the men who feature so prominently in Keckley’s text. From one perspective, for instance, Keckley simply usurps the privileged role of mother from the mistress/employer. Although President Lincoln’s term of endearment for Mrs. Lincoln is “Mother,” Keckley in fact represents the kind of capitalized maternity Mary Todd Lincoln is incapable of, for as both birth and surrogate mother Keckley transcends regional and racial boundaries. Claiming she loves her families “both black and white” (41), Keckley receives letters from those to whom she was once enslaved in which they name her “mother to us all” (259, 264) and name themselves her children (265). But to the degree it is Keckley who aids the women in “pecuniary embarrassment” (222) such as Mrs. Lincoln and the Garlands (238), and to the extent that hers alone are the sheltering arms the women seek in “terrible affliction” (189) or as death approaches (239), she is more like the supporting head of the household, the figure who stands in for an absent or dead husband. In fact, Keckley repeatedly aspires to public conduct insistently coded in the text as masculine. Her national leadership, as founder of the Contraband Relief Association in 1862, is an immediate success (she takes pains to include an index of substantial donations) and its high-profile support from black and white notables, from Frederick Douglass to Wendell Phillips, is no doubt designed to highlight her social and political influence outside the sphere of the domestic. And in case readers miss the connection, Keckley concludes by strategically echoing Lincoln’s title (and second term) with her own: “Mrs. Lincoln made frequent contributions, as also did the President. In 1863, I was re-elected President of the Association, which office I continue


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to hold” (116). Her work with the Contraband Relief Association, effectively placed between a reprinted memorial tribute to Willie Lincoln by Nathaniel Parker Willis and an account of the White House in decorous mourning for the boy, represents her response to others injured, widowed, or abandoned to “cold neglect” (112): the “relief of suffering soldiers . . . suffering blacks” (113). Like Mr. Lincoln – whom she imagines the Lord advising, like Job, to “‘Gird up thy loins now like a man . . .’” (120–1) – Keckley takes action, while Mrs. Lincoln’s sphere of vision and movement becomes increasingly constricted: “She could not bear to look upon [Willie’s] picture; and after his death she never crossed the threshold of the Guest Room in which he died, or the Green Room in which he was embalmed” (116–17). What Keckley desires, through Mrs. Lincoln, is the potency of Mr. Lincoln, “the Jehovah” (154), the “Moses of my people . . . an idol . . . a demi-god” (190). What sympathetic feminine reciprocity exists is linked to her allegiance to her race rather than to her employer, Keckley explains, because Mrs. Lincoln was the wife of the President, “the man who had done so much for her race,” and thus she “could refuse to do nothing for her” (269). Racial sympathy is cautiously extended to Mrs. Lincoln by other African Americans for similar reasons. Although Mrs. Lincoln recognizes that “most of the good feeling regarding her straitened circumstances proceeds from the colored people” (Keckley, Behind The Scenes, 35), the letters from Frederick Douglass and Henry Garnet reveal the extent to which they, too, distanced themselves from a cause that might prove “ridiculous” (319) and jeopardize the pressing interests of the race. Keckley establishes proximity to Mrs. Lincoln, while simultaneously substituting their respective roles, mainly because Mrs. Lincoln exists in closest proximity to the President. metonymies of d esire This psychic economy of exchange and transference also informs the function of intimate material objects, the giving and collecting of which occupies a disproportionate space of Behind The Scenes. Keckley’s descriptions sometimes read like a fashion reporter’s: “Mrs. Lincoln looked elegant in her rose-colored moire-antique. She wore a pearl necklace, pearl ear-rings, pearl bracelets, and red roses in her hair. Mrs. Baker was dressed in lemon-colored silk; Mrs. Kellogg in a drab silk, ashes of rose; Mrs. Edwards in a brown and black silk; Miss Edwards in crimson, and Mrs. Grimsly in blue watered silk” (89). Her accounts are in the mode of drawing-room realism, but her interest in apparel goes beyond its use as a decorative index of social status.

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If Keckley’s narrative is “public history privately experienced,” as James Olney cogently puts it, then it is also a history of the public experience of private objects – soiled gloves, blood-stained cloaks, Confederate wrappers, and of course Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe, carefully described throughout and painstakingly invoiced at the narrative’s end. Keckley mediates her personal relations – and her relation to national history – through the sartorial.17 Almost all the women’s relations are bartered in some way through clothing. Keckley’s aunt, Charlotte, for example, is given a silk dress by Mrs. Garland’s mother on “condition that her maid look cheerful, and be good and friendly with her,” and “to make friends with her” (155) after Keckley’s aunt dares to display unhappiness for being punished. As Mrs. Garland describes it: A maid in the old time meant something different from what we understand by a maid at the present time. Your aunt used to scrub the floor and milk a cow now and then, as well as attend to the orders of my mother. My mother was severe with her slaves in some respects, but then her heart was full of kindness. She had your aunt punished one day, and not liking her sorrowful look, she made two extravagant promises in order to effect a reconciliation . . . the mistress told her she might go to church the following Sunday, and that she would give her a silk dress to wear on the occasion. (255)

Mrs. Garland’s mother’s “extravagant” measures to secure the appearance of friendliness from her slave suggest the necessary purchase of deception required to uphold the image of close relations. Her admission that “maid” is a euphemism for slave before the war, though meant to distinguish Keckley’s current “condition” as domestic servant, nevertheless exposes the similar affective economy at work in both situations between white and black women. This particular exchange of clothing, however, confounds the racial privilege of largesse, for when Mrs. Garland’s mother has nothing to wear for an occasion, “the maid proffered to loan the silk dress to her mistress” and she “made her appearance at the social gathering, duly arrayed in the silk that her maid had worn to church on the proceeding Sunday” (256). That such largesse is needed to appease is the subject of another tale Keckley relates (with intent to amuse) in which an ex-slave recently come North complains that “‘I is been here eight months, and Missus Lingom an’t even give me one shife . . . My old missus us’t gib me two shifes eber year’” (141). Keckley explains that on Southern plantations the mistress “every year made a present of certain under-garments to her slaves, which articles were always anxiously looked forward to and thankfully received. The old woman


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had been in the habit of receiving annually two shifts from her mistress, and she thought the wife of the President of the United States very mean for overlooking this established custom of the plantation” (142). Within the humor of the story is the suggestion that combined with the withdrawal of castoffs, which presumably “bought” gratitude from women of color, is the withdrawal also of any semblance of affection: “shiftless” when it comes to others, Mrs. Lincoln is thought “mean.” In his chapter “The Clothes Make the Man and the Woman” in Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made, Eugene Genovese notes that “[t]hroughout the South, masters and mistresses distributed clothing in a manner designed to underscore their own benevolence and to evoke gratitude for a supposed gift – a sensitivity to the social significance of clothing that suggests an awareness of the slaves’ own positive attitude toward their clothing.” Before long, however, “the slaves began to translate these ‘gifts’ into ‘rights’ and to let their masters understand as much.”18 The consequences of any failure to fulfill these unwritten contracts of give and take are apparent also in the narrative’s close, when Mrs. Lincoln extends to Keckley frequent promises that she will be “well remembered” (358) if the widow manages to see any profit on her wardrobe, reminders of future rewards that increase as Keckley withdraws after not being reimbursed for all her work sewing and negotiating on Mrs. Lincoln’s behalf for several months. According to Keckley, the offers of money, which presume a pecuniary relationship, come hand in hand with appeals for sympathy, which by contrast presume bonds of friendship unsullied by the pecuniary. Even as she defers payment, Mrs. Lincoln desperately pleads in her letters for Keckley to write more, for she feels “as if I had not a friend in the world save yourself ” (347). But in response to one of Keckley’s letters urgently requesting $500 as partial payment for work to date, Mrs. Lincoln tells her only that when “I get my [wardrobe] back, if ever, from–, I will send you some of those dresses to dispose of at Washington for your own benefit” (360). Shifts too little and too late, apparently, cannot recreate the plantation façade of sororial friendship, especially in the face of a postwar economy in which Keckley has every right to money. Mrs. Lincoln’s offer of clothes seems especially antiquated because what need has a seamstress of clothes – the very clothes, in fact, that she had made? If she rejects the traditional bartering of female ties, however, Keckley still finds old and used clothing immensely valuable for different reasons. Certainly her occupation as seamstress grants her access to the inner domestic circle, and the occasion to comment on the important and mundane events in others’ lives: the loss of a lace handkerchief lets her

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weigh in concerning the Lincolns’ son, Tad, who had “displaced” it – he is “mischievous, and hard to restrain” (89), she concludes. Fitting a dress for Mrs. Lincoln and making “the search for a missing article an excuse” (119), she looks over the shoulder of the President to find out what passage in the Bible he is reading. Another time she is “basting a dress” (130), and overhears arguments between Mr. and Mrs. Lincoln about Senators Chase and Steward; later, listening to a conversation between husband and wife as she fits Mrs. Lincoln, she even finds she shares with Mr. Lincoln, of all things, a powerful love of goats (181). As Sharon Dean suggests, black female servants can transform their historical invisibility into the “potent angle of vision”19 of inside outsiders, though I would suggest that Keckley’s potency lies not simply in the collection of odd tidbits of personal information, however choice to her readers. From Keckley’s vantage point she both creates clothing that attracts the attention of those who observe it (78, 101) and, more importantly, uses her association with an object of clothing to turn herself into the object of interest. In 1865, at a Chicago charity fair that displayed a wax figure of Jefferson Davis in the outfit in which he was reportedly captured, Keckley makes the “pleasing discovery” that it was clothed in one of the two “chintz wrappers” she had made for Mrs. Davis in 1860 (74). Though the exhibition is usually surrounded by a “great crowd” (74), Keckley herself soon replaces the wrapper as spectacle: When it was announced that I recognized the dress as one that I had made for the wife of the Confederate President there was great cheering and excitement, and I at once became an object of the deepest curiosity. Great crowds followed me, and in order to escape from the embarrassing situation I left the building. (75)

The wrapper mediates between Keckley and the Davis family, but there is no simple transfer of interest or social worth. The hidden work of the scene is Keckley’s initial and necessary attribution of value to the object: she must first point out to others the significance of the wrapper and herself – and in that gesture, their mutual importance. That part of the scene, however, is suppressed through the passive voice; we do not know how or why some person “announced” Keckley’s association, nor how or exactly why Keckley informed him or her, and indeed it must be suppressed because if Keckley is to share in the object’s interest, the object must first appear self-evidently interesting. From the Latin interesse, “having legal claim or title to,” “interest” assumes proprietary investment, and Keckley is the most interested party to an object that, she implies, is a phenomenon endowed with a life and intrinsic worth of its own. But it is the crowd’s


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“excitement” that functions as demonstrative speculation, driving up the stock of both the things and her person with its “great cheering” that does not simply acknowledge (as Keckley implies) but actually determines the changeable value of the cultural icons – the wax figure, the chintz wrapper, and the seamstress herself. Despite her best efforts, this value is deflated even within her account. Davis, Keckley concedes, was in fact wearing a “water-proof cloak instead of a dress, as first reported” when captured, but, she insists, this “does not invalidate any portion of my story” (75). The “story” that she wishes to remain viable involves not simply her claim that the wrapper was indeed the one she had made for Mrs. Davis (she offers the exact month and year when it was contracted) but that the clothing could have been involved in romantic circumstances. Since she cannot be the indirect instrument for the celebrated cross-dressing escape attempt by the Confederate President because – to her clear disappointment – the tale is fabricated, Keckley can only insist that the “coincidence is none the less striking and curious” (75). Her belaboring the incident is an effort to stitch together an identity based on associative connection, on the public investment in appearance and possibility, if not fact. Clothes, for this reason, construct personae in Keckley’s account. Davis’s wrapper is linked to subterfuge (if erroneously), as is Lincoln’s plaid shawl, which is “rendered somewhat memorable as forming part of his famous disguise . . . when he wended his way secretly to the Capitol to be inaugurated as President” (309), and as is Mrs. Lincoln’s use of heavy black veils when masquerading as Mrs. Clarke in her initial efforts to sell her wardrobe quietly. (Such personae must be tended carefully for, so clothed, they can take on a life of their own. When Keckley insists it would be indelicate of Mrs. Lincoln to leave her hotel at night unaccompanied, she argues that “Mrs. Lincoln has no reason to care what these people may say about her as Mrs. Lincoln, but she should be prudent, and give them no opportunity to say anything about her as Mrs. Clarke” [183].) Like the strategic transvestism so commonly employed by slaves in their flights to freedom, these evasions and escapes dupe because they play off the use of clothing as transparent synecdoche of the self – but in this case cross-dressing is used to signify an alternative public rather than racial self.20 It is the public life of objects that most consumes Keckley. The historic resonance of some articles of clothing or accidental objects retroactively create for her not only a past, but also a prophetic future. She finishes a dressing gown for Jefferson Davis before the Civil War, for instance, “little dreaming of the future that was before it. It was worn, I have not the shadow

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of a doubt, by Mr. Davis during the stormy years that he was President of the Confederate States” (69). When, after those “stormy years,” the presidential party toured the fallen Richmond, they “examined every object of interest” (165), and Keckley makes a point of saying she handled the official papers on desks, and “sat in the chair that Jefferson Davis sometimes occupied; also in the chair of the Vice-President, Alexander H. Stephens” (166). But why the fascination with a piece of furniture whose only claim to fame is that it supported some famous person’s posterior? palpable history In one sense, of course, by setting her seat upon theirs, Keckley both subtly insults and assumes the men’s authority. Yet the desire to gaze upon and handle such objects is also an effort to understand and touch history – to make oneself contiguous with the props of historical drama. This desire informs what George Brown Goode, the Director of the US National Museum at the Smithsonian Institute at the fin de siècle, called the “museum idea.” In his Principles of Museum Administration (1895), Goode calls for democratic access to objects held in common ownership but previously available only to the socially privileged and the wealthy. As Tony Bennett argues, the “museum idea,” deriving from the principles of Benthamist utilitarianism, “rests on the notion that museums should serve as instruments of public instruction” – in other words, “extended circulation”21 of select national objects among the unwashed masses might reform the lower and working classes into a more refined citizenry. Keckley’s inclusion as a black working woman on the presidential tour of “every object of interest” is an exercise in edification for both her and her readers; her actual handling of the resolution prohibiting all free colored people from entering the State of Virginia (166) is intended for her audience as an historical lesson in the ironies of injustice. Keckley views these items in their original material context, but they are already transformed in significance by historical events, and already reserved for “tour” observation. For this reason Paul Valéry accused exhibitions and museums of being “mausoleums,”22 entombing objects in an historical vacuum. Indeed, the collected objects function not as a chronology but as a collage of artifacts, as cultural shorthand to a history reassembled in the present. In that sense the objects are made at once familiar and foreign, as the viewers, Keckley included, become tourists of their own culture. But as in the case of the Davis wrapper, Keckley moves from being a tourist – or tour-guide – to becoming part of the tour. After all, as Keckley’s


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handling of the Virginia resolution suggests, the exhibit is transformed by those who interact with it, and thus in a sense become events and exhibitions themselves. And when she returns to the South to visit the Garlands, she sits in the room that “General Jackson always slept in, and people came near and far to look at it.” Each visitor to this “idol” “would tear a splinter from the walls or windows of the room, to take away and treasure as a priceless relic” (253). But in the sentence following this remark, she becomes the priceless artifact, the “object of great curiosity” (254). Keckley claims she is “clothed . . . with romantic interest” (254) both because she is associated with Mrs. Lincoln, and because she still has an “attachment” for the Garlands, “whose slave I had once been” (254). Both her presidential connections and her “attachment” to her ex-owners position her as a physical medium to a romanticized past. Keckley seems to anticipate this construction of a past in her request for objects she believes will become “sacred” (367). The white glove that President Lincoln wore on his right hand during the ceremony following his second inauguration is a “precious memento” (154) to Keckley precisely because of the social metonymy of clothing: the glove bears “the marks of the thousands of hands that grasped the honest hand of Mr. Lincoln on that eventful night” (155). Even though Mrs. Lincoln insists Keckley has “some strange ideas” in wanting something “so filthy when he pulls it off [that Mrs. Lincoln] would be tempted to take the tongs and put it in the fire” (155), it is the very fact that the glove is “soiled” (158) – the material used in, and standing for, social exchange – that makes it such a coveted object for Keckley. Of course, in Mrs. Lincoln’s case, previously worn clothing can also depreciate in value, as Keckley’s reprint of a review of the “exposition of Lincoln dresses” in the New York Evening Express makes evident: “‘Some of [the dresses],’” the reporter writes, “‘if not worn long, have been worn much; they are jagged under the arms and at the bottom of the skirt, stains are on the lining, and other objections present themselves to those who oscillate between the dresses and dollars, notwithstanding they have been worn by Madam Lincoln’” (304). In fact, after his death, Mrs. Lincoln is increasingly dissociated from her late husband by a critical public, and so while Keckley collects objects of his, the only objects of interest to her associated with her “friend” are things connected to the President: the dress worn by Mrs. Lincoln at the last inaugural address of Mr. Lincoln (368) and the earrings, “the identical cloak and bonnet worn by Mrs. Lincoln on that eventful night. On the cloak can be seen the life-blood of Abraham Lincoln” (367). The cloak, she explains elsewhere, is especially significant because it “bears the most palpable marks

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of the assassination, being completely bespattered with blood, that has dried upon its surface, and which can never be removed” (311), just like the glove that “bears the marks of thousands who shook his hand on that last and great occasion” (368). The blood, it turns out, proved not to be the President’s, suggesting that like Davis’s wrapper – Keckley’s claims notwithstanding – clothes are not incontrovertible “palpable” connections to the famous events and persons. Despite their materiality – which is meant to testify to the legible presence of history, indeed, to testify to the existence of history itself – things offer at best only emotional, and therefore immaterial, links to the past. Keckley’s description of herself lifting “the white cloth from the white face” (190) of Lincoln lying in state thematizes this process of making raiment legible. Her adjectival equation of fabric and face suggests a doubling of the racial veil: lifting the white cloth reveals only another racial mask. But upon Lincoln’s racially opaque surface, Keckley inscribes his transcendent divinity, the “god-like intellect” that she reads on his “placid” face. This gesture of exposing the public mask (if only to create another of even more mythic proportions) is itself acutely public: the many distinguished people from the Cabinet and army clustered around Lincoln’s body make room for and observe her (190). In that parting of the white crowd for a black woman, Keckley, with Lincoln, becomes a “Moses of my people” (190), the historical guide and racial interpreter for her audience. Indeed, the act of writing and publishing Behind The Scenes reproduces this exercise in reading “blank” cloth as textual surface and racial shroud, a canvas on and under which she interprets self and history. In Michael Fried’s discussion of “upturned faces” in Stephen Crane’s story “The Upturned Face,” and in The Red Badge of Courage, the “pale, horizontal plane of the corpse’s face” similarly evokes the “special blankness of the as yet unwritten page” to create an “allegorization of writing.”23 In Crane’s fiction, however, the faces are invariably disfigured, which Fried identifies with the “enterprise of writing,” the “force of art” that can only consume or bury, not resuscitate, the natural world (“Realism, Writing,” 94–5). Keckley’s script does indeed lay Lincoln to rest, but there is no textual pollution of the “white cloth,” nor “horror” (“Realism, Writing,” 94) at his open casket. Rather, the horror is transformed into poetic opportunity: “Notwithstanding the violence of the death,” Keckley writes, “there was something beautiful as well as grandly solemn in the expression . . .” (191). She “gazed long” (191); Lincoln’s upturned face is offered up almost willingly as the sacrificial scene of and surface for interpretation, as “the flesh made word.”24


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Or, put another way, the word – Behind The Scenes – can only be written after Lincoln’s death. Her collection of “valuable relics” (366) has narrative and symbolic significance only when the presidential flesh is no more. The relics’ currency is uncoupled from their status as mere commodity; thus she makes a point of refusing the use or exchange value of objects she inherits or barters for. Rather, she donates what is “too sacred to sell” and “what could not be purchased from me, though many have been the offers for it” (367) to Wilberforce University, where her son was educated. Unable to give up all possessions, however, she withdraws the initial offer of the right-hand glove, explaining in a note that she retains the glove as a “precious souvenir of our beloved President” (367). Only as a token and keepsake may such items be privately kept, and whether donated or collected, the objects are out of commercial circulation. “The phenomenon of collecting,” Walter Benjamin argues, “loses its meaning as it loses its personal owner.”25 But Keckley, though she capitalizes on her objects’ “aura” and the Benjaminian metaphysic of origin, would not consider her donation to a public collection as perfidy to an object’s “original” significance or the meaning vouchsafed it by the owner of the private collection. As Tony Bennett suggests, the placing of art (or objects) in a public collection is not “a loss of history – it is not a double betrayal of the history it once had and of another and ideal history it might have had – but, rather, the acquisition of another history, and of the history it has had” (889).26 Keckley’s donation, in this sense, lets objects doubly acquire rather than doubly lose history. When she reads the “white cloth” on the “white face” of Lincoln, she grants the inanimate a living history; and by in turn donating what items she does collect, Keckley publicly enshrines the objects’ acquisition of this (her) history. marketing intimacy Keckley thus takes pains to distance herself from the marketplace traffic that expedited her patron’s fall and violates her ethic of collection. But the accumulation of things verifies her position as consumer, and Keckley seems unwilling to entirely forgo her status as market adept. The distinction, after all, between consumer and commodity is especially important because possession (which even the privilege of donation assumes) of objects separates the seamstress from her erstwhile status as personal chattel. Hence her involvement in the scandalous sale of clothes places her at crosspurposes and becomes a tension that Keckley cannot finally resolve. After all, she initially agrees with and publicly defends (307) – is even instrumental in

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managing – the selling of Mrs. Lincoln’s wardrobe, even though by the narrative’s end she tries to set herself above the market system to preserve her reputation. A letter to Bishop Payne of Wilberforce University indicating her intent to donate appears not accidentally after a letter from Mrs. Lincoln pleading with her to reject a scheme for money that Keckley had proposed in an earlier letter “announcing that [Mrs. Lincoln’s] clothes were to be paraded in Europe” (364–6), but Keckley suggests she never had any plan to traffic in selling and spending. Insisting she holds to a moral economy unlike her employer’s, Keckley argues that despite her incriminating actions, she had always thought that Mrs. Lincoln’s plan to use her expensive wardrobe as an insurance against poverty was “borrowing trouble from the future” (270). Critics, however, saw no distinction: Behind The Scenes was received as a similarly unforgivable peddling of private wares, especially because Keckley lays bare her own and Mrs. Lincoln’s “motives” (xiv) for money as much as for reputation. Bankrupted by her unremunerated alliance with Mrs. Lincoln in the postwar years, Keckley explains in her concluding words that if “poverty did not weigh me down” (330), she would not be writing. Her pleas of poverty, though, worked only against her, for they confirmed the unacceptable obvious: that their employer-employee “friendship” was primarily a function of money. Booker T. Washington had promised whites that “interlacing our industrial [and] commercial” lives would assure them of being “surrounded by the most patient, faithful, law-abiding, and unresentful people the world has seen” (Up From Slavery, 221); Behind The Scenes seemed to breach the contract exchanging employment opportunity for emotional guarantees. Some in the black community feared a white backlash from Keckley’s actions and distanced themselves from her (Foster, Written by Herself, 129). Mrs. Lincoln reportedly refused to speak to Keckley after the narrative’s publication. Her other white regulars, too, refused her – not out of sympathy for the late President’s widow, but for the seamstress’s racial heresy in expecting payment for “services” that included acts of loyalty and labor that whites hoped need not be bought in the postwar era. Despite her extraordinary ability to manipulate the conditions of her employment to her advantage, in 1868 Keckley crossed a line of which, given the flux of legal and racial renegotiations of labor relations in those early years of Reconstruction, neither she nor her white employers and audience were probably fully cognizant.27 With the line so clearly drawn across the life and career of Keckley, however, African American writers in her wake were far more circumspect about suggesting that intimacy required reimbursement.


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cod a: servicing marie in grace king’s monsieur motte In the reciprocal dependency of slavery . . . the slaves needed masters and mistresses they could depend on; they did not need masters and mistresses to love them. But the whites needed their servants’ love and trust. The slaves had the upper hand, and many of them learned how to use it. Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll 28

The social and financial ostracism Keckley received in payment for writing Behind The Scenes suggests the degree to which domestic service, as a model for close working race relations, inherited some of the affective contours if not the legal shape of slavery. Published twenty years later, Grace King’s Reconstruction novel, Monsieur Motte (1888), is still mourning what King saw as the prelapsarian days of slavery when, as she pictures it, devotional dusky servants tended to the intimate toilette of white women. An opening scene in the novel (one of a tetralogy set in New Orleans) clarifies more keenly what is at stake in the white audience’s – particularly white women’s – profound repudiation of Keckley and of any compensation for any other black domestics who might publish the “private archives” (Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 212) of white lives. In this exchange Marie, the white ingénue, is thanking Marcélite, her loyal black servant and “confidante,” for bringing her new white satin boots: [Marie] put her arms around the bonne’s neck and laid her head on the broad soft shoulder . . . “Ah Marcélite, my uncle can never be as kind to me as you are. He gives me money, but you – .” She felt the hands patting her back and the lips pressing against her hair; but she could not see the desperate, passionate, caressing eyes “savoring” her like the lips of a dog. (33)29

The devotion of the servant assuming the ardor of a lover involves a translation the difficulty of which is suggested by the impossible strain of her simile (Marcélite’s eyes as dog’s-lips?). Marie in turn responds to something untranslatable offered by Marcélite, in this case marked by the discreet dash (“he gives me money, but you – ”), a gift that constitutes a certain emotional indebtedness to the bonne in contrast to the implied pecuniary obligation to the uncle. But clearly it is Marcélite for whom duty becomes desire. These women’s devotional bonds function on an arc of compulsion and consent – in other words, an erotically charged “female world of love and ritual”30 complicated by the race and class hierarchies structuring domestic service after Reconstruction.

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Setting devotional relationships in the context of historicized and evolving gender roles, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg argues that any examination of homosocial ties must shift from “a concern with deviance to that of defining configurations of legitimate behavioral norms and options . . . [and should] emphasize general cultural patterns rather than the internal dynamics of a particular family or childhood” (Disorderly Conduct, 54). While I agree that one must view Marcélite’s passionate involvement with the girl not as “deviant” but as part of a larger cultural impulse on the part of whites to “normalize” postwar relations, Smith-Rosenberg’s analysis does not take into account the women’s relative standings with regard to sexual maturity, nor their shifting relations over time from adolescence to adulthood, and from antebellum to postwar conditions, when many emancipated “mammies” were taking their leave. All of these factors are crucial here since Marcélite’s labor of love finally subjugates this emancipated slave, and it is narrativization of love’s labor that constitutes King’s response to the Civil War’s disruption of the rites of female adolescence dependent on black-white intimacy. Conflating the love of service with the service of love, King works to retrieve imaginatively once institutionalized antebellum relations between female slave and mistress. Monsieur Motte’s titular hero and the uncle Marie has never met is Marcélite’s invention. As erstwhile family slave and survivor of the Civil War and death of Marie’s parents, Marcélite supports the child – too young at the time to remember her genealogy – under the ostensible aegis of Monsieur Motte, putting her through the Catholic girls’ school where she is employed as hairdresser. The novel’s sequels, On the Plantation, The Drama of An Evening, and Marriage of Marie Modeste follow Marie’s fate after her social-debut graduation, and the revelation of Marcélite’s “grotesque masquerade” (79). Anticipating reactionary elements in both Thomas Dixon’s and Margaret Mitchell’s romances (Marcélite is a cross between the scheming Lydia in The Clansman and Mammy in Gone With the Wind), Monsieur Motte was first rejected for publication by Richard Watson Gilder, the editor of Century, then handled by Charles Warner, contributing editor to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, who placed the manuscript finally with the New Princeton Review. Written as “antitexts”31 to more progressive fiction, King intentionally attempted to wrest history from the likes of George Washington Cable, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Albion Tourgee, and Edward King, who she felt misrepresented the South and tore apart the loving kinship of white and black she believed existed under slavery. Her literature, she argued, was intended to “bring us all nearer together blacks and whites.”32


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im personating men, miscegenating women Critics have suggested that Marcélite’s attachment for Marie, what King called the “holy passion of the Negro woman”33 for her mistress, simply reflects a “misguided”34 love, but I would suggest that such representations of homoerotic unions across the color-line directly guide us to cultural anxieties about miscegenation. To argue so, of course, is to ignore the critical presumptions of heterosexuality and sexual conversation (at least in its most literal sense) in the term “miscegenation”; but then the apparently prurient national obsession with “amalgamation” is not really about sex. It is, at least in part, as Eva Saks suggests, about the way representations of sex secure norms of identity (national and/or racial) and lines of property. Miscegenation – the “taboo of too different,” she suggests – is historically and legally associated with incest and sodomy – the “taboo of too similar,” since these “crimes” rely on a “pair of bodies which are mutually constitutive of each other’s deviance . . . [Thus] neither body can represent the norm, because each is figured as deviance from an other.” According to this reasoning, same-sex or intrafamilial relations fall beyond the pale because the “pair of bodies . . . upon conjunction . . . are too similar to each other and too different from the ‘norm.’”35 Under these terms Marie and Marcélite in Monsieur Motte exhibit the tendency to be both too similar (shared gender) and too different (racial poles). But in this narrative and others in which “miscegenating” women are also ex-slave/servant and mistress/employer, the difference-in-sameness produces the norm: the women’s relations are coded in the narratives as a necessary and “natural” preparation for or accommodation to traditional heterosexual marriage.36 Involved in the rites of white women’s (hetero)sexual coming-of-age, Marcélite, as hairdresser and de facto guardian of the Southern debutante, serves as a “proximate male”37 upon whose intimate physical services the white women are dependent for the effect of womanhood. Homoeroticism shares with miscegenation the threat to lines of blood and property because by competing for white female affection the black women appear to disturb patronymic influence (disrupting “blood” reproduction) and inheritance (the dispersal of property along those bloodlines). And yet, as this chapter explains, same-sex coupling in these texts eventually proves fundamental to the maintenance of class, sex, and especially racial norms, suggesting how we might understand how, in Judith Butler’s terms, “homosexuality [or any same-sex pairing] and miscegenation . . . converge at and as the constitutive outside of a normative heterosexuality that is at once the regulation of a racially pure reproduction.”38

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Philip Brian Harper argues that antimiscegenation sentiment and homophobia “derive their impetus largely from a common organizing principle: the sanctity of the private realm as a means by which to control the flow of economic capital.”39 Miscegenation, that is, presumes “two equal subjects to the extent that they agree to behave as though each has command of a private realm,” which “implies the reconceptualization of a non-white individual, not as a privatized object, but as private subject (who would then, by definition, be entitled to hold private property)” (Harper, “Private Affairs,” 124). In King’s novel the white anxiety over ownership of privatized property – in this case, Marcélite herself – is heightened because she is an ex-slave; in other words, she is property that, at least in the language of possessive individualism, now owns itself. In this way she becomes a “private subject,” as it were, by becoming her own personal property. Provocatively, for most of the novel she refuses to relinquish title to Marie by keeping the white girl’s family history a secret from her. By doing so Marcélite attempts, through her financial sponsorship of Marie, to “own” she who had previously possessed her, in effect rendering Marie the “paid for” (King, Monsieur Motte, 97) private property of previously privatized property. Though King, a devout segregationist, represents Marcélite’s loyalty to her white charge as admirable – albeit only because she believed it “highly honorable to the Southern women that they could be so served and loved by slaves”40 – the novel invalidates the black woman’s attempt to lay claim to an a priori “private realm” – and by extension to Marie – by insisting that to do so she must construct a surrogate self, a fictional “uncle” for Marie named Monsieur Motte. This persona is legal proxy for the nonexistent male family relation who would have had, in fact, de jure rights to the girl. As Monsieur Motte, Marcélite becomes the sole bearer of Marie’s pedigree, hiding on her person the papers that prove Marie is descended from white Southern aristocracy. When Marcélite confesses her avuncular ruse, she searches her dress, “fumbling, feeling, passing, repassing inside her torn dress-waist” (101), at last handing over the “little worn-out prayer book . . . filled with dates and certificates . . . unanswerable champions for the honor of dead men and the purity of dead women” (102) to the only “real” man in the novel, Monsieur Goupilleau, “master” and “saviour” (96), and later Marie’s stepfather. Until that moment Marcélite had “carried around in my body now for seventeen years . . . the precious relics, discolored and worn from bodily contact” (emphasis mine, 102). Physically incorporated with Marcélite, these papers become a kind of miscegenated body – part white, part black, and part flesh, part text – until she is forced to “cry uncle,” as it were, and becomes, “stripped of her disguise” (106),


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“a wretched substitute crouching, cringing, trembling . . . unnaturally, unrecognizably” (105) before Marie. Of course, this “substitute” (ironically, for the other substitute, Monsieur Motte) must be recognized, the novel suggests, as the “natural” Marcélite. She is, we are told, after all is said and done, only a “fool nigger” (97) with “false assurances of her own capability” (51), who has no right to her interest in Marie – a “love, which had always been unscrupulous . . . ferocious, insatiable” (107). racial fid elit y and romantic discipline For King this controversy over rightful racial and appropriately gendered partners is important because Marcélite’s bid for parity threatens Marie’s financial and sexual solvency: Marie almost loses her wealthy fiancé until Marcélite produces the papers proving the girl is from “pure” heritage; and, perhaps more importantly, Marie’s extended intimacy with Marcélite threatens to make her unfit for men. On the one hand female bonds are the most eroticized: the St. Denis Institute all-girls’ school is littered with classbooks dedicated to girlfriends that “when opened would direct you to a certain page on which was to be found the name of ‘celle que j’aime,’ or ‘celle que j’adore,’ or ‘mon amie cherie,’ or ‘ma toute dévoueé’” (59). When the school’s headmistress, Madame Eugenie Lareveillère, revisits her old “amie de coeur” (125), the unmarried Mademoiselle Aurore Angely, she finds they renew their friendship – cooing, petting, calling each other by their old school “pet names” – by again becoming blushing seventeen-yearolds, “dreaming . . . of love and a first lover” (171): [Aurore] had gone back, back, in her life, far away from the present; where was she going to stop, in the sweet loveliness of her caressing manner and words? . . . It was worth so much . . . to meet again as they had started in life, heart open to heart, tongue to garrulous tongue, all revealed, understood, nothing concealed, – absolutely nothing. (176–7)

Yet, despite this “tongue to . . . tongue” ecstasy, Marie’s headmistress reflects with concern about her unwed friend: “‘Heavens! what a difference a man makes in a woman’s looks, – that is, of course, a man who is not a brother, – poor Aurore!’ At school Aurore’s relations with her sex had been as close as possible; she was la plus femme des femmes. Now economical Nature seemed stealthily recalling one by one charms that had proved a useless, unprofitable investment; flattening her chest, straightening her curves, prosaicising [sic] her eyes, diluting her voice” (126). According to this use-it-or-lose-it theory of sexual identity, intense intragender relations simultaneously make one

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la plus femme des femmes (the most womanly of women) and yet somehow the least, most diminished, of women – flat, straight, diluted, prosaic. Marcélite worries that she has kept Marie too long to herself for similar reasons, wondering, “Other girls were women in appearance at Marie’s age; why did she not shed her childhood also? Why did not her arms round and her shoulders soften? Why could not some of her own exuberant flesh and blood be given to her bébé?” (145). To invoke again Eva Saks’s argument, if Marie and Marcélite are too similar in terms of gender to make the white girl a “woman,” then neither can they exchange bodies – “flesh and blood” – as Marcélite would like, because they are too different in terms of race. Yet we see how their “miscegenating” relationship actually enables its apparent antithesis: white-on-white, cross-sex desire. Marcélite’s love for Marie is structured by what one might call the “romantic discipline” of servant relations, necessary because she has “pierced the protection of . . . secluded femininity” (King, 16) supposedly preparatory for male-female relations. She is not only the “hairdresser of the school,” but also the “general chargée d’affaires, confidante, messenger, and advisor of teachers and scholars” (19). She, like King’s other black domestics, is both knowing voyeur and unsuspecting object of scopophilic fascination. In The Drama of an Evening, for instance, King watches the “help” watch a New Orleans soirée: The hairdressers and maids . . . had the privilege of the steps all the way down to the [dance] floor beneath. They sat . . . exchanging their bold, frank, and characteristically shrewd comments on their whilsom masters and mistresses.What did they not know of the world in which destiny had placed them in the best of all possible positions for observation? (212)

King grants the servants a worldly ringside view, nonthreatening because they remain offstage as well as “aggressively . . . loyal” in “their obstinate servility to family and name” (213). In short, the judgments passed by blacks serve to approve rather than enjoin the social play before them: “It was a pleasure to look up and see them, to catch a furtive greeting or demonstration of admiration. Their unselfish delight in the enjoyment of others gave a consecration to it” (213). King’s religious justification – that servants’ stations are both divinely sanctioned (“destiny”) and spiritually sanctioning (“consecration”) – develops from her insistence that black love is an act of faith not a form of obligation. In a letter to Charles Dudley Warner, King explains that she rejected a friend’s suggestion to justify Marcélite’s extreme devotion to her charge by suggesting she was saved from the auction block. She refuses rational or psychological motivation because, she says, the “[g]reat instances of devotion . . . among even the worst treated


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slaves” reflect so well upon the mistresses who apparently simply inspire it.41 Yet the narratorial scrutiny of blacks in such scenes betrays the fear that the crowd on the stairs is less than devotional or sanctifying. Just as Babo’s support of Don Benito is actually menacing – “the black with one arm still encircled his master” (Melville, “Benito Cereno,” 14) – so the servants ringing the dancefloor are vaguely threatening: the girls “danced round and round in the circle bounded by the rows of darkly-clad chaperones, as if they did not see them, their anxious, calculating fears, their sombre-hued bodies, or their sombre-hued lives” (205). If the girls do not seem to see their “chaperones,” the narrator certainly does – but in their conspicuous invisibility lies the threat not of violence but of abandonment.

savage hair: coif f ing race Marcélite’s peculiar hold over the girls she chaperones, for example, is clear when she fails to show up in time to prepare the hair of the principal and graduating class of the Institute. Madame Lareveillère views “being deserted in a critical moment by a trusted servitor, dropped without warning by a confidante, left with an indifference” as “heartlessness.” This public exposure to “the prying eyes and gossiping tongue of a stranger, – not the mere trivial combing, was what . . . approached tragic seriousness” (73). But Marcélite’s failure to show up (before her confession about “Monsieur Motte”) is also the highest apostasy because the women lose not only face but also their femininity – and with that, their racial distinctiveness. Their deshabille reflects atavistic regression: similarly left uncoiffed, Mrs. Joubert, the French teacher, “had returned to . . . that most primitive and innocent way of combing her hair, called la sauvagesse. Unrelieved by the soft perspective of Marcélite’s handiwork, her plain, prominent features stood out with the savage boldness of rocks on a shrubless beach. ‘How frightfully ugly!’ thought Madame Lareveillère” (65). Without Marcélite’s skill to prevent the “uglification process” (46), as one character puts it, the girls, with an “unfinished appearance . . . [to] their heads” (75), end up each looking like “a nègre” (72) – that is, not only looking “black” but, with this invocation of the French masculine form, also looking male. As Helen Taylor points out, Marcélite’s “art distinguishes the two races and sexes from each other,” and her “nonappearance reveals how fragile is the construct of femininity, and indeed of whiteness” (Gender, Race, and Region, 55). Although Marcélite is made to realize that “the difference between Madame’s head and hers [is] between a consciousness limited by

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eternity and one limited by a nightly sleep” (48), the chaos in her absence suggests racial difference is, in fact, only a hairdo away. Marcélite’s métier of hairdresser is itself a deeply erotic, fetishizing occupation, if we are to believe Freud.42 Yet she only mediates attraction, because for Marcélite to desire or be desired is to become “a monster of selfishness” (107). Marcélite is associated with the “hot, dull, heavy, dangerous maturity” (113–14) of her race, and thus is pivotal in the transformation of both Madame and Marie into Women, existing as an icon of primitive forces that prevents the “closing up of the hidden passage” (87), the fate of spinsters.43 Marcélite, as both a servant and a black woman – made knowledgeable by vocation and history, according to King – understands desire, and is, for that very reason, desirable. In her reading of Annie Leclerc’s essay “The Love-Letter,” a meditation in part on Vermeer’s painting “Lady Writing A Letter, with her Maid,” Jane Gallop points to the representation of the woman-servant as closely connected to the source of feminine knowledge, to the “secret well of immanent femininity” (170): “The woman servant stands in all-knowing plenitude. She is full, present, solid, round, and she knows . . . The maid is narcissistically, pleasurably whole unto herself, hence her desirability” (173).44 Preparing Eugenie’s negligee for her suitor, Marcélite aids the na¨ıve and inept woman, whose “white fingers . . . could only wander aimlessly amid the bows and laces” (164). The hairdresser, on the other hand, needs “neither directions nor explanations. Her dark face glowed with intelligence; she seemed transformed by a sudden illumination” (165), causing Eugenie to exclaim that, just as she suspected, “Marcélite is more of a woman than Aurore” (166). The black woman’s attractiveness – her features “regular and handsome according to the African type” and erotic, “with a strong sensuous expression, subdued but not obliterated” (17) – incites sexual yearning, the “gratification of desire” ( 127), but not for her. The same-sex dynamics across the color-line come to dissemble, rather than disassemble, the very straight and very white Kingdom of Womanhood.45 We see this process of the racial sponsorship of white heterosexuality throughout King’s work: when Mademoiselle Aurore considers devoting her life to the saints, she simply makes a “visit to the [slave] quarters, and talking to the women there” (148) she rejects “martyrdom” (148) and holds out for marriage. Similarly, on their “entrance into the ‘great world’” (205) in The Drama of An Evening, the young girls dance with prospective husbands, but it is not the white men but the “colored pianist,” Benoit, whose “dark bold head . . . could be seen in passionate movement” (203), who sexually awakens them.46 The girls cannot help giving themselves over to the “pleasure of the dance”:


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with that new blood beating in their veins, and new life bursting in their hearts under the forceful music of Benoit, – that warm, free, full, subtilely [sic] sensualized African music . . . The buds themselves would have burst into blossom under the strains . . . (230).

The girls are like newborns, their heads “still wet with the touch of holy water” (182), and like Benoit, Marcélite’s assigned role is to help birth the white woman to the white man, hence the bonne’s rejection also of the cult of piety (154). Even the servant’s invention, Monsieur Motte, is an avuncular front for erotic interest. When the headmistress, Madame Lareveillère, initially resists her suitor, Goupilleau, she protests by curiously reproducing the relationship between Marie and Marcélite, comparing herself to the girl and Goupilleau to the girl’s “uncle”: “I look upon him as a father, and he treats me as if I was his daughter . . . He is very old, – as old as Monsieur Motte himself . . . He is just exactly like a father, I assure you” (88). Yet the screen of Goupilleau as father allows the two to smoulder for each other for years (they will eventually marry), just as Marcélite as uncle masks the racial taboo of her own love with the sexual taboo of incest. When Marcélite rebels, then, her racial insurgency is not surprisingly cast as a lover’s “jealousy” (154): “As if the Virgin would do more for her than I! As if the Virgin could love her more, – as if God could love her more than I!” (154). In Madame Lareveillère’s room, too, a virile Marcélite rebels against the “Virgin Mother” with whom she is in direct competition for Marie: The cords of her short, thick neck stood out, and her broad, flexible nostrils rose and fell with passion. Her untamed African blood was in rebellion against the religion and civilization whose symbols were all about her in that dim and stately chamber . . . She felt a crushing desire to . . . reassert the proud supremacy of brute force. (51)

African atavism is meant to save Marie from the neutering effects of Christian civilization (from the Virgin, but also, it is suggested, from the risk of permanent virginity). The Virgin is not her only competition: Marcélite is equally threatened by her own Monsieur Motte, and senses almost immediately that Marie’s fictional uncle will supplant their apparent same-sex sufficiency. In the scene alluded to at the outset of this chapter, Marcélite and Marie put on the coveted white boots that the former has purchased for Marie’s graduation. I quote at length because it defies paraphrase:

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“Let us try them on,” said Marcélite. She knelt on the floor and stripped off one shoe and stocking. When the white foot on its fragile ankle lay in her dark palm, her passion broke out afresh. She kissed it over and over again; she nestled it in her bosom; she talked baby-talk to it in creole; she pulled on the fine stocking as if every wrinkle were an offense, and slackness an unpardonable crime. How they both labored over the boot – straining, pulling, smoothing the satin, coaxing, urging, drawing the foot! What patience on both sides! What precaution that the glossy white should meet with no defilement! Finally the button-holes were caught over the buttons, and to all intents and purposes a beautiful, symmetrical, solidified satin foot lay before them. (33–4)

Despite the pleasure of being shod, it is only, in Marie’s view, a prelude: “what would the reality be, if the foretaste were so sweet” (34), she wonders, repeatedly asking if her uncle will be “pleased . . . satisfied” (35) with her. Even as she is listening “dreamily and contentedly to praises thrown off by Marcélite’s fluent tongue” (34), Marie is wondering what her uncle will say. The “straining, pulling . . . coaxing, urging, drawing” (33) is apparently only symbolic initiation – the boot, “too tight” (34) at first, “will stretch” (34) with use. Marcélite herself is a tight fit, unable to wedge her bulk through the “diminutive door” (16) that guards the St. Denis. Her difficult squeeze suggests that though she is “indispensable” (19), she is also not easily lodged in the girls’ school. The phallus that Marie and Marcélite create – the “beautiful, symmetrical, solidified, satin foot” (34) – in place of the nonexistent uncle, the patriarchal void, turns out to be necessary but also necessarily temporary fetish. The carefully bound appendage is the physical duplication of another phallic construction, Monsieur Motte; King is careful to point out both as “masquerade” (79) once their purpose is fulfilled.47 Indeed, Marie realizes, in the fourth in the series, Marriage of Marie Modeste, that all the time she spent with her bonne and at the school was in preparation for her husband: “Everything I did was for him . . . Oh I feel like a woman now; I know what it is to be a woman” (292). After Marcélite’s revelation to Marie, she finds it “impossible to awake an interest in Marie” (150), feels she would prefer the “loud-mouthed fury and passion of her own people down there in the [slave] quarters, than this apathetic white silence” (150). Marriage is the goal of female relations – white or black – but it is also the end of them; marriage, therefore, becomes a “burial procession” (281), the bride a “corpse” (282) in Marriage of Marie Modeste. Because black duty is recuperated as unrequited desire, homoerotic interest serves to reinstitute slaveholding bondage in King’s fiction: Marcélite’s faithful service becomes sexual fidelity, a loyalty motivated by neither


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whip nor marketplace and thus not subject to the legal or economic changes that King so deplored.48 Not accidentally, King’s fantasy historically coincides with, even as it directly contradicts, the divorcing of white and black women’s interests, reflected in the escalating tensions within ladies’ clubs and women’s events in the 1880s and 1890s.49 As relations between “sisters” across the color-line became increasingly tenuous, black women became more politically outspoken in their desire to “establish mechanisms of representation” (Carby, “Women’s Era,” 245) for African Americans, to be released from the publicly circulated exoticizing and romanticizing discourses of blackness. Thus Marcélite stands in striking contrast to the black political agitation of the day. Her love for Marie seeks no manumission; Marie may abandon her bonne to marry but Marcélite will never break faith or contract with her white charges. In fact, in Monsieur Motte, reflecting King’s hyperbolic need to reinvent the mistress-servant covenant, black women cannot even bear release from their employ.

chap t e r 2

Off-color patients in Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy and W. D. Howells’s An Imperative Duty

Both Keckley’s exposé and King’s romance capitalize on the ability of domestic service to provide a model that both insists upon and regulates interracial contact, particularly between women. By the 1890s the medical industry, newly organized at the national level, offered another, and to some extent historically overlapping, rubric that promised to orchestrate cross- as well as same-sex race relations. Just as white employers and black domestics enlisted historically situated workplace codes and vernaculars, the doctor-patient relationship was replete with its own peculiar host of rhetorical protocols and rituals. And they, too, had political ends and effects: semiformalized by the turn of the century, medical discourses created a clinical color-line that, if it could not be crossed, could be treated. And when the physicians were white and the patients of – or “off” – color, the discourses of health care and Jim Crow united to most curious effect. ∗∗∗ The influential physician (and novelist) S. Weir Mitchell quipped in 1881 that “To be ill is a feminine verb,” phrasing lightly his quite serious judgment that womanhood itself is a pathological condition.1 Indeed, according to both popular and scientific assessment in fin de siècle America, the hysteric typified modern womanhood; she was, as Carroll Smith-Rosenberg points out, “characteristically female . . . the embodiment of a perverse or hyper-femininity.”2 Though hysteria has been the subject of much feminist interrogation, it is a defining model of womanhood whose racial politics have yet to be explored.3 If, as Hazel Carby argues, race and gender collaborate in antebellum definitions of womanhood – specifically in the “cult of true womanhood”4 – how must they in the era of Jim Crow? How do turn-of-the-century scientific and literary narratives newly contour racial as well as feminine norms? In short, with what effect does the rhetoric of female pathology converge with that of race politics in the 1890s? Medical practice, I argue here, offered an articulation of both the color-line and the workplace. In particular, this chapter explores the consanguinity of the 58

Off-color patients

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“Race Problem” and the “Woman Question” in the “mixed blood” hysteric, represented in both Frances E. W. Harper’s Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted and William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty.5 race as il lness: race politics and female pat hology Contemporary critics have only in passing paired Howells, editor and “father” of American realism, and Harper, author and activist. By the time Howells (1837–1920) published An Imperative Duty, his influential career as novelist and editor was well established. He had already published more than a dozen well-received novels and scores of articles in leading magazines, such as Atlantic, Harper’s, Scribner’s, The Century, and North American Review. His editorship (1871–81) of the Atlantic and later his “The Editor’s Study” (1886–92) in Harper’s Magazine provided him with forums for his patrician commentaries on culture, language, and literature. His controversial reviews of Charles Chesnutt and, especially, of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s second volume of poetry, Majors and Minors (1896), parts of which were reprinted in his introduction to Dunbar’s Lyrics of the Lowly, engaged and inflamed the racial controversies over language use. This chapter argues that in An Imperative Duty Howells also undertakes a controversial consideration of the African American in the so-called “American Girl.”6 For Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, race and representative womanhood were already and always inseparable. Born free in the slave state of Maryland, Harper (1825–1911) became the first female instructor at Union Seminary (the precursor of Wilberforce University in Ohio), and at a time when public speaking by women was openly discouraged, Harper lectured and toured for the Maine Anti-Slavery Society. With Frances Smith Foster’s recent discovery of Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph in the Christian Recorder, we now know that Harper published no fewer than four novels, and “at least eight books of poetry, innumerable prose pieces, and so many journal articles that she became known as the ‘journalistic mother’ of the African American press.”7 She served on the editorial board of the Anglo-African Magazine, and on the national boards of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, the American Equal Rights Association, and the National Council of Women of the United States, among the many other organizations to which she belonged that were devoted to elevating the status of black womanhood in America. The only recognized points in common between Howells’s and Harper’s two “race” novels have so far been their shared date of publication (1892) and the general critical consensus that both are highly compromised works in

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terms of historical accuracy and/or political efficacy.8 Such evaluations privilege a traditional realist aesthetic invested in mimesis. Rather than assess the novels as examples of failed realism, this chapter considers the curious palimpsest of scientific and sentimental discourses in Iola Leroy and An Imperative Duty, wherein “transparent” narratives of race and gender are in fact writ over and against each other.9 “Hysteria,” a word borrowed from both discourses, becomes a key regulatory term in managing – indeed, merging – what might otherwise be realist languages in conflict. The realist coup of Harper and Howells, I argue, derives not from the faithful reflection of Jim Crow in the 1890s; it derives from the ingenious manipulation of the dominant languages of realism to create what Amy Kaplan calls an “alternative reality”10 to Jim Crow. Both Howells and Harper explore the sexual politics of race through the “tragic mulatta,” but unlike mid-nineteenth-century sentimental narratives, An Imperative Duty and Iola Leroy narrate the young woman’s racial coming of age as a medical condition. Both the novels’ mulattas are attended by physicians who locate the etiology of neurasthenia in miscegenation, moving the mulatta from genre type to case study, from “tragic” to “hysterical” figure.11 Because diagnoses of hysteria represented, in part, a professional articulation of womanhood, it was a gendered – and gendering – discourse. Medical studies by Mitchell and George M. Beard suggested, further, that nervous diseases (on the continuum from dyspepsia to insanity) were also race and class specific: women of color, they concluded, lacked the extreme feminine sensibility and degree of cultural refinement marking the developed neurasthenic.12 The racial coding of hysteria (and related disturbances of the nerves) as a middle-class white woman’s disease meant it was not simply a condition of “modern” women, but also functioned as a condition for womanhood and modernity in Victorian America. Though they trafficked in similar racialist assumptions, Mitchell’s and Beard’s arguments are particularly significant in their modification of earlier equations between white women and blacks based on putative similarities in brain size and intellectual capacity, which suggested that women’s “psychological and anthropological peculiarities . . . seemed to relate [them] to the ‘inferior races.’”13 In contrast to these earlier homologies, hysteria increasingly operated as a clinical color-line between the more or less “civilized,” linked to the tendency toward juridical segregation of race and gender at the turn of century. As Anna Julia Cooper explained in 1892, restrooms labelled “For Coloreds” (read: for black men) and “For Ladies” (read: for white women) left women of color not only embarrassed but in an epistemological quandary: in both

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senses of the word, where were they to go?14 Such labels made AfricanAmerican womanhood a legal oxymoron, just as hysteria rendered AfricanAmerican womanhood a medical oddity. The “racial hysteria” in Howells’s An Imperative Duty and Harper’s Iola Leroy plays both with this racialized notion of hysteria (and womanhood) as white, and more generally with public anxiety about racial contagion in women.15 The striking parallels between Howells’s only full-length treatment of race relations and Harper’s best known novel suggest the cultural authority of medical discourse across genre and color-line. Once the respective mulattas, Rhoda Aldgate and Iola Leroy (who are raised white, look white, and act white – that is, racially privileged), discover their “one drop,” they are counseled by and later married to doctors. With this treatment, both narrative and medical, neither Rhoda nor Iola dies, as did so many of their literary predecessors. The authors’ revision of the tragic mulatta is predicated on the shared investment in – if varied modification of – the newly professionalized “sciences” of philology, psychiatry, ethnology, and especially medicine.16 Out of the flux of contested orthodox and emergent theories, these often loosely bounded disciplines began institutionalizing a pathology of race that underwrote much of the literary and political language concerning interracial relations for the next century. As Sander L. Gilman has argued, medical theory and practice increasingly defined Jews, African Americans, and ethnic Others in terms of mental illness, physical disease, and criminal degeneracy. Indeed, scientific studies, military research, and medical data associated high morbidity and mortality, especially from tuberculosis and syphilis, among African Americans with an innate racial susceptibility to systemic weakness.17 In this palimpsest of scientific and popular narratives, simultaneous accounts of feminine neurasthenia and racial disease rescript, as they partially obscure, each other. The effect in An Imperative Duty and Iola Leroy is that the double afflictions of race and gender in the novels’ neurasthenic mulattas, Rhoda and Iola, are a function of each other: racial conflict becomes a crisis of gender, and female hysteria a sign of racial dis-ease. In Howells’s novel, for example, when Rhoda, raised white by her white Aunt Meredith, discovers she is “mixed,” Aunt Meredith is sedated for her violent neurasthenic response to Rhoda’s “ancestral infamy” (30) and her “hysterical haste” (37) to broadcast Rhoda’s bloodlines. Rhoda, herself, displays “hysterical weakness” (87) over her “negro descent” (31). Similarly, in Iola Leroy, Iola, raised white by her mother, “breaks into peals of hysterical laughter” (106) on discovering her racial identity when her white Southern father dies. Her mother, Marie, also a “nervous” (80) mulatta, suffers from “brain fever and

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nervous prostration” (107) when remanded into slavery on her husband’s death; her sister, Gracie, dies of the “nervous shock,” just like two other “poor girls,” we are told, who are similarly struck dead “as surely as if from a blow” (100). Iola survives what is for others a fatal verdict of race; yet she inherits not only the “condition of the mother” – the historical euphemism for slavery – but also her mother’s “nervous condition,” an analogous embodiment of racial anxiety about enslavement.18 racial prescriptions In An Imperative Duty and Iola Leroy, however, this conflation of infirmities becomes symptomatic of a new feminine ideal. The plot of An Imperative Duty revolves around Rhoda’s courtship by a white physician secretly informed (though Rhoda does not suspect it) of the girl’s “anomalous origin” (38) by Aunt Meredith. For this Dr. Olney his “off-color” patient becomes a figure who merges race and gender, the primitive and the civilized, the past and the present: It was Rhoda’s elder world, the beauty of antiquity which appealed to him . . . the remote taint of her servile and savage origin gave her a kind of fascination which refuses to let itself be put into words: it was like the grace of a limp, the occult, indefinable lovableness of a deformity, but transcending those in infinite degree, and going for the reason of its effect deep in the mysterious places where the spirit and animal meet and part in us. (90)

Olney metamorphoses the tragic mulatta from aberration to archetypal woman through a kind of alchemic eroticism, transforming the physical disfigurement of race – Rhoda’s “limp,” her “deformity” – into the metaphysics of gender – the “occult” grace of a woman.19 In effect, he translates stereotyped race traits into gender attributes, turning Rhoda’s “servile origin” (and the source of her hysteria) into the very basis of his desire. She is superior, Olney suggests, to the “tame, blonde, Northern type” (89) because her link with the primal places her before and, paradoxically, above the more “advanced” and domesticated Anglo woman. Similarly, in Iola Leroy, Iola’s white father, Eugene, argues that it is precisely his wife’s lowly origins that make her near suprafeminine. He defends his desire to marry Marie, a “quadroon girl” (70) – despite the insistence of his racist friend, Lorraine, that women of color have no “virtue” (70) and are “willing victims” (70) of sexual violence – because she is so appealingly “helpless” (65), the subject of masculine “pity” (67). Her “defenselessness,” Eugene says, is the “best defense” (65). By linking the “supremacy of her

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virtue” (70) with the racial potential for victimization, Eugene finds in Marie “something different from all [his] experience of womanhood . . . It was something such as I have seen in old cathedrals, lighting up the beauty of a saintly face” (69). Like Olney in An Imperative Duty, he is attracted to this union of “spirit and the animal” (Howells, 90) because the union of high and low makes ex-slaves (or the descendants of slaves) exemplary wives. Within these “new” women inhere the most alluring characteristics of the “good ole” slave: faithfulness, loyalty, obedience, a good work ethic. Eugene falls in love with Marie’s service to him as a “faithful, devoted nurse” (72) during his Civil War service as a wounded soldier; Marie’s daughter, Iola, demonstrates such gifts as a “born nurse” (56) that the white suitor Dr. Gresham begins “talking like a lover” (56). Though the notion that traces of the weaker race enhance those of the weaker sex appears simply to conflate stereotypes, it does complicate ideologies of the “angel of the house.” In Harper’s novel, for instance, images of nursing or teaching, and the desire for “labor [to be] more honored among women” (210) undermine the doctrine of separate spheres for the sexes.20 And both Iola Leroy and An Imperative Duty revise the racial exclusivity of angeldom: Olney wishes to grant Rhoda feminine privilege, to make her “purely and merely a young lady, like any other” (38); she is a girl, as W. E. B. Du Bois writes in a review of An Imperative Duty, who “goes her way as thousands have done and are doing.”21 The feminization of race (and with it a limited refiguration of the terms of womanhood) makes possible the mulatta’s status as representative Woman – and simultaneously establishes her as model patient. Mitchell’s feminine infinitive (“to be ill”) linguistically grounds the female body as site of unrest, and the American Medical Association increasingly intervened in such forms of physical and social dis-ease, legislating women’s bodies in the 1880s and 90s by successfully working to ban abortion, restrict birth control, and require forced gynecological examinations for prostitutes.22 As the AMA’s involvement suggests, much of the “business of the physician,”23 as Mitchell called it, involves plotting the body to establish a position of cultural authority from which to narrate social change.24 In his own writings (both fiction and nonfiction), Mitchell diagnoses the social as well as the physical body – dispensing medical judgments, literary advice (he was “offended” by the realism of Norris and Dreiser), and rules about public etiquette. Howells’s literary correspondent and his daughter’s erstwhile physician, Mitchell represented the vast cultural and moral arbitration of the doctor.25 With what he called his “clinic in every book,” Mitchell assumes the influence of the literary intellectual at the turn of the century: the physician

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becomes the literary realist, the “Editor’s Study” now at the bedside. In turn we witness the realist cum diagnostician in an extraordinary sketch of Howells in an 1886 edition of Tidbits. Howells may hold the surgical instrument like a butter knife, and stare off as if preoccupied, but the “Demonstrator of the American Girl” clearly illustrates the suturing of literary arena and medical theater. Posed as though in one of Thomas Eakin’s “clinics,” scalpel in lieu of pen in hand, Howells prepares an incision/inscription on the woman prone and exposed beneath him (see Figure 2). Because their female, racial bodies are the most epistemologically contested, Rhoda and Iola become the patients most in need of such aid. All the physicians – Drs. Gresham, Latrobe, and Latimer, in Iola Leroy, and Dr. Olney in An Imperative Duty – offer both medical intervention and a moral therapeutics to heal their off-color patients.26 Combining “the functions of the priest and the leech, especially in the case of nervous ladies” (24), Dr. Olney seeks to protect the sacred mysteries of Rhoda’s birth by keeping them within a decidedly genteel gynecological domain, explaining the “cross in her blood” (100) as a “woman’s problem.” When the doctor is consulted about Rhoda’s “future” – that is, her marital prospects – he “perceived as never before that there was an inherent outrage in the submission of such questions to one of the opposite sex; there should be women to deal with them” (31). Her racial past incites both desire and indignation in the doctor because of his unspoken association of miscegenation with interracial rape and illicit relations: seeing Rhoda’s aunt’s desire to disclose the girl’s “anomalous origins” as “impertinent” and “squalid” (31), he reacts to her racial “stain” (30) as though he had lifted her skirt, “getting red with shame at what he’s been told against his will” (38). As Hortense Spillers puts it, the mulatta allows white society “to say without parting its lips that ‘we have willed to sin.’”27 Thus, out of a stimulated, if embarrassed, sense of willing complicity in white sexual violation, Olney finds it is “atrocious for Mrs. Meredith to have allowed her hypochondriacal anxieties to dabble with the mysteries of the young girl’s future in that way” (31). Professing superior discretion as physician, Olney decides to keep in confidence what women like Mrs. Meredith will not. Similarly drawing the bounds of good taste and the limits of medical practice, the white doctor in Iola Leroy, Dr. Gresham, also believes that as, apparently, “a woman of fine culture and good breeding,” Iola should “bury” (60) her “secret” (57). The “complexion of affairs” (58) so distresses Iola that Gresham warns she will “soon be our patient instead of our nurse” (60); and in fact the “continuous strain upon her nervous system” causes

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Figure 2 “William Dean Howells: Demonstrator of the American Girl” (Tidbits, May 1, 1886). With permission from the General Research Division, The New York Public Library; Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations.

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her “to suffer from general debility and nervous depression” (112), and so requires the assistance of Dr. Gresham – just as Rhoda turns to Dr. Olney (100). The doctors’ diagnosis of racial hysteria carries prescriptive force; as Mitchell puts it, physicians must tell the afflicted woman “what is real, what is unreal, what must be respected, what has to be overcome or fought.”28 In both novels the “real” is administered with a dose of professional sobriety meant to heal the mulatta of the sentimental hyperbole of her “tragedy.” Gresham thinks he can banish the “dread” “shadows” (231) that he believes Iola fears, and Olney suggests that Rhoda’s race must be examined “in no lurid twilight gloom, but in plain, simple, matter-of-fact noonday” (94), echoing Howells’s famous prescription for realism: the “simple and honest truth . . . as unphilosophized as the light of common day.”29 Both men secure the boundaries of reality through complete patient allegiance, determining the significance of the woman’s racial status through a process of confession: a distraught Iola tells Dr. Gresham the “secret of my birth” (111) and Rhoda finally “gasps hoarsely” that she is a “negress!” (94). The centrality of the confession to both novels, and the fact that the “nervous specialist,” as Dr. Olney muses, “must confess his patients before he be[gins] to prescribe for them” (20) are tied to the keys to interpretation. The doctors claim a racial literacy that the woman herself is represented as lacking because “of deep bodily opacities which only a specialist [can] interpret.”30 As confessor, the physician becomes the clearing-house for patient selfdisclosure because the mulatta’s racial “opacity” – her “neither/nor” status, her inner struggle about racial alliances – seems to require professional insight. The act of racial confession, however, both gives the “keys” to specialists, and reveals how easily the door can close on white authority. Despite the defensive insistence of white scientists like Dr. Latrobe in Iola Leroy, who claim that “there are tricks of the blood which always betray them” (229), and thus confessions just reconfirm the doctor’s own diagnosis, confessions in fact are reminders of the constant threat of passing. Because generational miscegenation left physiognomy and color unreliable markers of race, and despite philologists’ attempt to find linguistic litmus tests for race, voluntary revelation of the “one drop” was the only reliable form of disclosure.31 In the novels this anxiety is emphasized to the degree it is preempted: unbeknownst to the women, the doctors are already privy to their racial histories (Olney from Rhoda’s aunt; Gresham from a friend) before they are taken into the women’s confidence. Their confessions, then, seem simply to reiterate the doctors’ own knowledge (Gresham never admits he had known

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previously; Olney only belatedly reveals it afterwards) and thereby confirm an authority apparently never in question. Should such actions ever appear underhanded, Olney is careful to insist that no physician misleads “against [the] will” of the patient – that is, so Mrs. Meredith assures, no doctor will “cheat his patient” unless “he has some sign, some petition for deception, from the patient” (22). Of course, doctors can be cheated as well. As if to preclude the possibility of patient deception, doctors mediate racial identity by controlling the circuit of information.32 But in Iola Leroy the black Dr. Latimer violates the medical guardianship of white male authority with his own confession of passing to his white colleagues – most devastating because it comes from within the profession. The white Dr. Latrobe – who prides himself on being “clear-sighted enough to detect the presence of negro blood when all physical traces had disappeared” (239) – assumes Latimer is one of “us” (238) until the latter reveals himself as Other by declaring that he is “one of them” (238). Latimer replaces the white physicians’ racial brokering with his own, coming to quite different conclusions, as I will explain, about Iola’s “race” and its social consequences (263). practitioners of love With such high stakes for masculinity (white and black), it is almost predictable that the professional confession is transformed into spousal covenant when the physician becomes a practitioner of love. This conflation of professional ambitions and lovers’ pursuits imparts a certain virility to doctors, whose vast authority is, in turn, made manly. Mitchell argued that physicians “make good husbands . . . due to . . . their knowledge of the difficulties of feminine life,”33 and as the physician’s scrutiny and the lover’s gaze become one in these novels, Drs. Olney, Gresham, and Latimer claim intimate knowledge also of the women’s racial life. Professional license warrants them to propose marriage as the cure for the mulatta’s “crisis” (Howells, An Imperative Duty, 98). In Iola Leroy, for instance, Dr. Latimer offers a matrimonial tonic for the stress of racial uplift: “As a teacher, you will need strong health and calm nerves. You had better let me prescribe for you. You need,” he added, with a merry twinkle in his eyes, “change of air, change of scene, and change of name.” “Well doctor,” said Iola, laughing, “that is the newest nostrum out. Had you not better apply for a patent?” “Oh,” replied Dr. Latimer, with affected gravity, “you know you must have unlimited faith in your physician.” “So you wish to try the faith cure?” asked Iola, laughing. (272–3)

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The proposal is of course lighthearted, but even after she has accepted his proposal, Iola continues to call him “Doctor,” just as she calls her earlier suitor, Gresham, “Doctor,” after he, too, has confesses love. And Dr. Olney, in Howells’s novel, cajoles Rhoda “as if she were his patient” (98) in order to convince her to marry him. Despite the similarities between both novels’ courtship rhetoric, however, only the black doctor argues for marrying within the race. Latimer’s “faith cure” (270) weds racial “struggle” (271) to the “bonds of affection” (267), in contrast to Gresham and Olney, who pit conjugal fidelity against racial loyalty. Gresham’s offer to Iola of maternal surrogacy (“having my mother be your mother” [116]) is directly at odds with her sister’s injunction to “Stand by mamma!” (118) – that is, to stand by her mother’s race. Latimer’s proposed course of treatment runs directly counter to the miscegenetic resolution to the “race problem” suggested by the white Gresham, and by Dr. Olney in An Imperative Duty. To the degree that Howells’s novel is preoccupied with making Rhoda white, it is a related twist on Harryette Mullen’s suggestion that “the literature of passing . . . has as its central concern the American mechanism for the cultural and genetic reproduction of whiteness”;34 but Harper’s novel, in which Iola is finally restored as unequivocally “black,” clearly reflects what P. Gabrielle Foreman notes is the mulatta’s “attempt to identify with and recuperate blackness in a familial context,”35 an attempt that is a response to what Robert Reid-Pharr notes is “the messiness of the mulatto,” which “always threatens to overtake the project of a selfcontained, self-defined Black American literature and community.”36 If for white physicians interracial matrimony attempts to domesticate racial angst in order to foreclose political desire, Claudia Tate convincingly argues that intraracial marriage in Harper’s novel is reformist in part because it “dramatizes the novelist’s refusal to discredit African-American identity, solidarity, and racial equality” (99).37 And certainly Iola’s acceptance of Latimer exposes the impotence of whites like Gresham, who is both dismembered (a war injury leaves him with a “sleeveless arm” [144]) and has his suit twice rejected. But the historical terms of marriage are also refused. The “peculiar institution” is represented as continuous with the “holiest institution”: Eugene’s friend, Lorraine, for instance, unwittingly indicts both marriage and slavery when he suggests they are redundant arrangements. As he points out, under the law of coverture women are the legal possession of the white man. Thus, according to Lorraine, slavery makes marriage redundant: Marie is already “your property, to have and to hold to all intents and purposes” (65). Gresham’s proposal, too, resonates with the language of possession: “consent to be mine, as nothing on earth is mine” (112, repeated

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verbatim on 230). And even those women who are willingly a` couvert risk becoming mere commodities. Eugene’s marriage contract with Marie – and her Pygmalian remaking from ignorant “ward” (73) to educated wife – for instance, does not protect her from reenslavement as chattel. Nor does it prevent Lorraine’s insistence that women of color are not the victims but (referring to black mistresses) the “curse of our Southern homes,” attributing to them white men’s own culpability and destructive agency. Indeed, the very language of wedlock enables this projection whereby white men recast themselves as “victims”: in An Imperative Duty, for instance, Olney jests that Rhoda will keep him in “hopeless slavery as long as [he] lives” (98). If Olney denies his own power in such relationships, both white doctors also seem oblivious to what, in Iola’s words, “might result from such a marriage” (117): Gresham pauses at the mention of children who show “signs of color,” and at the end of An Imperative Duty Olney and Rhoda are living childless in Italy. Only Dr. Latimer, it is implied, is the sort of man to not only marry a woman of color but father children by her. Marriage, then, both asserts the masculine prerogative of the white doctors even as it marks the absence of paternity, the traditional marker of masculine prerogative. The white doctors’ apparent inability to conceive (or conceive of ) children, however, is balanced against the implication that offspring represent a sort of “health risk.” Since passing is part of the cure – Olney and Gresham agree the mulattas’ race should be kept a secret from the public – children pose the threat of transmission.38 Given its criminal status since the early seventeenth century, interracial marriage has often been considered a progressive solution to racial strife.39 But, like William Byrd’s comment in 1728 that a “sprightly Lover is the most prevailing Missionary” since “a Moor may be washt white in 3 Generations” and “an Indian . . . blancht in two,”40 Dr. Gresham’s belief that “the final solution of this question will be the absorption of the negro into our race” (228), and Dr. Olney’s argument that “sooner or later our race must absorb the colored race” (27), make clear that the conjugal bed simply offers a more intimate form of colonization. The fact that both Gresham and Olney advance this theory without elaborating their own role as progenitor of a “washt white” generation presumes that the “final solution” is cultural as well as physical, that even a childless marriage is an act of “absorption.” By moving the question of social protest to the bedroom, the white doctors also reflect the political shift in Jim Crow legislation from public concerns about states’ rights to those concerning private rights of

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association. Ironically, when Gresham argues that “[n]o one has the right to interfere with our marriage if we do not infringe on the rights of others” (234), he is invoking the legal prerogatives of personal contact (to be – or not to be – with whomever one chooses) undergirding the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson ruling on separate-but-equal public accommodations.41 Both he and Olney believe that mutual silence – a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy – ensures that miscegenation will “not infringe on the rights of others” potentially offended by interracial coupling. Olney actually argues that private contracts fulfill public responsibility, that their marriage is racial uplift. In response to Rhoda’s “imperative duty” to help her race, he insists that “the way to elevate them is to elevate us . . . Begin with me” (96). Both Gresham and Olney offer love, the paradigm of the interpersonal, as the local and localizing political solution. the romance of race This “halo of romance” (Harper, Iola Leroy, 110) and the “occult, indefinable lovableness” (Howells, An Imperative Duty, 89) surrounding the novels’ mulattas, seem to remove the novels from “the light of common day” – and thus from most critical accounts of literary realism.42 Rather than the “matter-of-fact noonday” light that Dr. Olney calls upon, Howells, Anna Julia Cooper argues, “attempts merely a sidelight in half-tones” (201). If Howells was criticized for painting with insufficient light, Harper’s novel, until very recently, has been neglected in part because her characters seemed too brilliantly lit, too idealized in the name of racial service.43 Yet just as romantic idealization, as Claudia Tate suggests, lays claim to reality, realist literature in turn makes, in Howells’s terms, “Reality its Romance.”44 The medicalization of the mulatta and of her sentimental plot in both these novels puts the lie to any easy generic distinctions between realism, romance, and racial-uplift fiction. In An Imperative Duty, for instance, Dr. Olney’s medical expertise – his realist’s tools – calms Rhoda’s racial hysteria, but it is “love [that] performed the effect of common-sense for them . . . in its purple light they saw the everyday duties of life plain before them” (emphasis mine, 99). It is crepuscular rather than “noonday” light – the mixing rather than contrasting of light and dark – that sobers up the couple. In fact, this mixing – of light and of “blood” – offers a kind of moral aesthetics for Olney, who resists seeing the world in conflictual black and white as does Rhoda’s aunt. Mrs. Meredith is capable of “atrocious cruelty” because “[r]ight affected

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her as a body of positive color, sharply distinguished from wrong, and not shading into and out of it by gradations of tint, as we find it doing in reality” (24). In a “purple light,” then, Rhoda’s “tragic family mask” (14) is not so much discarded as it is troped, becoming similar to what Howells, in The Years of My Youth, terms the “mask of fiction” necessary for self-realization: “No man, unless he puts on the mask of fiction, can show his real face or the will behind it.”45 As Eric Cheyfitz argues, Howells develops a “romance of realism”46 whereby identity emerges through idealization, through narratives that make possible a “real” self of the “highest effect” (57). Cheyfitz offers the example of Madison Woodburn and Fulkerson in Howells’s A Hazard of New Fortunes: “As soon as [Miss Woodburn] begins to conceive of Fulkerson in . . . ‘chivalrous’ terms, he begins ‘to see [himself] in that light’ . . . [She] realizes Fulkerson through idealizing him” (56–7). Similarly, in An Imperative Duty Olney listens to a potential suitor and rival, Bloomingdale, tell of how he could “almost wish for the direst misfortune, the deepest disgrace . . . to befall [Rhoda], if only that I might show her that it counted nothing against her, that it counted everything for her!” (81). Olney, in turn, is moved to behave in a similarly “generous” (80) and “noble” (81) fashion. He realizes that “such a lover could be told everything . . . knew this from his own thoughts as well as from the other’s words; he himself was like the spirit he conceived; ‘Du gleichst dem Geist den du begreifst’” (81). Through Bloomingdale’s tearful professions of love, Olney not only conceives of himself as “someone who can be told everything” (i.e. about Rhoda’s race), but also conceives of Rhoda’s “deepest disgrace” as something that “counted everything for her.” She, too, becomes a “Geist den du begreifst,” though in this case the Geist is a racial spirit, described as an “inherited mask,” a “family face” (13). An Imperative Duty is, finally, not interested in unmasking at all. Rhoda’s “classic mask,” which reminds Olney of the “Clytie head” (13), is a kind of ideal racial pose, less Grecian than Southern.47 A mulatta, born in the South (19) but living in the North, Rhoda embodies Howells’s “national fantasy”48 of Reconstruction; her marriage to Olney, reconstructed as a union between North and South, recapitulates her corporeal embrace of black and white. In her mourning black at her aunt’s funeral, Rhoda assumes a Southern aura: “black singularly became her. It is the color for the South, and for Southern beauty; like the inky shadow cast by the effulgence of tropical skies . . . The girl’s inky splendor dazzled him from the sable cloud of her attire” (89). Here, ironically, black rather than white represents

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Southern womanhood, and, oddly enough, Rhoda’s “sable” clothing serves as a nostalgic reminder of her “sin-born” (54) origins in the Old South, its equatorial tropics linking it with an Adamic (pre-Civil War) past. The past Olney yearns for is expressed, as is his desire for Rhoda, through the sartorial; he longs for the older generation of blacks that resists the “barbaric taste” (7) of the younger set in favor of darker clothing, “invariably delightful to him” because it “subdued itself to a sable which left no gleam of white about them but a point or rim of shirt collar” (7). Rhoda’s “sable” attire, at once emphasizing her blackness and “subduing” its effect, similarly signifies race in its proper place. Her marriage to Olney resolves the race question through a romantic circumvention of “social equality” (20). In An Imperative Duty this modern “solution” is also historical recompense, for it is the “father’s race” (23) that is to blame: “shame to the man who called himself [her grandmother’s] master!” (94) Olney declares. In fact, it is Rhoda’s “white” blood, her paternal lineage, that is identified as the source of her nervous problem: “[If] Olney ever had any regret it was that the sunny-natured antitypes of her mother’s race had not endowed her with more of the heaven-born cheerfulness with which it meets contumely and injustice. [Rhoda’s] struggle was with that hypochondria of the soul into which the Puritanism of her father’s race had sickened in her” (101). Rhoda’s hysteria, then, represents the curse of the sinning fathers, of the Anglo-Saxon men who first enslaved her ancestors – and in some sense of Howells himself, who feared his own daughter, Winifred, had inherited the neurasthenia with which he, and his wife, Elinor, had struggled their entire lives. In fact, most compelling in funereal black (89), Rhoda darkly resurrects Winifred. An Imperative Duty was written only two years after Winny had died from “hysterical complications” under the care of S. Weir Mitchell. Like Rhoda’s, Winny’s entrance on to the social scene was disrupted, her “coming out,” for which the Howellses had rented a Boston house, canceled by her morbid illness in the fall of her seventeenth year. Her death left Howells with feelings of intense guilt and the fear that she had succumbed to what John Crowley has called the Howellses’ “economy of pain” in which each family member “took turns, as it were, breaking down.”49 In the novel Olney finally takes Rhoda to live in Italy, the same Italy for which he (as was Howells as a youth) at the outset of the novel is “very homesick” (8). Indeed, Howells’s frequent trips to Italy were a “return to life” for his “nervous personality.”50 But like Olney’s failed scheme of setting up practice where he might treat “the nervous Americans who [come] increasingly

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abroad every year” (9), Howells’s attempt to resolve domestic tragedies abroad – healing national and personal grief through ex-patriation – offers depreciating returns. In fact, Olney originally returns to Boston to find Dr. Wingate: “a nervous specialist of his popularity must, of course, have followed nervous suffering somewhere out of town . . . [and had] only promised himself to . . . be suitably settled to receive the nervous sufferers when they began to get back in the fall” (10). His decision to return to Italy with Rhoda ironically echoes the hope of the hysterical aunt he treats so dismissively; Mrs. Meredith concludes that Rhoda’s only chance for matrimony might be in Italy (35). The equation is set up early in the novel when Olney waxes nostalgic about Boston blacks and the “domestic foreign”: “the brilliant complexions” and “public spectacle” of “negroes in Boston somehow brought back to Olney’s homesick heart a sense of Italy, where he had never seen one of their race” (8). Only Rhoda’s racial Geist seems to transcend both nation and grave. The defect of Puritan “hypochondria of the soul,” though “sickened” in Rhoda, is muffled by her African “cheerfulness,” the “cross in her blood” (100) apparently the “cure” Howells never found for Winny. Indeed, Rhoda’s maternal “antitypes” (101) might possibly reinvigorate the national racial stock, just as the young Irish women whom Olney assesses “scientifically” (4), “might give us, with better conditions, a race as hale and handsome as the elder American race,” though he finds that “the transition from the Old World to the New, as represented in them, was painful” (4).51 If Rhoda’s “Old World” blood proves redemptive for a modern age, however, only Olney – dispelling Rhoda’s hysterical fears “as if he had literally rescued her from her own thoughts of herself” (100) – can redeem her, becoming the savior Howells could not be. Thus, in the end, the mulatta offers a remedy to not only Anglo-Saxon morbidity but also paternal guilt. There is no similar Great White Hope in Iola Leroy; the white doctor, like Iola’s white father, saves no one. But, like Rhoda, Iola and her nerves represent racial and national futurity. Dr. Latimer assures Iola that, like her, all African Americans will “catch the fever and fret of the nineteenth century soon enough” (269), though for that very reason hysteria also signals postwar generational boundaries within the race. The ex-slave Aunt Linda, for instance, refuses to learn to read, insisting that “it would gib me hysterics ef I war to git larnin’ froo my pore ole head” (156). Though she is spirited – giving licks to selfish white folks, to the intemperate, to the politically unscrupulous – she will not take advantage of the postwar benefit of education. All concerned in the novel recognize that for better

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or worse she does not fit into the new social order; the incongruous image of an hysterical Aunt Linda – of the salt of the earth gone witless – suggests an almost physiological breach between pre- and postwar epochs. As a mark of modernity, then, neurasthenia heralds the cultural initiation of African Americans specifically through the refiguration of womanhood. Even the single instance of male hysteria in Iola Leroy demonstrates the way in which a “feminine” illness enables a recuperation of the racial masculine as well. Early in the novel, after discovering he is not all-white, Iola’s brother, Harry, experiences a womanly “swoon” (120), a psychic response even more marked than his sister’s. After months in a hospital, he recovers, however, because of his “excellent constitution” (123), and serves in a black Civil War regiment that does well because the “boys” “possess greater breadth of physical organization and stronger power of endurance” (134) than others. If Harry is at first a “case that baffles” (121) – because both his racial and his gender status are unstable – his successful Civil War service retroactively confirms his masculinity by revising castrating notions of African Americans as effete and insensible. That is, Harry does not so much overcome his illness as graft modern sensibility to masculine exertion in the name of national service. Indeed, Harry’s “distinguished malady” (Lutz, American Nervousness, 4) seems to herald his wartime valor, for it establishes his participation in the modern national temper. As George Beard put it, “American nervousness is the product of American civilization,” and makes “necessary and possible a new and productive country.”52 Thus, because African Americans represent the potent salvation of white America in both novels, Iola Leroy and An Imperative Duty strikingly reverse orthodox theories of African-American physical and civic degeneracy at the turn of the century. Structured by the medical discourse they seek to exploit, Harper’s racial-uplift project and Howells’s realist work risk the circulation of canards of racial and feminine infirmity in order to reconceive them. If for Dr. Mitchell there is a “host of enemies”53 within nervous women, then for Harper’s and Howells’s white doctors, race is the enemy within, at least initially. By both novels’ ends, however, the mulatta/o is no longer the sign of racial entropy, but a medium for personal and national restoration. Further, if in Harper’s novel Dr. Latimer cautions Iola that she is growing “morbid and nervous” (269) because of her mixed heritage, it is not her race that he describes as the “enemy within,” but the social consequences of racism without. The “best blood is African” (208) Latimer insists; thus Iola does not belong to an “effete and exhausted people, destined to die out before a stronger race” (247), as the Hon. Dugdale, describes it in

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the novel. Instead, in what Sander L. Gilman and Nancy Stepan term “transvaluation,”54 the feminized “disabilities of color” (Harper, Iola Leroy, 233) represent the legacy of slavery, not of blood. Despite these novels’ very different racial agenda, finally, both suggest that racism, not race, is the “disease” (Iola Leroy, 216), “plague” (86), “virus” (239), the “deadly cancer eating into the life of a nation” and the “wound too deep to be lightly healed” (131).

chap t e r 3

“Alien hands” in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening

What intellectual feats had to be performed by the author or his critic to erase me from a society seething with my presence . . .? Toni Morrison1

“All along the white beach, up and down, there was no living thing in sight.” Kate Chopin2

[T]he real challenge . . . is to make whiteness visible as a culturally constructed ethnic identity historically contingent upon the disavowal and violent denial of difference. Kobena Mercer3

If in Howells’s and Harper’s fiction doctors successfully arbitrate racial and gender maladies, in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899) Edna Pontellier’s Dr. Mandelet is unable to either correctly diagnose or treat her “morbid condition.”4 Her white Creole husband thinks the fact that she is “not like herself ” (117) has something vaguely to do with the “eternal rights of women” (118) even though she is not associating with what the doctor refers to as that circle of “pseudo-intellectual women” (118). Because she “lets the housekeeping go to the dickens” (117), finds weddings “one of the most lamentable spectacles on earth,” and refuses him in bed (“you understand – we meet in the morning at the breakfast table” [118]), Mr. Pontellier thinks the problem is generally of a gynecological nature. The “semi-retired physician,” most often sought for consultation for his “wisdom” than for his “skills” (116–17) concurs. The doctor is of another, older generation, we are frequently reminded, and though he affords her more understanding than most of the other men in the novel, he interprets her malady in ways the novel suggests are outdated: he surmises that Edna’s behavior is either a sign she is having an affair or, sounding like S. Weir Mitchell, is merely a mark of the feminine: “Woman, my dear friend, is a very peculiar and delicate organism – a sensitive and highly organized woman, such as I know 76


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Mrs. Pontellier to be, is especially peculiar. It would take an inspired psychologist to deal successfully with them . . . Most women are moody and whimsical. This is some passing whim of your wife” (119). Yet the “scientific” narrative he tells Léonce Pontellier is no more correct than the moral tale he tells after dinner that, trying to catch her conscience, is about “a woman’s love, seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source after days of fierce unrest” (123). Edna in contrast invents an apparently gripping story for her company about lovers who “never came back” (123). The doctor can only conclude that she has taken a lover, and most interpretations of The Awakening focus on it as a sexual coming-of-age novel. Yet it is noteworthy that even though the good Dr. Mandelet later offers himself as available “for her confidence” (171), Edna refuses his assistance as advisor, saying she only wants her “own way” (171). However, if Edna feels no need of a doctor’s care, her “way” of “freedom and independence” (134) does require, she says, “Old Celestine,” a black servant “who will come and stay with me and do my work” (134). What Dr. Mandelet is far from diagnosing is the way the complex forms of racial labor performed by the many others like Celestine in the novel are critical to understanding Edna’s “condition.” ∗∗∗ Upon one of the several literal and figurative “awakenings,” Edna Pontellier rouses herself from a “delicious, grotesque, impossible dream to feel again the realities pressing into her soul.”5 These waking realities – motherhood, marriage, Victorian mores – leave Edna heavy-lidded; in the glare of domestic, religious, and social conventions she is repeatedly “overcome” (47, 82, 83) and “overtake[n]” (78) by “sleep” and “drowsiness” (82). Her husband attempts to force her “thoroughly awake” by reproaching her with “her habitual neglect of the children” (48), but in the home, as in church (82), she feels pressed into slumber. Though Edna is touted as a woman who “refuses to be caged by married and domestic life and claims for herself moral and erotic freedom,”6 her feminine liberation is narcoleptic, a movement in and out of consciousness. Because the world seems too much with Edna, critics have aligned Chopin’s work with transcontinental “New Woman fiction” preoccupied with the fin-de-siècle “desire to throw identity away and live beyond culture.”7 Hence Edna’s dozing is seen as an attempt to dispose of “that fictitious self,”8 and her ennui as a kind of out-of-culture experience. The result of such an alignment is the critical reinscription of a traditionally Western conceptual duel (and duality) of self against culture, and the idealization of the self-sufficient individual.9 Sandra Gilbert, for instance, implicitly

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endorses the myth of autonomy by arguing that Chopin (1851–1904) institutes a “feminist myth of Aphrodite/Venus as an alternative to the patriarchal myth of Jesus.”10 As Venus springs fully formed from the waves, so Edna appears above but not of culture. Represented as a self-made woman and placed in the tradition of an American Adam/Eve, Edna inherits the legacy of what Quentin Anderson termed the imperial self.11 This characterization, however, tends to preempt investigation of the cultural and, I wish to argue, specifically colonial production of white female selfhood and sexuality in the novel. In her critical revision of Anderson, Wai-chee Dimock suggests that the imperial self is not a matter of personal character but rather a function of national culture. As such, the imperial self is also an imperialist: “‘imperial’ not only in consciousness but in conduct . . . At once autonomous and impregnable . . . the imperial self is quite literally empire-like, his province akin to national polity.”12 Within this expansionist discourse the imperial subject is avaricious, colonizing, annexing. To be the “soul that dares and defies,” Mademoiselle Reisz in The Awakening points out, “includes much,” for “one must possess many gifts – absolute gifts – which have not been acquired by one’s own effort” (115). In other words, the independent self cannot acknowledge receipt of gifts it must appear to own a priori; individuality must be a sufficiency unto itself even as it is acquisitive. It is in this context that I wish to interrogate the cultural and racial boundaries of Edna’s “solitary soul,” for as the “regal woman, the one who rules, who looks on, who stands alone” (145), her sovereignty has gone unimpeached. Though Edna appears to be the epitome of discrete selfhood – insisting that her sexual “awakening” is the result of “no external” source (79), that she is “self-contained” and feels as though she walks “unguided” (61) – she declares in the same breath that neither does her restlessness derive from any source “within” (79). Rather, she provocatively suggests that she “had placed herself in alien hands for direction” (79). It is this alien touch, a foreign presence that again and again “overcomes” Edna, that goes unnoticed in critical projects that focus only on The Awakening’s movements “beyond culture.” It did not go unnoticed, however, by Chopin’s contemporaries, who commented frequently on her representation of “these semi-aliens,”13 the diverse residents of Louisiana, remarking that her characters are “exotic, not-quite-American species.”14 For Chopin and her readers there were more compelling images than Aphrodite, no less mythic and much closer to home, in the historical racial types with which she was quite familiar.


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In other words, Aphrodite was in Chopin’s own backyard, for those of the “warmer” races had been long considered “well-vers’d in Venus’ school.”15 Edna locates in racial and ethnic Others a territory necessary for a liberating alterity: in their difference, she finds herself. The white Catholic Creole society is the most apparent but not the only influence on Edna, a Protestant Kentuckian. Though Edna admits that she is initially attracted to the “excessive physical charm of the Creole” (57) and to the caresses of Madame Ratignolle in particular, Creole women in The Awakening are also described as emphatically chaste. Edna calls Madame Ratignolle a “faultless Madonna” (54), a “sensuous Madonna” (55), whose “lofty chastity” is in “Creole women . . . inborn and unmistakable” (53). Instead, Edna first discovers the erotic frontiers of the self by exploiting the less visible constructions of sexual difference associated with blacks, quadroons, and Acadians in the novel. By returning these repressed Others to considerations of Chopin’s possessive individualism, one can better understand Edna’s fitful naps. Alternately awake and asleep – sovereign (“unguided” [61]) and subjugated (“overcome” [47]) – Chopin’s heroine enacts the paradox of the imperial self who appears to rule while being herself ruled. The unbearable contradiction of being both free agent and yet acted upon is characteristic of the colonizer’s position. And as the myth of self-authorization must involve the erasure of its own authorizing principle, so must Edna repress that which is both the basis for and a threat to her autonomy. As Albert Memmi argues, the colonizer, unable to accept his or her sovereignty as contingent, must eventually seek to “dismiss [the colonized] from his mind, to imagine the colony without the colonized.”16 In this sense Edna’s sleep is both passive in its submission to alien influence, and aggressive in its effective silencing of any conflict within the self. Her paroxysmal sleep can be seen as an unwitting contribution to what George Washington Cable refers to as the “silent South,”17 part of the collective amnesia regarding the abuses and uses of interracial intimacy in the postwar South. alien hands and the alien-ated self In one sense “alien hands,” anatomized and anonymous, simply render domestic services; nameless, speechless, shadowy women manumit Edna from “responsibility” (79), and, as critics have noted, to that extent her sexual awakening is a white middle-class luxury.18 But the relation between sex and labor is not simply a matter of economic privilege in The Awakening, for

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Edna’s class bias is not her “chief obstacle to freedom of expression.”19 Critics have argued that the hierarchical class relations in the novel limit Chopin’s feminist project because they interrupt the circuit of female sympathy for those less privileged; but it is actually Edna’s generalized identification with – rather than her alienation from – the marginalized that both affirms her class position and allows her to critique the sexual constraints associated with it. Equating maternity and slavery, for instance, Edna remarks that her children are her “soul’s slavery” (175). Karen Sánchez-Eppler, in her analysis of the intersection of early and mid-nineteenth-century feminist abolitionist works, analyzes the appropriation of the imagery of slavery for the purposes of feminine liberation, arguing that the strategic likening of white women to black female slaves promoted “the recognition that personhood can be annihilated and a person can be owned, absorbed, and un-named. The irony inherent in such comparisons is that the enlightening and empowering motions of identification that connect feminism and abolitionism come inextricably bound to a process of absorption not unlike the one they expose.”20 Not only does identification elide the particularity of white and black women’s exploitations, it actually enables a more subtle form of distancing. By emphasizing and identifying with the subjugation and silencing of the slave, the white woman “asserts her right to speak and act, thus differentiating herself from her brethren in bonds. The bound and silent figure of the slave metaphorically represents the woman’s oppression and so grants the white woman access to political discourse denied the slave.”21 By initiating her escape from gender convention through the rhetoric of racial oppression, Edna reinforces rather than razes class and race differences. In fact, class distinctions reflect the structuring of racial difference that enable Edna’s sexual expression. There is no suggestion that she sympathizes with the vague dissatisfaction of the nannies on Grand Isle, who appear “disagreeable and resigned” to their caretaking duties (63).22 Edna neglects not so much her children, as Mr. Pontellier insists, but the quadroon nursemaid who tends them. When Mr. Pontellier rhetorically asks, “[I]f it was not a mother’s place to look after children, whose on earth was it?” (48), neither Edna nor her husband seems to recognize the answer revealed by their daily practice: the quadroon’s. Not just of no account, but not accounted for, the quadroon cares for the toddlers morning to night. It is she who accompanies the children to Iberville when Edna begins her affair with Arobin, and she who takes them for the day when Edna escapes with Robert to Chênière Caminada. Edna’s agency is measured against – indeed is contingent on – the necessarily mute quadroon.


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Actually, despite her presence the quadroon is often neither heard nor seen. As Edna awakens, race is rendered narratively invisible.23 Much of her vacationing on Grand Isle involves the “vacating” of the quadroon, who steps into the narrative ellipses created by Edna’s consuming presence. For example, in a rather mundane passage in which the quadroon appears initially, she is inventoried along with the other items of local color as Edna surveys the scene outside her New Orleans house: “The boys were dragging along the banquette a small ‘express’ wagon. The quadroon was following them with little quick steps, having assumed a fictitious animation and alacrity for the occasion. A fruit vendor was crying his wares in the street” (104). Such impressionistic notetaking generates the accumulative description often associated with local-color literature. The details are listed rather than ranked, and this leveling of the field of signification (with the concomitant implication of the “objective” reporter) has led critics to call Chopin a “quasi-anthropological” writer with an “almost scientific detachment.”24 Mary Louise Pratt notes that such anthropological portraiture (associated also with travelogue and conquest literatures) “textually produces the Other without an explicit anchoring either in an observing self or in a particular encounter in which contact with the Other takes place”;25 that is, because the perceiving subject is absent (though the authorial and authoritative voice remains), one never witnesses the interaction of “native” and “non-native.” Hence the “neutral” reporting masks the often aggressive physical or textual effacing of the Other. Similarly, in Edna’s account the relationship between her and the quadroon is made unavailable because it is encoded within established subject positions inherent in the genre. In fact, one begins to understand how the two might function in relation to each other only when Edna recounts her lack of enthusiasm for the world around her, this time ticking off everything but the quadroon: “She felt no interest in anything about her. The street, the children, the fruit vendor, the flowers growing there under her eyes, were all part and parcel of an alien world which had suddenly become antagonistic” (104). When Edna enters the picture, the nanny is, as it were, excused. As an item on a list, the quadroon was never in relief, but her elision in the passage is significant in relation to Edna’s entrance and heightened self-consciousness. It is the nanny who first betrays a theatrical estrangement from the world in which she appears; her behavior is “fictitious,” she is in but not of the picturesque scene. The quadroon’s play-acting suggests the kind of epistemological disjunction that provokes Edna’s own sense of alienation. In becoming “self-absorbed” (104), Edna absorbs as well the split sensibility of the quadroon. When the narrator

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comments that Edna was “becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world” (emphasis mine, 108), the echo suggests that she has claimed the quadroon’s fictive identity even as she rejects the association. Though the quadroon reinspires her childhood sense of the divided self, the “dual life – that outward existence that conforms, the inward life which questions” (57), Edna has no recollection of the quadroon at all as she awakens to her new alien-ated self.26 It is no accident that the quadroon is anonymous; she is in effect absented or, perhaps more accurately, displaced by Edna. The “sweet half-darkness” (102)27 that Edna seeks is made possible by the partially visible life of the quadroon, a life that may be entered only by remaining unexposed and little understood. After all, Edna does not really want to know the experience of the people of color she sees dimly on the street; her new identity emerges only in the twilight of junctures, in the illicit coupling of her life to theirs. Assuming the “far-away meditative air” (44) that earlier in the novel characterizes her nanny, Edna takes on and takes over the quadroon’s distance from the bourgeois life Edna is eager to leave behind. As a “little black girl” sweeps with “lazy absent-minded strokes” (79), as “an old mulattresse” sleeps “her idle hours away” (163), so Edna is frequently lost in an “inward maze of contemplation or thought” (46) and feels pulled to “lose [her soul] in mazes of inward contemplation” (57). And in direct proportion to her “awakening,” she becomes absent-minded – daydreaming in company (60), acting “idly, aimlessly” (61), humming “vacantly” (129). Thus it is not only that the quadroon’s (and the little black girl’s and the mulattresse’s) physical labor is taken for granted, but that Edna employs as well their tropological potential, their associations with the marginal and, ultimately, with the erotic. In his useful analysis of the figure of the black servant in the visual arts, Sander L. Gilman points out that one of the image’s “central functions in . . . the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was to sexualize the society in which he or she is found.”28 From Hogarth’s A Harlot’s Progress (1731) to Manet’s Olympia (1863), black servants, signifying sexuality though not necessarily overtly sexual themselves, eroticize white women. As Gilman argues in his discussion of Manet’s Nana (1877), the “sexualized female [functions] as the visual analogue of the black” even where no blacks are present, for “the black servant is hidden in Nana – within Nana. Even Nana’s seeming beauty is but a sign of the black hidden within” (251). In Chopin’s fiction the quadroon similarly appears divested of subjectivity and, it would seem, of sexuality. And yet like Nana’s, Edna’s sexuality is brought into relief by the quadroon’s literary inheritance of


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sexual conventions. As Hortense Spillers puts it, the “mulatto in the text of fiction” silently speaks of unsanctioned sex, allowing the “dominant culture to say without parting its lips that ‘we have willed to sin.’”29 The relationship between Edna’s willingness to “sin” and the quadroon is further reinforced by the narrative’s own “vocabulary of signs,”30 signs that provocatively yoke Edna’s and the quadroon’s mutual distraction, and, thereby, their potential social and sexual deviance.31 oppression by the oppressed The racial midwifery of Edna’s sexual awakening is not simply repressed; it is refigured. To the children the silent and static quadroon is simply a “huge encumbrance . . . good only to button up waists and panties and to brush and part hair” (51); to Edna she and the other servants are equally obtrusive. Indeed, such women are not only in the way; they function as stable counters to Edna’s flights. When Edna throws her wedding ring to the floor in a pique of frustration, it is not her husband but the maid who returns it to her, reaffirming the established life that Edna has tried to toss aside (100). Servants and nannies, Chopin implies, are the keepers rather than the victims of traditional Southern society; hence Edna can complain, as she moves out of her husband’s house, that there are “too many servants” whom she is “tired of bothering with” (134). However, Edna does not live entirely on her own, for her independence is made both possible and appealing because “Old Celestine, who works occasionally for me, says she will come and stay with me and do my work. I know I shall like it, like the feeling of freedom and independence” (134). Her comments suggest that people of another color and class are, paradoxically, both a hindrance to and yet necessary for her liberation. Celestine is one of the bare essentials in life, but too many like her become a basic part of Edna’s oppression. Color itself, not as it is discriminated against but as it functions to discriminate, becomes oppressive to Edna. The “black,” the “mulatto,” the “quadroon,” and the “Griffe,” are subtle indices to social status in the white community. Named according to the ratio of “Negro blood” in their veins, these representative figures function not as an indictment of an arbitrary color-line, but as a reminder and reinforcement of cultural tiering. At one of many parties that Edna and her husband are obliged to attend, she notes that a “light-colored mulatto boy, in dress coat and bearing a diminutive silver tray for the reception of cards,” admits the guests, while a “maid, in white fluted cap, offered the callers liqueur, coffee, or chocolate” (100). The mulatto boy is one of the prestigious minutiae – like

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the silver tray, the white cap, the liqueur that constitute the suffocating drawing-room atmosphere Edna loathes; he is visible as a racial marker (not a victim) of social hierarchies. The oppressed become the oppressors as black subordination becomes an element of white victimage.32 The reversal has at least two effects, both of which are most evident in an important but overlooked scene between Victor Lebrun and a nameless “black woman” with whom he has a dispute over opening the door for Edna. The incident, an example of the “offensive” behavior of blacks (owing to what Victor calls “imperfect training”), codes sexual initiation as concern over a servant’s duty. An interesting gloss on Edna’s relationship with the quadroon, the episode suggests the ways blacks obliquely structure white sexual experience. Furthermore, because potential debates about civil rights are, in effect, reinscribed as sexual rites, the episode illustrates the process by which race and class conflicts are deflected: Before she saw them Edna could hear them in an altercation, the woman – plainly an anomaly – claiming the right to be allowed to perform her duties, one of which was to answer the bell. Victor was surprised and delighted to see Mrs. Pontellier . . . He instructed the black woman to go at once and inform Madame Lebrun that Mrs. Pontellier desired to see her. The woman grumbled a refusal to do part of her duty when she had not been permitted to do it all, and started back to her interrupted task of weeding the garden. Whereupon Victor administered a rebuke in the form of a volley of abuse, which, owing to its rapidity and incoherence, was all but incomprehensible to Edna . . . [Victor] at once explained that the black woman’s offensive behavior was all due to imperfect training, as he was not there to take her in hand. (110–11)

The black woman’s resistance is not simply a sign of domestic unrest but a mark of Victor’s adolescent incompetence. The argument is potentially threatening to traditional roles, but the debate becomes unrecognizable – “incomprehensible” and “incoherent” – and thus is represented as little more than an entertaining aside: the heteroglossic exchange does not produce social parity, the babble does not level rank. Despite Victor’s reference to the woman’s need for training, it is her superior knowledge of “natural” hierarchies that eventually reinforces the domestic order as well as an established sexual economy. Though she eventually does go in search of his mother, as he asked, she has underlined his social/physical immaturity, thus emasculating him before Edna. Victor, described as having a childish crush on Edna, has his manhood put in question by the insubordination of one supposedly “under” him. In this curious triangulation of desire, the boy cannot become a man except


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by overcoming the mother. The black woman acts as a mammy to the boy, but as the presence of his biological mother upstairs suggests, hers is a symbolic maternity. She also, more provocatively, doubles as the “woman before” Edna (she literally precedes her at the door), as a test case of his masculine authority. The black woman at the door figuratively stands in as the sexual stumbling block he must overcome before he is man enough for a white woman; in that sense Victor’s seemingly innocuous attempt at verbal domination evokes the history of rape as boyhood initiation. She is used, like so many before her, as the measure of a white boy’s political power and sexual prowess. She is not allowed direct speech – we know her words, like those of all the women of color in the novel, only as they are mediated through indirect narration – but she is both social arbiter and sexual measure. “strange, new voices” This kind of sexual work in the novel is rendered either by domestics, like the quadroon and the “black woman,” or by various “servants-at-large.” Women of another color or class tend to serve as sexual coaches, their homes as sexual “safehouses.” Often older than their pupil – and thus putatively removed from sexual competition – they authorize white sexuality and self-knowledge. In Chopin’s fiction the experienced woman is always of a lowered racial or ethnic status than her novice: if the heroine is white Creole, her mentor may be Acadian; if she is Acadian, her guide may be “black.” The “black-as-night” (195) Manna-Loulou in “La Belle Zora¨ıde” (1894), for instance, enlightens her mistress about sex beyond the pale. In “Athéna¨ıse” (1896) the quadroon landlady, Sylvie, instructs the Acadian heroine in the ways of sex and motherhood.33 Thus it is not altogether unusual that Edna in The Awakening names Madame Antoine, her hostess on Chênière Caminada, as the source of an after-dinner tale of adultery (124). A counter to Dr. Mandelet’s didactic tale of a woman’s errant love “seeking strange, new channels, only to return to its legitimate source” (123), Edna’s version of illegitimate sex is ascribed to an author other than herself. Though the story is in fact Edna’s and not the Acadian’s, she betrays the ethnic precedent of her own narratives. Arguably, Manna-Loulou’s, Sylvie’s, and Madame Antoine’s stories are examples of Chopin “giving voice” to these women, granting them, with their supposedly more “worldly” knowledge, conditional authority over white women. Some of Kate Chopin’s characters are surely as dependent

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on the sexualization of racial service as are Grace King’s, and with both writers this service is as central to the white women’s Bildungsromane, but, unlike King, Chopin erases the obligation by denying the debt. The women become near-invisible, barely heard background. Madame Antoine speaks “no English” (83). And earlier, when Edna is napping in the woman’s home, she perceives only Madame Antoine’s son’s “slow, Acadian drawl” (which she says she does not understand) and Robert’s French (which she understands only “imperfectly”) among “the other drowsy, muffled sounds” (84). Robert in a sense assumes Madame Antoine’s voice, translating and brokering Edna’s exchanges with her. Edna uses her cultural illiteracy to her advantage, however, for Robert’s translations (very much like Victor’s) stand between her and the natives or servants, performing an enabling interference. In effect, the translation of Madame Antoine’s patois offers Edna the immediacy of the spoken word without the responsibilities and required give and take of conversation. Patricia Yaeger points out that “Robert’s knowledge of several languages” gives him “the power to control what others hear and speak.”34 Nevertheless, his “attentions, his services, his affection” are, as Cynthia Griffin Wolff suggests, “extensions of [Edna’s] own will or desire.”35 In this case Robert’s linguistic negotiations both dramatize and sustain Edna’s own ambivalent role with the locals by providing, as George Steiner describes it, the “dialectic of impenetrability and ingress, of intractable alienness and felt ‘at-homeness’” that remains “unresolved, but expressive” in translation.36 Erotic in their elusiveness, the “alienness” of the languages “lull[s] her senses” (84). The sensual voices are muted, then, but usefully so because the “drowsy” (84), secondhand talk allows her to be both “in” and yet not implicated in a culture that she finds appealing only up to a point. Most importantly, these narratives precede and are therefore not the result of her romantic longings, as Edna herself seems to suggest when she compares being moved by beautiful music and memories of Robert to an earlier time when she “had wept one midnight at Grand Isle when strange, new voices awoke in her” (116). She is, admittedly, obsessed with “the spiritual vision [of] the presence of the beloved one” (145), but she misses Robert when he leaves for Mexico because she links him with the “brightness, the color” (emphasis mine, 95) he brings to her life. His attractiveness derives from his status not as a lover but as a guide to this “local color.” Critics’ focus on Edna’s male partners rather than the indistinct voices on the islands risks masking the primacy of the latter in her sexual awakening, for the men function more to mediate than to initiate Edna’s “latent sensuality” (163).


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the coloniz ation of race Within the codified hierarchies of race and class in post-Reconstruction Louisiana, Acadians were considered “lesser” whites. Their lower class status and rural lifestyle set them apart economically, ethnically, and linguistically from Creole society; in Chopin’s fiction they are often represented as both primitive and passionate.37 Hence Edna’s dozing in Madame Antoine’s house on Chênière Caminada reflects, paradoxically, her desire to be one of the “folk” and yet to remain “stretched out in the very center of the high, white bed” (84), the “snow-white” (83) bed. The scene dramatizes Edna’s sense, articulated later when she moves from her husband’s house, of having “descended in the social scale, with a corresponding sense of having risen in the spiritual” (151). But what to make of a white “lady” (83) on a whiter bed? White bourgeois entitlement, reiterated by the white-on-white iconography, is clearly one tradition Edna does not reject. It is in another’s home and in another’s bed – the site of both birth and sexuality – that Edna feels “invited to repose” (83). Much later, Edna recalls that she “liked then to wander alone into strange and unfamiliar places. She discovered many a sunny, sleepy corner, fashioned to dream in. And she found it good to dream and to be alone and unmolested” (109). The strange and unfamiliar corners Edna finds, however, are sometimes occupied, a point easily forgotten, for women such as Madame Antoine are apparently “all eagerness to make Edna feel at home” and (ironically, given who is intruding on whom) “unmolested” (83). In similar fashion, when Edna shows up unannounced at Victor’s house “for no purpose but to rest” (173), she nevertheless expects to have dinner, and, if they have it, fish in particular. Victor volunteers his own room, though she assures him that “any corner will do” (174).38 Madame Antoine’s “strange, quaint bed” (84) is just right for Edna in this erotic fairytale, and there are no returning bears angry with Goldilocks’s trespassing. Nevertheless, she is not content with her guest status; she would rather her host disappear altogether. Upon rising from her nap, she narrates her own apocalyptic fantasy in which she condemns everyone else to an eternal sleep: “How many years have I slept? . . . A new race of beings must have sprung up, leaving only you and me as past relics. How many ages ago did Madame Antoine and Tonie die? and when did our people from Grand Isle disappear from the earth?” (85) Edna is not Rip Van Winkle, however, but Snow White, dwarfing those around her in order to live out her fantasy of solitude in the lap of “native hospitality” (83). Like Lyndall in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of An African Farm (1882), who tells her lover

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“I will not go down country . . . I will not go to Europe. You must take me to the Transvaal. That is out of the world,” Edna must imaginatively purge her utopian world in order to occupy it. The pastoral world of Chênière Caminada is similarly otherworldly, both primitive and unchanging: “How still it was, with only the voice of the sea whispering through the reeds that grew in the saltwater pools! . . . It must always have been God’s day on that low, drowsy island, Edna thought” (83). Rendered static, the indigenous land at once provides a stable and ancient site for self-discovery. Her “narrative of personal progress,” as Wai-chee Dimock might term it, allows her to “impose a ‘manifest’ harmony on what might otherwise appear naked conflict.”39 This progress toward independence both justifies Edna’s presence on the “colony” and simultaneously naturalizes any conflict, for she is as welcome as “the sunlight” (83) in Madame Antoine’s cot. Nevertheless, her bid for the right of self-possession subtly entails native dispossession. The burden her patronage places on others is the less obvious because those obliged are so very compliant. The “fat” Madame Antoine – who, after all, had only unproductively “squatted” and “waddled” (87) during her years on Chênière Caminada – is quite pleased, we are told, to have ventured out during Edna’s nap. Robert speculates that she has gone to Vespers and to visit friends (86); hence Edna’s arrival and Madame Antoine’s leaving are presented as acts of mutual liberation. Yet it is noteworthy that Madame Antoine makes such an effort not for her own sake, but because she “thought it best not to awake” (86) Edna. “Edna’s most authentic act of self-definition” (30), according to Sandra Gilbert, offers a similar example of strategic occupation without conflict. At the “coup d’état” of her dinner party, Edna is enthroned in, and thus usurps, the patriarchal seat at the head of the table. But her husband’s seat is already vacant since he is out of town on a business trip; hence she stages the “spectacle” (173) of her selfordination without the effort of direct confrontation. Edna does finally find a place of her own, but even that bears the shadow of the Other. As Hortense Spillers argues, in the nineteenth century passion lay beyond the “precincts of the father’s house,”40 usually in the slave cabins with the mulatto/a. Notably, it is only after Edna’s move from her husband’s estate and his “precinct” (140) to the “pigeon-house” around the corner that she begins her affair with Arobin. The pigeon-house resembles the Grand Isle cottages where Edna experiences the first stirrings of rebellion, and which Gilbert suggests represent a “female colony.”41 Yet perhaps more important than the homosocial appeal is a past of racial bondage, for the cottages are ex-slave quarters. The Pontelliers’ place of summer retreat was before 1866 a sugar plantation, the main building of


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which is still called “‘the house’” (44). As Frederick Stielow points out in his study of the Louisiana leisure class, Grand Isle “included a selection of buildings dramatically altered from their previous duties . . . Interestingly, the most prized accommodations were thirty-eight refurbished slave cabins, set in double rows.”42 Lafcadio Hearn, describing a visit to Grand Isle after the Civil War, also notes this peculiar conversion: “It makes a curious impression on me: the old plantation cabins, standing in rows like village streets, and neatly remodeled for more cultivated inhabitants.”43 In a new twist on the old plantation as imaginative refuge, Edna leaves the patriarchal house but most certainly not the grounds.44 The pigeon-house in New Orleans, while not homologous with the Grand Isle cabins, nevertheless recreates the sexual cartography of the plantation: Edna leaves the Big House in town and is subsequently freer to entertain both Robert and Arobin. The erotics of race not only govern the place but also afford the principal basis of Edna’s awakening. Though Edna finds the Ratignolles “very French, very foreign” (105), she also decides they lead a rather “colorless existence” (107). In contrast to Madame Ratignolle’s “embodiment of every womanly grace and charm” (51), Edna’s frank arousal leaves her “unwomanly” (165) in her lack of “repression in . . . glance or gesture” (123); at best, she admits, she is a “devilishly wicked specimen of the sex” (138). Her “unwomanly” behavior does not unsex her – quite the opposite; it allies her with the putatively feral and libidinous races. The Cult of True Womanhood (whose tenets of purity, piety, and domesticity Madame Ratignolle as a “motherwoman” to some degree represents), sets race against gender; females of the physical and promiscuous race by definition fall outside the bounds of womanhood – as does Edna. Her sexual awakening is couched in the same terms as those conventionally used to define the woman of color in the 1890s. She becomes “some beautiful sleek animal waking up in the sun” (123); her lover “appeals to the animalism stirring impatiently within her” (133). Even her dining habits assume a bestial air as she “tears at [her bread] with strong white teeth” (85). Chopin writes of a similar animal in “Emancipation: A Life Fable” (1869), often referred to as a precursor to The Awakening. Basking in the sun, a beast with “strong limbs,” “handsome flanks,” and “sleek sides” (177) escapes its cage and well-fed life. Written only four years after the end of the Civil War, the vignette employs antislavery discourse – rejection of the cage’s dubious protection – in order to spring the trap of the bourgeois marriage. Joining woman and beast, Chopin finds deliverance from Victorian convention in felinity. Edna resembles the quadroon Palmyre in Cable’s The Grandissimes

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(1880), a “barbaric beauty” whose “grace and pride was inspiring but – what shall we say? – feline? It was femininity without humanity – something that made her with all her superbness, a creature that one would want to find chained.”45 Awakening to this new and more colorful identity, even her skin is illumined with “myriad living tints” (145) in contrast to the alabaster cast of the more conventional Madame Ratignolle. The tan that her husband complains at the outset of the novel burns Edna “almost beyond recognition” (44) is not only a rebuttal of the “fair lady” image, but a foreshadowing of her awakening into a “native” sexuality. As Calvin Hernton notes, despite the fact that the “Negro woman is denied virtually all the ‘privileges and graces’ of American culture . . . according to the myth of Negro sexhood, it is the black woman who is endowed with an irresistible sexual attraction and enjoys the sex act more than any other creature on earth.”46 White women’s desire for sexual expression, therefore, may lead to a sympathetic admiration nevertheless predicated on racialist notions of sexuality: as Manna-Loulou tells her mistress in Chopin’s “La Belle Zora¨ıde,” “you know how the negroes are . . . There is no mistress, no master, no king nor priest who can hinder them from loving where they will” (198). The famed uprising of The Awakening’s Edna, then, cannot be seen as an uncharted move into what Freud tellingly called the “dark continent” of female sexuality.47 If hers is a radical departure from the repertoire of white women’s sexual norms, it is nevertheless quite in keeping with scripted conventions of racial behavior.48 Given these conventions, some white women may “not only envy Negro females,” as Hernton suggests, “but actually want to be black.”49 Edna’s racial surrogacy is at once less explicit and more inclusive, for it is not only black women who become representative of alternative sexual experience. She is intrigued, for instance, by Mariequita, a vulgar Spanish girl with “pretty black eyes” and “ugly brown toes” (81) who is sexually associated with both Victor and Robert (98). As alter egos, both women are mutually fascinated and mildly competitive with each other. In fact, Edna moves from her usual indifference to momentary jealousy when she imagines Robert and the “transcendently seductive vision of a Mexican girl” (161).50 Edna appropriates this vision, however, becoming by the novel’s end the transcendentally seductive object of Mariequita’s jealousy (173). This conversion entails the translation of racial or ethnic difference into the idiom of contested selfhood. Seeing “with different eyes, and making the acquaintance of new conditions in herself that colored and changed her environment” (88), Edna can only vaguely “realize that her present self . . . was in some way different from the other self” (88). Her inner confusion


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becomes an “indescribable oppression, which seemed to generate in some unfamiliar part of her consciousness, filled her whole being with a vague anguish. It was like a shadow . . . It was strange and unfamiliar.” She assumes this alien presence is simply a “mood” (49), though as something “foreign within,” her ambivalence reproduces the political stance and emotional tenor of Southerners who first imported and then felt invaded by blacks. Internal colonization – usually a reference to the North American colonization of Native and enslaved African Americans – is in Edna’s case actually the internalization of the colony.51 In other words, Edna interiorizes the intimate distance marking most Southern interracial relations, circumscribing within the arena of selfhood the tension of racial and ethnic influence. white beaches The critical emphasis on and frequent celebration of Edna’s quest for “solitude” masks these inner struggles as existential angst and thus replicates the character’s own fictions of social identity. Yet possessive individualism, with its myth of the inalienable self, is precisely what makes it so difficult to see the investment in “race” upon which the white female subject capitalizes. This is not to naturalize or normalize whiteness as unraced – quite the contrary; my aim has been throughout to analyze Edna’s racial construction of whiteness.52 Behind her claims to self-sufficiency and “self-contain[ment]” (61), Edna’s authority derives from and is frequently threatened by that which “comes upon her like an obsession . . . independent of volition” (145). This superfluity, the “extraneous” (145), shadows her life as well as her death. There is no racial or ethnic presence in the final scene on the beach. And yet Edna’s image of the “white beach” where there “is no living thing in sight” (175) reveals anxiety about the influence of the Other. “Certain absences are so stressed,” Toni Morrison argues, “so ornate, so planned, they call attention to themselves, arrest us with intentionality and purpose, like neighborhoods that are defined by the population held away from them.”53 The population textually held at bay in the last scene is implied by the emphasis on Edna’s “white body” and “white feet” on the “white beach” (175–6). Edna’s earlier trial swim shares this preoccupation: as waves like “white serpents” play at her feet, she breathes the scent of “white blossoms” and the “white light” of the moon dispels the “weight of darkness” (73) around her. This fetishization of whiteness perhaps implies not only a defensive insistence on racial privilege (Madame Antoine’s “high, white bed”) but an attempt to blanch her self of those “myriad tints” (145).

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Her final thoughts of childhood during the fatal swim might suggest this kind of denial, for they predate her arrival on the islands and therefore also her sexual awakening. More likely, though, is the possibility that the overdetermination of color reflects an attempt to resolve the heightening tension between Edna’s sexual indebtedness to racial/ethnic difference and her fundamental commitment to the status of whiteness. An extension of her earlier fantasies of solitude, this resolution involves not the imagined death (85), but the total absorption of the “population held away.” Given the sexual logic of the novel, this incorporation of the ethnic and racial Other is to a certain degree predictable. Edna moves back and forth between racial models of womanhood (alternately “tanned” or “tinted” to unequivocally “white”), but liberation is represented, finally, only in terms of a colonizing whiteness. “White” moves from an adjective to an assertion of race in a process of assimilation perhaps most vivid in a later story, “The Storm” (1898). The Spanish Calixta, whose hair is “kinked worse than a mulatto’s” (179),54 becomes suffused with whiteness during lovemaking: with her “white neck,” “white throat,” and “whiter breasts,” she is as “white as the couch she lay upon. Her firm, elastic flesh that was knowing for the first time its birthright, was like a creamy lily . . . The generous abundance of her passion . . . was like a white flame” (282–3). It is not sex per se but the climax of whiteness that temporarily frees Calixta – as it does Edna. Orgasm is the context for Calixta’s freedom, but the realization of her sexual “birthright” (283) is incumbent upon her momentary escalation from a “dark” woman to a “white” woman. Albescence, then, represents an attempted resolution of the “antithetical sexual natures of white women and dark women,”55 a move that in The Awakening similarly enables Edna to be “new-born” (175). Though, of course, transcendent whiteness leads not to “petit mort” but to death for Edna, debatably both sex and suicide are modes of liberatory release.56 Edna may be transformed by the white subsumption of the Other, but women like Mariequita or the quadroon or the “black woman” do not and must not change in the novel: precisely because Edna’s break with gender constraints is dependent on representations of racial and ethnic difference, those differences – in order to be available in the first place – must remain intact. As sexual “catalyst[s],”57 the serviceable equations of race and sex make possible a Victorian erotics, but they are also subtly tied to the Jim Crow legalisms predicated on similar constructions of difference58 – an irony that nevertheless might explain the subtle necessaries and sufficiencies of “race” for whites in American culture.59 My point, then, is not that Edna fails to pierce the veil of stereotypes – a critique that irresistibly


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dichotomizes ontological categories as well as power structures: real/false, self/other, colonizer/colonized – but rather that racial figuration is intimately involved in the warranty and production of her “self.” To the extent that such troping is in a sense “productive” as well as repressive, “race” is constitutive of Edna’s new identity, including the extent to which she can claim whiteness as unraced. In this light the racial politics of womanhood in Chopin’s novel must complicate, if not compromise, our celebration of a nineteenth-century white woman’s sexual liberation. Chopin’s novel’s submerged tale of racial familiarity is but a representative moment in the long history of white expressivity indebted to a “transmogrified” blackness, to borrow Eric Lott’s term. We see the literary legacy of similarly troubled variants of white cooptation and half-acknowledged “borrowing” in, among others, The Jazz Singer (1927), Norman Mailer’s “The White Negro” (1957), and John Berryman’s Dream Songs (1955–69), and in what Ann duCille calls the “intellectual skin trade” persisting into the contemporary moment.60 In one of the few studies of Chopin that considers her alongside the tradition of black women writers, Elizabeth Ammons emphasizes the women’s desire for an artistic life in the face of gender biases.61 Acknowledging the “crucial differences” between Chopin, Alice Dunbar-Nelson, and Pauline Hopkins, Ammons argues nonetheless that “there runs through the major work of each writer . . . powerful formal as well as thematic expression of each writer’s fierce desire for freedom as an artist” (59). Yet the scenario of a formal or artistic kinship among women writers across the color-line makes more difficult an appreciation of the way black and white women’s literary production often worked at odds. Black women writers assumed, as Ann duCille (extending Nancy Cott’s term) puts it, a “literary passionlessness”62 decades after white women had begun exploring images of sexual freedom; this chapter suggests that divergence is not accidental: white women’s popular investment in the sexy “raciness” of blackness thwarted many, if not all, alternative explorations of race and womanhood.

chap t e r 4

“For blood that is not yours”: Langston Hughes and the art of patronage

rethinking patronage On the one hand we could argue that the racial politics of a sexual liberation that we see at work in Chopin’s The Awakening simply extend in similar form through the end of the nineteenth century into the twentieth. Chopin’s dependence on the notion of black libidity as lynchpin for white female liberation looks a precursor to modernist primitivism. By the 1920s racial “diseases” (once more commonly aligned with nonwhite populations, as Chapter Three suggested) were increasingly associated with whites, a racial malaise whose symptoms included sexual apathy, low fertility and waning cultural vitality. Such genteel anemia, many began to think, could benefit from a dose of African-American “vigor,” as Howells had anticipated. What Roderick Nash called the “nervous generation” of 1917 to 1930 found a cure for post-World War I disillusionment more in cultural than medical fixes, particularly in “primitivism.”1 Many have already noted that modernism’s fascination with perceived racial atavism and sexuality formed the cultural underpinnings for the “Negro vogue” during the Harlem Renaissance.2 It is certainly true that throughout the entire span of the twentieth century, popular culture and literature continued to represent African Americans as both social bane and opportune site of marginality from which to launch social critiques – critiques, it should be noted, often quite unrelated to self-identified black racial concerns during any given period. We have only to consider Nancy Cunard’s well-publicized train of black lovers as transparent gesture of white social rebellion in the 1920s, or Norman Mailer’s cool hipster of the 1950s (“a wedding of black and black,” he says, in which the “Negro brought the cultural dowry”),3 or white rapper Eminem’s adoption of black hiphop as signal and dress code for the dispossessed white working class in the 1990s to see how common, across time and apparent commonsense, is this move. As the self-reflective white hiphop performance artist Danny Hoch 94

Langston Hughes and the art of patronage

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puts it, “it is possible to love black cool but not like black people.” Many have begun exploration of the complex modes of bilateral validation in the artistic realm, from Gertrude Stein’s prefatory remarks to “Melanctha,” which presents the seal of approval given by some black men to whom she read her story as its mark of authenticity, to Eminem’s validation by black rapper/producer Dr. Dre – both interesting reversals of the nineteenthcentury history of black authors requiring white vouchsafing. No doubt the debate will continue over the relative costs/benefits in these now international markets of cultural gifting and graft. Where some cite embezzlement, others claim the free trade of intellectual and artistic property; where Paul Rubie warns that the “crossover dreams” of white musicians and artists lapse into “rip off” without “respect,”4 Stanley Crouch hails a great syncretism of black and white styles and traditions – what he calls a “boiling gumbo,” a grand “mulatto art.”5 But there is more to examine between the poles of this continuum, more to be said of interracial exchange, particularly as it affects and effects artistic and literary production, and especially during the Harlem Renaissance – the site where, arguably, so much productive interaction between blacks and whites occurred and yet the very place, according to others, where the interaction went wrong. Most accounts of white patrons of the period suggest white fiscal support of black art for the most part corrupted it.6 The economic manipulations and eccentric peculiarities of the likes of Charlotte Osgood Mason are often taken as representative, especially to the degree she, like many, was deeply invested in, and willing to pay handsomely for, literary and performative displays of “primitivism” by those she patronized (in both senses of the word). However, as George Hutchinson points out, to characterize all white patrons as obsessed with primitivism, and more generally to characterize the “fall” of the Harlem Renaissance as the result of condescending and controlling white patronage, is grossly to oversimplify black-white relations during the 1920s and 1930s. Michael North has astutely pointed out that simply attending to the “shallow Negrophilia” of the Harlem Renaissance and to the fact that the “modern coveted the primitive . . . perhaps even created it, is to focus myopically on a rather vapid message.”7 North’s study of the medium for modernism, the ways “linguistic mimicry and racial masquerade were not just shallow fads,”8 but, rather, essential to the rise of white modernism, offers an example of a more nuanced accounting of the myriad relations between blacks and whites. Significantly, the linguistic medium for complex cultural exchange between whites and blacks that North emphasizes is not one requiring direct contact between the races. Indeed, the medium

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in which the white appropriation of dialect and vernacular for the reinvention of the English language occurred – “black” speech and performance as “an integral part of the cultural and technological innovation of the 1920s” (8) – curiously operated in the absence, and often at the expense, of their African-American contemporaries’ own efforts to revise stereotypes (195). As Aldon Lynn Nielsen concludes, “a history of modernism’s representations of blackness serves to demonstrate that, for all their contributions to revolutionizing form, white modernist poets have only infrequently managed to approach the representation of black life without reerecting the terministic screens of racist imagery.”9 Of course, face-to-face contact with the “object” itself, in this case “a living race” (Nielsen, Reading Race, 49), is no guarantee of revelation beyond representation. Gertrude Stein, Vachel Lindsay, and others did have contact with African-American writers such as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, and Richard Wright, and though most aspired toward racial “accuracy,” proximity granted them no more or less purchase on racial “truths” than anyone else. The white patrons of the black arts who are the focus of this chapter, Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten, are distinctive not simply because they were in more sustained contact with African Americans, or because, by virtue of their decades-long relationships with Hughes, they somehow understood African-American experiences more astutely. However, the fact that their respective friendships with Langston Hughes were lifelong affairs does encourage reassessment of almost every truism about patronage. As Emily Bernard, editor of Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964, explains: “I became interested in the dynamics of [Van Vechten’s] relationship with the Harlem Renaissance writers, especially Hughes. The more I read, the more questions I had. What was the story of their friendship? Was it only built on gratitude? Did Hughes privately resent Van Vechten? What was the secret that kept their friendship alive?” Precisely the same questions might be asked of Hughes’s relationship with Amy Spingarn, which, like that with Van Vechten, began when Hughes was in his early twenties and lasted until death. Bernard concludes that the “secret” to the longevity of the Van Vechten friendship must be that “Hughes loved him.”10 I take this, whatever its possible truth, as but a fascinating starting point for an examination of Hughes’s working relationship with both Van Vechten and Spingarn. Of particular interest to this chapter is the way their relationships were a function of the particular forms of the white patronage system that evolved from the late nineteenth century and took shape during the Harlem Renaissance, the way their alliances were a delicate negotiation


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of complex differentials of money, class, and race. It is tempting to see their relations as otherwise, as, for example, simply exceptional – Arnold Rampersad calls the Van Vechten–Hughes friendship, for instance, “one of the more inspiring in recent American history” because the sharp “differences about art and politics, about money and the complexities of culture . . . were never allowed to come decisively between them.” Along similar lines, Steven Watson notes that their differences make their relations all the more remarkable: “Carl Van Vechten was a socially adept, married, homosexual, forty-four-year-old white man. Langston Hughes was a poor, single, sexually ambiguous, talented but barely published, twentytwo-year-old black man.”11 Amy Spingarn, for her part, was a white, Jewish married mother, socialite, part-time artist, poet, and philanthropist. But as Bernard astutely points out of the Van Vechten–Hughes friendship – and I find it equally applicable to the Spingarn–Hughes relationship – theirs “thrived because of difference, not despite it” (xxvii). The patronage system, of which all parties were highly conscious as it came to bear on their work, reflected those differences but also generated artistic possibilities for exploiting difference that had not previously existed. It is the particular and sometimes peculiar ways these three work their differences in the interests of their art and accomplishments rather than somehow seek to overcome differences for the sake of friendship that is the subject of this chapter. As is well documented, when Hughes (1902–67) meets both Van Vechten and Spingarn, he is the recipient of their assistance: Van Vechten becomes a pivotal link to Blanche Knopf and the publishing house; Spingarn helps fund his college education and then future artistic endeavors. I argue, however, that eventually Spingarn and Van Vechten evert – turn inside out – the conventions of patronage by becoming artistic beneficiaries themselves under their arrangement with Hughes. As their working relations change in their relative position to each other, Spingarn and Van Vechten, as I will explain, move beyond sponsorship, eventually making Hughes and the racial subject central to their own art rather than mere objects of largesse. I would like to note here that, though I briefly discuss Spingarn’s collaboration with Hughes, Dear, Lovely Death, her artwork, and one of her published poems, my critical focus is on the corpus of extant correspondence between Spingarn and Hughes.12 Similarly, this chapter does not deal with the large body of fiction published by Van Vechten, including his infamous novel, Nigger Heaven (1926), about which much insightful criticism has already been tendered. Instead, I treat as literary texts the hundreds of letters between Spingarn and Hughes and between Van Vechten and Hughes. My investigation here resists treating epistolaries as giving

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transparent access to the “inner life” of the writers, as well as the tendency to view the content of these letters as valuable only to the extent that they may provide insights to the authors’ literary productions. Rather, I am looking at the letters as literary productions.13 Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus remind us of the need for literary and rhetorical analysis of this putatively “private” genre, noting that the “letter’s public dimension by far outweighed its use within a private, intimate context.”14 Their focus on medieval women’s letters is applicable here in its accounting for “the presence or absence of status-oriented rules on form and style . . . in negotiating the relationship between addressee and author,” concerns that also come to bear in Hughes’s letters with his white patrons. Referring to women’s lower socio-economic and civil status, Cherewatuk and Wiethaus insist on the importance of “a gender-sensitive perspective” which makes “this emphasis on status and form become even more important” (4–5). Hughes similarly takes up his pen from a legally subordinate position and, as I explain, his rhetorical moves always account for and manage such differentials. In fact, because he cannot take recourse in generic guidelines for letters to patrons (since none exist), Hughes’s moves are often the more subtle and precise, as they must be, in his negotiations with a white woman and man who have so much more social status, political power, and economic advantage over him. Hughes’s letters are, especially in the case of those to Van Vechten, textual artifacts that all concerned knew would be collected and made public. It would be a mistake to think that because there is no formalized genre between patrons and their “clients,” there were not complex and subtle rules of racial and rhetorical protocols under which Hughes operated. These “rules” come into relief – are to some degree invented – within the letters themselves, so there is no appeal to fixed external rhetorical models to explain the negotiations that take place within the correspondence. In these letters, I argue, Hughes actually generates formal strategies for gain. But more generally, many of his letters are in fact metacommentary on the patron-protégé relationship itself, epistolary blueprints for black authors who would befriend the white and wealthy. To some extent this constitutes the “subgenre” that, taking Janet Gurkin Altman’s point, Cherewatuk and Wiethaus refer to when they argue that: literary genres and subgenres develop the greatest cohesion and complexity when they evolve within a limited “socio-historical context.” For medieval women, the cohesiveness of formalized epistolary rules was determined by medieval patriarchy. In this limited “socio-historical context,” women constituted what anthropologists call a “muted group.” Given asymmetrical power relations, women were at a


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disadvantage in formulating their ideas, concerns, and experiences, because rules for public and semi-public communications were controlled by the dominant group. Therefore medieval women letter writers could either choose to break into the privileged epistolary precinct reserved for men or opt to ignore it and create their own system. In the end, neither option allowed women to exert the same influence as cultural primary definers . . . [they] always wrote at the margins of a realm staked out by male authors. (Cherewatuk and Wiethaus, 5)

My intention is obviously not to compare white medieval women’s constraints to Hughes’s, but to suggest that Hughes negotiated historically specific epistolary precincts with not only gendered but also racialized boundaries. Though he had no formal training in the ars dictaminis or ars dictandi, the rhetorical study and practice of epistolary compositions, Hughes in effect pens his own dictamenal manual. What is distinctive about Hughes, further, is that while he also writes from “margins . . . staked out” by whites, he does in fact come to exert considerable influence as a “cultural primary definer” – eventually defining “culture” in fact far more than his patrons. I have asked what the patrons get from their relationship with Hughes. It is equally important to address the question: what, in turn, does Hughes get from these relations? Yes, he received financial assistance, social connections, and publishing support. He surely also received and gave, as Bernard suggests, some emotional gratification. But those are not the subjects of this chapter. I ask instead: if the social relations emerge within the context of work, what relation has this to his work? The last part of this chapter analyzes the way Hughes’s Broadway play, Mulatto (first produced in 1935), explores the relationship between black dependants and white benefactors. Recurrently focusing on a son’s demands for familial recognition, his play, and the cluster of related texts he wrote on the same theme collectively represent an extended consideration of patronage – and, by extension, of racial debt and national recompense. Mulatto is my particular focus because both its content and its context – especially its production history – make it an exemplary textual case of the interracial dramas occurring within variants of the patronage system. Though much of Hughes’s work concerns itself with intraracial issues, we often forget that he also makes a point of saying that the black artist ought to analyze the interracial, finding that “when he chooses to touch on the relations between Negroes and whites in this country with their innumerable overtones and undertones surely, and especially for literature and the drama, there is an inexhaustible supply of themes at hand.”15 In Mulatto, I argue, Hughes plays with some of these under- and overtones, taking the remarkable step

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of making patronage the subject of art rather than simply the condition for it. ∗∗∗ Patronage, as Arnold Rampersad argues in the film documentary Against the Odds: Art of the Harlem Renaissance, has always been necessary for the production of “unofficial” art or art not supported by the state; indeed, several critics have suggested that white patronage – enlisted for a mix of artistic and social-justice ends – literally underwrote what we commonly term the Harlem Renaissance. As Steven Watson claims, white backers were “instrumental forces” whose “influence proved essential to the growth of the movement.”16 What is perhaps unique during this era is the ways the peculiar forms of patronage developed defined and merged both professional and personal relations across the color-line. They provided a flexible medium for black-white working relations, sometimes enabling extended forms of cultural exchange and transference, responding to the pragmatic concerns as well as the imaginative lives of patron and artists alike. In that sense the white patronage sponsoring the vogue for things “Negro” (complementing the developing base of black patronage) evolved into one of the most extensive networks facilitating and governing race relations during the 1920s and 1930s, directing most of the cultural traffic in the arts between blacks and whites. Nearly all the major figures of the Harlem Renaissance had financial underwriting and social support from white philanthropists and organizations. In fact, in The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White, George Hutchinson suggests that “one of the most fascinating aspects of the Harlem Renaissance is the extent to which direct interpersonal relationships and intellectual networks that crossed many traditional boundaries led to the creation of the institutions that supported the literary movement . . . The print culture of New York . . . created new social groups, communities of face-to-face interaction, that in turn fostered new developments in print culture – journals, publishing houses, theaters, forms of graphic design and political cartoonings, and so forth – as people congregated among likeminded culture-workers for intellectual exchange, training, or even intimate relationships.”17 In short, the “greater freedom and variety of interracial and interethnic relationships only intensified the experimental development of new forms of ‘racial’ expression” (6). If domestic service and the medical industry, as I have suggested, provided institutional frameworks indirectly structuring interracial relations in the mid- and late nineteenth centuries, patronage emerges in the first half of the twentieth century as yet another dominant rubric. And akin to domestic service and medicine, patronage


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also functioned within de facto and de jure Jim Crow, orchestrating close working relations between blacks and whites in ways that echoed racial status quos and yet at times offered the architecture for new professional and artistic spaces between the races. The range of patronage for creative endeavors included everything from “official” funding sources like Julius Rosenwald’s Sears, Roebuck, and Co. money for twenty-five YMCAs for African Americans in the 1910s, to the short-lived Federal Theater Project money for “negro units” in the 1930s; and from private patrons like eccentric Charlotte Osgood Mason and Nancy Cunard with their own often narcissistic agenda, to more socially committed sponsors like Carl Van Vechten and the Spingarn family – all of whom Zora Neale Hurston loosely termed “negrotarians.” Patronage is a curious structure in that it controls a creative arena that itself operates on a continuum of commercial and explicitly nonmercantile imperatives, often functioning as a bridge between the business and the “poetic” aspects of art. In that sense the reach of patronage extended to both the public and the private lives of the artists to the degree that these can be productively deemed distinct. The artistic sphere for blacks and whites allowed unprecedented contact – not just in galleries and literary salons or at “Dark Tower” parties, but one-on-one as clients in offices and guests in private homes. As with domestic service and the medical industry, the patronage relationship often functioned to embroider new and subtle forms of social and professional segregation even as it explicitly claimed to supersede it. But in the new configurations of black-white relations, patronage also opened up the possibility of “the sort of ‘liminal’ conjunctions that foment cultural change.”18 religious patrimonies: the case of amy spingarn During his composition of the lyrics for a cantata commissioned by the Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Langston Hughes was challenged by a rabbi concerned that the black poet might not capture “this particular Jewish feeling that we’re after.” According to David Amram, Hughes “blew the rabbi’s mind” – and reportedly foreclosed further debate – by (incorrectly) claiming that he indeed understood that “kind of feeling” because his grandfather was Jewish.19 By invoking blood-ties Hughes responded directly to the racialist basis for the rabbi’s presumption of a peculiarly Jewish aesthetic sentiment. That is, rather than calling upon, for example, some sense of blacks’ and Jews’ shared experience of oppression to legitimize his interest in writing a script for a Jewish musical program,

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Hughes claimed artistic competence based on shared “blood.” The irony is, of course, that it was Hughes’s great-grandfather – a slave trader, no less – who was Jewish, a patrimony more distant and not quite as innocent as Hughes allowed the rabbi to assume, and one that most certainly complicates the rabbi’s belief in Jewish sensibility as racial inheritance.20 In fact, this exchange, and in particular Hughes’s elliptical account of his ancestor, reflects the kind of strategic omission and discreet negotiation that enabled many of his closest alliances with Jewish organizations, philanthropists, and friends. Such tacit, and often mutual, agreements to overlook differences in collective national experience, in economic and color privilege, and in religious and racial ideologies, both served and thwarted artistic and political collaboration between American Jews and blacks. On the one hand Hughes’s personal as well as professional relations with Jews suggest an easy intimacy and identification. Isadore Kaplow and Irwin Braverman were his partners in social ostracism at Central High; Max Cohen remained his lawyer and close friend throughout Hughes’s lifetime; his early education at Lincoln University (and many years of later work) were sponsored by Amy Spingarn, at whose retreat, Troutbeck, New York, he was a regular guest. Hughes frequently lectured at the behest of Jewish organizations, he contributed to an anthology of Yiddish translations, he shared with many of his Jewish friends their leftist politics, and in 1965 he visited San Francisco for the premiere of his cantata Let Us Remember, with music by David Amram, commissioned for the biennial convention of reformed Judaism. Yet in Fine Clothes To The Jew (1927), The Big Sea (1940), and elsewhere, Hughes subtly sets Jewish privilege against black struggle. After much difficulty attaining passage aboard a ship to Cuba because of his skin color, for instance, Hughes notes that the Caronia’s guests were predominantly Jewish tourists, “affable” folk, but people who had apparently not similarly suffered under the line’s de facto policy of discrimination. Hughes insisted he “liked Jewish people,” but he also privately complained about racism in “Hollywood under Israel.”21 A moment in Hughes’s and Spingarn’s relationship that bespeaks much about Jewish involvement in the economics of artistic production and reception, and about black and Jewish expectations of each other, occurred in 1934, when Hughes boycotted director Martin Jones’s premiere production of Hughes’s Broadway play, Mulatto. Because Jones had imposed segregated house seating and had excluded all blacks from a postproduction party (discussed at length later in this chapter), Amy Spingarn accepted the many


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advance tickets Hughes had purchased.22 What to make of her attendance in light of his protest? What looks like capitalization on his misfortune and complicity with, if not frank endorsement of, Jones’s racism is complicated by the fact that Hughes himself gives her the tickets. Does he not expect her to boycott as well, because of both her personal relationship with him, and her well-established investment in civil rights? Or did his gesture of giving her the tickets suggest some shared sense that his fight is not hers, his strategies different from hers? Was it even perhaps a mutual attempt at subversion of Jones’s segregationist policies – was she a sort of spy in the enemy’s camp? Was her attendance at Hughes’s play a way of wresting it from Jones, a small gesture to reclaim the play and at least part of Hughes’s intended audience? So much is clearly unspoken in this exchange, especially when one must consider also occasions of strategic Jewish silence: neither Spingarn nor its Knopf publisher explicitly criticized the inflammatory title of Fine Clothes To The Jew, which seemed to reinforce the image of Jews capitalizing on black poverty, though the collection drew more fire from white and, for somewhat different reasons, black presses than almost anything else Hughes published in his lifetime.23 Jewish philanthropy in the 1920s and 1930s of course heightened the unresolved tension between racial alliance and economic entitlement informing such clashes. Jewish landlords in Harlem were often accused of inflating prices for black residents, but wealthy Jews also substantially funded artistic expression during the Harlem Renaissance. The two are linked to the degree that economics, whether in residential politics or patronage systems, governed much of black-Jewish relations. The particular orientation of Jewish patronage to African Americans took shape among notables like the Seligmans, the Schiffs, the Lehmans, the Knopfs, Julius Rosenwald (of Sears, Roebuck, and Co.), and the Spingarns. The Spingarn family in particular was influential in Hughes’s life and career: Joel was a founder of Harcourt, Brace, and Co., and at various times President, Treasurer, and Chairman of the Board of NAACP and had a much-documented, close friendship with W. E. B. Du Bois.24 Spingarn’s brother, Arthur, was Chair of the NAACP Legal Committee, and the entire family provided monies for the Spingarn Medal, The Crisis literary competitions, and other awards, of many of which Hughes was a beneficiary. The very act of patronage made highly visible the acute class differences between Jews and blacks, even as it symbolized an affective erasure of such differences: financial support represented the “sympathetic understanding,” according to Rosenwald, of Jews for “other persecuted peoples.”25 While the motives of WASP “Negrotarians” were, as David Levering Lewis puts it, “an amalgam of

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inherited abolitionism, Christian charity and guilt, social manipulation, political eccentricity, and . . . persiflage,”26 Jewish involvement, in contrast, was mostly a species of identification rather than condescension. Most Jews understood anti-Semitism as continuous with black racism, evident in the increase during this period of both Jewish quotas and Jim Crow laws, in the resurgence of the Ku Klux Klan antiblack and antiJewish campaigns, and, in many Jews’ minds, in the 1915 lynching of the Atlanta Jewish businessman Otto Frank. Jews were classified as “Semites” – not consistently recognized or self-identifying as “white,” though not quite “black” either in the popular and scientific imagination of the period. The affective underwriting of Jewish association with black civil rights was based, then, on Jews’ construction of blacks on a continuum of both Self and Other. Blacks were represented as both mutually oppressed subject (“in need like us”) and as designated beneficiary and object (“in need unlike us”) of Jewish aid. For different reasons blacks could simultaneously view Jews as both in league with and yet alien to (indeed, as oppressors of ) them.27 money mat ters The peculiar terms of racial desire and disavowal in Hughes’s career-long union with Amy Spingarn defy easy categorization, but understood in the context of Jewish patronage – the initial and arguably the most illuminating frame for their work and their working relations – those terms come somewhat into relief. We know at least what their relation was not: unlike the forms of intimacy between black and white women in Keckley’s, King’s, and Chopin’s writing, or between white men and black women in Harper’s and Howells’s novels, the correspondence and creative work of Hughes and Spingarn offers a notably chaste instance of the historically most inflammatory pairing: a black man and a white woman. By all accounts, theirs was not a sexual relation, which perhaps explains the lack of critical attention given to date to their artistic relationship: without an apparent sex plot and lacking any evidence whatsoever for prurient investigation, the conventional language of interracial gender dynamics seems to falter. And despite some parallels, it was also rather strikingly dissimilar from the relationship her husband, Joel Spingarn, shared with W. E. B. Du Bois, as I will explain later in the chapter. Hughes’s relationship with Spingarn was formal and always at arm’s length; but within the context of patronage, his formality served significant rhetorical and racial ends. In the more than 350 extant letters of Amy Spingarn to Hughes, currently at Yale University’s Beinecke Library of Rare


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Books and Manuscripts, Hughes always maintained a polite and almost mannered distance. In the 1960s, some thirty years after they had met, Hughes still addressed her as “Mrs. Amy Spingarn” in typed letters probably dictated to a secretary. Most of his letters to her have been lost,28 but those that survive stand on ceremony in this way; on the one hand this is perhaps of some surprise given the frequency and duration of their letter-writing, but on the other hand his almost deferential tone is of little surprise given the risk to life and limb that familiarity with a white woman posed to any black man. In turn, her style of address in contrast to his (she addressed him by his first name in her letters) indexes both her race and class, for a white woman could and frequently did assume license to address black people more familiarly than they could (or would) address white people. Yet Hughes manipulates even as he maintains this respectful distance. One of his earliest letters, in which he requests support to attend Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, is also, significantly, a guide to the properly unintrusive conduct of patrons. He would not meet the particularly obtrusive Charlotte Osgood Mason until a year later, in 1927, but clearly he was versed in the difficulties of such relations and was not above proposing Amy Spingarn’s patronly roles and goals: I believe this: that you do not want me to write to you the sort of things I would have to write to the scholarship people. I think you understand better than they the kind of person I am or surely you would not offer, in the quiet way you do, the wonderful thing you offer me [his Lincoln tuition and board]. And if you were the scholarship people, although I might have to accept it, there would be too many conditions to fulfill and too many strange ideals to uphold. And somehow I don’t believe you want me to be true to anything except myself. (Or you would ask questions and outline plans.) And that is all I want to do, to be true to my own ideals. I hate pretending and I hate untruths, and it is so hard in other ways to pay the little prices people attach to most of the things they offer or give. And so I am happier than I have been for a long time because you offer freely and with understanding . . . because of the realization of the dream which you make come true for me.29

In positioning Spingarn outside traditional organs of patronage, namely those “scholarship people,” Hughes suggests instead that theirs is a more personal relationship and, further, that those are of the noblest sort: her selfless “understanding” leads to his “happiness”; her unconditional support allows him to fulfill his highest ideals. His comment calling upon her superior disinterestedness – “I don’t believe you want me to be true to anything except myself” – takes the liberty of narrating on her behalf her own sense of self-realization in order to engage in his own. Together

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they can be more than they might alone, he suggests; together in mutual understanding they can move beyond the conditions and requirements of scholarship programs. On the one hand Hughes’s careful coaching could be counted as among the “little prices” he suggests he need not pay her. His efforts to recruit her persist throughout their relationship, as Amy Spingarn was not a particularly enthusiastic patron; she took four months to decide to fund his college education at Lincoln, extended only limited support for him afterward (much of which he repaid over many years). Several of Hughes’s letters to her bring to her attention worthy causes, few of which she supported. One example is his own opera The Barrier, which he called a true “native American opera.” He suggests a donation of $1,000; she offers a tenth of that amount and then wants to know if it is tax deductible (JWJ, 246). On the other hand Hughes is not simply cajoling his patron into giving, for from the outset it is she who is positioned as recipient: even in that early letter, Hughes begins by telling her what she will get from him. Or rather, what she will not be getting from him, for he will not, he says, be writing prospectuses nor outlining plans for her. What she gets, in effect, is this letter of thanks, though what convention would suggest we take as an obligatory gesture of gratitude (even though, importantly, no thanks are actually ever articulated) reads much more like a statement of independence. Yet the letter is more than simply an assertion of artistic sovereignty; it is less a manifesto than a call to conversation. Hughes uses the protocols of letter-writing to put the burden of reply on the receiver, for he as speaker constantly refers to “you” – the you who understands him, the you who wants him to be true to himself, the you who offers freely the means to realize his dream. This constructed “you,” writ into the letter, is a persona and addressee upon whom there rests the implicit expectation of response. If the patron-artist relationship is traditionally understood as one in which donor obliges beneficiary, Hughes’s letter in effect turns the tables by making Spingarn the audience obliged. In short, his rhetorical feat subtly positions Spingarn as beholden even as he is ostensibly the supplicant of her favors. head in hand If economics inextricably formed the basis of Hughes’s and Spingarn’s relationship, it did for most black-Jewish relations of the period.30 Honor Tranum recalled decades later that when Hughes was first invited out to their estate, Troutbeck, she sensed that he “terribly resented”31 their wealth.


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But those economic givens are only the point of departure for discussion of the kind of nonmonetary remuneration that Hughes suggests that patronage might offer them both. Amy Spingarn thought him her most “generous friend” (JWJ, 526). Their collaboration, Dear, Lovely Death, according to Rampersad, “would remain Hughes’s favorite book.”32 And, according to her instructions, when Spingarn died at age ninety-seven Hughes’s poem “Dear, Lovely Death” was read over her ashes as they were scattered over the Troutbeck stream.33 As Hughes’s early letter to Spingarn anticipated, their relations respectively advanced both their work. In part his appeal was successful because Spingarn was an artist herself. She studied painting with the established New York artists Kenneth Hayes Miller and Hans Hofman, and was a published poet, whose writings included a collection, Humility and Pride (Knopf, 1926).34 If she gave money for his art, he gave himself to her art: from his first visit, for instance, she had him sit for a sketch of his profile, a practice of racial posing that became a regular feature of their meetings.35 As Rampersad puts it, linking Hughes’s dependence on Spingarn’s patronage with his obedience as artistic model, Hughes’s “head was in her hands.”36 His head appears not only in her paintings but in her home – specifically on the ceiling: the Spingarn estate boasted carvings on the ends of four huge mahogany beams as heads representing the “Nordic, Jewish, Indian, and African peoples,”37 and Amy Spingarn’s sketch of Hughes served as the model for the African bust. The fact that Hughes – a self-described American “native son” who was not, as he notes in his autobiography, even recognized as “black” when he first visited Africa – becomes African archetype complicates even further the problem of who represents what for whom. Here the African ancestry of which he is made representative most certainly does not include his distant Jewish paternity, which would put him in closer historical relation to the Spingarns than to his African forebears. But on the pillars his “Africanness” becomes unequivocal, literally carved in wood if not in stone, and measured against an equally reified notion of “Jewishness.” In this sense the beams are at once an image of racial mimesis – each head mirroring the other in size and stature – and of racial divergence – each head a totemic symbol of putatively distinct “race traits.” Spingarn exerted some control financially over both his life and his representation. The massive beams, however they might suggest essentialist incarnations of race, were probably instead meant to embody the historically evolving sense of “race” as understood by Amy Spingarn’s husband, Joel. Race was, in his words, “not so much an ethnic entity as a spiritual quality of mind made

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of imaginative memories and experiences.”38 His view was that race was but the anticipation of a new Geist, what Alain Locke called a “spiritual Coming of Age” and Randolph Bourne termed a “new spiritual citizenship.”39 A very close friend of W. E. B. Du Bois and one-time president of the NAACP, Joel Spingarn was an academic reformist who was dismissed along with several other professors from Columbia University in 1911 for criticizing what he saw as its increasing materialism and corporatization. Spingarn “did not seek the absorption of the Negro spirit into middle-class American society. He rejected the uniformitarian idea of the melting-pot theory and argued for a cultural pluralism based on mutual respect” (Van Deusen, J. E. Spingarn, 61). He understood support of Harlem Renaissance art as one of the many ways his family could advance civil rights. Spingarn became the general editor of the European Library with the new publishing firm of Harcourt, Brace, and Co.; his role was to “keep Americans in touch with the intellectual and spiritual ferment . . . of Europe,” and especially those trends that might provide a “new outlook” and challenged “American standards of taste or morals.”40 It is precisely this sense of race as spiritual and transnational that Spingarn felt would leaven national platitudes about the “race question” and thus raise the national temper as a whole. His views on art and politics explain how the idealized images of race that he commissioned in the form of ceiling beams were designed to represent, both literally and figuratively, a form of uplift. He believed in a certain moral component to art, particularly a sense of civitas that informed though did not dictate creative expression: “Out of morals and philosophy [the artist] has to make, not morals or philosophy, but poetry; for morals and philosophy are only a part . . . of the whole reality which his imagination has to encompass . . . It is a vision of reality, and not reality, imagination and not thought or morals, that the artist gives us.”41 Interested as he is in the “visions” of reality, he is wary of protest literature’s claims on material realities, as he suggests in “The Negro in Art” (The Crisis, April 1926), because he felt it reduced the creative spirit to a form of instrumentalism. A higher spiritual idealism must guide the practical, he believed, but resisted praxis driving art. In part, the question for Spingarn was not whether or not a poet should draw upon experience, or whether or not to cultivate indifference to the social conditions for and consequences of art. He did believe in art’s relevance to the world, but only in the sense that a poet’s mission and civic duty is to fulfill his private artistic obligation “to be true to his art.” According to Spingarn, it “is not the inherent function of poetry to further any moral or social cause” (Van Deusen, J. E. Spingarn, 109). In this way, he believed, one could avoid the


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vulgar Marxist diminishment of art to pamphleteering and mechanistic technique, “the narcotic of all aesthetic discussion” (109) and the death of creative experimentation.42 Joel Spingarn’s call for the artist’s freedom only superficially resembles Hughes’s own insistence that black artists must eschew public opinion and be “free within ourselves.”43 Hughes’s claim that “[a]n artist must be free to choose what he does, certainly, but he must also never be afraid to do what he might choose” (“The Negro Artist,” 1271) reminds his audience that being true to oneself means being true to one’s “own racial world” (1271), and, in that sense, he suggests, racial experience is an artistic imperative. Art would seem to transcend the racial imperative, however, if we take the Spingarns’ ceiling beams as a translation of the Spingarns’ aesthetic politics. Nor are the beams an effort to use Beauty, as Du Bois put it, to “set the world right.”44 Despite the Spingarns’ criticism of “parlor socialism,”45 the beams – literally serving as structural support for the family dwelling – feature race as domestic (and domesticated) art. B. Joyce Ross has noted the criticism of what she terms the Spingarns’ “noneconomic liberalism,” their interest in civic but not economic reform.46 But their response to Hughes’s poetry collection Fine Clothes To The Jew suggests how complex their racial/religious politics were: the collection’s title, with its focus on the economics of race relations, would seem to put its finger right on the open wound between blacks and Jews. In one of the poems in Fine Clothes, titled “Hard Luck” (a poem explicitly critical of Jewish complicity with and capitalization on black poverty), the narrator writes: When hard luck overtakes you Nothin’ for you to do. When hard luck overtakes you Nothin’ for you to do. Gather up yo’ fine clothes An’ sell ’em to de Jew. Jew takes yo’ fine clothes, Gives you a dollar an’ a half. Jew takes yo’ fine clothes, Gives you a dollar an’ a half. Go to de bootleg’s, Git some gin to make you laugh.47

Yet despite the fact that “many Jews did not like it,” the Spingarns, albeit carefully, praised Fine Clothes as a collection that captured the “core of life” in which “Jacob and Negro come into their own.”48 It is, conceivably, this romanticized notion of an ur-Jew and an aboriginal black, linking

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Hughes’s “core” with the Troutbeck carvings, that allowed his patron to reconcile the economic and racial differences between them through artistic experimentation. And if Hughes never experienced the volatile rise and fall with the Spingarns that he did with “Godmother” (Mason), it is perhaps because at stake in this reconciliation – suggested both in Hughes’s understatement to the rabbi that opens this chapter, and in the Spingarns’ circumspection regarding Fine Clothes – is the carefully tended narrative of Jewish-black kinship, the Bildungsroman of “Jacob and Negro” coming “into their own.” Ann Douglas misses this history of tacit black-Jewish arbitration when arguing that just because Hughes did not make Spingarn a character in his memoirs, in his “drama of patronage and reparentage,” as he did Mason, Van Vechten and Mary McLeod Bethune, she could not “hold center stage in his story.” She reasons that the fact that Spingarn was Jewish and “beloved” by him (versus the “WASP would-be mother” who must be “overcome,” according to Douglas) accounts for the relatively little he wrote about her publicly.49 There were of course contradictory tensions not altogether silenced by all this understatement and circumspection. The Spingarns’ trophy heads, for instance, paying dramatic homage to race by literally putting each “type” on pedestals, risk turning Hughes into the totemic, if not token, “Negro.” He risks therefore also being depersonalized in the process of being made a representative. But does he really lose his own head as he joins the august company hoisted aloft? It is important to note that Hughes is well aware of the benefits as well as the challenges of posing as racial representative for both black and white communities. Hughes himself “cherished and even encouraged the often-bestowed title of ‘Poet Laureate of the Negro Race.’”50 For Hughes the representative potentially gains a capacious and fluid sense of historical identity, much as does the narrator in his famous “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” (Collected Poems, 1921). In the poem Hughes’s collective “I” claims a transhistorical liberty across centuries of tribulation and tributaries. In this sense the concept of the representative – “the Negro” – allows Hughes to map unbroken “bloodlines” and therefore also claim uninterrupted cultural traditions for the race without resorting to the flawed discourses of biological racialism and without denying the Creolized nature of the diverse diasporic African cultures that emerged in the wake of the slave trade. The somewhat paradoxical tensions within the very notion of the representative had its political usefulness for Hughes: as at once an elected representative, thus distinct from the group, and yet a representative of the group, the concept of representativity allows Hughes to find his coveted “racial individuality” (1271) in group affinity.51 In this way taking


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on the mantle of “The Negro” enables Hughes to reconcile the Talented Tenth’s belief in an elite racial leadership, a chosen few, with his own belief in the wise self-governance of black “folk.” But Hughes also knew that, in the wrong hands, the representative can be made into merely a representation. His story “Slave on the Block,” collected in Ways of White Folks (1934), is particularly alert to the risk that philanthropists posing as artists will simply aestheticize the race and, in doing so, anesthetize racial politics. The painter-composer team Michael and Anne Carraway, we are told, “went in for the Art of Negroes,”52 and planned to accompany paintings with music – a “sonata” or a “fugue” – in the irresistible “novelty” of a joint “‘concert-exhibition’” (21). Anne wishes to paint “a modern slave plaint, 1850 in terms of 1933, Vieux Carré remembered on 135th Street. Slavery in the Cotton Club” (25). In order to in effect replace the “New Negro” with the “Old Negro,” the “stock figure perpetuated as a historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism,” in Alain Locke’s terms,53 Carraway decides to sketch an “adorable Negro” with a “black, black face” and “very white” teeth – most “effective in oil and canvas” (24). The Carraways’ racial stereotyping (blacks as a “childlike people” [24] who are wont to “make love” [27]) and Anne’s sexual voyeurism (gazing at the boy, Luther, when he sleeps “nude – or at least half nude” [24]) exposes the unflattering impulses behind the appreciative white gaze. In “It’s the Blues I’m Playing,” Hughes similarly critiques the subordination of race to “art for art’s sake” (which turns out to be merely art for whites’ sake) and in his later story, “Professor,” collected in Laughing to Keep From Crying (Henry Holt, 1952) critiques philanthropic white folks in general. Such stories would seem pointedly aimed at the Spingarns, to whom he dedicated Not Without Laughter, and to the wealthy liberal and music aficionado Noël Sullivan, to whom Hughes dedicated Ways of White Folks.54 But, if we may exploit Hughes’s epigraph to the same volume, borrowed from Berry in “Poor Little Black Fellow”: these are the ways of only “some white folks.” hughsiana: the hues of hughes There is a sense in which Spingarn collects Hughes both as a racial artifact and for her own artistic ends. After several decades she had amassed a “valued collection of Hughsiana,” as she put it, a treasury of signed books, buttons, and posters that “rejoices my eye” (JWJ, 297). Like “Victoriana” or “Americana,” Hughsiana suggests her lay connoisseurship; the term of endearment here, although affectionately meant, evokes quaint trinkets

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and charming mementoes of a bygone era safely tucked into a glass display case. It strikes an odd and inadvertently trivializing note, given the fact that she is referring to an internationally renowned and politically committed writer’s lifework. A similarly acquisitive impulse is suggested by her stated desire to keep a “Haitian scrapbook” (JWJ, 62) of people of color she sees on the streets there. It is an idea motivated, she says, by the black people she meets at a party: the “color and beauty of people’s heads, faces” that she “adored” reminded her of people she had met on her trips to Haiti. As she puts it, “my eyes have not had such a feast since I was there” (JWJ, 528). In this sense Spingarn was a casual if appreciative collector for whom the appeal of race was largely specular. We see the appeal of race as color in one of her oil paintings of Hughes.55 The portrait weds Hans Hofman’s well-known fascination with the spatial dimensions of color to her own recurrent interest in Hughes’s face. An exercise in solid colors, mostly blue and ocher, the painting transforms Hughes into a study in planar angularity in which nose, eyes, brows, lips, cheeks, chin, form a constellation of flat triangles. There is no social context for Hughes, nor are there any of the cues to psychological depth or interiority so much a part of the conventions of portraiture. His eyes gaze vaguely off; neither the artist nor any implied audience seems the object of his glance. Behind him is a framed backdrop of light dots, and behind that, yellow and orange Mondrian-like panes that resemble a stained-glass window. So dissimilar from more well-known portraits of Hughes, such as Winold Reiss’s famous 1925 contemplative sketch of him (manuscript in front of Hughes and scenes of Harlem behind him), Spingarn’s portrait abstracts and refracts his form into a disjunctive consortium of colored parts and planes. It is a presentation of color, and race, as relational. Hughes becomes hues. Spingarn, however, did not merely view Hughes as a palette of color, nor was her artistic involvement with race an end in itself. It is important to remember that her artistic experiments in racial portraiture proved one of the few sanctioned avenues of private ambition open to her as a woman of the time and of her social class. A mother of four within the first five years of her marriage,56 her frustrations with gender restrictions are quite explicit in her collection of poems, Humility and Pride, in which all fret against the social and sexual confines of her life. “It is a struggle to be a woman,” she reflects in “Women’s Souls,” “Plants that are feeble/Often disappear,/Unseen, unrecognized,/And so do/Women’s souls/When they are bonded to men they want to please.” In “Mothers and Wives” the narrator admits that, unlike gardeners who “nurse their plants/With loving


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care,” as a mother she is an “impatient gardener/Who takes little joy in tending hers.” “What else does life impose on wives and mothers?” she asks in the same poem: “Limits, boundaries:/Wifehood is a garden/with walls around it;/No woods or fields/to wander and stray in/Fences and walls/Surround all wives and mothers;/Children must know/ Where they can find their Mother.” In “Parlor Car, I,” the narrator confesses that: Without I am cool and impassive, And my behavior is suited to a parlor car, But within I feel whirling gusts of passions and tumult; I want to run through the streets naked, With hair and clothes streaming behind me; I want to drink and dance with lustful Alexanders, I want to carouse wild-eyed with other wild-eyed companions, I want to be a wanton, a maenad, a Bacchante; But all the time I remain wistfully in the parlor-car, And while I am quietly looking out of the window, Deep down within my feverish depths I listen To voices shrieking IO BACCHE, IO BACCHE.57

The poems in Humility and Pride (also illustrated by Spingarn) often figuratively enact their own escapes: in “Parlor Car, II,” for example, the narrator leaps through the thick glass window of a suffocating car into “A steaming cauldron/Of hot desire/Swaying and flaming forever;/I let its flames/Run over me/And through me;/I gave myself to them,” only to find that she “too had flames,” that now “Like Aeolus himself/I carry my own blasts” (20–1). To some extent her allusions to “lustful Alexanders” and “wild-eyed companions” are Greek tropes for racial primitivism, classical myths obliquely racialized – a common enough phenomenon during the Harlem Renaissance, as witnessed, for example, by some of both Hughes’s and Countee Cullen’s poems.58 More specifically they function to parallel and punctuate the poetic narrative of her own religious and sexual frustrations. Spingarn’s frustrated desires were not atypical: the 1920s was a pivotal decade in women’s rights, when others also let loose their “own blasts” and “shrieking voices.”59 As Ann Douglas notes, women of this decade in particular “were at least as eager as their male peers to seize the liberties of adventurous autonomy, creative and rigorous self-expression, sexual experimentation, and full exposure to ethnic and racial diversity, liberties that were even harder to come by for women than men . . . [this was] the generation of women whose leaders, asked to contribute to a feminist symposium in The Nation in 1926 . . . complained about the ‘injurious strain of my mother’s devotion,’ the ‘bitterness’ of maternal rule, and ‘selfish and deceitful’ ‘Mother

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Nature.’”60 Spingarn garnered only modest attention for her gender-based poems; ironically, her ambitions as a woman were realized more through her race-centered art. It was as a graphic artist that she participated in the public – if not as directly the political – forum of race relations occupied by her husband and her brother-in-law, Joel and Arthur Spingarn. Significantly, race was both the occasion for as well as the content of most of her work. A devotee of Jung, with whom she studied in Europe, she was interested in “the symbols and rituals that are part of the racial unconscious which my studies in psychology have made me value” (JWJ, 270). But it was the German abstractionist Hans Hofman, with whom she took a short course of study, who first suggested she look to African-American artists as the ones doing the only worthwhile work in America.61 Yet Spingarn did not turn to black graphic artists as guides or teachers; instead, she used African American artists themselves as her art. Even the coverage she received in regard to her showings foregrounds her use of the racial subject; there was more mention of who she drew than of how she drew them. The showbill and press release of her first (of two) one-woman shows in the spring of 1933 (housed in the 135th Street “Colored” YMCA, a veritable literary salon at Lenox Avenue) evokes it as “an exhibition of paintings, lithographs, and drawings of ‘chiefly Negro subjects,’” portraying various “aspects of Negro life and portraiture.” The exhibit offered an “interesting cross-section of life” from her visits to the Virgin Islands as well as “figures of prominence in the art, literary, and musical world whose likenesses” have been “brilliantly realized,” among them Richard B. Harrison, “star of Green Pastures, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes.” She also has portraits, the poster notes, of “Maurice Hindus, Rex Brasher, Lewis Mumford, John Jacob Niles, Hans Hofman, Hendrick Glintenkamp, and Nansen, the explorer,” but the bulk of images were of African Americans and black West Indians.62 For Spingarn realism’s conventions provided a mode of art by which she could negotiate race relations in ways that contradictorily gesture toward both social containment and social critique. Her almost exclusive emphasis on portraiture, for example – especially portraits of guests whom she had double as live models, inviting them to her home studio – allowed her to maintain an “up-close” distance with regard to black people. Gayle Wald reminds us that “to the degree that they, too, are mediated by commodity culture, the spaces of ‘intimate’ social relations cannot be privileged as a space ‘outside’ the dynamics of racial hierarchy.”63 Wald here is keeping in mind bell hooks’s caveat that making “one’s self vulnerable to the seduction


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of difference, to seek an encounter with the Other, does not require that one relinquish forever one’s mainstream positionality. When race and culture become commodified as resources for pleasure, the culture of specific groups, as well as the bodies of individuals, can be seen as constituting an alternative playground where members of dominating races, genders, sexual practices affirm their power over intimate relations with the Other.”64 Spingarn, patron cum artist, assumes the position of the “objective” interpreter of the racial subject in these sittings, much like the semi-omniscient narrator of a novel, a controlling but indirect presence in the composition. But of course, as one Henry James’ character, who “perversely” admits “an innate preference for the represented subject over the real one,” puts it, “the defect of the real [is] so apt to be a lack of representation. I like things that appeared; then one was sure. Whether they were or not was always a subordinate and profitless question.”65 The profitable question here, too, is not: does Spingarn “realistically represent race,” but rather: “how does her real represent race?” What appearance is she trying to be “sure” of? Or, to put it another way, to what end does she represent a racial reality? To answer this we must consider that Spingarn’s interest in representational art is due in part to the influence of her teacher, Kenneth Hayes Miller, with whom she studied art most extensively, and whose own naturalist interest in urban and commercial activity was influenced by his novelist friend, Theodore Dreiser. This impulse to capture the “natural” and the “real” is tied to what Leo Bersani notes is the late nineteenth-century novelist’s “reassuring belief in psychological unity and intelligibility,” limiting to the degree that it ignores “the psychic discontinuities and incoherence from which all our fragmented experience ultimately derives.” Realism’s assertion of a “myth about psychic order and structure [that] helps to contain, and limit, all critiques of disorder,” according to Bersani, makes it resistant to “experimenting with nondestructive versions of fragmented desires.”66 Kenneth Warren refines Bersani’s claims in order to locate realism to race, in part by not assuming that a particular social politics necessarily always inheres in any given genre. For it is no accident, he notes in Black and White Strangers, that realism’s interest in the “importance and fragility of the social order” should extend to African Americans, whose story “from emancipation through the turn of the century is a story of social intolerance and perceived disorder.”67 I agree with Warren that, while we cannot assume either an uncomplicated reactionary politics or a liberatory politics inhering in realism, we must still ask “about the relation of aesthetics to politics . . . in a way that did not simply collapse one term into another” (14).

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Race, Work, and Desire the conversion of race

Thus to answer my earlier question – to what end does Spingarn represent a racial reality? – I would argue that on its most superficial level, Spingarn’s realist portraiture simply allows her a rapprochement between the formal and the familiar, since it allows her paradoxically to keep her racial intimates literally at arm’s length. But, as one of her charcoal sketches of Hughes’s head suggests, the covenants of realism do much more than merely position her as artistic ethnographer. The sketch I am most interested in appears as the frontispiece to Dear, Lovely Death, a volume of their poetry published by the Spingarns’ private press in 1931.68 Printed on handmade paper in a signed, numbered edition of 100 copies, it had a cover designed by Hughes’s erstwhile traveling companion, the artist Zell Ingram. In Spingarn’s sketched profile of Hughes (see Figure 3), he is curiously and unmistakably Semitic-looking, his heavily outlined nose given an emphatic bump and narrowed arch that seem to exist only on the page, since no photograph nor description has ever suggested they exist outside Spingarn’s imagination. In this image Hughes acquires what Sander Gilman refers to as “codes of Jewishness” and what Michael Rogin calls a prototypical “Jewface,”69 as at first glance Spingarn’s portrait suggests an interpretive identification between Jew and black. But Spingarn’s “Jewish” Hughes is not a reflection of any kind of “psychic fusion”70 between them of the sort that W. E. B. Du Bois is thought to have shared with Joel Spingarn. Spingarn instead seems to be gesturing toward what I would like to call a “conversion of race.” The phrase is meant intentionally to evoke Du Bois’s “Conservation of Races” (1897), in which history is composed of groups and races, suggesting a racial essentialism he would revise in his later writings. But I also mean to combine the two senses of “conversion” – that of a supreme act of individual agency (an act of religious conversion is, unless understood as an act of grace, a choice made with heightened self-consciousness) and yet, paradoxically, also that of a profound transformation enacted upon the self (one’s entire life is said to be changed wholly by a conversion) that shifts in identification for blacks and Jews involved. Obviously, racial and religious identities are matters not simply of private choice but also of public designation, and the degrees to which either comes to bear at any given moment are often quite distinct and incontrovertible for blacks and Jews.71 But in Spingarn’s graphic and, as we shall see, poetic translations between what Werner Sollors calls “consent” – community contract – and “descent” – “blood” heritage – in the ethnic continuum, she capitalizes on the slippage between these terms.72 Race and faith become


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Figure 3 Untitled charcoal sketch of Langston Hughes by Amy Spingarn. With permission from the James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Yale University.

“converted” so that religion is racialized and racial elements given religious dimension. Certainly since the antebellum era, blacks’ representation of Jews and Jewish representation of blacks – usually in biblical equations of diaspora and divine selection – frequently trade and culturally barter socially resonant aspects of their racial or religious identities. Sometimes blacks and Jews are simply represented as interchangeable, as when Du Bois is called a “sunburnt Jew,” or when Waldo Frank passes for black while traveling with Jean Toomer in the South.73 In that sense blacks and Jews share

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a long history of rhetorical consanguinity and performative intelligibility. Distinctive to Spingarn’s representations of race and faith, however, is the way racial performance is recast as spiritual transition. “f or blood that is not yours” In several of the poems in Humility and Pride, it is not Judaism but Christianity that represents the physical and spiritual ardor so appealing to her in Hughes’s work. “Because of my secluded life,” she writes to him in a letter, “I know so little of this world you picture,” but through his poems she “can feel the passion and torment that goes on in the negro soul” (JWJ, 221–2). Her poem “St. Paul” recognizes his “Great Jewish heart” but, more importantly, finds in him “Another fiery soul and burning mind” whose “Warm hopes and deep desires” “feed and fan my inner fires” (Humility and Pride, 35). She finds in the converted Jew an icon of the emotional release, the expressive passion that she also finds in the “Negro soul” and the “steaming cauldron of hot desire”74 just outside her parlor-car existence. In a sense, then, it is St. Paul who is the black, not Hughes who is the Jew, in Spingarn’s poetic logic. This conversion is linked to, if not wholly commensurate with, the epistemological problems and opportunities associated with passing so cleverly outlined by Walter Benn Michaels in Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism: Instead of being embodied in Negroes, “Negro characteristics” may or may not be possessed by them. Identified as in some way belonging to the race (since they are “Negro”) but not as determining race (since Negroes might not possess them), these “characteristics” are a new racial entity; it is their existence that gives a nonironic meaning to the project of making yourself into a Negro. This is why passing . . . has constituted a significant theoretical advance. The possibility of concealing one’s racial identity – of looking and behaving in ways that do not reflect one’s race – makes available the desire to reveal it. And the conception of racial identity as the sort of thing that might or might not be revealed by one’s behavior extends the regime of race to belief and action.75

As Michaels suggests, the very notion of “passing” (of supposedly posing as what one “is not”) ironically brings into question the notion that there is a fixed racial identity one can betray, since passing foregrounds the role of choice, affect, behavior in determining racial association; hence “[b]iology is an essential but not a sufficient condition of an identity that . . . requires a relatively anonymous set of practices to complete its constitution” (119). Passing reminds us that being “black” is partly a function of belief, which is more often the nomenclature of religious association.


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In her poetry Spingarn invokes religious belief – and, more specifically, the freedom to choose one’s faith, heritage, and affect – not to escape race – or, more specifically, the dictates of descent and biological determinism – but to argue for a kind of ideological miscegenation. In fact, throughout her poetry Spingarn similarly divests herself of Judaic identification precisely so that “blood could mix,” as she puts it in “Humility and Pride.” Jews are associated with a masturbatory ethnic chauvinism: “I come from a proud and stiff-necked race/Which has never known a dream of grace,” she writes in the same poem. “An eye for an eye/And a tooth for a tooth . . . And I felt that my blood/With no blood could mix/Because of Christ’s blood on the crucifix./Oh, how can this world/Of which poets sing/Be a self-enclosed, onanistic ring?” (27). Another poem, “Talmudic Scholars,” similarly condemns her “black-browed” and “skull-capped ancestors” who “never knew/The love that can feel/For blood that is not yours.” Her Jewish ancestors, the speaker states, lived in “Ghettos of the heart/And of the spirit/As well as of the body” (36). Judaism in these poems is almost exclusively associated with an Old Testament repressiveness that is both sexual and imaginative in its scope. Her “thwarted race . . . my strong and baffled race” (“Iceland,” Humility and Pride, 37), she suggests, are “baffled” precisely because they are too insular, cannot feel “love . . . /For blood” that is not their own. The racial discrimination extends to gender relations and is the reason, she suggests, for her religious apostasy: because conservative Judaism segregates worship by gender – “Their women sat/In galleries above/In silent prayer” (“Devotions,” 33) – “Now that I am a woman,” she chooses instead to sit in her room reading the New Testament, especially “St. John and the Corinthians.” In this conflation of sexual growth and spiritual development, Judaism is represented as religiously prepubescent; her (female) maturity requires the (male) apostles “when the holy spirit stirs within” (34). In her poetry Judaism is a distant abstract, a generalized “my people” who command no immediate spiritual or political currency for her because they are too racially exclusive, sexually backward and spiritually provincial. St Paul’s conversion to this more “warm-blooded” religion, then, is both representative of and precedent for the spiritual transformation of both herself as Jewish woman and of the body politic. Her indirect equations between St. Paul’s “deep desires” and Hughes’s racial “anguish” provide the language to vent her frustrations as a wannabe “Bacchante” (“The Parlor Car, I,” 3); and, rather than a euphemism for Christian charity, the notion of “loving others’ blood” becomes a trope for both sexual reinvention and cultural miscegenation.

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In this way Spingarn actually retreats from nearly all the usual figurative and historical links between the two “chosen” peoples. (And eventually she converted to Catholicism.)76 Racial identification and religious affiliation merge in Spingarn’s work, but in nearly inverse relation to the traditional history outlined by Paul Gilroy, who argues that the figurative resonances between African Americans and Jews run so deep through their respective political and literary imaginaries as to be nearly inextricable. The narrative of the Jewish Exodus, for example, did not simply provide a rhetorical parallel to the Middle Passage; it more profoundly “provided the primary semantic source in the elaboration of slave identity, slave historicity, and a distinctive sense of time.” This “consciousness which derives from the Old Testament was enhanced by other biblical tales of co-operation between blacks and Jews as well as by the sense that there were close parallels between the historical experiences of the two groups during particular periods.”77 Kwame Anthony Appiah, along the same line of reasoning, points out that both blacks and Jews used “race as a basis for moral solidarity” and as the basis for their “political life” within their respective groups: “what blacks in the West, like secularized Jews, have mostly in common is the fact that they are perceived – both by themselves and by others – as belonging together in the same race, and this common race is used by others as the basis for discrimination by accepting the racialism it presupposed.”78 Yet Spingarn gives up all these readily available associations in order to convert them into an altogether new field of representation. I have suggested that Spingarn makes use of Hughes, but we cannot simply say that Hughes was “used.” The Hughes–Spingarn correspondence – frank, ingenuous, devoid of flirtation – is almost entirely about art or literature: they discussed the latest poetry and together saw dozens of plays, including Edward Albee’s American Dream (JWJ, 402) and Joseph Stein’s Fiddler on the Roof (JWJ, 273).79 They invited one another to dinner parties with Thurgood Marshall (JWJ, 254) and exchanged photographs of Judge Horton of the Scottsboro case (JWJ, 418). But most of the letters concern the progress of their own work. From the outset Spingarn discusses her writing and art with Hughes. She mentions work of his that she has seen published, but apparently he sent her material in progress only occasionally. There are no pictures of Hughes by her dated after the early 1940s; instead, it seems that in the last twenty years of their relationship she turned to him as artistic advisor rather than artistic model. But much earlier than that, Spingarn is already penning lengthy descriptions of her sketching, painting, and writing to him, asking him everything from specific questions about his “‘mood-words’ to convey sorrow” (JWJ, 25) to thanking him for his


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“stimulating criticism” (JWJ, 48) of her poems. She even seeks his approval of her inclusion in the 1930 American Caravan (JWJ, 67). By his death in 1967, it is clear that Hughes has moved from object of Spingarn’s patronage and paintbrush to her mentor, assessing her poems and art as her peer and artistic superior. “1 8 vestal virgins (housebroken) ”: t he case of carlo Although “white patronage” has become a catch-all for any white person or institution funding black arts, probably the greatest connection between Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten (“Carlo” to those with whom he was familiar) was Hughes himself. Like Hans Hofman and Spingarn, Van Vechten believed that race held the most promise as artistic subject, but Van Vechten was much more interested than Spingarn in primitivism, in “the squalor of Negro life, the vice of Negro life.” For him these were the source of “a wealth of novel, exotic, picturesque material to the artist,” and if black writers were not going to take advantage of “this exotic material while it is fresh,” he argued, then it will be a “free gift” to “white authors who will exploit it”80 (like himself, apparently). Also like Hughes’s chaste relationship with Spingarn, Van Vechten was apparently not Hughes’s lover (Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, xxiii), though there is a homoerotic strain running through some of their exchanges, as David Levering Lewis has noticed.81 Yet if the Jewish Spingarn and homosexual Van Vechten were marginalized in some ways, the ways they experienced that marginalization were vastly different from each other’s and, as I will explain, their artistic attraction to the even more socially and politically disenfranchised African American still more different. I flag Spingarn’s and Van Vechten’s distinctions mostly to foreground an assumption that informs this chapter: that the critical simplification of white patronage has often obfuscated the subtleties and complexities of black-white working relations and their relation to the art both parties produced.82 Ann Douglas’s characterization of Van Vechten is typical of most critics’ emphasis on his theatricality, his affectations, the more prurient side of his fetishization of African Americans: Van Vechten’s motives were hardly above reproach. He shared Mrs. Mason’s fervor for the primitive, and he later remarked that his interest in the Negroes of the 1920s had been “violent,” “almost an addiction” . . . Though married, Carlo was gay, flippantly fastidious to the point of triviality, and a voyeur. Playing plump and white-haired host, he sometimes affected the elaborate cerise and gold Mandarin costume of (in a friend’s words) “the Dowager Empress of China, gone slightly

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beserk”; he had affairs with talented Negroes like the man-about-town Harold Jackman and kept a growing collection of photographs of nude black men. One might say that he took literally D. H. Lawrence’s injunction to strip off the “idealistic clothes” and see the “dusky body” beneath. (288)

Most critics suggest that Van Vechten not only wished to gaze upon black men but to be a black man; it is easy to make much of his favorite caricature, of himself as a black man done by the artist Miguel Covarrubias. Underneath the image read the caption “A Prediction.” And certainly Van Vechten’s love of this “blackface” representation of himself asks us to consider Kobena Mercer’s incisive question: What happens when the “Negro” becomes “an inverted image of otherness, in which attributes devalorized by the dominant culture were simply revalorized or hypervalorized as emblems of alienation and outsiderness, a kind of strategic selfothering in relation to dominant culture norms? . . . There is a whole modernist position of “racial romanticism” that involves a fundamental ambivalence of identifications. At what point do such identifications result in an imitative masquerade of white ethnicity? At what point do they result in ethical and political alliances? How can we see the difference?83

In many ways the man Zora Neale Hurston anointed as an “honorary Negro”84 and whom Hughes teased as having a “little bit of colored . . . mixed up in you”85 did valorize black “outsiderness,” and his identificatory involvement in black culture at times constituted a “strategic self-othering” whose politics were questionable. But to conclude that identification is all that Van Vechten was about is to miss almost everything about his relationship with Hughes – and, as I will explain, to miss what ethical and political dimensions did exist in their alliance. Of those who have speculated on the politics of the Van Vechten–Hughes relationship, nearly all have concluded it was negative: Nathan Huggins’s criticism of patronage in general and of Van Vechten in particular is that any good that white benefactors may do is outweighed by their warping influence on black creativity. The kind of patronage represented by Carl Van Vechten, he suggests, has had an especially damaging effect on black artists because though any artist must ask how much “the critics, the profitoriented apparatus distorts his statement . . . it is different when it is racial”: There is, at first, the suspicion that the patron values Negro-ness, not talent. Nor was the Negro artist assumed to be the final judge of truth and the relevant statement. The patron – best illustrated by Carl Van Vechten – was a teacher, guide, and judge; his search for authentic Negro voices was dictated by his own needs. Without the help and friendship of white men and publishers, there probably would have been little production of commercial black art in the 1920s. But white


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guidance and encouragement probably prevented those few men and women of real talent from wrestling with their own senses and plodding through to those statements which the thrust of their lives and experience would force them to make. Whatever other burdens Negro artists carried, this arrangement stigmatized Negro poetry and prose of the 1920s as being an artistic effort that was trying to be like something other than itself.86

Huggins concedes the necessary assistance of whites in the Harlem Renaissance but assumes that artists “of real talent” dissipated their ability because cushioned by their patrons, producing inferior work because it was somehow, inexplicably, “something other than itself.” What that “itself ” might be he does not state; his problematic hypothetical projection of a pure racial art that might be self-evidently true to itself (whatever that might be) exists only as a kind of phantom ideal of the actual art that black artists did produce. Though his recognition of the context and constraints under which black artists worked is of crucial importance, to the extent that Huggins cannot imagine black art being “itself ” when produced with the help of white patronage he participates in the stigmatizing of the black poetry and prose of the 1920s that he says poses an extra burden to black writers. In addition, and more disturbing, there is his implication that black artists were so little in control of their work that their “own senses” and “experience” were opaque to them – all of which seems a tremendous underestimation of black artists, and most especially of Hughes, who worked more closely with Carl Van Vechten than probably any other African American. It is hard to imagine anyone calling Hughes a dupe of Van Vechten. Hughes himself even gently joked about these accusations, saying that after the publication of Nigger Heaven Van Vechten was charged with “ruining, distorting, polluting, and corrupting every Negro writer from then on.”87 He admits that Carlo has been his “main literary help – not influence, mind you, as some critics claimed” (159). His own artistic manifesto, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” puts it even more flatly: “if white people are pleased, we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter.”88 End of discussion. There is no evidence that Hughes applied this principle inconsistently to his own work: typical is the response Hughes gives Van Vechten in a letter to the latter’s criticism of his poems in Good Morning, Revolution (1933), in which he says that they are “very weak on the lyric side” and that in ten years Hughes would “be ashamed” of them; Hughes simply thanks him for his “frankness” but states that “I like some of [the poems] as well as anything I ever did – which is merely my taste against yours, and means nothing, as everyone has a right to his own likings, I guess” (Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, 103–4). Regarding Van Vechten’s singling out of his sardonic

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“Advertisement for the Waldorf-Astoria” as unduly critical of the hotel, Hughes states unequivocally that he simply “doesn’t agree” (104) with him. As for the unilateral influence that Huggins and others have found so damaging in white patrons, Van Vechten goes out of his way to resist such charges, writing as early as 1927 in an open letter to Dr. Benjamin Brawley that “I am unaware even to this day, although we are the warmest friends and see each other frequently, that I have had the slightest influence on Hughes in any direction. The influence, if one exists, flows from the other side . . . I have quoted freely from Mr. Hughes’s opinions on the subject of Negro folksong” (49–50). Now Van Vechten, who certainly wanted to be appreciated for his efforts, may have been somewhat disingenuous in such disclaimers, and other patrons such as Nancy Cunard and Charlotte Osgood Mason undeniably exerted negative influence on the many protégés and beneficiaries of their largesse, but it is difficult to tell always who played who even then.89 Huggins’s view reflects a standard one of Hughes as an innocent debauched and obliged by Van Vechten, but, as Emily Bernard suggests, though “Hughes felt a certain debt to Van Vechten, who would serve as his de facto editor and agent for years to come, gratitude hardly covers the range of feelings Hughes and other blacks felt for Van Vechten. What they saw in Van Vechten was more than a useful contact; he was fellow champion of free expression in black arts and culture” (xxi). Van Vechten presented Hughes’s work to the Knopf publishing family, said the “proper incantations over it” as he put it, and convinced Vanity Fair to publish Hughes’s poems as well. As Bernard notes, his “direct influence” had a powerful impact on the publishing success of several black writers; soon after championing Hughes, he was also “hard at work helping other black writers get published at Knopf” (xxi), including Nella Larsen and James Weldon Johnson. His influence, therefore, was certainly extensive and tangible; but my study of the Van Vechten–Hughes relationship does not operate from the premise that as a patron Van Vechten perverted Hughes’s work in any way or even that the influence was unilateral. Quite the contrary: though Van Vechten’s early letters to Hughes are filled with advice (and he will continue to advise at, and in the absence of, Hughes’s requests), by the 1930s Hughes is not only counseling but giving public seals of approval to Van Vechten’s work. In fact, analysis of the correspondence between them suggests that to an impressive degree, given the disparities in wealth and standing with national publishers, Hughes controlled both their relations and his art in relation to Van Vechten’s artistic judgments. Beyond this, the most significant aspect


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of their affiliation is their heretofore unexamined relation to history. Together they not only collaborate as the era’s historiographers; Hughes and Van Vechten literally “make history,” both as they self-consciously represent their own relationship as a historical artifact and as they formally institutionalize it as “history-worthy” by including it in the James Weldon Johnson Collection that Van Vechten set up with Yale University. As I will explain, to an important extent and in circular fashion, they both actively construct and mutually vet the history for which they claim to be merely passive ciphers. “the abraham lincoln of negro art ” To appreciate Hughes’s and Van Vechten’s historiographic project, one must begin by considering how they constructed themselves in relation to history and to each other. On the one hand it seemed Van Vechten was master of his own image, cultivating his own self-representation through others’ of him and collecting monikers like coins: Hughes early on named him “my good angel,” the black singer Taylor Gordon called him the “Abraham Lincoln of Negro Art” (Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, xxii), and Paul Robeson’s wife referred to him as “godfather,” echoed by the Herald Tribune, which praised him as “the beneficent godfather of all sophisticated Harlem.” Yet, as with his relationship with Spingarn, Hughes had the upper hand in rhetorical control of letters. This is evident even in his style of address: though Hughes is more familiar with Van Vechten than with Spingarn (calling him by his common handle, Carlo, for example), Van Vechten complains that Hughes is too conventional in his correspondence with him. As late as 1958, Van Vechten chides him: “Apparently I cannot cure you of your business signature of ‘sincerely’ . . . At least it is unique, as no other of my numerous correspondents is so formal” (303–4). Hughes’s signature is in contrast to Van Vechten’s always flamboyant literary exits, which included “laurel and peach-blossoms to you!” (52), “strings of pearls to you!” (171), “leopard skins and Coty perfumes and blueberry pancakes to YOU!” (225), “four pounds of tiger teeth to you!” (176), “18 vestal virgins (housebroken) to you!” (277), and occasionally a pet trademark – Van Vechten’s interpretive sketch of a cat viewed from the rear (173). Van Vechten could never cajole Hughes into the kind of repartee that his own letters encouraged. Now and then Hughes would join in and end his own notes in something resembling the spirit of Van Vechten’s, but as Van Vechten points out, most of the time Hughes concluded formally. This remove and resistance to the kind of familiarity Van Vechten was proposing

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in his letters was something Hughes used to maintain a certain dignified distance. He never allowed himself to become one of Van Vechten’s amusing “collectibles”; he was in on the joke but would never let himself become the joke. We saw in his relationship with Spingarn also this ability to signal connection without conceding to the terms of the relationship laid out explicitly (or simply presupposed by the higher social position) by a white correspondent. It was one of the reasons Hughes could so deftly stay in both Van Vechten’s graces and the high esteem of the black community when Nigger Heaven drew such fire, defending his friend in The Big Sea but, as Emily Bernard notes, never the “book’s merit” (xx). One comes to suspect that Van Vechten’s reasons for agreeing not to attach his name to the James Weldon Johnson Collection at Yale at the time it was set up stemmed less from modesty and the pragmatic recognition that “if the collection was in his own name, black writers and artists might not donate their work” (xxiv) than from his confidence that his was such a Harlem household name that his fame did not require it. His name is prominent enough elsewhere: dedications to him even appeared in both Hughes’s Fine Clothes To The Jew (1927) and Nella Larsen’s Passing (1929); he lobbied for and won permission to write reviews and introductions to many black-authored novels and books of poetry, including Walter White’s Fire in the Flint (1924); and he had more than his share of tributes and dinners in his honor. But by the 1950s he had lost most of his literary influence and nearly all those affectionate appellations.90 In letters he grows upset not just because no one calls him nicknames any more, but because no one is calling him, period: “Every one seems to hear from you but me” (215) he complains to Hughes at one point. It is significant that late in his career, therefore, when he has become, as Bernard notices, peevish and, in fact, “bitter,” because he feels “forgotten or neglected by the Negro people” (xxvi), he finally feels the need to give himself a title. In one particular letter written in 1959, after venting his frustration to Hughes, he signs the letter, at most half-seriously, given the humorless text preceding it, “Carlo, the Patriarch”: For the past ten years I have devoted at least fifty percent of my waking hours to this perpetuation of the fame of the Negro and it saddens me to realize how few Negroes realize this and how fewer still make any attempt to assist the collection . . . I am not running this show as a benefit for myself. It is even named for someone else. It is conducted solely to glorify the Negro and I hope that someday at least a majority of the race will begin to realize this fact. Yrs, with too much impatience, and some faint hope! Carlo, the Patriarch! (bold in original, 304).


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Hughes answers the letter by hailing him, tongue in cheek, as “Unbearded Patriarch,” an attempt gently to shave him of any false self-estimates, with his humor still making clear that he is sure Van Vechten would not seriously wish to assume the trappings of the mythic hoary patriarchy. But Carlo’s self-naming is a way of shoring up a prestige he suggests is slipping – most revealing to the extent that he cannot resist praising his own craft in that same letter (suggesting what is really at stake in his anger). Van Vechten argues that one “of the most brilliant episodes in the Collection is my mounted photographs of Negroes prominent in the Arts and Sciences” and then accuses those who will not pose for him – like Sidney Poitier – of acting like a “spoiled child” (304).91 The arrogance and condescension of his insult is revealing of much more than just a temper, with its suggestion that children should obey their fathers, “patriarchs” who know what is in their best interest and for their own good. The references to patriarchs and their children has much to do with Carlo’s flavor of politics and his investment in – as distinct from identification with – black people. Van Vechten’s parents bequeathed to him a nineteenth-century sense of political activism that, when it came to African Americans, resembled a fairly old-fashioned notion of noblesse oblige: his mother was a suffragist who worked with abolitionists and his father was a donor to the Piney Woods School for free black children in the late 1890s. The family gave money to institutions supporting racial advancement and employed black people even if they did not socialize with them. From this experience Van Vechten learned to address African Americans “respectfully” (xvii). But I would argue, additionally, that his own paternalistic commitment as the “Abraham Lincoln of Negro Art” to the James Weldon Johnson Memorial Collection of American Negro Arts and Letters at Yale bears not a little resemblance to the model of Reconstruction-era uplift that his parents embraced. Though Hughes and Van Vechten exchanged hundreds of letters concerning the arts and theater scenes, and shared a love of what Van Vechten called the “real Harlem folkstuff ” (135), they did not share political sensibilities. When Hughes began writing poetry that more directly challenged economic and political injustices around the globe, Van Vechten suggested more than once that it was at a cost to his art. Critics who have labeled Van Vechten as a foppish socialite have wondered how, given Hughes’s commitment to social activism, the two stayed friends.92 But if we look at Van Vechten as operating under an older (and by the early 1930s, most had decided outmoded) model of social justice at the same time that Hughes

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was becoming what he called a “revolutionist,” then their alliances and their conflicts take on altogether new meaning. I have suggested that in their letters Hughes often has the upper hand; he uses this advantage not for material gain, but to try to lead Van Vechten by the hand to liberate him from the paternalism (with all its assumptions of cultural superiority) into which he increasingly lapses, toward a more equitable relationship in which they are peers. In a neat twist Hughes seems to do this for what he feels is Van Vechten’s good: he becomes in a sense Van Vechten’s “Lincoln,” though without any discernible condescension on Hughes’s part, despite the fact that by the 1950s he was world famous and Van Vechten at best a historical footnote. When Van Vechten complains that he alone seems to care about the Collection, Hughes does not let Van Vechten set himself above and apart from the “race,” does not let him “lament the faults of the race” (305). They are in this together, he suggests, as compatriots: Of course I understand how you feel about the JWJ Collection. I feel that way, too. But, in my long life, I have noticed no general excitement among any large numbers of the colored race about ANY collection . . . They are just not collection minded . . . So, those of us who do know and do care will just have to redouble our efforts, I reckon, and include in those efforts . . . the bestirring of others. (305)

Hughes’s insistence that the Collection must be a community effort, that it is better to “bestir” than bash the very people Van Vechten says he wants to “glorify” (304), comes from his longheld belief in those whom he called the “low-down folk.” Where the two men’s conflicting models of social commitment merge, then, is in their joint effort to write themselves into history – or more precisely, to construct tautologically a history in which they would be historically significant. It was Van Vechten who first encouraged Hughes to write his autobiography at an age younger than most people begin to write reflective memoirs, for example, encouraging Hughes from the start to view biography as history, in Emerson’s words, to write his private life as Harlem’s history. From the beginning, as Hughes and Van Vechten exchange drafts of his first volume of autobiography, The Big Sea, both are acutely selfconscious about their own inclusion. At one point, when Blanche Knopf argues for cutting out almost all mention of Van Vechten in the book, Van Vechten writes to Hughes: “Please assure me you aren’t taking any of ME out of The Big Sea” (158). He later appeals directly to Knopf, who backs off and tells Hughes in a subsequent letter that those parts can remain. Van Vechten writes back that now he is sure that far “from being too long, they


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may be too short. I was distressed to have them removed as they are, to my mind, an essential part of the book’s integrity” (156). Hughes reassures him by saying that it is “important to leave YOU and ME in the book,” so that if white and black critics who have never read their work “want to read about themselves, they’ll have to read about us too.” But in the next line he says he refuses to cut out the portions about Harlem social life (in which Van Vechten figures largely) as Knopf advises because “that phase of Harlem’s rise to culture and neo-culture seems to me to be of historical importance” (159–60). Their inclusion among New York City’s who’s who is explained both as a self-interested (and almost cynical) effort to get read, and yet also as a disinterested record of what Alain Locke called the “race capital.”93 More than wanting a franchise on the name-dropping (he garnered more celebrity status as the autobiography hit the stands), Van Vechten desired historic perpetuity for himself as much as for Harlemites. Just as he anticipated the Renaissance in many ways, discovering and promoting black authors, performers, and playwrights, Van Vechten was perspicacious in recognizing in advance the Renaissance’s historical importance. From the beginning he was obsessive about being recorded in any Harlem history and Hughes was his best chance of being included; this sentiment only increased with time as he found he was being writ out of history by others (xxv). But the fact that, as with his monikers, his self-image was always enabled by another (in this case by Hughes) meant he had to orchestrate historiography obliquely on his behalf. The James Weldon Johnson Collection, set up by Van Vechten and Bernhard Knollenberg, head librarian at Yale in 1938, becomes the vehicle by which he officiates over history and institutionalizes his own name in it via Hughes. The Collection is impressive and most agree that it “may well be the greatest contribution made by Carl Van Vechten to the cause of black arts and letters” (xxiv). It was no small effort: Van Vechten had to collect, organize and label all the materials, and he devoted decades to this archival project.94 The works he sent to Yale included not only novels, playbills, posters, and photographs; they also included correspondence. Of particular historical value, Van Vechten felt, would be the letters between Hughes and Van Vechten: “What letters you write!” Van Vechten remarks in 1943. “Maybe I do too. Sometimes I wonder if OUR letters wont be the pride of the Collection!” (222). He seems to see no irony in the fact that letters, now written with the express recognition that they will be public, may lose whatever relative value they might have had as “raw” artifacts from the period. In effect, they become secondary rather than primary

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materials, since by the 1950s most of the letters are dominated by their own self-referential metacommentary: letters about getting their letters to the Collection. In effect, their historicizing displaces conversations of historical note that they might have had. Van Vechten’s shameless self-congratulation about the Collection in many of his letters frequently functions, then, to generate a form of triangulated desire in which he narrates someone else’s appreciation of him not only to inspire it in Hughes (usually to goad him into sending more materials, out of guilt) but also to inspire it in whoever, ostensibly, might eventually be reading the letter to Hughes in the Collection. In effect, he is preemptively writing his own review of the Collection for future scholars: Roi Otterly came to be photographed Saturday and definitely we are getting the manuscript. When he saw your beautiful boxes [of Hughes’s materials for Yale], he almost swooned and exclaimed, “The Schomburg Collection doesn’t keep things like this.” Of course, nobody else does and even Yale wouldn’t, if I didn’t do it myself. The material turned into this Collection is in a condition thanks to my energy and foresight which not many other Collections can boast. It is hard work and endless, but I think it is worth it . . . I expect to be deluged with [your] manuscripts and letters when you return. The boxes will still be here, as certain things have to be signed. Besides I have to catalogue the contents of these boxes before they go . . . Even if you don’t reply to other letters, answer MINE. Our correspondence will be historical. (223)

This is a fascinating example of history being made in the moment, of history as a function not of the past but of the present. It is as if Van Vechten were taking up as his mission James Baldwin’s insight that “[h]istory is the present . . . You and I are history. We carry our history. We act our history.”95 If Baldwin saw the fact of history as “You and I” to serve as caution and challenge, Van Vechten sees it simply as clear opportunity. He is not so much worried that history will (over)determine identity, but rather motivated by the idea that identity can become history. Ironically, the letter he is demanding in return from Hughes because it “will be historical” is merely regarding the handling of earlier letters, so it is hard to see the “historic” nature of such correspondence. The ensuing letters are, in fact, often little more than bureaucratic in content. Hence the further – painful – irony that the “history” to which these letters aspire is for the most part only the history of their historymaking. And irony of ironies, his focus on hitting historical pay-dirt with the Collection worked to the opposite effect, at least when it came to his own fame, since scholars such as Emily Bernard admit that, because by the 1950s “the James Weldon Johnson Collection was virtually the only thing he discussed in his correspondence with Hughes,”


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she “included fewer letters from that period” (xxv), apparently finding so little historical value in Carlo’s letters about the historical value of his letters that she chose not to publish them. Surely Van Vechten is turning in his grave. yale never sleeps In short, Van Vechten turns on its head Baldwin’s notion that history is identity in his effort to make identity into history. Thus it is little surprise that for Van Vechten his letters not only represent him; they are him: It is hard to believe that you still have me in the basement. I believed everything was being cleared out when somebody helped you at Yale’s expense years ago. I don’t know what to tell you about my letters except people who would write about you often want to see them and if they are not at Yale NOBODY CAN. Because, of course, nobody can see anything chez vous except letters on file. Anyway, please get the ones on file sent to Yale as soon as you can. Subito actually means immediately. ALL your letters to me except contemporary ones (and these go as they come) have been in Yale for YEARS. (301–2)

Not just his letters but he is in the “basement,” Van Vechten frets: he clearly feels that his (dis)placement, left behind and below, devalues him – a point he makes clear since he puts himself in relation to Hughes, whose material, he says, is already in the hallowed library. He also puts the letters, as his textual surrogate, in relation to – actually in competition with – others with whom Hughes might be corresponding, though there is no reason to believe his letters trump theirs in historical value. (Van Vechten here does not leave that to chance and anoints himself as the arbitrator of “historical value.”) It is clear from his exasperated letter that his concern is with those whose scholarly interest he anticipates might be in him, not Hughes. He seems most concerned with being readily available to history (the only way, he suggests, he can be relevant to it), but is dependent on Hughes’s willingness to include him in the Collection (“people who would write about you often want to see [Van Vechten’s letters]”), and thus the degree to which Van Vechten’s self can be construed as historic is mediated through Hughes: [I]t is MORE convenient for anyone writing about ME, or YOU, or Negroes, or whatever to examine them than it is chez vous. You are frequently sleeping or out of town or not in. Yale NEVER sleeps. Let me know when you can send them . . . All of your letters to me got to Yale promptly and the old ones were in Yale ten years ago. You may not believe this but I am much busier than YOU, but by working steadily from dawn to midnight I manage to get things done. (299–300)

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Hughes responds always with rather remarkable good humor but, obviously feeling pressured, carefully suggests that the Yale money was well spent but not sufficient, deftly mentions the other correspondence (with African Americans) that, given the Collection’s objective, one would think might be of greater historical importance than Van Vechten’s letters, and reminds Van Vechten that he has other more immediate and, it is implied, more important professional obligations: Cullud though I may be, the Lord cares about me, and has enabled me to find without too much delay a whole batch of your letters from 1925 on in the basement and these are now all sorted out in folders by years right up to now – with some years missing – but no doubt in the basement somewhere still . . . What with complications in page proofs regarding a Dorsey gospel song . . . permission to use at last moment STILL not being forthcoming, and having to replace it with something else that fitted line for line, and other last minute details before flying off to Kansas City in a few hours to begin my fall lecture tour, I wasn’t able to research my own materials any more this week. But as soon as I come back, your letters, a considerable number of Arna [Bontemps]’s, and a sizeable box of Countee [Cullen] and other literary and musical ones will go off to Yale. They are all sorted. My summer helper has returned to his Cleveland musical school. He and other various helpers have long since absorbed the money Yale gave me originally to sort and classify material – but that is neither here nor there. Everything I have of literary value will eventually be sorted and sent anyhow. But it was my impression these things were for posterity, not contemporary use, I proceeded at “all deliberate speed” rather than subito. Now that you have clarified me, SUbiTO! Subito . . . Can’t seem to get out of the house – always some imminent deadline looking me in the face or unending proofs to read, or somebody who wants to know why I haven’t sent their unsolicited manuscript back yet that they sent me to read and comment upon! (302–3)

The James Weldon Johnson Collection functions not only as neutral repository but also as authenticating site for their would-be history. “History” here is not made just through lived experience nor through the act of letterwriting (which can function both as primary “experience” or as a secondary record of experience) but, as Van Vechten divined, is “made” by this degreegranting facility that can confer also its institutional stamp of approval on the Van Vechten–Hughes correspondence. If Van Vechten fears that if he and Hughes blink they will be lost to the inexorable advance of time (send everything “Subito!” he cries), the Collection at Yale – represented as some sort of academic factory that “never sleeps” – becomes the ever-watchful mechanism by which they are made History.


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patronage and blood d ebt: the case of l angston hughes’s m u l at t o You’ve taken my blues and gone You sing ’em on Broadway And you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl, And you mixed ’em up with symphonies And you fixed ’em So they don’t sound like me. Yep, you done taken my blues and gone. You also took my spirituals and gone. You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones And all kinds of Swing Mikados And in everything but what’s about me – But someday somebody’ll Stand up and talk about me, And write about me – Black and beautiful – And sing about me, And put on plays about me! I reckon it’ll be Me myself! yes, it’ll be me. (“Note on Commercial Theater,” 1940)

If throughout their correspondence there are dozens of needy letters from Van Vechten – pleading, begging, needling, shaming Hughes into writing to him or sending him materials – Hughes also acknowledged debts to Van Vechten. Hughes’s relation to debts both fiscal and cultural is extremely important because, I argue in this section, his drama Mulatto seeks to restructure the racial balance sheet of debts owed and incurred. Hughes is being more than polite when he makes a point of paying back all debts acquired. He did occasionally borrow money from Van Vechten – like the $200 he borrowed when Mason dismissed him in 1930, the $25 borrowed for Christmas presents in 1935 while awaiting payment for Mulatto (134) – but he always reimbursed the lender for all sums outstanding, large and small (144). In a letter that touches Van Vechten “very deeply,” Hughes sends him money, reimbursing him in full (albeit fifteen years later), and writes: “certainly a mere check can’t begin to repay you for your kindness, but anyhow, here a check it is! The interest will have to be my gratitude for your friendship all these years, and your kindnesses not only to me, but to many artists and writers, and to the Negro people” (234).

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Hughes repays the longstanding financial debt, but generously (now that he can extend the credit) offers to remain provisionally indebted in another way, recognizing the cultural “note” that he and, he suggests, other African Americans, owe him. Van Vechten insists he had “kept no record of any transaction like this” (234) but it is obviously of much importance to Hughes. This exchange of debts is not a straight swap; rather, it allows Hughes to give a nod to the original terms of their relationship in which Van Vechten came to Hughes’s aid, without agreeing to those terms any more, and he is free to do so precisely when it is quite clear that Hughes no longer needs Van Vechten either financially or socially. Hughes’s thankyou note enables him graciously to express gratitude without remaining beholden in the same way any longer – or, at least, the being beholden is at the discretion of black people, he implies. The letter also invokes his status as a racial representative in a novel way in order to compliment his erstwhile patron, whose need to be fêted Hughes understood very well. Like Spingarn, Van Vechten admired Hughes for what he calls, in the letter answering Hughes’s, his “special aptitude for speaking for the ‘people,’” and praises him as “their official spokesman” (235). It is nowhere so appealing to Van Vechten that Hughes speaks for black people as when those people (so Hughes says) are expressing gratitude for his efforts. Throughout his career Hughes continued to adjust this notion of who was beholden to whom in his working relations with whites, especially in his work in the theater, where he did much of his collaborative work (with both blacks and whites). Though more well-known for his poetry, essays, and short fiction, Hughes wrote forty plays authored independently and twenty-three written in collaboration with other writers and musicians from the 1920s on.96 They were staged in diverse venues that extended from Broadway to off-Broadway to community theaters (such as Karamu House in Cleveland), to churches, union halls, libraries, and college campuses, and Hughes worked on theatrical projects with many different kinds of people and organizations, from the Federal Theater Project to John Reed Clubs (whose motto was “Art is a Class Weapon”) to independent producers. So committed was he to the dramatic world and so desirous of making sure there were theaters and companies to produce the kinds of plays he wanted (including his own plays) that Hughes even founded his own: the Harlem Suitcase Theater, the Los Angeles Negro Art Theater, and the Skyloft Players in Chicago. Theater was his “love and his torment,”97 as Leslie Catherine Sanders writes. In a letter to James Baldwin in 1953, Hughes opines that “[i]f you want to die, be disturbed, maladjusted, neurotic and psychotic, disappointed, and disjointed, just write plays!”98


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Yet Hughes kept writing plays and seeking the communion through theater. In Hughes’s case the power dynamics between patron and protégé connected with the processes of theater most directly in the relation between the director and the playwright, in which there is always negotiation of the hierarchy of roles – and for Hughes during this period, also of the rights of racial privilege. This is most evident in his play Mulatto (written in 1931, produced on Broadway in 1935), whose director and producer was Martin Jones, who had previously produced the sensational White Cargo: A Play of the Primitive.99 As with Hughes’s relations with other patrons who helped him gain publishing contracts, Jones offered theater connections and helped Hughes get his play on to The Great White Way. The play, opening on Broadway with the renowned black actor Rose McClendon, was a box-office hit, running for a record-breaking 373 performances, the second-longest Broadway production of a play by an African American (Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 A Raisin in the Sun subsequently surpassed it). Jones represented himself as in a position to assist Hughes as someone ostensibly more knowledgeable about commercial theater. Hughes, it was suggested, needed him, and Hughes’s dramatic agent, John Rumsey, concurred, advising him to “enlist the services of a more experienced” person to revise the script.100 Once Hughes agreed, however, Jones quickly claimed absolute authority, ignoring Hughes’s very specific suggestions for rewriting the play and instead taking it upon himself to rewrite large sections of Acts II and III to include a rape and lynching, without consulting the playwright. When Hughes protested over the changes, Jones simply overruled him, saying: “Rape is for sex. You have to have sex in a Broadway show.”101 Jones even staged preshow publicity stunts to stir up controversy (and generate higher sales) over the violent and sexed-up version, “employing an immigrant worker to dress up as a Southern colonel and march outside the theater with a sandwich sign reading ‘Mulatto at Vanderbilt Theater is a Lewd and Lascivious Lie and is Unfair to Southern Aristocracy’”102 – a strategy that served Jones’s interest for both Northerners and Southerners rushed to buy tickets to see what the hullabaloo was about. To add insult to injury, Jones forced Hughes to take legal action to obtain the royalties legitimately due him (Arthur Spingarn served as NAACP counsel for him) and, as mentioned at the outset of this chapter, Jones imposed segregated house seating on performances. Hughes boycotted the opening night of his own play in protest. Thus, though the play was a commercial success, the production history was a racial debacle and an example of the dangers inhering in such patronage arrangements across the color-line. As Jones’s actions should make

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clear, this was not simply an example of a tyrannical director. To the extent that his conduct was so highly racialized – that is, to the extent that he felt perfectly free to take financial advantage of Hughes, to disregard totally all the playwright’s suggestions and objections, to insert without consultation his own playscript revisions, to replace characters designated “mulatto” with white actors, to promote the play through race-baiting, and to segregate the theater – Jones was clearly taking white racial advantage. The salacious version gave the play notoriety (it was advertised as the “daring drama of sex life in the South”)103 but gutted much of its political potency and, as reviews suggested, even its racial relevance.104 Unlike with Spingarn and Van Vechten, Hughes lost control of his text to Jones, though, in similar fashion to his alliances with the other two, he gained from Jones’s connections and influence to the extent that (a version of ) his play did make it to Broadway (even if Hughes was cheated out of most of the money owing him). Jay Plum, in his article “Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones’s Production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto,” provides an excellent study of Jones’s manhandling of Hughes, so my goal here is less to rehearse than to reconsider it, as I have, in the context of patronage. A primary benefit of recognizing the affiliation between the type of working relationship between Jones and Hughes and the ones he shared with Spingarn and Van Vechten – that is, the family resemblance between white patrons and producers – is that it lets us see how the production history of Mulatto proved an unwitting example of the very conflicts the play was staging. In fact, as I suggested at the beginning of this chapter, in Mulatto Hughes makes patronage the subject of art rather than simply the condition for it. I am intentionally diverging from most readings of Mulatto, which focus on what Sybil Ray Ricks calls the so-called tragic mulatto’s “inferiority complex” and “personal”105 problem, arguing instead that the play’s focus on demands for familial recognition, and more generally on the national issue of dependants and white beneficiaries, is as a meditation on patronage itself. In fact, the play challenges the premise of patronage itself, which takes as a given white entitlement to riches that are then in turn “generously” dispensed to those less fortunate and deemed worthy out of goodwill or a sense of civic responsibility. In the play the son, Robert, rejects the dribs and drabs the father might reluctantly give him, resents even having to ask for what he thinks is – by birth, history, and moral obligation – already his. In a revision of the tragic mulatto convention, the “mixed race” son of the white father is a trope not for adolescent angst, psychological division, or opportunistic white


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identification, then, but for black “blood” membership in the American civic family; in that sense Hughes’s “cross of blood,” the “little yellow bastard boy,” is not about the attenuation of blackness. As will become clear in my reading of the final scene of the play, the mulatto is part of the national family but he is also reaffirmed as coextensive with the black community. The mulatto is metonymic of blackness: it is in the name of black people that Hughes presses for white paternal obligation and rightful bequests. The mulatto in this context is a symbol of community for both blacks and whites based on both genealogy and what Michael Cooke in The Achievement of Intimacy sees as a kind of social kinship.106 But if the mulatto figure stands as a sign of cultural consanguinity, it also functions in the play as a sign of transgression – what Hortense Spillers calls the “will to sin” (white men fathering illegitimate children with black women) – and therefore serves as evidentiary grounds for Hughes’s theatrical petition for civil rights. Thus, I argue, the play’s kinship narratives become “surrogate historical texts,”107 to use C. K. Doreski’s term, agitating for not simply domestic inheritance but also national reparation. “i’d lik e to kill all the white men in the world” In the play Robert (the restive prodigal son of the black mistress, Coralee Lewis, and white Colonel Norwood, a plantation owner in post-World War I Georgia) insists that his father acknowledge him. Norwood has no children by a deceased wife and no white heir. In Jones’s version the “overseer,” Talbot, rapes Norwood’s “mulatto” daughter, Sallie, and Robert strangles his father in his study (in Hughes’s original script he is innocent of murder). After being chased by townspeople, he commits suicide in his mother’s bedroom, only to be posthumously lynched by the mob (another invention of Jones). The play dramatizes a theme recurrent in many of Hughes’s other works, including “The Cross” (1925), which was reprinted on the playbill for Mulatto; the stories “Father and Son” (1924), which Hughes gave to Jones to read as background for the play, and “Mulatto” (1927); and the libretto based on Mulatto, “The Barrier” (1950). In these explorations across genres, illegitimate mulatto children lay claim as heir to their father’s estate: “The Colonel’s my father – the richest man in the country – and I’m not going to take a lot of stuff from nobody if I have to stay here, not from the old man either . . . I’m a Norwood – not a field hand nigger.”108 Accused frequently of not “knowing his place,” Robert refuses the euphemism for the racial hierarchy by appealing to a familial

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hierarchy that works both within and against it: “Nobody’s going to fix a place for me. I’m old man Norwood’s son. Nobody ever fixed a place for him” (Mulatto, 16). As Stuart Hall argues, cultural identity is always about positioning, and thus Robert attempts to reascribe his geographical place (he wants to sleep in the Big House rather than the shack) as well as his masculine placement (he wants to be a son rather than a “boy”). As Eva Saks notes, the national anxiety about miscegenation is more specifically an anxiety about establishing patriarchal lines of property, about the transmission of material goods within the white community, and the corresponding disinheritance of the black mother and any children born of an interracial union.109 Wanting retribution for that disinheritance is in no way akin to what Hughes critiques in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” (1926) as a “will to whiteness.” Though William (the older brother in the play) does accuse Robert of trying to be a “real white man” (Mulatto, 14), Robert’s is not a bid for whiteness; in fact, Hughes’s story, play, and libretto all end violently in some variation of white parricide. Anticipating not Norwood’s but Robert’s death in the play, however, Robert and the Colonel, in a variation of the dozens, the ritual dissing of an opponent’s mother, make clear that any challenge is fatal: rob e rt : But I’m not a nigger, Colonel Tom. I’m your son. norwood: You’re Cora’s boy. rob e rt : Women don’t have children by themselves. norwood: Nigger women don’t know the fathers. You’re a bastard. rob e rt : I’ve heard that before. I’ve heard it from Negroes and I’ve heard it from white folks. Now I hear it from you. You’re talking about my mother. n orwood: I’m talking about Cora, yes. Her children are bastards. rob e rt : And you’re their father. How come I look like you, if you’re not my father? norwood: Don’t shout at me boy. I can hear you. How come your skin is yellow and your elbows rusty? How come they threw you out of the post office today for talking to a white woman? How come you’re the crazy buck you are? rob e rt : They had no right to throw me out . . . Just as you had no right to raise that cane today when I was standing at the door of this house where you live, while I have to sleep in a shack down the road with the field hands. But my mother sleeps with you. norwood: You don’t like it? rob e rt : No I don’t like it. norwood: What can you do about it? rob e rt : I’d like to kill all the white men in the world. norwood: Niggers like you are hung from trees. (23)


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Robert is concerned not so much with being turned out of the house but with his father’s illegal squatting. He demands that Norwood accept his paternity, but by implication the white father’s potency is, from the outset, stolen, for Robert suggests that Norwood has in effect wrongfully assumed the position of head of the home, wrongfully assumed the right to bed his mother, and thus to have even wronged him by fathering him. Robert’s bids for inclusion are methodically, if illogically, dismissed: his father points to both ashy elbows, social discrimination, and his son’s questionable sanity as proof of racial difference. Significantly, the black father, in this scene and throughout the play, exists only in potentia because he has been absented, criminally displaced, by Norwood and by extension all white men. Significantly, the apotheosis of white power, Colonel Norwood, from the outset of the play is already threatened and anxious about the loss of his authority. Hughes sets Mulatto in the depressed post-World War I South. The Norwood plantation house that Hughes describes in director’s notes is “out-dated,” “shabby” and “rather depressing” (3). Norwood’s demonstrations of white authority and privilege depend on what amounted to the postwar indenture of the black servants who live and work on his plantation. His status is secured through their subservience and through the absenting of black men/fathers. Robert, sounding like the protagonists in the black revolutionary plays of the 1960s and 1970s, wants to “kill all the white men in the world.” In lieu of white posturing and “imposturing,” he proposes a racial alternative: while in school in the North he witnessed “real colored people who don’t have to take off their hats to white folks or let ’em go to bed with their sisters” (16). Robert explains to his older brother William that he might “stay here awhile and teach some o’ you darkies to think like men” (16). Since other African-American males in the Broadway version of the play are represented as either feral brutes or neutered uncles unable to prevent white male sexual avarice, Robert’s “real colored” man is both an historical oxymoron and an ontological impossibility – yet it is precisely and ambitiously what he claims to be. Hughes’s mulatto, then, is not tragic; he is anarchic, wishing not for assimilation but rather annihilation. In fact, in perverse actualization of the Oedipal triangle, Robert supplants his father after killing him, literally assuming his place in his mother’s bed. In his flight from the lynch mob he runs eventually to his mother’s room to hide under her bed, where she says she “saved a place for him.” Because the mob is at the door and there is no time, she then counsels him not to bother hiding underneath it but to “lay on ma bed” (34) – in effect, in his father’s stead. Hughes’s poem “The Cross” ends by asking, “I wonder

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where I’m gonna die/Being neither white or black,” a query that finds an answer in the ending of Mulatto when Cora insists that her son is “coming home” to die, is a soul come home. It is a phrase that holds both religious and racial connotations in the play, for Bert returns to both his mother’s “place” and his mother’s race. Though throughout the play he is coded variously as both “white” and “black,” the signal events of being laid to rest in his mother’s bed and then strung up and lynched render him unequivocally black.110 Not surprisingly, many whites took umbrage at Robert’s refusal to be grateful for what charity Norwood bothered to extend him; Norwood, precisely like the white patron, is represented as one of the few white men who would bother to give him anything. Sympathy was extended not to the victim of race and caste hate but to the white “benefactor” whose charge did not appreciate what(ever) he was offered. The influential Brooks Atkinson wrote in the New York Times that Mulatto “seems like a moral retribution drama about the misery of a white man plagued by the social misdemeanor of having illegitimate mulatto children. For Colonel Norwood is always in trouble with his neighbors and the members of his household [for his generosity to Negroes], and is finally killed by a boy so cocky and impudent that he seems more like an ungrateful son than a martyr to race prejudice.” Wilella Waldorf of the New York Evening Post observed that “when the Colonel, out of the kindness of his heart, sends his offspring ‘up No’th’ for an education, Robert becomes a student and a football hero and returns full of highfalutin’ ideas that he has rights on the plantation as Colonel Norwood’s son.” And the New York Sun’s Richard Lockridge complained (reproducing Norwood’s suggestion that any black man who questions his lot has lost his mind) that Hughes’s “boy” was a “noisy and obnoxious little brute . . . Mr. Hughes will forgive me, I hope, if I characterize him as no-count and ornery, as well as aggressively deficient in ordinary intelligence.”111 Such responses make clear how radical was Hughes’s attempt to restructure the terms by which white largesse is conceived and how fierce the indignation of whites who felt that the hand that fed had been bit. Perhaps the person who bites the hardest, however, is Cora. She seems the recipient of the most material gain from Norwood (gratefully living in the post-War equivalent of the Big House) and yet she, not he, is the one to settle their account. She has worked and served in his home as his common-law wife for decades, their four children are the collaborative product of their “labors,” quite literally. But in the last Act Cora accuses him of breaking his contract; and we suddenly see that the terms of their relationship as understood by Norwood (that he gave her more than most


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would have given) are not at all how she defines them (which is that it was she who had sacrificed and he who was obliged). Until that moment she has appeared more complicit with Norwood’s racist arrangements than is Bert (she does indeed “sleep with” Norwood, as her son resentfully states), but it is a working arrangement: “ma mama said, go up there and keep de house for Colonel Tom, sweep de floors and make de beds, and by and by, you won’t have to sweep de floors and make no beds” (32). What she expects in return is made fully clear only in the last scene.112 In a powerful extended monologue, she has the last important word in the play, delivering the last rites over the father (really a postmortem indictment) as she reminds Norwood that she “was already ready for you when you come to me in de night” (33), never denying him. She then says what is unsayable, at least punishable, elsewhere in the play: the four were “your chilluns and mine” and Robert especially was “always yo’ child.” But as he lies prostrate at her feet, his paternity is asserted even as his potency is questioned: she knows all about his infidelity with the black servant Livonia (30), but she is the one who bears him children, she insists, a point of pride she asserts also in relation to his deceased wife. In both cases her plenitude and fertility are emphasized against his inability to produce without her. She is in control of the facts of paternity as well as of the racial “condition” of her children: to Norwood’s claim that all her children are “bastards,” she counters that “[w]hite men, and colored womens, and little bastard chilluns – that’s de way of de South . . . mixtries, mixtries” (30–1). In short, she challenges the social “mysteries” in Georgia, the racial mixings going on that lead to those Southern-style immaculate conceptions in which, putatively, black mothers conceive without sex (23) – certainly the white father’s carnal participation is never mentioned. Cora is the gatekeeper, in the play arbitrating who comes in and out of the front and back door, and finally barring the door and then the stairway to the bedroom where Robert hides when the mob comes to lynch him. She is the one before whom all is narrated, performed, witnessed, judged, until it is her turn to judge and she accuses Norwood of having been among the living dead: “Colonel Tom! . . . Look! All your chilluns, runnin’ from you, and you layin’ on de floor there, dead! (Pointing) And when you come home, upstairs in my bed on top of my body, dead . . . You died here in this house and you’d been living dead a long time. You lived dead. And when I said to you this evenin’, ‘Get up! Why don’t you help me?’ You’d been dead a long time – a long time before you laid down on this floor here, with the breath choked out o’ you – and Bert standin’ over you living, living, living” (32–3). The allusion to his inability to “get (it) up” refers simultaneously to

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his failure as a lover, a father, and a moral citizen, for she insists that though once he had cried after setting his dogs after a black man trying to escape a lynch mob, now he has simply joined those who would have bloodlust for her son. It is Norwood’s spiritual death, his “living dead,” that precedes any act of the son’s that squarely lays culpability upon the white father. And in the racial quid pro quo of their working arrangement – in which she lies down with him with the expectation, she argues, that he will stand up as a father to his children – Norwood has failed to honor his part of the bargain. In this restructuring of cultural and social debt, therefore, Hughes suggests that “patronizing” the race is no longer sufficient. Not to recognize white indebtedness to those with whom one has worked, to be insensible to black civil rights, is to lose one’s own humanity, to be among the “living dead,” to use Cora’s terms: to make oneself a zombie. That Robert’s insistence on family rights is a trope for the race’s just case with the nation is made explicit in Norwood’s complaint that the “[d]arkies been getting mighty fresh in this part of the country since the war. The damn Germans should’ve . . .” (6) If blacks worked patriotically with whites to overthrow fascism abroad, Hughes makes clear, he is not simply requesting equal rights for future generations or asking for a seat at the national table for “tomorrow” – a request deferred. Instead, he is filing a retroactive claim against filial debt already owed to sons and daughters past, reparations not just due but overdue. working montages Cora’s complaint of Norwood’s breach of contract counters Van Vechten’s accusation of lack of good faith among African Americans. Both see blackwhite relations as a mutual project, but, as is clear, negotiating those crossracial allegiances is an ongoing and complex undertaking. Given Hughes’s difficulties with collaboration with not only whites but also occasionally blacks, it is striking that he continued – and with great enthusiasm – to seek out so many collaborative projects with people of all racial and religious backgrounds during his long career. It is worth listing a few of these projects, if only because, though he is known as the “people’s poet,” Hughes is often portrayed as a solitary figure; the truth is that he seems to have been one of the most collaborative. With the infamous exception of the play Mule Bone (co-written with Zora Neale Hurston and not produced until 1991 because of conflicts over finance and authorship), most people are unfamiliar with Hughes’s many


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joint projects: in 1936, for example, he co-wrote a play in three acts, When the Jack Hollers, with Arna Bontemps; in 1949 he and Bontemps co-edited the landmark anthology The Poetry of the Negro, 1746–1949, and then in 1958 co-edited The Book of Negro Folklore. In 1939 Hughes worked with the black actor, writer, and singer Clarence Muse on the film Way Down South, starring Bobby Breen and Clarence Muse. That same year he also cowrote a poem, “Red Clay Blues,” with Richard Wright, published in New Masses magazine. In 1940 he collaborated with the renowned composer and musician James P. Johnson on an innovative blues opera, De Organizer, and, working with Kurt Weill, he co-wrote many of the songs for the opera version of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Street Scene, which opened on Broadway in 1947. In 1950 he worked with the German-American Jan Meyerowitz to produce an opera, The Barrier, based on his play Mulatto and performed at Columbia University. This would be the precedent for many other endeavors in which Hughes wrote the text and Meyerowitz composed the music. In 1954, for instance, Hughes collaborated with Meyerowitz on an oratorio with music, Five Foolish Virgins, performed in New York; in 1955 he penned “The Glory Around His Head,” an Easter cantata with music by Meyerowitz that debuted at Carnegie Hall. Two years later he wrote the libretto for the opera Esther, with music by Meyerowitz; then in 1960 he wrote the opera Port Town, with Meyerowitz, which had its debut at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. While Meyerowitz was one of his most frequent collaborators, Hughes worked with many others as well: in 1950 he joined in the writing of a musical play, Just Around the Corner, with Abby Mann, Bernard Drew, and Joe Sherman. In 1955 he collaborated with Roy De Carava to create Sweet Flypaper of Life, a collection of photographs with fictional narratives written by Hughes, published by Simon and Schuster. His well-received musical play in one act, Jerico-Jim Crow, premiering in 1964 in New York with the Greenwich Players Inc., was produced in coordination with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and the NAACP. And with Milton Metzer as co-author, Hughes published first A Pictorial History of the Negro in America, and then in 1967 Black Magic: A Pictorial History of the Negro in American Entertainment was published posthumously.113 As Paul Rosenwald suggests, “Complex works of art speak not through individuals but ensembles.”114 Hughes worked with others and extended the possibilities of collaboration both out of necessity – especially early on in his career when he needed both the money and the literary and theater industry connections that whites provided him with – and, I would argue, out of

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the desire to realize his aesthetic, articulated as early as 1926 in “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in which he insists that the artist must be engaged with the community. The flexible and multiple roles Hughes adopted in his creative work relationships reflect a collaborative model that expanded that “community” to people of all religious persuasions and racial backgrounds; more than a programmatic system, it was more like a jazz ensemble or a montage in which various differentiated voices sounded. Hans Ostrom, in his analysis of Hughes’s “Montage of a Dream Deferred,” notes that “‘montage’ . . . suggests the composite nature of the poem but also hints at the more modern, cinematic connotation . . . one more in keeping with the spirit of jazz than the word ‘collage.’”115 And for Hughes jazz is a racial index, “one of the inherent expressions of Negro life in America.”116 Thus his extensive work in theater and in musical productions reflects not an aberration from his more well-known poetry, but rather could be considered the most obvious fulfillment of his aspirations for this aesthetic because theater is, as a genre, “the most social of arts,” to borrow Larry Neal’s expression. His theatrical efforts, I would argue, therefore, are in many ways most representative – if still the least examined – of Hughes’s craft. Theater enabled Hughes to conjoin the social imperatives of his art with a collaborative practice; in fact, the artistic collaborative was both a means to and an end of his political objectives. ∗∗∗ As I mentioned in my Introduction to this book, affective relations across the color-line have at times been appealed to as a goal (“let’s all get together”) rather than a means to civil rights work. In his collection of interviews, Race (1993), Studs Terkel, for instance, eschews the political in favor of the personal, suggesting that people just “listen to their proper hearts at moments of epiphany. And allow sympathy to work its magic.” Terkel goes so far as to propose the notion of “affirmative civility,” apparently in lieu of – or at least, he implies, more effective than – affirmative action.117 As Benjamin DeMott puts it, everyone argues that “right feeling” is the key, that “personal intention” is the primary or even sole variable in the calculus of racial success in this country.118 Yet as early as the decline of the Harlem Renaissance, most experiments in interracial intimacy were increasingly perceived as problematic or untenable. The patronage industry was perhaps the last sustained effort before the socialism of the 1930s and the initial civil rights protests of the early 1960s of a certain kind of collaboration across the color-line. From Faulkner’s Clytie-Rosa slap in Absalom, Absalom! (1936) to decapitation in Wright’s Native Son (1940), interracial bonds – at least the kind dependent on sentiment and “heart” – appear either strained or


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literally severed. But there is, oddly enough, hope in the fact that if we look afresh at Langston Hughes’s artistic and cooperative relations with Amy Spingarn and Carl Van Vechten, it becomes clear that their negotiation of artistic and racial needs, of their interests and satisfactions, occurred successfully not through Terkel’s epiphanies of magical sympathy. Rather, the mutual coordination of their respective racial desires occurred in and around their work, and it was the kind of intellectual, cultural, and artistic labors they shared in those working spaces that apparently made those relations “work.”

Epilogue: “co-workers in the kingdom of culture”

This, then, is the end of [the American Negro’s] striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”1

How do we negotiate between my history and yours? How would it be possible for us to recover our commonality, not the ambiguous imperial-humanist myth of those shared human (and indeed almost divine) attributes that are supposed to distinguish us absolutely from animals but, more significant, the imbrication of our various pasts and presents, the ineluctable relationships of shared and contested meanings, values, material resources? It is necessary to assert our dense particularities, our lived and imagined differences; but can we afford to leave untheorized the question of how our differences are intertwined and, indeed, hierarchically organized? Could we, in other words, afford to have entirely different histories, to see ourselves as living – and having lived – in entirely heterogeneous and discrete spaces? Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History2

. . . we’ll pretend the people cannot see you. That is, the citizens. And that you are free of your own history. And I am free of my history. We’ll pretend that we are both anonymous beauties smashing along through the city’s entrails. Lula to Clay in Amiri Baraka’s Dutchman3

anonymous beaut ies At the outset of this book, I suggest that we inquire into the centripetal as well as centrifugal forces of racial desire in literary representation, and respond to Kara Walker’s marvelous query about how certain images can contain “all the secrets of the re-enactment of history in the arena of Desire.”4 As a way of coming to some conclusions about how racial desire “works” 146


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in the texts I have been examining here, I would like to take note of the stakes in answering such questions. In Dutchman (1964), as we see in the epigraph, Lula tries to seduce Clay with a call to abandon history. It is an exhilarating and romantic suggestion, and represents one tempting response to the kind of question that Satya Mohanty asks in the second epigraph above: “How do we negotiate between my history and yours?” We can simply forget it altogether, Lula proposes. But Lula proves fatal to Clay; and the realm of the interpersonal, Baraka’s play suggests, is precisely not the arena for racial reform – not only because it can be the crucible for the most virulent forms of racism, but because it too often asks in the name of love to be “free” of history. “I don’t love you,” Baraka writes in a later (1969) poem to white people, not when love involves the tease of racial anonymity of the sort Lula dangles before her man. “& Love is an evil word,” he says elsewhere: “Turn it backwards/see, see what I mean?/an evol word. & besides/who understands it?”5 As Dutchman makes clear, Lula’s desire to choose “anonymous beauties” over “dense particularities” is not an effort to vault their respective racial pasts into a harmonious future but rather to skip out on historical accountability.6 This is when love turns “evol”: for though Lula may accuse black people of having murder in their hearts, in the end it is she who slaughters. This will to dominate is masked at times by nostalgia for an imagined historical past in which whites are blameless. Irving Howe argues, for instance, that behind the “terrible sense of estrangement” (269) between blacks and whites in the fiction of that master of insight into white consciousness, William Faulkner, is an impossible yearning for interracial childhoods past and invented. Howe acknowledges that Faulkner’s touching “vision of lost fraternity . . . involves an outrageous naivete”; citing Leslie Fiedler, he notes that the white man “dreams of his acceptance at the breast he has most utterly offended. It is a dream . . . sentimental . . . outrageous . . . desperate . . . How the Negroes themselves would look upon this violated dream they do not think – perhaps they do not dare – to ask.”7 We have only to recall Elizabeth Keckley’s refusal to keep the offending Mary Todd Lincoln close to her breast in Thirty Years A Slave, or of the refusal of Langston Hughes’s Robert to accept the violated dream in Mulatto – and then to recall whites’ hot and unequivocal response to both their challenges, nearly a hundred years apart – to remind us that such questions posed by whites about the dream deferred have almost always been intentionally rhetorical.

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Race, Work, and Desire the bl ack shad ow of history

Baraka suggests that we take history out of the personal only at risk of life and limb; Faulkner, on the other hand, suggests that the personal is no place for the historical. And the reason why, at least as Joanna Burden’s father in Light in August sees it, is that history is the white man’s burden. Though Joanna’s grandfather and brother are murdered by Colonel Sartoris for their pro-black views, her father argues that they are killed: “not by one white man but by the curse which God put on a whole race before your grandfather or your brother or me or you were even thought of. A race doomed and cursed to be forever and ever a part of the white race’s doom and curse for its sins . . . The curse of every white child that ever was born and that ever will be born. None can escape it.” And I said, “Not even me?” And he said, “Not even you. Least of all you.” I had seen and known negroes since I could remember. I just looked at them as I did at rain, or furniture, or food or sleep. But after that I seemed to see them for the first time not as people, but as a thing, a shadow in which we all loved, we lived, all white people, all other people. I thought of all the children coming forever and ever into the world, white, with the black shadow already falling upon them before they drew breath. And I seemed to see the black shadow in the shape of a cross. And it seemed like the white babies were struggling, even before they drew breath, to escape from the shadow that was not only upon them but beneath them too.8

The shadow on the cross here does not in fact suggest black sacrifice, black martyrdom; for the Burdens the shadow means that the white man’s sins will never be forgiven. This realization does not lead to a reflection on the complexities of historical debt and inheritance but instead to the defensive cul-de-sac of white victimage. History becomes an oppressive force and blacks the shadowy instruments of oppression, not a people but a “thing” (239). Father assumes that whites must engage in racial uplift – their own – but it is a Sisyphean task made more difficult because of the “curse of the black race”: You must struggle, rise. But in order to rise, you must raise the shadow with you. But you can never lift it to your level . . . But escape it you cannot. The curse of the black race is God’s curse. But the curse of the white race is the black man who will forever be God’s chosen own because He once cursed Him. (240)

Mr. Burden would forget history for whitefolks’ sake: it is the suffocation of white babies born under the weight of this debt that he mourns, not the millions born under the suffocation of slavery.


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co-workers in the kingd o m of culture In effect, Burden’s shadow, the “shadow in which we all loved, we lived, all white people, all other [nonblack] people” inverts, with obscene arrogance, W. E. B. Du Bois’s veil – “the shades of the prison-house closed around us.”9 The “us” and “we” in each respective vision seem very far apart indeed, and the possibility of finding a common humanity appears unlikely given this language of mutual oppression. Du Bois’s veil comes down upon him in his youth; it is a social invention and injustice that he believes history will prove wrong. Burden’s shadow, on the other hand, seems to refer to history itself, which in his vision is a postlapsarian condition into which one is born, the birthmark of original sin. Du Bois’s veil must be lifted in order to understand history, whereas Burden’s shadow can be lifted only by bringing the curtain down on history. Only then, he suggests, when there is release from the historical memory of white sinning, can “we” (for Burden, that means “white people”) return to the Garden. As I suggested in the Introduction, what Benjamin DeMott calls the “friendship orthodoxy”10 often lays blame at the foot of history itself in order to purge individuals of responsibility (even of the responsibility to remember). In short, the orthodoxy holds that people would work together just fine if they would just will themselves to forgetfulness for the sake of future relations. Such arguments run the risk of becoming complicit with the most reactionary postures of white victimage. Analyzing Roland Barthes, for instance, Chéla Sandoval points out: The privation of History is “felicitous,” a happy but ignorant figure. Inoculating consciousness, procuring a little tantalizing difference – but not too much – the privation of History protects and tames the colonizer’s imagination as viewer. But if this pose for consciousness happily turns its practitioners away from the very production of contemporary and past histories, it also distances the citizen/subject from recognizing its ability to intervene in that which ever rages: the possibility of shaping one’s own destiny.11

Of all the ways not to be “impaled” on History, to use James Baldwin’s vivid term, making a “plea,” as he puts it, is definitely not the answer. A typical evasion, according to Baldwin, usually runs something like this: “Do not blame me. I was not there. I did not do it. My history has nothing to do with Europe and the slave trade. Anyway, it was your chiefs who sold you to me. I was not present in the middle passage.”12 A very different response – and one that we see in nearly all the texts studied in Race, Work, and Desire – is, borrowing Sandoval’s language, to intervene in the raging

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desire to shape destiny through the production of “contemporary and past histories.” Here precisely is the intersection of race and desire. And here precisely we see such interventions, whether we applaud their claims or not, in Keckley’s efforts to write herself into history and in King’s efforts to write the history she wants; we see it in Chopin’s erasure of history altogether and in Howells’s and Harper’s taking on the “imperative duties” of history; we see it in Spingarn’s conversions of history, in Van Vechten’s yearning to make history, and in Hughes’s desire to change history. For all these writers and artists, racial histories matter; and they matter, furthermore, in part because, as Mohanty notes, black and white histories are imbricated. They are so many-layered and entwined, in fact, that though these texts commit desire to history, none can indulge in the traditional “search for ‘origins,’” nor does any suggest “a voiceless obstinacy toward a millenial ending.”13 Even Van Vechten, who has perhaps the most traditional historical sense (reflected in his establishment of black and white histories in libraries for future generations), reveals a belief in the pliability of history and the compliancy of time. As Giorgio Agamben puts it, “Every concept of history is invariably accompanied by a certain experience of time which is implicit in it, conditions it, and thereby has to be elucidated. Similarly, every culture is first and foremost a particular experience of time . . . the original task of a genuine revolution, therefore, is never merely to ‘change the world,’ but also – and above all – to ‘change time.’”14 Van Vechten’s coaxing and prodding of Hughes to hurry letters to him, to make time to mail correspondence, are not merely an old man’s griping, then, but a belief in the ability to change the timetables of history and of culture. Their representations of working across the color-line, in short, make claims on history; they all also both comment on and perform the cultural labor that Du Bois, in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” called for when he insisted on the need for “co-worker[s] in the kingdom of culture” (615). If, as George Hutchinson argues, “our aim is human community, then we will not achieve it by finding common denominators of human essence but by acts of making – especially acts of aesthetic making.”15 As I have suggested, their aesthetic “work,” in the Du Boisian sense, does not so much represent shoulder-to-shoulder bonhomie above (or out of step with) time and history. In fact, Du Bois does not suggest that we forget History, rather that we forge new histories, collaborate in constituting representations of an interracial intimacy that interpret rather than simply try to waive raciality. This notion of workers and of the workplace, then, need not be instrumentalist – not about proletarian revolutions nor nationalist narratives of progression and


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uplift – nor is the reference to culture either Arnoldian or, conversely, technocratic in nature. Rather, work and culture, so often represented at high and low odds, are both meant in the pragmatist sense as an “effect of action” rather than an “antecedent essence,”16 available to more than one social or aesthetic program on the one hand and yet, on the other hand, resistant to an idealistic universalism dismissive of racial or religious particulars. I have suggested that the deployment of both racialized and deracialized discourses is potentially complementary if historically agonistic.17 Similarly, if Race, Work, and Desire indicts the way affective relations have been represented as transcendent at various moments in history, I realize that to condemn this strategy altogether would be simply to advance another kind of apocalyptic jeremiad, merely to use, for example, Kara Walker’s provocative profile of the beheaded mistress as a finger-wagging warning of the pitfalls of interracial intimacy. That, too, would be the end of History, in that it would deny the potential of images that engage paradigms of the interpersonal their possible time and place – either in history or in the future.

Notes

i n t rodu c tio n : wo rkin g rel atio n s a n d r aci a l d e s i re 1. Transcribed from a facsimile of Kara Walker’s handwritten notes in the exhibition catalogue, Kara Walker (Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1997), 6. 2. See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995) and bell hooks’s Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). 3. Both the Topsy-Turvy doll and the Kara Walker image remind one of Claudia in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), who also “manipulates” dolls, in this case destructively tearing off the head of the white doll to discover what makes it so desirable. 4. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth-Century Fiction and the Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act, in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John Callahan (New York: The Modern Library, 1995), 85. 5. George Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on AfroAmerican Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1987 (1972); Mia Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African American Ideas about White People, 1830–1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 6. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Lott suggests that minstrelsy enables perhaps “the best way to understand the affective life of race,” for it functioned as “an index of popular white racial feeling in the United States” (4, 5). See also Michael North, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 77. 7. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), x. 8. Front page, New York Times (Sunday, June 11, 2000). This series ran for approximately two months, from May through July 16, almost every Sunday. The fifteen Times pieces were collected in How Race Is Lived in America: Pulling Together, Pulling Apart, eds. Correspondents of the New York Times, Introduction by Joseph Lelyveld (New York: Times Books, 2002). 152

Notes to pages 7–14

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9. Booker T. Washington, “The Atlanta Exposition Speech” (1895), reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 515. 10. Faulkner’s Jason Compson in The Sound and the Fury, for instance, argues that racial interdependency necessitates not white cooperation with blacks but white emancipation from blacks: “In 1865, Abe Lincoln freed the niggers from the Compsons. In 1933, Jason Compson freed the Compsons from the niggers.” 11. Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). Even as the slave was incorporated into the plantation “family,” by virtue of a slave’s “natal alienation” he or she was a “socially dead person” (5). 12. George Washington Cable, The Silent South and The Freedman’s Case in Equity and the Convict Lease System, ed. Arlin Turner (New York: Doubleday, 1958), 55–6. Originally published in 1889. 13. For a fuller discussion of the history of this debate, see C. Vann Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 14. Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 95. 15. For other discussions of black-white bonding in literature, see Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999) and Sollors, ed., Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776–1863 (New York: New York University Press, 1972); Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Doubleday, 1965); Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (New York: Stein and Day, 1966); Elisabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of Carolina Press, 1988); Minrose C. Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). 16. Benjamin DeMott, The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4, 23. 17. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967), 231. 18. James Baldwin, “A Rap on Race” (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1971). Quoted in Byron Kim, “An Interview with Glen Ligon,” in Glen Ligon Un/Becoming, ed. Judith Tannenbaum (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 54. 19. James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 410. Originally published in Ebony magazine (August 1965). 20. Albert Memmi, Preface, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), vii.

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21. Fanon terms this phenomenon the “psychoexistential complex” (Black Skin, White Masks, 12). 22. Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 89. 23. Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 105. 24. Nancy Bentley, The Ethnography of Manners: Hawthorne, James, Wharton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 5. 25. Mary Poovey, Uneven Developments: The Ideological Work of Gender in MidVictorian Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 124. 26. Claudia Tate, Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 9. 27. Lindon Barrett, “Handwriting, Legibility and the White Body in Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom,” in American Literature 69 (June 1997), 315–36. 28. Deborah McDowell, for instance, places Harper against Alice Walker, arguing for the development of an “ordinary and inner-directed” black woman character rather than Harper’s “static, disembodied, larger-than-life characters.” See Deborah McDowell, “The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Woman Novelists,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 92, 95. 29. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolitionism, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 6. 30. Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 130. 31. See, for example, Priscilla Wald in Constituting America: Cultural Anxiety and Narrative Form (1995); Robyn Wiegman in American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (1995); Sánchez-Eppler in Touching Liberty. 32. See Trudier Harris, Exorcising Blackness: Historical and Literary Lynching and Burning Rituals (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984). 33. See, for instance, SallyAnn H. Ferguson’s “Charles Chesnutt’s ‘Future American,’” in MELUS 15 (1988), 95–107, which discusses Chesnutt’s interest in “amalgamation” as a way to solve the so-called Race Problem. White ethnic immigrants as well suggested this as a solution at times. A reviewer in The Living Age (1914) wrote that Israel Zangwill’s Christian-Jewish intermarriage plot in his 1909 play The Melting Pot “was calculated to do for the Jewish race what Uncle Tom’s Cabin did for the colored race.” Quoted in The Columbia Literary History of the United States, ed. Emory Elliot, et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 584. 34. Quoted in Martha Banta, Introduction, An Imperative Duty, in An Imperative Duty and The Shadow of A Dream (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), xii. 35. This book only briefly revisits two of the already most critically examined contexts for interracial intimacy – marriage and miscegenation. Thus I do not discuss two early twentieth-century African-American writers related less


36.

37.

38. 39. 40.

41. 42. 43.

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closely to this project because their emphasis is not so much on working relations as on the multiracial body that sexual relations produced. Toomer advocated the idea that the “future American” would be multiply racial; Chesnutt specifically advanced the idea that “amalgamation” would prove the social and political solution to race problems. For a discussion of the overlap in their philosophies, see Ferguson, “Charles Chesnutt’s ‘Future American,’” 95–107. See also George Hutchinson, “Jean Toomer and American Racial Discourse,” in Texas Studies in Literature and Language 35 (1993), 226–50. I am not here disagreeing with Ann duCille, who argues in The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) that Harper’s “literary passionlessness negated a negative,” giving “virtue to the historically virtueless” even as it “held up to scorn the same hegemonic values it, on some level, inscribed” (32). But I would also like to suggest that a cautious African-American erotics of sorts in Iola Leroy, grafted to the language of medical discourse and as a form of political discourse, does emerge. I do not discuss W. E. B. Du Bois’s novel Dark Princess, and others like it in which sex and politics merge, for this same reason: courtship and marriage plots are less the focus here than the social contracts within working relations. As Sedgwick elaborates, homosocial desire constitutes the range of same-sex affective expression that functions as a “social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship.” See Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 2. Morrison, Playing in the Dark, x. René Girard, Deceit, Desire and the Novel: Self and Other in Literary Structure, trans. Yvonne Freccero (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 107, 111. In other words, these timeframes overlap: black domestic service for whites continues in much the same form through the 1950s; science and medicine had fixated on the black female body well before the turn of the century; and white patronage of African Americans operated before the Harlem Renaissance, though I would argue in these chapters that domestic service holds particular significance and influence as a model after the Civil War, as does medicine in the 1890s, and patronage in the 1920s. See Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), xxvi. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 8, 13. W. D. Howells, An Imperative Duty, in An Imperative Duty and The Shadow of A Dream, ed. with Introduction by Martha Banta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 101. Further references will be to this edition. Joanne Dobson, “Reclaiming Sentimental Literature,” in American Literature 69 (June 1997), 266.

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44. See Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993); George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995); North, The Dialect of Modernism. 45. Ralph Ellison, Introduction, The Invisible Man (New York: Vintage, 1980), xv. 46. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989), 11. 47. Vincent Crapanzano, Waiting: The Whites of South Africa (New York: Random House, 1985), 23. 48. Ralph Ellison similarly suggests realism’s dependence on literary convention, its inability to capture transparently the “real.” As his Invisible Man puts it in his memorial speech for Brother Tod Clifton, all he can do is “repeat what is known” (Ellison, Invisible Man, 459) but even stating “just the facts” nonetheless turns the police killing into dime-store entertainment: “The blood ran like blood in a comic-book killing, on a comic-book street in a comic-book town on a comic-book day in a comic-book world” (458). 49. Ellison, “Mask of Humanity,” 83. 50. Harry J. Elam, Jr., Taking It To The Streets: The Social Protest Theater of Luis Valdez and Amiri Baraka (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 12–13. 51. Ellison “Mask of Humanity,” 84. 52. In one of the few critical mentions of the doll, Shirley Samuels offers a slightly different interpretation, finding in the doll the “double gesture of at once presenting and refusing the reversibility of identity . . . when the doll is turned upside down, we discover that the slave woman and the white woman are the same.” See Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 113, 128. I agree that in the early and mid-nineteenth century the continuity of identity is certainly at stake in the doll (though it is not clear whether Samuels is distinguishing the stakes for blacks or whites), but I would argue that by the later nineteenth century to the present, the doll’s cultural valence shifts and becomes less a question of “presenting” or “refusing” a racially transcendent identity, and more a tug of war of interracial desire – desire that in this case presupposes an irreducibly racial other. Further, my interest is on the doll’s joint hips, which represent an impossibly balanced moment between those forces that seem to simultaneously rend and bond white and black. The Topsy-Turvy doll’s coraciality is distinct from contemporary dolls marketed as “ethnically correct,” though clearly, as Ann duCille cogently argues in Skin Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), racial difference is manufactured in these dolls as well. 53. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Harper & Row, 1987). William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1972), 85. Faulkner, for instance, may relinquish the idea of forced servitude but not the ideal of a “mammy,” “who served with no calculation of recompense.” For him this was the black


54.

55.

56. 57. 58. 59.

60.

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woman who helped raise him, Caroline Barr, to whom he dedicated Go Down, Moses (1940). Judith Bryant Wittenberg in “Race in Light in August: Wordsymbols and Obverse Reflections,” in The Cambridge Companion to William Faulkner, ed. Philip M. Weinstein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), argues that the decapitation suggests an attempt to “remove the source of such categorizing intellection from the body with which he has shared pleasures”; and that Burden’s “‘racism’ is more benign . . . but the couple’s intimacy makes it more problematic” (156). I would say it proves the most dangerous, and because of – not but for – the intimacy. The popular art-form, however, is also important because it is tied to, as Walker describes it in unedited project notes, the “starting ground, the idea of the Historical Romance. Realizing that in most cases the novel carries the same structure from title to title . . . the characters are primarily white, hetrosexuals [sic] and the settings are accurate enough to support the essential(ist) passion and pioneering spirit and/or genteel chivalry or stubborn determination of the hero and heroine . . . has caused me to question the role of these constructs as they affect (America’s) social sensibilities on a fairly pedestrian level . . . which in the long run is the whole history and present and everything else. (What I mean is that the Family Portrait, the silouette [sic], and the historical romance/trash novel all are accessible means of communicating our values to a middle-class enviornment [sic] . . .) often viewed as mundane entertainments . . .” (41). Robin Updike, “Shades of Meaning,” in Seattle Times “Scene” Review (September 12, 1997). Arnold Rampersad, The Life of Langston Hughes: I, Too, Sing America, Vol. I: 1902–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 315. From Countee Cullen’s “Tableaux” (1925), reprinted in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1305–6. “Tableaux” is not Cullen’s last word on the subject, though his other later poems and essays do not in my opinion lead to any qualification of my point that representing love as the “sword,” in his words, of social change is something challenged in the texts examined here. Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in Shadow and Act, 111. 1 dre ssi n g d ow n the f ir s t l a d y: e l i z a be t h k e ck l ey ’s b e h i n d t h e s c e n e s , o r t h i rt y y e a r s a s l av e a n d f o u r years in the white house

1. Elizabeth Keckley, Behind The Scenes, Or Thirty Years A Slave And Four Years In The White House (1868). Reprinted with an introduction by James Olney (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 254, 210. Further references will be to this edition. 2. Olney, Introduction, Behind The Scenes, xxx. 3. See Frances Smith Foster, Written by Herself: Literary Production of African American Women, 1746–1892 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993).

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4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

Notes to pages 29–31 See William Andrews, “The Changing Moral Discourse of NineteenthCentury African American Women’s Autobiography: Harriet Jacobs and Elizabeth Keckley” (1991), in De/Colonizing the Subject: The Politics of Gender in Women’s Autobiography, eds. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 225–41. See also William Andrews, “Reunion in the Postbellum Slave Narrative: Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley,” in Black American Literature Forum 23:1 (Spring 1989), 5–16. Andrews persuasively explains Keckley’s account of her invited visit to Anne Burwell Garland in 1866 in which she was “carried to the house in triumph” (Keckley 25) as an effort to renew “the slave narrative as a genre that could still be relevant to the new post-slavery era” (15). My aim here is to push this insight even further, to suggest that one way in which Keckley is positioning her narrative’s relevance in the postslavery era is by positioning herself and her writing in the postslavery market system. Anonymous, Behind the Seams; By a Nigger Woman Who Took in Work From Mrs. Lincoln and Mrs. Davis (New York: National News Co., 1868), price ten cents. Quoted in Frances Smith Foster, Written By Herself, 128. Jennifer Fleischner, Mastering Slavery: Memory, Family and Identity in Women’s Slave Narratives (New York: New York University Press, 1996), 95. Fleischner’s Mrs. Lincoln and Elizabeth Keckly: The Remarkable Story of the Friendship Between a First Lady and a Former Slave (New York: Broadway Books, 2003) was released after my book went to press and so is unfortunately unavailable for review here. On distinctions between Keckley’s notion of self-reliance as cautious embrace of white social norms versus Emerson’s anticonformist definition of selfreliance, see Darryl Pinckney, “Promissory Notes,” in New York Review of Books (April 6, 1995), 41–6. See Ishbel Ross, The President’s Wife: Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1973) and Ruth Painter Randall, Mary Lincoln: Biography of a Marriage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953). Keckley in part redefines her position as domestic laborer by frequently contracting outside the home in which she is working, and by elevating her work as a “mantua-maker” to a bona fide profession. Letter to The New York Citizen (April 25, 1868). Quoted in John E. Washington’s “‘Behind The Scenes’: The Story of Mrs. Keckley’s Book,” in They Knew Lincoln (New York: Dutton, 1942), 4. There are, of course, a few precedents to Keckley’s narrative, most notably Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859). Potter, like Keckley, was very independent and outspoken, but she does not name names and she does not profess loyalty to – and thus expose herself to the same accusations of betrayal of – any one family. Those differences, as well as the volatility of the postwar years, may have accounted for the more hostile reaction to Keckley’s work. The debate over the extent to which Keckley’s account was ghostwritten or written in conjunction with her editors seems moot, here, except to note that


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it engages realist demands for authenticity not necessarily invoked in other genres. More noteworthy is the fact that Keckley self-consciously distinguishes herself from, and yet simultaneously defines, a relatively new literary form. The form does not develop into a tradition, however, because, as I conclude in this chapter, the eclipse of Keckley’s career virtually extinguished the possibility of others finding publishers, let alone an audience, for such narratives. Later works seem to take the lesson of her demise. The “barber-poet” James M. Whitfield (1822–71), though passionate about the outrages of racial injustice, never writes of his work or patrons; Frances Harper (1825–1911) worked in domestic service before writing and teaching, but none of her extant poetry, magazine articles, or novels broach the subject of work relations in the same manner; the political writer Maria W. Stewart (1803–79) was a servant girl in a minister’s home, but her collection of essays and memoir, Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1879), mentions working for the clergyman’s family only in passing. Mrs. N. F. Mossell’s The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894), which argues for the virtues of fiscal and emotional autonomy for black women, makes clear in its catalogue of their achievements in literature, journalism, politics, higher education, and medicine, that African-American women were increasingly no longer content to work only as domestics. Charles Chesnutt’s “Sis Becky’s Pickaninny,” in The Conjure Woman (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), provides a fascinating example of Keckley’s legacy in Uncle Julius’s subtle management of interracial intimacy between employer and employee. I give this story extended treatment in “Uncle Julius, Uncle Remus, and the Avuncular Erotics of American Dialect Fiction,” American Studies Association paper (Pittsburgh, 1995). 11. Judith Rollins, Between Women: Domestics and Their Employers (Temple University Press, 1986), 59. 12. See Booker T. Washington, Up From Slavery: An Autobiography (New York: Carol Publishing, 1989). See especially the reprinted “Atlanta Exposition” speech, 217–33. For a good discussion of the nursing profession, one of the earliest trades open to black women, see Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation in the Nursing Profession, 1890–1950 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989). For intraracial class relations involving domestics, see June Jordan, “Report from the Bahamas,” in ON-CALL (Boston: South End Press, 1985). 13. Foster argues that Redpath “indirectly destroyed [Keckley’s] business and irreparably harmed her reputation” by publishing Behind The Scenes in its final form, though she admits that his impeccable credentials suggest that other factors, which I explore in this chapter, were perhaps more at play in the unexpected, hostile reception of the text. Redpath was “a political activist, a war correspondent, and an advisor to Lincoln on issues such as the independence of Haiti. Redpath was also an abolitionist and democrat who had edited and published works by Louisa May Alcott, Wendell Phillips, Balzac, Swift, and High in his ‘Books for the Times’ and ‘Books for the Campfire’ series. Perhaps more

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14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

Notes to pages 32–44 important to Keckley, Redpath had published William Wells Brown’s Clotelle and The Black Man: His Antecedents and His Genius, a biography of Toussaint L’Ouverture, and his own Public Life and Autobiography of John Brown. His Palm and Pine had published poems by Frances Harper and the Lyceum Bureau, which he was in the process of establishing during the year that Keckley’s book was being published, represented Emerson, Greeley, Beecher, Sumner, and Wendell Phillips” (Foster, Written By Herself, 128). See Jean H. Baker, Mary Todd Lincoln: A Biography (New York: Norton, 1989), 230. Herman Melville, “Benito Cereno,” in Herman Melville: Selected Tales and Poems, ed. Richard Chase (New York: Holt, 1950), 16. Quoted in Ross, The President’s Wife, 167. Jennifer Fleischner focuses on Keckley’s collection of articles as mementos of mourning, suggesting that for Keckley “articles are the children of memory” and their collection “fill[s] familial gaps left through the years.” See Mastering Slavery, 122. Andrews distinguishes Keckley’s “materialist and pragmatic mode of self-valuation” and valuation of things from Harriet Jacobs’s idealist moral standard (“The Changing Moral Discourse,” 237). My argument here seeks to extend and complicate more than rebut either argument, for clearly Keckley’s “materialism” includes but is also more than a commitment to the values of the marketplace or hoarding against a lifetime of losses – though I find especially convincing Fleischner’s explanation of the interpolation of private letters and documents into Behind The Scenes as a “form of symbolic transference over separations” earlier in her life. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Vintage, 1976), 555, 557. Sharon Dean, Introduction, A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life by Eliza Potter (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), xxiv. In a brief remark about Behind The Scenes, Lindon Barrett suggests that Keckley’s presentation of “images of white bodies at length . . . broached through the synecdoche of dress and fashion, define her text much more fully than images of black bodies.” See Lindon Barrett “Handwriting, Legibility and the White Body in Running A Thousand Miles for Freedom,” in American Literature 69 (June 1997), 319. My argument aims to elaborate just why and how her text cloaked black bodies in white dress. Tony Bennett, “The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility,” in Critical Inquiry 21 (Summer 1995), 862. See Llewellyn Negrin’s discussion of Theodor Adorno’s analysis of Valéry in “On the Museums’ Ruins: A Critical Appraisal,” in Theory, Culture, and Society 10 (February 1993), 97–125. Michael Fried, “Realism, Writing, and Disfiguration in Thomas Eakins’s ‘The Gross Clinic,’” in Representations 9 (Winter 1995), 33–104, especially “Postscript: Stephen Crane’s Upturned Faces,” 94. We see a fascinating twist on this theme of upturned faces in the burned countenance of the black man, Henry Johnson, in Crane’s “The Monster”; I discuss this at more length in


24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

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“Fear and Loathing in the Classroom; Or, Who’s Afraid of Stephen Crane’s ‘The Monster’?,” in Teaching the New Canon: Students, Teachers, and Texts in the Multicultural Classroom, eds. Bruce Goebel and James C. Hall (Urbana: National Council of Teachers of English, 1995), 211–23. I am borrowing the meaning of Susan Gubar’s words here, for in her discussion of the final scene between Seldon and Lily in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, she, like Fried, sees a dead body written over, illustrating “the terrors not of the word made flesh but of the flesh made word.” See Susan Gubar, “The ‘Blank’ Page and Female Creativity,” Writing and Sexual Difference, ed. Elizabeth Abel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 82. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting,” in Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), 67. Carolyn Sorisio offers another interpretation of the scenes of mourning (and of commodity culture) in relation to Keckley’s negotiation of the codes of genteel conduct, in “Unmasking the Genteel Performer: Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind The Scenes and the Politics of Public Wrath,” in African American Review 34 (2000), 19–38. See also Philip Fisher, Making and Effacing Art: Modern American Art in a Culture of Museums (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Bennett is making this claim apropos of Philip Fisher’s revision of Benjamin’s philosophy of collecting. See Bennett, “The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility.” Harold H. Wyman and William M. Wiecek point out that 1863–7 saw a seachange in judicial review, especially in the area of states’ rights to intervene in local city or private affairs as well as the legal and entrepreneurial professions. See Harold H. Wyman and William M. Wiecek, Equal Justice Under Law: Constitutional Development, 1834–1875 (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 339. Black writers did not begin to critique interracial relations between women, in particular, until the 1950s. After the publication of James Paule Marshall’s Brown Girl, Brownstones (1959) came James Baldwin’s Another Country (1963), Allison Mill’s San Francisco (1974), Ann Allen Shockley’s Loving Her (1974), Al Young’s Who Is Angelina? (1975), Alice Walker’s Meridian (1976), Barbara Chase-Riboud’s Black Sally Hemings (1979), Alice Childress’s A Short Walk (1979) and Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby (1981). For brief discussions of these novels, see Elizabeth Schultz, “Out of the Woods and into the World: A Study of Interracial Friendships between Women in American Novels,” in Conjuring: Black Women, Fiction, and Literary Tradition, eds. Marjorie Pryse and Hortense J. Spillers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1985), 67–85. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, 344. Grace King, Monsieur Motte (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1969), 19. Further references will be to this edition. It originally appeared as “Monsieur Motte,” in New Princeton Review 1 (January, 1886), 91–133, and was later published in book form as Monsieur Motte (New York, 1888) with three sequels, On the Plantation, The Drama of An Evening, and Marriage of Marie Modeste.

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30. I obviously refer to – even as I mean to suggest complication of – Carroll Smith-Rosenberg’s characterization of same-sex intimacy between women in the nineteenth century in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). My emphasis here differs from two other extensive treatments of this novel, Anna Shannon Elfenbein’s Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989) and Helen Taylor’s Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989). Both focus on Marcélite’s limited acquisition of power, suggesting that she is “neither tragic nor rendered marginal, but rewarded white kinship” (Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region, 61) by, among other things, helping Marie keep up the “appearance required . . . to be a lady” (Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 98). Both recognize the interdependency of black and white women in the novel, though I come to different conclusions about the erotic dimension and cultural relevance of the relationship between Marie and Marcélite. For other historical discussions of the intense love-hate relationships between black women domestics and their white antebellum mistresses and postwar employers, see also Trudier Harris, From Mammies to Militants: Domestics in Black American Literature (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1985); Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within The Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988); Minrose C. Gwin, Black and White Women of the Old South: The Peculiar Sisterhood in American Literature (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985). 31. Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region, 48. I use Taylor’s term here with qualification, since she suggests that a primary difference between the two involves King’s representation of more powerful women, especially quadroon women, though it strikes me that Marcélite’s sexualized role for white women simply complicates the representation of black women as the object of white male desire. 32. Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, September 17, 1885, in the Grace King Papers, Louisiana and Lower Mississippi Valley Collection, Hill Memorial Library, Louisiana State University. 33. Letter from Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, October 4, 1885, in Grace King Papers. 34. Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 97. 35. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” in Raritan 8 (1988), 53–4. On national/state investment in miscegenation and homosexuality regulation, see also Mark Strasser, “Family Definitions and the Constitution: On the Antimiscegenation Analogy,” in Suffolk University Law Review 25 (Winter 1991), 981–1034. 36. I am thinking particularly of Keckley’s work, as well as Eliza Potter’s A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (1859), and Kate Chopin’s “La Belle Zora¨ıde” (1894) and “Athéna¨ıse” (1896).


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37. Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On The Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993). Keckley, and in Chopin’s fiction Manna-loulou, Sylvie, and Chopin’s other attendants of color similarly serve this function. 38. Butler, ibid., 167. 39. Philip Brian Harper, “Private Affairs: Race, Sex, Property and Persons,” in GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies 1 (1994), 124. 40. Letter from Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, October 4, 1885. Quoted in Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 51. 41. Grace King to Charles Dudley Warner, September 17, 1885. Quoted in Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region, 51. Anne Goodwyn Jones argues that the servant, by the novel’s end, illustrates “the good ‘heart’ – the androgynous values that King would like so much to see prevail,” placing Marcélite’s sacrificial love above race or class issues, in Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 117. Taylor, in attempting to understand the “significant absences and omissions” in “the author’s failure to explain or justify crucial elements in Marcélite’s behavior,” concludes more convincingly that Marcélite has “suppressed and then conquered her race’s particular claims and desire for revolt” (60). Taylor argues, however, that the servant is thus granted “surrogate white kinship” (61). My point here is that King refuses motivation because Marcélite suppresses no desire for revolt or even racial kinship – in fact, her necessary participation in white girls’ sexual initiations requires her continuing racial exclusion within the “family” proper even if peripherally attached. 42. Freud here is referring specifically to “coupeurs de nattes,” – literally “perverts” who enjoy cutting off women’s hair: “without knowing it [these hairdressers] play the part of people who carry out an act of castration on the female genital organ.” See Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalysis in Culture,” in Freud Reader, ed. Peter Gay (New York: Norton, 1989), 461. The haircutter’s symbolic castration, as both denial and acknowledgment of women’s “lack,” accounts for the mingled affection and hostility toward the fetish. 43. Too numerous and lengthy to analyze here are King’s similar accounts of blacks’ eroticism, both arousing and intimidating, as in this description of a “gang” of black laborers walking to work: the women’s bodies, as though vaguely recalling ancestral nudity amid tropical forests, seem to defy concealment, throwing out bold curves and showing lines of savage grace through the scant folds of their loose-fitting garments . . . in their eyes spoke the untamed desires of wild, free Nature . . . The men followed, aggressively masculine, heavy-limbed . . . wearing their clothes like harness . . . responding grudgingly and deprecatingly to [the women’s] frank overtures . . . [The children] exuberant with life and animal spirits (123–4).

44. For her discussion of women’s attraction to those of another class, see Jane Gallop, Thinking Through the Body (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 165–77. 45. In this the relationship between Marcélite and Marie cannot surpass the love of men as characterized in Lillian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendships and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present

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46. 47.

48.

49.

Notes to pages 54–8 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981). More critical work needs to be done on interracial “friendships” between women. For a probing essay on late twentieth-century interracial relations between men, see David Bergman, “Race and The Violet Quill,” in American Literary History 9 (Spring 1997), 79–102. ´ See also the blind, black piano player, Benoit, in Willa Cather’s My Anton´ ıa, who also arouses young dancers to dance and desire. Again we see the parallels to representations of servant-master relations in Melville’s “Benito Cereno”; Monsieur Motte, like Don Benito, is exposed as impotent by the novel’s end – the symbol of his authority, his scabbard “artificially stiffened” and “empty,” as Monsieur Motte is proved a hollow fake. What might appear to be a critique of patriarchal authority in King’s novel, however, is only the fear of its misappropriation by blacks: Motte is an empty word, or “mot,” because the phallus belongs to another. Some later white women writers only more compulsively reinscribed the “serviceable” friend in her absence: from Ellen Glasgow’s Barren Ground (1925) and Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind (1936) to Carson McCullers’s A Member of the Wedding (1946) and Anita Clay Kornfield’s In A Bluebird’s Eye (1975). For discussion of the falling out between black and white women at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, a representative example of the racism within temperance and suffrage movements, see Hazel V. Carby, “Women’s Era: Rethinking Black Feminist Theory” (1987), reprinted in African American Literary Theory, ed. Winston Napier (New York: New Press, 2000), 242–3. 2 of f - co lo r patien ts in f r a n ce s e . w. h a r pe r ’s i o l a l e r o y a n d w. d . howel l s ’s a n i m p e r at i v e d u t y

1. See S. Weir Mitchell, Lectures (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1881). See also Diseases of the Nervous System, Especially in Women (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea’s Sons and Co., 1881), Doctor and Patient (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1904), Fat and Blood and How to Make Them (Philadelphia: J. B. Lippincott, 1878). For an excellent review of Mitchell’s fiction, see Eugenia Kaledin, “Dr. Manners: S. Weir Mitchell’s Novelistic Prescription for an Upset Society,” Prospects 11 (1987), 199–216. 2. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 198. See also George M. Beard, M.D., American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New York, 1881), Nervous Exhaustion (New York, 1879), Sexual Neurasthenia (New York: 1884, reprinted 1902), “Neurasthenia, or Nervous Exhaustion,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal 3 (1869). For contemporary scholarship on medical literature in the United States, see also F. G. Gosling, Before Freud: Neurasthenia and the American Medical Community, 1870–1910 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987); John S. Haller


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and Robin M. Haller, The Physician and Sexuality in Victorian America (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1974); Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English, Complaints Disorders: The Sexual Politics of Sickness (New York: The Feminist Press, 1973); Susan Sontag, Illness as Metaphor (New York: Vintage, 1979); Anita Clair Fellman and Michael Fellman, Making Sense of Self: Medical Advice Literature in the Late Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia, 1981); George F. Drinka, M.D., The Birth of Neurosis (New York, 1984); Suzanne Poirier, “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure: Doctors and Patients,” in Women’s Studies 10 (1983), 15–40; Mark Olfson, M. D., “The Weir Mitchell Rest Cure,” in Pharos 51 (1989), 30–2; Barbara Sicherman, “The Uses of Diagnosis: Doctors, Patients, and Neurasthenia,” in Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 32 (1977), 36; Philip P. Weiner, “G. M. Beard and Freud on ‘American Nervousness,’” in Journal of the History of Ideas 17 (1956), 269–74; T. J. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1981), 47–58. 3. Exceptions to this include Jennifer DeVere Brody’s insightful Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity, and Victorian Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 1998), which examines discourses of race and femininity, and of the relation of hybridity and purity, in the construction of white Victorian culture; but there are few similar extended reconsiderations of the mulatta in American literature. Excellent articles that do force serious reexamination of the mulatta in ways I see as wholly complementary to my own approach include P. Gabrielle Foreman’s “Who’s Your Mama: ‘White’ Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom,” in American Literary History (Spring 2002), 505–39, and “Reading Aright: White Slavery, Black Referents, and the Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy,” in Yale Journal of Criticism (Fall 1997), 327. Though I know of no critical discussion of medical discourses in relation to miscegenation other than mine here, there are several analyses of legal discourses of the same period that sought to legislate the racially mixed individual, among them Ariela Gross, “Litigating Whiteness: Trials of Racial Determination in the Nineteenth-Century South,” in Yale Law Journal 108 (1998), 109–88. 4. See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the AfroAmerican Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), which discusses the ways the tenets of the cult of true womanhood (piety, purity, domesticity, submissiveness) are set in contradistinction to stereotyped characteristics of black women (as libidinous, feral, aggressive, etc.). On the tenets of “true womanhood,” see Barbara Welter, Dimity Convictions: The American Woman in the Nineteenth Century (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976). 5. William Dean Howells, An Imperative Duty, in An Imperative Duty and The Shadow of a Dream, ed. with introduction by Martha Banta (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970). Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, Introduction by Frances Smith Foster (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). Further references will be to these editions.

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6. On Dunbar’s response to Howells’s insistence that Dunbar best expressed the “difference in temperament” between the races through his dialect rather than standard-speech poetry, see Elsa Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class in Howells’s America (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1988), 82. Nettels correctly notes that for Dunbar “the debt of gratitude . . . becomes the burden of a grievance,” and briefly reviews the responses of James Weldon Johnson, J. Saunders Redding, Dickson Bruce, Jr., Chidi Ikonné, Darwin Turner, Benjamin Brawley, Houston Baker, Bert Bender, Addison Gayle, and William Andrews. On the race question, see also Howells’s essay on Booker T. Washington, “Exemplary Citizen,” in North American Review 73 (August 1901), 280–8. In Howells’s work African Americans also appear, albeit only briefly, in Their Silver Wedding Journey, A Hazard of New Fortunes, and An Open-Eyed Conspiracy, as well as more prominently in two essays, the first of the Suburban Sketches and “Police Report.” Other shorter pieces of Howells in which race (I am focusing here on African-American rather than Irish) figures in more than a passing way include Howells’s 1860 poem “Old Brown” (about the John Brown episode), published in Ashtabula Sentinel; “The Pilot’s Story,” printed in Atlantic Monthly; and the sketches “Mrs. Johnson”’ and “A Chance Acquaintance.” 7. Introduction to Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, ed. Frances Smith Foster (Boston: Beacon Press, 2000), xv. 8. See Kenneth Warren’s influential Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 66–70, and his comparison of the novels. See also Houston Baker, Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women’s Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), especially 30–4, whose critique of Iola Leroy is representative. Iola Leroy is Harper’s best-known novel; recently rediscovered by Frances Smith Foster are Harper’s Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, and Trial and Triumph. An Imperative Duty is one of Howells’s least known (and most poorly received) novels. 9. Amy Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 11. Kaplan’s excellent study of realism focuses primarily on class issues, though I would extend her reassessment of realism to novelists’ treatment of race relations as well. 10. Kaplan, ibid., 13. 11. For one of the first critical discussions of the mulatta in Iola Leroy that notes Harper’s revision of the type, see Hazel V. Carby’s Introduction to the novel (Boston: Beacon Press, 1987) especially xxi–xxiii. Most analyses of Iola Leroy, including those by Alice Walker and Barbara Christian, have seen the mulatta as simply, in Deborah McDowell’s words, a “static, disembodied, larger-than-life character whose physical appearance accommodates white ideals of femininity.” See Deborah McDowell, “The Changing Same: Generational Connections and Black Women Novelists,” in Reading Black,


12.

13. 14. 15.

16.

17.

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Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 95. My point here is to suggest that, far from being either “disembodied” or “accommodating,” Harper’s mulatta bodily enacts the contradictions of race and gender. For further discussion of the traditional tragic mulatta, see Hortense J. Spillers, “‘The Tragic Mulatta’: Neither/Nor – Toward An Alternative Model,” in The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1989), 165–86; Judith Berzon, Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York University Press, 1978); Joel Williamson, New People: Miscegenation and Mulattoes in the United States (New York: The Free Press, 1980); Jean Fagan Yellin, The Intricate Knot: Black Figures in American Literature, 1776–1863 (New York: New York University Press, 1972). See also Jennifer DeVere Brody, Impossible Purities, on versions of mulattas in English Victorian literature. See George Beard’s “tree of nervous illness” reprinted in Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). As Lutz points out, neurasthenia was first linked to Civil War amputees and evolved into a “fashionable” disease, later identified as peculiarly American. See especially Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality, and Ehrenreich and English, Complaints and Disorders, for the relationship between hysteria and middleclass white women’s agitation for economic and political rights. Haller and Haller, The Physician and Sexuality, 68. See Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From The South, ed. Mary Helen Washington (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 96. Originally published in 1892. The “hysterical” fear of “contamination” – specifically, of intimate interracial relations – not only informed Jim Crow but also became the public rationale for race riots, public lynchings, and immolations after Reconstruction. For a good discussion of how the Southern white woman becomes a trope for the “violated” social body, see Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). For the rise of the American Medical Association, see P. Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine: The Rise of a Sovereign Profession and the Making of a Vast Industry (New York: Basic Books, 1982) and J. Cassedy, Medicine in America: A Short History (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). On Jews and racial disease, see Sander L. Gilman, “Mark Twain and the Disease of the Jews,” in Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonoko to Anita Hill, eds. Cathy N. Davidson and Michael Moon (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 271–91; Sander L. Gilman, The Jew’s Body (New York: Routledge, 1991); Sander L. Gilman and Nancy Stepan, “Appropriating the Idiom of Science: The Rejection of Scientific Racism,” in The Bounds of Race: Perspectives on Hegemony and Resistance, ed. Dominick LaCapra (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 72–103.

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18.

19.

20.

21. 22. 23.

Notes to pages 62–3 The rhetoric of racial illness was rendered all the more alarming in the context of government speculation about black troops’ racial “unfitness” for military duty during the Spanish American War, as well as Theodore Roosevelt’s warnings of “race suicide” – the fear that epidemic black and immigrant birthrates would outpace white fertility, resulting in a racial eclipse of the “healthier” white population. See Amy Kaplan, “Black and Blue on San Juan Hill,” in Cultures of U.S. Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald Pease (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993), 219–36, and Lutz on the link between Roosevelt’s theories of race and neurasthenia (American Nervousness, 9). Many of Thomas Dixon’s novels – and D. W. Griffith’s 1915 film Birth of A Nation, based on Dixon’s The Clansman – represent the mulatto mongrel as a sign of racial and political decay. For a sense of the international discussions about race and hysteria, see Alexander Pilcz, Beitrag zur vergleichenden Rassen-Psychiatrie (Vienna: Fans Deuticke, 1906). In both cases the traditional assumption that women are the bearers of race is turned on its head, for in these novels mulattas – as a generational index of the rape and bondage of their maternal ancestors – bear physical testimony to racism. For further discussion of the sexual politics informing this trope, see Spillers, “‘The Tragic Mulatta,’” 168. For an interesting discussion of the relationship between the occult and race, see Susan Gillman, “Pauline Hopkins and the Occult: African-American Revisions of Nineteenth-Century Sciences,” in American Literary History 8 (Spring 1996), 57–82. Gillman argues that Hopkins invokes the language of blood “in the service of her Ethiopianism” (63) by shifting “blood” not only from the “literal passing down of inheritance theorized by the biological sciences, as well as . . . the biblical inheritance of spirit or culture . . . [but also] to hereditarian theories of psychic identity that endures over time and space,” which results in a “process of transculturation” (64). This essay argues that Howells and Harper, neither as interested in pan-Africanism as Hopkins, are similarly revising the terms of scientific racism, but find blood peculiarly acculturating. Howells is interested in Rhoda’s “geist,” her “elder world,” for instance, because it allows him to imagine changes in the culture of the everyday. On black labor, see Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Sex and Race in America (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1984). Giddings, among others, has noted that nineteenth-century black women’s novels that portray nurses, stenographers, shopgirls, and similar images of working African-American women represent a critique of antebellum models of femininity. On white women’s activities resisting the conventions of the cult of true womanhood, see Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 20–2. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Howells and Black Folk,” in Writings (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1147. See Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 24. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, 131.


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24. The traditional equation between the female body and the social corpus is linked, of course, to social Darwinism, eugenics, sexology, “all parts of the metaphoric discourse in which the physical body symbolized the social body, and physical and social disorder stood for social discord and danger” (SmithRosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 40). In this chapter I argue that the crisis of gender is inextricable from the crisis of race, both foregrounded by the epistemological ambiguity of the mulatta. 25. For a discussion of Howells’s literary relationship to business enterprises, see Kaplan, The Social Construction of American Realism. The status of patrician spokesman-editors such as Howells was in part eroded, as Amy Kaplan argues, by the rise of influential businessmen. Howells was a transitional figure between the “gentlemen literary editors of The Century, North American Review, and Atlantic Monthly, and a younger generation of professional businessmen who edited such magazines as McClure’s, Cosmopolitan, and Ladies Home Journal ” (16). But the powerful conflation of medical and commercial interests underwriting the popularity of physician-writers such as Mitchell suggests that the medical industry created a competitive caste of its own. This “business” – as Mitchell’s novels suggest – turned what Howells called “idle” romance into a realist’s labor, validating literary realism “within the producer’s ethos of the middle class” (18). For a discussion of the broader debates about manhood in the late nineteenth century, see Anthony Rotundo, American Manhood: Transformations of Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era (New York: Basic Books, 1993); and R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995) and Manhood in the Making: Cultural Concepts of Masculinity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990). 26. Doctors are established as the norm against which the deviance of the mulatta is measured, which is why Rhoda’s white father, also a physician, lost his practice after making public his marriage to an “octoroon” (Harper, Iola Leroy, 32): as Mrs. Meredith describes it, people must “make a familiar of” the “confidante” because they “don’t like to think there is anything strange about their doctor” (33). 27. See Spillers, “‘The Tragic Mulatta,’” 168. 28. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, 131. 29. Howells, “Criticism and Fiction,” in Criticism and Fiction and Other Essays, ed. Clara M. Kirk, et al. (New York: New York University Press, 1959), 14, 39. Dr. Olney is also critical of Rhoda’s aunt for her “romantic coloring” of race: “[Mrs. Meredith] had often imagined herself telling Rhoda what she had to tell, and with the romantic coloring from the novels she had read, she had painted herself in the heroic discharge of her duty at the instant when the girl was radiant in the possession of accepted love, and had helped her to renounce, to suffer, and to triumph” (48). Mrs. Meredith’s fatal unwillingness to part with this sentimental script leads her to overdose on sleeping pills. 30. See Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 135.

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31. On discussions about the relationship between language and race from the period, see Max Müller, Three Lectures on the Science of Language (Chicago: Open Court Publishing Co., 1899) and William Dwight Whitney, Max Müller & The Science of Language: A Criticism (New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1892). As William Dwight Whitney argued, language is “capable of application to ethnological purposes far beyond any others . . . Hence, when the ethnological relations of a community are to be settled, the first question is as to the affinities of speech” (274–5). On language and race, see also my “Dark Dialects: Scientific and Literary Realism in Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus Series,” in New Orleans Review 18 (Spring 1991), 36–45. 32. Dr. Olney exploits his position as well in his exchanges with a potential suitor to Rhoda who approaches Olney first because of his position as de facto family physician for Rhoda and her aunt, and later, when Olney uses his position to seek out Rhoda after the funeral. 33. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, 99. 34. Harryette Mullen, “Optic White: Blackness and the Production of Whiteness,” in Diacritics: A Review of Contemporary Criticism 24.2–3 (1994), 73. 35. Foreman, “Who’s Your Mama,” 508. 36. Robert Reid-Pharr, Conjugal Union: The Body, The House, and the Black American (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 11. 37. For a discussion of the “politicization of domesticity” in the nineteenth century, see Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine’s Text at the Turn of the Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992) and Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of Berkeley Press, 1990). 38. One is reminded of Clare Kendry’s comment in Nella Larsen’s Passing (1928) that she nearly “died of terror the whole nine months” before her child was born “for fear that she might be dark.” 39. For a discussion of the early laws concerning miscegenation, see James Kinney, Amalgamation! Race, Sex, and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century American Novel (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985). 40. William Byrd, Histories of the Dividing Line Betwixt Virginia and North Carolina (New York: Dover, 1967), 4. 41. On the Plessy debates and Mark Twain, see Eric Sundquist, To Wake the Nations (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 225–70. 42. Anonymous reviewer from The Critic (January 16 1892), quoted in Martha Banta’s Introduction to An Imperative Duty, ix. Indeed, criticism of the novels has centered on the failure of representation: a reviewer for The Critic panned An Imperative Duty because of Howells’s “ignorance of the subject . . . [Howells] likes the race . . . in theory and at a distance.” Past and more recent critical assessments of both novels offer conflicting criteria for “realist” fiction, though the arguments reveal the high racial stakes involved in such definitions. For instance, on the face of it, the didactic imperative in Iola Leroy – and in racial uplift fiction generally – can be set against Howells’s explicit denial that realist art moralizes or offers social programs. Indeed, the obligation to racial service


43.

44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

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encouraged by Iola Leroy, and voiced by Rhoda in An Imperative Duty, is critiqued in Howells’s novel as, ironically, the fault of “Puritan civilization” carrying “the cult of personal conscience into mere dutiolatry” (89). For Anna Julia Cooper, on the other hand, racial duty is set apart from what seems to be a lack of conscience. She criticizes An Imperative Duty, for instance, because the realist’s approach only aestheticizes. Howells’s “study of a morbidly sensitive conscience hectoring over a weak and vacillating will” (Cooper, A Voice From The South, 202), Cooper argues, is like the “kodak,” which, she assumes, fails to “preach or solve problems” (202). Her criticism points in her mind to the limitation of realism, both its representative subject – the hysteric – and its most commercial form – the photographic still. See also Robert Leitz’s remarks pointing out that in a letter to his father Howells mentions his own experience visiting the “lowly and kind people” at a black church, which later became the basis for the questionable scene in the novel. See Selected Letters of W. D. Howells 1852–1872, ed. Edwin H. Cady (Boston: Twayne, 1981), 264. Howells encountered similar resistance to his representations of the Irish. See his 1891 letter to his sister, Aurelia, quoted in Martha Banta’s Introduction to An Imperative Duty, ix. Mary Helen Washington, in her Introduction to Cooper’s A Voice From The South, for example, argues that “representative women” such as Harper and Cooper spoke “for ordinary black women . . . [they] rarely spoke to them” (xxx). This essay attempts to join with Carby and Tate in their reconsiderations of Harper, diverging from the early criticism of her work – beginning most vocally with the Black Arts Movement – as too removed from the “real” lives of blacks. Quoted in Eric Sundquist, “The Country of the Blue,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 9. W. D. Howells, The Years of My Youth and Three Essays, ed. David Nordloh, et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1975), 57. Eric Cheyfitz, “A Hazard of New Fortunes: The Romance of Self-Realization,” in American Realism: New Essays, ed. Eric Sundquist (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982), 42. No doubt drawing on some of these same associations, Faulkner would also give Clytie (Clytemnestra) as the name of a mulatta in Absalom, Absalom! (1936). See Lauren Berlant, The Anatomy of National Fantasy: Hawthorne, Utopia, and Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). For the link between the national corpus and the individual body, see also Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (NewYork: Oxford University Press, 1985), especially 108–9. John Crowley, “Winifred Howells and the Economy of Pain,” in The Mask of Fiction: Essays on W. D. Howells (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 90. See also Edwin Cady, “The Neuroticism of William Dean Howells,” in PMLA 61 (1946), 229–38. Howells had been a literary correspondent with

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50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

Notes to pages 72–7 Mitchell for years, but their relationship changed markedly after Winny’s death. Mitchell reputedly performed an autopsy and determined that she had suffered from an incurable organic rather than mental illness, and thus had been beyond his help. Nevertheless, in a letter to Mitchell, Howells hints at his own anger and guilt: “[We] are almost happy to be assured that [her death] was not through any error or want of skill; though this was what we believed from the first. The torment that remains is that perhaps the poor child’s pain was all along as great as fancied, if she was so diseased, as she apparently was.” See Cady ed., Selected Letters of W. D. Howells, 247. Edwin H. Cady, The Road To Realism: The Early Years of William Dean Howells, 1837–1885 (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1958), 95. See also Henry Wonham’s excellent analysis, which compares Du Bois’s notion of “double-consciousness” to neurasthenia: “Howells, Du Bois, and the Effect of ‘Common-Sense’: Race, Realism, and Nervousness in An Imperative Duty,” in Criticism and the Color Line: Desegregating American Literary Studies, ed. Henry B. Wonham (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 126–39. Wonham notes, too, that Howells “appropriates black health as an antidote to nervous suffering” (156). Quoted in Lutz, American Nervousness 4, 6. Mitchell, Doctor and Patient, 131. Gilman and Stepan, “Appropriating the Idiom of Science,” 92. To the degree that Harper’s term, “disabilities of color,” invokes the medical idiom of raceas-disease in order to indict racism as the social ill, it is, in Gilman’s and Stepan’s words, “couched in terms similar to the dominant discourse . . . [but moves] further away from total acceptance or accommodation to the dominant discourse of difference.” 3

“al ien ha n d s ” in kate c ho p in ’s t h e awa k e n i n g

1. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: The Afro-American Presence in American Literature,” in Michigan Quarterly Review 28 (1989), 11. 2. Kate Chopin, The Awakening, in The Awakening and Selected Stories, ed. Sandra Gilbert (New York: Penguin, 1984), 175. Further references will be to this edition. 3. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing,” in How Do I Look: Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object Choice (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 205. 4. Chopin, The Awakening, 122. 5. Chopin, ibid., 78. 6. Quoted from the backjacket of the cited edition. 7. Linda Dowling, “The Decadent and the New Woman,” in Nineteenth-Century Fiction 33 (1979), 451. 8. Chopin, The Awakening, 108. 9. See Rita Felski for the argument that a liberatory politics, though requiring a subject with agency, need not uncritically enable bourgeois individualism, in Beyond Feminist Aesthetics: Feminist Literature and Social Change (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 66–71.


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10. Sandra M. Gilbert, “The Second Coming of Aphrodite,” Introduction, The Awakening and Selected Stories, by Kate Chopin (New York: Penguin, 1984), 20. 11. See Quentin Anderson, The Imperial Self: An Essay in American Literary and Cultural History (New York: Vintage, 1972). 12. Wai-chee Dimock, Empire for Liberty: Melville and the Poetics of Individualism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 8. 13. From a Houghton Mifflin advertisement for Chopin’s Bayou Folk in “Publisher’s Weekly” (March 17 1894), 450. Quoted in Emily Toth, Kate Chopin (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1990), 223. Chopin’s Northern audience included Creoles as well as Acadians and blacks in this category. Southern reviewers, while sensitive to the social and cultural distinctions among ethnic groups, did not consider these populations to be “alien” in this same sense. 14. From the review, “Living Tales from Acadian Life,” in New York Times (April 1 1894), 23. Quoted in Toth, Kate Chopin, 226. 15. Quoted in Winthrop Jordan, “Fruits of Passion: The Dynamics of Interracial Sex,” in Woman and Womanhood in America, ed. Ronald W. Hogeland (Lexington: D. C. Heath, 1973), 55. 16. Albert Memmi, The Colonizer and the Colonized (Boston: Beacon Press, 1965), 66. 17. Cable explains the implications of the “silent South” in “The Freedman’s Case in Equity”: “It means to recommit [racial inequity] to the silence and concealment of the covered burrow. Beyond that incubative retirement, no suppressed moral question can be pushed.” See George Washington Cable, The Silent South Together with the Freedman’s Case in Equity and the Convict Lease System (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1889), 3. Cynthia Griffin Wolff similarly suggests that Edna uses sleep and daydreaming as a strategy of repression, arguing that Edna’s internalization of the contradicting images of womanhood (the mother-woman and the vixen) is in part what leads her “to produce an ‘identity’ that is predicated on the process of concealment.” See Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros: Kate Chopin’s The Awakening,” in The Awakening by Kate Chopin, ed. Nancy A. Walker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993), 235. Wolff’s psychoanalytic perspective leads her to the conclusion that this contradiction arises from the differences between Edna’s sisters, Margaret and Janet, rather than from the sexual contradictions established between white women and women of color that Edna also internalizes. 18. See Elizabeth Ammons, Conflicting Stories: American Women Writers at the Turn into the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 75. 19. Anna Shannon Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line: Evolving Stereotypes and the Writings of George Washington Cable, Grace King, Kate Chopin (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989), 143. I should note here that though Chopin’s portrayal of Edna enjoins irony occasionally, qualifying her protagonist’s perceptions, I can find no example where irony extends to Edna’s relations with people of color in The Awakening.

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20. Karen Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolitionism,” in Representations 24 (1988), 31. See also Anne Goodwyn Jones, who suggests in Tomorrow Is Another Day: The Woman Writer in the South, 1859–1936 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981), 151, that Chopin uses blacks “as an objective correlative for her feelings about oppression.” 21. Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds,” 31. 22. There are many other instances of black labor: Madame Lebrun has a “little black girl” sit on the floor and work the “treadle of the [sewing] machine” so she need not imperil her “health” (66); “two black women” spend their afternoon making ice cream for a whites-only party (70); Madame Ratignolle points out to Edna that laundry is “really [the] business” (105) of her black maid, Cité. While one may interpret as ironic comment on Creole gentility Madame Lebrun’s insistence on protecting her “health,” there is no suggestion elsewhere that white women should assume their servants’ labor. 23. In the 1890s “race” was frequently and loosely applied not only to people of color or to people of a certain class but to people of various religious identifications (especially Catholic) as well. For discussions of the history and debates surrounding this term, see Stephen Jay Gould, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: Norton, 1981); Nancy Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1982); Eric Cheyfitz, The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 24. Gilbert “The Second Coming,” 16, 17. 25. Mary Louise Pratt, “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushmen,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 140. 26. Wai-chee Dimock argues that the “quadroon’s ‘off-centeredness’ complements the centered subjectivity that is Edna’s”; hence the subjectivity of both the quadroon and Edna’s husband, Dimock suggests, are similarly “adduced and dismissed” (42). See “Rightful Subjectivity,” in Yale Journal of Criticism 4 (1990), 25–51. My point is that the quadroon is not simply a foil but fundamental to Edna’s sense of self. 27. Gilbert quotes a similarly provocative line from Chopin’s travel journal that refers to the “sweet, half-seen pagan life” (33), using it to support her argument that Chopin drew on Greek imagery. Yet the South itself was commonly orientalized in the period’s fiction. See Hortense J. Spillers, “Changing the Letter: The Yokes, the Jokes of Discourse: or Mrs. Stowe and Mr. Reed,” in Slavery and the Literary Imagination, ed. Deborah McDowell and Arnold Rampersad (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 25–61. 28. Sander L. Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies: Toward An Iconography of Female Sexuality in Late Nineteenth-Century Art, Medicine, and Literature,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., 228. 29. Hortense J. Spillers, “‘The Tragic Mulatta’: Neither/Nor – Toward An Alternative Model,” in The Difference Within: Feminism and Critical Theory, ed. Elizabeth Meese and Alice Parker (Philadelphia: J. Benjamins, 1989), 168.


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30. Gilman “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 251. 31. Edna’s quadroon also brings to mind the infamous quadroon balls of New Orleans, still held with some regularity in the 1890s. The plaçages or liaisons (often more like common-law marriages) between wealthy white men and these much-courted quadroons and octoroons must have seemed appealing to a white woman questioning traditional marital and sexual arrangements. For a discussion of the plaçage, see John W. Blassingame, Black New Orleans, 1860– 1880 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973). See also George Washington Cable, Madame Delphine (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1893), 5–6, for his reverence for these women, whom he saw, paradoxically, as “chaste sirens.” 32. In Chopin’s fiction explicit allusions to class relations, and the need to preserve social hierarchies, are often made by “mulattoes.” In The Awakening, for instance, the mulatta Madame Pouponne wishes to “discuss class distinctions” (110) with Edna; in Athéna¨ıse the quadroon, Sylvie, believes “firmly in the color line, and would not suffer a white person, even a child, to call her ‘Madame Sylvie,’ – a title which she exacted religiously, however, from those of her own race” (245). In New Orleans in the 1880s and 1890s intraracial discrimination was common, but because in Chopin’s fiction blacks – and almost never whites – conspicuously voice support for the class hierarchies based on color, they deflect attention from white discrimination. Like the nannies and servants in The Awakening, Sylvie and Madame Pouponne become representatives of certain status quo class relations (something of an irony given the fact that Sylvie functions as a “madame”) 33. The light-skinned Sylvie is often associated with sexual experimentation. After having run from her husband’s sexual attentions, Athéna¨ıse is revealed to herself after a chat about life’s facts with the “very wise” (257) quadroon: “She stayed . . . quite stunned, after her interview with Sylvie . . . Her whole being was steeped in ecstasy. When she finally rose . . . and looked at herself in the mirror, a face met hers which she seemed to see for the first time, so transfigured it was with wonder and rapture” (257). Sylvie is “knowing,” perhaps, because she runs a “house” that caters to “discreet gentlemen” who wish an evening “outside the bosom of their families” (247), men who want, like Athéna¨ıse, to escape domestic confines. Sylvie’s place, then, is a kind of border crossing where sexual enlightenment is a “discreet” possibility. 34. Patricia S. Yaeger, “‘A Language Which Nobody Understood’: Emancipatory Strategies in The Awakening,” in The Awakening: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism, ed. Nancy A. Walker (New York: Bedford Press, 1999), 285. 35. Wolff, “Thanatos and Eros,” 239. Though Arobin is Edna’s lover, he similarly assumes an attitude of “subservience” (133) and dons a dust-cap to help Edna clean her pigeon-house (141). 36. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1975), 392–3. 37. In the companion story, “At Chênière Caminada” (1894), for instance, Madame Antoine is described as kind but with “coarse hands”; her son, Tonie, is a “rough fisherman” with a “bronzed” face and flesh as “hard as a horse’s hoof” whose love for a mainland girl fires the “savage instinct of his blood.” See also

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38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

Notes to pages 87–90 “At the ’Cadian Ball” (1892) and “The Storm: A Sequel to ‘At the ’Cadian Ball’” (1898). For an historical genealogy of the Acadian presence in the South and an account of the changing attitudes toward Acadians in the nineteenth century, see Carl A. Brasseaux, Acadian to Cajun: The Transformation of a People, 1803–1877 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1992). Such homes, seen also in Chopin’s novel At Fault, are represented as an open invitation to the white women. For a discussion of the nostalgia among white women in particular for this romanticized interracial sisterhood, see Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988). Dimock, Empire for Liberty, 20. Spillers, “‘The Tragic Mulatta,’” 173. Gilbert, “The Second Coming,” 25. Frederick Stielow, “Grand Isle, Louisiana, and the ‘New’ Leisure Class, 1866– 1893,” Louisiana History 23 (1982), 243. The Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn, 2 vols., ed. Elizabeth Bisland (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1922; first published 1906), I: 87. Quoted in Stielow, “Grand Isle,” 243. See also Hearn’s mention of the island in his novel Chita: A Memory of Last Island (New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1889), 11. For a discussion of the idealization of the plantation as a utopian social and economic model, see Richard Slotkin, The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization, 1800–1890 (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1985), 141–6. George Washington Cable, The Grandissimes: A Story of Creole Life (New York: Penguin, 1988), 71. Calvin Hernton, Sex and Racism in America (New York: Doubleday, 1965), 50–1. For an analysis of the relationship between Freudian constructions of (white) female sexuality and race, see Gilman, “Black Bodies, White Bodies,” 256–7. See also George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998). Critics have pointed out the contrast between sexual expectations for white women and women of color, especially black women, in the nineteenth century and in Chopin’s fiction. See Wendy Martin, Introduction, New Essays on The Awakening (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 16. See also Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), xxv. For works that more extensively examine the role of race in Chopin’s fiction, see Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 117–58, and Helen Taylor, Gender, Race, and Region in the Writings of Grace King, Ruth McEnery Stuart, and Kate Chopin (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 138–203. Elfenbein and Taylor criticize Chopin’s racial stereotyping, while Emily Toth argues that Chopin appropriates racial stereotypes in the service of a broader social critique. See Emily Toth, “That Outward Existence Which Conforms: Kate Chopin and Literary


49. 50.

51.

52.

53. 54.

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Convention,” Dissertation, Johns Hopkins University, 1975. My essay hopes to move beyond the question of stereotyping in order to examine some of the stranger satisfactions that race affords Edna, and the ways Edna’s sexuality works in conjunction with – and not despite – troubling constructs of racial difference. I further discuss the need to reconsider the role of “race” in biographical studies of Chopin in “‘The Rogue in Porcelain’: Feminism, Race, and the Representation of Kate Chopin,” in Genre 24 (Winter 1991), 461–7. For a critique of white feminist theory that points up the necessity to factor race into analyses of gender relations, see bell hooks, Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism (Boston: South End Press, 1981). Hernton, Sex and Racism, 51. Elfenbein suggests that, for Edna, “Mariequita appears stereotypically dark and carefree” (149), but that her reinforcement of Victor’s romanticized image of a “mythic Edna” means Mariequita remains “untouched by Edna’s awakening” (157). Like other “dark” women in the novel, Mariequita is not elevated by Edna’s “awakening”; I argue further that, in fact, by reinforcing the representation of Edna as a social belle (“who gave the most sumptuous dinners in America”), she is represented as complicit with the social expectations Edna seeks to evade. For arguments linking the United States’s imperialist discourse with domestic policy regarding the “race question,” see Hazel V. Carby, “‘On the Threshold of ‘Woman’s Era’: Lynching, Empire, and Sexuality in Black Feminist Theory,” in Gates, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 301–17, and C. Vann Woodward The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), 72–5. My argument’s position should not be confused with my characterization of Edna’s perception. I am emphasizing this point that whiteness is raced, though I trust it is obvious throughout my chapter, in part as a response to Rebecca Aanerud’s comment in a footnote about my article, “‘Alien Hands’: Kate Chopin and the Colonization of Race” (American Literature 66: 2 [June 1994], 301–23), on which this chapter is based, in which she suggests that my concluding analysis regarding the novel’s final scene on the beach “in effect reinscribes the racially neutral position of whiteness in American literature.” See “Fictions of Whiteness: Speaking the Names of Whiteness in U.S. Literature,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 58. As I hope is very clear in my article and this chapter, Edna identifies no racial presence on that beach, including her own, the racial construction of her self requiring her absenting of others’ racial and ethnic identities as she asserts her own whiteness, whiteness being a race that itself is characterized by a presumption of being a racially unmarked and normative default. Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken,” 11. Calixta figures both in the companion story “At the ’Cadian Ball” (1892) from where this quotation is taken, and “The Storm” (written in 1898), where her hair is “kinked more stubbornly than ever” (282).

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55. Elfenbein, Women on the Color Line, 141. Indeed, Calixta’s act would be considered liberatory only if she were a (vicariously) “white” woman; as a “dark” woman, her sexual passion would be viewed as commonplace. Elfenbein argues that the “story suggests more about the limitations of bourgeois marriage” than about sexual antitheses, though I suggest that it is this dialectic that forms the very basis of a critique of white middle-class marriage. 56. Clearly, the politics of “race” in The Awakening need not have complete explanatory force throughout the novel, nor does it exhaust the reasons for Edna’s death; but it does, I suggest, reframe the controversy surrounding it. 57. Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992), vii. Morrison further points out that examining the ways constructions of racial or cultural difference “ignite critical moments of discovery or change or emphasis in [white-authored] literature” (viii) helps us understand “literary whiteness” as well as “literary blackness” (xii). 58. See Anna Julia Cooper, A Voice From The South, ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Writing in 1892, Cooper offers a scathing critique of legislation based on perceived differences between white and black women. 59. I would not wholly separate Chopin’s peculiar brand of negrophilia from her indirect associations with the virulent racism of the White League, to which her husband belonged, though I hope it is clear that the goal of this chapter is an articulation of her racialist feminism, not simply to brand Chopin a racist. Emily Toth argues that it cannot be known whether Chopin shared her husband’s prejudices and “cheered on the White League,” suggesting instead that “motherhood, not race, dominated Kate’s years in New Orleans, and linked women with each other, across the color line” (Toth, Kate Chopin, 136). But such an argument suggests that gender, and particularly maternity, is not entwined already with social class and racial difference. Similarly, I have difficulty with the narrative license Chopin assumes even when she explicitly crosses the color-line by putatively entering their minds, though this is a gesture often praised by most critics of her work: Sandra Gilbert, for instance, praises her for taking on the “point of view of [New Orleans] working-class men – one white, one black – into whose consciousness a decorous lady like Chopin herself might not have been expected to enter” (Gilbert, “The Second Coming,” 16), and Toth admires the ability of the “daughter of slave holders” to look on “the thoughtless white world through the eyes of a woman of color” (Toth, Kate Chopin, 138). As this chapter is meant to suggest, such acts are to some degree coextensive with her figurative appropriation of women of color. 60. Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 6. See also Ann duCille, Skin Trade (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), 7. 61. See Elizabeth Ammons’s chapter “The Limits of Freedom: The Fiction of Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Kate Chopin, and Pauline Hopkins,” in Conflicting Stories. For a discussion of race and sex in Chopin’s novel At Fault, and in her other


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short fiction, see Sandra Gunning, Race, Rape, and Lynching: The Red Record of American Literature, 1890–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), especially 108–36. 62. Ann duCille, The Coupling Convention: Sex, Text, and Tradition in Black Women’s Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 32.

4

“f or b lo o d that is n ot yo u r s ” : l a n g s to n h u g h e s a n d the a rt o f patro n ag e

1. See Robert Nash, The Nervous Generation: American Thought, 1917–1930 (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1970). 2. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday Press, 1995). 3. Norman Mailer, “The White Negro: Superficial Reflections on the Hipster,” in Advertisements for Myself (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1959), 340. Mailer’s association of the African American with a sort of existentialist moral and “sexual outlaw” (348) is critiqued by, among many others, Ned Polsky, who points out that the cool cat hipsters “still want us to be spooks. They don’t really dig us as people; they just dig us for our music and our pot.” Thus even “in the world of the hipster the Negro remains essentially what Ralph Ellison called him – an invisible man. The white Negro accepts the real Negro not as a human being in his totality, but as the bringer of a highly specified and restricted ‘cultural dowry,’ to use Mailer’s phrase. In so doing he creates an inverted form of keeping the nigger in his place.” Quoted in Mailer, Advertisements for Myself, 369. 4. Phil Rubie, “Crossover Dreams,” in Race Traitor, eds. Noel Ignatiev and John Garvey (New York: Routledge, 1996), 151. 5. Stanley Crouch on the art of Robert L. Thompson in Notes of a Hanging Judge: Essays and Reviews, 1979–1989 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 186– 7. Quoted in African-American Art, ed. Sharon F. Patton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 227. 6. Harold Cruse and Amiri Baraka have been some of the Renaissance’s harshest critics, arguing that it failed because it was “smothered,” in Cruse’s words, by white “cultural paternalism” and, as Baraka put it, was hijacked by the “Black Bourgeoisie” in the thrall of whites. See Harold Cruse, The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual (New York: William Morrow and Co., 1967), 38. See also Baraka/Leroi Jones, letter to the editor, “Correspondence,” in Partisan Review, 25 (1958), 473. George Hutchinson is particularly critical of the Black Arts’ critique of the Harlem Renaissance on this point; see The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 14–28. 7. Michael North, Preface, The Dialect of Modernism: Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). 8. North, ibid.

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9. Aldon Lynn Nielsen, Reading Race: White American Poets and the Racial Discourse in the Twentieth Century (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1988), 49. 10. Emily Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem: The Letters of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, 1925–1964 (New York: Knopf, 2001), xxvi. 11. Arnold Rampersad and Steven Watson, quoted on the backjacket of the hardcover copy of Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem. 12. Bernard’s work is invaluable, but she admits to including fewer letters after 1950 in her collected edition because they focus on the James Weldon Johnson Collection, letters that are especially of interest to this chapter and thus might provide additional support for or even possibly revision of my claim here. I draw on the published letters in the case of Van Vechten and those available at the Yale University Collection of American Literature in the Beinecke Library of Rare Books and Manuscripts with the full understanding that, as material becomes more readily available, more critical work will evolve. The James Weldon Johnson Collection at the Beinecke holds 322 leaves of dated correspondence between Langston Hughes and Spingarn (1925–67) and thirty-five leaves of undated correspondence between them. At the Library’s request, I have cited the Collection but not the box and/or folder numbers for these letters since the latter change. Hereafter, all references to the James Weldon Johnson Collection will be “JWJ.” 13. A note: there is the possibility, of course, of distortion in analyzing only selected letters, but the risk is no more than in analyzing selected pieces from an author’s oeuvre or in analyzing only one. My aim is not toward a comprehensive survey of all but a close analysis of a few. There are hundreds more letters (not yet in a published collection in Van Vechten’s case and no longer surviving in Spingarn’s case), but I am not taking the body of letters as a single work; rather, I am treating each discrete letter as a text like others – an historical and rhetorical document to be considered both as it informs and is informed by broader literary and cultural contexts. 14. Karen Cherewatuk and Ulrike Wiethaus, eds., Dear Sister: Medieval Women and the Epistolary Genre (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1993), 4–5. 15. Langston Hughes, “ The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Norton, 1977), 1269. 16. Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920–1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995), 95, 96. 17. Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance, 5–6. 18. Hutchinson, ibid., 5. 19. David Amram, Vibrations (New York: Macmillan, 1968), 443. 20. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (New York: Hill and Wang, 1940), 11. 21. Arnold Rampersad, I, Too, Sing America: The Life of Langston Hughes, Vol. I: 1902–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 176, 128, 368. 22. Rampersad, I, Too, 314. It is worth noting that Hughes also gave some tickets to black friends, for whom some of these same questions might apply, though


23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

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obviously somewhat differently since Spingarn was not required to sit in the “heaven” above. Hughes himself insists that his relations with Knopf, and the politics informing the publication and reception of Fine Clothes To The Jew, must be considered in the context of similar reactions to Van Vechten’s Nigger Heaven. See Ross Posnock’s insightful analysis of the friendship between Du Bois and Joel Spingarn in Color and Culture: Black Intellectuals and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 148–61. Quoted in David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Vintage, 1982), 102. Lewis, ibid., 99. The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews, published by the Nation of Islam, suggests that blacks are the “true Jews,” the true “chosen people,” versus the “hook-nosed, bagel-eatin’, lox-eatin’ Jew-imposters” – a comment suggesting that identification can come to look like encroachment, and that being “almost the same” can easily become a battle over the boundaries of racial and religious identity. For further discussion of the history and issues concerning black-Jewish relations, see Michael Lerner and Cornel West, Blacks and Jews: Let the Healing Begin (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995); Jack Salzman, ed., Bridges and Boundaries: African-Americans and American Jews (New York: Jewish Museum, 1992); Paul Berman, ed., Blacks and Jews: Alliances and Arguments (New York: Delta Press, 1994); Robert G. Weisbord and Arthur Stein, Bittersweet Encounter: The Afro-American and the American Jew (Westport: Negro Universities Press, 1970); Robert G. Weisbord and Richard Kazarian, Jr., Israel in the Black American Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1985); Nat Hentoff, ed., Black Anti-Semitism and Jewish Racism (New York: Richard Baron Press, 1969); Hedda Garza, African Americans and Jewish Americans: A History of Struggle (New York: Franklin Watts, 1995). Most of Hughes’s letters to Amy Spingarn were kept after her death in the home of her daughter, Honor Tranum, and were tragically lost in a hurricane that destroyed her home in St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands in the early 1990s (telephone conversation with Tranum, September 5, 1998). Draft of Langston Hughes’s letter to Amy Spingarn, c. 1925 (JWJ). Spingarn much later in her life became a patron of the renowned black artist Jacob Lawrence, financing one of his family’s year-long trips to Africa. Money and class structured Amy Spingarn’s other relationships with African Americans as well: she had a black chauffeur for nearly twenty years, as well as a black nurse for the last ten years of her life. Honor Tranum, in a telephone conversation, September 5, 1998. Quoted in Arnold Rampersad, I, Too, 222. The poem reads: “Dear, lovely Death That taketh all things under wing – Never to kill – Only to change

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Notes to pages 107–9 Into some other thing This suffering flesh, To make it either more or less, But not again the same – Dear, lovely Death Change is thy other name.”

34. Rampersad, I, Too, 118. As early as 1924 Spingarn had published a poem in The Crisis under her maiden name. 35. Spingarn used portraits as an occasion to cross class lines, to become intimate with those she would not have done otherwise, in a context other than as employer, though it was through the license of class status that she solicited them. Honor Tranum, in 1997 correspondence with the author, writes of how her mother enlisted innumerable Haitian peasants as (unpaid) models during one visit. Once they were sitting, she often drew them into conversation, but she became intimate with them only in their positions as models; they did not socialize outside that setting. 36. Rampersad, I, Too, 118. 37. Rampersad, ibid., 189–90. 38. Quoted from Joel Spingarn’s article on George Edward Woodberry in the Dictionary of American Biography, cited in Marshall Van Deusen, J. E. Spingarn (New York: Twayne, 1971), 61. 39. Alain Locke, “The New Negro,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 970; Randolph Bourne, quoted in The Radical Will: Selected Writings, 1911–1918, ed. Olap Hansen (New York: Urizen, 1977). 40. Quoted in Van Deusen, J. E. Spingarn, 67. 41. Quoted in Van Deusen, ibid., 109. 42. See Posnock, Color and Culture, 112–44, for a fuller discussion of the Spingarn– Du Bois intellectual and aesthetic programs in the context of early twentiethcentury pragmatism. 43. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1271. 44. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 754. 45. Quoted in Van Deusen, J. E. Spingarn, 52. 46. B. Joyce Ross discusses further the relationship between the Spingarns’ “noneconomic liberalism” and their participation in race relations in J. E. Spingarn and the Rise of the NAACP, 1911–1939 (New York: Athenum, 1972). Amy Spingarn seemed to share this philosophy in an early letter to Hughes, which explains that white students, too, must work through the summer to support themselves (JWJ, 53). 47. “Hard Luck,” in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, eds. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vintage, 1995), 82. 48. Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 264; Arthur Spingarn, quoted in Rampersad, I, Too, 140.


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49. Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Noonday Press, 1995), 291. 50. Arnold Rampersad, “Introduction to Langston Hughes,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1254. 51. William Wordsworth’s “spots of time,” described in his Prelude (1799, 1805, 1850), are “half-created” historical moments, imaginative recollections of places and events. This, I would suggest, best approximates Hughes’s treatment of history here as well – a strategic function of race memory and imagination moving one to creative work. 52. Langston Hughes, “Slave on the Block,” in Ways of White Folks (New York: Vintage, 1990), 19. 53. Locke, “The New Negro,” 961. 54. Though the novel was written with the urging and economic support of Mason, she forbade public dedications; nevertheless, Hughes had the option of dedicating Not Without Laughter to no one. 55. The portrait to which I refer here is part of the James Weldon Johnson Collection, catalog number u.1942.348. 56. Spingarn described these consecutive labors as a “horror,” which drove her later interest in Margaret Sanger and birth control. Recounted in a letter from Honor Tranum to the author, September 9, 1997. 57. Amy Spingarn, Humility and Pride (New York: Knopf, 1926), 3. 58. For example, Hughes’s “When Sue Wears Red” and “Jazzonia,” as well as Cullen’s “Heritage,” make biblical and classical connections to black Harlemites. 59. Joel, her husband, in fact seems to have been the earliest vehicle for escape. In a September 5 1997 telephone conversation with the author, Honor Tranum recalls that her mother courted the Columbia professor, and thinks she married as the only way out of the claustrophobic “ivory tower” of her very wealthy family. Joel introduced her to politics, to birth control, to women’s suffrage (he encouraged her to join a New York parade in 1919 lobbying for women’s vote). Honor Tranum, in fact, recalls her mother bringing out a box of exotic contraceptives from across Europe that she had gathered with a woman companion, a newspaper reporter, to show to Honor and her girlfriend (then both seventeen), much to their embarrassment. 60. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 247. Probably the most well-known example of the currents of gender dissatisfaction representative of Spingarn’s contemporaries, Sophie Treadwell’s extraordinary Machinal (1928), a scathing critique of the mother-daughter relationship, opened on Broadway. 61. Edward Spingarn, telephone conversation with the author, September 15, 1997. See also JWJ, 490, in which Amy Spingarn tells Hughes that Hofman advised her to “study negro sculpture with its conception of form.” 62. From the “Society of Independent Artists” Press Release and Exhibition Announcement, March 4, 1933. Spingarn was never particularly successful in marketing these portraits – in one case, for instance, she offered Knopf one of

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63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71.

72.

73. 74. 75. 76.

77.

Notes to pages 114–20 her sketches to help with marketing one of Hughes’s collections, but it was politely declined. Gayle Wald, Crossing the Line: Racial Passing in Twentieth-Century U.S. Literature and Culture (Durham: Duke University Press, 2000), 79. bell hooks, “Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance,” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (Boston: South End Press, 1992), 23. Quoted in Wald, Crossing the Line, 79. So says the artist-narrator in Henry James, “The Real Thing” (1892), in The Portable Henry James, ed. Morton Dauwen Zabel (New York: Penguin, 1979), 110–11. Leo Bersani, A Future for Astyanax: Character and Desire in Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 60–1. Kenneth Warren, Black and White Strangers: Race and American Literary Realism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 13, 3. Troutbeck Press published, at the Spingarns’ expense, short monographs, poetry, and critical articles by contemporary and long-dead authors whom they admired. Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 236. Posnock, Color and Culture, 161. The Spingarns as public figures were objects of anti-Semitism and thus neither Hughes nor Spingarn could simply “pass” out of their race or faith, would they even wish to. See Lewis, When Harlem Was In Vogue, on anti-Semitic comments about J. E. Spingarn, who at the time was persuading Du Bois to join the War cause. Both were badly misused by the Wilson presidential Cabinet. For further definition of these concepts, see Judith Stein, “Defining the Race, 1890–1930,” in The Invention of Ethnicity, ed. Werner Sollors (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 77–104. See also Tzvetan Todorov, On Human Diversity: Nationalism, Racism, and Exoticism in French Thought, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993). The Du Bois quotations are from Posnock, Color and Culture, 213, 39. Amy Spingarn, “The Parlor Car, II,” in Humility and Pride, 20. Walter Benn Michaels, Our America: Nativism, Modernism, and Pluralism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995), 118. It is worth noting that though both Joel and Amy had Jewish parents, they never attended synagogue, and their children were given a parochial education. According to Honor Tranum, her mother’s parents repudiated Judaism for the sake of social assimilation; only by shedding their religious affiliations did they believe they could join the inner social circles. Amy Spingarn rejected Judaism, for the most part, not because she found it socially compromising, but because she associated it with imaginative restriction. Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), 207.


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78. Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 17. 79. Typical of many of their divergent reactions, Spingarn thought Albee must have a “‘nasty inside’ to portray people like that, and there is no compassion anywhere” (JWJ, 402). Hughes, on the other hand, apparently enjoyed American Dream. Spingarn’s surviving descendants, Honor Tranum Spingarn and Edward Spingarn, now in their mid-eighties, remembered Hughes as being especially kind to Amy in his last years, taking her out on Sundays almost weekly, as he did a few other elderly women. 80. Quoted in Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, xix. Van Vechten penned these words for an anonymous composition in The Crisis called “The Negro in Art: How Shall He Be Portrayed?” published six months before the release of his novel Nigger Heaven, which arguably fulfills his own warning about white exploitation. The fact that The Crisis solicited his composition but did not acknowledge his authorship partially conceded Huggins’s complaint that white perspectives influenced black audiences, sometimes without their knowledge (since The Crisis’s audience would most likely have assumed the writer was black). 81. In a review of Remember Me to Harlem, David Levering Lewis writes that the “letters drip with homoerotic innuendo,” though this seems something of an overstatement since there are only a few in the collection edited by Bernard that match that criterion. See New York Times Book Review (Sunday, April 22, 2001), 9. 82. Lewis suggests, in his review of Remember Me to Harlem that “[f]or those who remain interested, the judgment on Van Vechten’s influence on Hughes and the Harlem Renaissance continues to be . . . a mixture of bile, special pleading and indifference . . . [The letters] may not entirely convince skeptics that Van Vechten’s roles as cultural impresario of the Harlem Renaissance and mediator between the races for a long time thereafter deserve radical revision.” I agree with Lewis only to the extent that he implies the recovery of Van Vechten’s reputation (Hughes’s is secured as few others are) is unlikely; nor is my goal to arrive somehow at a balance sheet that weighs the positive (the impressive library collections) against any negatives. Neither Spingarn nor Van Vechten is being singled out here for particular censure: Spingarn’s appetite for race, fulfilled through the artistic consumption of the African-American subject, was common enough among white patrons and liberal philanthropists during the period. And she was nowhere near as avid a collector as Van Vechten, whose penchant for “collecting” black people as his private projects and as social conversation pieces, as Emily Bernard notes, put off some African Americans. His “proprietary attitude about his photographs” of people, many of them Harlem luminaries, “extended increasingly to his feelings about black culture in general” (xxv). Yet there is much to admire in the fact that the Spingarn–Hughes and Van Vechten–Hughes friendships were not a “creative attempt at living above the veil, at making interracial friendship an attempt to ventilate . . . [the]

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83. 84. 85. 86.

87. 88. 89. 90.

91.

92.

93. 94.

Notes to pages 122–9 ‘provincial’ role of race man” (Posnock, Color and Culture, 157); the friendships between them are more a creative attempt to mine race identity artistically – what makes them distinctive and worthy of closer analysis is the ways they and Hughes developed working relations that challenge many of the platitudes about patronage even as they at times reinforce them. Kobena Mercer, “Skin Head Sex Thing,” in How Do I Look: Queer Film and Video, ed. Bad Object Choice (Seattle: Bay Press, 1991), 207–8. Quoted in Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, xix. A line from a humorous poetic tribute to Van Vechten at a dinner in 1942 in his honor. Quoted in Bernard, ibid., 339. Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 128–9. For a call to understand better the “highly-charged relationships between black artists and white patrons” beyond mere “compliance and acquiescence,” Jeffrey C. Stewart, argues, in complement to my own position I believe, that too little attention has been paid to the way “artists and patrons, both black and white, approached the production and interpretation of African American art in the 1920s with divergent cultural agendas.” See “Black Modernism and White Patronage,” in The International Review of African American Art, 11:3 (Hampton: Hampton University Museum, 1994), 43. Quoted in Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, xx. Hughes, “The Negro Artist,” 1271. Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 283. Bernard notes that Van Vechten never knew Hughes had asked a Knopf publisher if he should invite Van Vechten to contribute an introduction to his latest edition of poems. The editor sends back a clear directive: “I certainly do not think that at this time it would be a good idea to ask Carl Van Vechten to write one” (Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, xxv). Bruce Kellner describes how insistent Van Vechten could be when he wanted to be appreciated for his art; in a letter he says that by the 1950s, when Van Vechten held parties at his house to showcase his photographs, sitting guests before the pictures, “these events could be rather uncomfortable because if you didn’t Ooh and Aah enough over each one as if it was some masterpiece out of the Uffizi, he’d get miffed and call a sudden halt. On the other hand, they could go on at deadly length sometimes and the only way to curb his enthusiasm was to deliberately stop oohing and aahing” (Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, 174; fn 4). Van Vechten roundly criticizes Hughes’s “Good Morning, Revolution” (1933), which includes his famous attack on the Waldorf Hotel, as “very weak” to the degree it is a “revolutionary tract” rather than a poem (Bernard, Remember Me to Harlem, 103–4). Hughes thanks him for his frankness but is equally frank in his disagreement with him. Locke, “The New Negro,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 964. Van Vechten not only donated black materials to a white institution; he also established the George Gershwin Memorial Collection of Music and Musical


95.

96. 97.

98. 99.

100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106.

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Literature at Fisk University in 1947, making available white-authored works at an historically black college. James Baldwin, “A Rap on Race” (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1971). Quoted in Byron Kim, “An Interview with Glen Ligon,” in Glen Ligon Un/Becoming, ed. Judith Tannenbaum (Philadelphia: Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, 1998), 54. For an overview of the range of genres encompassed in Hughes’s dramatic work, see Susan Duffy, The Political Plays of Langston Hughes (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 2002). Leslie Catherine Sanders, with Nancy Johnson, Introduction, The Collected Works of Langston Hughes, Vol. V, The Plays to 1942: Mulatto to The Sun Do Move, eds. Sanders and Johnson (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 2. Quoted in Sanders, Plays to 1942, 2. W. E. B. Du Bois makes a special point of criticizing Jones’s production of White Cargo in his “Criteria of Negro Art” (1926) arguing that Jones’s representation of the “fallen” black woman who simply goes “down further and further” – especially in contrast with another play, Congo, running at the same time, which had a “fallen” white woman who “in the end is one of the angels of the Lord” – participated in the “propaganda . . . [that] white blood [is] divine, infallible and holy” but denied the same “right of propaganda to those who believe black blood human, lovable and inspired with new ideals for the world.” See “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 758. Jay Plum, “Accounting for the Audience in Historical Reconstruction: Martin Jones’s Production of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto,” in Theater Survey: The Journal of the American Society for Theater Research, 36:1 (May 1995), 7–8. Quoted in Plum, “Accounting for the Audience,” 9. Plum, ibid., 13. Quoted in Plum, ibid., 15. See Plum, ibid., 5–7, for the preponderance of reviews and analyses that suggest the play is really about sex rather than race. Sybil Ray Ricks, “A Textual Comparison of Langston Hughes’s Mulatto, ‘Father and Son,’ and ‘The Barrier,’ in Black American Forum 15 (Fall 1981), 103. Other readings, such as Arnold Rampersad’s autobiographical analysis of Hughes’s “obsession” with miscegenation, suggest the play is informed by the playwright’s alienation from his father, and thus not so much about “the youth’s mulatto sense of racial ambivalence” as “rage for full acceptance by his father” (Rampersad, I, Too, 192). Critics often emphasize the play’s similarity with Greek or Shakespearean drama in which the father-son conflict plays out on epic dimensions, analyses that tout the play’s “universal” or formal characteristics versus its racial politics (Plum, “Accounting for the Audience,” 5–6). Michael Cooke, Afro-American Literature: The Achievement of Intimacy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 148.

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107. C. K. Doreski, Writing America Black: Race Rhetoric in the Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), xxii. 108. Langston Hughes, Mulatto, in Five Plays by Langston Hughes, ed. Webster Smalley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1963), 18. 109. Eva Saks, “Representing Miscegenation Law,” in Raritan 8 (1988), 53–4. 110. Harry J. Elam, Jr. and I offer a more extended analysis of the welter of racial identifications and attributions occurring in the play in “Blood Debt: Race, Nation and Masculinity in Hughes’s Mulatto” (forthcoming). There is insufficient space here to develop this issue, which is especially complex in part because Jones used white actors for the mulatto characters, again against Hughes’s wishes. 111. All critics quoted in Plum, “Accounting for the Audience,” 12. 112. Cora’s long soliloquy that follows the death of the Colonel explains how she came to be Norwood’s mistress (33). Reinforcing earlier reviews of the poems and story, which emphasize her lack of culpability, Cora’s account of him taking her at age fifteen, calling her a “pretty little piece of flesh . . . Black and sweet” (33), and her mother’s explanation that “it was better than workin’ all your life in de cotton and cane” reminds us of Linda Brent’s point, in Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, that slave women ought not to be judged by the same standards as white women, that the moral economy surrounding sexual virtue assumes a personal sovereignty denied women of color. Thus Cora’s choices must always be understood within the context of institutional constraints preemptively determining the range and possibilities of choice: hence Brent’s choice of white lover – like Cora, who becomes the de facto lady of the house after Norwood’s barren wife dies – is explained as a subversive exercise of agency within a world of severely constricted and already scripted options. 113. There are other forms of work that can be termed collaborative that I list here mostly to give a sense of just how frequently Hughes worked with others and with others’ works: these include the unpublished journals of his West Indian travels co-authored with the illustrator Zell Ingram, and of course the many translations of others’ works he undertook. In 1947, for instance, he translated with Mercer Cook a novel by Jacque Roumain, Masters of the Dew (Reynal and Hitchcock). He also translated works by the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral as well as Cuba Libre by Nicolás Guillén and Gypsy Ballads by Garc´ıa Lorca. Then there is the long list of various songs that Hughes wrote with others: “Swing Time at the Savoy” (Hughes wrote the lyrics and the accomplished Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle composed the music); “Lonely People” (lyrics by Hughes, music by Jean Berger); “Love is like Whiskey” (Hughes lyrics, Roger Segure music); “Selected Songs for High Voice” (Hughes lyrics, musical score by John Musto); “Signifyin’ Natives” (a song that lists, in addition to Hughes, none other than Samuel Delaney, Audre Lorde and Bill Love as co-writers). 114. Quoted in Watson, The Harlem Renaissance, ix. 115. Hans Ostrom, A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 254.


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116. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist,” 1270. 117. Studs Terkel, Race: How Blacks and Whites Think about the American Obsession (New York: New Press, 1992), 17. 118. Terkel quoted in Benjamin DeMott, The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 32, 53, 84. e p i log u e: “co - wo rker s in the kin g d o m o f cu lt u re ” 1. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk, in W. E. B. Du Bois: Writings (New York: The Library of America, 1986), 365. 2. Satya P. Mohanty, Literary Theory and the Claims of History: Postmodernism, Objectivity, Multicultural Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 130. 3. Amiri Baraka, Dutchman, in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, eds. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 1889, 1892. 4. Transcribed from a facsimile of Kara Walker’s handwritten notes in the exhibition catalogue, Kara Walker (Chicago: The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, 1997), 6. 5. Amiri Baraka, “In Memory of Radio,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, 1880. 6. Not accidentally, the kind of anonymity Lula desires is tied to the anonymity essential to what Mary Louise Pratt recognizes as a “very familiar, widespread, and stable form of ‘othering.’” See “Scratches on the Face of the Country; or, What Mr. Barrow Saw in the Land of the Bushman,” in “Race,” Writing, and Difference, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 139. Specifically, Lula tries to render Clay anonymous in her speculation about his name, musing arbitrarily about whether it is Lloyd, Norman, Leonard, one of “those hopeless colored names creeping out of New Jersey,” and assuming she knows how his friends talk, walk, and think, what his family background is, and about what she presumes are Clay’s own artistic and class pretensions remaining entirely uninterested in him, hostile to him, as an individual (Baraka, Dutchman, 1888–90). 7. Irving Howe, “Faulkner and the Negroes,” in The Sound and the Fury: A Norton Critical Edition. ed. David Minter (New York: Norton, 1987), 269–70. 8. William Faulkner, Light in August (New York: Vintage, 1972), 239. 9. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” 364. 10. Benjamin DeMott, The Trouble With Friendship: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998), 4. 11. Chéla Sandoval, “Theorizing White Consciousness for a Post-Empire World: Barthes, Fanon, and the Rhetoric of Love,” in Displacing Whiteness: Essays in Social and Cultural Criticism, ed. Ruth Frankenberg (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997), 90. 12. James Baldwin, “White Man’s Guilt,” in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948–1985 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985), 411.

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13. Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Genealogy, History,” in Language, CounterMemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, ed. Donald F. Bouchard (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 154. Through their engagement across the color-line, the texts put in practice Michel Foucault’s distinction between “genealogy” and “history.” Genealogy, he argues, “must record the singularity of events outside of any monotonous finality; it must seek them out in the most unpromising places, in what we tend to feel is without history – in sentiments, love, conscience, instincts; it must be sensitive to their recurrence, not in order to trace the gradual curve of their evolution, but to isolate the different scenes where they engaged in different roles . . .” (emphasis mine, 199). Genealogy, Foucault elaborates, “rejects the metahistorical deployment of ideal significations and indefinite teleologies. It opposes itself to the search for ‘origins’” (139–49). 14. Giorgio Agamben, Infancy and History: Essays on the Destruction of Experience, trans. Liz Heron (London: Verso, 1993), 91. 15. George Hutchinson, The Harlem Renaissance in Black and White (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 34. 16. Ross Posnock, Color and Culture: Black Writers and the Making of the Modern Intellectual (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000), 12. 17. Posnock concedes that “color-blind ideas are appropriated routinely for conservative political use, [thus] it is easy to distrust the ideal and even regard it as inherently bankrupt.” But he notes that “this reflex can end up perpetuating the very ahistoricism it intends to challenge. For in fact black intellectuals historically have used deracialized discourses as weapons against the status quo of white supremacy” (Posnock, ibid., 12). On this debate, see also Glenn C. Loury, The Anatomy of Racial Inequality (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002).

Index

Aanerud, Rebecca 177 affect and the body 17–19 and race politics 11–12, 15, 144–5 Agamben, Giorgio 150, 190 Ammons, Elizabeth 93, 173, 178 Amram, David 180 Anderson, Quentin 173 Andrews, William 28, 157, 160 Appiah, Kwame Anthony 120, 185

Byrd, William 69, 170 Cable, George Washington 11–12, 48, 79, 89, 153, 173, 176 Cady, Edwin 171, 172 Carby, Hazel 4, 58, 152, 164, 165, 166, 176, 177 Cassedy, James H. 167 Cherewatuk, Karen and Ulrike Wiethaus 98–9, 180 Chesnutt, Charles 18, 154, 159 Cheyfitz, Eric 20, 71, 171 Child, Lydia Maria 13 Chopin, Kate 8, 17, 94, 150, 162 The Awakening 10, 19, 76–93 and history 87–91 imperial(ist) identity 78–9, 91 literary realism 20 quadroon nanny 80–3 race and class 80, 83, 84, 87 racial colonization 87–91 white sexual investment in race 79–86, 92, 178 see also racial desire Comaroff, Jean and John Comaroff 22 Comaroff, John see Jean Comaroff Connell, R. W. 169 Cooke, Michael 137, 187 Cooper, Anna Julia 60, 70, 167, 171, 178 Crapanzano, Vincent 21, 156 Crouch, Stanley 95, 179 Crowley, John 171 Cruse, Harold 179 Cullen, Countee 26, 157 Cunard, Nancy 94, 124

Baker, Houston 166 Baker, Jean H. 32 Baldwin, James 14, 130, 153, 187, 189 Banta, Martha 154, 170, 171 Baraka, Amiri 146–7, 179, 189 Barrett, Lindon 17, 154, 160 Bay, Mia 6, 152 Beard, George M. 60, 164 Beatty, Warren 13 Benjamin, Walter 8, 45, 161 Bennett, Tony 45, 160 Bentley, Nancy 154 Bergman, David 164 Berlant, Lauren 171 Berman, Paul 181 Bernard, Emily 96, 124, 125, 126, 130, 180, 185, 186 Bersani, Leo 115, 184 Berzon, Judith 167 Bethune, Mary McLeod 110 Bisland, Elisabeth 176 Blassingame, John W. 175 Bontemps, Arna 143 Bourdieu, Pierre 11–13, 153 Bourne, Randolph 108, 182 Brasseaux, Carl A. 176 Brody, Jennifer DeVere 165, 167 Brooks, Van Wyck 19 Brown, Gillian 170 Butler, Judith 49, 163

Davidson, Cathy N. and Michael Moon 167 Dean, Sharon 40–2, 160 DeMott, Benjamin 13, 144, 149, 153, 189 Dimock, Wai-chee 88, 173, 174, 176

191

192

Index

Dobson, Joanne 20, 155 Doreski, C. K. 137, 188 Douglas, Ann 113, 121, 179, 183, 186 Douglass, Frederick 30, 37, 152 Dowling, Linda 172 Drinka, George F. 165 DuBois, W. E. B. 63, 109, 116, 117, 149, 150–1, 155, 168, 182, 187, 189 duCille, Ann 93, 155, 156, 178, 179 Duffy, Susan 187 Ehrenreich, Barbara and Deirdre English 165, 167 Elam, Harry Justin, Jr. on Mulatto 188 and ritual representation 22, 156 Elfenbein, Anna Shannon 162, 163, 173, 176, 177, 178 Ellison, Ralph 5, 21, 22, 26, 152, 156, 157, 179 English, Deirdre see Barbara Ehrenreich Faderman, Lillian 163 Fanon, Frantz 13, 153 Faulkner, William 24, 144, 147, 148, 153, 156, 171, 189 see also ritual violence Fellman, Anita Clair and Michael Fellman 165 Fellman, Michael see Anita Clair Fellman Felski, Rita 172 Ferguson, SallyAnn 154 Fiedler, Leslie 147, 153 Fisher, Philip 161 Fleischner, Jennifer 34–6, 160 Foreman, Gabrielle P. 68, 165, 170 Foster, Frances Smith 28–9, 158, 159 Foucault, Michel 169, 190 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth 153, 162, 176 Frankenberg, Ruth 177 Fredrickson, George M. 6, 152 Freud, Sigmund 90, 163 Fried, Michael 44, 160 Gallop, Jane 54, 163 Garza, Hedda 181 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. and Nellie McKay 174, 177, 187, 189 Genovese, Eugene D. 38–9, 47, 160, 161 Giddings, Paula 168 Gilbert, Sandra 77, 173, 174, 176, 178 Gillman, Susan 168 Gilman, Sander L. 61, 82, 115, 116, 167, 174, 175, 176 and Nancy Stepan 75, 167, 172

Gilroy, Paul 120, 184 Girard, René 155 Goode, George Brown 42 Gosling, F. G. 164 Gould, Stephen Jay 174 Gross, Ariela 165 Gubar, Susan 161 Gunning, Sandra 167, 179 Gwin, Minrose C. 153, 162 Hall, Stuart 138 Haller, Robin M. and John S. Haller 165, 167 Haller, John S. see Robin M. Haller Harlem Renaissance 94, 95–6, 113, 122–3, 129, 144, 155 Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins 8, 17, 166 as activist 59–60 and history 150 Iola Leroy 10, 19, 58–75 literary realism 20, 60 Harper, Philip Brian 49, 163 Harris, Trudier 18, 154, 162 Hartman, Saidiya V. 15, 154 Hearn, Lafcadio 89 Hernton, Calvin 90, 153, 176, 177 Hine, Darlene Clark 159 history and desire 3–4, 25, 150 and race 146 historical amnesia 27 historical revenge 24 as white man’s burden 148–9 see also James Baldwin, Ralph Ellison, Frantz Fanon, William Faulkner, Frances E. W. Harper, Elizabeth Keckley, racial desire, Carl Van Vechten homosocial desire 19 hooks, bell 4, 152, 177, 184 Howe, Irving 147, 189 Howells, William Dean 8, 17, 155, 166, 169, 171 as “Demonstrator of the American Girl” 64 and history 150 An Imperative Duty 10, 18, 58–75 and literary realism 20, 59, 60 Paul Laurence Dunbar 59 Winifred Howells 21, 71–4 Huggins, Nathan Irvin 186 Hughes, Langston 6, 8, 17, 19, 95–6, 176 artistic collaborations 142–5 and epistolary strategy 98–9 and history 150

Index and literary realism 20 Martin Jones 102, 181 Mulatto (Broadway play) 11–13, 25, 99, 102, 133–42, 147 see also mulatta/o, patronage, Amy Spingarn, Carl Van Vechten Hurston, Zora Neale 122–3, 142 Hutchinson, George 21, 95, 100, 150, 155, 156, 179, 180, 190 Jacobs, Harriet 30, 188 James, Henry 115, 184 Johnson, Nancy see Catharine Leslie Sanders Jones, Anne Goodwyn 163, 174 Jones, Martin 102, 181 Jordan, June 159 Jordan, Winthrop 173 Kaledin, Eugenia 164 Kaplan, Amy 20, 155, 166, 168, 169 and Donald Pease 168 Keckley, Elizabeth 8, 17, 19, 28–46, 147, 157 Behind The Scenes 8–9 Confederacy 35, 40–2 domestic service 30–3 gender identifications 34, 36 and history 150 and literary realism 20, 29, 31 racial commodities, black and white 30 rhetoric of friendship 39, 46 see also Mary Todd Lincoln Kellner, Bruce 186 King, Grace 8, 17, 47–57, 161 and history 150 and literary realism 20 miscegenating relations 49–50, 54 Monsieur Motte 9–10, 19 romantic discipline 51–3, 56 King, Rodney 13 Kinney, James 170 LaCapra, Dominick 167 Lears, T. J. Jackson 165 Leitz, Robert 171 Lerner, Michael and Cornel West 181 Lewis, David Levering 103, 121, 181, 185 Lincoln, Mary Todd 8, 10, 31 and dress scandal 28 and modes of grief 34 see also Elizabeth Keckley Lincoln, President Abraham see Elizabeth Keckley, Mary Todd Lincoln Lipsitz, George 176

193

literary realism 19–23, 115 racial representation 60 “romance of race” 70–3 see also Kate Chopin, Frances E. W. Harper, William Dean Howells, Langston Hughes, Amy Spingarn, Carl Van Vechten Locke, Alain 108, 111, 182, 183, 186 Lott, Eric 152, 178 Loury, Glen C. 190 Lutz, Tom 167, 168, 172 Mailer, Norman 94, 103, 179 Martin, Nancy 176 Mason, Charlotte Osgood 95, 101, 105, 110, 124, 133, 183 McDowell, Deborah 154, 166, 174 McKay, Claude 96 McKay, Nellie see Henry Louis Gates, Jr. medical discourses 58 clinical color-line 58–9 doctor-patient relations in Harper’s Iola Leroy 11 in Chopin’s The Awakening 76–7 female pathology and race politics 59–62 “mixed blood” hysteric 59–60 practitioners of love 67 racial neurasthenia 61 see also mulatta/o Memmi, Albert 15, 79, 153, 173 Mercer, Kobena 76, 172, 186 Meyerowitz, Jan 143 Michaels, Walter Benn 118, 184 Mitchell, S. Weir 58, 60, 63, 66, 67, 74, 164, 168, 169, 172 Mohanty, Satya P. 146, 150, 189 Moon, Michael see Cathy N. Davidson Morrison, Toni 6, 21, 76, 152, 155, 156, 161, 172, 177, 178 Mossell, N. F. (Mrs.) 159 mulatta/o “mixed race” hysteric see medical discourses and modernity 62, 71–3 as racial Geist 19, 71–3, 74 revision of “tragic mulatta/o” 20, 61, 136 Mullen, Harryette 68 Nash, Roderick 94, 179 Negrin, Llewellyn 160 Nettels, Elsa 166 Nielson, Aldon Lynn 96, 180 Nordloh, David 171 North, Michael 21, 95, 152, 156, 179

194 Olfson, Mark 165 Olney, James 28, 34–6, 37–42, 157 Ostrom, Hans 144, 188 patronage and Hughes’s Mulatto 133–42 Jewish patronage 101–4, 109 see also Amy Spingarn rethinking patron relations 11–12, 94–7 see also Harlem Renaissance, Carl Van Vechten Patterson, Orlando 8, 153 Patton, Sharon F. 179 Pease, Donald see Amy Kaplan Pilcz, Alexander 168 Plum, Jay 136, 187, 188 Poirier, Suzanne 165 Poovey, Mary 154 Posnock, Ross 181, 182, 184, 185, 190 Potter, Eliza 158, 162 Pratt, Mary Louise 81, 174, 189 Pryse, Marjorie see Hortense J. Spillers racial desire and black-white affective relations 6 and history 5, 146 in literature 15, 17, 80 and political desire see Claudia Tate and sartorial objects 37–42 in workplace 6–8 racial hysteria 61 racial neurasthenia see medical discourses Rampersad, Arnold 97, 100, 107, 157, 174, 180, 181, 182, 183, 187 and David Roessel 182 Randall, Ruth Painter 158 Reid-Pharr, Robert 68, 154, 170 Ricks, Sybil Ray 136, 187 ritual violence 23–6 see also William Faulkner, Kara Walker, Richard Wright Roessel, David see Arnold Rampersad Rogin, Michael 116, 184 Rollins, Judith 31, 32, 33, 159 Rosenwald, Paul 143 Ross, Ishbel 158, 160 Ross, Joyce B. 182 Rotundo, Anthony 169 Rubie, Paul 95, 179

Index Saks, Eva 49, 52, 138, 162, 188 Salzman, Jack 181 Samuels, Shirley 156 Sánchez-Eppler, Karen 18, 80, 154, 174 Sanders, Catharine Leslie and Nancy Johnson 187 Sandoval, Chéla 149, 189 Scarry, Elaine 171 Schultz, Elizabeth 161 Sedgwick, Eve K. 19, 155 Sicherman, Barbara 165 Smalley, Webster 188 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll 48, 58, 162, 164, 168, 169 Sollors, Werner 184 Sontag, Susan 165 Sorisio, Carolyn 161 Spillers, Hortense J. 64, 83, 84, 167, 168, 169, 174, 176 and Marjorie Pryse 161 Spingarn, Amy Edward Spingarn 183 and history 150 and literary/artistic realism 20, 114 Honor Tranum 181, 182, 183, 184 Jacob Lawrence 181 Joel Spingarn 103, 104, 107–9, 116, 183 Langston Hughes 8, 11–12, 17, 19, 96–121 poetry and art 112–20, 183, 184 see also patronage Starr, Paul 167 Stein, Gertrude 95, 96 Stein, Judith 184 Steiner, George 175 Stepan, Nancy 174 see also Sander Gilman Stewart, Jeffrey C. 186 Stewart, Maria 159 Stielow, Frederick 89, 176 Strasser, Mark 162 Sundquist, Eric 170, 171 Tate, Claudia 68, 70, 154, 170 political desire 15, 16 Taylor, Helen 53, 162, 163, 176 Terkel, Studs 144, 189 Todorov, Tzvetan 184 Topsy-Turvy doll 5, 23, 152, 156 Toth, Emily 176, 178 “true womanhood” 4 racial politics of 89, 165 see also Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Barbara Welter

Index Updike, Robin 157 Valéry, Paul 42 Van Deusen 108, 182 Van Vechten, Carl (“Carlo”) 8, 17, 110 and history 150 and literary realism 20 James Weldon Johnson Collection 11–12, 15, 124–32, 180 Langston Hughes 96–101, 121–34 Wald, Gayle 114, 184 Wald, Priscilla 154 Walker, Kara 1–4, 23, 25, 151, 152, 157, 189 Warren, Kenneth W. 21, 115, 156, 166, 184 Washington, Booker T. 6, 11–12, 31, 46, 153, 159 Washington, Mary Helen 171 Watson, Stephen 97, 100, 180, 188 Weiner, Philip P. 165 Weisbord, Robert G. and Arthur Stein 181 and Richard Kazarian 181 Welter, Barbara 165

West, Cornel see Michael Lerner whiteness as contingent racial process 2–3, 76, 91–3, 177 Whitney, William Dwight 170 Wiecek, William M. see Harold Wyman Wiethaus, Ulrike see Karen Cherewatuk Williamson, Joel 167 Wittenberg, Judith Bryant 157 Wolff, Cynthia Griffin 173, 175 Wonham, Henry 172 Woodward, C. Vann 153 Wright, Richard 24, 96, 143, 144 Wyman, Harold H. and William M. Wiecek 161 Yaeger, Patricia S. 175 Yellin, Jean Fagan 153, 167 Zangwill, Israel 154

195

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Multilingual America: Language and the Making of American Literature (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

Voices of Persuasion (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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In Respect to Egotism: Studies in American Romantic Writing (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

The Culture and Commerce of the American Short Story (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture)

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