Antebellum literature imposed the distortions of moralistic controversy and made the Negro a wax-figure of the marketplace: postbellum literature retaliated with the condescending reactions of sentiment and caricature and made the Negro a genre stereotype. Sustained, serious or deep study of Negro life and character has thus been entirely below the horizon of our national art. Only gradually through the dull purgatory of the Age of Discussion has Negro life eventually issued forth to an Age of Expression.

—William Stanley Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature” (1925)

Noted Harlem Renaissance poet and critic William Stanley Braithwaite traced the changing face of the Negro in American literature, deploring the condescending portraits authorized by the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) and reinforced by Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation (1880). According to Braithwaite, Stowe sentimentalizes, George Washington Cable caricatures, and Thomas Dixon libels the Negro—none providing a realistic representation of black life. While he regards the characterization of Uncle Remus as “something approaching true portraiture,” he finds Harris only partly responsible for the portrait, adjudging the Negro race “its own artist, lacking only in its illiteracy the power to record its speech.”¹ Braithwaite predicts, “In the perspective of time and fair judgment the credit will be divided, and Joel Chandler Harris regarded as a sort of providentially provided amanuensis for preserving the folk tales and legends of a race” (35).

Braithwaite's critique addresses a concern shared by several of his contemporaries, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke. Considered among the intellectual leaders of the “New Negro Movement,” these men saw the positive representation of the Negro as critical to the social and political elevation of the race. They, as well as numerous writers of the Harlem Renaissance, concerned themselves with the appropriate depiction of Negro life in American literature. The suitability of folk culture, particularly the use of dialect, continued to be a contentious issue during the Harlem Renaissance, having been debated at the turn of the century with regard to the dialect poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar.

Audiences that delighted in local color literature, popular during the 1870s and 1880s, appreciated the authenticity of Dunbar's folksy characters and their colorful dialect. His work drew the attention of prominent and influential white critic William Dean Howells, who wrote the introduction to Dunbar's bestselling collection of poems, Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), and who celebrated Dunbar as a gifted Negro writer. Although Dunbar won acclaim from white and Negro audiences alike, several Negro critics charged that he pandered to whites and perpetuated degrading stereotypes of the Negro popularized in the “plantation tradition” of literature.

While the accusation does not take into consideration the pressure Dunbar faced from white publishers, who would produce only his dialect poetry, it does raise significant questions regarding the political and social implications of incorporating folklore into Negro literature. Equating folk culture and its sign, Negro dialect, with backwardness or ignorance, the Negro intelligentsia of the Harlem Renaissance found folklore a hindrance in their campaign to promulgate the intellectual achievements of the race. Even those who did not find dialect degrading considered it limiting and encouraged Negro writers to move beyond its restrictions. James Weldon Johnson, whose God's Trombones is considered a masterpiece of Negro sermonic folk poetry, describes dialect as “an instrument with but two full stops, humor and pathos” and determines it inadequate to express the full range of Negro life.²

Not all Negro critics and writers of the Harlem Renaissance eschewed the folk and folk culture, however. Writers such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and Sterling Brown saw Negro folk culture not as symbolic of the Negro's image problem, but rather as essential to Negro life and literature. Brown, for instance, embraces folk culture, celebrates folk speech, and defends the use of dialect:

There is nothing “degraded” about dialect. Dialectical peculiarities are universal. There is something about Negro dialect, in the idiom, the turn of the phrase, the music of the vowels and consonants that is worth treasuring. Are we to descend to the level of the lady who wanted “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” metamorphosed into “Descend, welcome vehicle, approaching for the purpose of conveying me to my residence?”³

Further, Brown argues that the qualities which the Harlem Renaissance intelligentsia hoped to prove were Negro characteristics were to be found in the “lowest” as well as in the elite: “astute heroism … heartbreaking courage … nobility … a shrewd, philosophical irony” (78). “And all of these qualities we need, just now, to see in our group,” he concludes (78).

The politically charged questions of whether to, who can, and how best to represent authentic Negro folk and folk culture can be traced throughout African-American literary history. As Braithwaite indicates, and Negro folk forms evidence, African-American orature has always been functional, responding to the social and political exigencies of the day. Thus, the answers to the aforementioned questions have varied depending on the Negro's political needs at the time the query was posed. Charles Waddell Chesnutt employed folk cultural traditions as he wrote during the late 1800s to counter the stereotypical portrayals of Negroes in the plantation literature produced following the Civil War. Brown and Hurston collected folklore during the 1930s and worked for the Federal Writers' Project to preserve the stories of ordinary folk and to record the folk wisdom that enabled them to survive slavery and reconstruction.

During the 1950s Ralph Ellison sought to broaden conceptions of “American reality” by investigating the social and political instrumentality of the Negro stereotype and mining the psychological state of those who create and perpetuate distorted depictions of black life. Ellison challenges American literature's “counterfeit” and anti-Negro portraits by embracing the bedrock of black life, its folk culture, in his own portrayals. Ellison writes, “A people must define itself, and minorities have the responsibility of having their ideals and images recognized as part of the composite image which is that of the still forming American people.”⁴

Contemporary author and Nobel laureate Toni Morrison extends Ellison's consideration of Negro representation in American literature, examining the instrumentality of a black presence in fiction. She too charges African-American writers to define themselves and to challenge the “master narrative” of Western history and literature. Defining her fiction as “literary archaeology,” Morrison engages in the postcolonial reclamation of her African and African-American folk heritage in order to pass on the wisdom and tools necessary for black folks to confirm their place in the future.

Similarly, Paule Marshall reconnects the African Diaspora in her fiction in the hopes of recapturing what she calls the “sweetness” of life and what Hurston terms “the boiled-down juice of human living.” Marshall considers separation from one's folk culture tantamount to spiritual death. She advocates a diligence not only in preserving but also in living one's culture. A consideration of the uses of folk culture by these representative writers attests to the critical influence of folklore on the African-American literary tradition.

HARRIS, CHESNUTT, AND THE PLANTATION TRADITION

The portrait of the slave and the sketch of plantation existence—the central concerns of the slave narrative—continued to factor significantly in the postbellum literature of writers such as Thomas Nelson Page, Joel Chandler Harris, and Charles Waddell Chesnutt. While the fictionalized “Old Plantation” of Page and Harris sought to counter the slave-narrative's negative portrayal of southern life, Chesnutt's fiction served as a counterpoint to the idyllic Eden depicted in the plantation school of literature. The abolition of slavery and the devastation of southern planter life resulting from the Civil War initiated an identity crisis for the South. Defeated and disparaged by northern powers, the South struggled to regain self-determination and self-definition. Out of the nostalgic urge to preserve a positive image of the Old South emerged a plantation mythology of a benign, if not beneficial, system of slavery, replete with benevolent masters and blissful darkies.

Eric J. Sundquist, in his analysis of Chesnutt's fiction, argues that plantation literature served as more than a paean to the past. He likens the public's interest in the waning slave culture to the nation's ostensible regret regarding the vanishing “noble savage.” He finds the nostalgia in both cases “a duplicitous act that frequently combined idealization and subjugation.”⁵ In reference to literary representations as well as minstrel shows and other public exhibitions of Negroes and Negro life, Sundquist describes the dual purpose of the plantation myth:

The recreated plantation was a perfect topos for lamenting the loss of legitimate white mastery but also for demonstrating that, though legal slavery was gone, the forms and hierarchies of a clearly defined racial order, with its consequent economic privileges, could still be maintained. Plantation literature and culture did not simply demand a febrile return to the past; it was the deceptive screen for keeping contemporary African Americans in bondage to the whole white race, as Albion Tourgée had said in his brief for Homer Plessy.”⁶

Sundquist describes a pageant staged in 1894 in New York and Boston and billed as an “ethnographic exhibit” of “genuine” black plantation life (288). The romantic living pastoral, titled Black America, portrayed happy slaves singing spirituals, eating watermelon, and participating in cakewalks. Sundquist notes the complex impact of such pageants as they employed large numbers of African Americans and preserved elements of African and African-American folk culture, while at the same time they perpetuated stereotypes and propaganda geared toward curtailing civil rights for Negroes.

The plantation school of literature employed the stereotypes of minstrelsy and served the same purposes as the plantation pageants Sundquist describes. Following the publication of Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, southern writers scrambled to rebut the negative depictions of plantation life and to reinforce the image of the “venerable darky” represented by Uncle Tom. A spate of pro-slavery novels was released to bolster the threatened institution. Life at the South, or Uncle Tom's Cabin As It Is, Being Narratives, Scenes, Incidents in the Real “Life of the Lowly” (1852) makes its purpose clear through its title. The author, William L. G. Smith, sought to correct the perceptions of the South that Stowe had perpetuated. In the novel, Uncle Tom, with little provocation, escapes to the North only to find that freedom cannot measure up to his loving and secure plantation home. A contented slave delivers the same message in an anonymously authored novel, The Yankee Slave-Dealer, or An Abolitionist Down South, A Tale for the Times, By a Texan (1860). The slave refuses an abolitionist's offer of assistance to escape bondage and cites the Bible in explaining that divine provenance placed him in his condition.

The plantation literature of the Reconstruction era continues the themes of the contented slave and the disappointed freedman. Both antebellum and postbellum plantation novels included several stock characters, among them the contented slave, the “wretched freedman,” the tragic mulatto, and the brute or “bad nigger.”⁷ The main stock character was the contented slave or “venerable darky” depicted as a dignified, loyal, good-natured family retainer whose child-like devotion to his master overshadowed any notions of freedom. The old “Uncle” loved, nurtured, and protected his young master and miss, regaling them with old stories and songs, and desiring nothing more than the comfort and protection of his plantation home.

Thomas Nelson Page was a primary proponent of the mythical South of the plantation tradition. Page, born on a plantation in 1853 and having witnessed its loss during the Civil War, was motivated to recapture his romantic childhood in his fiction. In so doing, his re-creation of an Edenic South allowed him to assuage southern guilt for any ill effects of slavery and to pay homage to his kin who sacrificed home and honor in a heroic effort to protect their way of life. If southern writers could depict slavery as a benign or beneficial institution, they could support the political ideology that justified the continued control of Negro freedmen as a natural and humane effort to aid a childlike and helpless race. Representing the contented slave or “happy darky” was instrumental to this effort. An often-quoted passage in Page's short story, “Marse Chan,” from In Ole Virginia (1889) demonstrates the extent of the contented slave's fidelity. Sam accompanies his master into war and reminisces about the wonderful slavery days:

Dem wuz good old times, marster—de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac'! Niggers didn't hed nothin 't all to do—jes' hed to 'ten to de feedin' an' cleanin' de hosses, an' doin' what de marster tell 'em to do; an' when dey wuz sick, dey had things song 'em out de house, an' de same doctor come to see 'em whar ten' to de white folks when dey wuz po'ly. D'yar warn' no trouble nor nothin.⁸

Readers of Page's plantation literature accepted his authority as a member of the genteel southern society whose close relationship with Negroes afforded readers an intimate knowledge of Negro behaviors and values. Page's rendition of Negro dialect added authenticity that audiences of local-color literature valued as evidence of realistic portrayals of the race. Thus they could believe Page's description of the plantation experience and accept that slaves indeed were contented with their lot in life.

JOEL CHANDLER HARRIS

Although Joel Chandler Harris wished to be celebrated simply as an “editor and compiler” of Negro folktales in his Uncle Remus stories, his fiction and nonfiction works evince the themes and goals of plantation literature and might be read as propaganda as well. His selection of tales and the frame for his Uncle Remus stories reflect his personal and political view that the “realities” of slavery, “under the best and happiest conditions, possess a romantic beauty all their own.”⁹ It is the “happiest conditions” and “romantic beauty” of plantation life that Harris chooses to portray in his Uncle Remus tales.

Unlike Page, Harris did not experience the idyllic childhood of plantation life. Born illegitimately in 1848 in Putnam County, Georgia, to Mary Harris, and abandoned by his father, an Irish laborer, Harris grew up in poverty in Eatonton, Georgia. Although he asserts he was unaware of his impoverished condition due to the “kindly interest” of his neighbors, Harris learned early to appreciate the differences between his own existence and the genteel life. Joseph Addison Turner, editor and publisher of Countryman, apprenticed Harris as a typesetter for the periodical, and introduced him to plantation living. The thirteen-year-old Harris was deeply affected by the expansive Turnwold plantation and Turner's life as the gentleman of the estate.

Described as a “shocking redhead,” self-conscious about his appearance and ostracized because of his bastard status, Harris was isolated and insecure as a child. He secreted himself in Turner's extensive library, fostering a love of literature, and found acceptance among the slaves on the plantation. Harris learned Negro folktales and trained his ear for dialect by listening to the stories of George Terrell and an elderly slave whom he identifies only as “Old Harbert.” Harris lost his beloved adopted home in 1864 when Federal troops pillaged Turnwold during the Civil War. Turner's resources dwindled, and publication of Countryman ceased.

Over the next decade, Harris worked in various positions in the publishing industry in Georgia and Louisiana. He was a typesetter for the Macon Telegraph; a staff writer in New Orleans, and later for the Monroe Advertiser in Forsyth, Georgia; an associate editor for the Savannah Morning News; and a writer for the Atlanta Constitution. It was in Savannah and Atlanta that Harris began developing the sketches that would become his Uncle Remus tales. At the Savannah Morning News, he wrote a daily column, “Affairs in Georgia,” in which he sharpened his skills as a humorist and local colorist. By 1877, writing for the Constitution, Harris began printing Negro songs, dialect stories, and animal tales in his column. Uncle Remus first appeared in 1879, and the following year, Harris collected his stories to publish his first book, Uncle Remus, His Songs and His Sayings: Folklore of the Old Plantation. Several volumes of Uncle Remus tales followed. In addition to his folklore collections, Harris wrote several children's books; novels and novellas; short story collections; and nonfiction works.

While the folktales Harris recounts are generally faithful to the oral stories from which they come, he selected the stories and created the narrative frame. Old Uncle Remus—who is, according to Harris, a composite of three or four Negroes he knew—tells the folk stories to his young, white male charge. Deviating little from the stereotypical portrayals of the “venerable darky” of plantation fiction, Harris's Uncle Remus is steadfast and affectionate. He dotes on and nurtures the seven-year-old boy just as he had done with his mother, Miss Sally. In Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories Told after Dark (1889), Harris pictures Uncle Remus's existence much as Page's Sam describes plantation life. Uncle Remus does “no great amount of work” and is well respected by his fellow slaves because he is “not without influence with his master and mistress.”¹⁰ Thus with a measure of power and privilege, his concerns are insignificant and his home life happy. Harris advanced such propaganda because he viewed the institution of slavery as a “university in which millions of savages served an apprenticeship to religion and civilization, and out of which they graduated into American citizens.”¹¹ Under ideal conditions, Harris emphasized, both master and slave were devoted to one another and benefited mutually from the institution. Remus both illustrated and articulated Harris's utopian view.

Numerous critics have debated the purpose and impact of the fictional Uncle Remus. Believing that he had a “fair knowledge of the Negro character and a long familiarity with the manifold peculiarities of the Negro mind and temperament,”¹² Harris asserted that he had created a faithful portrait of the Negro in Uncle Remus and captured “everything, or nearly everything of importance in the oral literature of the Negroes of the Southern states” (xi). Responses to Harris's assertions have reflected diametrically opposed perspectives. Some critics take exception to Harris's presumption, noting that his “knowledge” of the Negro was grounded in the white supremacist notion that Negroes were simple, inferior beings totally transparent to their white superiors. Consequently, his characterization of Negroes relied on stereotype rather than on unbiased observations. Critic Bernard Wolfe takes this view.

Harris insisted, however, that his portraits were accurate. His comfort with and knowledge of Negroes allowed him to disarm his informants, making it possible for him to shape an accurate portrait of Negro characters. Some critics have accepted Harris's explanation and appreciate his portrayal of the Negro. Such critics argue that even if not perfect, Harris's depictions take a positive step in humanizing the Negro's image.

In her 1965 introduction to Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings, Stella Brewer Brookes suggests, as does Braithwaite, that Uncle Remus rises above stereotype and approaches a realistic portrayal of the Negro. According to Brookes, Harris humanizes Uncle Remus by attending to the physical details of his appearance, frailties, and personal predilections.¹³ The fact that Remus wears glasses or that he has a bit of a temper makes him real to the reader, Brookes suggests.

Educator and author Darwin T. Turner, in his ambivalent defense of Harris, “Daddy Joel and His Old-Time Darkies,” agrees somewhat with Brookes. While he acknowledges Harris's tendency to “misconstrue the characters of Negroes,” Turner determines that Harris acted honorably, humanizing Negroes not only in his literary representations of them but also with regard to their social and political treatment.¹⁴ Harris defended the character of the Negro, supported education for blacks, and advocated equal protection under the law. Turner concludes that “in respect for Uncle Remus, the judgment about his creator should be favorable: A Caucasian, born in Georgia and reared during the Civil War and Reconstruction, Harris could not escape from the attitudes instilled by his culture. Believing in the black man and wanting to help him, Harris, like Kipling, felt superior to the black man” (127).

Other critics do not accept as readily as does Turner the thesis that Harris simply mirrored the racist and paternalistic attitudes of his time. Among the critics who charge that Harris uses his characterization of the Negro to advance his political and personal agendas are Opal J. Moore, Robert Bone, and Bernard Wolfe.

Moore considers the narrative frame of the Uncle Remus tales as politically calculated to relieve the nation of the psychic burden of slavery by perpetuating the mythology of a benevolent institution. Although Robert Bone recognizes the politics inherit in Harris's position, he sees him as less politically motivated than Moore describes him. Like Turner, Bone is of a divided mind with regard to the effect of Harris's Uncle Remus tales. He acknowledges Harris as “an active propagandist in the cause of white supremacy” and “a leading proponent of the plantation myth.”¹⁵ However, Bone essentially dismisses Uncle Remus as “a figment of the white imagination,” and concludes that Joel Chandler Harris was “a complicated man, full of neurotic conflicts and self-deceiving ways” (131). Centrally, Bone argues that Harris demonstrated “schizoid tendencies” because he was a member of the white dominant class but had an “emotional attachment to a pariah class” (136). This “fissure in his personality” allowed Harris to present Negro folktales with integrity, simultaneously employing Uncle Remus “in the white man's game of Reconstruction politics” (136). Bone suggests that attention to the Uncle Remus tales should focus not on the problematic narrative frame but on the subversive nature of the folktales themselves. He approves Bernard Wolfe's assertion that the stories “constitute a covert assault on white power” (134). Bone writes, “Brer Rabbit, according to Wolfe, is a projection of the slave's festering hatred of his master, a means of giving vent to his aggressive impulses” (134).

According to Bone, Harris was a sensitive and intuitive artist whose feelings of guilt resulted in his unexpurgated representation of the emotionally and morally “pathological” world of the slave (138). In his assessment of Harris's divided mind, Bone fails to recognize his own. As Harris depicts the “happy darky” of the plantation myth, Bone characterizes Negroes in the manner of Thomas Dixon's The Clansman and The Leopard's Spots—as violent, deceitful, and dangerous. Both depictions are stock characterizations in plantation literature used to contrast the Negro under the civilizing hand of slavery with the unregenerate freedman. By assigning innocence or ignorance to Harris while regarding the trickster figure and the Negro slaves who employ him as malevolent, Bone is perpetuating stereotypes as well.

Bone concludes that African Americans “owe a considerable debt” to the author for the “preservation of their folk heritage.” He does not consider the possibility that Harris might “owe a considerable debt” to Negroes for exploiting their culture. Bone holds a one-sided view in that he paternalizes the Negro just as Harris does. Bone focuses on the sentimental, utopian myth of slavery that Harris supported in his narrative frame, rather than on the realities of the institution. Harris explains that his work is necessary because Negroes could not preserve their own folklore: “they have had few opportunities to become acquainted with that wonderful collection of tales which their ancestors told in the kitchens and cabins of the Old Plantation,” he writes.¹⁶ Forgetting that slaves had retained and passed on folktales from Africa for more than two centuries, and failing to recognize that the oral tradition persisted even as the tales were being collected in written form, Bone agrees that Harris's work was requisite for the preservation of Negro folk culture. Essentially sharing Harris's paternalistic view of the Negro, Bone writes that Harris saved Negro folktales “from possible oblivion” and determines that it was only because of Harris “that a major figure in the pantheon of American folk heroes saw the light of day” (130).

Wolfe handles Harris less charitably than does Bone. Describing Uncle Remus as the “prototype of the Negro grinner-giver,” Wolfe writes that when “Remus grins, Harris is pulling the strings; when he ‘gives’ his folk stories, he is the ventriloquist's dummy on Harris's knee.”¹⁷ However, Wolfe does not attribute Harris's depiction of Negro characteristics under the guise of the malevolent rabbit to political motives, as Moore suggests, nor to benevolence, as Bone finds. While he suggests that Harris's view reflects the South's schizophrenia with regard to the Negro, he sees the depiction as resulting primarily from ignorance. He asserts that Harris unconsciously denudes the trickster tales of power by attributing them to an African origin. As such, the tales would have little relevance to the institution of slavery and would not be threatening to white Americans. They could be told, as Harris suggests, simply to amuse.

Wolfe argues erroneously that the malevolent rabbit is more likely rooted in European folklore than in Africa. He specifically cites the Renard fables, and hypothesizes that slaves gathered the tales surreptitiously, overhearing white parents telling the stories to their children. Slaves would then sublimate their aggressions into the actions of the trickster figure. Wolfe explains that “the slave, through his anthropomorphic Rabbit stories, seems to be hinting that even the frailest and most humble of ‘animals’ can let fly with the most blood-thirsty aggressions” (529). Similarly he suggests that the humble Uncle Remus is not the benevolent and “venerable darky” for which Harris mistakes him. Rather, he is a subversive menace who frightens his young charge with violent animal fables and conjure stories that leave him quaking in his bed each night (535).

Harris's personal writings suggest that his motives in presenting his Uncle Remus tales were neither as baneful as Moore suggests nor as innocent—morally or intellectually—as Turner, Bone, and Wolfe imply. Harris truly valued Negro folktales even as he used Uncle Remus as a mouthpiece for promoting the South's supremacist ideology. More important than his motives for collecting the tales and creating Uncle Remus, however, is the impact his folklore had on African-American literature. Although Harris profited politically and professionally from the exploitation of Negro folk culture, he also performed a valuable service in preserving and fostering an interest in folk materials. Additionally, a consideration of Harris's narrative techniques in framing the folktales allows significant insight into the political and social functions of folk culture. Such a study discloses the fact that folklore can serve as both an implement of oppression and a weapon of resistance.

CHARLES WADDELL CHESNUTT

Charles Waddell Chesnutt clearly recognized the functionality of Negro folklore. He consciously used Negro folk culture not only to gain literary success but also as a means of countering or revising the characterizations of Negroes in the plantation tradition. Defining his fiction as a “literature of necessity,” Chesnutt directly articulates his intent to “write for a purpose, a high holy purpose,” the moral elevation of whites.¹⁸

Chesnutt was born in 1858 to Andrew J. and Ann Maria Chesnutt in Cleveland, Ohio, and grew up during Reconstruction. His parents were free Negroes who left Fayetteville to escape the hostilities free blacks faced in North Carolina prior to the Civil War. Returning with his family to Fayetteville in 1866, Chesnutt attended the Freedmen's Bureau's Howard School, a normal school established for African Americans in 1865. After ending his formal education, Chesnutt worked as a teacher in Charlotte, North Carolina, and then as the assistant principal and later the principal of Howard School. In 1883 he moved to New York and took jobs as a Wall Street stenographer and journalist. After moving back to Cleveland in 1884, and while serving as a railway clerk and stenographer for Judge Samuel E. Williamson, Chesnutt studied law. He passed the Ohio State bar exam in 1887 and worked as a legal stenographer before opening his own court reporting business in 1890.

Despite his professional achievements, Chesnutt sought success as a writer, having moved to New York to “get employment in some literary avocation.”¹⁹ He began his literary career in the late 1880s, during a period which Sundquist describes as “an age of black caricature on stage and in print.”²⁰ Chesnutt was aware of the popularity of minstrelsy and dialect literature and considered local color fiction a logical choice for his entry into the literary world. He writes in his journal in 1880: “I have thought, during the great revival which is going on, that a collection of the ballads or hymns which colored people sing with such fervor, might be acceptable, if only as a curiosity, to people, literary people, in the North.”²¹

Chesnutt contributed short stories to relatively minor periodicals; however, his literary reputation did not begin to develop until the 1887 publication of “The Goophered Grapevine” in Atlantic Monthly. “Po Sandy” followed in 1888 in Atlantic Monthly, and “Dave's Neckliss” in 1889. That same year, Overland Monthly published “The Conjurer's Revenge.”

Chesnutt's conjure stories were well received by the public and critics alike. Narrated by John, a white northern capitalist, the stories center on Uncle Julius McAdoo, an ex-slave who uses his knowledge of Negro folk culture and white attitudes primarily for personal gain. Chesnutt trades upon the plantation tradition to gain a white audience, but subtly subverts the stereotypical characterizations of the genre. Uncle Julius McAdoo regales the white couple, John and his wife Annie, with tales of the old plantation, in faithfully rendered dialect; however, he exhibits neither the deference nor the contentment of Harris's Uncle Remus. Instead, he disarms the couple with his manner and stories of “befo' de wah,” gaining Annie's ear and sympathies and John's acquiescence in order to negotiate a space of self-determination within their unequal relationship. For example, in Chesnutt's most anthologized story, “The Goophered Grapevine,” McAdoo talks himself into a position as John and Annie's coachman in order to maintain the profit he takes from the vineyard the couple is considering purchasing. McAdoo employs the tools of his folk heritage in the ever-present power struggle between Negroes and whites in the days of southern Reconstruction.

By 1890 Chesnutt thought that his initial success might offer him the freedom to move away from the plantation tales and the restrictions of dialect. In a letter to his literary mentor George Washington Cable, Chesnutt laments, “I notice that all of the many Negroes … whose virtues have been given to the world in the magazine press recently, have been blacks, full-blooded, and their chief virtues have been their dog-like fidelity to their old master, for whom they have been willing to sacrifice almost life itself. Such characters exist. … But I can't write about those people, or rather I won't write about them.”²²

Moving away from the plantation tradition, Chesnutt wrote his first novel, The House behind the Cedars. The question of “passing” was the focus of the novel. Rena Walden, the protagonist of the novel, is the daughter of a white man and his Negro mistress. A man of means, the father takes care of his mulatto family, providing them a home “behind the cedars,” where he visits his mistress. When Rena reaches adulthood and prepares to leave her home, she worries about life in the unprotected world as a Negro. Her brother encourages her to adopt his strategy and “pass,” live as a white person in a community unfamiliar with her past. Rena is successful for some time but her secret is discovered as she prepares to marry a white man. Shunned, Rena returns to her Negro roots and becomes a schoolteacher and advocate for racial uplift. Her former fiancé and the principal of the school charge that she is not chaste. In a conclusion common for the tragic mulatto, the distraught Rena dies.

Chesnutt's novel of passing raised complex questions from both perspectives across the racial divide. While mulattos realized more favorable treatment than dark-skinned Negroes, the issue often caused resentment among Negroes. Passing was viewed negatively by most Negroes because it was seen as abandoning the race. Whites, of course, were concerned about the phenomenon as well. During Reconstruction, white southerners became extremely concerned with the problem of miscegenation (race mixing) between white women and Negro men. They feared that the high death toll during the Civil War and the resulting shortage of white males might contribute to the problem. They expected an increase in mulatto children and increasingly light-skinned progeny with each passing generation. The purity of the white race depended upon strict social control. The possibility of passing heightened these concerns. As such, a novel on the subject was not highly sought at the time, though several would be published during the Harlem Renaissance.

After several rejections, Chesnutt withdrew the novel from the literary market and wrote for nearly a decade with little success. He called the period “the silent years.”²³ Finally, Walter Hines Page, editor of Atlantic Monthly, encouraged Chesnutt to submit a collection of his short stories for consideration as a book. Chesnutt submitted twenty stories to Page; however, Houghton Mifflin, the parent company of Atlantic Monthly, rejected the collection. Page then suggested that the publisher might reconsider if Chesnutt would submit his conjure stories exclusively. In a letter to Chesnutt, Page writes, “I cannot help feeling that that would succeed. All the readers who have read your stories agree on this—that ‘The Goophered Grapevine’ and ‘Po' Sandy,’ and the one or two others that have the same original quality that these show, are stories that are sure to live.”²⁴ Chesnutt complied, and Houghton Mifflin published The Conjure Woman in 1899. Like Dunbar, Chesnutt faced the economic reality that white publishers had the power to control his literary career, and as such, the themes and style of his literature. He recognized that his political novels would not be published. Consequently, if he desired to be published, he must, for the moment, adhere to the popular plantation tradition.

In 1899 Chesnutt published a second collection of short stories, The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line, and Frederick Douglass, a biography. In 1900 Houghton Mifflin, after initially rejecting it, published his first novel, The House behind the Cedars. After publishing a second novel, The Marrow of Tradition, in 1901, Chesnutt hoped his literary career had been successfully established, and he closed his stenography business to devote his time to writing. None of his subsequent works garnered the acclaim of The Conjure Woman, however, as critics and the public deemed his racial themes too controversial. Eventually forced back into his stenography business, in 1905 Chesnutt published his last novel, The Colonel's Dream.

THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE AND THE FEDERAL WRITERS' PROJECT: BROWN, HURSTON, AND THE PROLETARIAN AESTHETIC

When Alain Locke established the philosophy of the New Negro movement during the 1920s, he dismissed existing representations of the folk as old-fashioned and defamatory—outmoded stereotypes of the plantation tradition. He writes in The New Negro:

The day of “aunties,” “uncles,” and “mammies” is gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on, and even the “Colonel” and “George” play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fiction, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.²⁵

The “facts” Locke invites his reader to face is that pre-renaissance portraits of the Negro had little literary value to the New Negro, as they represented the “mere external view” and were externally imposed as well (xxv). The “truest social portraiture” of the Negro, he notes, is a product of self-expression. “So far as he is culturally articulate,” Locke writes, “we shall let the Negro speak for himself” (xxv). Negroes had looked South in search of themselves too long, he insisted, and should turn to face the east, toward the nascent Negro culture and the rebirth of “folk-expression.” Pre-renaissance works carried the burdens, the humiliations, of southern politics, and could not serve the needs of the future. Houston A. Baker writes that during the Harlem Renaissance, “to a great extent, the folk were left behind as black Phi Beta Kappas, Guggenheim recipients, and cosmopolitan travelers became the spokesmen of black Americans.”²⁶ Baker explains that “some of the foremost leaders of the renaissance were determined that a new image of the black American as a man of culture, cleanliness, intellect, and overall respectability should result from the efforts of the twenties” (141).

Locke's The New Negro has been hailed as the definitive text of the Harlem Renaissance because the anthology brings together the views of the most noted intellectuals and artists of the period. However, the unified face of The New Negro masks the deep philosophical disagreement of some of its contributors regarding the place of folk culture in the emerging black aesthetic. Numerous issues—including gender, militancy, and erudition—separated the intellectuals and artists of the Harlem Renaissance, and the distinction between high and low culture was among its most divisive concerns. The older generation considered Negro folk culture as a quaint tradition that provided a Negro distinctiveness, but should be divested of its stereotypical qualities in order to be elevated to the level of art in the service of uplifting the race. The younger generation saw the celebration and preservation of folk culture as acknowledging the human equality of Negroes. They believed that Negro culture did not need to be uplifted but rather should be accepted. True racial and psychological health lay in rejecting bourgeois values and embracing the beliefs and strategies that Negro folk had employed in their self-preservation efforts throughout slavery and Reconstruction.

Du Bois took the uplift position. He declares in his 1926 essay “Criteria of Negro Art” that “all Art is propaganda and ever must be.”²⁷ As such, he exposes the propagandistic nature of plantation literature and charges Negro writers with the high purpose of using their art as he does: “for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy” (328). In his critical works, Du Bois celebrates Negro folk culture and advocates its honest depiction; however, he takes a very conservative stance with regard to the literary representation of black life. Du Bois's reviews of Negro fiction of the period contrasts the views he espouses in his criticism. For example, in “Negro Art,” he supports an open and honest representation of Negro life:

With a vast wealth of human material about us, our own writers and artists fear to paint the truth lest they criticize their own and be in turn criticized for it. They fail to see the Eternal Beauty that shines through all Truth, and try to portray a world of stilted artificial black folk such as never were on land or sea.

(310)

In contrast, Du Bois's review of Claude McKay's Home to Harlem suggests that too much “Truth” results not in “Eternal Beauty,” but in “filth.” He accuses the young writer of catering to the “prurient demand on the part of white folk for a portrayal in Negroes of that utter licentiousness which conventional civilization holds white folks from enjoying.” Further, he charges, McKay “used every art and emphasis to paint drunkenness, fighting, lascivious sexual promiscuity and utter absence of restraint in as bold and as bright colors as he can.” In the same review, Du Bois praises Nella Larsen for depicting a Negro character “on whom ‘race’ sits negligibly and Life is always first and its wandering path is but darkened, not obliterated by the shadow of the Veil.” By suggesting that the best Negro writing eschews the “dirty” aspects of life and treats the “Veil” of blackness as a minor obstacle in Negro existence, Du Bois is asserting a sanitized view of black folk. Contrary to the view espoused in his criticism, Du Bois is demanding that Negro writers depict Negro life and character in as positive a manner as possible.

Du Bois writes of the “lowly” folk in his chapter “Of the Meaning of Progress” in The Souls of Black Folk (1903). He describes the Burke family whose children were among those he taught “in the hills of Tennessee” when he was a Fisk student:

They used to have a certain magnificent barbarism about them that I liked. They were never vulgar, never immoral, but rather rough and primitive, with an unconventionality that spent itself in loud guffaws, slaps on the back, and naps in the corner.

(648)

Du Bois displays an affectionate primitivism towards the Burkes, but he finds no role for them in Negro progress. Rather he believes that only the “trained Negro leaders of character and intelligence, men of skill, men of light and leading, college-bred men, black captains of industry, and missionaries of culture” could uplift the race (685, 695). Du Bois sees that the “better classes” of Negro segregate themselves from the lower masses who, without an appropriate example, sink into sensual vulgarity or angry militancy (711). Neither characteristic is fit for Negro literature, Du Bois's reviews suggest, and it is on this basis that he criticizes McKay's novel.

Locke's attitude toward the Negro peasant and the militant is not unlike that of Du Bois. He values the lowly folk life as the primordial ore from which the younger generation was to mine “a lusty vigorous realism” to invigorate their art. He juxtaposes this purpose against that of the elder generation of writers who “felt art must fight social battles and compensate social wrongs.”²⁸ According to Locke, those goals were no longer necessary. Rather, the younger generation of writers needed to “dig deep into the racy peasant undersoil of the race life” only for its “vital originality of substance” (51). Locke concludes, “The newer motive, then, in being racial is to be so purely for the sake of art. … In flavor of language, flow of phrase, accent of rhythm in prose, verse and music, color and tone of imagery, idiom and timbre of emotion and symbolism, it is the ambition and promise of Negro artists to make a distinctive contribution” (51). Although Locke espouses a commitment to the “pure art” of folk culture, he essentially supports sanitizing black life in order to raise “the folk gift to the altitudes of art” (51).

Certainly the younger generation of writers resisted the circumscription of their art by either the elder statesmen or the elite intelligentsia of the movement. The folk poets of the Harlem Renaissance, James Langston Hughes and Sterling A. Brown, saw Negro folk culture as indispensable to a black aesthetic and incorporated the life and language of the “lowly” folk in their work. Likewise, Hurston celebrated Negro folk culture with no apologies and was viewed as a rather controversial figure during the Harlem Renaissance. Establishing a “proletarian” aesthetic in their work, Hughes, Brown, and Hurston chose working-class or rural folk as their subjects, included the spiritual beliefs and communal values in their characterizations, and gave voice to their subjects in Negro dialect. Hughes's often-quoted manifesto “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain” declared independence from bourgeois values. In this 1926 essay, published in the Nation, he writes:

We younger Negro artists … intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear and shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn't matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, their displeasure doesn't matter either.²⁹

In an attempt to provide a vehicle for the unencumbered expression of the younger artist, Hughes, Hurston, Richard Nugent, and Wallace Thurman decided to start a radical publication which they titled Fire! They intended to celebrate those aspects of Negro life deemed unworthy of attention by the elite propagandists of the movement: “jazz, paganism, blues, androgyny, unassimilated black beauty, free-form verse, homosexuality.”³⁰ Financial difficulties and a fire that destroyed most of the first issue shut down Fire! before it could make a substantial impact on the movement. However, the values advocated by the magazine's founders were reflected in their fiction and poetry, offering a direct glimpse of both urban working-class and rural folk existence.

While the Harlem Renaissance or New Negro movement was invaluable in authorizing Negro artists to claim control of the Negro image, it did little to preserve folk culture, as folklore suffered a diminished status during the period. However, those artists who fought to value Negro folk culture during the movement continued their efforts, making important contributions to the preservation of folklore during the 1930s. Sterling Brown and Zora Neale Hurston were particularly important to preservation efforts. Both traveled to the South to collect folklore, and viewed the Works Progress Administration (WPA) as potentially valuable in the preservation of Negro culture. Each worked for the WPA for about eighteen months, allowing each an opportunity to record the oral histories and lore of unprecedented numbers of African Americans. Baker notes that the efforts of WPA writers during the 1930s were “in large measure responsible for the continuance and growth of the black American literary tradition” that was threatened by the end of the Harlem Renaissance.³¹

President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the WPA on 6 May 1935. The program, an extensive work-relief effort, was developed to reduce the country's devastating unemployment by creating jobs for America's laborers and artists. The WPA was criticized because it provided employment opportunities for professionals as well as manual laborers; however, no division of the project was more controversial than the arts and culture program. Although a relatively small segment of the WPA, the Federal Writers' Project (FWP) drew criticism from conservatives concerned about the use of tax dollars on frivolous projects. However, the FWP made contributions toward the preservation of American culture unparalleled by any other WPA division. The most noted product of the FWP was the American Guide series, colorful geographic and cultural guidebooks that provided information about the histories and sites of interest in each of the forty-eight states. Active between 1935 and 1943, the WPA produced more than three hundred publications and employed 8.5 million Americans.³²

In addition to its pioneering work in documenting American landmarks and history, the WPA was crucially important in preserving American folk culture. The writers of the WPA—among them, Hurston, Saul Bellow, Arna Bontemps, Claude McKay, Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, Margaret Walker, Conrad Aiken, Nelson Algren, and John Cheever—interviewed countless Americans of all walks of life to preserve their stories. David A. Taylor, writing for the Smithsonian magazine, estimates that the Library of Congress housed nearly 10,000 unpublished interviews that sat in obscurity for more than 30 years before they finally were published in the 1970s.³³

Deeply rooted in the lives of impoverished peoples, the work of the WPA brought some of America's most promising writers in contact with the country's folk spirit, and enriched the literature they would write. Arguably Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man was informed by his WPA interview with Leo Gurley who told him the story of a man called “Sweet the Monkey” who could make himself invisible.³⁴ Richard Wright's Uncle Tom's Children won Story Magazine's contest for the best fiction by a FWP writer. Taylor reports that Margaret Walker consciously changed the focus of her work, having experienced the “political atmosphere” of the project.³⁵ Walker explains that her writing changed from “very romantic and sentimental” to “a very realistic and factual type of poetry” (108). The works of Zora Neale Hurston and Sterling A. Brown were informed by their WPA experiences as well. Hurston was writing Moses, Man of the Mountain as she collected folklore in Florida. While Brown's most critically acclaimed book of poetry, Southern Road, was published in 1932, his critical studies of the importance of folk culture emerged from his experience as editor of Negro affairs for the project.

STERLING ALLEN BROWN

An educator, poet, critic, and anthologist, Brown followed in his father's footsteps in his commitment to teaching. He was born into a middle-class family 1 May 1901 in Washington, DC, to Adelaide A. Brown and Sterling N. Brown, a writer and professor of theology and ministry at Howard University. Brown attended Lucretia Mott Elementary School and Dunbar High School, and won a scholarship to the prestigious Williams College. He received his A.B. from Williams College in 1922, graduating Phi Beta Kappa, and earned a master's degree at Harvard in 1923. He soon embarked on a teaching career that culminated with forty years on the faculty of Howard University.

Brown did not produce an extensive body of poetry and, though well respected as one of the most promising young poets of the Harlem Renaissance, he was not viewed as a significant contributor to the African-American literary tradition until late in his career. Southern Road (1932), his first book of poetry, was well received and was acknowledged as rivaling Hughes's The Weary Blues as the epitome of folk poetry. However, despite Southern Road's success, Brown was unable to interest publishers in his poetic works and published only two volumes of poetry in his career.

Although interest in his poetry during the late 1960s finally brought Brown the appreciation he deserved as a poet, he has been most valued as a “pioneer cultural critic.”³⁶ He has been credited with “anticipating the trends in recent literary theory that have interconnected anthropology, sociology, folklore, linguistics, race politics, and religion to the study of literature” (390). Additionally, recent reconsideration of his poetry has brought Brown praise as “the authentic poetic voice of black America.”³⁷

It is not surprising that Brown is lauded for perfecting in his poetry those characteristics he advocates in his criticism. As a poet and critic, Brown countered both the contented-slave caricature of the plantation tradition and the idealized Negro of the Harlem Renaissance intelligentsia. Instead, he celebrated authentic folk characters and culture in his poetry and, through his criticism, was determined to establish folklore as an essential element of the African-American literary tradition. He used folk speech, depicted the confrontation and transcendence of life's struggles, and celebrated the folk heroes of Negro culture. He incorporated blues and folk songs in his poetry. He brought to the page the voices and experiences of southern blacks, and celebrated their strength and endurance.

“Southern Road,” for example, carries the theme and rhythm of the blues and reflects Brown's folk aesthetic. The narrator, at work on the chain gang, tells the story of his misfortune. He has killed a man, received a life sentence, and left his daughter to survive as a prostitute, and his wife alone in the hospital to deliver another child. The narrator acknowledges his responsibility for his predicament and confronts the consequences of his actions—a life of hard labor. Like its antecedent, the work song, “Southern Blues” uses sound and repetition to establish the work pace of the narrator:

Swing dat hammer—hunh—
Steady, bo';
Swing dat hammer—hunh—
Steady, bo';
Ain't no rush, bebby,
Long ways to go.

The swing and strike of the hammer urges the narrator's grunt and emphasizes the dual nature of the hard times illustrated in the poem. The narrator juxtaposes the hard time he is doing on the chain gang against the hard times his family must now survive.

In this poem, Brown draws upon a central motif of the blues—travel, and escape from the difficulties of the human condition. The image of the southern road evokes feelings similar to those elicited by the sound of a train whistle or the sight of railroad tracks. The use of the image in the title of this poem is both ironic and realistic. Ironically, the speaker's life sentence and the reality of chains prevent him from taking up the southern road to freedom. Further, it is a truism that the southern road often leads to bondage for the Negro.

Brown's subject matter illustrates the complex realities of Negro life. He does not make his character innocent; however, he renders no judgment regarding the murder the narrator commits. Brown simply submits the vignette to the reader. He brings the reader into the mind of the character to witness his resignation and his ability to endure. Although a tragic figure, the narrator in “Southern Road” demonstrates the fortitude of the folk.

In addition to examining the personal struggles of Negro life, Brown also takes up social concerns in his poetry. His “Southern Cop” tells of a white police officer shooting a black man, assuming that he is a criminal because he runs. He wryly comments on the lack of regard for Negro life:

Let us condone Ty Kindricks
If we cannot decorate.
When he found what the Negro was running for,
It was all too late;
And all we can say for the Negro
It was unfortunate.
Let us pity Ty Kendricks
He has been through enough,
Standing there, his big gun smoking,
Rabbit-scared, alone,
Having to hear the wenches wail
And the dying Negro moan.

Although published in 1932, the poem still resonates in the present. Some critics suggest that Brown's examination of controversial social issues contributed to his difficulties obtaining a publisher.

After several failed attempts to find a publisher for his second collection of poems, No Hiding Place, Brown directed his energies to literary criticism. The mission of his first critical works, The Negro in American Fiction (1937) and Negro Poetry and Drama (1937), is similar to that of Chesnutt's fiction as Brown sought to preserve what he saw as a declining culture and to correct the misrepresentation of Negro folk experience in white racist fiction. Brown defined “folk” as rural, unlettered people whose geographic isolation preserved their oral culture and communal values. He believed that urbanization and the propagandistic motives of the Negro elite were eroding folk tradition. To slow this erosion, Brown critiqued white-racist and black-sanitized representations of Negro life and encouraged black artists to create, reclaim, and value authentic depictions. He also undertook the preservation of Negro literature, working with Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee to compile an anthology, The Negro Caravan (1941), considered one of the most important contributions to African-American literary history.

In his critical works, Brown surveys the portrayals of Negro characters in white fiction, delineating several stereotypical characterizations and exposing their purposes. “Negro Character As Seen by White Authors” critiques the pro-slavery fiction of Irwin Russell and Thomas Nelson Page as well as the plantation literature of Joel Chandler Harris and George Washington Cable. Brown also examines Thomas Dixon's propaganda, noting Hollywood's role in fixing the “stereotype in the mass-mind.”³⁸

Brown does not uniformly dismiss characterizations of Negroes by white authors, however. He acknowledges “attempts at realization” by Eugene O'Neill and Du Bose Heyward, but sees that too often such attempts fall short of success. Brown concludes that “the exploration of Negro life and character rather than its exploitation must come from Negro authors themselves. This, of course, runs counter to the American conviction that the Southern white man knows the Negro best, and can best interpret him” (182).

Despite his encouragement of Negro writers, Brown does not uniformly praise their characterizations of folk culture either. He criticized Hurston's Mules and Men as idealized, and implies that Their Eyes Were Watching God is unbalanced because the people in the all-black town “escape the worst pressures of class and caste” (292). He does, however, appreciate Hurston's “yarns” as well as her facility with folk speech. Brown celebrates this quality in Langston Hughes's work as well, but praises above all Hughes's “sympathetic identification” with poor folk. Brown commends Hughes's Not Without Laughter as exemplifying those qualities important in an unbiased representation of black life:

Our author does not exploit either local color, or race. He has selected an interesting family and has told us candidly, unembitteredly, poetically of their joy lightened and sorrow laden life. Langston Hughes presents all of this without apology. Tolerant, humane, and wise in the ways of mortals, he has revealed beauty where too many of us, dazzled by false lights, are unable to see it. He has shown us again, in this third book of his—what he has insisted all along, with quiet courage:

Beautiful, also, is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

(280)

Brown's commitment to Negro folk culture was reflected in his approach to his role as editor of Negro affairs for the Federal Writers' Project. Appointed to the position in 1936, he managed the collection and cataloging of all of the materials associated with African Americans. Brown defined the “express purpose” of the office as “helping to present the race adequately and without bias,”³⁹ and actively pursued that end. He insisted on hiring black writers for the project and fought to ensure Negro representation in the American Guide series. Several guides focusing on Negro life were planned for the series; however, The Negro in Virginia was the only Negro-centered guide to be published during the period. The Florida Negro, on which Hurston worked, was not published until 1994.

Brown saw the primary value of the FWP as encouraging a critical look at the American past. Further, the project engendered a new respect for Negro folklore. White artists and anthropologists no longer approached Negro folk culture as a curiosity, and embarrassed blacks no longer avoided the subject out of the desire to forget their past and assimilate into white society. In “The New Negro in Literature,” Brown laments that at the start of the Harlem Renaissance, Negro writers took the urban scene as their subject matter and “left the South to white writers.”⁴⁰ They did not reclaim the territory until the work of the WPA re-ignited an interest in the Negro's past. He writes that the FWP “is a valuable ‘folk history’” that has helped to “slay the ghosts of the plantation tradition” (201).

ZORA NEALE HURSTON

Hurston's commitment to Negro folk culture never wavered during the Harlem Renaissance. Alice Walker, who rescued Hurston's work from obscurity, proposes that the circumstances of her birth engendered in Hurston a racial health unfathomed by most of her contemporaries in the Harlem Renaissance and the Works Progress Administration. Having developed her self-perception among Negro people who enjoyed self-determination and self-definition, Hurston claimed an unencumbered love of her people, and consequently a freedom from racial prejudice. Her worldview granted her an affectionate look at southern Negro culture, and fostered in her the drive to defend and preserve it.

Hurston was born 7 January. The year of her birth has been variously reported as 1891, 1898, 1899, and 1901. In his carefully researched biography of Hurston, Robert E. Hemenway prefers the earlier date.⁴¹ She was born to John and Lucy Hurston in Eatonville, Florida, the first incorporated all-black town in America. Her father was a preacher and carpenter, and served three terms as mayor of Eatonville. Her mother was a seamstress. One of eight children, Hurston's early years were idyllic. Her parents loved, protected, and provided well for their children. Hurston reports in her autobiography Dust Tracks on a Road that her mother cultivated Hurston's spirit as well. Lucy Hurston encouraged her daughter to “jump at de sun” even if she never reached it.

Her mother passed away when Hurston was nine years of age. Her father soon remarried, and Hurston did not develop a positive relationship with her stepmother. She boarded with various relatives and was shipped off to a school in Jacksonville, Florida, for a while before she joined a Gilbert and Sullivan traveling theatrical group when she was sixteen. After leaving the show in Baltimore, Hurston encountered the first of several patrons who would support her educational and professional endeavors. A woman for whom she worked as a maid facilitated her enrollment at Morgan Academy in Baltimore. Following graduation in 1918, she attended Howard University, and although bright, worked only sporadically at her studies. Her experiences at Howard excited her love of literature, and there she developed the desire to become a writer. She was invited to join the prestigious Stylus literary club, formed by a respected English professor, Alain Locke.

The Stylus club published Hurston's first fiction, and Locke was impressed with her talent. He recommended her to Charles S. Johnson, the editor of the Urban Leagues literary journal, Opportunity. Johnson was committed to developing the talents of promising young Negroes and organized a literary contest for the journal. Hurston submitted two works, a short story titled “Spunk” and a play, Color Struck, to the contest. Both pieces were selected for awards, and Hurston was invited to the Opportunity awards dinner in the spring of 1925.

The dinner provided extraordinary patronage opportunities for Hurston, as well as for the other aspiring artists who attended. There Hurston met Fannie Hurst, author of Imitation of Life, a sentimental story of the color line. Hurst hired Hurston as her secretary and introduced her to other influential members of New York and Harlem society. Through Hurst, Hurston met her next mentor, Annie Nathan Meyer, one of the founders of Barnard College. Meyer made it possible for Hurston to attend Barnard on a scholarship. She enrolled in fall 1925 and began a study of anthropology under Franz Boas.

Though enthralled by Harlem society, Hurston never abandoned her folk heritage. She told raucous stories of life in Eatonville, often becoming the center of attention at social engagements. As the protégé of Johnson and Locke, both members of the conservative arm of the movement, Hurston was included among the younger generation of artists promoted in The New Negro, and encouraged to adopt their conservative agenda.

As Hemenway notes, however, Hurston attempted “to reject bourgeois values and identify with the folk” (27). Like Brown and McKay, Hurston championed a proletarian aesthetic and advocated a “‘natural’ art that did not emulate a bourgeois world” an art “that was true to one's instincts” (44). Hurston therefore pictured the “lowly” folk in her fiction. She carefully considered the nature of their folk speech in order to render it faithfully. She recognized that it was not simply fragmented words represented by peculiar spelling. Hurston set out her observations in an essay on the characteristics of Negro speech and employed those perceptions in her fiction. Further, Hurston attempted to present the interior life of the folk in order to demonstrate their shared humanity with whites.

Hurston's study of anthropology with Boas afforded her an opportunity to examine critically the source of the “natural art” she advocated. Boas found Hurston intelligent and enthusiastic, and he hoped that her charisma and skin color would gain her access to a quality of Negro folklore that white collectors had been denied. She undertook her first field assignment in 1926 but found that she was no more successful than whites at penetrating the barriers that her informants erected against outsiders. Hurston's sense of herself as a Barnard-educated scholar impeded her ability to approach her informants as equals. Consequently, her initial trip was not successful.

After Locke introduced Hurston to a new patron, Charlotte van der Veer Quick Mason, she undertook several, more successful trips into the South. As a condition of her patronage, Mason insisted that Hurston simply collect folklore during her trips but not commit anything to writing until her fieldwork was completed. Chafing under Mason's control, Hurston accepted her patronage from December 1927 until March 1931. During that time, she traveled throughout the South as well as in the Bahamas, collecting the lore that would become Mules and Men.

Hurston found herself without a patron and out of work in the spring of 1931 and decided to return to college for graduate study. Hemenway reports that the Rosenwald Foundation first offered then withdrew a scholarship for her doctoral study, resulting in Hurston's “final break with the formal study of folklore as an academic subject” (212). Hurston was not committed to her studies, and welcomed the freedom.

Awaiting the publication of Mules and Men, she sought work in the theater before taking a position in fall 1935 as a drama coach for the WPA's Federal Theatre Project. Theater had always been for Hurston an important vehicle for presenting Negro folk culture because of the shared focus on oratory and performance. Hurston left the theater project in March of the following year because she received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study Obeah, a West Indian occult practice. Her two-year study resulted in Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (1938). The study was not well received and is considered Hurston's least effective work. Some critics charge that Hurston's Barnard training had readjusted the lens through which she viewed black life, encouraging her to assume a professional distance from her folk origins. Consequently, she mixed a “political analysis” with her folkloric approach and produced what Hemenway sees as unsubstantiated observations from an anthropological tourist (248-9).

If her Barnard education had taken Hurston away from her Florida folk roots, her FWP experience immersed her once again in the realities of Negro existence. Hurston joined the Florida unit of the Federal Writers' Project after submitting her Tell My Horse manuscript to the publisher. She worked for the project for nearly eighteen months on The Florida Negro—a state guide book patterned after The Negro in Virginia, and part of the American Guide series. In 1999 Pamela Bordelon discovered and compiled Hurston's FWP writings, and reports that all of Hurston's contributions were excised from The Florida Negro. Bordelon's collection, Go Gator and Muddy the Water: Writings by Zora Neale Hurston from the Federal Writers' Project, presents the previously unpublished works and includes a biographical essay that illuminates Hurston's WPA experience.

Hurston's work with the Florida Negro unit of the Federal Writer's Project gave new direction to her folklore study. Her fieldwork in Jamaica and Haiti brought her in contact with a relatively isolated folk group that had retained distinct practices from their African heritage. Hurston's exploration into Caribbean spiritual beliefs allowed her to see the religious practices of Florida's Negroes in a new light. Hurston's essay “The Sanctified Church” reflects the growth of her understanding of African retentions. She notes the call and response of the religious service, describing the manner in which the priest calls out and the congregation responds, “bearing him up” (95). Hurston quotes her informant, Mama Jane: “What ever point he come out on, honey, you bear him up on it” (96). Further, Hurston notes other African retentions, including shouts and spirit possession. “So the congregation is restored to its primitive altars under the new name of Christ,” Hurston concludes (96).

The Federal Theatre Project and the writers' project also provided the folklorist an opportunity to draw connections between Florida Negro folk culture and African music and dance. Near the close of the WPA, the Florida office planned a cultural program to share their findings with the public. Hurston was asked to contribute a theatrical production and developed “The Fire Dance: An African Grotesque” for the WPA National Exhibition of Skills. The dance highlighted ring dances, drumming, and songs that clearly reflected an African heritage. Bordelon notes that the performance was taken from a 1932 off-Broadway production that Hurston wrote, The Great Day. Hurston had discovered the music and dance during her West Indian fieldwork. The WPA simply offered her a new audience to which she could demonstrate the Negro's connection to an African past.

While she was working in Haiti, Hurston wrote in seven weeks, time her most critically acclaimed novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Two more novels and her autobiography followed: Moses, Man of the Mountain (1939), Dust Tracks on a Road (1942), and Seraph on the Suwanee (1948). None, however, were as well received as Their Eyes Were Watching God. Her waning career was virtually destroyed by a false morals charge in September 1948.⁴² Although all charges were dismissed in March 1949, Hurston never fully recovered from the blow. She published several essays in various magazines and journals, but died in poverty and obscurity in 1960. Her works might never have gained serious critical attention if not for Alice Walker's diligent efforts to revive Hurston's reputation.

ELLISON'S BLACK AMERICAN AESTHETIC

According to Bordelon, the Works Progress Administration was a source of shame for Hurston who was self-conscious about living “on the dole” during the Great Depression. Ralph Ellison also joined the relief project but expresses no embarrassment with regard to his stint with the WPA. In a 1982 interview with John Hersey, Ellison describes the experience:

When I got into the research, I realized I was dealing with American history. … I collected kid's rhymes and game songs and so on, but I'd take the opportunity to question old people and get them to tell me stories. It was a rich harvest. It was just tremendous. And it fitted right into some of the things I was reading. By this time I was rereading Mark Twain, and I'd started reading Henry James.⁴³

The enthusiasm evident in Ellison's desire to learn about the past is reflective of his approach to African-American folk culture. His vision of connecting folk culture to the literary works of American “masters” also reflects the value he placed on folk tradition and the direction in which he would take African-American literature. Ellison actualizes the ideals to which Locke and Du Bois gave lip service during the New Negro movement. He mines black folk culture and imbues his writing with a folk spirit that foregrounds a black aesthetic in the fiction but locates it squarely in the American literary tradition.

In his essay “Remembering Richard Wright,” Ellison evokes an axiom from Heraclitus, “Geography is fate,” to explain the worldview revealed in Wright's fiction. He contrasts his Oklahoman childhood with Wright's southern upbringing, and notes the implications of growing up in a state with a history of chattel slavery:

Both of us were descendants of slaves, but since my civic, geographical, and political circumstances were different from those of Mississippi, Wright and I were united by our connection with a past condition of servitude, and divided by geography and a difference of experience based thereupon.⁴⁴

What drew Ellison to Wright's work was its spirit of resistance. Ellison notes that Oklahomans “fought back” (193), thus he identified with Wright's attempts to throw off the servile attitude expected of the descendants of slaves, particularly those in former slave states. The difference in worldview to which Ellison alludes, however, arises out of the authors' differing approaches to resistance. Ellison found that embracing the wisdom of his folk roots was a form of resistance that offered a catharsis. He saw that Wright's resistance did not provide for a transcendent moment that restores one for renewed resistance. Ellison chooses elements of folk culture to demonstrate what Wright missed. In so doing, he demonstrates what he values from folk culture as well as what functions he believes that folk ways serve:

For in my terms, Wright failed to grasp the function of artistically induced catharsis—which suggests that he failed also to understand the Afro-American custom of shouting in church (a form of ritual catharsis), or its power to cleanse the mind and redeem and rededicate the individual to forms of ideal action.

(195)

Ellison's childhood in Oklahoma, like Hurston's Eatonville experience, freed him from shame regarding his heritage. It gave him a healthy regard for Negro folk life that allowed him to recognize its unique place within American culture and to use it to secure his place in society.

Ralph Waldo Ellison was born 1 March 1914 in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, to Ida and Lewis Ellison. His family initially was comfortable but struggled after his father's death in 1917. His parents, despite limited funds, were well read. A construction worker and independent businessman, his father loved literature, naming his son after the famous essayist, Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ellison recalls his mother, a maid and political activist, sharing her interest in “prenatal culture.”⁴⁵ His parents' broad interests, and a progressive music program in school, kindled in Ellison a love of literature and music. He took formal music lessons and studied music theory at Douglass High School, and fed his hunger for literature when the Negro minister of the town “invaded” the library and opened its doors to the Negro community (155).

Oklahoma City had a “rich oral literature,” as well, Ellison recalls (157). The observant youth picked up the Negro idiom; customs and values; spiritual beliefs; and tall tales in “the churches, the schoolyards, the barbershops, the cotton-picking camps; places where folklore and gossip thrived” (157). The folk culture of his community embedded itself in Ellison's unconscious and emerged years later to shape his literary aesthetic. “Writers in their formative period absorb into their consciousness much that has no special value until much later,” notes Ellison (157).

A trumpet player in high school, Ellison attended Tuskeegee Institute between 1933 and 1936 with the intent of becoming a musician and composer. He recalls in “Hidden Name and Complex Fate” that he encountered T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land at Tuskeegee, and notes, “although I was then unaware of it, [this discovery of Eliot's poem] was the real transition to writing” (159). In 1936, short of funds for his fourth year at Tuskeegee, Ellison decided to find a job in New York, where he thought he could earn enough money to return to Alabama to complete his degree program. Ellison never returned to Tuskeegee and within the year gave up his dreams of becoming a musician.

On his first day in New York,⁴⁶ Ellison met Alain Locke and Langston Hughes, who introduced him to Richard Wright. Wright inspired Ellison to write, and encouraged him to read Henry James, James Joyce, and Feodor Dostoevski. Ellison attempted a short story, “Hymie's Bull,” for New Challenge, a Communist-Party sponsored literary journal for which Wright served as editor. Although the story was not published, Ellison was hooked on becoming a writer and decided to stay in New York. However, his mother's passing in February 1937 took Ellison away from the city, and he began to write seriously during his months of grieving in Dayton, Ohio.

Ellison returned to New York in 1938 and worked for the Living Lore Unit of the Federal Writers' Project. He conducted interviews and researched folk culture for the FWP for four years and deepened his appreciation of Negro folk speech and values. Responsible for work on the volume Negroes in New York, Ellison recorded conversations with ordinary Negroes, listening not only to their stories but also to the language in which they spoke. Lionel C. Bascom notes in his collections of recovered writings from the FWP that Ellison used the experience to sharpen his depiction of Negro idiom. Ellison remembers, “I tried to use my ear for dialogue to give an impression of just how people sounded. I developed a technique of transcribing that captured the idiom rather than trying to convey the dialect through misspellings.”⁴⁷

Ellison's FWP experience influenced not only the style but also the themes and political perspectives of his literature. The writers with whom he associated, particularly Langston Hughes and Richard Wright, were affiliated with left-wing politics and introduced Ellison to the Communist Party. Wright had served as the secretary of the John Reed Club while living in Chicago, and Hughes was a member of the American Writers' Congress, a left-wing literary group. Ellison never became a member of the Communist Party or any other radical group; however, between 1939 and 1944, he contributed short stories and essays to several radical journals, including New Masses, Direction, and New Challenge. Ellison asserts that he rejected “social realism” and “didn't think too much of the so-called proletarian fiction,”⁴⁸ yet his fiction evidences many of the values associated with the school of thought: class consciousness, interracial working-class unity, the possibility of activism among the masses, and the revolutionary potential of literature. Ellison separated completely from leftist organizations in 1944, citing their betrayal of Negro people by supporting President Franklin D. Roosevelt's segregated army.

In 1943 Ellison joined the merchant marine in order to contribute to the war effort. While at sea, he received a Rosenwald Fellowship and attempted his first novel. From the writing, he salvaged the short story “Flying Home,” which incorporates the literary values Ellison used in his longer fiction. “Flying Home” is about a Negro aviator whose plane crashes in Alabama. An elderly Negro comforts the downed flyer as they wait for a doctor, telling him a folktale about a black angel kicked out of heaven for flying too fast. Like the stories that Julius McAdoo tells in Chesnutt's fiction, the old man's tale is meant to instruct both the listener and the reader about freeing one's self from the constraints of racism. The story recalls the flying African tales as well, tying the reader and the story's listener to a Negro folk heritage.

In 1945, following his stint in the merchant marines, Ellison began Invisible Man, the novel that would secure his reputation as one of the most important literary figures of the twentieth century. Published in 1952, Invisible Man won the National Book Award in 1953 and was named in a 1965 New York Herald Tribune Book Week poll as the most distinguished postwar novel published in America. Ellison describes it as “a novel about innocence and human error, a struggle through illusion to reality.”⁴⁹ The unnamed protagonist searches for his identity, failing to attain self-definition because of “his unquestioning willingness to do what is required of him by others as a way to success,” Ellison explains (177).

Although Invisible Man debuted to staggering praise, Ellison was reproached by a number of critics for not fulfilling their expectations for a Negro novelist of the period. Probably the most noted critique came from Irving Howe in his 1963 Dissent essay “Black Boys and Native Sons.” Howe deems Wright an authentic Negro writer, hailing him the “archetypal” and “true black boy,” and the “Spiritual father” of Ellison and James Baldwin. Howe rebukes Ellison for presenting a novel apparently free from the “ideological and emotional penalties suffered by Negroes in this country,” thus failing up to the example set by his “literary ancestor.” In choosing to reject Wright's “clenched militancy,” Ellison and Baldwin also failed in their responsibilities as Negro writers, Howe suggests.

African-American critics of the Black Arts Movement shared Howe's concerns regarding Ellison's political stance. Ellison was accused of being an “Uncle Tom” for being an integrationist. At a 1969 lecture at Oberlin College, a student complained to Ellison that Invisible Man “doesn't mean anything” because he was “shooting down Ras the Destroyer, a rebel leader of black people.”⁵⁰ Henry Louis Gates Jr. explains that Wright “was elected godfather of the Black Arts Movement” because Native Son's Bigger Thomas “cuts off a white girl's head and stuffs her in a furnace.”⁵¹ Consequently, Ellison's brand of protest proved too mild for the movement.

Ironically, Ellison's political position came closer to that of the Black Arts Movement than the disillusioned students suspected. Ellison saw “no dichotomy between art and protest” but thought that too often “books by Negro writers are addressed to white audiences.”⁵² In Ellison's view, protesting to white readers to “plead the Negro's humanity” is a waste of time—a “false issue” because Negro humanity is a reality (171). Rather, Negro writers should determine what aspects of that humanity are valuable. Ellison suggests that Negro writers should look to folklore because it “embodies those values by which the group lives and dies” (171). Yet he does not wish to restrict Negro folk life to a useless provincialism. With regard to Negro folklore, which he calls “an especially courageous expression,” Ellison concludes:

We can view it narrowly as something exotic, folksy or “low-down,” or we may identify ourselves with it and recognize it as an important segment of the larger American experience—not lying at the bottom of it, but intertwined, diffused in its very texture.

(172)

Ellison's style was to intertwine folklore in his text. He uses it not simply as an ornament or symbol, but also as a formal element in the fiction to move his plot forward. Folklore becomes functional for both the character and the author.

MORRISON'S POSTCOLONIAL RECLAMATION

It might be argued that Nobel laureate Toni Morrison takes Ellison's literary argument to its logical conclusion in her fiction. In his interview with Alfred Chester and Vilma Howard, Ellison responds to a charge of provincialism that “The universal in the novel … is reached only through the depiction of the specific man in a specific circumstance” (172). He believed that in representing specific experience, writers reveal human situations in which anyone could recognize the shared humanity of the reader, the writer, and the represented. Morrison dispenses with the pursuit of “the universal” altogether, acknowledging that readers recognize as universal only that which conforms to their own worldview.

As Ellison accepts the humanity of the Negro as an inarguable reality, Morrison views the universality of human experience as indisputable. Rather than representing black experience with which white readers can identify in order to evoke recognition of universality, Morrison chooses to make her fiction “irrevocably black.” She privileges Negro life, folk culture, and values in her fiction and reclaims the African heritage from which they are derived. As such, she demands acknowledgement of a world that might not mirror the reader's. She challenges the “disallowing” of difference and asserts that all experience is vital to American culture.

Ellison argues that “If the Negro, or any other writer, is going to do what is expected of him, he's lost the battle before he takes the field. I suspect that all the agony that goes into writing is borne precisely because the writer longs for acceptance—but it must be acceptance on his own terms.”⁵³ Similarly, Morrison asserts that she must represent black experience on her own terms and demands that it be assessed on the basis of the worldview out of which she writes. She explains that in embracing black folk culture and experience, she shares it with the world and claims the world as her own:

I fell in love with myself. I reclaimed myself and the world—a real revelation. I named it. I described it. I listed it. I identified it. I recreated it. And having done that, at least, then the books belonged in the world.

Morrison's fiction demonstrates that it is through sharing specific experience across difference that a connection can be made.

Morrison's demand for self-definition was instilled in her as a child. Wahneema H. Lubiano writes that Morrison “was nurtured by her parents' insistence on narrating their own experiences, by her education, and by her own recognition of her connections to her ancestors.”⁵⁴ Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford 18 February 1931 in Lorain, Ohio, to George and Ramah Wofford. Her father was variously employed in the small steel mill town as a welder, in road construction, and as a shipyard worker. In her 1976 essay “A Slow Walk of Trees (As Grandmother Would Say), Hopeless (As Grandfather Would Say),” Morrison remembers a close-knit family in which she spent a great deal of time with her parents and grandparents. The essay addresses her family's views on race relations and demonstrates the importance of these issues to Morrison from an early age.

Morrison attended Lorain High School, then Howard University. She earned a B.A. from Howard in 1953 and an M.A. from Cornell University in 1955. At Cornell, she wrote her master's thesis on alienation in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, examining the sanctity of each human being that should be inviolate but is not. This theme resonated with Morrison as it recurs in most of her fiction.

An educator, editor, author, and critic, Morrison began her teaching career at Texas Southern University in 1955. From there she went to Howard University from 1957 to 1964. She became senior editor at Random House publishers in New York from 1965 until 1985, supporting the literary careers of other black writers, including Toni Cade Bambara, Angela Davis, and Gayle Jones. Morrison returned to teaching in 1971, and subsequently taught at the State University of New York at Purchase (1971-72), Yale University (1976-77), the State University of New York at Albany (1984-89), Bard College (1986-88), and since 1989 at Princeton University, where she is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council of the Humanities. She also was the Massey lecturer at Harvard University in 1990.

Morrison began writing her first novel, The Bluest Eye, during the modern Civil Rights Movement. Intrigued by one of the rallying cries of the movement, “Black Is Beautiful,” Morrison wanted to consider the impact of externally imposed standards of beauty and the denial of self-love on the psyche of a little black girl. The novel, initially rejected for publication several times, was published in 1969. Her second novel, Sula, was published in 1973, and was nominated for a National Book Award the following year. Sula received high praise for its portrayal of a woman who refuses to conform to society's demands. Critic Sara Blackburn, however, charges that Morrison is too talented a writer to limit her work to “black provincial American life.”⁵⁵

It was not until the publication of Song of Solomon in 1977 that Morrison began to consider herself a writer. The novel won the National Book Critics Circle Award and was named a Book-of-the-Month selection, the first work by a black writer to receive that honor since Wright's Native Son in 1940.

Morrison's novel Tar Baby was published in 1981. She moved from depicting the small communities she addressed in her previous novels to considering a group of community-less people who, seeking refuge on a lovely island, find none.

Morrison's next work, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize and is considered by many her best work. Published in 1987, it is the story of an escaped slave who kills her child to protect the child from the horrors of slavery. Morrison explores the difficult concerns of love, possession, and obsession in her trilogy, Beloved, Jazz (1992), and Paradise (1998). In 1993 Morrison was honored for her body of work with the Nobel Prize in Literature. She was the first African American and the eighth woman to be so honored.

In addition to her fiction, Morrison also has written a play, an opera, poetry, and literary criticism. Her critical work, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (1992), extends Ellison's consideration of the function of blacks and blackness in American literature. Additionally, she has edited several volumes of essays that address important social and political issues, including the Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill hearings, the immigration debate, and the O. J. Simpson trial.

Although highly praised, Morrison's fiction is often misunderstood because it is not evaluated within the cultural context within which it is written. Early in her career, Morrison explained her desire to Nellie McKay:

I long for a critic who will know what I mean when I say “church,” or “community” or when I say “ancestor,” or “chorus.” Because my books come out of those things and represent how they function in the black cosmology. … I am yearning for someone to see such things—to see what the structures are, what the moorings are, where the anchors are that support my writings.⁵⁶

The anchor or mooring that supports Morrison's fiction—as well as that of Chesnutt, Ellison, Hurston, and countless other African-American writers—is folklore. In each of her novels, Morrison reclaims not only African-American folk tradition, but she also reaches back into her African roots. She works to counter what she sees as the “silencing” of the “indigenous qualities” of African-American peoples.⁵⁷

Morrison writes from a postcolonial perspective, meaning that she seeks to reclaim those indigenous ways of knowing that were devalued by the colonialist control of African Americans during slavery. She also recognizes that colonialism, in order to be effective, must control the mind and the body. As such, she focuses on the tools of oppression that keep African Americans in spiritual bondage.

As a student of the colonial domination of Africans in the New World, Morrison considers the manner in which the Western master narrative controls language, history, and Manichean characterization in order to position the African American as inferior to whites. In her works she combats these tools of oppression with pre-colonial beliefs and forms of knowledge. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison addresses the importance of self- and social acceptance. She draws upon the African orphan tale to show the necessity of seeing one's self reflected positively in the eyes of another member of the community. She focuses on the beautiful/ugly binary to show how little black girls are denied self-acceptance because they do not meet the standards of beauty imposed by Western society. Further, Morrison exposes the internalization of colonialist characterizations that prevents African Americans from valuing one another. Her story illustrates the African communal message that the individual exists because of the community. When the community is not stable, the individual slips into nonexistence.

A similar message underpins Sula. When Sula overhears her mother say she does not like her daughter, the child becomes unanchored. With no sense of value, she values nothing and becomes both a threat and an example to the community. In this morality tale, Morrison uses the community as a chorus or collective that fails to pull together for the moral and spiritual well being of the rejected young girl. Morrison emphasizes the failure of the community to rely on the African concepts of good and evil. Recognizing that traditional philosophy holds that good and evil are but two sides of the same coin, Morrison suggests that Sula's community forgets that both are necessary for balance.

Morrison draws upon a Negro folktale for the inspiration of Tar Baby, and the flying African tale as the center of Song of Solomon. In both works, she considers how her African-American characters lose their true and ancient properties—their folk ways—and ultimately themselves by adopting Western values. Morrison suggests that African Americans are taught that their histories are of no value in the pursuit of success. Characters Jadine Childs of Tar Baby and Milkman Dead of Song of Solomon believe that all they need in the world is material things. Morrison returns to the pre-assimilation sources to demonstrate the stories that they really need.

Morrison's historical trilogy includes Beloved, the story of slavery; Jazz, which addresses the Great Migration of Negroes from the South to the North; and Paradise, which explores the exodus of Negroes moving from the South into the West. She takes as her task the integration of black stories into American history, providing versions of historical events from a black perspective. In each of these works, as in all of her novels, Morrison draws from folklore, African-derived spiritual beliefs, and the values of community to restore her fragmented characters. She breaks the bonds of silence imposed on her characters by historical neglect. Additionally, the oral quality of her lyrical language demands that her works be read aloud—shared like the tales that inspired them. In reclaiming folk culture as the center of her fiction, she makes the stories and the values available to her reader.

Notes

1. William Stanley Braithwaite, “The Negro in American Literature,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 32-44.

2. James Weldon Johnson, preface to The Book of American Negro Poetry, in Black Literature in America, edited by Houston A. Baker Jr. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1971), 181-93.

3. Sterling Brown, “Our Literary Audience,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 69-78.

4. Ralph Ellison, “Twentieth Century Fiction and the Black Mask of Humanity,” in Shadow and Act, (New York: Random House, 1964).

5. Eric J. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of the Harvard University Press, 1993).

6. Sundquist, 287. Sundquist is referring to the 1896 Plessy V. Ferguson case in which the U. S. Supreme Court upheld the conviction of Homer Plessy, a Negro, for riding in a whites-only railroad car, finding it “reasonable” for states to provide “separate but equal” public accommodations for blacks and whites.

7. Sterling Brown, “Negro Character as Seen by White Authors,” in A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Mark A. Sanders (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 149-84. Brown delineates seven “types” of Negro characterizations perpetuated by white writers.

8. Thomas Nelson Page, In Ole Virginia (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1889).

9. Joel Chandler Harris, “The Negro as the South Sees Him,” Saturday Evening Post (2 January 1904), reprinted in Joel Chandler Harris: Editor and Essayist, edited by Julia Collier Harris (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1931), 130-46.

10. Joel Chandler Harris, “How the Birds Talk,” in Daddy Jake the Runaway and Short Stories Told after Dark (New York: Century, 1889), reprinted in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, edited by Richard Chase. (New York: Houghton, 1955).

11. Ibid.

12. Joel Chandler Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus: Myths and Legends of the Old Plantation (New York: Houghton, 1883), reprinted in The Complete Tales of Uncle Remus, edited by Richard Chase (New York: Houghton, 1955).

13. Stella Brewer Brookes, “Introduction,” in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (New York: Schocken, 1965), vii.

14. Darwin T. Turner, “Daddy Joel Harris and His Old-Time Darkies,” in Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, edited by Bruce R. Bickley Jr. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 113-29.

15. Robert Bone, “The Oral Tradition,” in Critical Essays on Joel Chandler Harris, edited by Bruce R. Bickley Jr. (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1981), 130-45.

16. Harris, Nights with Uncle Remus, xiv.

17. Bernard Wolfe, “Uncle Remus and the Malevolent Rabbit,” in Mother Wit from the Laughing Barrel, edited by Alan Dundes (New York: Garland, 1981), 540.

18. Charles W. Chesnutt, The Journals of Charles W. Chesnutt, edited by Richard H. Brodhead (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

19. Quoted in Gates and McKay, 522.

20. Sundquist, 282.

21. Chesnutt, Journals, 121.

22. Quoted in Helen M. Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1952), 57-8.

23. Helen Chesnutt, 73.

24. Helen Chesnutt, 91-2.

25. Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro: Voices of the Harlem Renaissance (New York: Simon & Shcuster, 1927), (New York: Touchstone Books, 1997).

26. Houston A. Baker Jr., Black Literature in America (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1971).

27. W. E. B. Du Bois, “Criteria of Negro Art,” in The Oxford W. E. B. Du Bois Reader, edited by Eric Sundquist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 324-28.

28. Locke, 50.

29. Langston Hughes, “The Negro Artist and the Racial Mountain,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, edited by Angelyn Mitchell (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994), 55-9.

30. Steven Watson, The Harlem Renaissance: Hub of African-American Culture, 1920-1930 (New York: Pantheon, 1995).

31. Baker, 204.

32. Jeutonne P. Brewer, The Federal Writers' Project: A Bibliography (Metuchen, NJ: The Scarecrow Press, 1994).

33. David A. Taylor, “A Noble & Absurd Undertaking—The Federal Writers' Project Gave Depression-Era Writers a Second Chance … and America Its First Comprehensive Self-Portrait,” Smithsonian 30, no. 12 (March 2000): 100-12.

34. Lionel C. Bascom, A Renaissance in Harlem: Lost Essays of the WPA, by Ralph Ellison, Dorothy West, and Other Voices of the Generation (New York: Amistad, 1999).

35. Taylor, 108.

36. Eleanor W. Traylor, R. Victoria Arana, and John M. Reilly, “‘Runnin' Space’: The Continuing Legacy of Sterling Allen Brown,” African American Review 31, no. 3 (1997): 389-97.

37. Lorenzo Thomas, “Authenticity and Elevation: Sterling Brown's Theory of the Blues,” African American Review 31, no. 3 (1997): 409-15.

38. Sterling A. Brown, “Negro Character As Seen by White Authors,” in A Son's Return: Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Mark A. Sanders (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 149-83.

39. Elizabeth Davey, “The Souths of Sterling A. Brown.” Southern Cultures 5, no. 2 (summer 1999): 20.

40. Sterling A. Brown, “The New Negro in Literature,” in Selected Essays of Sterling A. Brown, edited by Mark a. Sanders (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1996), 184-203.

41. Robert E. Hemenway, Zora Neale Hurston (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1977).

42. See Hemenway, 319.

43. John Hersey, “‘A Completion of Personality’: A Talk with Ralph Ellison,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, edited by Kimberly W. Benston (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987), 285-307.

44. Ralph Ellison, “Remembering Richard Wright,” in Speaking for You: The Vision of Ralph Ellison, edited by Kimberly W. Benston (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987), 187-98.

45. Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage, 1995), 144-66.

46. Hersey, 300. Some sources state that Ellison met Hughes and Locke on his second day in New York. See Robert G. O'Meally, “Ralph Ellison,” in African American Writers: Profiles of Their Lives and Works—From the 1700s to the Present, edited by Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Collier, 1991), 81-103.

47. Bascom, 34.

48. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 168.

49. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 177.

50. Robert G. O'Meally, “Ralph Ellison,” in African American Writers: Profiles of Their Lives and Works—From the 1700s to the Present, edited by Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Collier, 1991), 81-103.

51. Quoted in David Remnick, “Visible Man,” New Yorker (14 March 1994): 34-8.

52. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 170.

53. Ellison, Shadow and Act, 170.

54. Wahneema H. Lubiano, “Toni Morrison,” in African American Writers: Profiles of Their Lives and Works—From the 1700s to the Present, edited by Valerie Smith, Lea Baechler, and A. Walton Litz (New York: Collier, 1991), 255-65.

55. Sara Blackburn, review of Sula, New York Times Book Review (30 December 1973): 3.

56. Nellie McKay, “An Interview with Toni Morrison,” Contemporary Literature 24, no. 4 (1983): 413-29.

57. Toni Morrison, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken.” Michigan Quarterly Review 28, no. 1 (1989): 1-35.