[In the following review, Fleissner defends “… And Ladies of the Club” against charges of racism.]

Because Central State University hosted a most successful conference on Helen Hooven Santmyer's best-selling novel, “… And Ladies of the Club,” in January, 1985, it is particularly important to come to terms with the issue of race. A number of prominent reviewers (for example, in Newsweek and in the New York Times) have pinpointed racism as a defect in this work. But is it? Owing to the fact that our campus is only four miles from where she resides, I have had the opportunity to interview her and her friends, who have staunchly defended her on this point. At one point, I seriously considered jettisoning the conference because of its apparently controversial nature, but close study of the text made me desist. In this essay, I should like to consider some ten key points seriatim on the novel's attitude toward blacks.

1. The Zack episode. When I first picked up the novel, I automatically turned to the page describing how a black worker in a rope factory gets into an accident and is tended by Dr. Gordon. His name may sound a bit odd and as though it is making fun of him, at first, but upon careful reading we recognize that it is meant respectfully as an abbreviation of Zachariah (of Biblical vintage). Zack argues that if his leg has to be amputated, he will not be good for anything (p. 318). At first, this description struck me as possibly racist; however, when I brought it up in class, a freshman thought that the worker's feeling was entirely understandable and even acceptable in terms of the historical setting of the novel (at this time, 1878). It is important, therefore, to retain the awareness that Miss Santmyer is, before anything else, historical in her approach.

2. One reviewer of the book referred to the ignominious fact that a black is cited as having a “prehensile foot” (p. 348). Although, granted, the allusion may appear unduly grotesque, even simian if taken literally, the heroine's own daughter, Binny, is described at another point as a “monkey” (p. 545). The evolutionary argument will not hold water.

3. On the very next page, John Jordan is described as sensitive to prejudice against blacks or (at least) to the notion of keeping blacks from advancing: his son refers to “the Enemy,” whereupon Mr. Jordan responds, “‘Enemy! Who's the enemy?’” He then “frowned, fork suspended, thinking of the colored children who lived in the East End.” (The reference is obliquely to that section of Xenia, Ohio, which is a few miles from our campus and which is almost entirely black.) Surely the father's remonstrance is meant to be antiracist.

4. Captain Bodien dresses down a black servant with strong language later in the book (p. 733); his voice is gruff and military, corresponding with his title, but he is not necessarily thereby guilty of bias. For he also uses strong language toward a priest who had been looking after his wife, going so far as to ask for his rifle. This personage is not one to be envied; he himself certainly can be thought of as biased. But that does not mean that he mirrors the novelist herself.

5. The description of the cook Martha's death seems very sincerely expressed (pp. 846-47), given an acceptance of Fundamentalism, but it is possible to read into it other meanings. For instance, a certain tacky quality emerges: Martha never married, but apparently did not want to be thought of as a virgin, saying “I wouldn' want yo' to think Ah neve' had me a man”; then on the very same page, a bit later, she expresses strong Christian spiritual beliefs. (A colleague of mine felt that her dialect was unauthentic, but that is beside the point.) Evidently the author wanted us to feel that Martha was humanized, not hypocritical, however. Her mistress' reaction after her death certainly may give the impression of condescension: “‘Such faith should be rewarded; maybe we all get the Heaven we believe in.’” But on the other hand, it does not hurt to take it literally, too.

6. On the matter of educating blacks, Miss Santmyer has this to say:

The Southern [blacks], according to Rachel, have been effectively disenfranchised over the last ten years, and if they can't vote, what hope is there of getting decent schools for them? Or of getting away from what amounts to bondage to the land: they're all sharecroppers and never get out of debt to the landowners. I could see she was right: What was the point of all that fighting, if the [black] isn't any better off than he was before?

Such writing is hardly eloquent, but it is honest and realistic, pointing to an attempt on the part of Northerners after the Civil War to come to terms with their inheritance.

7. Along the same lines, the Woman's Club (which the novel mainly concerns) decided to have a paper read on the writer Tourgée because “he has done such fine work against the Klan and for the cause of the [blacks.]” (p. 555). Thus, if individual women in the club may not have been always unbiased, the Club as a whole, at least, was striving toward a sense of equality.

8. The strong emphasis upon the Republican Party and its politics in the novel hardly can be said to be opposed to what blacks were after then, because, since they followed Lincoln's party, they naturally were then on the Republican side, too. This point is often made in the novel, for what it is worth.

9. Regardless of how authentic or unauthentic the dialect here used by blacks is, and how irrelevant it may seem to modern readers, it does relate to that used also by such a noted poet of the area as Paul Lawrence Dunbar; it need not be thought of merely as “gibberish,” as one reviewer put it.

10. True, blacks are cited in this novel as servants and having low-class, low-paying jobs. This situation strikes some modern readers as uncomfortable, yet it merely reflects the author's attempt to be objective.

To sum up, if we say that Santmyer's portrayal of blacks is racist, we would have to say that she is also anti-Catholic because of her portrayal of poor-white Irish Americans, anti-Presbyterian because of her portrait of the Reverend McCune, anti-German because of the Club's final reaction to the Rausches, and where do we stop with such special pleading? It might be mentioned, in passing, that one reviewer (in the New York Times) criticized her for being anti-Jewish because of her description of the Klein family as mercenary; however, in point of fact the Kleins are Lutheran, and the passing references to Jews at times, though apprehensive perhaps, are complimentary.

Is it not then demeaning—not only to Santmyer, but to black people—for an ambitious work like this, one which has such strong moral messages (Aurelius' Meditations, for example, being cited in exemplary fashion throughout), to be labeled prejudiced simply owing to its attempt to be objectively fair about nineteenth-century social realities, without excessive sentimentality? The novel may not be The Great American one in all respects—for example, its style is not distinguished enough for that—but it is a remarkably accurate picture of life in this area from the time of the end of the Civil War to Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Not all the characters are likable, but that is true of many important novels; and besides, there is no reason to think that Santmyer intended it otherwise.