[In the following essay, Ridgely presents an overview of Southern literature between 1879 and 1899, emphasizing major figures and works in the era of local color.]

The South's strong resistance during Reconstruction to a complete reordering of its way of life was less valorous than its wartime performance, but it was more successful. As the scars of occupation faded, its writers embarked upon a popular program of sectional justification that would have astonished the editors of scores of dead little southern journals. For northern editors were now not merely tolerating writing from the South; they were demanding it. And they not only sought it; they bought it. This episode in American literature is usually called the emergence of the “local color” school. Not only the South was involved in it, to be sure, but it was the South that ultimately proved to be richest in its materials and most prolific in its celebrants. By the 1880s the still unreconstructed must have been baffled: the South had become the most popular setting for American fiction. The wry reaction of the northern novelist Albion W. Tourgée, who had described his experiences during Reconstruction in A Fool's Errand (1879), is revealing. American writing, so he charged in the Forum magazine in 1888, has become “not only Southern in type but distinctly Confederate in sympathy. … A foreigner studying our current literature without knowledge of our history, and judging our civilization by our fiction, would undoubtedly conclude that the South was the seat of intellectual empire in America, and the African the chief romantic element of our population.”

Tourgée's sour remarks tell only part of the truth; the South was simply the chief beneficiary of a mood and a literary trend that had characterized the whole nation in the years after the close of the Civil War. In fighting for the preservation and the strengthening of the Union, the North necessarily had attacked sectionalism and campaigned for the homogenization of the American people. In constructing its giant war machine for this purpose it had stimulated industry and manufacture. The technological superiority of the Union forces was a bitter fact to the defeated Confederacy. By the 1880s some southern leaders, like Henry W. Grady, who spoke through his influential Atlanta Constitution, were urging that the only hope for a truly reconstructed South lay in the adoption of laissez-faire capitalism and the development of industry throughout the region. Only Grady's scarcely hidden racism—his reliance on white domination for the success of his programs—ameliorated his policy in the eyes of die-hard upholders of the old regime.

It sometimes surprises modern readers of local color fiction to observe how little the “New South” enters the picture. But this is to misunderstand its real nature. For literary taste was now strongly nostalgic. In the midst of the Gilded Age there were many who remembered what seemed to have been a less complicated, a freer, even a happier time. The war had opened a great gulf in national history; on the other shore the colors now appeared brighter, the skies more open, the people more individualistic. An age of simple elegance had vanished in an all-conquering mechanistic modernism. Where were the self-contained and pleasant little New England villages? And where now were the courtly stock who had given the South its peculiar tone?

The situation was a godsend, a boon that the defeated nation could hardly have expected. Except for the work of the humorists of the Old Southwest, northern periodicals had not been particularly receptive to tales from the South. Now northern editors were beginning to accept as fact what the South had been insisting for decades: that it was the only “romantic” society America had produced. The West—with its gunfighters, its outlaws, its cowboys and Indians—had color; what it lacked was “charm.” The West was open and awe-inspiring; the South was cozy and “home.”

The southern writer seized the day. No longer required to defend slavery as an institution, he could now, without giving offense, depict the black as the happy-go-lucky darky, still benevolently cared for by the white man he once had to call “master.” The Negro was considered to be the South's own special problem. Increasingly strict Jim Crow laws were evidence of how he was being contained in fact. In fiction, with the notable exceptions of Cable, Harris, and Twain, this type of continued enslavement was largely ignored. The blacks were a picturesque peasantry; their comic speech, their superstitions, their penchant for stolen watermelon or chicken were “realities” everyone could now laugh at—benevolently, of course. And now that the South presented no threat to the body politic, its quixotic attempt to establish an aristocratic empire could take on the special glamor reserved for lost causes. Domiciled amid the ruins of its artifacts, the southern writer could dream of the never-never land—the pillars of its plantations grown prodigious, its ladies more classically beautiful, its men more dashingly gallant, its gardens more lovely in the moonlight, its field songs more melodious and soothing. Alas for the fled, alas for the fallen!

The plantation South was the most popular version of the myth of the past because its high-toned life now could be enjoyed without guilt. But there were other Souths, and writers from several sections were quick to stake out their claims. One of these areas which was largely unexplored was the high upland and mountainous Appalachian chain; though the mountaineer had long since appeared as character in early romances and southwestern tales, there had been little attempt to picture him in his own setting of lonely hill cabins, hardscrabble fields, dark hollows. The authors who first penetrated this thicket were in no sense sociologists or fieldcollecting folklorists. These latter would come later and would preserve a rich store of ballad, song, and tale—folkways that revealed much of the character of the original European settlers. The local colorist observed some of this same material, but he sentimentalized, softened—or, conversely, melodramatized—the true culture of the region.

One of the most successful of these exploiters of a pocket in time was a crippled Tennessee spinster, Mary Noailles Murfree, who rejoiced (if that is the word) in the pen name of Charles Egbert Craddock. She had already become known in the pages of the Atlantic Monthly before she published a first collection of tales, In the Tennessee Mountains (1884). Murfree capitalized on the brooding peaks, the strong vein of superstition in her people, and the fiercely independent concepts of justice and propriety which contrasted so sharply with those of the lowlander. She also, like her fellows in the field, depended heavily upon dialect, often intentionally comic but sometimes surprisingly eloquent and moving. Murfree's skill at dialog as well as her reliance on melodramatic plot line can be sampled in one of her best stories, “The ‘Harnt’ that Walks Chilhowee.” The dominant character of the story is one Reuben Crabb, “a stunted, one-armed little critter a-onder-takin' ter fight folks and shoot pistols.” In one scene the site of his house is remembered, but, as an acquaintance remarks in summarizing Reuben's life and death, it

“ain't thar now, 'kase Sam Grim's brothers burned it ter the ground fur his a-killin' of Sam. That warn't all that war done ter Reuben fur killin' of Sam. The sheriff run Reuben Crabb down this hyar road 'bout a mile from hyar,—mebbe less,—an' shot him dead in the road, jes' whar it forks. Waal, Reuben war in company with another evil-doer,—he war from the Cross-Roads, an' I furgits what he hed done, but he war a-tryin' ter hide in the mountings, too; an' the sheriff lef' Reuben a-lying thar in the road, while he tries ter ketch up with the t'other; but his horse got a stone in his hoof, an' he los' time, an' hed ter gin it up. An' when he got back ter the forks o' the road whar he had lef' Reuben a-lyin' dead, thar war nuthin' thar 'ceptin' a pool of blood. Waal, he went right on ter Reuben's house, an' them Grim boys hed burnt it ter the ground; but he seen Reuben's brother Joel. An' Joel, he tole the sheriff that late that evenin' he hed tuk Reuben's body out'n the road an' buried it, 'kase it hed been lyin' thar in the road ever sence early in the mornin', an' he couldn't leave it thar all night, an' he hedn't no shelter fur it, since the Grim boys hed burnt down the house. So he war obleeged ter bury it.”

This is a ruse; Reuben has survived and, hiding out from the law, becomes the “harnt” that walks the mountain. At the story's close an old acquaintance persuades Reuben to stand trial, gets him acquitted, and takes him to live in his own house, where Reuben proves to be a troublesome and thankless guest. The host is himself an uncouth and ignorant man, but he has performed an act of selfless charity. This “moral gallantry” allows Murfree a final sentimentalizing note of the kind that gratified readers of these “low” tales: “The grace of culture is, in its way, a fine thing, but the best that art can do—the polish of a gentleman—is hardly equal to the best that Nature can do in her higher moods.”

The dialect story was also the forte of Joel Chandler Harris, who erased the image of the black as the pious and suffering Uncle Tom by creating the sly and engaging Uncle Remus. Harris's region was the Middle Georgia of the old Cotton Belt, and while he dealt with other types, particularly poor-whites, it was his portraits of plantation blacks that brought him international renown. As a writer for Grady's Atlanta Constitution, Harris tried to promote reconciliation and supported the tenets of the New South. But his own roots were strictly rural. The illegitimate son of a woman named Mary Harris and an Irish laborer with whom she lived until he deserted her, young Joel had no hopes for bettering himself until a nearby planter, who was also a lawyer and newspaperman, took on the boy as an apprentice. In his early years Harris witnessed slavery and its abolition; he even got a glimpse of the war as Sherman's army passed by on its march to the sea. He could also directly testify to the plight of both black and white in the harsh years of Reconstruction. His association with ex-slaves opened up for him a body of oral lore which had been largely untouched by earlier southern writers. Though generations of southern children had heard “mammy's” tales and though both southern and northern auditors were often moved by black spirituals and work songs, such material was considered too subliterary to warrant recording. Besides, it was argued, weren't they simply garbled versions of what slaves had heard from whites? The notion that a black could draw from a cultural tradition of his own people was self-evidently false; he had to be taught everything, and most masters had found him a slow learner indeed.

Harris himself long was diffident about the literary merits of the poems and tales which he had printed in the Constitution and which he first collected in Uncle Remus: His Songs and His Sayings (1880). In a letter to Mark Twain, he low-rated himself: “I am perfectly well aware that my book has no basis of literary art to stand upon; I know it is the matter and not the manner that has attracted public attention and won the consideration of people of taste at the North.” What attracted attention, of course, was both matter and manner. The matter was pastoral: a way of life that was not grand and snooty but warm, loving, familial. The manner was more artful than it appeared: the accurately rendered accents of an unlettered black man presented without condescension. Harris's skillful use of speech tune and folk metaphor is a far cry from the “Sambo” strain of most earlier black talk in fiction. Something of his appeal still comes across in this passage from the end of “How Mr. Rabbit Was Too Sharp for Mr. Fox.” The scene is familiar. Brer Fox, having gotten Brer Rabbit impossibly tangled up with the Tar-Baby, listens to his victim's pleas not to fling him into the brier-patch. Uncle Remus explains:

“Co'se Brer Fox wanter hurt Brer Rabbit bad ez he kin, so he cotch 'im by de behime legs en slung 'im right in de middle er de brier-patch. Dar wuz a considerbul flutter whar Brer Rabbit struck de bushes, en Brer Fox sorter hang 'roun fer ter see w'at wuz gwineter happen. Bimeby he hear somebody call 'im, en way up de hill he see Brer Rabbit settin' cross-legged on a chinkapin log koamin' de pitch outen his har wid a chip. Den Brer Fox know dat he bin swop off mighty bad. Brer Rabbit wuz bleedzed fer ter fling back some er his sass, en he holler out:

“‘Bred en bawn in a brier-patch, Brer Fox—bred en bawn in a brier-patch!’ en wid dat he skip out des ez lively ez a cricket in de embers.”

How far Harris was aware of his materials as concealed black protest has been a matter for lively debate in recent years. In answering the question as to why the rabbit and not the fox is the trickster-hero, Harris gave an insightful response in the preface to his first collection: “It needs no scientific investigation to show why he [the Negro] selects as his hero the weakest and most harmless of all animals, and brings him out victorious in contests with the bear, the wolf, and the fox.” And he did recognize black sources: “It would be presumptious in me to offer an opinion as to the origin of these curious myth-stories; but, if ethnologists should discover that they did not originate with the African, that effect should be accompanied with a good deal of persuasive eloquence.” But a nagging question remains: did Uncle Remus outwit his own creator? Is the violent, treacherous, amoral, competitive animal world of the tales a direct analog of black-white relationships? Was Harris psychologically unable to face the deep racial implications of the stories which he so successfully retold? Such questions cannot be answered with certainty. But, because they have been raised, Harris himself has emerged more clearly in the twentieth century as a man deeply torn by the conflicts of the Reconstruction era, by the desire for “progress” and the attractions of a more Edenic South.

At the height of the local color movement, every southern state could boast of having added strokes to the general panorama. Richard Malcolm Johnson followed Longstreet's lead in finding the Georgia cracker a source for rustic humor. Irwin Russell, who specialized in Negro dialect poetry, produced a great favorite with “Christmas Night in the Quarters” (1878). Even northern writers felt the pull of the Southland. As early as 1873 Mrs. Stowe wrote of her Florida homestead in Palmetto Leaves; and Cooper's grandniece, Constance Fenimore Woolson, remembered her days in the Carolinas and Florida in Rodman the Keeper: Southern Sketches (1880). But only natives really excelled. Two widely separated locales, Old Virginia and Creole Louisiana, finally produced the two most significant writers to come out of the rejuvenation of southern letters. They were Thomas Nelson Page and George Washington Cable—and they could not have been more different.

Cable's Louisiana is dense, violent, and dominated by its racist attitudes; Page's Virginia is a land of faded glamour and lost dreams, but redeemed and elevated by its harmonious black-white relationships. Of all the defenders of the Lost Cause, Page was the one most beloved by his contemporaries and most scorned by the liberal southern writers who reacted against him in the twentieth century. Born in 1853, Page himself saw little of the Old South in which Nelsons and Pages had flourished; in the years of Reconstruction he sought to restore family prestige and power not by returning to the plantation but by practicing law. Yet the tale of Virginia's legendary past—a Golden Age brought to an end in chivalrous but futile combat—continued to haunt him. His sentimental and highly idealized stories depicting the defeat of southern principles successfully colored and softened attitudes in all sections of the restored Union. Page produced many stories, novels, and other works before his death in 1922; but his classic book, one indispensable in examining the national literary mood, is the collection of six tales, In Ole Virginia, published in 1887. Page's forte, like Harris's, was the tale told in Negro dialect. However embarrassing (and sometimes difficult to comprehend) such a rendering of dialog may seem to the reader of today, it was vital in giving the ring of “reality” to his favorite characters, the faithful black servants who knew—and would not give up—their places. The wide success of the book suggests how easily his readers could accept the doctrine of paternalism—though, in fact, ex-slaveholders had been shocked by the “uppity” attitudes of their former property.

The opening story of In Ole Virginia, one of the most popular he ever composed, is an epitome of Page's world—and his appeal. The central narrative of “Marse Chan” is framed by a well worn device: a lone traveler on horseback meets a stranger, asks a few perfunctory questions, and is rewarded with a long and stirring narrative. The setting here is the eastern Virginia of many earlier tales; but the time is 1872 and the once splendid mansions which line the narrator's route are falling into decay. His ruminations on mutability are broken into by a mild domestic incident: a Negro is calling home a “noble-looking old orange and white setter,” but one now “gray with age, and corpulent with excessive feeding.” The dog is “Marse Chan's,” and when the narrator inquires about the owner he is given a tale with plot incidents enough to fill a novel.

The story is an unabashed tear-jerker which gains its effect—if it succeeds at all—by the reader's willingness to accept the fundamental goodness of the world which Sam, the black man, recalls so elegiacally. Marse Chan was the heir of a great plantation owner; Sam had been assigned to him as body servant and they had grown up, like brothers, in close association. There appears to be no irony in Sam's words, and certainly none in Page's, as he describes the joys of the old order: “‘Dem wuz good ole times, marster—de bes' Sam ever see! Dey wuz, in fac'! Niggers didn' hed nothing '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 sont 'em out de house, an' de same doctor come to see 'em whar 'ten' to de white folks when dey wuz po'ly. Dyar warn' no trouble nor nothin'.’”

Now enters the love interest. Chan is smitten at an early age with the charms of Miss Anne, daughter of a neighboring plantation owner, “Cun'l Chahmb'lin.” But the story takes on a Romeo and Juliet turn, as the fathers of the pair split over politics. Chan, after being publicly insulted by the colonel, is even forced into a duel with him; with true nobility he refuses, after the colonel's shot has missed him, to return the fire, saying only (in Sam's words): “‘I mek you a present to yo' fam'ly, seh!’” Something of a stickler in matters of honor, the colonel proclaims himself not satisfied; and bad blood continues between the two families, until even Miss Anne denies she ever loved Chan. Chan now escapes into the Civil War, where he rises to a captaincy, but both he and Anne are physically suffering from their thwarted romance. Finally the colonel relents. Anne writes Chan that she wants him, and he plans to marry her on the furlough he will receive after the next big battle. Naturally, Chan is killed; his homecoming is his burial. Anne becomes a Confederate nurse, but shortly before Richmond falls she dies of a fever. The tale ends on a motif out of the ballad of “Barbara Allen” and a thousand other tales of frustrated lovers: they are buried side by side in the old churchyard. But Page adds another, more Victorian, note of weeping religiosity. Sam asks: “‘An' will yo' please tell me, marster? Dey tells me dat de Bible sey dyar won' be marryin' nor givin' in marriage in heaven, but I don' b'lieve it signifies dat—does you?’” The narrator reassures Sam with “the comfort of my earnest belief in some other interpretation” and gives him a little money, “for which he seemed humbly grateful.” As Sam goes into his cabin, the narrator hears him call to his wife, “‘Judy, have Marse Chan's dawg got home?’”

Even northern readers like Mrs. Stowe's brother, Henry Ward Beecher, and Emily Dickinson's “mentor,” Thomas Wentworth Higginson, gladly confessed that they had shed tears over the tale; and their watery response would seem no more than was appropriate to this calculatedly doleful tale of love cut short. Yet something else is at work in Page's story. The plot contained nearly every stereotype of the southern legend: the gallant young man who falls for his nation; the chilly but eventually faithful lady; the proud colonel; the duel; the well treated darky; the good times on the old plantation. Chan and his Miss Anne sprang out of a vanished time; their deaths symbolized the passing of a never-to-be-resurrected social order of grace and honor. Surely these were not the people whom the North had sworn to destroy. They had not created the slave system; they had only defended their homeland and their way of life. Had the South alone been at fault in the conflict in which such people had given their lives?

For all the derivative quality of his work, for all the choke in the voice when he spoke of the old régime, Page was writing what for him was sacred history. As late as 1887 he gave a famous address on “The Old South” at Washington and Lee University, which he had attended and where the great General of the Confederacy now had his shrine. He undertook, he told his auditors, to prove that “the New South is, in fact, simply the Old South with its energies directed into new lines.” Reviewing the history of the slave trade, he charged that the North had hardly been guiltless and that actually it was southerners like Thomas Jefferson who had fought to abolish it. The extinction of slavery seemed assured, Page said, but it “was prevented by the attitude of the Northern Abolitionists. Their furious onslaughts, accompanied by the illegal circulation of literature calculated to excite the negroes to revolt” caused the temper of the South to change. For Page the issue was quite clear: “The real fight was whether the conservative South should, with its doctrine of States' rights, of original State sovereignty, rule the country according to a literal reading of the Constitution, or whether the North should govern according to a more liberal construction, adapted, as it claimed, by necessity to the new and more advanced conditions of the nation.” The South had a sacred duty to fight to maintain its institutions, which had produced “a civilization so pure, so noble, that the world to-day holds nothing equal to it.” In a few paragraphs, Page summarized the South's case and demanded recognition of its unique achievement:

After less than a generation it has become among friends and enemies the recognized field of romance.

Its chief attribute was conservatism. Others were courage, fidelity, purity, hospitality, magnanimity, honesty, and truth.

Whilst it proudly boasted itself democratic, it was distinctly and avowedly anti-radical—holding fast to those things which were proved, and standing with its conservatism a steadfast bulwark against all novelties and aggressions. …

Slavery itself, which proved the spring of woes unnumbered, and which clogged the wheels of progress and withdrew the South from sympathy with the outer world, christianized a race and was the automatic balance-wheel between labor and capital which prevented, on the one hand, the excessive accumulation of wealth, with its attendant perils, and on the other hand prevented the antithesis of the immense pauper class which work for less than the wage of the slave without any of his incidental compensations.

After this traditional attack on northern economy, Page brought himself to endorse reconciliation, but only with the understanding that the Lost Cause be recognized as having been constitutionally sanctioned:

No section of this country more absolutely, loyally, and heartily accepts the fact that slavery and secession can never again become practical questions in this land, than does that which a generation ago flung all its weight into the opposite scale. But to pretend that we did not have the legal, constitutional right to secede from the Union is to stultify ourselves in falsification of history.

If any portion of this nation doubt the South's devotion to the Union, let it attempt to impair the Union. If the South is ever to be once more the leader of this nation, she must cherish the traditional glory of her former station, and prove to the world that her revolution was not a rebellion, but was fought for the principle upon which she was established as her foundation-stone—the sacred right of self-government.

It is no wonder that, with the command of such rhetoric, Page was widely hailed as the keeper of the flame. On the other hand, it would be the lot of Page's contemporary, George Washington Cable, eventually to be branded a “Southern Yankee.” There was nothing in Cable's upbringing to suggest such apostasy. Born in 1844 in New Orleans, son of a businessman, Cable had no connection with the plantation culture that Page had made sacred. But he and his family dutifully became Confederates, and young Cable served in the southern army from 1862 to the end of the war. By the postwar years, however, he had begun to doubt that the South had had any legal right to secede, and with this break from the conservative creed he began a steady march toward a liberal view of the slavery issue. Yet little of his crusading zeal is evident in his first book, Old Creole Days (1879), a collection of local color stories which had appeared in Scribner's. Cable had observed in his native city a kind of exoticism and high melodrama which he rightly guessed would be broadly appealing. Creole culture, with its roots in the Indian, French, and Spanish occupations of the area, was new to American letters, and he became its chief interpreter. That he implicitly—and rather prudishly—condemned its mores was a factor which rubbed nerves at home; but outside readers reveled in the freshness of acquaintanceship with an aristocratic society that owed nothing to the Old Dominion.

By his second book, The Grandissimes (1880), Cable had nerved himself to write of something stronger than the peccadilloes of this class-conscious society; he was ready to confront the morality of slavery and the fate of the blacks in the postwar world. His attack was somewhat oblique; he posed the problem through an intricately plotted romance set at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. The situation was a classic one for a sociopolitical novel: that moment when an alien power is about to disrupt an isolated culture smugly secure in the hierarchical structure which it had created over many decades. The American “invaders” are correctly seen by the Creoles as destroyers of their world. Before they are brought under the reign of the new society they are forced to test unchallenged beliefs: their social codes, their pride in family, their land titles, their contemptuous treatment of those of mixed blood. The temporal displacement of the plot line, which allowed for a more colorful backdrop, was not, however, intended to disguise the immediacy of the racial issue; conditions at the time of the Purchase and in Cable's own day clearly were parallel. The worst of contemporary southern prejudice was but an inheritance from the cream of Creole society.

Criticism of the closed mind is carried on in the novel largely through dialogs between a young outsider, an apothecary named Joseph Frowenfeld, and the scion of one of the proudest of the Creole dynasties, Honoré Grandissime. Frowenfeld, a northern immigrant to New Orleans, is the only member of his family who has survived a fever epidemic; he is, therefore, entirely on his own in taking on a man he suspects is incapable of change. Frowenfeld is given to rather platitudinous homilies on slavery and the caste system, and he is particularly censorious of the free sexual alliances which have doomed offspring to be ranked according to their degree of black blood. Even Honoré has a halfbrother, a “free man of color,” who bears the same name. The “f.m.c.,” as he is called, loves a quadroon woman who, to complicate matters, loves the white Honoré. This is all melodramatic enough, and even daring for its period, but Cable is not out to titillate his readers. Frowenfeld gets a lesson—and a surprise—when he and the white Honoré come upon the despondent “f.m.c.” as he is attempting to drown himself, and they foil the attempt. The white Honoré's comment on the intended act reveals his own growing awareness of the horror at the core of Creole culture:

“Ah! Mr. Frowenfeld,” said the Creole, suddenly, “if the immygrant [as Frowenfeld is] has cause of complaint [about Creole exclusivity], how much more has that man! True it is only love for which he would have just now drowned himself; yet what an accusation, my-de'-seh [my dear sir], is his whole life against that ‘caste’ which shuts him up within its narrow and almost solitary limits! And yet, Mr. Frowenfeld, this people esteem this very same crime of caste the holiest and most precious of their virtues. My-de'-seh, it never occurs to us that in this matter we are interested, and therefore disqualified, witnesses. We say we are not understood; that the jury (the civilized world) renders the decision without viewing the body; that we are judged from a distance. We forget that we ourselves are too close to see distinctly, and so continue, a spectacle to civilization, sitting in a horrible darkness, my-de'-seh!” He frowned.

“The shadow of the Ethiopian,” said the grave apothecary.

M. Grandissime's quick gesture implied that Frownfeld had said the very word.

“Ah! my-de'-seh, when I try sometimes to stand outside and look at it, I am ama-aze at the length, the blackness of that shadow!”

Frowenfeld is finally given the ultimate revelation of that “blackness” when he hears the full story of Bras-Coupé, a slave whose history obsesses the whole Grandissime clan. The tale, which Cable sets at the very center of the book, is too intricate to allow easy summation; what must be said about it, however, is that it remains the most penetrating and powerful parable of slavery written by a southerner in the postwar period. It tells of a true noble savage, an African prince brought in bondage to the Louisiana fields, where it is fated that he will clash with the white owners who try to strip him of his manhood. Eventually he commits a capital crime, striking his master; after putting a curse on the land, he takes refuge in the swamps. The land rots under the spell of the black man, but inevitably he is captured and undergoes the terrible punishment of being lashed and hamstrung—a symbolic castration. The end of the story suffers somewhat from Cable's penchant for the melodramatic and sentimental, but the racial theme is powerful enough to redeem it. Bras-Coupé's master, dying under the curse which the slave has cast, asks to be forgiven. The plea is seconded by the master's wife, who comes to the maimed Bras-Coupé and places her baby within “the hollows of the African's arm.” It puts “its hand upon the runaway's face, and the first tears of Bras-Coupé's life, the dying testimony of his humanity, gushed from his eyes. … He laid his [hand] tenderly upon the babe's forehead, then removing it, waved it abroad, inaudibly moved his lips, dropped his arm, and closed his eyes. The curse was lifted.” Bras-Coupé's death occurs soon after; asked if he knows where he is going, he whispers, “‘To—Africa—’ and was gone.”

The retelling of this violent tale has become an annual ritual among the Grandissime clan; what Cable implies is that they—by a verbal reenactment of the slave's life, death, and act of forgiveness—are attempting to expiate the guilt of the past which still hangs over their own lives. But they miss the ironic central point: the black man must set the whites free.

In a later essay, Cable remarked, “I meant to make The Grandissimes as truly a political work as it ever has been called. … I wrote as near to truth and justice as I knew how, upon questions I saw must be settled by calm debate and cannot be settled by force or silence.” Cable felt that journalists and politicians did not accurately present the more moderate racial views of his people, and he tried to address a “silent South” which might be encouraged to speak and act more openly. But his reasonable plea for “civil equality” for blacks was too advanced for the mood of the time. It appeared to parrot the old northern line, and it was generally understood that the North would now stay out of the South's handling of its own peculiar social problem. Cable continued to express his liberal ideas both in fiction and in tracts like The Negro Question, but his work was to decline in power. In 1885, largely disowned by his own region, he settled in Northampton, Massachusetts. Like Page, he had acknowledged the curse of slavery, but he had argued that the South could now cast off the burden of racism. Like Page, he had urged reconciliation between former enemies. But, unlike Page, he had taken the injunction quite literally: he had turned himself into a northerner.

In late 1884 Cable joined forces with Mark Twain on a four-month lecture tour. The jaunt was a great success—Cable regaled audiences with Creole songs and Twain read from his new book Huckleberry Finn—but Cable's primness and piety galled the free-thinking Twain. He had found, he wrote to Howells, that “Cable's gifts of mind are greater & higher than I had suspected”; but he added: “You will never know, never divine, guess, imagine, how loathsome a thing the Christian religion can be made until you come to know & study Cable daily & hourly. … in him & his person I have learned to hate all religions. He has taught me to abhor & detest the Sabbath-day & hunt up new & troublesome ways to dishonor it.”

By the time of this tour Mark Twain had lived away from the South since 1861, and he had moved toward contempt for the South's “religion”: its code of chivalry which masked horrors like feuds and lynchings under the proud badge of “honor.” Of course, like all his views, Twain's attitudes toward the region were marked by riotous contradictions, by conflicting emotions which drove him to picture the South both as the pastoral Eden of his boyhood and as a present-day cultural and moral wasteland. In the 1880s and '90s the latter view was predominant. This Twain thundered and blasted away as a self-proclaimed anti-“Southron,” but it is obvious that he could not have been so caustically brilliant if he had not himself once embraced the South's dogmas about race and caste. His father was a Virginian with the airs of the gentry, his mother a Kentuckian; the family had moved on to the slave state of Missouri, where Samuel Langhorne Clemens was born in 1835. The young man emigrated to the West, where he made his reputation; in later years he built homes in the East, where he made his fortune. But three of his best books—Life on the Mississippi, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Pudd'nhead Wilson—are set in the Southland he had known; and one fat volume of previously unpublished writings is devoted to “the Matter of Hannibal,” the small river town of his youth. He had missed the Civil War because, after a brief stint as a Confederate militiaman, he had decamped to join his Unionist brother in Nevada. His imaginative return to the place of his youth was not to come until 1875, when he contributed to the Atlantic Monthly a series of sketches called “Old Times on the Mississippi,” which glorified the cub pilot days when he first learned to “read the book” of the great river. There is little direct confrontation of the slave-holding South here; and in his “boys' book” of the next year, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, nostalgic recollections of his river town are disturbed by terrors which are more melodramatic than sociological.

Twain's continuation of his memoirs, however, is another matter. Life on the Mississippi (1883), written after he had toured the South for the first time since 1861, contains untrammeled assaults on the flossier versions of southern chivalric legend which had been flooding postwar periodicals. In his view, the South had been the victim not only of chattel slavery but of a slavishness of mind which Twain largely attributed to the enthralling prose of Sir Walter Scott. In a characteristic reading of history, he argued that, though the French Revolution and Napoleonic wars had involved real crimes, the world was in their debt for “great and permanent services to liberty, humanity, and progress.” In a familiar passage which prefigures the style and technique of H. L. Mencken, Twain then ripped into the Old South's cherished romancer:

The comes Sir Walter Scott with his enchantments, and by his single might checks this wave of progress, and even turns it back; sets the world in love with dreams and phantoms; with decayed and swinish forms of religion; with decayed and degraded systems of government; with the sillinesses and emptinesses, sham grandeurs, sham gauds, and sham chivalries of a brainless and worthless long-vanished society. He did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote. Most of the world has now outlived good part of these harms, though by no means all of them; but in our South they flourish pretty forcefully still. Not so forcefully as half a generation ago, perhaps, but still forcefully. There, the genuine and wholesome civilization of the nineteenth century is curiously confused and commingled with the Walter Scott Middle-Age sham civilization, and so you have practical common-sense, progressive ideas, and progressive works, mixed up with the duel, the inflated speech, and the jejune romanticism of an absurd past that is dead, and out of charity ought to be buried. But for the Sir Walter disease, the character of the Southerner—or Southron, according to Sir Walter's starchier way of phrasing it—would be wholly modern, in place of modern and mediæval mixed, and the South would be fully a generation further advanced than it is. It was Sir Walter that made every gentleman in the South a major or a colonel, or a general, or a judge, before the war; and it was he, also, that made these gentlemen value these bogus decorations. For it was he that created rank and caste down there, and also reverence for rank and caste, and pride and pleasure in them. Enough is laid on slavery, without fathering upon it these creations and contributions of Sir Walter.

It is admittedly a “wild proposition,” Twain went on, but “Sir Walter had so large a hand in making Southern character, as it existed before the war, that he is in great measure responsible for the war.”

Twain's diatribe is without real substance as historical analysis; but it is eloquent proof of an author's belief that his works create, rather than reflect, the mood of a period. Scott had been, after all, but one element in the medieval revival which had swept over much of Europe and America. What his romances did, fundamentally, was to confirm for many Southerners the essential rightness of a caste system and a chivalric ideal; that confirmation came, however, from other sources as well.

In his eagerness to diagnose the “Sir Walter disease,” Twain was not very perceptive or accurate about past and present southern writing. He scorned the “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’” of much antebellum American writing, and he had to confess that it “was the fashion in both sections of the country.” But he had to twist literary history to bring his final charge against the pernicious effect of romanticism upon the South. In prewar days, he asserted, “the South was able to show as many well-known literary names, proportioned to population, as the North could.” “But,” he went on, “a change has come, and there is no opportunity now for a fair competition between North and South. For the North has thrown out that old inflated style, whereas the Southern writer still clings to it—clings to it and has a restricted market for his wares, as a consequence. There is as much literary talent in the South, now, as ever there was, of course; but its work can gain but slight currency under present conditions; the authors write for the past, not the present; they use obsolete forms and a dead language.” Was Twain really so blind about the enormous vogue for a southern literature about the southern past? Probably he had simply come to hate the widespread acceptance of the content of southern writing; critique of style was a poor argument, for even in the North “realism” was hardly the dominant mode in most popular fiction. Twain reserved praise only for Cable and Harris—“two of the very few Southern authors who do not write in the Southern style.” Yet, illogically, it was their command of local dialects that he praised unreservedly. What he did not mention was the attraction for him of their relatively radical beliefs on the racial issue.

In his next major work, Huckleberry Finn (1885), Twain managed to make his points less frenetically by adopting a new distancing device, allowing an unsophisticated boy to speak his thoughts in a rough vernacular tongue. Though the novel rises above the southern scene to pose the large philosophical issue of man's freedom to choose his own course, its satirical attack is often quite specific and local. The world of Huck Finn's vision is a moral desert, where slavery and bigotry are the bedrock of “sivilization.” Huck's own movement toward humaneness—toward his recognition that Jim, though black and a slave, is a man—is slow in pace; and, in the crucial scene where he decides not to report Jim as a runaway, he still acknowledges the weight of his culture's central beliefs. Conscience, the instilled voice of society, tell Huck that to aid Jim is a damnable act; and he makes his decision in defiance: “‘All right, then, I'll go to hell.’” As Twain sets up the mood of the scene, we are clearly meant to applaud Huck's act; but all the events of the river journey make it certain that Huck already is in hell, that once off the river he and Jim are forever outcasts from Christian society. Twain knew this landscape from his own early and recent experiences, but his choice of targets also shows the pressure upon him of several decades of the South's endeavor to create a favorable self-image. Romantic tastes are mocked in the name of the wrecked steamboat aboard which Huck and Jim have their first adventure—the “Walter Scott.” The intellectual aridity and cultural shallowness of the gentry are pilloried in the chapter devoted to Huck's description of the “taste-fulness” of the Grangerford home. But Twain's greatest scorn is expended on the Old South's pride in its stratified society, and he makes Huck the mouthpiece for some ironically edged words: “Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family. He was well born, as the saying is, and that's worth as much in a man as it is in a horse, so the Widow Douglas said, and nobody ever denied that she was of the first aristocracy in our town.” Their code of honor has involved the Grangerfords in a bloody feud with the Shepherdsons—“another clan of aristocracy” which is as “high-toned and well born and rich and grand.” Huck tries to learn from young Buck, one of the Grangerford lads, what initiated the quarrel; and he gets a lesson in the niceties of aristocratic behavior when Buck tells him: “‘It started thirty year ago, or som'ers along there. There was trouble 'bout something, and then a lawsuit to settle it; and the suit went agin one of the men, and so he up and shot the man that won the suit—which he would naturally do, of course. Anybody would.’” Huck flees the scene as the two families are wiping each other out in a culminating gunfight; but his raft drifts him into another locale in which Twain makes his most ferocious assault upon caste—the Boggs-Sherburn episode.

Boggs, a harmless old drunk, has publicly mocked Colonel Sherburn, and the colonel, after warning Boggs of retaliation if he doesn't shut up, has shot him dead on the street. A lynching party is gotten up and confronts Sherburn at his home. Sherburn's defiance of the mob, and his denunciation of the southern code of justice, is all the more cutting because it comes from the mouth of one who had been raised in the system:

“The idea of you lynching anybody! It's amusing. The idea of you thinking you had pluck enough to lynch a man! … Why a man's safe in the hands of ten thousand of your kind—as long as it's daytime and you're not behind him.

“Do I know you? I know you clear through. I was born and raised in the South, and I've lived in the North; so I know the average all around. The average man's a coward. … Your newspapers call you a brave people so much that you think you are braver than any other people—whereas you're just as brave, and no braver. Why don't your juries hang murderers? Because they're afraid the man's friends will shoot them in the back, in the dark—and it's just what they would do.

“So they always acquit; and then a man goes in the night, with a hundred masked cowards at his back and lynches the rascal. Your mistake is, that you didn't bring a man with you; that's one mistake, and the other is that you didn't come in the dark and fetch your masks. … Now the thing for you to do is to droop your tails and go home and crawl in a hole. If any real lynching's going to be done it will be done in the dark, Southern fashion; and when they come they'll bring their masks and fetch a man along. Now leave—.”

The high rhetoric and the sneering analysis of mob psychology are more than a Huck could have managed; and Twain returns us to Huck's voice in his toneless comment: “I could a stayed if I wanted to, but I didn't want to.”

The final chapters of Huckleberry Finn—the elaborate plot to “free” Jim from his mock captivity at Phelps Farm—have seemed to many readers only a tediously extended parody of the Scott-Dumas school which degrades the character of Jim himself. But they properly take us back to the world of Tom Sawyer, that “good bad boy” who can face life only by turning its horrifying realities into containable illusions. At the end of the book Huck stands defeated: he knows that the Tom Sawyers of this world will prevail and that their ethic will never allow blacks and whites to live together in a bond of brotherhood. Twain allows him only a futile gesture of escape; he will, Huck tells us, “light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she's going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can't stand it. I been there before.” So had Twain. And, by this time, so have we.

Twain's last major use of southern material was in Pudd'nhead Wilson (1894), a near-botch of a book which is saved largely by his unusually frank portrayal of a mulatto woman character, Roxana. Twain tells us that he had started to write a farce about Siamese twins; the farce had begun to turn into a tragedy when he introduced Roxana and had her switch her illegitimate baby with the newborn son of her master. The “tragedy” is said to be that of Pudd'nhead Wilson, the freethinker and longtime outcast citizen of the village who, by the end of the book, has made himself a hero by winning a sensational murder case and has become a “success.” But the real tragedy is man's notion that he can escape his heredity and environment, and Twain again employs the South's illusions about its society to illustrate his case. The boys exchanged in the cradle meet suitably ironic fates: the “base-born” Tom, raised as a white, is betrayed by the “nigger” in him, is unmasked, and is literally “sold down the river.” The “high-born” Chambers, raised as a slave, succeeds to a white man's estate; but he cannot free himself from the manners and attitudes of the black he has thought himself to be.

For once Twain had the temerity to expose the most embarrassing, and the most hushed-up, aspect of slavery: the sexual exploitation of the black woman by white masters. Roxana herself is the offspring of miscegenation: “Only one-sixteenth of her was black, and that sixteenth did not show. … To all intents and purposes Roxy was as white as anybody, but the one-sixteenth of her which was black outvoted the other fifteen parts and made her a negro. She was a slave and salable as such.” Roxy has had a liaison with one of the white grandees of the village; their child, therefore, was “thirty-one parts white, and he, too, was a slave, and by a fiction of law and custom a negro.” Twain's contempt for the Old Dominion's chivalry—the “F.F.V.'s” who dominate the town's society—now had grown to the point where he could treat them with pure mockery, burdening them with fanciful names like “Colonel Cecil Burleigh Essex” and “Percy Northumberland Driscoll.” Against such people Roxy tries to act as a moral foil; she works herself out of slavery and tries—by placing her own baby in the white heir's cradle—to tilt the balance of her black/white world. Yet Roxy too remains in thrall to the pervasive racism. In a scene in which she reveals to her son the truth of his parentage, she tells him proudly: “‘You ain't got no 'casion to be shame' o' yo' father, I kin tell you. He wuz the highest quality in dis whole town—ole Virginny stock. Fust famblies, he wuz.’” And later, when her son refuses to fight a duel, she stings him with the taunt that blood will tell: “‘It's de nigger in you, dat's what it is. Thirty-one parts o' you is white, en on'y part nigger, en dat po' little one part is yo' soul.’”

Mark Twain was a humane man, and in his private life as Samuel Clemens he was a steadfast advocate of civil rights for black people. But philosophically he increasingly became skeptical that anyone in the whole “damned human race” was capable of salvation. The notion of individual freedom was the final folly of a species which could escape neither history nor biology. Twain may well have seemed what William Dean Howells called him: “the most desouthernized Southerner I ever knew.” But his fictions betray the real truth: he could not go home again, but that home forever burned in his blood. It was “the Southerner” in him that gave him his most powerful themes.

The last years of the nineteenth century saw the fading of the local color movement; but they were marked by two ironic events in southern letters. The first was that a black man won fame by writing about black people without revealing his own racial identity. The other was that a woman won notoriety by frankly revealing what it meant to be a woman in her time and place.

The black author, Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932), had broken into print in the Atlantic Monthly in 1887 with a local color story set in North Carolina. A number of other tales followed, and in 1899 he issued the two collections upon which his present reputation rests: The Conjure Woman and The Wife of His Youth. That his publishers did not reveal Chesnutt's color was not, as one might suspect, the result of any fear of prejudicial reaction. Their silence was meant as compliment: his work was just as good as that of any white author. Chesnutt himself did not wish to be known as a “Negro writer”; he sought recognition as a person who had mastered the literary craft of the local colorists as it had been practiced in prestigious periodicals. Yet he did manage to present a black point of view without creating the direct emotional confrontation quite possible in this decade of stricter “Jim Crow” laws. Chesnutt was not the first southern Negro to write fiction (a fugitive slave named William Wells Brown had produced a sensational protest novel as early as 1853) but he was the first to have his work initially judged on its own merits. He wrote on into the twentieth century, but his later and more frankly “black” productions were a disappointment, both to favorable critics like Howells and to Chesnutt himself, who had hoped to contribute to the bettering of racial relations.

The continuing conservatism of taste was to be felt by Kate Chopin (1851-1904), who dared to make the sexual desires of a woman the main subject of her novel The Awakening (1899). Before this book Chopin had published a number of local color stories of the French-American South, which had been collected in Bayou Folk (1894) and A Night in Acadie (1897). Her work in this vein is best illustrated by the frequently anthologized “Désirée's Baby,” a story of unwitting miscegenation in which the mother is cast out by her husband and drowns both herself and her child. But the story is given an unexpected twist: not the mother but the father turns out to have been the carrier of Negro blood. In 1890 Chopin experimented with longer fiction in At Fault, but this rather weak production would be forgotten in the attention given The Awakening. This second novel, which details the life and death of a woman who, tiring of her husband, seeks sexual satisfaction outside marriage, proved too “European” for contemporary critics; after one reprinting it disappeared, only to be rediscovered and properly reevaluated in recent years. Its frankness and its cool attitude toward extramarital gratification make it unique for its period. Chopin had been born in Missouri during the days of the Old South; she lived through the whole of the New South and dutifully did her part for her region in her short stories. But in her last novel she had the courage to look toward a newer South, one in which women writers could at last free their characters from that stultifying stereotype, the Southern Lady.

Bibliographical Note

In the past few decades the study of southern literature in all periods has become a major academic undertaking. Though the chief research centers are southern-based, they are far from being southern-biased; scholars are finally able to examine a regional literature dispassionately without undergoing the criticism of regional patriots. The criticism, biography, and history which they have produced is immense; a basic aid to sorting it out is Louis D. Rubin, Jr., A Bibliographical Guide to the Study of Southern Literature (Baton Rouge, 1969). A follow-up volume is Southern Literature, 1968-1975, edited by Jerry T. Williams (Boston, 1978). An annual bibliography, published in the spring issue of the Mississippi Quarterly, brings this information up to date. Useful information about current activities can also be found in the News-Letter of the Society for the Study of Southern Literature (currently issued by Mississippi State University).

In writing a concise survey of literature in the South before 1900, I have been very conscious of how much I have had to omit. I have attempted to put together a coherent essay by concentrating upon those whom I take to be key figures, whatever the intrinsic quality of their work. I have emphasized what seems to me most “southern” in the authors I have surveyed; inevitably, this approach has meant neglect of the work which many did in other areas. Fortunately there is a long and authoritative study which will help to fill in these and other gaps: Jay B. Hubbell's The South in American Literature, 1607-1900 (Durham, N.C., 1954). I am indebted to this work throughout my own essay; a number of brief quotations, otherwise unidentified, are taken from this source. I have also quoted texts from one of the best one-volume anthologies, Southern Writing, 1585-1920 (New York, 1970), edited, with excellent introductions and headnotes, by Richard Beale Davis, C. Hugh Holman, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A later anthology, The Literary South (New York, 1979), is edited by Rubin alone. Two earlier collections remain standard: Edd W. Parks, editor, Southern Poets (New York, 1936) and Gregory L. Paine, editor, Southern Prose Writers (New York, 1947). A guide to the whole range of southern authors is Southern Writers: A Biographical Dictionary (Baton Rouge, 1979), edited by Robert Bain, Joseph M. Flora, and Louis D. Rubin, Jr. A useful discussion both of accomplishment and of remaining problems in the field is Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities, edited by Rubin and Holman (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1975). Of the journals which regularly print articles on the South, I especially recommend the Southern Literary Journal (Chapel Hill, N.C.); its review section is both dependable and stimulating. In the notes on individual chapters which follow I have identified the sources of my quotations; because of space limitations, I have listed only those articles and books which have most directly contributed to my remarks. …

Notes

Historical works which I have used are C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South (Baton Rouge, 1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (New York, 1966). Two anthologies of local color writing contain the texts which I have quoted: Harry R. Warfel and G. Harrison Orians, editors, American Local-Color Stories (New York, 1941) and Claude M. Simpson, editor, The Local Colorists (New York, 1960). The Harris story is from Uncle Remus: His Songs and Sayings (New York, 1880). Page's address is reprinted in The Old South (New York, 1892). Passages from The Grandissimes are from the original edition; for Cable's political writings I have used Arlin Turner, editor, The Negro Question (New York, 1958). Twain's letter to Howells is in Henry Nash Smith and William M. Gibson, editors, Mark Twain-Howells Letters (New York, 1960); the texts of the novels are from the “Author's National Edition” (New York, 1907-1918). The fullest and most convincing study of Twain and his region is Arthur G. Pettit, Mark Twain and the South (Lexington, Ky., 1974).