[In the following excerpt, Campbell explores the ways in which Griggs's Imperium in Imperio and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition reflected the moral climate of their time. ]

The fiction of Sutton Griggs and Charles Chesnutt emerges from post-Reconstruction despair, both writers crafting romances that bespeak vast promise, that give voice to black heroism in the face of devastating odds. Both resort to the Genteel Tradition in order to supplant degrading stereotypes. At the same time, both launch indictments of education for the limited advantages it offered Afro-Americans. Finally both create two heroes, one militant and one accommodationist, heroes that reflect Griggs's and Chesnutt's ambivalence toward their mythmaking role.

Griggs especially strives to awaken his audience to blacks' innate power; his notion of black solidarity, autonomy, and separatism cemented by creative thinkers conjoins the myth of the messiah with his faith in Western rationality. His saviors must unite their intellectual and visionary capacities to deliver Afro-America from its sense of powerlessness, effect political change, and, ultimately, reorder the world. For Griggs, post-Reconstruction's overwhelming constraints on black America dictate identification with transcendent figures, for suffering and death constitute everyday realities. Although Griggs's ideal leadership rests on an educational foundation, he insists that black thinkers must not forget their folk roots or seek to assimilate. In keeping with such thinking, he jettisons Brown's reverence for light skin, encouraging pride in blackness. Given the dangers implicit in Griggs's endorsement of revolt, however, his dramatization of revolt divides in two, and one of his messiahs becomes an accommodationist.

Griggs employs a number of strategies in the mythmaking process. Romance, his primary device, serves him well for projecting his Utopian vision of black political power embodied in a gigantic secret society designed to rectify social injustice. His heroes and heroines occupy the upper reaches of human possibility, hovering close to divinities in their abilities to survive attempts on their lives, and in their intellectual and artistic talents, qualities that occasion instant stardom. Just as the romance allows for characters of ideological rather than psychological magnitude, so too does romance plotting free the narrative from the burden of verisimilitude. His heroes' talents enable them to unify Afro-America, creating a national organization that exceeds the limits of plausibility in its size and power. To elucidate his allegiance to blackness, Griggs designs a subplot in which one of his heroines commits suicide rather than produce light-skinned children with her suitor. To dramatize the healing power of laughter, Griggs makes use of the oral narrative mode, reinforcing trickster figures' centrality in black life. Aside from his reliance on Sentimental Heroines, the Genteel Tradition and inflated diction, Griggs has trouble incorporating historical events into his narrative, and he repudiates African historical connections. Despite his limitations, however, Griggs remains the first black artist to dramatize an appreciation of dark skin and political separatism and as such anticipates later historical fiction.

Imperium in Imperio presents an account of the lives of Belton Piedmont and Bernard Belgrave, childhood companions who struggle to develop and receive recognition for their talents in a racist society. Whereas their white grade-school teacher victimizes Belton because of his poverty and dark skin, he appears to favor Bernard, a well-to-do mulatto. Despite their opposite treatment, the two protagonists achieve equal academic credentials in grammar school and enter college. Belton's political leanings become clear when he launches a successful student protest on campus, subsequently organizing a secret society to secure black rights. After Belton and Bernard graduate from college, both embark on careers, encountering all the stumbling blocks that typify post-Reconstruction. Eventually Belton builds his secret society, the Imperium in Imperio, to great proportions and recruits Bernard to serve as president. Ultimately, when Belton refuses to join a militant plan, he agrees to be executed by the Imperium, as policy dictates. Griggs's romance concludes with an epilogue written by the man who has betrayed that plan in order to subvert the race war that would result.

Griggs's protagonists are essentially one-dimensional, representing two heroic alternatives: pacifist and militant.¹ Both undergo numerous trials that demonstrate to the audience the value of "manly" behavior, offering a mythology of power and heroism. Repeatedly mistreated and thwarted by the grammar school teacher who considers him a "nigger brat," Belton still develops into a superior student who receives a full scholarship to a black college on the strength of his commencement address. When Bernard is being considered for president of the Imperium in Imperio, he undergoes initiation rites including a real firing squad and actual gallows. Both characters repeatedly receive accolades; Belton's graduation speech is "everywhere .. . hailed as a classic."² Bernard's achievements at Harvard are likewise "so remarkable that the Associated Press telegraphed the news over the country" (85). The demonstration Belton organizes at Stowe University is so successful that it triggers similar revolts in many schools throughout the United States. Both become involved in politics. Bernard, in fact, is elected to Congress but is denied the office because of typical post-Reconstruction fraud at the polls. Ultimately, when the two are involved in the Imperium, nearly every black in the country regards them as heroes.

Like other romances of its era, Imperium in Imperio reflects the Genteel Tradition, an unfortunate but inescapable influence. Not only Belton and Bernard but their lovers Antoinette and Viola reach the zenith of middle class respectability. It would never have occurred to Griggs to have created heroes and heroines who speak black English. Rather, he employs diction epitomized by the formula, "Take that, you knave" (185). Viola leaves a suicide note paralleling in style most of the sentimental romances of the time: "If in the shadowy beyond, whose mists I feel gathering about me, there is a place where kindred spirits meet, you and I shall surely meet again" (175). Another device with which Griggs underlines his characters' gentility is their attire. Belton, though making his initial appearance in a patched jacket and an elaborately described collection of hand-me-downs, later sports "a most beautiful and costly silk handkerchief that he stows "in the tail pocket of his handsome Prince Albert suit of lovely black" (70). Inevitably, houses are furnished with "exquisite taste."

Female characters are both genteel and remarkable, befitting their suitors: "Miss Viola Martin was a universal favoirte. She was highly educated and an elocutionist of no mean ability. She sang sweetly and was the most accomplished pianist in town. . . . She was most remarkably well-informed on all leading questions of the day, and men of brain always enjoyed a chat with her. .. . In all religious movements among the women she was the leading spirit" (100). Antoinette is no less extraordinary. She is "famed throughout the city for her beauty, intelligence and virtue. . . . She neither sang nor played, but her soul was intensely musical and she had the most refined and cultivated taste in the musical circle in which she moved" (113-14). According to the dicta of the popular sentimental romance, women must not only be described as virtuous, but they must prove their virtue through suffering. Just as Belton and Bernard undergo trials to prove their manhood, Viola and Antoinette demonstrate that they are appropriate models for their audience. Because Viola believes that a union between two mulattoes such as herself and Bernard will cause the race to grow pale and to deteriorate, she commits suicide, an act the reader is encouraged to view as a noble, if misguided, sacrifice. Antoinette, too, possesses heroic powers. When she gives birth to a white baby, Belton abandons her, assuming she has been unfaithful. Later, of course, her virtue is revealed, but her suffering continues when Belton is executed by the Imperium. Significantly, Griggs, unlike Brown, Harper, and Hopkins, refuses the tragic mulatto theme, maintaining that black skin is purer than white. And although Griggs's emphasis on gentility seems quaint, even amusing, to contemporary audiences, he wrote as do all writers from within a particular era, and his insistence on racial pride and heroism far outweighs his conventionality. Of primary significance is the characters' participation in the myth-making process that Griggs deems indispensable to fiction of historical nature.

For Griggs as for Brown the miraculous creates a sense that not only survival but transcendence of oppression are within reach. As do most romances, Imperium in Imperio abounds with coincidences, escapes from peril, and astounding, even improbable, events. Often such events intertwine with post-Reconstruction conditions to suggest that with sufficient agility and ingenuity blacks can combat their situation. One of the most spectacular of such incidents involves Belton's entrapment by the Klan (called "Nigger Rulers") who shoot and hang him as punishment for entering a white church and helping a white girl find the correct place in her hymnal. By chance the bullet merely penetrates the skin at the base of his skull, failing to enter the brain; luckier still is the whites' impatience to get on with the dissection of "such a robust, well-formed, handsome nigger," for they cut him down before he has time to die (156). Once on the operating table, Belton has his valor tested when the doctor cuts and pricks the victim's skin to assure himself that he is dead. Belton, of course, does not flinch. When the doctor conveniently places his dissecting tool next to Belton, the protagonist seizes the opportunity to stab the doctor, lay him out on the table, and leave a note to head off his pursuers. Even carrying a bullet in his head, Belton makes his way to Baton Rouge—not to escape, but to turn himself over to the governor. When it seems that Belton is doomed, Bernard is employed as a deus ex machina. With an eloquence comparable only to that of Daniel Webster, the narrator informs the audience, Bernard pleads the case before the Supreme Court and secures an acquittal.

Dramatizing these events without excessive narrative intrusion, Griggs leads the reader to identify with his protagonists and thus succeeds in indirectly commenting upon many aspects of contemporary history. That blacks were segregated from white churches and subject to lynching for infractions of the Jim Crow code is illustrated by the results of Belton's "impudence" in suggesting that a white girl was too stupid to locate the correct page in her hymnal. Since post-Reconstruction, blacks have been caught in a double-bind: self-assertion assures chastisement for impudence; aloofness from whites guarantees castigation for surliness. Imperium in Imperio as well as The Marrow of Tradition and The Quest of the Silver Fleece abound with scenes fictionalizing this historical truth. Also illustrative of the mood of the time is the suggestion of the white church's hypocrisy (a legacy from the slave narratives) and the utter corruption of supposedly moral members of white society. The postmaster, a government employee, heads the Nigger Rulers, and the doctor, who has dedicated himself to saving lives, finds joy in sacrificing this "fine specimen" to an experiment that is clearly counterfeit. Because the nineteenth century regarded science with both awe and suspicion, the scene becomes doubly significant. For murdering Belton, the postmaster receives from the doctor a keg of whiskey, symbolic of dissipation in much black literature. Ultimately, these incidents conclude so as to satisfy the tastes of a late-Victorian audience: the postmaster is punished, the hero resurrected.

Thus these events describe the mood and morals of the time; furthermore they illustrate the oral narrative, a tradition rooted in folklore and music, a tradition crucial to black literature. Because Griggs established his own publishing company, promoting his fiction among the entire black community, Gloster postulates that his novels were more widely read than those of Chesnutt and Dunbar.³ Whatever the case, Griggs, like Harper and Hopkins, strove to approach his audience by way of the popular mode, one that would appeal to a wide readership. The popular mode deriving from the oral narrative utilizes formulaic style (epithets) and protagonists with whom the audience can easily identify, and it relies on formula episodes as well. Most familiar of these formulas are those employed in the western or the detective story. In "Prolegomena to a Study of the Popular Mode in Narrative," James Mellard asserts: "If we are going to understand 'pulp' fiction or the 'slicks,' the western, the detective or science fiction, the soap, the confession, or the adventure, we must come to understand their structural conventions and formulas as fully as the scholars of the oral tradition understand Homer's themes and plots."⁴ By the same token, to read Imperium in Imperio properly, the reader must view it according to the conventions Griggs employed, rather than denigrating it because it fails to satisy demands outside its scope.

The episode described above, that of Belton's capture, escape, and acquittal, presents him with several obstacles he must overcome. By considering for a moment the fictional forms mentioned earlier—the western, for example—the reader may realize that the protagonist often confronts several obstacles within an episode, each of which must be dispensed with in order for the protagonist to triumph. Viewed within this context, Belton's actions seem predictable to the extent that the reader assumes he will ultimately outsmart his antagonists. Yet in much the same way that the audience of a tragedy knows the outcome of events but is engaged by the working out of these events, the audience of the popular narrative stays with the story in order to discover the author's variation of the formula. Employing the conventions of the popular mode, Griggs suggests that, though seemingly entrapped by a kind of historical destiny, blacks can attain heroic or mythic stature and eventually change the course of that destiny by outwitting the opponents they confront.

Robert E. Fleming speaks of Griggs's use of comedy to "ridicule the exaggerated dignity of the white master race."⁵ Particularly does he refer to those scenes involving the practical jokes played on Tiberius Leonard, Belton and Bernard's grammar school teacher. From placing a tack on Leonard's chair to contriving an elaborate device to drop him into a cistern at the culmination of graduation exercises, these scenes derive from a humorous tradition easily recognizable as oral. The gradual piling up of details which lead inevitably to a disastrous conclusion is a device which demands that the audience, consciously or unconsciously, predict that conclusion. As with the episode involving Belton's escape, the audience waits to see the way the teller will vary this formula. Griggs, of course, assumes that the audience has as little regard for Leonard as do he and the romance's characters. In transforming a figure who is historically real, who is indeed horrifyingly familiar, into a victim of clever jokes, Griggs reiterates much the same notion as with the use of formula episodes. Blacks may respond to oppression in various ways; by laughter they may revolt against and transcend it. Thus black oral tradition contributes to the mythology Griggs creates.

Many of the jokes achieve success because they are directed at a teacher. For an audience whose primary identification does not lie with the academic world, the teacher functions as a time-worn target for humor. Contemporary American films, televison programs, and comic strips continue to exploit the audience's ambivalence toward and alienation from education, as well as their anger toward authority figures. For Griggs's audience, Leonard is drearily emblematic of teachers available to blacks. Griggs takes pains to describe the stigma attached to teaching in a black grammar school and makes clear that Leonard's criminal past has made him unfit for any other career. But Griggs's mythologizing of history reaches far beyond a condemnation of the poor quality of teachers. Imperium in Imperio fictionalizes historical reality and at the same time debunks the educational theories of Booker T. Washington and William Wells Brown.

The romance opens with Belton's mother sending him off to school because she is determined to expose him to all available education. Tiberius Leonard favors Bernard over Belton because of his own shady associations with Bernard's white father; however, because he pits the two boys against each other, they strive to outdo each other. Upon graduation Belton obtains a teaching position, yet when he starts a newspaper that decries fraud at the polls, he is fired. With this incident, Griggs exposes the relationship between education and politics, suggesting that the teacher must function as a puppet to survive, that the intention of education is not to encourage independent thinking or integrity but to reward students and teachers for docility. Thus Griggs implies that the educational philosophy of Booker T. Washington accommodates itself to political corruption. To undermine Brown's concept that black education will inevitably lead to joy and prosperity, the narrator informs us that though Belton's aid to the Republican party entitles him to a high position in the post office, his color consigns him to a post as stamping clerk. Shortly afterward, his refusal to support a racist candidate for Congress causes him to lose his job with the post office. Although educated, Belton is victimized by a corrupt environment because he lacks Bernard's influential white father and his light skin. Contrary to Brown's and Harper's doctrine of black "perfectability" leading to the creation of an ideal society, Griggs maintains that this "perfection" leaves Belton at the mercy of a society preferring expediency to integrity. Finally Belton takes a position as president of his alma mater. Significantly, the only hope for an educated black man during post-Reconstruction is to return to his own community; white culture refuses to acknowledge his talents. En route to his new life Belton encounters the ethic of Jim Crow: he is literally thrown off a train for refusing to leave a first-class coach; he is refused service in a restaurant; and he is harassed by the Klan. Promising prosperity and joy, education brings instead frustration, alienation, and a more acute sense of injustice.

But Imperium in Imperio does not totally indict education. Rather, Griggs rejects the myth that education necessarily serves as a tool by which blacks can achieve material success in white society and replaces this notion with an emphasis on education as a process that should develop critical and creative thinking so that blacks can alter oppressive conditions. Such thinking is essential for the members of the Imperium, the secret society Belton creates. An organization intended to operate in the political arena, the Imperium suggests Du Bois's Niagara Movement (of which Griggs was a member) that later evolved into the NAACP. The Imperium, however, limits its membership to blacks. The legendary quality of the Imperium is clear, for its members number 7,250,000 and its treasury $850 million. Further, the Imperium represents a separatist government that will settle legal differences without needing to resort to the bigoted white system. The Imperium boasts an army, a congress, and a constitution.

The political philosophy of the Imperium crystallizes when a black postmaster's house is burned, he and his family shot. This event, one that actually occurred in 1898 in Lake City, South Carolina, precipitates a meeting to decide black-white relations in this country. There follows Bernard's discourse on injustices of the period: the relegation of blacks to a physical rather than a mental plane, the Jim Crow laws, the emasculating intentions of education, the prejudice of the courts, and the practice of mob rule. Imperium members propose three solutions: amalgamation, African emigration, and war. At the third suggestion Belton recoils, his rebuttal taking an accommodationist position. Attributing to the Ango-Saxon a culture superior to that of "primitive" Africa, he urges the Imperium to adopt the tenets of Christianity taught them by this "superior" culture. Rather than engage in race war, he resolves that the Imperium devote four years to impressing whites of the New Negro's talents. Should that fail, Belton proposes that the members of the Imperium emigrate to Texas, "working out our destiny as a separate and distinct race . . ." (245). Belton's proposal is defeated the next day by that of Bernard, who resolves to enter into secret negotiations with foreign enemies and seize Texas by force. Because Belton will not accede to this plan, Belton agrees to be punished by execution.

Belton and Bernard, then, occupy the two horns of the dilemma faced by blacks in turn-of-the-century America. With the suggestion to "work out destiny," Belton echoes Booker T. Washington's Atlanta Address of 1895. Possibly, Griggs had in mind the Washington-Du Bois controversy, with Belton representing Washington, Bernard, a more militant Du Bois. But both positions created doubts for the black audience. Belton's non-violent stance and his insistence on Christian humility gained a sympathetic ear; in fact, such tactics later proved effective for Martin Luther King. But his notion of the inferiority of African culture mirrors the very indictments that whites were using to perpetuate oppression. Tragically, Belton has come to accept a stereotyped, erroneous view of Afro-American history, a view that remains dominant until well into the twentieth century. Bernard's insistence on militance, though laudable for its loyalty to the black community, raised fears of race suicide, heroic but futile. To ascertain Griggs's position, the reader might be tempted to take Belton's death as an endorsement of militance. But Berl Trout, who foils the Imperium's plans, urges in the epilogue that humanity must unite to secure black rights "because love of liberty is such an inventive genius that if you destroy one device it at once constructs another more powerful" (165). Imperium in Imperio, then, should be read both as an incentive to black solidarity and as a warning that unless the black's place in history changes for the better, violence will inevitably erupt.

Griggs shies away from returning to his racial past, and in Imperium in Imperio he concentrates most of his energies on analyzing the historical moment, on creating a mythical society to rectify the horrors of that moment. The work begins about the time of the Compromise of 1877; unlike Harper and Hopkins, Griggs chooses not to approach the subject of slavery at all. Instead, Imperium in Imperio focuses on events contemporaneous with the time of its publication and reveals that late nineteenth-century blacks were largely controlled by prejudice. Even so, his mythology insists, blacks can reshape their environment, primarily through education and adoption of white middle-class speech and cultural mores. Griggs believes that Afro-Americans' political understanding must be sophisticated; however, the action taken on the strength of that understanding remains unclear. Unable to endorse either total accommodation or total militance, Griggs merely depicts these two positions through Belton and Bernard. And much of Imperium in Imperio' s strength and complexity derives from Griggs's failure to take a position, for his romance documents the ambivalence characteristic of the period's black intellectual.

Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) also fictionalizes the bewilderment of a man full of righteous anger but incapable of abandoning hypnotic security. Far angrier in tone than any of Chesnutt's earlier works, this romance, like Imperium in Imperio, employs two black characters, one conciliatory, one militant. Unable to embrace militance, yet consumed with rage, Chesnutt remains ambivalent toward blacks' proper position in history; each character depicts a possible mode of being. As Griggs responded to post-Reconstruction's socio-historic pressures, so too did Chesnutt. Just as an actual event—the murder of Postmaster Cook and his family—spurred Griggs on to interpret contemporary history, so did the race riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, provide part of Chesnutt's impetus. Occurring in the same year—1898—the two events furnished Griggs and Chesnutt with dramatic material to transform into fiction and myth at once. [As shown elsewhere in Mythic Black Fiction], such events are not isolated ones, the climate of the 1890s being so vicious that it allowed for numerous such occurrences. The year 1898 spawned mobs in Greenwood County, South Carolina, where many blacks were shot and hanged. In 1900, mobs robbed and assaulted blacks for three days in New Orleans. During this time, in fact, the proportion of lynching was increasing in the South.⁶

Like his fellow post-Reconstruction writers, Chesnutt responds to the dehumanization of blacks, and his primary emphasis is self-definition. In the manner of many black writers, he uses messianic figures to point to traditionally Christian virtues without making direct reference to Christianity. Thus he mythologizes endurance and dignity in the face of adversity, demonstrating the transcendence of suffering he wants his audience to acknowledge in the black community. Moreover, Chesnutt depicts black visionary qualities, particularly intuitive wisdom, to arrive at a notion of the various ways Afro-Americans are empowered to change history. Literacy, a central fixture of Chesnutt's mythmaking, has the potential to demonstrate black intellectual agility, if not to provide social mobility.

The romance, with its emphasis on heroic characters who triumph over corrupt forces, is an ideal strategy for depicting Chesnutt's myth. His three central characters form a kind of trinity engaged in battle with the unholy "Big Three," Chesnutt's fictionalization of typical post-Reconstruction políticos. Romance also allows him to uproot prevailing stereotypes, particularly those promulgated by the Plantation Tradition, and redesign them from a black perspective. Generally speaking, Chesnutt's mythmaking in The Marrow of Tradition centers on educated blacks, fleshed out by the Genteel Tradition, the Sentimental Heroine, and the tragic mulatto, devices to further his insistence on assimilation. At the same time, however, he offers an uneducated working-class hero, Josh Green, whose messianic capabilities emerge when he avenges slavery's injustices. Two other paradigmatic characters, William and Janet Miller, both of whom are educated, dramatize dignity and refusal to misuse power. Both can see beyond the mammoth injustices inflicted on them to envision an ideal world, and they behave according to the dictates of that world without sacrificing their integrity. Perhaps because Chesnutt views his racial past as humiliating, or perhaps because he assumes his audience views it thus, he cannot incorporate that past into his mythology. While such omission may or may not constitute a fictional flaw, one cannot ignore more obvious flaws: The Marrow of Tradition suffers from the stock devices of the sentimental romance, including overplotting, and its language is as stilted as that of most romances of its day. Nevertheless, if examined within the mode Chesnutt chooses, The Marrow of Tradition cannot justly be criticized for melodrama or implausibility or for flat characterization or plot contrivances, for Chesnutt deliberately employs such strategies to convey his fictional mythology.

Both Griggs and Chesnutt sought to counteract stereotypes and create heroes for their audiences, but these audiences differed from one another. Earlier it was noted that a larger number of blacks read Griggs' fiction than read either Chesnutt's or Dunbar's. Chesnutt failed to reach a large black audience, in part, because in some instances he chose not to reach that audience. In a letter to Houghton Mifflin, December 14, 1899, Chesnutt wrote that he did not favor advertising or reviews from the majority of black newspapers. His reason involved this theory: "Most of them are grossly illiterate, and their readers, generally speaking, buy comparatively few books."⁷ Thus while he, like Griggs, tried to merge historical issues with popular fictional strategies to attract a large readership, his major audience was not the black working class but those whites and middle class blacks suffering the influence of the plantation tradition of Joel Chandler Harris, Thomas Nelson Page, and, later, Thomas Dixon.

Harris and Page's fictionalization of pre-war times, albeit ludicrously simplistic or historically inaccurate, did provide impetus for Chesnutt. In addition, Chesnutt reacted as vehemently as Hopkins to newspapers of the time that vilified blacks as brutes lurking in the shadows, intent on raping innocent white women. With The Marrow of Tradition, he wished to confront the lack of reality of black characters presented to American society. Moreover, Chesnutt envisioned himself as crusading against what he perceived as the "subtle, almost indefinable feeling of repulsion toward the Negro, which is common to most Americans."⁸ As a result, The Marrow of Tradition strives to develop multi-faceted characters.

Chesnutt accomplishes this characterization in part because he realized that black characters, though functioning as counter-stereotypes, need not necessarily appear divine. White characters, he saw, needed to occupy roles other than villainous ones—or at least needed motivation for villainous acts. Proceeding from these assumptions, Chesnutt created Jerry, a black character whose class interests preclude moral action, and Old Mr. Delamere, a truly benign member of the gentry. During slavery Jerry would have experienced a certain degree of protection from his master, but as a freedman he is on his own, shrewdly ascertaining that his well-being depends on obsequiousness. Disloyal to whites and blacks alike, he contributes to the near-lynching of an innocent black man. Although a victim of racism, Jerry is at no time presented sympathetically. Rather, he reveals the dehumanization resulting from the New South's mores. Whereas the Plantation Tradition made much of the suffering freedman, Harris and Page chose not to depict the reality of his condition as did Chesnutt. Many of Chesnutt's characters resemble Plantation Tradition types; however, each transforms the original to explode and replace contemporary myths. Consequently, The Marrow of Tradition both parallels and parodies the romances of its literary adversaries, revising both history and historical fiction.

Primarily, Chesnutt addresses the Plantation Tradition through contrasting the old and the new. For Harris and Page, who wished to perpetrate the notion that the South had deteriorated since the Civil War, it was necessary to show the benevolent paternalism of the old masters. Old Mr. Delamere, whose faith in the innocence of his servant Sandy Campbell obliterates his faith in his own grandson, exemplifies this sort of ideal gentleman. In contrast, his grandson Tom, emblematic of the new order, is portrayed as a whiskey swilling, insensitive rake, who not only cheats at cards, defying the code of the Southern gentleman, but robs (and possibly murders) his own aunt to pay off his gambling debts. More hideous still, he frames the loyal servant who raised him, almost causing Sandy's lynching. Had Chesnutt depicted Old Delamere as a stereotypic Southern gentleman, the reader might feel bewildered by Chesnutt's apparent use of the Plantation Tradition. Actually, Chesnutt transmutes stereotypes into real historical figures, presenting Delamere's loyalty to Sandy in historically accurate fashion: Sandy is found innocent simply because Delamere's blacks had been carefully raised, in other words, socialized. White romancers would have lionized the beatific Southern gentlemen of the past; however, they would have avoided showing that men such as Delamere produced dissolute grandsons such as Tom. Chesnutt's mythmaking, then, recreates and undercuts the Plantation Tradition.

Servants, too, embody contrasts between antebellum and post-Civil War periods. Just as Chesnutt opposes Sandy, the ultimate innocent, to Jerry, the sycophant, he juxtaposes the faithful old Mammy Jane with a combative new nurse. Significantly, however, Mammy Jane, while genuinely kind, is appallingly self-righteous, as shown by her response to her employer's claim that Mammy Jane has no peer: "Deed dere ain't, honey; you is talkin' de gospel truf now! None er dese yer young folks ain't got de trainin' my ole mist'ess gave me. Dese yer new-fangle schools don' l'arn 'em nothin' ter compare wid it."⁹ Through this speech, Chesnutt underscores the nature of the servant's compliment to her mistress, her firm resolve to identify with the power of the ruling class. In contrast, the nameless nurse is described as passing through racial adolescence: "she was in what might be called the chipon-the-shoulder stage, through which races as well as individuals must pass" (42). With the phrase "as well as individuals," Chesnutt slyly suggests that all readers, white as well as black, have at one time manifested the "pugnaciousness" which post-Civil War blacks stood accused of originating. Through these and other devices, Chesnutt seeks to dispel Plantation Tradition myths.

To further mythologize black history, Chesnutt resorts to the Genteel Tradition, that delimiting but inevitable set of values in the turn-of-the-century romance. Amusingly, when Chesnutt wishes to symbolize Tom Delamere's utter depravity, he reveals a bureau drawer's contents. To his horror, Old Mr. Delamere discovers "bottles of wine and whiskey; soiled packs of cards; a dice-box with dice; a box of poker chips, several revolvers, and a number of photographs and paper-covered books at which the old gentleman merely glanced to ascertain their nature" (223). Chesnutt's handling of black characters further reinforces genteel values. William Miller, the young doctor, is rarely called by his first name; that the reader knows him as "Dr. Miller" seems pretentious and formal. In addition it has led several critics to call him "Adam," his father's name. Miller and Janet, his wife, speak white English at all times and struggle to influence "the best people" (190). In one episode a train conductor forces Miller to ride in the Jim Crow car, and he briefly shares his quarters with some farm laborers whose noise and dirty clothes he finds "offensive" (61). That he must ride with them galls his class sensibilities. Chesnutt's willingness to exploit the tragic mulatto theme constitutes a more serious limitation. Miller and Janet are both mulatto; in fact the primary emotional impact of The Marrow of Tradition hinges on Janet's relationship with Olivia Carteret, her half-sister, and Olivia's refusal to acknowledge Janet's existence, much less her right to their father's estate. Bearing a strong family resemblance to Olivia, Janet is nevertheless denied social acceptance by the white community. Chesnutt's purpose in emphasizing Janet's color is much the same as his predecessors; by stressing the physical similarity between Olivia and Janet he hopes to elicit white sympathy and identification. Whereas Harris and Page emphasize the mulatto's "tainted nature," Chesnutt deplores the racial mixture because it leads to isolation. Janet and her husband, though financially stable, are as Chesnutt described himself, "neither 'nigger,' white, nor 'buckrah.' Too 'stuck up' for the colored folks, and, of course, not recognized by the whites."¹⁰

As with Brown, Harper, and Hopkins, the appeal to whiteness suggests an underlying sense of racial supremacy disturbing in a writer seeking to counter white supremist's romances. Chesnutt himself, however, would have found such criticism irrelevant because he unabashedly envisioned part of his "high, holy purpose" as promoting assimilation.¹¹ Through assimilation, he felt, racial prejudice would vanish. That such a notion is politically anathema to black nationalists is obvious. But even in Chesnutt's time the tragic mulatto theme was considered sentimental. According to the 1860 census, only 12 percent of the black population was mulatto.¹² By 1900 the census did not solicit such information, but there is little reason to believe the figures had altered significantly. For most blacks the mulatto was not tragic but fortunate, enjoying special privileges denied darker Afro-Americans. Thus for some black readers Chesnutt dwelled on sentiment for its own sake. Significantly, neither Griggs nor Du Bois exploits the tragic mulatto theme. Finally, the reader must regret Chesnutt's use of the theme as indicative of his imprisonment in a cliché.

A more appealing device of Chesnutt's romance to counter stereotypes is his emphasis on characters' extraordinary qualities. Josh Green, Dr. Miller, and Janet Miller possess heroic potential, each serving a distinct ideological function. Josh Green exhibits the most obvious heroism, and the modern reader can identify with him more easily than with the Millers. The reader first glimpses Josh, "a huge Negro, covered thickly with dust," through Miller's eyes. Poles apart from the wellmannered doctor, Josh immerses his head in a water trough and shakes himself "like a wet dog." In contrast to Miller, who has paid first-class train fare, Green has hopped on a car without paying. To Miller, Josh is "an ordinarily good-natured, somewhat reckless, pleasureloving negro" (59). Therefore he is surprised to see Josh's expression change to one of intense hatred when he glimpses Mc Bane, a fellow passenger. During a Klan incident Mc Bane has shot Josh's father and traumatized his mother so that she has never regained her sanity; Josh is determined to avenge these deeds. Even while he regards Josh as a "dusty tramp," Miller admires his dedication to revenge (59). Most blacks, Miller admits to himself, want to forget their history, a "dark story." Josh, on the other hand, remembers his and "shapes his life to a definite purpose" (112). Josh remains unintrigued by middle-class manners and mores. His sympathy, language, and behavior lie entirely with the black working class, and his life purpose is to rectify the wrongs done to them, wrongs symbolized by his mother's disrupted sanity.

Chesnutt further stresses Josh's heroism through opposing his militant stance to Miller's accommodationist principles. Whereas Miller attempts, with no success, to convince the indifferent whites of Sandy Campbell's innocence, Josh proposes that blacks take up arms and surround the jail. Even when Miller refuses to join Josh's resistance group against Mc Bane and Carteret's raid on the black citizenry, the rebels proceed fearlessly without him, disregarding his warning that resistance is suicidal. The ensuing riot provides Josh with his long-awaited confrontation with Mc Bane. While more than one critic has lambasted this scene for its melodramatic qualities, the scene clearly ignores the demands of verisimilitude and moves into the realm of romance. Josh, a "black giant, famed on the wharves for his strength," amazes the crowd with his immunity to the endless rain of bullets. "Armed with a huge bowie-knife, a relic of the civil war," and a smile which "seemed to take him out of mortal ken," Josh plunges the weapon into Mc Bane's heart. Given the post-Reconstruction era, Chesnutt cannot endorse Josh's violence, finding it necessary to query, "One of the two died as the fool dieth. Which was it, or was it both?" (309). Nevertheless, Josh's larger-than-life status remains intact. He occupies a pivotal position in black historical fiction, a man who would "ruther be a dead nigger any day dan a live dog," thus contributing to the mythologizing process (284).

Dr. Miller's heroism is more elusive, but Chesnutt does mean him to serve as a paradigm, even though Miller laments his own advice to disband the resistance group as "not heroic but. . . wise" (283). Dr. Miller belongs to the segment of black culture Du Bois designated as the "talented tenth." Colleagues here and abroad regard him as the best in his field, and he has performed a remarkable operation that has gained him recognition in a medical journal. Moreover, his humanitarian instincts have led him to dedicate personal funds to establish and maintain a black hospital in the South rather than in the less oppressive North or in Europe because he regards his mission as remaining with his people, contributing "to their uplifting" (51). Despite repeated slights and insults, such as being denied entrance to Carteret's home, where a Northern doctor has invited him to assist at a delicate operation, he maintains impeccable dignity. The romance's final scene pushes Miller's self-command beyond the point any ordinary man could endure. His hospital reduced to rubble by a racial massacre perpetrated by Carteret, his own son shot during the holocaust, Miller is approached by Olivia Carteret to save her son's life by performing a tracheotomy. During several impassioned, irrefutable speeches, Miller outlines the moral situation: Major Carteret is a murderer, while he is a victim; Major Carteret represents injustice, while he represents justice. In short, Miller, as the only doctor who can save Carteret's son from death, occupies the messianic throne of power. Satisfying as his power appears to the audience, Miller, like Chesnutt, cannot reconcile himself to the militance his position suggests. Just as Chesnutt edges away from Josh's violent attack on Mc Bane, he takes the reins from Miller and hands them to Janet, allowing her to perform her mythic function.

Janet's heroic potential is almost as difficult to perceive as is Miller's, but when viewed within its historical context, her heroism emerges clearly. Serving, like her husband, to counter prevailing Plantation Tradition stereotypes, she is college-educated, well-read, and unlike the so-called "impudent new negroes," unfailingly gracious and polite. In fact Janet is the quintessential Sentimental Heroine: aside from her role as tragic mulatta, she is "an exhaustless fountain of sympathy" who all her life has "yearned for a kind word, a nod, a smile," from her sister Olivia Carteret (65-66). Despite Janet's self-abnegation, Chesnutt wants his audience to view her as an extraordinarily sensitive and introspective woman. In reflecting on her all-forgiving nature, Janet muses that she has often rebuked herself for her spineless behavior and poor self-concept. She attributes these flaws to the "taint of slavery" (66). Janet's meditations are not apt to arouse in the reader a sense of her heroism, in the traditional sense. Unlike Josh, her remembrance of her history does not lead her to "shape [her] life to a definite purpose" and avenge the wrongs done to her ancestors. In contrast to Josh, she feels more shame than anger in connection with the history that has "tainted" her; or, more to the point, she has internalized her anger rather than directing it toward an appropriate target. What is heroic is her willingness to confront her own docility and to examine its supposed origins. Chesnutt obviously views Janet as a woman concerned with the nature of truth, a woman who has access to profound realities. His confidence that "when the heart speaks, reason falls into the background" explains why Janet's decision to allow Miller to perform the tracheotomy is not simply a retreat from militance, for Chesnutt believes she possesses a penetrating intuitive understanding of truth (66).

The Marrow of Tradition's final moments permit Janet to turn around a potentially humiliating confrontation with her sister and achieve tragic greatness. Chesnutt stresses her mythic qualities: "she towered erect, with menacing aspect, like an avenging goddess" (326). When Olivia, fearing that Janet will not send Miller to her baby's aid, exercises her last effort at manipulation by offering Janet the portion of their father's estate to which his will already entitles her, Janet retorts scornfully, "I throw you back your father's name, your father's wealth, your sisterly recognition. I want none of them—they are bought too dear! . . . But that you may know that a woman may be foully wronged, and yet may have a heart to feel, even for one who has injured her, you may have your child's life, if my husband can save it!" (329). Compared to the narrow, petty selfishness of her sister, she emerges as heroic, almost saintly. The Marrow of Tradition concludes with Miller entering the Carteret house. Still, the reader remembers not this seeming defeat but Janet's superb victory over the groveling, ignominious Olivia. Indeed, Janet's nearly superhuman dignity during her last speech ensures her mythic stature. Each of the romance's heroic characters has suffered tremendous loss: Josh Green lies dead, Dr. Miller's hospital stands in ruins, Janet is deprived of her child and her inheritance. But the three characters remain ennobled—not by suffering but by their ability to transcend that suffering. Putting aside personal, selfish motives, each acts with dignity even in the face of degrading circumstances. Each, larger-than-life, achieves legendary status, suggesting that blacks would be better equipped to lead than whites if given positions of power.

Did Chesnutt's characters not triumph in this fashion, his romance would be unbearably depressing, for he fictionalizes in meticulous detail post-Reconstruction politics. Carteret, Belmont, and McBane convey through their values and actions Chesnutt's concept of history. With the leaders of the white supremacy movement, Chesnutt explains the forces behind disenfranchisement. Major Carteret, editor of the Morning Chronicle, the organ of the political party defeated in the last election, seeks to reinstate the old South for his son's sake. Carteret, who believes in "the divine right of white men and gentlemen," represents those for whom the Southern code's external manners easily symbolize true morality (34). As William L. Andrews has demonstrated, Chesnutt has modelled Carteret on an actual person, Josephus Daniels, "who, as editor of the Raleigh News and Observer . . . conducted an anti-fusion, anti-Negro press campaign during the election year of 1898." General Belmont, Andrews establishes, is likewise based on a real historical figure in Wilmington politics, Alfred Moore Waddell.¹³ Belmont, a lawyer aspiring to be governor, is entirely unscrupulous. In Chesnutt's moral hierarchy, Belmont retains his gentlemanly position primarily as a result of birth, education, and shrewdness. In short, unlike Carteret, he is the sort of man who before the war would have turned his head when his slaves were mistreated. "Captain" Mc Bane, whose title is purely fictitious, epitomizes the old South's obliteration. Whereas before the war Mc Bane would have served as an overseer, slavery's abolition, coupled with his ambition, has allowed him to move from manual laborer to political aspirant. Benefiting from illegally-acquired wealth, Mc Bane seeks a political office to ensure the status formerly denied him. Thus he perches on the bottom rung of the ladder, below Carteret and Belmont.

Their campaign to repeal the Fifteenth Amendment through convincing North Carolina that blacks should never have received the vote is for each of these men only a tool to further his own ambitions. Finally, they possess a frightening amount of political power. What Carteret and Belmont lack in effrontery Mc Bane makes up for; what Mc Bane lacks in influence Carteret and Belmont counterbalance. As a result, "the Big Three" constitute an invincible force. With these characters and the massacre they bring about (for which Carteret disclaims responsibility when the wholesale murder repels his sensibilities) Chesnutt suggests that if history is cyclical, it is so because men like these desperately need the security previous eras afforded. To be sure, blacks are floundering in a post-Reconstruction morass, but the Big Three, as well, stumble through unknown territory, struggling to forge stable identities. Carteret and Belmont can best forge these identities by reinstating the old order. By identifying with this order, Mc Bane can blot out his past's humiliation. Through these characters, John Reilly writes, "Chesnutt exposes the fundamental similarity of white men who mistakenly believe themselves to be distinctly different because of social class and manners."¹⁴The Marrow of Tradition demonstrates that history is shaped by humanity's psychological needs, its insecurities and weaknesses. Analyzing the white supremacy campaign's success, the narrator reflects that selfishness, rather than patriotism, humanism, or spirituality, "is the most constant of human motives . . . burrowing unwearingly at the very roots of life" (239). Perhaps because Chesnutt spent much time with whites, he arrives at a vision of history that recognizes the degree to which blacks' and whites' fates intertwine. Selfishness motivates all of us, the only hope lying with those who can put aside selfishness and behave morally. Both black and white characters exhibit this ability: Old Delamere, who intervenes on Sandy Campbell's behalf, acts as morally as do Josh, Miller, and Janet. J. Noel Heermance makes a case for the optimism Chesnutt exhibited most of his life. Pointing to a statement to Walter Hines Page in 1899 that blacks were "moving steadily upward," Heermance argues that even in the period of Chesnutt's most profound despair, he never failed to believe in the future amelioration of blacks' condition.¹⁵ For Chesnutt, as for Griggs, life is grim. Yet while Imperium in Imperio reveals bewilderment at the proper means to confront that life, The Marrow of Tradition conjectures that even when nothing can be gained except the assurance of dignity and heroism, by refusing to misuse power blacks can transcend oppression.

Griggs and Chesnutt both rely on their own era's historical events to furnish fictional material. Like Brown, they do little more than allude to a past whose "primitiveness" precludes the possibility of heroic figures for their audience. Both flirt with militance, yet neither can fully endorse that militance. Whereas each decries the paucity of reward gained through education, each takes pains to provide genteel, educated blacks to counteract stereotypes. Both romances embody the desire to provide legendary figures who dispel myths of inferiority and populate a realm of heroic possibility. For the post-Reconstruction romancer, the need to create a positive mythology was monumental. But the unabashed heroism of Iola Leroy and Contending Forces ultimately eludes Griggs and Chesnutt. To repudiate white cultural values as does Josh Green, or to embrace militance, as do both Josh and Bernard, suggests the very dehumanization these writers fight so hard to erase. Accordingly, to accept white mores while refusing to fight back, as do Belton and Dr. Miller, means betrayal of one's race, loss of integrity. Even Janet achieves her heroism at the expense of joy. Many blacks today believe their dilemma mirrors the one Griggs and Chesnutt depict. Yet Imperium in Imperio and The Marrow of Tradition disclose a far more constrictive culture, one that totally denies black humanity and achievement, forcing its writers to take refuge in a heroism tempered by bitterness and ambivalence.

NOTES

¹ S. P. Fullinwider points out in The Mind and Mood of Black America: 20th Century Thought (Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press, 1969), 75, that in four of Griggs's romances two such heroic figures mirror Griggs's own ambivalence.

² Sutton Griggs, Imperium in Imperio (1899; rpt. New York: Arno, 1969), 40. All further references to this work appear in the text.

³ Hugh M. Gloster, Negro Voices in American Fiction (1948; rpt. New York: Russell and Russell, 1965), 57.

⁴ James M. Mellard, "Prolegomena to a Study of the Popular Mode in Narrative," Journal of Popular Culture 6 (1972), 8.

⁵ Robert E. Fleming, "Sutton E. Griggs: Militant Black Novelist," Phylon 34 (1973), 75.

⁶ Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 87.

⁷ Chesnutt Papers, as quoted in William L. Andrews, "A Reconsideration of Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line, " College Language Association Journal 19 (1975), 144.

⁸ Journal, May 29, 1880, Charles Waddell Chesnutt Collection, Erastus Milo Cravath Memorial Library, Fisk Univ., Nashville, Tenn., as quoted in J. Noel Heermance, Charles W. Chesnutt: America's First Great Novelist (Hamden, Conn.: Archon, 1969), 19.

⁹ Charles Waddell Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition (1901; rpt. Miami: Mnemosyne, 1969), 41. All further references to this work appear in the text.

¹⁰ Chesnutt Papers, as quoted in Andrews, "A Reconsideration," 142.

¹¹ Helen Chesnutt, Charles Waddell Chesnutt: Pioneer of the Color Line (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1952), 21.

¹² Woodward, The Strange Career of Jim Crow, 16.

¹³ William L. Andrews, The Literary Career of Charles W. Chesnutt (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1980), 180.

¹⁴ John Reilly, "The Dilemma in Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition," Phylon 32 (1971), 34.

¹⁵ Heermance, Charles W. Chesnutt, 137.