Афроамериканцы

Предисловие

This Bronze Booklet aims at a survey of the Negro in American fiction,
both as character and author. It is the first full-length presentation
of this subject, but differs from the usual academic survey by giving
a penetrating analysis of the social factors and attitudes behind
the various schools and periods considered. Sterling A. Brown, now
associate professor of English at Howard University, born and educated
in Washington, D. C., was graduated from Williams College in 1922 with
Phi Beta Kappa honors and the Clark Fellowship to Harvard, received his
master’s degree at Harvard in 1923, and has since pursued graduate work
in English literature at Harvard University. He has had wide experience
teaching at Virginia Seminary and College, Lynchburg, Va., 1923-26,
at Lincoln University, Mo., 1926-28, Fisk University, 1928-29, and at
Howard University from 1929 to date. His volume of verse, _Southern
Road_, published in 1932, put him in the advance-guard of younger
Negro poets, and, as well, the then new school of American regionalist
literature. In 1937, Professor Brown was awarded a Guggenheim
Fellowship for creative writing and among other things, will complete
for publication his second volume of verse, “_No Hiding Place_.” Since
1936, he has been directing editor on Negro materials of the _Federal
Writers’ Project_ at Washington headquarters. For the last five years,
his literary book review comments in _Opportunity_ under the caption:
“_The Literary Scene_,” have revealed a critical talent of sane but
progressive and unacademic tendencies,--a point of view that the reader
will find characteristically carried through in this provocative and
masterly study.
*
The treatment of the Negro in American fiction, since it parallels his
treatment in American life, has naturally been noted for injustice.
Like other oppressed and exploited minorities, the Negro has been
interpreted in a way to justify his exploiters.

 I swear their nature is beyond my comprehension. A strange
 people!--merry ’mid their misery--laughing through their tears, like
 the sun shining through the rain. Yet what simple philosophers they!
 They tread life’s path as if ’twere strewn with roses devoid of
 thorns, and make the most of life with natures of sunshine and song.

Most American readers would take this to refer to the Negro, but
it was spoken of the Irish, in a play dealing with one of the most
desperate periods of Ireland’s tragic history. The Jew has been treated
similarly by his persecutors. The African, and especially the South
African native, is now receiving substantially the same treatment
as the American Negro. Literature dealing with the peasant and the
working-class has, until recently, conformed to a similar pattern.

The blind men gathered about the elephant. Each one felt the part of
the elephant’s anatomy closest to him, the trunk, tusk, eyes, ear,
hoof, hide and tail. Then each became an authority on the elephant.
The elephant was all trunk, or all hoof or all hide, or all tail. So
ran their separate truths. The single truth was that all were blind.
This fable, pertinent to our study, might be continued to tell how some
of the blind men returned to their kingdoms of the blind where it was
advantageous to believe that the elephant was all trunk or tusk.

We shall see in this study how stereotypes--that the Negro is _all_
this, that, or the other--have evolved at the dictates of social
policy. When slavery was being attacked, for instance, southern authors
countered with the contented slave; when cruelties were mentioned,
they dragged forward the comical and happy-hearted Negro. Admittedly
wrong for white people, slavery was represented as a boon for Negroes,
on theological, biological, psychological warrant. Since Negroes
were of “peculiar endowment,” slavery could not hurt them, although,
inconsistently, it was their punishment, since they were cursed of
God. A corollary was the wretched freedman, a fish out of water. In
Reconstruction, when threatened with such dire fate as Negroes’ voting,
going to school, and working for themselves (i.e., Negro domination),
southern authors added the stereotype of the brute Negro. Even today
much social policy demands that slavery be shown as blessed and
fitting, and the Negro as ludicrously ignorant of his own best good.

Many authors who are not hostile to the Negro and some who profess
friendship still stress a “peculiar endowment” at the expense of the
Negro’s basic humanity. Some antislavery authors seemed to believe that
submissiveness was a mystical African quality, and chose mulattoes
for their rebellious heroes, attributing militancy and intelligence
to a white heritage. Many contemporary authors exploit the Negro’s
quaintness, his “racial qualities.” Whether they do this for an escape
from drab, standardized life or out of genuine artistic interest or, in
the case of Negro authors, out of race pride, their work suffers from
the narrowness of allegory. It must be added that these authors play
into the hands of reactionaries, who, once a difference is established,
use it to justify peculiar position and peculiar treatment.

Whether the Negro was human was one of the problems that racked the
brains of the cultured Old South. The finally begrudged admission that
perhaps he was, has remained largely nominal in letters as in life.
Complete, complex humanity has been denied to him. He is too often
like characters in the medieval allegories: now Loyalty, or Mirth, or
Servility, or Quaintness, or Exuberance, or Brutishness, or Lust. Only
seldom is he shown as Labor or Persecution, although he was brought
here to supply the first, and as payment received the second.

Since there is no stereotype without some basis in actuality, it goes
without saying that individuals could be found resembling Page’s loyal
Uncle Billy or Stark Young’s William Veal, or Dixon’s brutal Gus, or
Scarlet Sister Mary or Van Vechten’s Lasca, or even Uncle Tom and
Florian Slappey. But when, as is frequent, generalizations are drawn
from these about a race or a section, the author oversteps his bounds
as novelist, and becomes an amateur social scientist whose guesses are
valueless, and even dangerous. Fiction, especially on so controversial
a subject as the American Negro, is still subjective, and novelists
would do well to recognize that they are recording a few characters in
a confined social segment, often from a prejudiced point of view. They
cannot, like Bacon, take all for their province.

Fortunately for American fiction, however, there have been authors,
even from the outset, who heard the Negro speak as Shakespeare heard
Shylock:

 He hath disgraced me ... laughed at my losses, mocked at my gains,
 scorned my nation ... cooled my friends, heated mine enemies; and
 what’s his reason? I am a Jew.... If you prick us, do we not bleed? If
 you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die? and
 if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest,
 we will resemble you in that.

We shall see in the nineteenth century many writers, from Melville to
Cable, who have shown sympathy and comprehension. Nevertheless it is
to present-day realists, a large number of them southerners, that one
must look for the greatest justice to Negro life and character. They
have been less concerned with race than with environment; they have
sought to get at social causes rather than to prop a social order.

In spite of the publishers’ dicta that certain authors know _the_ Negro
better than Negroes themselves; in spite of certain authors who believe
that slave-holding ancestry is necessary in order truly to know Negroes
(on the theory that only the owner, or his descendants, can know the
owned); in spite of the science of Negro mind-reading, flourishing
below the Mason-Dixon line, it is likely that Negro authors will, after
the apprentice years, write most fully and most deeply about their own
people. As we go to the Russians, the Scandinavians, and the French for
the truth about their people; as we go to the workers and not to the
stockholders, to the tenants and croppers and not to the landlords, for
the truth about the lives of tenants and croppers, so it seems that we
should expect the truth of Negro life from Negroes. The Negro artist
has a fine task ahead of him to render this truth in enduring fiction.
So far, much of what seems truthful has been the work of sympathetic
white authors. In all probability white authors will continue to
write about the Negro. Sometimes similarly conditioned in America’s
class structure, sometimes extremely sensitive and understanding,
they will get at valuable truth. But Negro novelists must accept the
responsibility of being the ultimate portrayers of their own.