Another reading post: ignore if it's not your thing.
My seventh book for the Classics Challenge is Iola Leroy or Shadows Uplifted by Frances E. W. Harper, published in 1892 (24 years after the last book I read for the challenge, Little Women). I chose this to fit into category #10, "Classic About a Family." The version I found at the Bookworm was part of a volume called The African-American Novel in the Age of Reaction, edited by William L. Andrews, and containing two other novels by Black authors as well. So, after Iola, I read the other two. Together, the three novels make a powerful reading experience.
The "Age of Reaction," according to Andrews, was the time after Reconstruction when the Supreme Court ruled in favor of "separate but equal," Black voter suppression intensified, and the Jim Crow era took off. In other words, it was a pretty horrible time in our country's history. Each of these novels deals with that time in different ways, from optimism and encouragement (Harper), to sad realism (Chesnutt), to pessimism and irony (Dunbar). And finally, all three are about African-American families.
I knew Iola Leroy had something to do with a family. But when I think of a "family novel" I think warm and fuzzy, with some problems to use up the space in the novel, but ending with everyone sitting around a Christmas tree, or whatever. That is not the plot of Iola Leroy. Iola is the story of a family split apart by slavery -- split multiple times -- and how they find each other again, once slavery is abolished. It's also the story of a young woman who can pass as white but chooses to align herself with Black people instead. And finally it is a somewhat sanitized history of Black life in America from the end of the Civil War until perhaps the 1880s (exact dates are unclear).
Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the author, was a freeborn Black woman originally from Baltimore, and later of Philadelphia, who published poetry, abolitionist works, and novels. She was active in many causes, including prohibition and women's suffrage, as well as abolitionism and then Black rights. Her concept of "fiction" in Iola Leroy is a little disappointing -- many of her characters just mouth historical facts or platitudes. It's as much a Black rights tract as it is fiction, and often Harper's goal seems to be a history lesson plus encouragement for Black people not to give up hope amid the horrors of post-Reconstruction. Also, a portion of her story is borrowed from Clotel, which in turn borrowed from Uncle Tom's Cabin, so I kept feeling as though I were reading the same story for the third time. Harper isn't a talented stylist. But she has a moving story to tell.
The first members of the family we encounter are Robert Johnson, a soon-to-be-freed slave, and Iola Leroy, the raised-as-white daughter of a white man and a light-skinned woman, who after her father's death is sold into slavery by a wicked cousin of his. Robert and Iola are uncle and niece, but it takes them a while to figure this out. They go on to search for and find Robert's mother, Iola's brother, and Iola's mother Marie (Robert's sister). The reunions are of course joyful, but what's sad is that none of them recognize each other. Iola and her mother and brother have only been separated for five or six years, so they eventually make the connection. But Robert's mother and sister were sold when he was very young, and Marie was sold away from her mother soon after. They figure out the relationships by birthmarks and such, and they recreate a happy loving family after the devastations of slavery, but they don't actually remember each other. That broke my heart and really made me think about Black families.
Slavery was abolished almost 155 years ago (December 18, 1865). The oldest relative I can remember knowing was my mother's father, who was born 15 years later, in November 1880. So if my family were Black, my grandfather's parents (my great-grandparents) could have been slaves. That's how recent slavery is. I know many things about my ancestors, stretching back to the 1600s. Most African-Americans in this country just don't have that type of information, even though many of their ancestors came to this country (against their will) around the same time mine did.
Many awful things happen in Iola Leroy, but the book puts a positive spin on everything and it ends happily, with Iola choosing to identify as Black, even though she is perhaps 7/8 white. I'm a little tired of the "passing" theme, but I should note that the book also contains intelligent, successful characters who are identified as "unmixed" (Miss Delany, Rev. Carmicle), unlike earlier novels where only light-skinned characters were allowed to succeed. In addition, Harper marries a fully Black character to an able-to-pass-as-white character (not Iola), which would have shocked some of her readers in 1892. Harper was writing a vision of how she wanted things to be, post-slavery, in the face of all the bad things that were actually happening, and I appreciated that, even though it is so far from the truth.
The shadows have been lifted from all their lives; and peace, like bright dew, has descended upon their paths. Blessed themselves, their lives are a blessing to others.
After reading Iola, I skipped the second book and jumped ahead to The Sport of the Gods, by Paul Laurence Dunbar (1902). Andrews, the editor of the volume, describes Sport as "grim, urban realism anticipating the work of Richard Wright," and a "chronicle of frustration and demoralization," with "themes of human futility and fatalism." This did not sound good to me. But every book can't be as positive as Iola Leroy, so I gave Sport a try.
In fact, The Sport of the Gods was less painful than I expected, because Dunbar writes well, and because I think the novel is intended to be more ironic than realistic. It's a terrible story, on the face of it -- Berry Hamilton, a Black butler who has served his white employer faithfully for 20 years, is wrongly accused of theft and thrown in prison, causing his whole family to lose their home as well. His wife and two teenage children leave their Southern town and move to New York, where one by one they are corrupted by the evils of urban life. No one back home or in New York will help the Hamilton family -- there seem to be no good people anywhere in the world. Instead of the painstaking reconstruction of the Black family in Iola Leroy, here we get the painful destruction of one. But you don't get to know the characters well enough to feel too badly for them, especially as the novel progresses and you realize that everyone, even Mrs. Hamilton, will be pulled under eventually by forces greater than themselves. Some of the problems are fixed by the end of the book, but nothing ever really gets fixed.
It was not a happy life, but it was all that was left to them, and they took it up without complaint, for they knew they were powerless against some Will infinitely stronger than their own.
[Post-note: I read it, and it was quite interesting, but very sad. Dunbar was an alcoholic and an abuser. Now I want to know less about Dunbar and more about Alice.]
Finally it was time to read The Marrow of Tradition by Charles W. Chesnutt (1901). I was dreading this book,
because I knew it was a fictionalized version of the white-on-Black "Wilmington
Massacre" of 1898. I had never heard of the Wilmington Massacre until a few months ago, when I read about it in the New Yorker. And then I learned about the Tulsa Massacre of 1921,
when Trump planned his unfortunate rally in Tulsa. And I thought, OK, I
have to read this book. So I did. But it was just as painful as I'd feared it would be. It's worth reading, but it's so very sad.
The story's frame is the relationship between two half-sisters: the elder, Olivia, white, married to Major Carteret, the editor of the local racist newspaper, and the younger, Janet, light-skinned Black, thought to be illegitimate, married to Dr. Miller, the local "colored" doctor. Olivia doesn't speak to Janet, due to her understanding of the relationship between her father and Janet's mother, and the general embarrassment of having a Black sister. Major Carteret helps incite a political coup and riot/massacre against the Black citizens of the town (called Wellington in the novel), and at the end, after Janet's child has been killed in the fighting and Olivia needs Dr. Miller's help to save her own child, Olivia is forced to apologize to Janet and accept her as a sister.
So again, this is a book about family, but it is a family that destroys itself from within. Perhaps at the end there is a little hint of racial reconciliation, but I wasn't uplifted by it. Too little too late, as Dr. Miller says when Olivia asks him to save her child.
"Madam," he answered more gently, moved in spite of himself, "my heart is broken. My people lie dead upon the streets, at the hands of yours. The work of my life is in ashes,--and, yonder, stretched out in death, lies my own child! God! woman, you ask too much of human nature! Love, duty, sorrow, justice, call me here. I cannot go!"
The book contains various subplots related to these characters and their friends and relations. None of the white family members distinguish themselves. One recurring event is the destruction or suppression of wills (old Mr. Delamere's, Olivia's father's, perhaps Miss Ochiltree's), which I found very upsetting, since in each case Black people would have benefited from the true wills. At the end we watch as the massacre destroys
the town and many of the people we've come to know. The one and only satisfying part of the book is when Captain McBane, one of its most odious characters, gets his comeuppance. All the rest is desolation.
But of the three novels contained in this volume, this is the one I'd read again. The Black characters are interesting and nuanced, as are some of the white characters. The book gives the clearest picture of the times and the clearest analysis of white people's heinous beliefs and acts. Andrews claims the book ends with hope, and maybe in 1901 Charles W. Chesnutt did have hope that race relations and the lives of Black people could improve. But reading the book now, in 2020, I see only the roots of the racism that continues today.
So that's it for my exploration of the literature of Reconstruction and its terrible undoing. These books were hard to read, but I'm glad I made the effort. The next book I plan to read for the Challenge was published in 1928, so it will be interesting to see how it differs from what I've read so far.
