Race and the politics of memory: Mark Twain and Paul Laurence Dunbar

Journal of American Studies

Volumn 40, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 283-309

  Fishkin, Shelley Fisher ^a  

^a STANFORD UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33746623732     PISSN: 00218758     EISSN: 14695154     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1017/S0021875806001381     Document Type: Article

References (107)

1. Mark Twain, "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It," New York World Sunday Supplement, 10 Dec. 1899, reprinted in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, 1891-1910, ed., Louis J. Budd (New York: Library of America, 1992), 440.
2. William S. McFeeley, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 311.
3. See Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985)
4. David Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 211-232.
5. As historian Eric Foner put it, "the Confederacy lost the war on the battlefield but won the war over memory." Eric Foner, "Selective Memory," The New York Times Book Review, 4 March 2001, Section 7, 28.
6. Blight observes, "By the mid-1880s and throughout the 1890s, American culture was awash in sentimental reconciliationist literature, published especially in successful magazines. Scribner's and Lippincott's were perhaps the earliest literary pilgrims at the altar of Southern romance and Negro dialect stories, but... Century took the lead by the 1880s, joined by Harper's Weekly and Monthly, in forging a widely popular literature of reunion. Many other magazines competed for the vast, often largely Northern and female, audience looking for an increasingly nostalgic depiction of American slavery and the Civil War epoch. Cosmopolitan, McClure's - and in the nineties, even one of the most Yankee journals of all, Atlantic Monthly, published in Boston - courted Southern writers and stories of the Old South." Blight, 216-17.
7. "Tom Shows" were stage shows that toured the nation during the postbellum era nominally dramatizing scenes from Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin; in reality they were demeaning, racist affairs that bore more resemblance to antebellum minstrel shows than they did to Stowe's novel. "By 1879 there were 49 touring 'Tom Shows,' as they became known, listed in the New York Daily Mirror" (Richard Moody, "Uncle Tom, the Theatre, and Mrs. Stowe," American Heritage, 6, 6 (Oct. 1955), 29-33, 102, 103.)
8. In the first major study of this phenomenon in 1947, Harry Birdoff wrote that "Tom shows took on aspects of minstrel shows; meanwhile, the blackface stars began performing 'Toms.' Foot-tapping, cork-smeared Topsys trod the boards, and pontificating Lawyers Marks chewed the scenery of the so-called legitimate theaters just as they did in the bawdier minstrel houses." Birdoff, The World's Greatest Hit: "Uncle Tom's Cabin" (New York: S. F. Vanni, 1947), 1.
9. See also Gossett, Uncle Tom's Cabin,
10. and Jo-Ann Morgan, "Picturing Uncle Tom with Little Eva-Reproduction as Legacy," The Journal of American Culture, 27, 1-24.
11. Sterling Brown, "Negro Character as Seen by White Authors, "Journal of Negro Education, 2, 2 (April 1933), 179-203,
12. and idem, The Negro in American Fiction (Washington, DC: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1937; rept. Arno Press, New York, 1969), 68
13. Ralph Ellison, "Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke," Partisan Review, 25 (Spring 1958), 212-22 (rept. in idem, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1953), 45-59)
14. Arnold Rampersad, "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Afro-American Literature," in James S. Leonard, Thomas A. Tenney, and Thadious M. Davis, eds., Satire or Evasion? Black Perspectives on Huckleberry Finn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 216-27
15. Forrest G. Robinson, "The Characterization of Jim in Huckleberry Finn," Nineteenth-Century Literature, 43 (Dec. 1988), 361-91 (rept. in Laurie Champion, ed., The Critical Response to Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1991), 207-2)
16. Emory Elliott, "Introduction," in Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (New York: Oxford University Press (Oxford World Classics), 1999), xxv-xxxv;
17. David Bradley, comments in WGBH documentary, "Born to Trouble: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," broadcast 26 Jan. 2000, PBS, and personal communication with the author;
18. Ralph Wiley, "Spike Lee's 'Huckleberry Finn'," (unpublished screenplay) ©1997; WGA-E Registered #107314-00 and personal communication with the author;
19. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "In Praise of 'Spike Lee's Huckleberry Finn' by Ralph Wiley," Mark Twain Circular, 13, 4 (Oct.-Dec. 1999), 1-9 (available at http://faculty.citadel.edu/leonard/od99wiley.htm, accessed 20 March 2005)
20. Jocelyn Chadwick-Joshua, The Jim Dilemma: Reading Race in Huckleberry Finn (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998)
21. Carl F. Wieck, Refiguring Huckleberry Finn (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2000)
22. J. Saunders Redding, "American Negro Literature," in Addison Gayle, Jr., ed., Black Expression (New York: Weybright & Talley, 1969), 231
23. Darwin Turner, "Paul Laurence Dunbar: The Rejected Symbol," Journal of Negro History, 52 (1967), 1-13
24. Charles T. Davis, "Paul Laurence Dunbar," in idem, Black is the Color of the Cosmos: Essays on Afro-American Literature and Culture, 1942-1981, ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Foreword by A. Bartlett Giamatti (New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1982), 121-65
25. Jay Martin and Gossie Hudson, "Introduction to the Short Stories" (63-66) and "Introduction to the Poetry" (261-67 in Jay Martin and Gossie Hudson, eds., The Paul Laurence Dunbar Reader (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975)
26. Jay Martin, "Foreword: Paul Laurence Dunbar: Biography through Letters," in idem, ed., A Singer in the Dawn: Reinterpretations of Paul Laurence Dunbar (New York: Dodd, Mead & Co., 1975)
27. Joanne Braxton, "Introduction," in The Collected Poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar (Charlottesville and London: University of Virginia Press, 1993), ix-xxxvi;
28. Dickson D. Bruce, Jr., "Identity and Ambiguity: The Literary Career of Paul Laurence Dunbar, 1892-1906," in idem, Black American Writing from the Nadir: The Evolution of a Literary Tradition, 1877-1915 (Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 56-98
29. Marcellus Blount. "The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance," PMLA, 107, 3 (May 1992), 582-93
30. John Keeling, "Paul Dunbar and the Mask of Dialect," Southern Literary Journal, 25, 2 (Spring 1993), 24-38
31. Gavin Jones, "Paul Laurence Dunbar and the Authentic Black Voice," in idem, Strange Talk: The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1999), 182-207. Jones's treatment of dialect in other chapters of this book is relevant and informative as well. Of all the discussions of Dunbar cited here, Gavin Jones's astute consideration of the complexity of Dunbar's achievement as a poet and fiction writer resonates most richly with the argument I am making inthis essay.
32. John Wallace called Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn "the most grotesque example of racist trash ever written" on a broacast of ABS's Nightline, Ted Koppel, anchor, 4 Feb. 1985, show #966 (transcript). Wallace repeated the same charge ten years later, asserting that "any teacher caught trying to use that piece of trash with our children should be fired on the spot, for he or she is either racist, insensitive, naïve, incompetent or all of the above and has no business in a public-school classroom." John Wallace, "This Book is Just Trash," USA Today, final edition, 25 Aug. 1995, 12A;
33. Julius Lester, "Morality and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn," in Leonard, Tenney, and Davis, 195-215.
34. Fredrick Woodard and Donnarae MacCann, "Minstrel Shackles and Nineteenth Century 'Liberality' in Huckleberry Finn," in Leonard, Tenney and Davis, 141-53, 142.
35. Jane Smiley. "Say it Ain't So, Huck. Second Thoughts on Mark Twain's 'Masterpiece'," Harper's Magazine, Jan. 1996, 61
36. Eric Lott, "Mr. Clemens and Jim Crow: Twain, Race and Blackface," in Forrest Robinson, ed., Cambridge Companion to Mark Twain (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 129-52
37. Elaine Mensh and Harry Mensh, Black, White, and "Huckleberry Finn": Re-imagining the American Dream (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000).
38. James Weldon Johnson, The Book of American Negro Poetry (1922; rev. ed. 1931; rept. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1958), 4.
39. Addison Gale, Jr., "Literature as Catharsis: The Novels of Paul Laurence Dunbar," in Jay Martin, A Singer in the Dawn, 150-51.
40. Suspicions about Dunbar's alleged embrace of white stereotypes also informs Houston Baker's comment in 1987 that Dunbar "does not have as one of his goals the general progress of the Afro-American populace." Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 39.
41. See the essay "Surviving Jim Crow" at http://www.jimcrowhistory.org/history/surviving2.htm, connected with the broadcast site http://www.pbs.org/wnet/jimcrow/ posted 2002 (accessed 19 March 2005).
42. "Paul Laurence Dunbar," ©2002 Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. http://www.pbs.org/wnet/aaworld/reference/articles/ paul_laurence_dunbar.html (accessed 19 March 2005).
43. Also available at http://www.britannica.com/eb/article?tocId=903145? (accessed 19 March 2005).
44. My reconstruction of Mary Ann Cord's experiences in Richmond and New Bern before her arrival in Elmira will appear in my forthcoming book, Reading America: A Companion to Literary Landmarks from Walden Pond to Wounded Knee (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
45. Samuel L. Clemens, typescript of notebook 35, May - Oct. 1895, 8, Mark Twain Papers.
46. Quoted in Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African American Voices (New York and Oxford: Oxford, 1993), 8-9, 36.
47. It is not clear whether the revisions in Mark Twain's manuscript of the story reflect his efforts to "improve on" Cord's story-telling or his efforts to capture it more precisely. Peter Messent (The Short Works of Mark Twain: A Critical Study (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 62) argues that Twain was not simply repeating what Cord had said, but altering it according to his own judgement of how best to tell her story.
48. Mark Twain, "A True Story, Repeated Word for Word as I Heard It," Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1874, 591-94.
49. Mark Twain, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885; rept. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press (The Oxford Mark Twain, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin), 1996), 201.
50. Mark Twain, Mark Twain's Notebooks and Journals. Vol. 3 (1883-1891), ed. Robert Pack Browning, Michael B. Frank, and Lin Salamo, general editor Frederick Anderson (Berkeley: University of California Press, The Mark Twain Papers, 1979), 89.
51. A South Carolinian, "South Carolina Society," Atlantic Monthly, XXXIX (June 1877), 684,
52. quoted in Rayford W. Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro from Rutherford B. Hayes to Woodrow Wilson (1954; rept. with Introduction by Eric Foner, New York: Da Capo Press, 1997), 252.
53. For a discussion of Twain's growing "unease about the situation of the post-bellum Southern African Americans" in Life on the Mississipi, a book Twain was completing as he was also in the process of working on Huckleberry Finn, see R. J. Ellis, "I Knowed He Was White Inside': Huck Finn's Dangerous Language," in Overhere: Reviews in American Studies, 14, 2 (Winter 1994), 10.
54. For a discussion of Twain's habit of collecting periodical clippings, from the early 1870s on, about the treatment of African Americans in the South, see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Was Huck Black.?, 70-71.
55. See Edwin McDowell, "From Twain, a Letter on Debt to Blacks," New York Times, 14 March 1985, 1, 16.
56. Charles Dudley Warner, "Education of the Negro" [1900] http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/3114 (accessed March 20, 2005).
57. Interestingly, Paul Laurence Dunbar challenged Warner on this topic directly in "Is Higher Education for the Negro Hopeless?", Philadelphia Times, 10 June 1900 (rept. in Paul Laurence Dunbar, The Sport of the Gods and Other Essential Writings, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin and David Bradley (New York: Random House, 2005)), 276-78.
58. Mark Twain, ["The Man With Negro Blood"], fragment, Box 37 DV 128 No. 4, in the Mark Twain Papers, the Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.
59. Quoted in Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "False Starts, Fragments and Fumbles; Mark Twain's Unpublished Writing on Race," Essays in Arts and Sciences, XX (Oct. 1991), 18.
60. While for years this fragment was mislabeled in the Twain papers as having been written during the last years of Twain's life, my research proved that in fact it was written some time between 1883 and 1889. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "False Starts, Fragments and Fumbles," 18.
61. Mark Twain, "The United States of Lyncherdom," in Mark Twain: Collected Tales, Sketches, Speeches & Essays, 1891-1910, ed. Louis J. Budd (New York: The Library of America, 1992), 479-86.
62. Mark Twain, "The True Character of Theodore Roosevelt" [autobiographical dictation, 14 July 1908], in Mark Twain in Eruption; Hitherto Unpublished Pages about Men and Events by Mark Twain, edited with introduction by Bernard De Voto (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1940), Ch. 6.
63. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897; rept. in Twain, Following the Equator and Anti-Imperialist Essays, ed. Shelley Fisher Fishkin (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)), 213.
64. Mark Twain, "The Stupendous Procession," in Mark Twain's Weapons of Satire: Anti-Imperialist Writings on the Philippine - American War, ed. Jim Zwick (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1992), 56.
65. For an extended discussion of this text (and of Twain's insights into racism and its relation to anti-Semitism and imperialism during his later years), see Shelley Fisher Fishkin, "Mark Twain and the Jews," in Arizona Quarterly, 61, 1 (Spring 2005), Special Issue: Mark Twain at the Turn-of-the-Century, 1890-1910, guest editors Shelley Fisher Fishkin and Forrest G. Robinson, 137-66.
66. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Old Cabin," in Collected Poetry, 260-61
67. idem, "Nelse Hatton's Vengeance," in Sport of the Gods, 124-33.
68. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "One Man's Fortunes," in Sport of the Gods, 164-79.
69. See also discussion of the story in ibid., 94-98.
70. Dunbar's poem, "To Miss Mary Britton," in his self-published 1893 collection of poems, Oak and Ivy, begins with this note: "When the legislature of Kentucky was discussing the passage of a separate-coach bill, Miss Mary Britton, a teacher in the Schools of Lexington, Kentucky, went before them, and in a ringing speech protested against the passage of the bill. Her action was heroic, though it proved to be without avail." "To Miss Mary Britton," Collected Poetry, 307-8.
71. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Race Question Discussed," in Sport of the Gods, 259.
72. Ibid., 258. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "The Race Question Discussed," in Sport of the Gods, 259.
73. Dunbar, "The Fourth of July and Race Outrages," in Sport of the Gods, 290-91.
74. Dunbar, "To the South - On Its New Slavery," in Sport of the Gods, 88.
75. Since it is impossible literally to get inside an author's mind, the issue of ascribing authorial intentions is limited, of necessity, to what the work reveals. Manuscript revisions - evidence of conscious authorial choice - can be useful, however, in the effort to understand what an author was trying to achieve. Further evidence of Mark Twain's efforts to hone and polish the anti-racist dynamics of the novel may be gleaned from recent analyses of his revisions in the manuscript in The Mark Twain Annual, No. 2 (2004).
76. See Leigh Biddlecome's "The Effect of Revision on Jim's Character," 116-117
77. Tom James's "Implications of Manuscript Alternations in Huck Finn," 120-21
78. Ben Fong's, "The Coloring of Jim into a Man," 121-22
79. and Julie Park's "Adjusting the Portrait of Huck and Jim: How Manuscript Changes Reflect Friendship Dynamics," 125-26.
80. The fact that readers at the time the book appeared did not recognize its anti-racist implications is not really relevant here, nor is the fact that such readings did not surface until after the Civil Rights Movement in the US. As David Bradley has observed, "Twain may have been the proverbial one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind" (personal communication, 9 Sept. 2005). The "warning" with which die book starts signals for the reader that what follows will not be an easy or formulaic read. It is likely that on at least some level Twain probably knew he had written a book whose irony would make its subversiveness especially challenging for readers to grasp. That same irony also endows it with tremendous power. For a discussion of some of the challenges of ascribing authorial intentions see Peter Messent, Mark Twain (New York: St. Martin's, 1997), 88-90.
81. Twain's efforts to make Jim's dialect readable are apparent from the many manuscript revisions documented in Huck Finn: The Complete Buffalo and Erie County Public Library Manuscript - Teaching and Research Digital CD-ROM, ed. Victor A. Doyno and Robert Hertholf (Buffalo: Buffalo and Erie County Public Library, 2003). As Greg Taylor notes, "Jim's speech appears on the following scan numbers: 19-20, 26, 74-76, 170-186, 188-195, 201-215, 221, 283(01)-283(02), 283(17), 283(44)-283(60), 297-303, 306-307, 367, 374-376, 385-386, 390-391, 470-477, 496-498, 703-704, 709-710, 712-715, 1052-1054, 1214, and 1288-1289."
82. Greg Taylor, "Jim's Dialect: Mark Twain's Vision of African American Vernacular English," Mark Twain Annual (2004), 133-39.
83. W. E. B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct Democracy in America, 1860-1880 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1935), 30.
84. Josiah Strong, Our Country (New York: American Home Missionary Society, 1885), 175-78,
85. quoted and discussed in Logan, Betrayal of the Negro, 166-67.
86. Cable's polemic ran in the Century Magazine in Jan. 1885, the same issue which contained the second pre-publication excerpt from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. It may be read online at http://etext.lib.virginia.edu/railton/huckfinn/hfequity.html (accessed 20 June 2005).
87. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "Nelse Hatton's Vengeance," in Sport of the Gods, 124-33.
88. Victoria Earle Matthews, "Aunt Lindy," A Story Founded on Real Life" [1893], A.M.E. Church Review, in The Online Archive of Nineteenth-Century U.S. Women's Writings, ed. Glynis Carr (posted Summer 2000; accessed 17 December 2004) at http://www.facstaff.bucknell.edu/ gcarr/190USWW/VEM/AL.html.
89. Logan notes that the "alleged unchastity of Negro women in general was analyzed in an article in the Atlantic. The practice was attributed to their lack of concern for sexual purity and to the free use that white men made of them. The author added that the sexual immorality of Negro women was a deterrent to loose morals between white men and white women." Logan, 247.
90. Logan, 265
91. Ida B. Wells, On Lynchings [Southern Horrors 1892, A Red Record 1895, Mob Rule in New Orleans 1900] (Salem, NH: Ayer and Co., 1987)
92. idem, The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World's Columbian Exposition: The Afro-American's Contribution to Columbian Literature (1893; rept, ed. Robert W. Rydell, Urban: University of Illinois Press, 1999)
93. idem, Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1931; rept., ed. Alfreda M. Barnett Duster, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).
94. For a good overview of these images of African Americans in popular media at the time see Rayford Logan, "The Negro as Portrayed in the Leading Literary Magazines," in Logan, The Betrayal of the Negro, 239-74.
95. Claudia Tate, Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1992).
96. "Coon's meat am a heap richer'n'pos'ums, but cher got ter take de kernels out'n de coon's fo'legs if you spect ter enjoy him., 'cause dar's gall in dese yer kernels, an' they spile de meat when it am a cookin'...." Dialect anecdote that ran in the Evening Register, reprinted from the Chicago Herald in 1886,
97. quoted in Logan, Betrayal of the Negro, 225.
98. One might also compare this piece with Dunbar's dialect poem "Possum," (Collected Poetry, 141-42), which, like the offensive anecdote, offers information about cooking a possum, but seizes the occasion to rant about white ignorance and black know-how when it comes to cooking - a notion absent from the piece quoted by Logan.
99. See Logan, Betrayal of the Negro, 244-47, for examples of dialect-speaking black preachers being ridiculed in prominent national publications at this time.
100. Paul Laurence Dunbar, "When Malindy Sings," in Sport of the Gods, 39-41.
101. Paul Laurence Dunbar to Alice Ruth Moore, 17 April 1895, Paul Laurence Dunbar Collection, series 10, box 22, OHS, quoted in Braxton, "Introduction," Collected Poetry, xiii-xiv.
102. Dunbar, "A Banjo Song," in Collected Poetry, 20-21.
103. Dunbar, "We Wear the Mask," Sport of the Gods, 48.
104. I address Hannibal, MI's abuse of Twain's legacy at length in Lighting Out for the Territory: Reflections on Mark Twain and American Culture (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Hannibal's efforts to respond positively, in at least some small ways, to some of the criticisms raised in that book were evident when I returned there in June 2001, with a camera crew from C-Span.
105. I am working to encourage new evaluations of Dunbar's achievements in his hometown of Dayton as well as nationwide by collaborating with scholars around the country to mount a range of events on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Dunbar's death in 2006. These include a major conference held at Stanford University in March 2006. The edition of Dunbar's work that I coedited with David Bradley in 2005 also endeavors to extricate Dunbar from some of the reductive myths that have distorted his place in literary history. See, in particular, Fishkin and Bradley, "Introduction to the Poetry," "Introduction to the Short Fiction," and "Introduction to the Nonfiction" in Sport of the Gods, 1-22, 91-106, 233-44.
106. Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" [1920], in Turner, The Frontier in American History (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986), 24.
107. Mark Twain, "My First Lie and How I Got Out of It," 440.