Both Sides of the Medal
Pro-Slavery Thought in the Old South. By William Sumner Jenkins, Ph.D. (University of North Carolina Press : Oxford University Press. Ils. 6d.) Mules and Men. By Zora Neale Hurston. With an introduction by Frans Boas. Ph.D.. LL.D , and illustrations by Miguel Covarrubias. (Kegan Paul. 12s. 6d.) Poe all its fashionable glamour, for all the prestige of Paul Robeson or Countee Cullen, Joe Louis or Bill Robinson, black America is still mysterious. Watching the apparently happy
crowds loafing in a southern street, the less happy crowds filling the streets above 125th Street in New York, the white observer feels, or ought to feel, himself out of his depth.
Miss Hurston, who is a Negro anthropologist, tells us, and it is easy to believe, that the average Negro, even the average “ Afro-American," puts on a show for the white inquirer, but keeps his heart to himself. It is hard to blame him ; you are one of the race that locks up prisoners in cages on the roads where they may and do burn to death. You are white, and so are the mean Southern politicians, with their sadistic appeals to mob emotion and mob violence. It is impossible not to feel uneasy, even resentful, Forgiveness to the injured doth belong For they ne'er pardon who have done the wrong."
. The possibilities of misunderstanding are admirably exem- plified by these books. Dr. Jenkins has written a clear and readable account of a debate of great importance at the. time, whose consequences are with America still. Miss Hurston has shown us some sides of the Negro's mind, and we can see the same facts from two complementary points of view. We can see the Christian gentleman planter training his backward charges, " half-devil and half-child," to borrow a phrase from a later theorist, making Christians out of them, teaching them industry, making possible for them as much virtue as they were
capable of. In Miss Thurston's account of contemporary. Negro folk-lore, the planter is " Ole Massa," fundamentally
a figure of fun, powerful to punish, to whip, but also infinitely gullible, diverted from his purpose by practical jokes, by tricks, even by a kind of luck that in some degree compensates the black man for his many handicaps. Brer Rabbit is too much for Brer Dog and here the master is the dog. In the numerous stories of slavery days told by Miss Hurston's raconteur, none are of the horrifying type Uncle Tom's Cabin would make us expect, but none justify the childish view that ruling classes so readily adopt, that the ruled not only were better off in the old days, but that they now realise it. Not that freedom is a panacea ; there is the " straw-boss " to conciliate, there are sheriffs and judges ready to " send you up," there are masters proud to be " unreconstructed rebels," modern Legrees whose crimes are punished by haunting, by " conjure," but all the ,same there are no regrets for the old plantation.
The difficulties of teaching the Negroes to work were one of- the main talking points of the defenders of slavery and the problem is very different seen from the Big House and seen from the slave cabins. To the Whites it was an attempt to make the Negroes useful to themselves and to the world, and that, according to the slave-owners' favourite " thinker," Carlyle, was the only real right of the Negroes. But to the untutored Negroes watching the planters and overseers, the problem was an historical one. How had it come that the Blacks did all the work and the Whites all the talking about its glories ? Because at the beginning of things, the Black had been tricked into taking up the bag which looked so heavy and impressive—as well it might since work was inside it ! An extremely interesting section of Dr. Jenkins's books is devoted to the anxiety of the Whites for the souls of the slaves. The evangelical efforts of the planters were not merely designed to make the slaves content with their lot, but to make Christians of them. The first aim was thwarted ; the second succeeded. There is plenty of religion in Black America and Miss Hurston gives a picture of some aspects of it, not the most
pleasing aspects, the wasting of effort on separate churches in one small village and the constant fight of doctrine against the joy of life. But Miss Hurston is more interested in and more sympathetic towards. " hoodoo," what the Whites call voodoo." She studied under several eminent practitioners in.
New Orleans, most of who claimed to be connected with the great Marie Leveau, whose fame was so great that " Even Queen ViOtoria ask her help and send her a cashmere shawl with money ,also." But even hoodoo is impregnated with Christian symbolism, in New Orleans naturally enough with Catholic symbolism, elsewhere with more Protestant ideas (e.g., about the magical powers of the Bible) and with general doctrines of sympathetic magic that do not seem to be specific- ally Negro. What might have been made clearer is whether these great conjure doctors had many Whites in their clientele. If they had not, it is not for want of superstition !
The problem discussed by Dr. Jenkins has changed form but not substance in the last sixty years. Whites may no longer have the naive views about the anatomical and physio- logical differences between the races, differences which pro- duced theories that -recall Herodotus. But now there arc newer substitutes of a more scientific type. It may no longer be believed that, in the long run, the two races are mutually sterile, that mixed bloods are progenitors of mules though obviously not mules themselves. Many of the explanations of and justifications of slavery have curious contemporary German parallels. There was the attempt to justify slavery by the Bible, but was polygamy not also tolerated by the Bible ? • A strict interpretation of the Bible might put the curse of Canaan on the Negro but it made him indubitably a man and it was hard (though Dr. Jenkins does not discuss the point) to preach from the text " what God hath joined " in face of the internal slave trade. On the other hand, to deny that the Negro was really a man was not only to run up against the semi-sacred authority of Mr. Jefferson (which VMS harder for a Virginian than for a Boston cotton Whig like Rufus Choate), but led to dangerous arguments of the type used by Fitzhugh, arguments which justified on Aristotelian grounds slavery for Whites as well as Black, arguments that lost more from political inexpediency than they gained from intellectual consistency. The " mud-sills " of u famous and tactless speech might, if they thought things over, adopt the views of Helper and attack both Negro and planter ; in any case, they would be di-gruntled. Fitzhugh, if generally accepted, would have put slavery on a more respectable basis than could Jefferson Davis, but be would have seriously interfered with the recruiting of the Confederate army.
The formal problem was solved by war, but the real problem remains ; these two books are helps to its understanding. D. W. BROGAN.
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