Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction

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INTRODUCTION Contending Classes, Dividing Lines In a private letter written to a friend in January 1900, Boston clubwoman Addie Hamilton Jewell criticized what she considered a controversial subject in Pauline Hopkins's historical romance Contending Forces (1900).1 Having heard Hopkins read from the forthcoming novel, Jewell did not object to its themes of lynching, concubinage, and miscegenation, topics one might expect to offend a genteel audience at the turn of the twentieth century. Instead, what she found most incendiary was Hopkins's depiction of contentious class relations among African Americans.2 By featuring women cattily competing at a church fair in one chapter, Contending Forces revealed what Jewell considered a “feeling of opposition” between blacks on “a lower scale” and other blacks “on the so called higher plane” (Jewell, “[Review],” 558, 560). In the reviewer's opinion, the novel risked damaging the public image of black Americans, who needed to appear united in the cause of racial advancement. “I am forced [to] condemn [the chapter],” Jewell determined, “and protest against it as calculated to retard the work which the author [Hopkins] aims to hasten viz the securing our rights as ‘American citizens and the protection of the law’” (559). Implicit in Jewell's critique is the premise that when representing intraracial class relations, African American authors needed to mind all the possible audiences and political resonances of their writing. Though Hopkins had read publicly for the all-black audience of the Colored National League, a civil rights advocacy group, her reviewer feared that when published, the novel also would circulate among white readers who might misinterpret Hopkins's motives. If Contending Forces showed black people discriminating among themselves, Jewell conjectured, “readers of the Caucasian race” who were “ever on the lookout for flaws in our character” might feel justified in their own prejudice against blacks (558). Jewell remained on guard against the racist logic that would Page 2 → interpret individual “flaws” within black communities as yet one more strike against the entire race. Importantly, however, she did not object to intraracial class hierarchies entirely. Rather, she recommends that Hopkins's chapter “calls for a sequel” to show that African Americans on the “higher plane” (presumably like Jewell herself) were always “respectful in their manner when dealing with those they consider their inferiors” (560).3 Missing the irony of her own self-interested protestations, Jewell proposes that a literary portrayal of a harmoniously structured black community—rather than a scene of racial infighting—could show that African Americans were model citizens worthy of full participation in American society. Addie Jewell's letter opens this book and echoes throughout it because her sentiments, rich with anxious contradictions, keenly identify postbellum African American literature as a prime cultural medium that inscribes—and in some cases, exacerbates—black Americans’ uneasy concerns over intraracial class differences. Like Addie Jewell, on one hand African Americans who promoted racial uplift questioned whether class antipathies among them might compromise their collective protests for political rights. On the other, African Americans emphasized class differentiation to show that their race could produce representative middle and upper classes distinguished from the uncultured figures who stood for black people in most Americans’ imaginations. Both these stances aimed to refute racial prejudice. But they carried different implications for how authors such as Pauline Hopkins and her literary contemporaries chose to represent black communities in their fiction. Dividing Lines: Class Anxiety and Postbellum Black Fiction explores how African Americans living and writing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries represent class differences as paradoxically hampering and enabling their claims to greater civil liberties. In the face of a stringent U.S. racial hierarchy, black authors considered the possibilities and risks of an alternative social order: What if one's class mattered more than race? Could middle-class African Americans then gain social equality with their white middle-class counterparts? What should be the relations of different social classes to one another, both within black communities and across the color line? In their dual roles as social commentators and creative artists, the writers whose fiction is at the center of this study—Pauline Hopkins, Frances E. W. Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and Charles W. Chesnutt—seldom arrive at consensus on the specific criteria for identifying classes. Their short Page 3 → stories

and novels draw dividing lines among African Americans based on factors ranging from cultural refinement and ancestry to reputation and occupation. Yet what interests me most are the dilemmas and narrative strategies the writers share in making intraracial class differences legible in fiction. As African American authors negotiate black and white readers’ expectations, along with turn-of-the-century literary conventions and the pursuit of black civil rights, the writers devise an identifiable repertoire of themes and formal patterns for representing intraracial stratification. I argue that class anxiety is the recurring textual sign of struggles over black Americans’ class identification, racial loyalty, and public representation in postbellum African American fiction.4 What I call class anxiety is the uneasiness over a potential loss of social status, over class disparities, or over a sudden change in condition, for better or for worse.5 As authors attempt to explore yet contain the fraught topic of class difference, they convey their characters’ anxiety, as well as their own, through a number of formal elements: extended dialogue and speeches, narratorial intrusions, evasions, lacunae, repetition, and genre hybridization. Though critics otherwise might judge these as aesthetic weaknesses, I recognize them as literary innovations to expand the limits of turn-of-the-century black fiction to represent class distinctions, an inherently contentious issue that presented both the promise and the peril of displacing racial solidarity. From the vantage point of postbellum black creative writers and their readers, we can derive an account of the intersections of race and class. Dividing Lines pursues close textual analyses of novels and short stories situated within a rich context of speeches, pamphlets, and other nonfiction texts; reader response in the form of letters to the editor, book reviews, and editorials also helps me identify particularly vexed passages in the fiction, such as the church fair scene in Contending Forces, that may have lost their immediacy over time. African Americans often turned to literature to theorize class differences at a time when sociology was still developing as a professionalized field.6 This is not to say, however, that black literature's authenticity depends on its transparent reflection of social conditions or social scientific inquiry. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Kenneth Warren have been among the most recent critics aiming to unhinge the long-held correspondence among African American literature, sociology, and history, warning that such an approach may underestimate the aesthetic value of black literature as creatively constructed narrative. Page 4 → Yet I concur with John Ernest, who, in Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History, suggests that divorcing sociology, history, and literary production “undermines the power of African American literature” (10). We are able to restore more of the texture of African American literature by noting the fuller range of literary, as well as sociological and historical, referents the texts engage. I approach literature as a form that does not merely supplement census records, residential patterns, or case studies—archives from which sociologists, historians, or scholars in other disciplines might write about class. Rather, we may encounter black fiction alongside these other forms so that, as Jacqueline Goldsby proposes, “rather than read history into such literary texts,” we can “read history out of them” (Spectacular Secret, 21). In the preface to Contending Forces, Hopkins herself identifies fiction as a genre well suited for capturing and historicizing social formations such as class division. “Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs—religious, political and social,” she proposes. “It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation” (13–14). According to Hopkins, while African American “historians, lecturers, ministers, poets, judges and lawyers” employ other forms of written and oral discourse, fiction writers can delve into the “manners and customs” that reveal the intricacies of African Americans’ lived experiences (13, 14). In novels and short stories capable of containing multiple voices, characters, and storylines in a single text, the writers elucidate dividing lines within populations whose complexity often is simplified by categories such as the “black community” or the black “race.” Published between 1889 and 1903—part of the period that Charles W. Chesnutt retrospectively labeled the “PostBellum—Pre-Harlem” era—the fiction studied here richly reflects the artistic and sociopolitical concerns of a burgeoning black middle class.7 In one influential literary history, Dickson Bruce Jr. proposes that most postbellum black authors “may be described without oversimplification as members of the black middle class that was taking shape and growing in size in the post-Reconstruction era” (Black American Writing, 5). He draws his conclusions from the authors' ideologies expressed in their works and the income that bivocational writers may have gained from their primary occupations as ministers, editors, teachers, doctors, and lawyers. Building on this assessment, I refer to “middle class” interchangeably with the term “better class,” a social designation that

circulated throughout Page 5 → the nineteenth century and appears most readily in the fiction examined in Dividing Lines.8 As a comparative term, “better class” reveals “the sense of moral and social superiority” that selfappointed social leaders sometimes presume in a class-structured order (Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 5). Like other terms in a class taxonomy, however, “better class” was less a consensually agreed upon social standing than one that was constantly valued and revalued. Amid recent critical debates over conceptualizing class, I approach it as both an economic and a social set of relations, whose meanings and effects must be historically situated.9 Inflected by racial inequality, as well as gender and locality, the experience of class was both distinct and diverse for African Americans in the nineteenthcentury United States. The rise of legalized segregation perhaps most impacted African American writers' awareness of both the possibilities and the limitations of class distinctions. The end of Reconstruction and the subsequent legal measures that disfranchised African Americans were aimed at the economic as well as the political and social gains that African Americans had made since slavery's end. As Kevin Gaines explains, “Jim Crow was the white South's, and the nation's, solution to the social advancement of a rising class of African Americans that threatened a polity founded on white supremacy” (30). Jim Crow law and custom conflated black Americans’ race and class subjectivities, treating all African Americans alike as second-class citizens, considered separate and unequal to their white counterparts. As black Americans turned inward to their segregated communities to orchestrate further self-help initiatives and racial protests, these efforts often depended on social leaders asserting their difference from and responsibility to a larger black constituency. As historian Willard Gatewood observes in Aristocrats of Color, near the turn of the twentieth century, “the issue was not whether a class structure existed [among African Americans] but what form its development and refinement should take in order to promote ‘the progress of the race.’ Of especial concern were the appropriate criteria for delineating between the upper, middle, and lower classes” (23).10 Indeed, there is little coincidence in the fact that many of the fictions examined in Dividing Lines were published in the years leading up to and following the Plessy v. Ferguson ruling (1896), one of the most widely recognized codifications of racial segregation. What I am tracing here, however, is not only class but, more specifically, class representation, the highly mediated translation of the dynamic Page 6 → relations of class into a cultural product, literature. Peter Hitchcock has argued that class is, in fact, unrepresentable: the abstract process by which “one social group may come to dominate the lives and livelihoods of another” through shifting relations of power, resources, and access cannot easily be conveyed, whether in one- or three-dimensional cultural productions (“They Must Be Represented,” 23). As Hitchcock adds, “Class is not a thing but a relation and one that puts a heavy burden on representation” (23). But if this complication reveals literature as always already inadequate to the task of representing class as an unstable set of relations, this point compels us to examine how authors nevertheless try to make class discernible with the literary forms and discourses at their disposal. What choices do black writers make as they note not only that class is difficult to convey in fiction but also that American literary culture has been much more attuned to considering black people in relation to race and racism than to class? By studying class representations and the anxiety they both convey and provoke, I consider African American literature as a medium that does not simply reflect class relations but rather works to reproduce them. As Bruce cautions, critics cannot “deal with ‘middleclassness' as such a general characteristic” that we “fail to perceive significant aspects of the literature itself” (8). Rather, it is the literature—its vocabulary, themes, forms, and audiences—that renders a keen sense of “middleclassness” in formation. Literary criticism has tended to address class in nineteenth-century African American literature in a few limited ways: by valuing the slave narrative and vernacular forms as expressions of working-class, “authentic” blackness, over and above the supposedly bourgeois novel form; by outright criticizing African American fiction writers and the literature they produced as “selling out” to white cultural assimilation; or by treating class as a secondary interest in race- or gender-centered approaches to black literature.11 In particular, the denigration of the black middle class has pervaded much of African American literary criticism, especially from the period of the 1960s to 1990s, during which African American literature became increasingly institutionalized and canonized. By installing the vernacular tradition as the foundation of African American literary culture, critics such as Houston Baker and Henry Louis Gates Jr. often implicitly displaced middle-class writers and their texts. Rather than

celebrating both the folk and the formal roots of black culture, Baker, for instance, offers what has become an often quoted (and retorted) evaluation of nineteenth-century black women writers as performing Page 7 → “Victorian morality in whiteface” (Workings of the Spirit, 33).12 These sentiments echo the critique epitomized by sociologist E. Franklin Frazier in his 1957 satiric study The Black Bourgeoisie, which has cast its long shadow over scholarly attitudes toward the black middle class across disciplines. Frazier dismissively charges his subjects with “acting white,” “pretending,” or “aping” white middle- and upper-class standards to compensate for a deepseated racial inferiority complex (Black Bourgeoisie, 12, 124). Though writing from different disciplines and periods, Baker and Frazier share the sense that racial betrayal motivates middle-class African Americans’ morals and manners, self-image, and often ambivalent relationship to the black working class. But to judge the desire for greater status as a sign of racial disloyalty and “acting white” reinscribes white bourgeois status as the “real” standard that people of color can only hopelessly imitate against their own self-interest. Just as class anxiety preoccupies the literary authors and subjects I examine here, such anxiety also may account for the ways that contemporary scholars have (and have not) interrogated class differences in African American literature. The discourse of black authenticity often presents “blackness” and “middle class” as contradictory poles, sometimes leading scholars of African American culture—many of whom are black and middle to upper middle class—into self-defensive postures that privilege racial pride while marginalizing class identification. In “Boojie! A Question of Authenticity,” Bryant Keith Alexander offers a deliberately self-conscious statement of his own positionality to expose the class anxiety underlying black cultural studies. Interrupting the form of his essay with an italicized insertion, Alexander asserts, “Tell me if you notice a defensive tone in my writing. And if you detect it, please know that it is a coy strategy that I am using to explore how discussions of racial authenticity often establish a space of entrapment for all involved” (“Boojie!” 312). By calling attention to his own imbrication in the politics of representation and black performance about which he writes, Alexander makes visible how the discourse of authenticity disserves (middle-class) scholars and the subjects of their scholarship.13 Taking a similar stance to offset the imposing debates over racial authenticity, Dividing Lines is in conversation with recent literary and cultural studies that interrogate, rather than either defend or vituperate, representations of the black middle class. Citing the title of a recent collection, From Bourgeois to Boojie: Black Middle-Class Performances, E. Patrick Johnson suggests that “a generational shift in our perception of Page 8 → the black middle class” registers in the change “from the serious moniker that bourgeois connotes to the more playful, half sardonic, half self-mocking connotations of boojie,” a popular abbreviation for bourgeois (foreword, xxi). Johnson proposes that artistic and scholarly inquiries into the black middle class have evolved in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries not despite the class's representation as “serious” and pretentious, but precisely because of it. Other critics, such as Candice Jenkins and Lisa Thompson, further examine how twentieth-century black writers thematize sexuality and the private sphere either to adhere to codes of respectability or, conversely, to “fracture notions of class and racial authenticity” that presuppose a single way of performing blackness or “middle classness” (Thompson, Beyond the Black Lady, 8). Yet these studies primarily address the period after the 1960s, focusing on what Thompson rightly delineates as the “new black middle class” that developed along with civil rights and affirmative action policies.14 Dividing Lines historicizes the disjunctures (and continuities) between representations of an earlier black middle class and its metaphorical “boojie” descendants by building on the work of Carla Peterson, Xiomara Santamarina, Frances Smith Foster, Elizabeth McHenry, and others whose inquiries into class begin to challenge generalizations about nineteenth-century black writers, readers, and communities.15 If one danger is to accept the bourgeois sensibility of nineteenth-century black fiction at face value, to recall Bruce's point, then another is to underestimate the class differences among black Americans that makes the literature middle class by comparison. As Peterson contends, for too long in American culture, as well as in much of literary scholarship, “We still hold certain truths about African Americans to be self-evident: that the phrase ‘nineteenth-century black Americans’ refers to enslaved people…that the ‘black community’ posits a classless and culturally unified society; that a ‘black elite’ did not exist until well into the twentieth century” (Black Gotham, 6).16 Though African Americans collectively were subject to racial prejudice, their individual economic conditions, geographic location, religious affiliations, and other social contexts particularized the ways they experienced and perceived their racial

identification. In Doers of the Word, Peterson identifies a two-tier stratification in many black communities that comprises the “subaltern” class of workers “rooted in oral and folk culture” and what she terms an elite class, “generally composed of a freeborn, Northern-rooted, and light-skinned population” (8, 9). She credits the latter as intervening more directly in literary Page 9 → production, though both classes collaborated in shared community-building through religious and cultural institutions. Black writers faced ethical and economic dilemmas in representing the race—whether “representing” meant serving as a proxy for a larger black constituency from which the authors sometimes felt distant or portraying black experiences for consuming audiences. As Peterson explains, “the very act of authorship could at times separate black writers from their broader community, constituting them as a distinct class that sought to speak not only for itself but also for the subaltern, and thereby working to some extent against community cohesiveness” (13). Thus, when writing about class anxiety, black authors likely reflected their own concerns about their relation to other black and white Americans. Examining intraracial class differences adds texture to the study of community-building, an issue that has been central to nineteenth-century black literary criticism. To disabuse the pathologizing notion that early black Americans were entirely demoralized by slavery or segregation, scholars have shown how black people managed to survive and thrive by establishing self-supportive affiliations. The connections among people of African descent were by no means automatic or based only on their race or shared oppression. Instead, disparate populations of “black folks” transformed into self-actualizing “black communities” through strategic collaboration (Ernest, Nation within a Nation, viii). Black people depended on religious institutions, mutual aid and benevolent organizations, literary societies, and other networks to mount racial resistance and pursue personal fulfillment. In addition, African American print culture, including books, periodicals, and ephemera such as pamphlets, especially served to coalesce affiliations on the basis of shared knowledge (F. S. Foster, “Narrative” 732). But while recovering the literary and social history of black communities, scholars must resist the temptation to idealize racial solidarity. Rather, as Saidiya Hartman suggests, we can displace the “romance of community” to instead “engage the issue of community through the disruptive antagonisms that are also its constituents” (Scenes of Subjection, 60). Such antagonisms can complicate and subvert community-building but also may enhance it as individuals and groups negotiate their pluralized identifications. Understood in this way, literary representations of intraracial class differences—and black writers' and readers’ sometimes antagonistic debates over those representations—served to refine the functions and parameters of African American communities. Page 10 → By urging scholars to expose the differences blanketed by central concepts such as “black community” and “racial uplift,” critics have begun to argue for greater attention to historically situated racial formations that account for class inequality. In the essay “Are We There Yet? Archives, History, and Specificity in African-American Literary Studies,” Xiomara Santamarina proposes that we move beyond totalizing notions of black identity to instead examine how African Americans negotiate “the particular dialectics of appropriation, contestation, and participation” that determine the multiple senses of what it means to be “black” in a particular place and time (307). Modeling this practice in her own research, Santamarina has shown how often overlooked writers and narrators, such as Elizabeth Keckley and Eliza Potter, contest the premises of racial uplift that purported to unify black communities. In their self-representations, these working women value their labor, contrary to the rhetoric of racial advancement that denigrated manual and unskilled labor as “drudgery” and reinforced intraracial class differentiation. I agree with Santamarina that a critical move to recover the specific conditions under which black writers wrote necessarily “preempts easy assumptions” about black communities and the intersection of race, class, and labor (Belabored Professions, 166). But while she finds it “counterproductive” to label authors and texts according to “traditionally discrete categories of identity such as ‘working class’ or ‘middle class’” (167), rather than setting aside such descriptors as impediments, we can consider what black writers' fluctuating use of them reveals about the complex calculus of social identification. By amplifying its focus on class representations, Dividing Lines sustains the inquiry into class that, until now, has been diffused through other useful critical approaches. As such, this book broadens the scope, chronology, and

genre focus of previous studies. Peterson's Doers of the Word and Santamarina's Belabored Professions both focus primarily on nonfiction narratives set before the 1880s, the period with which my work commences to address fiction in the pivotal post-Reconstruction era through the turn of the twentieth century. Meanwhile, critics such as Claudia Tate, Hazel Carby, P. Gabrielle Foreman, and Marlon Ross fruitfully have considered how class identities in early black literature are mediated through prescriptions of heteronormative femininity and masculinity.17 Scholarship based in American literature, American studies, and cultural studies also has begun to explore the often-obscured relation between race and class in the nineteenth century.18 Still, in these provocative Page 11 → intersectional studies, intraracial class differences sometimes recede as a secondary interest to gender or crossracial class inequalities. One of the goals of this book is to reframe our literary focus on the black middle class by reading class anxiety as a generative, rather than disabling or pejorative, element of nineteenth-century black Americans’ cultural production and social activism. Critic Sianne Ngai suggests that when inscribed in literature and cultural representations, affects such as anxiety can “be thought of as a mediation between the aesthetic and the political in a nontrivial way” (Ugly Feelings, 3). In her study of what she calls “ugly feelings,” which include anxiety, envy, irritation, paranoia, and similar emotions, Ngai indicates that such feelings arise from a subject's sense of “restricted agency” but function to express political dissent (2). As Ngai proposes, we can “recuperate several of these negative affects for their critical productivity,” that is, for their ability to serve as “signs that not only render visible different registers of problem (formal, ideological, sociohistorical) but conjoin these problems in a distinctive manner” (3). Each instance of anxiety encapsulates a larger history of social conditions and representations that invites further interrogation.19 In revaluing anxiety as generative, I differ from Ngai, however, by reading anxious literary representations as politically engaged. In her reckoning, “ugly feelings” such as anxiety bear an obvious but ambiguous relation to political action. She highlights “the unsuitability of these weakly intentional feelings for forceful or unambiguous action” (Ugly Feelings, 27). Understood in this way, an author's literary focus on anxiety remains passive because it likely does not intervene directly in the political realm in the way that public demonstrations, enfranchisement, or legislative changes might. However, scholars of African American literature often have challenged this putative distinction between cultural innovations and “real” politics. As Gene Andrew Jarrett compellingly argues in Representing the Race, as black writers employed literature to reshape their race's public image, “a reciprocal relationship existed between the literary dissemination of information among readers and the strategic enhancement of their social power. Informing society was indeed as much a political act as transforming society” (75, original emphasis). Insofar as postbellum black literature represented class conditions within African American communities, including the presence of a respectable middle class, the literature intervened in the American public sphere by asserting black Americans’ anxious desires for greater opportunity and civil liberties. Page 12 → When fiction writers, their characters, or individual citizen readers expressed class anxiety or sought to examine and resolve its origin, they generated distinctively new interpretations of class difference and racial inequality. And those interpretations—contested, expanded, or affirmed in print by other authors and readers—gave rise to additional African American literary production and consumption. “Anxiety is partly a feeling that generates a preparedness for action,” psychologist Charles Shepherdson suggests. “The feeling itself is inexpedient, so when it functions well, it disappears into action” (foreword, lv). To understand how class anxiety may mobilize action, it is useful to recall Addie Jewell's review letter, which disparages Hopkins's depiction of intraracial stratification. What is striking is not only the letter's content but also the very fact that Jewell finds intraracial class conflicts troubling enough to demand a written response. The unease that compels Jewell's action generates a material product—her review—just as Hopkins's own shrewd attention to intraracial stratification contributes to her writing Contending Forces. Modeled throughout the late nineteenth century, this dialectic of class anxiety and black writing contributed to the growth of African American literary culture.

Postbellum Conflict and Classification

The intraracial class conflict that Jewell notes in Contending Forces points to an important temporal shift in the literary representation of stratified black communities, making the postbellum-pre-Harlem Renaissance era a fruitful period for tracing class anxiety. This is not to say that earlier African American literature did not depict intraracial differences. Antebellum slave narratives often portray individuated status groups, such as field and house slaves; in addition, fictional and autobiographical narratives of free life in the North distinguished between moneyed and menial blacks.20 In these earlier narratives, however, African Americans often unite peaceably across class lines for the sake of antislavery organizing and other uplift efforts.21 A brief comparison illustrates this point. Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), one of the earliest novels by a black American, outlines a hierarchical class structure among free black Philadelphians, as embodied by three differently situated families: Mr. Walters, a millionaire real estate tycoon; Mr. Ellis, a mechanic providing for his “highly respectable and industrious coloured family”; and Page 13 → Kinch De Younge, the ill-kempt son of an illiterate shopkeeper (Webb, Garies, 16). Yet class differences are subordinated to racial camaraderie, especially as black Americans collaborate across classes to resist the common foes of slavery, northern hiring discrimination, and white mob violence. When the novel concludes with two cross-class marriages—between Charlie Ellis and the blue-blooded mulatta orphan Emily Garie, and between Esther Ellis and Mr. Walters—the text shows black social classes as harmoniously interdependent. By contrast, fiction from the 1880s to 1900s more consistently figures class distinctions as a source of anxiety and intraracial conflict rather than collaboration. When setting her novel Trial and Triumph (1888–89) in the city of “A. P.” (a pseudonymous Philadelphia), Frances Harper imagines a more intensely stratified black Philadelphia than does Webb. Harper's novel aims toward racial uplift as does Webb's, but as I argue further in chapter 1, Harper has to exert greater narrative energy toward reining in constantly erupting class discord in the postbellum city she depicts. Trial and Triumph shows class tensions as less easily resolved, as differently situated black Americans see their priorities being at odds. More than a mere difference in Webb's and Harper's authorial choices, their diverging depictions of black social stratifications may point to the heightened tension over class in the United States in the final decades of the nineteenth century, as well as class transformations specifically in African American communities. Americans long had been embroiled in what Martin Burke calls the “conundrum of class,” the problem of determining how class figured as a useful concept in the United States. The antebellum nation had prided itself on being a “classless” society, free from what were considered artificially imposed, inherited classes, as in the British system of social ranking; instead, economic inequalities in America were attributed to citizens' self-determined success or failure.22 This model of the United States as “a society formed by classes, but freed from class conflict, ” emphasized the harmony of interests between social classes (Burke, Conundrum of Class, 54). However, as urbanization, industrialization, expanding capitalism, and other historical developments in the mid- to late nineteenth century increased social chasms, the ideal of unhindered, peaceable class mobility vied with the reality of classes in antagonistic struggle for wealth and power. As Stuart Blumin notes, “the deepest awareness among Americans of the classes that divided them” developed in the aftermath of the Civil War (Emergence of the Middle Class, 258). Page 14 → Not incidentally, the years after the Civil War and into the century's end were also important to the class structure of black America. During Reconstruction, some black leaders attained political appointments that not only conferred elite status but also signified the hopeful possibility of greater class attainment for other black Americans. Taking posts as lieutenant governors, congressmen, and consuls, black Americans such as Blanche K. Bruce and Frederick Douglass were the national faces of black prestige. But these black Reconstruction leaders and the elites from “old families” differed from the burgeoning black middle or better class, whose rise in the 1880s was fostered by new or invigorated black institutions, including colleges, businesses, and churches that trained rising professionals (Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 6). Class anxieties arose in black communities as some class signifiers were displaced by others. While elites often derived status from their freeborn families, mixed-race ancestry, or entrepreneurship supported by a white clientele, by contrast, the postbellum black middle class developed from “self-made men [sic] whose economic roots” depended on the consumer needs of “the newly

urbanized masses” (Meier, “Negro Class Structure,” 266). From disparate perspectives, turn-of-the-century thinkers including W. E. B. Du Bois, Max Weber, and Thorstein Veblen contended whether class could be defined by economic conditions of income or wealth alone or whether, instead, class is actualized through converging economic and cultural patterns.23 In his 1899 study The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois as the premier black sociologist recognizes the convergence of material and immaterial measures of class as important for analyzing black communities, in which stark social distinctions may exist even among people whose economic conditions appear similar. According to Du Bois, both academic studies and public opinion tended to overlook intraracial stratification by treating black Americans as a monolithic, uniformly poor population. “Since so much misunderstanding or rather forgetfulness and carelessness on this point is common,” Du Bois writes, “let us endeavor to try and fix with some definiteness the different social classes which are clearly enough defined among Negroes to deserve attention” (310). Early in The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois outlines three “grades” of black Philadelphians based on income (172). Later in the volume, however, he provides a competing account of four, rather than three, grades: “the criminals,” “the poor,” “the respectable working class,” and “the well-to-do” (311). By way of explaining the discrepancy, Du Bois proffers in a footnote, “It will be noted that this classification differs materially from Page 15 → the economic division…. The basis of division there was almost entirely according to income; this division brings in moral considerations and questions of expenditure, and consequently reflects more largely the personal judgment of the investigator” (311). The additional footnote, meant to clarify Du Bois's methodology, provocatively suggests how class analyses can be tailored to nineteenth-century African American subjects. Emending his classifications to account for lifestyle and “moral considerations,” Du Bois departs from other perspectives that privilege wealth as the primary means of judging class. For instance, Du Bois's contemporary Max Weber distinguishes among the terms class, status, and party by construing “class” to describe explicitly economic groupings, while “status” refers to social groups, and “party” labels political groups. According to Weber, intraracial distinctions are best described in terms of “status” (“Class, Status, Party,” 44). Yet for all its clarity, Weber's triptych has the possible disadvantage of artificially separating economics, social relations, and politics, belying how these areas overlap in lived experience. Instead, the basis for intraracial class distinctions may comprise all the meanings that Weber's vocabulary decouples. Addie Jewell recognizes this when, in her response to Hopkins's fiction, she envisions that black Americans’ social relations and reputation, which sometimes had an indirect relationship to economic conditions, would parlay into greater political rights as “American citizens and the protection of the law” (“[Review],” 559).

Class Anxiety and the Aesthetics of Black Fiction Understanding the literary expression of class anxiety demands that we reassess the artistic achievements of postbellum African American fiction. In studying the rise of the African American novel, Maria Guilia Fabi has observed, “Nineteenth-century African American fiction has a bad reputation,” partly due to its authors' perceived “literary incompetence” and failure to master fictional form (Passing, 1). Joining Fabi in reassessing the aesthetic value of nineteenth-century black fiction, I aim to redress (mis)readings that approach African American authors as though they were in a perpetual state of literary apprenticeship and thus prone to “bad” habits and tastes. Rather, narrative elements such as evasions, repetition, and didacticism, which otherwise might be considered “bad” writing, indicate authors' efforts to disclose intraracial class Page 16 → difference while eluding the constrictions of available generic forms. Postbellum black writers contribute to fictional genres including local color, realism, domestic realism, historical romance, and naturalism; yet each of these presented limitations for conveying the social reform messages that the writers often intended. Though commercially lucrative, local color fiction risked promoting racial stereotypes at the expense of black advancement. Meanwhile, though the genre of literary naturalism frequently focuses on class disparity, its premise of biological and environmental determinism contradicts the ideals of racial uplift, which assume that black Americans might exceed their proscriptions by adapting middle-class morals and manners.24 Finding available genres often inadequate to representing African Americans’ class ambitions and attainments, authors meet this challenge by altering both the form and the theme of their fiction.

If, as Ngai suggests, “the very effort of thinking the aesthetic and political together…is a prime occasion for ugly feelings” (3), African American writers who rethink the political salience of class differentiation through fiction reproduce the disruptive effects of class anxiety in the narrative form itself. I closely read moments in African American fiction when the task of addressing class prolongs, arrests, or diverts the narrative's progress. For instance, Paul Laurence Dunbar presses the expectations of linear plotting and oversimplified black characterization in order to offer subtly politicized class commentary in his short stories. When writing in the genre of local color fiction that usually depicted southern-born blacks monolithically, Dunbar includes an aside in “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance” to assert what the usual local color “chronicler too often forgets”: that some former slaves possess “aristocratic notions and quiet but elegant tastes” (62). Inserting what becomes a paragraph-long description of black intraracial distinctions, the narrator arrests the story's plot, taking time to displace representations of the average African American freedperson as “some really rude plantation hand” (62). In Dunbar's story, which is primarily about postbellum reconciliation between blacks and whites, this passage is more than a superfluous digression; rather, it underscores Nelse's class-based tastes as qualifying him for social equality with his white neighbors. As I will show, where “the seams show” jaggedly in the narrative structure or in characters’ arguments, we often witness the unsettling presence of class, as well as contestations over its “proper” representation. In addition to encoding class anxiety through the formal elements Page 17 → of novels and short fiction, postbellum black writers also represent such anxiety thematically through three recurrent concepts at the heart of this study: fear of misclassification, fear of downward mobility, and fear of estrangement. Identifying these three expressions of class anxiety allows us to trace how authors often draw on a shared arsenal of literary approaches for representing the concerns of the emerging black “better class.” The fear of misclassification is a defensive concern over being categorized among an unfavored class, an offense akin to being derogatorily called out of one's name. Nineteenth-century African Americans remained guarded against what historian Patrick Rael calls “racial synecdoche,” the assumption that “the misdeeds of a few” reflected “the moral character of the entire race, ” which was caricatured as impoverished, lewd, or criminal (Black Identity, 179). In postbellum fiction, black writers and their characters attempt to refute racial synecdoche by emphasizing intraracial class distinctions. Recognizing how social identities are mediated through designations, speakers and narrators in the fiction verbally struggle over class terminology, whether by refusing to be known as a “worker,” offering an impromptu definition of “rich,” or asserting their “aristocratic” sensibilities. Each term offers a fragmentary and momentary explanation of class as the speaker assumes agential control over his or her self-definition. While this theme highlights the role of language in construing class differences, this is not to say that African American authors perceive class as a discursive construction alone. Rather, the struggles over terminology in the fiction are significant because classifications are “the basis of the representations of groups and therefore of their mobilization and demobilization” (Bourdieu, Distinction, 479). Through their verbal exchanges, fictional black speakers volley for class privilege within segregated communities and mobilize toward racial integration by first claiming control over the terms of social categorization. The fear of misclassification and the desire to mitigate it emerge through narratorial intrusions and extended conversations as African Americans question how much existing class vocabularies, which often originate in dominant culture, are relevant to describing the complex differences among blacks. The American vocabulary of class at the turn of the twentieth century often oversimplified, ignored, or ridiculed the reality of black class divisions. In an 1894 article entitled “Washington's Colored 400,” for instance, a bemused white newspaper correspondent sensed that his readers would balk at the idea of a top tier of four hundred refined black Page 18 → families in the nation's capital: “A negro aristocracy? Sounds odd, doesn't it,” the writer quips (“Washington's Colored 400”). In response to such public impressions generated outside black communities, black writers disentangle class signifiers from their usual racially exclusive connotations and adapt them to African American referents. Yet it is important to emphasize that the fear of misclassification in African American literature is not only a selfconscious concern over whites' impressions. As Foster has been foremost in arguing, black authors did not devise their literature “solely in reaction to, or for the enlightenment of, those who were not African American” (“Narrative,” 719). Rather, as they cultivated intellectual communities and debated ideas in predominantly black venues, they expressed themselves apart from reactionary motives. In novels such as Harper's Trial and Triumph,

serialized in the Christian Recorder, characters’ debates over class terminology provide models for an immediate readership of black Americans. As Elizabeth McHenry proposes in Forgotten Readers, middle-class readers and intellectuals formulated distinctive networks within the black population by means of their shared reading experiences (15). Through the pages of periodicals such as the Colored American Magazine, the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, and Colored American newspaper (Washington, DC), black Americans critiqued Charles Chesnutt's stories of Blue Vein elites or applauded Paul Laurence Dunbar for diversifying his usual fictional fare with profiles of black high society. Exposing the fear of misclassification, African American fiction writers and their readers debated how class divisions related to individual and collective advancement. While the fear of misclassification focuses on socially perceived reputation, a non-pecuniary class marker, the fear of downward mobility anticipates the threat of material loss. In Fear of Falling, a study of the American middle class in the late twentieth century, sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich proposes that middle-class Americans’ precarious position leaves them anxious over becoming too self-indulgingly elite or, by contrast, too poor. “Whether the middle class looks down toward the realm of less, or up toward the realm of more,” Ehrenreich suggests, “there is the fear, always, of falling” (Fear of Falling, 15). The threat of instability that is considered characteristic of the American middle class might be said to apply, with greater care and intensity, to “betterclass” African Americans in the Jim Crow era. While the concept of “fear of falling” comprises worries of moving both up and down from the middle class, I pry apart these contrasts to show how upward and downward mobility inspire distinct social responses, emotions, and literary representations. Page 19 → Setting upward mobility aside for the moment to return to it later, I note that without the protection of civil rights, postbellum African Americans realized that their downward mobility might be triggered not only by the vagaries of national economic trends, such as the Panic of 1893, but also by targeted hiring discrimination and unfair termination. In addition, their class attainments could be eroded by whites' extralegal confiscation or destruction of black property and, at the outset, by lynchings, which disrupted the economic—as well as emotional and social—bases of black families. Inscribing these conditions into the fictional worlds of novels and short stories, African American writers convey the fear of downward mobility by emphasizing wealth, property ownership, spatial boundaries, and other material signs of class. In contrast to the fear of downward mobility, the fear of estrangement relates to the ethical dilemmas of upward mobility. Placing a high premium on black solidarity as the basis for collective political mobilization, as well as racial authenticity, narratives that express the fear of estrangement serve to discipline black Americans’ class ambitions, which might distance them from the people, places, or values often associated with the imagined black community. The central concept of the “black community” itself is at stake in estrangement. This form of class anxiety serves to reinforce affective ties among black Americans across classes, giving rise to plots in which those whom Du Bois would label as the Talented Tenth contemplate their spatial, psychological, or social distance from other black Americans. Chesnutt's story “The Wife of His Youth” (1899) is one memorable instance of this theme, as further addressed in chapter 4. In Chesnutt's story, the reunion between Mr. Ryder, a light-skinned, middleclass man, and his estranged wife, an unschooled domestic laborer, foregrounds the moral quandaries of middleclass African Americans who wish to pursue individual class ambition while supporting racial unity. Dividing Lines is organized so as to trace five authors' subtle but important deliberations over the uneasy relationship between racial loyalty and class division within African American communities and, more broadly, in the American social order. Each chapter explores how an author confronts class anxiety as mediated through a particular factor: class taxonomy, labor and leisure, physical and economic mobility, genealogy, and social affinity. Though not exhaustive, these foci mean to engage but also move beyond what might be the most expected assumption for a study of this sort: that skin color serves as an obvious index to characters’ class. The prevalence of mixed-race protagonists in the fiction seems to Page 20 → impute greater social status to lighterskinned people of African descent than to darker ones. But by limning what Eve Allegra Raimon calls the “multivalent cultural operations” of mixed-race characters, a rich body of criticism fruitfully complicates earlier notions that such characterization devalues blackness (“Tragic Mulatta” 11).25 Through racially indeterminate characters whose phenotypic traits frustrate easy categorization, authors not only reveal race as socially constructed rather than ontological, to invoke a now axiomatic understanding of race. They also expose how the

distribution of wealth, power, and opportunity in the United States reifies racial inequalities. In this regard, the prevalence of mixed-race characters may be taken as descriptive—narrating the history of interracial intimacy and sexual violence that engenders mixed-race offspring—rather than prescriptive in authorizing light skin as a status symbol.26 As though anticipating the charges many historical and modern readers have leveled against them, the writers selfconsciously inscribe counterarguments against colorism, a form of social discrimination based on skin-color gradations. In doing so, they question the limits of mulatto/a characterization and refute cultural assumptions about color and class that their texts risk reproducing. When, in Harper's Iola Leroy, the teacher Lucille Delany fears that her suitor's family will reject her based on “complexional prejudices,” Harry Leroy arrests her concerns by insisting that his family is “too noble to indulge in such sentiments” against darker blacks (278). By raising this issue directly in the novel, Harper exposes colorism as incompatible with her vision of a social order based instead on moral respectability. Thus, while the novel focuses largely on the racially indeterminate Leroy family, Harper's depiction of Lucille disrupts the presumed correlation between “better-class” status and light skin. Likewise, in Chesnutt's works, which perhaps more than any others here focus on “better-class” mixed-race people, the author sympathizes with their desire for greater status but critiques their apparent color prejudices as misguided. I especially take up these concerns further in chapters 4 and 5 to show how Hopkins and Chesnutt, in particular, negotiate the precarious relation and disjuncture among skin color, ancestry, and inheritable wealth. But indeed, nearly every fiction examined here features striking passages in which African Americans contest the light-overdark color hierarchy or reiterate that skin color accounts for only one possible factor within a more intricate calculus of social status. Yet to qualify this observation, I underscore that how and when such passages arise in the fiction points again to the representational dilemmas Page 21 → that authors face in balancing racial solidarity and class stratification. Just as the fact that Harper raises the issue of colorism is significant, so, too, is the way that the narrative so quickly resolves the matter to reaffirm racial collectivity. When Lucille Delany is satisfied with her lover's oneline response, Harper moves from discussing colorism, which threatens to alienate certain black Americans based on status, to instead show the couple happily united in racial uplift. Discussions of intraracial color biases or class conflicts often appear as tangents, are initiated by secondary characters, or are marked by striking irony, humor, or bitterness that changes the tone of the scene. In these cases, such shifts signal the presence of class anxiety, as authors adapt dialogue or plotting to represent class differentiation but then also to redirect the narrative toward the collectivist imperatives of black civil rights. I begin with Frances Harper's writing because her career, which began in the 1840s and spans more than fifty years, highlights how authors reconcile existing social vocabularies with evolving black social structures. This chapter traces verbal struggles over taxonomy in Harper's novels Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy. By focusing on respectability, a quality that she presumes could be cultivated by anyone, regardless of material means, Harper devises social classifications such as “aristocracy of the soul” that unhinge class from economic markers. In Iola Leroy, which is set during Reconstruction, both freeborn and newly freed African Americans recognize the transition from chattel slavery to freedom as an opportunity to reconceive notions of order and class identities. Fueled by fears over both misclassification and estrangement among black Americans, Harper's language of class attempts to evade crass materialism; yet her attention to a morally based social order merely rearranges classes, nevertheless preserving the objective of hierarchy. I read the extended dialogues and speeches about class vocabulary in Harper's novels against similar debates over the languages of class in nineteenth-century periodicals and black-authored social histories, as black Americans attempt to elucidate a class terrain that was very much in flux. Harper's two novels, which both feature schoolteachers among the “aristocrats of the soul,” epitomize late nineteenth-century authors' tendency to present professionalized black Americans atop social hierarchies, while marginalizing the representation of manual workers. Chapter 2, “Working through Class: The Black Body, Labor, and Leisure in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed,” examines the narrative dilemmas that arise in representing the laboring black body, especially as authors address stereotypes that disparaged physical labor and sexualized working Page 22 → women. Griggs's Overshadowed (1901) expands the range of fictional characterization by

casting a domestic servant as heroine and questioning artificial distinctions between manual labor and trained professions. As hiring discrimination truncates the occupational range in black communities, the novel especially illuminates the fear of downward mobility. Often marked by multiple climaxes, reversals, and emotional excess, Griggs's novel relies on melodrama to represent the precarious social and economic conditions of black women's work. Allowing his novel to mimic the instability of the job market in order to critique it, Griggs employs melodramatic form more purposefully than prior critics have acknowledged in reading his fiction as aesthetically flawed. By offering one of the fullest critical accounts of Overshadowed, this chapter aims to restore Griggs's voice to considerations of postbellum black American writers who contest and complicate the claims of racial advancement. Chapter 3, “Mapping Class Difference: Space and Social Mobility in Paul L. Dunbar's Short Fiction,” investigates how Dunbar sets stories of class mobility in a number of locations, finding that whether in the North, South, or Midwest, African Americans remain constricted in their social spaces. While over 90 percent of African Americans continued to live in the southern United States well into the early twentieth century, black Americans’ gradual trends of northern-bound migration or rural-to-urban relocation after the Civil War caused black leaders' concern over redefining lines of class division in the midst of shifting demographics. These historical concerns make their way into Dunbar's fiction as fears over misclassification and estrangement. Dunbar uses the strategy of “mapping class,” emphasizing details of setting, including interior design, architecture, street-level neighborhoods, and regional landscapes, to convey social status. In selected short stories by Dunbar, characters’ movement—whether across the nation, across town into another neighborhood, or into the parlor reserved for receiving company—represents their experiences of upward (and downward) class mobility. Relying on the strategy of mapping class onto physical locations, Dunbar for the most part avoids encoding class signifiers onto physical bodies, thus circumventing the focus on color and corporeality that is more prominent in his contemporaries' works. The last two chapters address how Pauline Hopkins and Charles W. Chesnutt differentiate the black middle class from the working class according to genealogy and taste, measures to which Harper, Griggs, and Dunbar sometimes claim to object in their own depictions of intraracial Page 23 → stratification. Chapter 4, “Blood and the Mark of Class: Pauline Hopkins's Genealogies of Status,” examines how Pauline Hopkins attributes black Americans’ class mobility primarily to two causes: the acquired habits of the work ethic and the inherited traits of “natural” class superiority. Her novels Contending Forces (1900) and Of One Blood (1902–3) often privilege the latter explanation, suggesting that class is an inherited identity. Hopkins traces the roots of “better-class” African American families to an exalted heritage of rich British ancestors or African royalty in order to stave off misclassification that would assume that blacks are naturally poor or uncultivated; rather, she shows her protagonists as entitled by birth to the highest class categorizations. Yet by consistently depicting mixed-race Americans as enjoying greater intelligence and class attainment than so-called pure blacks, the texts also inadvertently concede to essentialist notions of white genetic superiority. Reading Hopkins's novels in conjunction with turn-of-the-century eugenics tracts, including the author's own nonfiction essays, I examine how Hopkins imbues her protagonists with genetic marks of class that assure them wealth, reputation, and social equality with whites. The final chapter is the apogee in the study's journey from the centrality of racial unity, evident in Harper's novels, to a more overt endorsement of class individualism in black fiction. In Chesnutt's fiction, black Americans contemplate their upward class mobility with a great deal more self-interest than the collectivist, anti-materialist characters of Harper's fiction with which Dividing Lines opens. Chesnutt uses the trope of “class-passing” to examine how individual black Americans might achieve social parity with whites by first exacting a cultured bourgeois performance. In stories from Chesnutt's collection The Wife of His Youth (1899), black Americans’ anxious class-passing is characterized by verbal evasions, ostentation, and color discrimination against darker blacks, as passers seek to hide their humble class origins or protect their tenuous status. By presenting stories of black Americans subversively transgressing class and color lines within black communities, Chesnutt prepares his audiences for the more controversial issue of upwardly mobile black Americans transgressing the color line, as in The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Though Chesnutt's middle-class black Americans occasionally fear estrangement

from others of their race, Chesnutt emphasizes class affinity, what he calls “kindred standards of thought and feeling,” as the foundation of social identification (“Social Discrimination,” 424). As he suggests over the course of his works, middle-class African Page 24 → Americans share a cultural affinity with other middle-class Americans, black or white, such that the nation's primary dividing lines most effectively might be based on class and culture rather than race. In this way, the author challenges racism by dismantling racial identifications and instead imagining interracial communities aligned along class lines. In concluding this study, I turn to W. E. B. Du Bois's manifesto “The Talented Tenth” (1903), one of the most recognized nonfiction accounts of the turn-of-the-century social order among black Americans. In it, Du Bois suggests that educated black Americans have a mission to lead anti-racist initiatives as well as black economic advancement. While Du Bois, with a freshly minted PhD earned in 1895, is considered one of the earliest academically trained black sociologists, his studies entered a conversation about intraracial class divisions that had been ongoing in other disciplines, particularly African American creative writing. I argue that Du Bois's turn to fiction allows him to dramatize with greater psychological complexity the class anxiety that he outlines more abstractly in his social scientific accounts. In Du Bois's short story “Of the Coming of John” (1903), the estranged, upwardly mobile intellectual John Jones emerges as a composite of the black “better class” that faces fears over downward mobility, misclassification, and estrangement, the central themes that Dividing Lines explores. Addie Jewell beckons me, and I invite my own readers, to encounter the texts with a keen eye to the representation and concerns of middle-class black Americans, precariously situated in the U.S. social structure. Amid efforts to recover, theorize, and contextualize nineteenth-century texts, an imperative that continues to galvanize black literary studies, I suggest that we cannot recover postbellum-pre-Harlem literary culture without also attending to black Americans’ class anxiety that lent to its development. For modern-day audiences, the short stories and fictions under study here provide an occasion for rethinking the complex nexus of race, class, and civil liberties in the United States. Dividing Lines aims to contribute to more nuanced analyses of African Americans’ varied positionality inscribed in literature; otherwise, our own scholarly approaches replicate the nineteenth-century assumption that black Americans essentially are “all alike,” unified and excluded from access to class privilege.

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1 THE LANGUAGE OF CLASS Taxonomy and Respectability in Frances E. W. Harper's Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy In Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), a former bondswoman's speech draws attention to the criteria African Americans use to judge intraracial differences and the problematized vocabulary through which they express them. The affectionately known “Aunt” Linda Salters describes the social relations in her neighborhood for her genteel auditors, the title character, Iola, and Iola's uncle Robert Johnson: “Dere's some triflin’ niggers down yere who'll sell der votes for almost nuffin…. Dey's mighty small pertaters an' few in a hill.” “Oh, Aunt Linda,” said Robert, “don't call them niggers. They are our own people.” “Dey ain't my kine ob people. I jis' calls em niggers, an' niggers I means.” (176) Emphatic about her word choice, Aunt Linda displaces “niggers” from its usual moorings as a racist epithet and uses it to classify relative social esteem. For Robert and Iola, a linguistic misunderstanding arises because the term “niggers” seems odd or imprecise here: it inadequately stands in the temporal and conceptual gap between the moment when Aunt Linda distinguishes herself from black folks who would sell their votes and when, seconds later, she searches for an apt word to articulate the distinction. While Robert and Iola remain preoccupied with racial solidarity and propriety, Aunt Linda redefines her immediate community to exclude politically apathetic African Americans. She proposes dividing lines to distinguish her “kine ob people” within the broader black population. The jarring language Aunt Linda uses to disaggregate black Americans Page 26 → points to a broader crisis of classification in post-Civil War America. Following emancipation, terms that conveniently (and reductively) had categorized African Americans into broad groups as either “slave” or “free” proved inadequate to the shifting sociopolitical and economic climate. And yet, in a nation preoccupied with policing “the color line” between blacks and whites with a range of terms to note race and racial admixture (i.e., “mulatto/a,” “quadroon,” “octoroon”), American phraseology generally offered less nuanced labels for categorizing African Americans by their wealth, occupation, or social values. As existing vocabularies became outmoded, lagging behind the postbellum relations the terms aimed to describe, observers like Aunt Linda and literary artists alike grappled for fittingly descriptive language for the emergent black social structure. Verbal exchanges such as the one between Aunt Linda and her listeners become primary narrative devices for interrogating and revising existing social categories in Frances Harper's fiction. In Iola Leroy and Trial and Triumph (1888–89), Harper's two postbellum novels that most clearly foreground black-identified communities, characters actively debate about who and what constitute the “triflin’ niggers,” “the poor,” “better class,” and “elite.”1 Such conversations respond to, but also reproduce, class anxiety in the form of what I call the fear of misclassification, a fear of not being recognized by one's self-identified social class. These textual contestations over class categories are significant because African Americans’ ability to lay claim to class-inflected labels such as “lady” and “gentleman,” “Mr.” and “Miss,” or “rich” was part of a larger sociopolitical argument: if American society realigns along lines of class identification rather than racial division, upwardly mobile black Americans may gain opportunities denied them on the basis of race. By deconstructing turn-of-the-century classifications that privileged wealth or genealogy, Harper posits an alternative taxonomy in which moral respectability—enacted through temperance, sexual purity, thrift, modesty, work ethic, polite manners, and other attributes—is the nonpecuniary basis of status.2 In this way, she aims to mobilize economically disadvantaged but striving black Americans for advancement within intraracial and interracial contexts.

The patterns of classification in Harper's works demand that when assessing class distinctions in postbellum black literature, readers should look beyond African Americans’ economic circumstances to also interrogate the language that conveys class. Harper's novels are striking because Page 27 → they relocate class from a market economy to a moral economy in which class identifications relate indirectly or inconsistently to material conditions. For Harper, respectability is an ostensibly value-free trait accessible to all. But as she does not fully acknowledge, respectability is always already classed, often in bourgeois terms, so that the discourse of respectability cannot entirely transcend either elitism or economic inequalities. The limits of Harper's classificatory language especially appear clearly in Iola Leroy, which often relapses into the hierarchical, exclusionary social vocabularies Harper aims to unsettle. In what follows, I first explore the author's developing classificatory language in her nonfiction speeches, which inform her later novelistic representations. I then examine fictional moments of verbal confrontation in Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy when characters’ rhetoric (dialogue), accents (dialect), and vocabulary for describing distinction (lexicon) intricately convey their subjective understandings of intraracial class differences. While challenging some of the social taxonomy of late nineteenthcentury America, the two novels ultimately reveal inequality as more systemically and grammatically embedded than even Harper's alternative vocabulary admits. Scholars have interpreted Harper's social politics as either an elitist endorsement of bourgeois morality or, contrarily, a progressive commitment to extend dignity to working-class Americans.3 In one well-known valuation in Workings of the Spirit: The Poetics of Afro-American Women's Writing, Houston Baker criticizes Harper and other late nineteenth-century black female leaders as asserting “a bright Victorian morality in whiteface” seemingly removed from the more immediate economic concerns of most black Americans (33). In a more generous characterization, Melba Joyce Boyd concludes that Harper “ignored the prejudices of the bourgeois imagination and thereby transcended the cultural and class contradictions of traditional writing” (Discarded Legacy, 151). While differing as to their sympathies with Harper's perceived class affinities, Baker, Boyd, and subsequent critics tend to base their conclusions on the types of African American characters Harper seems to privilege in her fiction, which can range from dark-skinned blacks to mulatto/as, menial laborers to professionals, and from dialect-speaking former slaves to their formally educated counterparts.4 But class persists not only in the content or subject of individual representations but also in the “act of framing,” how artists bring class into legible representation, “into signification in the first place” (Schocket, Vanishing Moments, 11). To advance Page 28 → class analysis beyond tracing the dichotomy of dialect versus standard English or mulatto/a characterization in Harper's works, I examine how class difference remains in Harper's language and perspective in framing intraracial relations so as to silence or resolve class anxiety. By highlighting class as realized through language, the point here does not intend to reduce class to what Marxist critics dismissively might consider vacuous “battles of signification” (Steinberg, “Talkin' Class,” 264). While class is based in material realities such as the distribution of power or access, language plays a role in translating those factors into subjective, lived experiences. Yet one effect of social classifications such as “poor” or “better class” is to make the relay between material and symbolic capital appear natural or incontrovertible, as though the mediating words merely reflect existing class realities rather than actively contribute to them. To draw on Pierre Bourdieu, classifications are the building blocks of representation, and representation further concretizes classes: “Systems of classification would not be such a decisive object of struggle if they did not contribute to the existence of classes…with the reinforcement supplied by representations” (Distinction, 480). Accordingly, Harper's literary approach primarily works to revise each class's symbolic value via its public image. For her, these verbal and ideological struggles over class constitute a step toward restructuring the American social order.

Class Taxonomy and the Politics of Respectability Read in the context of nineteenth-century public discourse, Harper's attention to the language of class and respectability is a historically relevant, strategic move to concomitantly reform both race and class relations. Her nonfiction prose published prior to Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, including speeches, letters, and essays, indicates that throughout a career that spanned more than fifty years, Harper posits a model of stratification in which moral respectability serves as the privileged measure of status. She makes this point clear, for instance, in her article “Land and Labor” (1870), featured in the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder as part of a

series on the state of black America. While recommending that black Americans acquire land and cultivate agricultural and industrial labor, Harper chides financially privileged or educated black Americans for “a disposition among some of our people Page 29 → when they were favored by fortune, to draw the hem of their garments a little too carefully from social contact with others less favored” (“Land and Labor”). Soon after objecting to elitism on the basis of “fortune,” however, she maintains that some means of social division is necessary to facilitate racial advancement: When I speak of exclusiveness and isolation among our people, I do not wish it to be understood that I would level all social distinctions. I think the time has come when colored women may begin to draw distinctions in society. I would advise no line to be drawn between riches and poverty, between knowledge and ignorance, but there is a place where the line should be drawn, sharply and distinctly, it is between those who are living virtuous lives, and those who are arming themselves against the peace, the progress and the purity of the fireside. (“Land and Labor”) According to this prescription, individuals of any socioeconomic background could show themselves respectable through their manners and morals, regardless of means, leisure, or education—markers that usually signify refinement. In keeping with the nineteenth-century cultural logic that held women as the guardians of society, Harper specifically enjoins black women to carefully police boundaries according to measures of virtue that are as exclusive as the line “drawn between riches and poverty.” Harper's nonfiction prose attests that she recognizes the material and sociopolitical disadvantages that impeded many black Americans’ advancement, but she maintains that one's status most immediately could be improved through moral respectability. Touring the United States as an antislavery lecturer and then, following emancipation, as an activist for women's rights, temperance, and black uplift, she witnessed firsthand the material needs of free blacks in the urban North and formerly enslaved people in the South. As she proposes in “The Great Problem to Be Solved,” a speech in 1875, “as a matter of political economy it is better to have the colored race a living force animated and strengthened by self-reliance and self-respect, than a stagnant mass, degraded and selfcondemned” (221). Carla Peterson notes that from the 1860s throughout Reconstruction, Harper's “economic arguments became increasingly foregrounded” in her speeches, letters, and essays (“Doers,” 134). She endorsed land ownership, entrepreneurship, industrial education, and Page 30 → non-discriminatory housing and hiring practices as means for African Americans to gain economic stability. She is consistent, however, in highlighting the thin line between respectable economic attainment and frivolous greed or consumerism, leading her to often promote a nonmaterial estimation of class. Harper offers one of her boldest attempts to outline a social order based on respectability in a speech just months before her first installments of Trial and Triumph appeared in the Christian Recorder. Addressing a racially integrated audience at the International Council of Women on March 27, 1888, Harper advises listeners that the charities that targeted the “perishing and dangerous class” needed also to reform “the neglected rich—the men with plethoric purses but attenuated souls” (“Neglected Rich,” 119). In an inversion that identifies the wealthy as the dangerous source of social corruption, Harper suggests that “while men may boast of the aristocracy of wealth and talent, the aristocracy of the soul outranks all other” (“Neglected Rich,” 120, emphasis added). The phrase “aristocracy of the soul” merges the conventional language of worldly hierarchy with an ethos of transcendent spirituality, significantly shifting the basis of status by deeming self-interested, money-hungry Americans as “poor” and asserting community-oriented people as true “aristocrats.” Harper's apparent moral values resonate with the discourse of respectability that circulated through out the nineteenth century. In the years following the Civil War through the Progressive era, black and white reformers intended that the widespread adoption of “respectable” values would improve the tenor of American society, countering the effects of urbanization, poverty, and ignorance. To this end, thousands of social activists, especially female reformers and social workers, wrote and distributed informational tracts and books, conducted home visits, and organized charities for groups considered in need of acculturation: ethnic immigrants, migrants, and the working classes (Dye, introduction, 4). As Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham further explains, for black Americans who promoted respectability through black community-building institutions such as churches, women's clubs, and

schools, “the politics of respectability emphasized reform of individual behavior and attitudes both as a goal in itself and as a strategy for reform of the entire structural system of American race relations” (Righteous Discontent, 187). Respectability was a central component of the racial uplift ideology that aimed to present them as fit for the privileges of U.S. citizenship, whether that citizenship would be enacted through black enfranchisement or primarily Page 31 → through other patriotic engagement with the nation, such as military service and economic cooperation. Nevertheless, for advocates of respectability such as Harper, a vexed relationship remained between race and class stratifications. If the way for black Americans to challenge racial inequality with whites was by enacting respectability, respectability nonetheless was bound implicitly to other forms of discrimination and exclusion. In this regard, respectability should not be considered an entirely equalizing objective. Harper's sense of an “aristocracy of the soul” offers certain possibilities, as well as constraints, for reconceiving social distinctions apart from prevailing lexicons. Given the economic changes under way in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, all Americans, black and white, were challenged to conceive of class in new ways. As recent scholars have shown, as the class structure of the United States transformed in the post-bellum era, “semantic labels…coped imperfectly with complex conditions…. Necessarily, then, vocabularies of class became a palimpsest of often competing meanings” (C. P. Wilson, “Secrets,” 343, 344). Terms such as “rich,” “poor,” “laboring class,” “working class,” “better class,” “lowly,” “elite,” and “middling” circulated together, at once affirming and undermining other terms.5 For instance, in the influential tract What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883), Yale professor William Graham Sumner observes, “‘The poor,’ ‘the weak,’ ‘the laborers’ are expressions which are used as if they had exact and well-understood definition” (13).6 In Sumner's estimation, “The ‘poor man’ is an elastic term, under which any number of social fallacies may be hidden…. The reader who desires to guard himself against fallacies should always scrutinize the terms ‘poor’ and ‘weak’ as used, so as to see which or how many of the classes they are made to cover” (19, 20). Sumner's answer to the question his book title proposes—what social classes owe to each other—was an emphatic “nothing.” Understanding writers' use of class vocabulary as politically inflected, he claimed that liberal writers manipulated language to gain sympathy and financial support for those “less successful in the struggle for existence,” whom he disparaged as responsible for their own poverty and failure (8). Though Sumner's own chosen language of class likewise was biased—his preference for “the rich, comfortable, prosperous, virtuous, respectable” is informed by Social Darwinism—his charge highlights the need that many of his contemporaries felt to analyze class taxonomy critically (8). African Americans throughout the nineteenth century recognized Page 32 → the political valence of social labels and theorized how a revised class lexicon could facilitate racial parity with whites, as well as fend against misclassification within black communities. Black writers offered accounts of intraracial stratification in privately published local histories and the society pages of African American periodicals. While antebellum American readers often expected black authors to focus on matters of slavery and abolition, nonfiction writers such as Joseph Willson and Cyprian Clamorgan instead highlighted class distinctions among free blacks, anticipating a challenge that Harper would take up in her post-bellum writings. In Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia (1841), the black physician Joseph Willson intends his social history to “remove some of the unfounded prejudices” of whites who viewed black Americans as “one consolidated mass…without any particular or general distinctions, social or otherwise” (Elite, 81, 82).7 Willson defines the “higher classes” most directly according to wealth, property ownership, and “comparative ease and comfort” (87). If he remained somewhat dissatisfied with his own definition, finding it “too liberal in its construction,” he conceded that such indefiniteness “could not be well avoided” since class distinctions are “a difficult case to decide” (79). Willson surmises that his assessment of the “higher classes”—perhaps like any single classification—fails to account for a number of exceptional cases or circumstances. Like Harper, however, he marks the starkest dividing line between “virtuous and exemplary” black Americans and “the vicious and worthless” (102). His social history intended to show that those in the former category were deserving of additional civil liberties, which would remove the onus of “incessant begging of their rulers to legislate in their behalf” (103). While Willson intended Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society as a possible impetus to black political rights, his text also exemplifies how disclosing intraracial stratification causes anxiety for African American

authors who faced the challenge of differentiating among black Americans without maligning any of them. Willson signs his volume with the protective pseudonym “a Southerner” and begins with a disclaimer before offering his definition of the “higher classes.” As he admits, “It is with caution and timidity that I approach the principal subject of the present chapter” (85). Willson's statement exceeds the self-effacement that often marks nineteenth-century African American writers, who humbly claim to be ill equipped for the noble task of writing. More than a perfunctory rhetorical gesture, the statement registers concerns Page 33 → about the available class terminology, as well as the possibility that misclassifications among African Americans would incite resentment. Claiming to be more assured of his class terminology and subject than was Willson, Cyprian Clamorgan, a barber of mixed-race descent, presented a wealth-based delineation in the Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (1858). Clamorgan explained, “By this term [colored aristocracy] is meant those who move in certain circles; who, by means of wealth, education, or natural ability, form a peculiar class—the elite of the colored race” (Colored Aristocracy, 46). Asserting his classifications in a less didactic tone than does either Harper or Willson, Clamorgan leaves matters of respectability at the periphery, choosing even to include in his account of “colored aristocracy” the rich mistresses of white lovers, who otherwise might be considered disreputable. He further differentiates aristocracy from the “second class of colored people,” a class that he hoped to investigate in a future published volume (63). Published nearly two decades after Willson's account, but only a year before Harper's first short story “The Two Offers” appeared in 1859, Clamorgan's text foregrounds wealth to an extent that Harper resists. If his wavering regard for respectability can be read as more than a matter of his own preference, his text indicates how African Americans approaching the Civil War construed materialist languages of class to show how upwardly mobile blacks contributed literal value to the nation. Xiomara Santamarina notes that such “protosociological” texts as Willson's and Clamorgan's shifted public attention toward differentiated black communities to show “a highly stratified society as proof, not of its blackness, but of its legitimacy and its ‘Americanness’” (“Antebellum African-American Texts,” 152). Taken together, the three accounts by Harper, Clamorgan, and Willson indicate how the stakes of classification were high for African Americans and increasingly would be after the Civil War. In the postbellum era, formerly bound and even freeborn black Americans needed to distance themselves from association with the status of “slave.” In 1865, one black columnist in the Christian Recorder, in which Harper frequently published, called for a revised social vocabulary that accommodated black Americans’ class ambitions and achievements in freedom. Defining a “gentleman” loosely as a man with “a big purse, and easy dignity,” the writer suggests “a loop-hole through which to slip a colored gentleman or two” into the racially exclusionary category that usually referred to well-bred white men (“Lights and Shadows”). As this unnamed journalist proposes, such a shift in classifications would indicate Page 34 → that black Americans had claimed the same class status as their white counterparts. Because black people often were barred from the occupations that traditionally indicated middle- to upper-class status in white communities, the writer's profile of prominent black Philadelphians offers what he or she considered comparable examples. From blacks and whites sharing gentlemanly values and tastes across the color line, the writer implies, there is only a short leap to blacks and whites pursuing equal access to public accommodations, education, labor, and political representation. As Harper, like the unnamed columnist, proposes that class could displace racial segregation as a means of social division, she joined African American writers and thinkers in envisioning a moral economy, in which an individual's selfless character trumps money, education, and lineage as the currency that determines social position. As John Ernest has argued, nineteenth-century African American literature underscores the principle of religious “belief's economizing potential, its power to serve as the motive force for reconfiguring human society, inspiring individuals and communities to begin the large task of reconstructing the house of order in accordance with God's plan” (Ernest, Resistance and Reformation, 5). In this sense, by privileging a divine order in which the spiritually rich would redeem America's sinful perpetuation of racial and economic inequality, antebellum black writers such as Harriet Jacobs, Harriet Wilson, and the early Frederick Douglass resist the existing social order. In Harper's work, this formulation of moral economy is most obvious in her essay “True and False Politeness” (1898), in which she proposes, “True politeness is the currency of everyday life. False politeness is a counterfeit coin with its brassy ring on the counters of existence” (398–99). This idea of authentic virtue as one's “currency”

informs both Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, as Harper merges the terms of economy and respectability. But if the principle of moral economy is common in the antebellum black literature Ernest cites, its relevance to the nation's political economy had declined by the time that Harper was endorsing it in her speeches and writings of the 1880s and 1890s. In economic theory, a moral economy “appeals to a moral norm—what ought to be men's reciprocal duties” in structuring businesses, labor practices, and economics to benefit common welfare (E. P. Thompson, “Moral Economy,” 91). By the mid-nineteenth century, disinterested capitalism had displaced moral economy in practice, but lower-middle- and working-class Americans Page 35 → still valued the notion (Beckert, “Propertied of a Different Kind,” 291). During the Gilded Age, thousands of copies of self-help manuals touted the mantra “character is capital,” suggesting that personal development and hard work paved the way for financial gain.8 Unlike in the success manuals, however, the “better-class” people of Harper's texts sometimes gain little more than social esteem (and, presumably, divine approval) for their character; “success”—a term that seldom appears in Harper's fiction—is figured as social responsibility. That Harper continued to advocate moral economy, despite its sometimes limited effect on an individual's economic outcome, indicates her resilient belief in respectability as social capital.

Fictionalizing Class Discourse Building upon ideas articulated in her articles, Harper dramatizes her prescribed class relations in Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, the first of which began serial publication just months after she delivered “The Neglected Rich” in 1888. As P. Gabrielle Foreman reminds us, when reading the works of nineteenth-century black women writers such as Harper who negotiated multiple genres, we can expect that “the unreservedly strident tone found in some writers' nonfiction prose might inform the objectives and discursive strategies in ‘sentimental’ novels by the same authors” (Activist Sentiments, 9). But the genre shift from speeches to sentimental fiction had implications for how Harper represents class, especially as she embodies class in individual characters whose discourse and deportment bear out her social theories. By privileging respectability as their governing ethos, Harper's fictions resonate with nineteenth-century “woman's fiction”: stories that feature a young woman deprived of familial support “who nevertheless goes on to win her own way in the world” (Baym, Woman's Fiction, ix). The orphaned or poor protagonists of woman's fiction develop moral fortitude through serial trials, often orchestrated by their rich, self-indulgent antagonists. Having gained and proved their stellar character, the young women in popular white-authored novels such as Maria Cummins's The Lamplighter (1854) often are rewarded with marriage and economic stability. In this way, however, white-authored domestic novels aim to move their female protagonists outside class, “outside history, outside the play of interests—economic, social, and political—that render the world unstable,” often by retiring Page 36 → them to the domestic space (Lang, Syntax of Class, 18). By contrast, Harper's novels indicate how race complicates African Americans’ chances for social mobility, making it necessary that the successful black heroine must move progressively into engagement with the politics and social inequalities that aim to impede her advancement. As Claudia Tate poses in Domestic Allegories of Political Desire, black women's sentimental fiction presents middle-class attainment within the home as entitling black Americans to greater access in the post-Reconstruction public sphere.9 Harper relies on a range of fictional patterns to invoke attention to class and, sometimes concomitantly, to obscure economic differences. Though focusing specifically on proletarian fiction that aims to move its protagonist and reader toward revolution, Barbara Foley's observations shed light on Harper's novels to a different end. Foley indicates that leftist novelists writing class propaganda tend to make use of a number of conventions: fictional debates, scenes of dramatized or forestalled class conflict, and “mentor” characters who “articulate the doctrine informing the text” and offer verbal or experiential lessons for the protagonist (Radical Representations, 272, 305). In lieu of the revolutionary outcomes of proletarian fiction, Harper's novels move toward reform by recruiting outliers (the lowest and highest classes) to consensus with the middle class. Deflecting class conflict, mentor characters in her fiction offer extended speeches and charity to counsel peace, progress, and purity, as in her essay “Land and Labor.” By novelizing her rhetoric, sometimes by transposing excerpts of her speeches nearly verbatim into the fiction, Harper universalizes her class philosophies throughout the text. The debates, conflicts, and mentors' speeches in

the novel are at once part of the story—attributed to the characters’ thoughts, emotions, and expressions—and part of the discourse, offering the narrator's or author's point of view addressed for the benefit of the reader. However, conversations in fiction “blur any simple distinction between the two levels of narrative [story and discourse],” reminding us how much the author's own voice is behind the characters’ voice and development (Foley, Radical Representations, 272). Harper disperses her own class ideologies through several fictional speakers who occupy different social positions: widowed working women, “better-class” matrons, and “lowly” targets of charitable outreach all articulate the author's ideas. This textual move strengthens Harper's argument that respectability can be enacted and verbally espoused by variously situated “aristocrats of the soul.” At the same time, this move from Harper's oratory Page 37 → to characters’ fictionalized speeches also means that the novel's conversations about class may be traced back to Harper's own middle-class, reform-centered imperatives, with which readers are led to identify. By creating conversations on a number of levels—both within the text and ideally outside of the text among a real audience—the serialized format of Trial and Triumph engages black Americans in renegotiating the criteria and lexicon of class distinction. At the level of story, characters in the fictive world use conversations pedagogically, influencing each others' understandings of class. Likewise, African American readers, positioned as eavesdroppers on the characters’ discussions, might replicate the textual dialogues, enacting their own conversations about class while awaiting the next installment of the story.10 As one scholar explains, “As was the custom of the nineteenthcentury readership, each new chapter of Harper's serialized novels would have been read aloud as it became available, so that the oral nature of such an event became an opportunity for communal discussion and reflection” (Toohey, “‘Deeper Purpose,’” 204). Encouraging such reflection, the editor of the Christian Recorder promoted a dialogic relationship by soliciting reader response while Trial and Triumph appeared in twenty weekly installments, from October 4, 1888, to February 14, 1889. In the November 15, 1888, issue, featuring the seventh chapter of the novel, editor Benjamin Lee remarks, “‘Trial and Triumph,’ the story now running through THE CHRISTIAN RECORDER, is meeting with high commendations. Several persons have written for back numbers. Call the attention of your friends to this popular story.” (While the paper does not offer critical reviews that clarify whether readers responded specifically to the novel's discussion of class or to the story's generally inspirational tone, a notice printed on February 14, 1889, announces, “‘Trials and Triumph’ [sic] closes with this number. Many have thought well of the story. How do you like?”) If readers of periodical fiction interpret a text in light of its paratext, then the articles, advertisements, and news surrounding Trial and Triumph may have influenced how Harper's original audience encountered the novel. While its chapters appeared in the Christian Recorder along with advertisements for beauty creams, silk robes, pianos, organs, chandeliers, and other goods, Harper lodges her objection to the growing materialism that she felt threatened racial uplift by fostering artificial distinctions of taste and consumption. Her novels elicit both characters’ and readers’ participation in reconsidering the boundaries of social divisions, first by examining the vocabulary of class. Page 38 →

Dialogue and Moral Distinctions in Trial and Triumph Throughout Trial and Triumph, verbal confrontations redefine the meanings of class while tracing the protagonist's maturation, both into womanhood and into favorable social status. Annette Harcourt begins as a precocious but troubled black girl whose mother has died and whose father abandoned her. Ridiculed by her white schoolmates and the wealthier African Americans who deem her too poor, unattractive, and “bookish” to befriend, Annette remains excluded from popular social circles until the “better-class” community leaders Mr. Thomas and Mrs. Lasette recognize her poetic creativity and help her become a teacher. In order to craft fiction that represents black Americans’ potential for advancement, without necessarily privileging wealth as the protagonist's aim or outcome, Harper emphasizes that Annette gains middle-class status, or in the terms of the period, “better-class” status, by committing herself to respectability. “Better class” contrasts the two extremes of the impoverished and the most wealthy, for while both of those classes are marked by their excess desire for pleasure, power, or money, “better-class” African Americans harness desire into moral rectitude and public service.

The classification “better class,” a central term under negotiation in Harper's novel, is a category similar but not identical to twentieth-century notions of middle class. According to some accounts, the term “middle class” circulated in American popular usage beginning in the 1830s and first appeared in American dictionaries in 1889 (Aron, “Evolution of the Middle Class,” 179), coinciding with the publication of the latter chapters of Trial and Triumph.11 Yet “middle class” does not appear in Harper's novel; the author instead uses the label “better class,” which, as historian Janette Greenwood cites, was the preferred classificatory term of black and white business and professional classes beginning in the 1870s (Bittersweet Legacy, 5). African Americans who classified themselves as “better class” often had meager incomes, occupations, and accommodations and lacked the wealth or political power that marked white middle-class citizens in the larger American socioeconomic structure (Greenwood, Bittersweet Legacy, 5). In reformulating social classes and their categorical labels in Trial and Triumph, Harper uses two grammatical strategies to revise what Amy Lang calls the “syntax of class”—the composite of signs and terms of class, functioning like individual but relational words in a vocabulary (Syntax of Class, 5). Each term in the syntax of class is shot through with Page 39 → additional contextual meanings and markers for signifying social distinction. First, Harper deconstructs “the poor” and “rich,” often inverting their connotations to favor “aristocrats of the soul.” Second, Harper complicates binary class positions by using more ambiguous phrases, such as “neither the best nor worst class.” Speakers devise “neither/nor” or “both/and” classifications to indicate, for example, that poverty and respectability are not mutually exclusive conditions. Rather than assuming that terms have a closed circuit of meaning, characters interpret words like “rich” or “poor” within relative, temporal contexts, giving the terms new meaning at the exact moment when the speakers converse about their class status. Struggles over respectability commence early in the novel. The narrator begins a pattern of resisting concise economic labels such as “poor” and “rich,” thereby drawing readers’ attention to other facets of the characters’ identities. Annette's grandmother and caregiver, Mrs. Susan Harcourt, is described as “a Southern woman by birth, who belonged to that class of colored people whose freedom consisted chiefly in not being the chattels of the dominant race—a class to whom little was given and from whom much was required” (Harper, Trial and Triumph, 188). While the lengthy sentence structure is characteristic of Harper's prose style, the circumlocution also attempts to reroute Mrs. Harcourt's class position through two distinct syntactical moves. The narrator first uses negation, explaining that the woman is not a chattel slave whose personal worth is assigned economic value in human trade. Disassociating Mrs. Harcourt from southern slavery, the narrator instead associates her with a second context. In the sentence, the phrase that follows the dash—“a class to whom little was given and from whom much was required”—reads Mrs. Harcourt's social standing through biblical principles.12 On the surface, the metaphorical description seems to obfuscate status rather than provide further clarity. One could more concisely say that the woman was freeborn but not rich. For Harper's purposes, however, Mrs. Harcourt's willingness to use what little she has for the good of others reveals more about her intrinsic spiritual worth in a moral economy in which this matters most. The narrator repeats this pattern throughout the novel, consistently displacing the economic with the spiritual, the concrete with a seemingly abstract or contradictory description. As the reader discovers more about Mrs. Harcourt, her class position may appear ambiguous, for while as an unschooled black woman she struggles to “keep the wolf from the door,” Page 40 → she has “obtained that culture of manners and behavior which comes through contact with well-bred people, close observation and a sense of self-respect and self-reliance” (188). When the novel originally appeared incrementally in the Christian Recorder, readers would have encountered the widowed Mrs. Harcourt and followed her story for weeks before learning of her means of labor. By delaying the knowledge that Mrs. Harcourt works as a “sick nurse” or domestic, as did many black women who lived in the urban North in the nineteenth century, the novel encourages observers to judge her on her self-reliance instead of her occupation. Rather than building a cumulative characterization of the Harcourts, in which each detail builds upon and confirms the previous one, Harper breaks the signifying chain that links status and occupation. Like Harper, other late nineteenth-century African American novelists shared the challenge of construing a social taxonomy of literary language specific to black communities. Yet by comparison, novels such as Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces (1900) accept many of the available social descriptors of class at face value,

seeming less troubled about the implications of class taxonomies. In place of Harper's equivocal language, Contending Forces more frequently conveys status through consumption and lineage. When introducing the novel's central protagonists, Hopkins relies, in part, on a descriptive catalog of household furnishings, clothing, and other consumer goods to convey respectability. For instance, in describing the Smith family's neighbors and associates, Hopkins's narrator refers to “a number of well-to-do families of color whose tax-bills show a most comfortable return each year to the city treasury” (142). In this way, Hopkins relies on a conventional lexicon of terms, metaphors, and standards for representing class stratification that Harper aims to avoid. In Trial and Triumph, the description of the Harcourt family's living arrangements in A. P., a fictionalized version of Philadelphia, again suggests Harper's attempt to refute the misclassification of striving African Americans who ordinarily would be disparaged as “poor.” Although Mrs. Harcourt hopes her personal habits will repudiate the negative connotations of being “poor” and black, she finds that “however decent, quiet or respectable she might appear on applying for a house,” she cannot barter her social propriety for entry into more “eligible” neighborhoods among whites (197). Instead, housing discrimination confines her to the undesirable Tennis Court neighborhood: “a secluded court, which was shut in on every side but one from the main streets, and [its] environments were not of the most pleasant and congenial kind” (196). For modern readers, Page 41 → the Tennis Court community resembles the geographically isolated and economically stagnant black neighborhoods in Ann Petry's The Street (1946) or Gloria Naylor's Women of Brewster Place (1982), two twentieth-century novels that similarly focus on beleaguered black women's attempts to thrive in the urban North.13 But while the protagonists of those novels live in recognizably low-income housing, the narrator of Trial and Triumph mentions less directly, “The neighbors, generally speaking, belonged to neither the best nor worst class of colored people” (196). As though lacking a more precise term to categorize the largely uneducated but good-hearted black residents who gossip, drink, and fight among themselves, Harper designates the tentative position between the “best” and “worst” class. The characters’ verbal confrontations reveal the way that social meaning often is produced through contestation. In conversations fraught with indignation and politely phrased accusations, speakers attempt to build consensus about classifications with their listeners and observers. Mrs. Harcourt's anxiety about her tenuous status repeatedly causes her to defend herself against misclassification by other A. P. residents. When a neighbor in Tennis Court sends Annette on an errand to buy beer without her grandmother's permission, Mrs. Harcourt rebukes the woman, telling her emphatically that “she wanted her girl [Annette] to grow up a respectable woman” (196). In her own first-person speech, apart from the narrator's description, Mrs. Harcourt labels herself “poor,” but her statement also suggests her desire to revise the connotations of the term. She adds, “I am poor…but I mean to keep my credit up” (196). Her sentence pivots on the conjunction “but” to relate two seemingly contradictory traits, poverty and “credit” or good reputation. Self-conscious about the negative stereotypes of poor urban dwellers as drunken, criminal, and otherwise immoral, as they often were sensationally portrayed in the literature and sociological research of the period, Mrs. Harcourt insists that her worth be based on her conduct and attitude, independent of her environs. From a historical perspective of nineteenth-century stratifications, Mrs. Harcourt may be among the “lower middle class,” though she never applies the term to herself. “Perhaps what defined lower-middle-class citizens most decisively was the very ambivalence of their position,” historian Sven Beckert elucidates, “their embrace of both bourgeois and proletarian strategies and values” (“Propertied of a Different Kind,” 294). While just eking out a living, Mrs. Harcourt manages to host charming Page 42 → dinner parties in the home she owns, dressed “in her white apron, faultless neck handkerchief and nicely fitting, but plain dress” (204). Though her belief in the dignity of manual and domestic labor resonates with working-class ethics, she also endorses values such as temperance usually ascribed to the middle class. Though the narrator designates Mrs. Harcourt's neighbors as “neither the best nor worst class,” Mrs. Harcourt, too, seems to occupy this interstitial position. Attempting to circumvent the confines of class language, Mrs. Harcourt positions herself as an exceptional character whose neither/nor classification allows her access both to the worst people, whom she hopes to influence positively, and to the “better class” to which she aspires. In the novel, “better-class” black Philadelphians carefully dissociate their integrity from their material means,

disparaging the elites' ostentatious display, snobbery, and prejudice against darker skin complexions. Mrs. Lasette, one black “better-class” woman, foregoes boundaries that call for her separation from those less privileged. She defends her protégé Annette against the elite who repeatedly snub the girl. When an observer on the margins of elite circles tries to explain social distinctions, Mrs. Lasette begins the ensuing conversation to offer a competing account: “I do not think your set, as you call it, has such a monopoly of either virtue or intelligence that you can afford to ridicule and depress any young soul who does not happen to come up to your social standard. Where dress and style are passports Annette may be excluded, but where brain and character count Annette will gain admittance.” “Mrs. Lasette,” said Mrs. Hanson, “you are rich and you can do as you choose in A. P. You can set the fashion.” “No; I am not rich, but I hope that I will always be able to lend a hand to any lonely girl.” (231–32) In this, one of the most central discussions of classification in the novel, Mrs. Lasette neatly substitutes a focus on lifestyle with a competing emphasis on character. As she suggests, a person's external possessions are meaningless unless accompanied by the proper attitudes toward education, work, and racial solidarity. Free from the need to work outside the home, Mrs. Lasette insists that her financial security obliges her to commit herself to what she elsewhere terms “a labor of love” in the community (198). Page 43 → But Mrs. Lasette's abrupt, evasive change of subject is a telling sign of her class anxiety, as well as Harper's desire to quickly resolve discussions of social disparities. Since, as Anthony Giddens proposes, class awareness for the middle class “may take the form of a denial of the existence or reality of classes” (Giddens, “Class Structuration,” 162, original emphasis), Mrs. Lasette's attempt to repress or silence class difference reveals as much as what she articulates. Her apparent disinterest in fashion and wealth may suggest that she is in fact secure in both. Claiming not to be “rich,” she distances herself from what may be her own complicity in the economic or social disadvantage of others. As Mrs. Lasette hastily redirects attention to her desire to “lend a hand,” the conversation points up Harper's own sometimes strained attempt to mediate class through language that underscores service to the race. Notably, however, with Mrs. Lasette as the self-selected spokesperson for the masses, the control over the language of class remains in the hands (or rather, mouths) of the “better class.” Mrs. Lasette's visibility in the African American community allows her to dictate the terms of social discourse. It is when she intends to align with the lowly, through both her outreach and her verbal repudiations of her own wealth, that the word “lowly” and the group of people to whom it refers gain legitimacy. She transfers her status to the cooperative targets of her reform. Harper's pattern of classification differentiates between those called the “better class” and the “elite.” The “betterclass” representatives such as Mrs. Lasette situate themselves as moral exemplars not only to the poor but also to moneyed people whose investment in worldly power leads them to misconstrue the true intent of social distinctions. Accusing the “the upper tens” of acting white by isolating themselves from darker or less cultured black folk, the narrator explains, “Although they were of African descent, they were Americans whose thoughts were too much Americanized” (239). The text invokes the terms “elite” and “society” pejoratively to describe self-interested African Americans. As the narrator elsewhere adds, “The society of P. [sic] was cut up and divided into little sets and coteries…. [They] had leisure, a little money and some ability, but they lacked the perseverance and self-denial necessary to enable them to add to the great resources of natural thought” (226, emphasis added). The description depicts the elite as pretentious and imitative, in contrast to the “better class” invested in black arts, enterprise, and service. By locating class internally—at the level of the thoughts and words that emanate from one's heart—Harper shifts attention from the physical Page 44 → body as the site of class. As characters verbally identify themselves and

others, their labels serve as shorthand for more in-depth but also more external characterization. In Trial and Triumph, Harper provides few details about her characters’ physical appearance, instead highlighting their actions and conversation. Only one comment in the novel implies that Annette possesses light skin: her mentor, Mrs. Lasette, tells her, “if it were not for signs there's no mistaking I should think you had a lot of Irish blood in your veins, and had kissed the blarney stone” (218). But Annette's “big nose and plain face” clearly reveal her African descent, foreclosing the possibility of passing as white (268). She lacks the conventional traits of outward physical beauty so that each of her triumphs, including her eventual marriage, is attributed solely to her perseverance and personality. By imputing few advantages to Annette's skin color, Trial and Triumph subtly works against the pattern of mulatta characterization in postbellum black fiction, recognizing the need to deemphasize whiteness and nearwhiteness as a status marker. In black-authored domestic allegories of the 1890s, including Iola Leroy, the heroines' appearance and conduct notably distinguish them from lower-class, darker blacks. Equaling or exceeding white Americans in adherence to bourgeois standards of decorum, the light-skinned or racially indeterminate women who populate the novels of Harper, Hopkins, and Amelia Johnson assert their respectability to refute negative impressions of people of African descent (Tate, Domestic Allegories, 104). But their appearance also could be misread as a desire to repudiate blackness and gain class privilege. To avoid this interpretation, Harper nearly decorporealizes Annette, placing little attention on her physical appearance to instead emphasize that respectability should trump the privileges imputed to white skin, both within color-conscious black communities and in American society. In order to deflect black Americans’ misclassification, Harper introduces a number of subplots that initially appear tangential to the narrative but instead serve to devalue whiteness and wealth to make room atop the moral economy for respectable black Americans. One such narrative thread includes repeated conversations about Irish American conflicts with black “aristocrats of the soul.” On the basis of her mettle, Mrs. Harcourt asserts her superiority over Irish Americans who attempt to stabilize their own precarious social position by degrading blacks. When little Mary Joseph harasses Annette at school, Mrs. Harcourt concludes that the girl's resentment stems from both racial and class antagonism. As Page 45 → one of Annette's sympathizers expounds, Mary's Irish immigrant mother “had been an ignorant servant girl, who had married a man with a little money…. She was still ignorant, loud and dressy[,] liked to put on airs. The nearer the beggar the greater the prejudice” (182). As Anna Engle explains, Harper draws on the popular nineteenth-century cultural and literary assumptions that associated Irish Americans’ social position with blackness and racial inferiority. These racialized metaphors exacerbated social relations in cities such as Philadelphia where Irish and African Americans competed for limited jobs, housing, and political clout (Engle, “Depictions of the Irish,” 154). As critics have noted, white writers including Rebecca Harding Davis, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, and Hamlin Garland presented metaphorical blackness as the sign of working-class subjection, especially by conflating white workers and African Americans as “slaves” or “dependents.”14 While literary and historical studies alike have elaborated how white privilege relied on the blackened representation of labor, scholarship leaves relatively unexamined how black writers either perpetuated or revised this assumption. In Harper's novel, Mrs. Harcourt's slip from discussing class to rehearsing racial stereotypes implicates her in turn-of-the-century nativism, which disparaged European immigrants as inassimilable foreigners. Proceeding as though the United States could bestow citizenship on only a limited sector of the population, black Americans reinforced nativism by arguing that their class aspirations proved them more fit for citizenship and acculturation than were European immigrants or poor whites (Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 133). In a moment of vengeful indiscretion, Mrs. Harcourt remarks, “an Irishman is only a negro turned wrong side out” (217). In one reading of Irish characterization in Trial and Triumph, Engle supposes that Harper presents upwardly mobile Irish Americans so as to “offer hope to African Americans struggling for upward mobility” (“Depictions of the Irish,” 166). But such a favorable interpretation misreads how Harper frames the Josephs as foils to the morally superior Harcourts. Rather than positively modeling how people can overcome their class origins to rise in the world, the Josephs show how meaningless economic gain is without the attendant moral virtues that Harper values. Though seemingly unrelated to African American stratification, the repeated conversations about Irish Americans’

possible inferiority allow Harper to show how respectable black Americans should merit greater social opportunities free from racism. Mrs. Lasette argues that since the Page 46 → Josephs have made their money through the liquor trade, they have not experienced true ascent: No, Annette, if Miss Joseph ever attempts to quarrel with you don't put yourself on the same level by quarreling with her. I knew her parents when they were very poor; when a half dozen of them slept in one room…. [Mr. Joseph] has gone up in property and even political influence, but oh, how many poor souls have gone down, slain by strong drink and debauchery. (220) By delimiting the realms in which Mr. Joseph's prosperity applies—in property and political influence—Mrs. Lasette suggests that the Josephs fail to move up the social ladder in the most important way: by profiting the “poor souls” over whom one has social influence as a responsible citizen. One might say that from once being “very poor,” the Josephs at best have become the financially wealthy but morally bankrupt “neglected rich” that Harper had described in her earlier speech. The Josephs' questionable respectability positions Annette, the modest granddaughter of a temperate domestic servant, to challenge their supposed superiority.15 Meanwhile, Annette herself remains silent on the topic of class throughout much of the novel. Less vocal than her grandmother and Mrs. Lasette, Annette does not articulate her class awareness through indignant monologues defending her respectability. She seems altogether to lack the language to describe the precarious class position between the lowly and the “better class” that ultimately allows her to embody Harper's concept of an “aristocrat of the soul.” Annette is the subject, rather than the active participant, in many of the novel's discussions about class. Although readers of the serialized novel may lose track of the developing chronology within the story, discussions about Annette's changing social esteem indicate the passing of time. Arising from her humble class origins, Annette graduates at the top of her class at her newly integrated school, moves to the South to teach in a rural black school, and eventually marries a suitor who shares her commitment to racial uplift. By the novel's end, she is, in Claudia Tate's terms, the “true black woman”: “domestic nurturer, spiritual counselor, moral advocate, social activist, and academic teacher” (Domestic Allegories, 97). Rather than depending on her husband's salary and retiring to the domestic realm after marriage, Annette balances paid labor, public service, and domesticity. As critics sometimes derisively have noted—and as the novel title Trial and Triumph invites us to anticipate—one goal of sentimental fiction Page 47 → is the final distribution of punishments and rewards. However, just as conversations function to elaborate class difference throughout the novel, the conclusion relies on conversation as a means of dispensing rewards. Strikingly, most of the admirable characters end up not far from where they started economically, albeit with appropriate marriage partners who support their accomplishments. As a teacher in the South among newly freed people of color, Annette is situated in neighborhoods of people who might be said to constitute “neither the best nor worst class of colored people,” much like the residents of Tennis Court. The real measure of Annette's social status is that, although the “lowly” blacks speak infrequently in the text, they devote their conversations to affirming that Annette deserves the social esteem she attains. One southern mother aided by Annette observes that her daughter is “just wrapped up in Miss Annette, thinks the sun rises and sets in her” (284). Rather than discussing their own status, the folk bespeak Annette's favorable status that she is too modest to claim throughout the novel. In Trial and Triumph, the most obvious limitation of Harper's narrative strategy for representing class is that “the lowly” largely remain silenced, unable to express their impressions of their own conditions. Representing the folk in mass, the narrator only once refers to any of “the lowly” by name or otherwise individualizes them as agents in facilitating their own uplift. Given Trial and Triumph's central engagement with exposing class tensions, it is notable that Harper's depiction of cross-class encounters represses any possible conflict between the “better class” and those known both as “neither the best nor worst class” and “the lowly.” To the extent that she sympathetically depicts low-income African Americans, Harper rehabilitates negative public images of them as social leeches or menaces. Yet her language of class failed to give voice to the lower classes who might define themselves by standards other than those the black “better class” endorsed. Though Harper refrains from representing the speech of black working folk in Trial, she recovers this opportunity in Iola Leroy, though not without raising additional difficulties of representing “lowly” speakers as respectable.

“Learning a New Language” of Class in Iola Leroy While Trial and Triumph foregrounds African Americans’ struggles over class distinctions and the terminology for expressing them, Iola Leroy attempts to defuse intraracial conflict, including class differences, Page 48 → by promoting racial uplift as a unifying social agenda. Harper's sense of the distinct target audiences for the two novels—the primarily black readership of the Christian Recorder in which Trial and Triumph appears and the black and white audience of Iola Leroy, produced as a bound volume—may have influenced how she attends to the issue of class differently in the two texts. Carla Peterson has proposed that the author's serialized fiction demonstrates “not only Harper's commitment to working with fictional and novelistic forms as she shaped them to fit her political, social, and ideological ends, but also her willingness openly to broach certain problematical issues” for an in-group audience of black periodical readers, while Iola Leroy addresses such issues “only indirectly or at the margins” (Peterson, “‘Further Liftings,’” 98). In the latter novel, Harper fictionalizes a history of emancipation and Reconstruction in which intraracial collaboration, sans apparent class contentions, seems paramount to (re)creating black communities in the war-torn South. By attending closely to the novel's dialogue, we see how Harper recognizes the slavery-to-freedom historical period as a crucial moment for refiguring black Americans’ class conditions. As the narrative and ideological centerpiece of the novel, the conversazione in chapter 30 provides a formal opportunity for African Americans to address concerns crucial to their communities, but speakers do not deliberate much on class divisions. Staged and attended by black intellectuals in the North, the debate addresses a number of topics that all implicitly relate to class: emigration, patriotism, racial solidarity, moral development, and the education of mothers. However, only one commentator during the forum considers how class relates to racial progress. After detailing the educational and economic advancement of black communities he witnessed during a recent tour of the South, Reverend Carmicle explains, “I also fear that in some sections, as colored men increase in wealth and intelligence, there will be an increase in race rivalry and jealousy” (259). His comments suggest that though racial uplift advocates intended for their class achievement to positively refute claims of inferiority, such achievement could also elicit white violence and retaliation. This, indeed, was one paradox of the economically driven uplift strategies that black leaders promoted. “The folk” are conspicuously absent as equal contributors to the intellectuals' conversazione, but Iola Leroy exceeds Trial and Triumph in featuring vernacular speakers who adjudicate class distinctions. At least twice Aunt Linda Salters outlines the gradations of the local black community, Page 49 → and by giving her evaluations recurrent space in the text, Harper situates Aunt Linda as a resident expert on southern social relations. In addition to the passage cited at the beginning of this chapter, Aunt Linda in another dialogue with Robert Johnson clarifies that her use of the term “nigger” refers to status rather than race: “I ain't runnin' down my people. But a fool's a fool, wether he's white or black. An' I think de nigger who will spen' his hard-earned money in dese yere new grog shops is de biggest kine ob a fool, an' I sticks ter dat” (160). In one scholar's estimation, “Aunt Linda as the chief black woman and southern spokesperson spends most of her words comically condemning the tomfoolery of her people, whom she labels ‘niggers’” (Baker, Workings of the Spirit, 32). However, this impression of Aunt Linda misreads the content of her conversation, for Aunt Linda's exact point is that people prone to “tomfoolery,” evidenced through intemperance, irresponsible voting, and extravagant spending, are not her people, at least not in terms of class aspiration. That Aunt Linda's speech could be interpreted in at least two ways—either as mere verbal comic relief for her bourgeois fictional auditors and real readers or, conversely, as verbal resistance of the usual conflation between race and class—suggests how class connotations operate at each level of speech. Aunt Linda's vocabulary and dialect ordinarily would signify her social position as an unskilled laborer; yet the content of her speech suggests her attempt to align with bourgeois notions of respectability. Class connotations conveyed in the language here work at counter purposes. Aunt Linda's speech patterns highlight the care that Harper, and other black writers representing class, had to take in depicting dialect in the context of late nineteenth-century debates over class, dialect, and classification. By deploying dialect, writers presented characters’ speech as indicators of their regional origins, education, and class affiliation. In comparison to the works of Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul L. Dunbar, Harper's works have received less attention with regard to her representation of vernacular speech. Yet this is one means by which she troubles

the usual signs of class. Harper lessens the stigma attached to vernacular speech so that readers cannot use it as a primary marker of respectability. In this case, the connotations of words, rather than their speakers' accents, reflect more about class identification. In The Politics of Dialect Literature in Gilded Age America, Gavin Jones explains, “Dialect was much more than a humorous gimmick; it enabled certain types of political criticism, especially among those who were alienated from centers of power, Page 50 → by creating another level of discourse in which deep ethical convictions could be safely represented” (G. Jones, Politics of Dialect Literature, 37). Aunt Linda's working-class accent and middle-class sensibilities remind us that authors' deployment of dialect can be subversive, threatening both the established race and class orders that they supposedly bespeak. Like Mrs. Harcourt in Trial and Triumph, who repeatedly articulates her claim to respectability in spite of her relative poverty, Aunt Linda verbally challenges impressions of freedpeople as slovenly. However, the scenes featuring Aunt Linda also expose the limitations of judging distinction according to respectability. In one case, Aunt Linda invites her old friend Robert to join her for supper after the two have been separated by the war. She prefaces her invitation by noting that despite apparent differences in education and skin color, which make Robert upwardly mobile in the North, she shares his values of self-improvement while she has remained unlettered, but industrious, in the South. Having never met Robert's niece Iola, Aunt Linda requests, “You jis' fotch dat chile to see me, if she ain't too fine. I'se pore, but I'se clean” (157). Through her cleanliness, thrift, and domesticity, Aunt Linda aligns herself with “better-class” ideology and feels honored to welcome Robert and Iola into her home, specifically into the “front room” or parlor that she “regarded with so much pride, and on which she bestowed so much care” (169). Yet Aunt Linda's mixture of pride and self-abnegation, which makes her assume that the yet unseen Iola may be (or consider herself) “too fine,” hints at the fear of estrangement between African Americans of different social positions, a fear that Harper's text attempts to resolve, though its effects linger. When Aunt Linda and Iola first meet, Iola appreciates the elder woman's attempts to replicate middle-class domesticity, but she cannot yet envision Aunt Linda as her social peer. At best, the older woman reminds Iola of her black mammy and “the bright, sunshiny days when she used to nestle in Mam Liza's arms, in her own happy home” (169). One may argue that Iola and Harper herself intend the reverie to compliment Aunt Linda's maternal qualities, which would have been considered admirable according to prevailing gender norms in the nineteenth century. However, this passage also implies that the narrator translating Iola's sentiments lacks a less condescending classification for describing black women like Aunt Linda. By invoking the image of a mammy, the narrator fixes Aunt Linda's social position as a personal servant or domestic laborer, while Iola ambivalently determines whether Page 51 → she “ain't too fine” to associate with her except in the superior role of model and teacher. Deriving from antebellum constructions of enslaved black southern womanhood, the thoughts attributed to Iola lag behind the postbellum class structure in which Aunt Linda pursues distinction. That Iola seems unaware of her time-bound reflections as being inconsistent with post-bellum class structures reflects the constraints of Harper's representations. As a condensed summary means to suggest, in Iola's transition from being considered a slaveholder's educated “white” daughter to later identifying with the African American community as a teacher, she circulates at a dizzying pace through a number of impermanent affiliations that disorient her sense of class. Her language of class may be influenced by each of these temporary statuses, leaving her literally at a loss for words for describing her own social status or classifying others'. Remanded to slavery after her white father's death, she becomes a sexualized, though virtuous, enslaved commodity. Her next move is upward again to laboring free woman in the North, as she lets others assume she is white while working as a shopgirl. Iola loses both her job and social clout when she is discovered, yet again, as being partly black. She later assumes her final class position, in the novel's temporal confines, as the wife of a middle-class mulatto doctor. Yet at the time that she interacts with Aunt Linda, Iola is unemployed, ostensibly living off her saved wages or aided by her newly found entrepreneurial uncle, Robert Johnson. On what basis can Iola consider her class status? Tracing Harper's mulatta characterization from her earlier serialized novel, Minnie's Sacrifice (1869), through Iola Leroy, Cassandra Jackson notes, “Though Harper's mulatto characters become useful tools in addressing the nation's treatment of race, her characterization of them also fosters a class hierarchy that she would still be struggling with in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy” (Barriers between Us, 68). In a novel that is invested in reclaiming history and

facilitating future advancement, a representational problem arises as the language of class reverts to stratifications based on the privilege of visible whiteness or bourgeois acculturation, class markers to which Aunt Linda aspires but that she does not fully attain. Iola's inability to devise a more progressive classification shows Harper's difficulty in redefining the language of class apart from its racialized and wealth-based connotations. But Iola Leroy does highlight the significance of this agenda for African Americans to claim the class terminology and positions that assert their social ambitions in freedom. Earlier Page 52 → in the novel, when the white plantation mistress Nancy Johnson meets her former slave “Robbie,” transformed into the dapper gentleman Robert Johnson, she grapples for what to call him. As the narrator explains, “She hardly knew how to address him…. It would be like learning a new language in her old age” (151). By extending this idea of “learning a new language” to the project of determining African Americans’ social status, we see the difficulty of asserting classifications throughout Harper's fiction. While Aunt Linda attempts to learn a new language of distinctions free from the lingering racialized connotations embedded in terms like “nigger,” Iola, too, struggles for labels that can be unhinged from an antebellum class structure that associated African American women with sexual and domestic servitude as mammies. Taken together, the language of class outlined in Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy is alternately malleable and recalcitrant. For “lowly” black Americans and their “better-class” allies, claiming control over social labels allows them to reshape the representation of “rich” and “poor,” conceiving of a social taxonomy free from materialism and hierarchy. Yet the less flattering connotations of terms such as “mammy” and “nigger” remain, even in the alternative context in which speakers attempt to privilege respectability in a moral economy. Though Harper attempts to create what her fellow Philadelphian called a classificatory “loophole” for expressing black Americans’ status via morality, her novels are inconsistent about keeping this loophole from closing against the entry of economically disadvantaged but respectable black Americans.

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2 WORKING THROUGH CLASS The Black Body, Labor, and Leisure in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed May the work I've done speak for me, May the work I've done speak for me, When I'm resting in my grave, there is nothing that can be said, May the work I've done speak for me. —African American spiritual1 Most memorably and soulfully rendered by twentieth-century singer Mahalia Jackson, the song “May the Work I've Done Speak for Me” asserts that work constitutes one's legacy after the body ceases its labor and nothing more can be said.2 While this spiritual's sentiments may refer to deeds performed in pursuit of heavenly reward, I invoke these lyrics because when considered in the context of nineteenth-century African American labor history, they raise questions about work, social status, and the legacy of racial uplift: How much is a person's work a reflection of him or her? How much could or should black work, in its various iterations, convey social status, thus serving as the basis of intraracial distinctions? In this chapter, I examine how postbellum African American fiction anxiously takes up these questions, especially as authors address how hiring discrimination and limited educational opportunities complicate the extent to which black people's labor can “speak for them” in shaping their class identifications. Recent scholarship in class studies has traced the literary representation of work in late nineteenth-century America, noting how struggles over the modes and compensations of labor often emerged through the pages of Gilded Age newspapers, religious tracts, and novels. Yet studies less often have examined how African American writers vied for cultural influence to shape readers’ attitudes toward work and class. As Xiomara Page 54 → Santamarina has observed in Belabored Professions: Narratives of African American Working Womanhood, critical approaches have tended to underestimate the significance of labor and class to early black literature and, in effect, to reproduce “the erasures of laboring subjectivity and contradictions common to nineteenth-century reform discourses on race and gender” (23). Yet some of the frequently addressed novels that are discussed elsewhere in my study—Frances E. W. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces (1900), and Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901)—in fact belie their authors' fuller engagement with labor issues. These authors summarily address labor in their now canonized novels but were more vocal about matters of fair wages, labor unrest, hiring discrimination, and occupational hierarchies in their lesser-known fiction and nonfiction.3 In order to recover a discourse of labor in African American literary history, this chapter turns to Sutton E. Griggs's second novel, Overshadowed (1901), which underscores the centrality of work. The novel's title unintentionally has prophesied its critical neglect. Even as emerging scholarship aims to restore attention to Griggs's oeuvre, his second novel has been overshadowed by critical attention to his first, best-known fiction, Imperium in Imperio (1899).4 In each of his five novels, published between 1899 and 1908, Griggs highlights how African Americans pursue and interpret their work, particularly within racially proscribed labor markets. But Overshadowed places work at its center by following Erma and John Wysong, siblings who must forego their life of relative comfort to seek self-sustaining work after their parents' death. Focusing primarily on Erma's precarious work conditions as a housekeeper, the novel examines the employment prospects for African Americans who perform a range of domestic and manual labor, skilled industrial work, imprisoned labor, homemaking, and trained professions. The text repudiates occupational hierarchies within black communities that stigmatize physical labor (industrial, service, and manual) in favor of professions or conspicuous leisure. Ultimately, Overshadowed highlights how intraracial class tensions and white prejudice often work in tandem to inhibit even the most diligent black workers from advancing.

Analyzing the generic form and rhetorical argument of Overshadowed reveals how Griggs responded to the high stakes of representing work in turn-of-the-century racial uplift fiction for black readers. Griggs printed many of his works through his financially strained publishing company, Orion, in Nashville, Tennessee, peddled them Page 55 → door-to-door, and attempted to gain the literary endorsement of black leaders to increase sales (Coleman, Sutton E. Griggs, 21). His audience included middle-class as well as working-class black readers, a sector of the population less often accounted for in reception histories that take middle-class readership for granted. By comparison, as Carla Peterson has noted, when Harper was writing Iola Leroy, she had to determine “how to depict the labor conditions of the black peasantry and working class without offending the sensibilities of a readership composed both of whites anxious to maintain their political and economic dominance, and of blacks all too aware of the necessity of accommodating this white dominance” (“Further Liftings,” 104). Nevertheless, much like Harper writing for a diverse audience, Griggs faced a number of challenges when targeting a class-stratified black readership that potentially held varying attitudes toward physical labor. The first challenge was to create characters and a plot with which working-class and black professional audiences alike might identify. The second issue, which reflected a central tension of the turn-of-the-century black “Woman's Era,” was how to validate female wage-earning as well as black women's unpaid work within the home. The third challenge was for Griggs's fictional representations to ring “true to life,” while also inciting more hope for upward mobility than contemporaneous conditions inspired (Overshadowed, 7). Melodrama's multiple plotlines and emphasis on speech allow Griggs to address within one text the many factors that determined the social status accorded to individual occupations. Griggs's novels often have been dismissed as artistically flawed because they appear to depart from prevailing realist literary trends at the turn of the twentieth century.5 Wilson Moses has suggested, “In better times, Griggs might have taught social anthropology in a university—but no such opportunities were present at the turn of the century, so Griggs wrote sociology in the form of the sentimental novel” (“Literary Garveyism,” 215).6 By Griggs's own account in the opening proem of his second novel, “To be true to life, the story must indeed be a sombre one. So, OVERSHADOWED is a tragedy—a story of sorrow and suffering” (Overshadowed, 7). The author and his subsequent critics have differed in identifying the genre of his work—whether fictionalized sociology, sentimentalism, tragedy, or utopian fiction—but this discrepancy indicates how post-bellum black writers such as Griggs hybridized literary forms to address complex black experiences. In different terms, melodrama aptly comprises the range of tones, conventions, and effects in Overshadowed. Page 56 → Melodrama “can best encompass both pathos and action,” as Linda Williams explains, including elements of mystery, romance, and violence that Griggs employs to entertain and motivate his readership (Playing the Race Card, 24). Through this elastic genre, the author comically critiques the pretentious black elite, sentimentalizes the rising black middle class, and dramatizes the tragic consequences of intraracial and interracial inequality. Nancy Abelmann has proposed, “Distinct from the argument that melodrama works by transgressing reality is the position that melodrama can be effective on account of reflecting ‘reality’—the melodrama of ‘real’ life” (Melodrama of Mobility, 25)7 The New South in which Griggs lived and wrote was marked by the chaos of racial violence, economic exploitation, and black disenfranchisement that made “fact stranger than fiction,” to use a common nineteenth-century expression. Read in these terms, Griggs's authorial intrusions, stylized language, and uncanny plot developments show that much like melodramatic fiction, ordinary black life during the nadir entailed extraordinary circumstances. In Overshadowed, melodrama purposefully aligns with the novel's thematic focus on labor to critique racialized, class-biased occupational hierarchies. In moments of high melodrama, including confessions, confrontations, and deaths, Griggs disrupts the narrative's expected development to show how racial inequality and intraracial class distinctions (re) produce a black middle class grappling with the fear of misclassification and the fear of downward mobility. As I propose throughout this study, the fear of misclassification is a defensive concern with refuting unfavorable perceptions of one's class by asserting an opposing, self-defined class identification. This form of class anxiety stimulates extended discussions in which characters or narrators contextualize or revise the meaning of specific class signifiers, labels, and biases. Black Americans in Griggs's fiction also harbor a fear of downward mobility, aware that their class attainments easily can be reversed or voided by the racist exigencies of the New South. Characterized by stark changes in characters’ social positions, emotional excesses, and lifealtering moral choices, melodrama demonstrates the extreme possibilities of an individual's fate. As such, the genre's multi-climactic narrative structure simulates the serial, sudden reversals of fortune that may occur for

black workers in an unstable job market that undermines the black middle class's viability. Griggs does not seamlessly reconcile the opposing representations of labor—one, a realistic depiction of stifling conditions for black workers, Page 57 → and another, an ambivalently hopeful, moral conclusion—but this does not represent his poor writing skills, as previous critics have concluded. By deemphasizing or only occasionally highlighting the corporeality of labor, the novel attempts to protect black working women's bodies from both sexual and economic exploitation in the workplace. As the story progresses, however, Erma Wysong's body is transformed from a site of physical work into one of maternal labor and martyrdom. These representations of labor continue to rest together uneasily, especially in the final pages of the novel, which offer multiple competing conclusions about the possible attainments of black labor toward upward class mobility. The contradictions that remain in Overshadowed point to both the aesthetic and the rhetorical difficulties endemic in representing African Americans’ occupations as a basis for judging intraracial stratification.

Women's Work and the Work of Melodrama Griggs takes up the challenge of revaluating physical labor, and specifically black women's work, through use of a narrative form that makes central the project of recognizing honor. As Peter Brooks assesses it, melodrama's objective is to devise a moral order in which one's character is acknowledged, even if not materially rewarded, in the face of unfavorable conditions: The reward of virtue…is only a secondary manifestation of the recognition of virtue. The distinction is important for an understanding of what melodrama is really about. To see the struggle as one for virtue's salvation from persecution and its reward for misfortune is to misread the trials of virtue beleaguered. (Brooks, Melodramatic Imagination, 27) Since melodrama is concerned with the “recognition of virtue” (29), its premises serve Griggs's specific task of inverting the stigma associated with black women's labor and instead claiming virtue for women workers. As Erma overcomes sexual harassment and discrimination in the marketplace, she disproves claims that women's employment either results from or leads to dishonor. As a kind of symbolic capital, favorable recognition becomes a reward in itself. Melodrama aims to uncover a moral order behind false appearances, Page 58 → but in the process, the form ironically may veil labor conditions in order to depict virtuous laborers as unsullied targets of readers’ admiration or pity. Cindy Weinstein has shown that in the mid-nineteenth century in the context of the emerging middle class in the United States, “Erasing the visible signs of labor became a cultural imperative, whether in factories, in landscapes, or in fictions” (Literature of Labor, 23). Although U.S. fiction of this period sometimes featured workers, the texts seldom depicted them actually performing labor in unsanitary, strenuous, or diminutive work environments, lest the corporeality of physical labor appear vulgar to discriminating readers.8 Labor remains marginalized or out of sight because its visibility compromises the aesthetic value of the product, culture, and social relations it enables. Black American writers shared this resistance to representing physical labor, though for somewhat different reasons. To disprove racial stereotypes that associated blackness with brute physical strength alone, black authors instead emphasize black laborers' emotional and intellectual capacity. As Laura Hapke finds in Labor's Text: The Worker in American Fiction, in antebellum black literature, “a postslave life as a menial worker is unthinkable” (40). Authors such as William Wells Brown and Frederick Douglass generally presented manual workers as possessing “natural nobility,” so much so that they bore little evidence of the struggles, corporeal signs, or consciousness of the working class and thus could be assimilated into the American middle class by the narratives' end (Hapke, Labor's Text, 37). The erasure of bodily labor similarly pervades postbellum African American literature, as authors disproportionately depict black Americans in professionalized occupations. To offset claims of post-emancipatory black retrogression promoted by late nineteenth-century Social Darwinists, authors including Hopkins, Harper, Chesnutt, and J. McHenry Jones largely represent black Americans performing the intellectual work of strategizing racial advancement.9 The mixed-race protagonists of racial uplift fiction generally avoid physical

labor or perform it briefly (often under duress) before pursuing more professional work as nurses, stenographers, doctors, lawyers, artists, journalists, or teachers. For instance, the light-complexioned Rena Walden in Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900) altogether avoids domestic servitude, and when she works as a schoolteacher in the latter half of the novel, it is only because she ultimately fails to pass as a white woman of leisure. In The House Behind the Cedars and other postbellum novels of racial passing, authors draw attention to the psychic pain that mulatto/as feel when Page 59 → denied justice and the claim to their white paternity; meanwhile, the texts obscure the bodily pain one might experience as a result of intense physical exertion. By contrast, by not extending to Erma the opportunity to pass as white, despite her possibly “passable” mulatta phenotype, Griggs withholds an option that would allow Erma upward mobility primarily on the basis of her appearance. Accounting for Erma's physical body remains central to how the novel refutes social classifications that denigrate physical labor. In Griggs's novel, as in actual historical conditions, African Americans’ eagerness or refusal to engage in physical labor exposes deeper social justifications for the racialized division of labor. Writing as a lifelong southerner who set all his fictions primarily in former Confederate states, Griggs recognized that both the economic value and the social interpretations of labor were especially significant for black southerners.10 Since unpaid slave labor had accounted for much of the South's agricultural economy before the Civil War, emancipation dramatically disrupted the means and modes of southern production. As a once steady, coerced black workforce sought to “infuse meaning into their freedom by carving out autonomy in every aspect of their lives,” many demanded higher wages, relocated from plantations to cities, or sought new forms of labor not associated with the work they had performed in bondage (Foner, Reconstruction, 129).11 Griggs's novel strikingly highlights this transition in the economic and social value of black labor. Throughout Overshadowed, characters rehearse many of the prevailing ideologies about southern black labor, as espoused by racial uplift advocates such as Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Anna Julia Cooper. In his essay “Industrial Education for the Negro” (1903), Washington remains attentive to laborers' possible misclassifications by distinguishing between “being worked” and “working”; he suggests that the former term indicates passivity and “degradation” while the latter enables “civilization” (9). Though African Americans’ concentration in physical labor could indicate their exclusion from other fields, Washington interprets physical labor as a pragmatic means to the South's and the race's economic viability. Suggesting that black Americans could best participate in and benefit from the nation through their productive labor, rather than through political enfranchisement, Washington asserts that “all forms of labor are honorable, and all forms of idleness disgraceful” (“Industrial Education,” 9), a principle that Griggs thematizes in Overshadowed. Page 60 → Within postbellum African American communities, debates over the value of physical labor and leisure took on heightened significance. The degree to which one's job—as compared to other possible status markers, such as genealogy, education, or respectability—signified social position in black communities varied by geographic location. But in assessing the African American class order in major cities including Philadelphia, Boston, and Chicago, historian August Meier maintains that occupation was “in fact the most important single criterion” of stratification during the turn-of-the-century period he designates as “the age of Booker T. Washington” (Meier, “Negro Class Structure,” 259). However, African Americans’ economic conditions did not always correlate with their present or desired social status because the jobs they performed in order to survive generally did not convey high esteem.12 Indeed, in Overshadowed, many conflicts and ironies arise precisely because black Americans aspire to a leisure status designed to exclude them. While Thorstein Veblen and other social thinkers theorized the “leisure class,” characterized by its honorific titles, abstention from productive labor, and conspicuous consumption, they likely did not have in mind the social structure of segregated black communities (Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class, 5). Griggs remained ambivalent about whether blacks could secure leisure and its corresponding status at a time when their economic progress remained vulnerable to peonage, discrimination, and disfranchisement. Overshadowed shows black female workers caught between the economic need for paid employment (whether

physical or professional) and the pressure or self-motivated desire to remain at home. In popular cultural contentions over black “woman's work,” the term functioned ambiguously, referring alternately to wage-earning labor and to the service that African American women rendered to their families and communities.13 Yet when women worked outside their homes, occupational and racial hierarchies often demanded that they perform the seemingly least glamorous work. According to one account, more than 90 percent of black female wage-earners at the turn of the twentieth century worked as domestics, even if they had modest educations (Hunter, To ’Joy My Freedom, 111). As historian Kevin Gaines proposes, in the South, “a region where black education in even its most conservative form might provoke violent opposition from white supremacists,” domestic service could offer a palatable means of gaining the support of whites in favor of black industrial and domestic training (Uplifting the Race, 141). If black spokespersons on one hand had to counter assumptions Page 61 → about women's sexual vulnerability (or hypersexuality) in the workplace, on the other hand, they had to combat the contrasting notion that labor lessened females' sexuality and physical attractiveness. Because domestic service exposed black women to public accessibility, especially by lecherous white male bosses, wage-earning could be inimical to black women's progress and physical safety. In writing “Colored Women as Wage-Earners” (1899), black southern reformer Anna Julia Cooper repeatedly contested claims that educated working women made unsuitable marriage partners or that black women competed against black men for jobs, lowering men's wages. Cooper posited women's gainful employment as important to both their financial and intellectual growth, which further contributed to collective racial uplift. Yet even while encouraging “honorable labor,” the rhetoric of racial elevation rewarded professional work and leisure with greater status than for bodily labor. Free from the degradation of working “just like men,” as they did in slavery, African American women of elevated status were expected to labor within the home or at least in refined occupations as teachers and nurses—occupations less often associated with the hint of sexual impropriety. By situating Erma Wysong in the context of both her work and her family, Griggs's novel reflects how many black women, including working women, sought to unhinge paid employment from the status they enjoyed through their immediate social and familial affiliations. In an analysis revealingly titled “When Your Work is Not Who You Are,” Sharon Harley finds that African American female wage earners from 1880 to 1920 “usually did not believe that their presence or their position in the labor force was an accurate reflection of who they were or of how they should be viewed by members of the black community” (4). By emphasizing their participation in social networks, including women's organizations, church volunteerism, and other community activities, black women could derive status from means including and beyond their paid employment or domestic work. In this regard, as Harley proposes, black women in the nineteenth century relied less on occupation or income than on respectability for measuring status. Recent inquiries complicate Harley's claim, however. As Santamarina contends in Belabored Professions, black women workers often claimed more ownership and social esteem for their work than historical accounts have acknowledged. Nevertheless, Santamarina maintains, “Yoking the concept of honor to black female employment was probably one of the most difficult of all rhetorical tasks to perform for the nation's most exploited population” (168). Page 62 → Griggs pursues this task in Overshadowed by relying on melodrama to volley between idealized and more realistic depictions of black women in the labor market. By exposing the threat of loss Erma encounters as a working woman, the novel situates her to gain virtue. As Griggs assures readers in the prefatory pages, his story of black labor will include “a heroic figure, a beautiful, noble girl, who stands unabashed in the presence of every ill” (8). Griggs grants Erma a mix of beauty, brains, and physical brawn that would promote physical labor while appeasing audiences accustomed to delicate, chaste heroines.

Laboring Ladies and Lustful Leisure Set in Richmond, Virginia, the plot of Overshadowed traces the complicated trajectory between African Americans’ class origins and their eventual outcomes. Though educated, when facing hiring discrimination, Erma

must accept work as a domestic servant, thereby losing social clout among her peers. After she demonstrates her determination and virtue, however, she marries a doctor and regains her favorable social status. By contrast, her brother John stumbles down the socioeconomic and moral ladder. After initially succeeding in an industrial trade, he is ousted by the racist union and turns to criminality. The novel juxtaposes Erma's blend of hard work, spirituality, and refinement with other black Americans’ varying attitudes toward physical labor. Erma never entirely transcends her social disadvantages as a black woman, but the narrative's careful representation of her body, speech, and work ethic shows her as deserving the class mobility she gains. The struggle over the proper representation of black women's work arises early in the novel, as Griggs introduces Erma's domestic servitude while omitting details about its physical demands. In From Mammies to Militants, Trudier Harris notes that domestic servants in African American literature often serve to point out the disparities between white privilege and the black labor exploitation on which it depends (24). Rendering their labor from the kitchens, basements, nurseries, and other marginal spaces of middle- to upper-class homes, black servants contribute to—but also expose—the façade of ideal white domesticity. Notably, however, by not showing Erma in knee-bending, back-breaking labor, Griggs attempts to aestheticize domestic servitude, making it genteel enough to be consistent with Erma's educational training and demeanor. She is Page 63 → never represented as completing domestic chores such as washing or sweeping in the home of Mrs. Turner, widow of the late mayor of Richmond, Virginia. Instead the Turners are delighted that their “servant girl is a belle in Negro society” (84), and they offer her advanced-level tutoring and invite her to play the piano for their white guests. But if Erma's job appears both intellectually and financially enriching, the text does not entirely escape the larger implications of her work. Her dispensable role within the Turner household generates surplus value for her bosses, for while she ostensibly is paid as a housekeeper, her employers also benefit from her labor as resident musician. Erma's service exemplifies Veblen's observation that “the leisure of the servant class exempt from productive labour is in some sort a performance exacted from them, and is not normally or primarily directed to their own comfort. The leisure of the servant is not his own leisure” (Theory of the Leisure Class, 38). Since the benefits of Erma's refined culture and manners accrue to her white employers, the rest of the novel aims to devise alternate social contexts in which Erma's gentility reflects upon the chosen subjects of her status: herself, her family, and her race. Griggs hesitates to have readers visualize Erma's embodied work in the Turner household, but the novel frequently discusses its social significance more abstractly, especially during melodramatic conversations. Using dialogue as a primary mode for developing the plot, Griggs shows black Americans expressing and combating their fear of misclassification. To defend the positive status of working women, Griggs's novel reconceives of the concept “lady” in terms of moral constancy and diligent work, rather than in terms of leisure or wealth. In a chapter poignantly titled “A Lady Who Did Not Know That She Was a Lady,” Mrs. Marston, an elderly washerwoman who befriends Erma, tries to dissuade her from becoming a servant, lest the young woman sully her status. Mrs. Marston is intent that the generation after hers should have a better life, and she works tirelessly to propel her own daughter, Margaret, into the upper echelons of leisure. Yet Erma convinces Mrs. Marston that social standing in the black community should be independent of one's occupation. Inspired by Erma, Mrs. Marston comes to a powerful moment of self-realization. “I ‘specks dese Suverners hes got us blevin’ wrong ter tink dat a washtub spiles yer ladyship,” Mrs. Marston muses to herself. “Mebbe arter all I hez been a lady and didunt know it all dis whiul. Been cheated outen my standing in life foolin' arter dese Suverners!” (45). Refuting southern white women's exclusionary claim to the title “lady,” Mrs. Page 64 → Marston claims to be a lady not despite her income-earning labor, but because of it. In the midst of the revelatory moment between Erma and Mrs. Marston, Griggs draws readers’ attention to the social manipulation and racial politics underlying occupational hierarchies. Mrs. Marston agrees with Erma's observation: “The Southern white people are the parents of the idea that physical labor is disgraceful, and, being such imitative people, we [black Americans] have accepted without question, their standard of what is honorable” (42–43). As the two women note that they have accepted the division of labor “without question,” they interrogate conditions easily taken as “real.” By having workers verbally redefine their work, rather than considering actual retaliation against white southerners, the narrative shows African Americans asserting rhetorical agency against their misclassification. Admittedly, modern readers may consider Griggs's representation of the women's speech

as merely compensatory: after all, although Mrs. Marston transforms her identification, her material conditions remain unchanged. Yet by recognizing the way that language mediates social relations, Erma and Mrs. Wysong usurp control over vocabulary as the first step toward claiming individual and collective respect for working women of color. Erma makes the point clearest by asserting, “I shall strive in my humble way to prove that labor is not inimical to ladyhood” (45). Griggs pushes the boundaries of fictional representation further than many of his African American literary contemporaries by presenting a sobering account of reputational loss that working women might experience. Most like Griggs in attempting to wed virtue and women's physical work in fiction, turn-of-the-century southern writer Katherine Tillman likewise foregrounds domestic laborers. Tillman's novella Clancy Street (1898–99) anticipates the recommendations of her later essay “Paying Professions for Colored Girls” (1907) by featuring a cast of female factory workers, domestic servants, and seamstresses (as well as working-class men). Unlike Griggs, however, Tillman in her novella strikingly chooses to silence issues of female sexual vulnerability in the workplace. For the adolescent maid Caroline Waters in Tillman's novella, domestic servitude provides an alternative to illicit, interracial sex. Caroline's work in “one of the most exclusive white homes in Louisville” is presented as “a splendid piece of good luck,” and neither she nor her parents express any concern for her safety (273). Tillman presents Caroline as a God-fearing, hardworking girl who receives paternal, rather than sexual, overtures Page 65 → from her white male employer. Elsewhere in Clancy Street, Tillman does allude to and warn against black women's consensual or coerced sexual relationships with white men. Rather than getting a job, Caroline's friend Hettie Ross considers exchanging sexual favors for luxury items. By making Hettie and not Caroline the fallen woman, Tillman offers a strategically untroubled representation of domestic servitude that Griggs complicates. In order to further privilege labor over leisure, despite the sexual risks of the former, Overshadowed introduces middle- and upper-class foils as the subject of ridicule, rather than as rightful models for uplifting the working classes. Margaret Marston, Erma's former classmate and Mrs. Marston's daughter, articulates the top-down pattern of racial uplift that assumes that “race men” and “race women” with leisure or education best represent the black majority. Although Erma's work in the Turner household requires little physical exertion, her status as worker nonetheless disqualifies her from association with the black elites. Shocked by Erma's public solicitation for work, Margaret exclaims, “White girls occupying the social station in their race that we do in our race would suffer themselves to be carried out of their homes dead before they would perform such menial tasks…. We must hold up our race just as they do their race. Why, just think, if we educated girls go to work, it can be truthfully said that our race has no first-class society” (37). But by showing Margaret as preferring death over work, the novel critiques the illogic behind her exaggerated words. Positioning herself as gatekeeper of elite society, Margaret diligently polices the boundaries between classes so as to protect her own projected status. She dresses well, speaks eloquently, and otherwise possesses all the qualities of a black society belle; however, since her social position is maintained only precariously through her mother's work as a laundress, Margaret remains constantly anxious over downward mobility. Thus Margaret, herself only a washtub away from labor, has the most to lose by the boundaries of class being renegotiated to include educated servant girls such as Erma. In representing Margaret's intense fear of misclassification, Griggs shows how threats to the class order literally unnerve the black middle class. If fainting or near fainting may be read as conventional signs of genteel feminine delicacy, Margaret attempts to display and confirm her own gentility through her nervous condition. When she reads a newspaper advertisement in which Erma solicits work, the ad “robbed [Margaret] of all strength and had shattered her nervous system,” driving her Page 66 → nearly to “go to bed from the shock” (32, 33). In a passage suffused with the language and psychosomatic signs of anxiety, Griggs dramatically depicts Margaret showing the newspaper ad to Ellen, another black society belle: “Let me see it,” said Ellen…“Is somebody dead?” she asked in anxious tones. “Worse than that,” said Margaret…. “Oh Ellen, it is just dreadful,” said Margaret, as though her heart was about to break….

“But I always did tell you that Erma Wysong would come to some bad end…. Well, all that I can say is, she is disgraced forever.” (32, 33) Because the narrator delays readers’ knowledge of the subject of the conversation, Erma's work, the suspenseful exchange between Margaret and her friend Ellen conflates labor with illicit sexual relations. Elsewhere in similarly coded Victorian language, as though drawn from seduction novels, the society girls conclude that by working, “[Erma] has just gone and ruined herself forever” (36). In this passage, Griggs playfully mocks the way that melodrama's overdrawn language skews interpretation. The speakers must excessively manipulate language to devise a signifying chain that links wage-earning and sexual misconduct, two ordinarily unrelated referents. Though Erma later actually is exposed to some sexual risk (which she safely overcomes) as a working woman, in the exaggerated exchange between Margaret and Ellen, Griggs exploits the disjuncture between the economic and social implications of women's work. Building on melodrama's capacity for excess, Griggs also deploys the form to reveal how the pursuit of high social status, achieved by any means other than hard work, leads black Americans to overextend their financial and ethical boundaries. As Brooks explains, the genre of melodrama inherently focuses on people living beyond their physical and emotional means, including “those [individuals] who plunge into desire hyperbolically…and those who attempt to elevate themselves above experience” (Melodramatic Imagination, 115). Erma and Margaret contrastingly exemplify this, for while Erma attempts to live as a moral exemplar immune to material desires, Margaret is trapped in living beyond her financial means. When Margaret attempts to confirm her leisure status by affiliating with a white politician, he acts according to his white male Page 67 → privilege to claim any black woman as his prey and property, regardless of her status within the segregated black community. In a letter divulging her seduction, pregnancy, and exile, Margaret confesses to Erma her misguided class ambition: My love of [Horace Christian], coupled with my desire to dress, my poverty, my failure to seek such work as abounded, my idleness and that peculiar influence which a distinguished man of a distinguished race exercises over a poor girl…. So, I go on my downward journey, and Mr. Christian moves upward. (148, 149) In the context of the late nineteenth-century emphasis on feminine self-control, Margaret fails to rein in the desire of both her body and her emotions. Describing her “love” and “desire to dress” as “coupled,” she conflates material consumption and sexuality, leading her to actions that rescind her respectability among the black better class. By inscribing Margaret's sentimental letter in first person for the reader, rather than leaving it to a narrator's paraphrase, Griggs underscores the change in Margaret's language for describing labor and honor. Highlighting the polarities on which melodrama pivots, Margaret explains that leisure can initiate contrasting courses of “downward” and “upward” mobility for black women and white men. When Margaret is banished from town following this episode, her complete erasure from the narrative remonstrates the risks of black Americans imitating their southern white adversaries by avoiding physical labor. Unlike Tillman, in whose fiction “fallen” black women later are reintegrated into supportive communities, Griggs depicts Margaret's fate as irrevocably alienating. Ironically, when Margaret leaves town to hide her past in New York, descending into social death (or in this case, ascending to obscurity in the urban North), Erma supplants the fallen girl in her mother's affections. The orphaned Erma moves into Mrs. Marston's home, where the two working women reconstitute a family based on shared work ethic and religious values. Collaborating in Mrs. Marston's home-based laundry business, Erma and her adoptive mother use the household as a site of both domesticity and market production, merging the leisure and labor that Margaret disastrously attempted to separate. Representing “the ‘anti-workers,’ the brain force” of the black leisure class as inappropriately sexualized in Margaret's case (139), the author Page 68 → contrastingly reinvests black working women's physical bodies as both virtuous and beautiful. After being wrongly fired from her position as domestic worker at the Turner household, Erma works as a laundress, demonstrating a measure of physical stamina uncharacteristic of nineteenth-century black female protagonists. Less prone to fainting than almost any fictional mulatta, Erma labors as a laundress with the kind of rigor that the genteel Sappho Clark in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces

(1900) would consider both undesirable and physically demanding. As Sappho explains when asked why she prefers a career in stenography, “I could not do housework, because my constitution is naturally weak” (127). Griggs depicts Erma as corporeally fit, though the text downplays the ill effects of labor on one's health or beauty, effects that later women writers such as Zora Neale Hurston highlight.14 Griggs avoids describing the results of domestic labor, such as the spidery veins, overdeveloped forearms, or wrinkled hands that might mark a laundress. As Janet Zandy reminds us in Hands: Physical Labor, Class, and Cultural Work, “hands speak” so that a worker's scarred, tanned, disfigured, or dismembered hands attest to his or her labor history and the “actual physicality of labor” (1, 2). Yet by representing Erma as unchangingly beautiful, Griggs obscures in novelistic representation the possibly less flattering elements of work to idealize domestic service. Still, the novel struggles to represent black working women as at once embodied and nonsexual. Earlier in the novel, Griggs refrains from depicting Erma's bodily labor within the context of the white Turner household, where she remains vulnerable to seduction by white male guests. In a later scene, her brother John witnesses her at work in the ostensible safety of Mrs. Marston's home. Yet Erma remains dangerously overexposed, at least to her audience's voyeuristic imagination: It was now winter and she was in the kitchen washing out a tub of clothes. She and John were in there alone. Her sleeves were rolled up beyond her elbows, laying bare arms that were perfectly rounded and that tapered with exquisite beauty. Her long black hair had become unpinned and had fallen down over her shoulders, allowing two shapely ears to peer out…. Her shirt waist was unbuttoned slightly at the throat, granting a glimpse of a neck…. Though at work she was laughing and chatting and joking with John, trying to make him lose his moodiness. (108) Page 69 → This passage highlights Griggs's attempt to characterize Erma as appropriately feminine and desirable—“round,” “full,” beautiful, and nurturing—despite her supposed gender transgression of wage-earning. Griggs attempts to acquit Erma of untoward insinuations about either the oversexualizing or the supposedly sexually neutering effects of physical labor. Because Erma's body retains its inward and outward signs of gentility, her physical immersion into the working class is incomplete. Instead, she remains poised for an appropriate, middle-class marriage proposal in which embodied desirability as well as moral constancy are virtues. Deploying marriage as part of the novel's plot, Griggs not only adheres to generic conventions of sentimental melodrama but also presents marriage as a gender-specific means of women's upward class mobility. Contrary to one critic's conclusion that “class, region and gender dynamics are collapsed under the category of race” in Griggs's fiction (Kay, “Sutton E. Griggs,” 191), Overshadowed emphasizes how gender concerns intensify black women's personal dilemmas over when, where, and how to work toward socioeconomic advancement. In Erma's case, black society remains intensely concerned about how her occupation reflects her status and the public image of the race. When Erma's long-distance friend Astral Herndon completes medical school and returns to Richmond to declare his love for her, the couple's marriage culminates Erma's upward mobility while threatening the existing class stratifications within the narrative. Transforming the private marital transaction between man and woman into a public affair thought to impact the welfare of the race, the couple's detractors “bitterly opposed the union on the ground that class distinctions were highly essential to the welfare of the race, which distinctions Astral's course was calculated to obliterate, in that he, who was to earn his livelihood by mental exertion, was to marry a girl who had deserted that pathway and resorted to menial labor” (184). The couple's marriage challenges the idea that rigid intraracial class divisions are a necessary stage of black Americans’ racial evolution and advancement. However, by offering Erma a formulaic way out of the working class, the narrative perhaps too easily alleviates the troubles black women face in urban job markets. Noting how easily Erma parlays into the black middle class, readers must recall that she is not so much climbing the social ladder as being restored to her former status, prior to her parents' death and her need to work. Still, in Griggs's economic trajectory, labor Page 70 → must precede leisure. Erma's responsible management of her own labor and body indicates that she can be trusted with the rewards and risks of greater leisure. For rather than being idle and vulnerable to mischief, as was Margaret, Erma

usefully reinvests her leisure into different forms of (unpaid) female labor as a stay-at-home wife and mother. By concentrating on Erma's work experience, rather than those of male protagonists as in Imperium in Imperio, Griggs attempts to establish a moral order in which women's work can be appreciated and rewarded, apart from the racist labor market in which men like Erma's brother, John, participate.15 Though Overshadowed elaborates less on John, his work experiences point further to Griggs's ambivalent portrayal of working bodies and heighten the melodramatic tensions of the novel. Foregoing the liberal arts education his sister initially pursues, John chooses to work as a machinist at Bilgal Iron Works, reasoning that it is better to “learn a trade, for teaching is now an overcrowded profession and there is nothing else in that line to do” (92). By having John verbally muse about his work while at work, Griggs makes the readers’ access to the iron factory auditory rather than visual. As readers, we are to listen to the effects of physical labor being performed rather than to see them: “So John experienced much joy between eight o'clock and twelve…John went on with his work, whistling and singing and planning great things out of his four dollars per day” (91, emphasis added).16 Resisting the account of industrial laborers as mere operatives, Griggs avoids the sensational representation of factory work as a kind of soulless alienation. In lieu of representing concrete details about the actual workplace or the bodies within it, the narrative sums up John's experience with an account that focuses on his vocalization and mental reflections. Significantly, however, Griggs seems not to dwell on John's working body for reasons different than with Erma. Since melodrama focuses on the public recognition of virtue, Griggs expedites the intervening hours of John's work experience, allowing both John and the reader to proceed to John's anticipated promotion, by which his employer and peers could publicly validate his labor. Overshadowed repeatedly touts the value of physical labor, but the novel also insists that as long as racism persists, neither physical nor professional labor can offer black southerners a safe, satisfying quality of life. Because John believes that his hard work will earn him upward mobility, he hopes to receive an accolade or promotion when the boss calls him into the office unexpectedly. Instead John is barred from the all-white labor Page 71 → union and fired. Excluded from his trade, he can find work only as a carriage driver, who, coincidentally, has to escort the “Master Workman of the Labor Union of the United States,” the visiting union leader whose policies led to his termination. Angry at seeing his hopes dashed by the reality of racism, he retaliates by pushing the union leader over a ledge, a gesture that symbolically overthrows the racially exclusionary labor system. By building heightened emotional tension through the murder, the author allows John's retaliation to dramatically demonstrate the possible threat posed by disillusioned black workers.17 John's work experiences, which end with homicidal rage and imprisonment rather than marriage, call attention to Griggs's gendered depiction of workers' control over their labor, mobility, and personal character. While Erma verbally reassesses her adverse work conditions, disassociating her ladyhood from her employment, Griggs represents John resorting to a more masculine, physical retaliation. Fearing downward mobility after losing his job, John internalizes his anger, “filling his heart with a brood of vipers, to be fed and kept alive by continued misfortunes” (99). Yet Griggs presents John's violent act as more desperate and emasculating than heroic. In a striking inversion of stereotyped gender attributes, Griggs presents Erma as strong in her “woman-like” moral resolve (109), while John, repeatedly reduced to tears following the murder, “would slink cowardly away” (110). By privileging Erma's approach over her brother's, the narrative defuses or retracts the radical potential of black Americans who try to circumvent the more gradual, peaceful class mobility that Erma pursues. However, because class becomes individualized when embodied by representative characters, the novel's treatment of John Wysong and Margaret Marston punishes individual social miscreants without ultimately challenging capitalism and its often racist underpinnings. Through their transgressions and subsequent confessions, John and Margaret attempt to challenge the economic disparity between blacks and whites. However, the characters—and presumably the author—also suggest that their downfall occurs because they inappropriately imbibe Anglo-Saxon social values of status seeking and competition. Erma Wysong remains the only black laborer who will experience material improvement and social mobility by the novel's end. She embodies virtue maintained through labor, class ambition without acquisitiveness, and civic responsibility that supersedes even sisterly affection for her brother, since it is she who confesses his murder to the police. As Griggs invites readers to follow Page 72 → Erma as the singular representative accessing class mobility, the novel that appears to focus

on working-class subjects instead moves toward the middle class.

From Working Womanhood to Womanhood Working In detailing both the causes and the consequences of African Americans’ class anxiety, Griggs employs melodrama most strikingly by offering multiple, emotionally wrought conclusions to his narrative of labor and class mobility. While readers might expect the novel to end as Erma contracts a middle-class marriage, Griggs allows additional plot developments to extend the novel's focus on labor, transmuting Erma's labor from manual to maternal to spiritual. As I read it, the novel's unwieldy conclusion, including multiple false endings, demonstrates Griggs's attempt once more to balance an inspiring representation of black women's work with a more modest, or even pessimistic, depiction of what black Americans’ hard work can achieve in the face of continuing racism. In the final chapters of the novel, Griggs transforms Erma Wysong from a representative of working womanhood into the figure of womanhood working. That is, from modeling women's capability as wage-earners, Erma becomes an example of how a woman's moral influence “works” to advance her family and community. Rather than detailing Erma's changing work through gradual characterization, however, Griggs relies on melodramatic conventions of mysticism, discovery, and death to reveal how rapidly one's class conditions can change, for better or for worse. By shifting the narrative focus and characterization of Erma from the early chapters of the novel to the final ones, Griggs valorizes wage-earning unskilled labor but also asserts family as the focal site of (re) production for women, wherein they bear and nurture future African American laborers and citizens. In the chapter ambiguously entitled “Name the Chapter After You Read It,” Griggs invites readers’ engagement in making meaning of Erma's labor. During her pregnancy Erma takes a solitary mountain retreat, but, as the narrator indicates, “the purpose of these protracted communings with the sublime side of nature, Erma never disclosed to mortal” (199–200). Although Erma attends church services earlier in the novel, readers may be unprepared for her later hermetic spiritual practices. The ambiguity surrounding Erma's accouchement in the mountains appears to be more than the usual Victorian Page 73 → delicacy concerning sexuality and pregnancy. Rather, as Griggs imbues the young mother-to-be with “preternatural” qualities (200), he resorts to mysticism to transfigure Erma's bodily, maternal labor. From being a servant in a white household to being her husband's helpmate, Erma more dramatically becomes “in an especial sense the handmaid of God” (198). In addition, as one critic rightly notes, “Wysong is also the handmaid of Sutton Griggs” (Vassilowitch, “Example of ‘Horace Christian,’” 67), mutable enough to allow Griggs to redirect the narrative toward an unexpected outcome. By the novel's end, Erma's primary labor becomes the moral and maternal work that, as Claudia Tate has shown, often encodes political desire in turn-of-the-century black fiction. Erma's marriage and motherhood serve, as Tate might put it, “not as a discourse of domestic incarceration but as a liberational discourse” (Domestic Allegories, 90). That is, though Erma is disqualified for racial leadership because of the sexual vulnerabilities that attend her gender, her responsible childrearing counts as political activism that equips the next generation for citizenship. In one scene, Erma is shown in her parlor supposedly enjoying her leisure by reading a book, but she actually is preoccupied with considering the future of her son. The precocious seven-year-old Astral Jr. assures his mother, “Mamma, I am going to be what you want me to be” (201). As the offspring of a formerly working mother and college-educated father, Astral Jr. merges the qualities of the laboring and professional classes to represent both constituencies. By establishing an organized household and producing a male offspring whom she ordains for racial leadership, Erma transforms the domestic space into a middle-class site for imagining or enacting black citizenship. Nevertheless, Erma's transition from working girl to holy, happy homemaker is disrupted by the residual impact of southern race and class relations, which undermine the traditional romantic plot of upward mobility. As Griggs nullifies Erma's middle-class achievement with the inevitably of death, melodrama serves again to accommodate the reversals of fortune entailed in capitalism and the racialized inequalities it authorizes. Just when the Herndon home seems impenetrable by the exploitative or exclusionary labor market, Griggs asserts another bizarre development by reintroducing Erma's brother, John Wysong. Without his sister's knowing, John had escaped being hanged for murder, but haunted by his guilt, he willingly resigned himself to imprisonment in Florida.

Emaciated and nearly frozen to death, John arrives unexpectedly Page 74 → at the Herndon household just before he dies. And when Erma sees her dead brother, whom she thought had died many years ago, she collapses from heart failure. Besides reflecting the author's predilection for dramatic deaths, the double death plot tellingly indicates the unromanticized condition of black labor and leisure. Following hard prison labor and fugitive escape, John's emaciated, hypothermic body offers telltale signs of the effects of labor, countering earlier scenes that present physical labor as noble and physically beautifying. Resurrected in the plot only to die in his sister's presence, John is a ghostly figure, haunting the black middle-class family. The passage exemplifies how, as Eric Schocket observes, “Mobility changes the experience of class, but it does not make it go away. Repressed or otherwise hidden, the trauma of class will be unveiled again” (Schocket, Vanishing Moments, 16). More specifically, in this narrative focused on labor, Griggs identifies black economic underdevelopment as a means by which white southerners reinforce racial injustice. Calling out to a white policeman after witnessing the deaths, Astral cries, “Enter my home! Enter, I say, and see the havoc which living side by side with your race has wrought!” (207). With its melodramatic double death plot, Overshadowed cites the imbricated ways in which race and class inequality disrupt the black public and private spheres. Griggs's turn to death as the unexpected resolution to problems of black labor and mobility does not foreclose discussions of work as a signifier of class, but rather extends the reach of work beyond the grave, as the lyrics of Jackson's spiritual attests. In Griggs's hands, Erma's death becomes work, serving to instruct witnesses both within and outside the novel. Noting the connection between her service while living and the implications of her death, Astral interrupts the funeral procession to explain: You now desire that her body shall go to enrich this soil. Should I allow you to proceed, will this land which her dust would help to compose—will this land render to the son of another mother more than it will to the son that she leaves behind…? (212, emphasis added) The idea that Erma's decomposing corpse might furnish fertilizer for southern soil offers a profound, if gothic, understanding of the extent Page 75 → to which the work of African American bodies is exploited in the New South. As Astral argues, since the couple's son will not accrue any of the privileges that his mother's dust may bring the region, her remains should not even be deposited in the South. This moment in the novel epitomizes what Russ Castronovo in Necro Citizenship calls a “shadowy space of a public sphere where people's bodies and identities are transmogrified” (xi). More specifically, the post-Reconstruction struggles over labor conditions and black citizenship are waged literally “over one's dead body”—in this case, the body of the black woman as metonym for black households and the race at large. Erma's death signifies the failure of democracy, and southern society in particular, to establish a socioeconomic and political environment that can embrace black workers and reward them with unhindered mobility within both all-black communities and interracial settings. The narrative's response to Erma's death indicates the representational limits of the conventional logic of death as freedom, as usually featured in melodrama. According to this logic, the black worker can gain freedom only through exchanging the social death of disfranchisement, hiring discrimination, and segregation for a literal demise and citizenship in heaven. Yet Astral's interpretation of Erma's life and death rejects consolation and, furthermore, renounces the U.S. stateside race and class relations. He determines to bury his wife in the ocean “because here there abides no social group in which conditions operate toward the overshadowing of such elements as are not deemed assimilable. And now, I, Astral Herndon, hereby and forever renounce all citizenship in all lands whatsoever, and constitute myself A CITIZEN OF THE OCEAN” (217). Though Astral possesses the living voice to declare his freedom, Erma's labor in death is the real catalyst to revolution. Ratcheting up the emotional stakes of the novel, the narrator intervenes to delay the denouement, simultaneously anticipating and demanding readers’ desire for the optimistic outcome of the Herndons' life and labors. Inviting the reader's engagement in making meaning of the text, Griggs inserts a two-page epilogue that qualifies Astral's revolutionary statement and offers a more conciliatory narrative conclusion:18

We who have followed their [Erma and Astral's] fortunes, lo, these many days, are loth to leave them until our minds can fasten on some circumstances external to our being, to confirm the thought Page 76 → that perennially rises within and bids us believe that their lives have not been spent in vain; that “somehow good will be the final goal of ill.” (217–18) What is significant in this passage is Griggs's anticipation that an inspiring story of class mobility necessarily must conclude not with lives being “spent in vain,” but with lives being saved or redeemed through the characters’ (and readers’) proper understanding of labor and class. Rather than remaining abroad, Astral Jr., the “mountain-imbued son of the handmaid of God,” returns to the United States to help resolve racial problems (218). The book's final lines enshrine Erma as a mother who begets not only an extraordinary son but also a new beginning for the race and the South: “In that day, pleasing thought, Erma shall live again in the wondrous workings of the child whom she has brought to earth. All hail to Erma!” (218). Because Erma sets an admirable pattern as worker and mother, the author recognizes her with an ending that extends her value beyond physical death. The text reinscribes Erma as a symbol of sacrificial maternal and public labor, whose death is, after all, regenerative for both the South and African Americans. Providing closure for the narrative, the melodramatic form ultimately serves the capitalist structures and stratifications it questions. As the narrator intervenes in Overshadowed to redirect both the conclusion and the readers’ attention, the text exposes the sentimental manipulation needed to ensure the Herndons' progress. Moreover, rather than motivating readers toward violent agitation against race and class divisions, the concluding pages admonish readers, “the Negro shall emerge from his centuries of gloom…. In this hope we calmly abide the coming of Erma's son, Astral Herndon, Jr.,” who returns to the United States despite his father's wishes (219). Significantly, the narrator's directive to “calmly abide” both repudiates Astral Sr.'s ex-patriation and recommits black readers to upward mobility within the geographic and capitalist structure of the United States. Significantly, it takes four different endings to Overshadowed, each with varying degrees of spiritual and political radicalism, for Griggs to convey the complex position of black laborers in the United States. The serial narrative conclusions—first Erma's marriage, then her tragic but glorified death, followed by her family's radical expatriation, and finally her son's redemptive repatriation—highlight the excess of authorial labor necessary for Griggs to make the outcome of black laborers presentable, Page 77 → and even conciliatory, for the various actual and intended audiences of his fiction. The fantastical elements of Griggs's fiction—such as disguises, murder, conspiracy, mysticism, and maledictions—illustrate both the pervasive, perverting impact of class and race inequality and the extreme means required by black physical laborers to circumvent that inequality (Gillman, Blood Talk, 12–13). Shifting between an endorsement of manual and domestic labor on one hand and a mystification of professional, educated black leadership on the other, the narrative invests most of all in the idea that blacks' morally appropriate individual behavior can render eventual benefits for the collective race. As Overshadowed plunges its characters into class instability and ultimately into death, Griggs relies on melodramatic formulas to highlight how racist systems of classification heighten black Americans’ class anxiety by denying them honor, regardless of their mode of labor. By the end of the novel, most of the black Americans in Overshadowed experience exile (Margaret Marston and Astral Herndon Sr.), imprisonment (John Wysong), or death (both John and Erma Wysong). Yet Griggs's addition of the epilogue allows the hopeful interpretation of black labor to rest alongside a bitter one. During Erma's lifetime in the fictive world of Overshadowed, the South neither properly values black labor nor sustains a black middle class epitomized by a virtuous, urbane woman. In order to affirm black ladies who do not know they are ladies—to borrow Mrs. Marston's earlier phrasing—and to protect black ladies who desire to remain modest ones, black southerners needed socioeconomic and political privileges that white southerners safeguarded against what they considered usurpation or “black domination.” Overshadowed suggests that to begin its long-term reformation, the South could capitalize on the contributions of its African American population by granting honor to both manual and professional labor. When black southerners would be safe from the threat of lost wages, lecherous white men, and the lack of honor for their work, Sutton Griggs and his character Erma Wysong both could utter the lyrics of the spiritual popularized by Mahalia Jackson: “May the Work I've Done Speak for Me.”

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3 MAPPING CLASS DIFFERENCE Space and Social Mobility in Paul L. Dunbar's Short Fiction In the article “Negro Society in Washington,” published December 14, 1901, Paul Laurence Dunbar introduces readers of the Saturday Evening Post to urbane African Americans, a sector of the American population seldom featured in the periodical's pages. Assuming that his white readers would be unfamiliar with the social group he describes, Dunbar aligns himself with black high society, explaining: In the light of all this, it is hardly to be wondered at that some of us wince a wee bit when we are all thrown into the lump as the peasant or servant class. In aims and hopes for our race, it is true, we are all at one, but it must be understood, when we come to consider the social life, that the girls who cook in your kitchens and the men who serve in your dining-rooms do not dance in our parlors.(“Negro Society,” 287–88) In distinguishing the “peasant or servant class” from black men and women of “society,” Dunbar draws readers’ attention to issues of social mobility and exclusion within and beyond African American communities. Though racial segregation aimed to relegate all African Americans to shared space, apart from social encounters as equals with whites, Dunbar highlights how the racialized public sphere does not suppress how black Americans apportion their own social spaces. Instead, because black cooks and butlers occupy marginal space in white settings (kitchens and dining rooms), the servants likewise disqualify for entry into black-owned parlors, the leisure space of the “best class of colored people” (288). Mediating between the audience and the subjects of his Page 79 → account, Dunbar establishes a triangular relation among his readership, African American domestic or manual workers, and the “best class” of black Americans with which he identifies. Since he and his wife, Alice Moore Dunbar, had lived in Washington, D.C., he writes as both a local resident and a national celebrity to offer a glimpse into black social life. As he attests, black society's “lines are…strictly drawn” (286). By referring to drawn lines, Dunbar evokes the imagery of mapping to highlight space as more than a neutral backdrop. Rather, spatial boundaries concretize the abstract distinction that he draws between collective, racebased “aims and hopes” and the class-based intimacies of “social life” among one's peers. Whereas some of the best-known antebellum black literature highlighted spaces such as a tight “loop-hole of retreat,” the “tomb of slavery,” or a beautiful “quadroon's home” in which African Americans possessed neither themselves nor their surroundings, in the postbellum era, representing free black communities called for a new range of settings demarcated by visible and invisible boundaries and stratifications.1 For Dunbar's original readers familiar with his career at the turn of the twentieth century, however, the author may have seemed a more likely guide into spaces other than the parlors he mentions in “Negro Society in Washington.” With titles such as Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896), Folks from Dixie (1898), and In Old Plantation Days (1903), Dunbar's popular poetry and short fiction volumes largely focus on “lowly” black southerners in churches, courtrooms, and cabins. By contrast, his essay in the Post invites readers to imaginatively tour a different geography of black experience, where African Americans spend summers at East Coast beaches and enjoy art parties in privately owned studios. Departing from the usual localities of his writing, he attempts to make room for upwardly mobile black Americans on the written page and in his readers’ imaginations. For Dunbar, focusing on space informs not only how he represents class but also how he navigates the spaces in which he writes and publishes. Since, as I argue throughout this book, class division is a sensitive topic for African American writers and their audiences, authors take care in determining the literary genres and publishing outlets—the material, textual spaces—through which to approach class. Dunbar needed to gauge the commercial, political, and artistic value of delineating black class aspirations within his literature. For though his essay on Washington socialites piqued readers’ attention, writing prose and poetry about contented servants proved a more

consistently lucrative Page 80 → avenue for him. In particular, Dunbar gained favor for his narratives derived from the plantation tradition, which memorializes the antebellum past with caricatured African Americans who remain “in their place,” figuratively and literally. Yet such stories seem at odds with Dunbar's occasional aim to depict black class ambition and politicized desire. How could an author plot a story of black class mobility when writing for audiences that prescribe black immobility as both aesthetically and socially more acceptable? In answer, Dunbar emplots class into many of his short stories through a narrative strategy that may be called mapping class: emphasizing details of setting, including interior design, architecture, neighborhood divisions, and regional landscapes, to convey status. By presenting black Americans’ social status spatially, he works within the conventions of two turn-of-the-century literary genres that already were preoccupied with place—local color fiction and its antithesis, urban realism—to reveal the complexity of the African American social structure. Moreover, Dunbar not only shows how class divisions operate within black communities but also subtly critiques the racial segregationist policies that relegate black Americans to those self-contained communities in the first place. Thus like the longitudinal and latitudinal axes that allow one to plot a location on a map, “class” and “race” become coordinates, marking the divisions among African Americans, as well as the lines that prohibit most blacks, regardless of class, from engaging with whites. As one representational approach in Dunbar's broader repertoire, mapping class may be explained in relation to his more recognized textual strategy of masking, most popularly expressed in his poem “We Wear the Mask.” Through the protective guise of the mask that “grins and lies,” one may control his or her public performance to maintain dual selves or perspectives (Dunbar, “We Wear the Mask,” 1). Reading the notion of masking as Dunbar's artistic parallel to W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double consciousness, James Smethurst proposes that masking illuminates how “there are different communities of meaning based on different histories—or perhaps different class and racial locations in the same historical space” (African American Roots, 31).2 Spaces encode dynamic histories of race and class inequalities, power struggles, and social identifications. But these masked or multivalent histories are most accessible to observers who anticipate them. While critics have considered masking as a key to interpreting Dunbar's poetic language, identifying the dualism embedded in his poems in both dialect and standard English, I see Page 81 → mapping class as similarly adding dimension to the settings of Dunbar's prose writings. Instances of mapping class convey additional details or contexts for interpreting the varied black experiences that are often obscured by undifferentiated categories such as “black community,” “black neighborhood,” or “the race.” Often marked by formal breaks, digressions, or repetitions in the narrative's progression, the ironic and emphatic details by which Dunbar maps class differences temporarily detour from the narrative's more overt themes. For instance, as I elaborate later in this chapter, in the exposition of several short stories, Dunbar notes that working-class black Americans mostly reside in the parts of town called “Little Africa” because of racial segregation; thus immediately in the opening of the story, the author denotes that the narrative that features seemingly happy-go-lucky folk is always already framed by a more contentious social history of race and class disparity. Through such moments, Dunbar's stories accommodate more acute commentaries about class and racial inequality than his original readers, and many modern-day scholars, may have recognized. Critics have disagreed over how much nineteenth-century readers would have understood such details as meaningful challenges to what Gene Andrew Jarrett calls “minstrel realism,” American culture's expectations that black minstrel performances, whether on page or stage, amounted to “realistic,” authentic accounts of the putative essence of blackness (Jarrett, Deans and Truants, 32). According to some accounts, audiences expected plantation fiction and dialect stories to affirm their race and class prejudices and thus were unaccustomed to limning any deeper social meaning from them. Lawrence R. Rodgers's maintains, “Whether Dunbar endorsed or undercut plantation-tradition stereotypes hardly seemed to matter because his readers, most of them white, were pre-conditioned to accept any linguistic and social designations of blackness as exotic at best and, more likely, as naturally inferior and bestial” (Canaan Bound, 41). By comparison, however, critics readily have noted how Dunbar's contemporary Charles W. Chesnutt navigates the American literary market while offsetting the constraints of minstrel realism. Like Dunbar, Chesnutt features plantation settings and southern black vernacular in his fiction, especially in his stories published in elite periodicals such as the Atlantic Monthly. And yet by examining both the structure and the fine-tuned black

characterization in Chesnutt's stories of Uncle Julius, the formerly enslaved raconteur of conjure tales, scholars recognize how Chesnutt intends his stories to direct readers “gradually to a desired state Page 82 → of feeling” about black Americans’ equality with whites (Chesnutt, Journals, 140). Similar traces of narrative complexity and possible subversion appear throughout Dunbar's short fiction, though critics have been less attuned to them. Whether or not his pattern of mapping class achieved a measureable outcome of transforming readers’ interpretive paradigms—and reader reviews suggests that it sometimes did—his strategy invites audiences at least to consider a more nuanced history of lived experience in the black communities he fictionalizes. Focusing on the class-inflected social geography of Dunbar's short fiction also lends a fuller sense of his literary production and spatial imagination.3 Dunbar published four volumes of short stories, as well as uncollected stories, but until recently, scholars have judged his short fiction as the least impressive genre of his oeuvre, dismissing it as commercial “hackwork” that demanded less of his artistic skill or social consciousness than did his poetry or novels. Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Thomas Morgan, and Gene Andrew Jarrett are among the critics beginning to reevaluate the author's short fiction, calling for a greater appreciation for “Dunbar's gifts as a writer of short fiction” (Jarrett and Morgan, introduction, xvi).4 Meanwhile, critical attention increasingly focuses on Dunbar's fourth novel, The Sport of the Gods (1902), which traces a black southern family displaced to New York, where the family compromises both its coherence and its respectable social standing. Farah Jasmine Griffin and Lawrence Rodgers cite The Sport of the Gods as initiating the twentieth-century “Great Migration narrative” or “migration novel,” an African American literary subgenre overtly preoccupied with the politics of space and mobility.5 This chapter bridges these two approaches to Dunbar's fiction—first, the previous (in)attention to his short stories, and second, insightful spatial readings that have been limited to a single text. Reading social space on a number of scales—spanning from the close-range details of household arrangements to broader regional landscapes—reveals how Dunbar's mappings delineate a social class spectrum among black Americans, as well as critique the limited, tight spaces available for blacks in American society and in cultural representation. As in “Negro Society in Washington,” Dunbar commandeers textual space within the turn-of-the-century mainstream literary market for representing African Americans’ class aspirations and social divisions. Citing this essay among the author's most pronounced nonfiction statements on the topic, the chapter then examines how Dunbar employs the strategy of mapping class in stories that are marked both indirectly and Page 83 → overtly by class anxiety. Dunbar's spatial analyses expose the tension between middle-class black Americans’ fear of misclassification and fear of estrangement. For while Dunbar resents how popular culture indiscriminately misclassifies African Americans “in the lump” together, to raise again his language in the Post piece, the author also questions whether the “aims and hopes for the race” demand that the black middle class maintain sociopolitical alliances with the black working class (“Negro Society,” 287). In particular, Dunbar opposes black Americans’ economically motivated relocations as having the unintended effect of fracturing black families and communities. Leaving these anxieties largely unresolved in his writing, Dunbar contemplates the class divisions within black communities while also imagining the possibilities and dilemmas of African Americans claiming a place for themselves in the nation's literary and political cultures.

Textual Tight Places and Class Representation Spatial metaphors not only shape Dunbar's literary representations of class but also provide a framework for theorizing how and why he addresses class divisions and black mobility in his writing. Seeking to balance multiple personal and professional agendas in turn-of-the-century literary markets, Dunbar was situated in what Houston Baker calls the “tight places” of black public representation: “Tight places” are constituted by the necessity to articulate from a position that combines specters of abjection (slavery), multiple subjects and signifiers…, representational obligations of race in America (to speak “Negro”), and patent sex and gender implications (the role of the Law as the Phallus). (Turning South Again, 15) Baker limns this concept specifically with regard to Dunbar's contemporary Booker T. Washington, but the two men shared a sense of being under constraints. Both Washington and Dunbar experienced a measure of crossover

appeal to white audiences, but they did so under pressure to both confirm and subtly disprove racial stereotypes that kept African Americans “in their place” as second-class citizenry. Washington, the most publicly recognized black American of his time, advocated self-help, agricultural development, and industrial education to improve the Page 84 → economic status of southern blacks. As a savvy spokesperson and fundraiser, he gained whites' philanthropic investment in black education primarily because he did not also insist on the more controversial issue of black Americans’ social and political equality with whites. Washington's position of mediating between whites and blacks, southerners and northerners, constituted a “tight place,” and as Baker suggests, Washington responded to the demands of tight places with “a certain species of performance anxiety,” grasping for a proper way to deliver his message (Turning South Again, 15). For Baker, Washington's anxiety was less a trait of his personal psychology than a function of his positionality, shared by other black Americans in the racist U.S. South. Though Dunbar was born free in Ohio and never experienced slavery or spent much time in the deep South, his writing similarly reflects what Baker calls the “specters of abjection” and the need to “speak ‘Negro’” that retain black public figures in tight places. While becoming one of the most prolific, celebrated black writers before the Harlem Renaissance, Dunbar found himself in a number of literal and figurative tight places: in elevators, where he initially worked as an elevator operator when he was denied the more professional jobs reserved for whites; on the written page, with his words in respected periodicals and books; and in the American imagination, as readers touted him as the “pure Negro” poet, whose blood was unadulterated by racial admixture.6 If the tight places of Dunbar's career gave rise to his own form of anxiety, as in Booker T. Washington's case, we can trace more specifically how Dunbar's anxiety inform his fictional strategy of rendering black Americans’ class conditions. Dunbar wrote primarily under the auspices of white publishing venues that maintained particular expectations for depictions of African Americans. After independently publishing his first poetry volume, Oak and Ivy (1892), Dunbar and his work gained the imprimatur of critic William Dean Howells, whose review of Lyrics of Lowly Life (1896) helped to propel Dunbar from regional to national attention. By the late 1890s and into the twentieth century, Dunbar was publishing regularly in the pages of national periodicals including Century, Lippincott's, and the Saturday Evening Post (Revell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 107). Many of his ardent professional supporters, such as William Dean Howells, the so-called dean of American letters, and George Lorimer, the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, were also his censors. While endorsing Dunbar's Page 85 → career, these literary brokers especially encouraged and sought the author's writings rendered in dialect, which generally characterize black “folk” seeking pleasure over class advancement and civil rights. Dunbar's relation to the Saturday Evening Post exemplifies his desire to represent black Americans’ class attainment and secure his own. As a regular contributor to the Post, he published at least a dozen short stories in the weekly magazine between 1899 and 1902. According to cultural historian Jan Cohn, at the turn of the century, when the Post was rebounding from previous editorial mismanagement, Dunbar was counted among a “distinguished list” of writers on whom the Post relied “to borrow whatever prestige it could from the men who wrote for it” (Creating America, 29). Dunbar's inclusion in the periodical's pages indicated his growing literary celebrity, as well as the magazine's. Under the editorship of George Horace Lorimer, who began his thirty-eightyear tenure as editor in 1899, the weekly magazine became a fixture in American mass culture, especially among middle-class readers. Its circulation ranged from 150,000 to 200,000 in the years in which Dunbar published in its pages (Cohn, Creating America, 25, 44). But though Dunbar began a contractual agreement with the Post in good faith around 1898, his commitment to publishing there benefited him less as his popularity increased. By 1901, he confessed in a letter to his agent, Paul Reynolds, “I should feel myself rather niggardly if I should withold [sic] from them [the Post] first sight of the things that are in their line merely because now that my things are selling I could get better prices elsewhere” (qtd. in Revell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 108). Besides being limited to a fixed price, only Dunbar's stories set on plantations or featuring dialect generally appealed to the Post as “in their line.” Stories such as “How Brother Parker Fell from Grace” and “The Walls of Jericho,” for instance, depict slaves in a plantation church congregation rivaling each other for clout. Dunbar's “The Conjuring Contest” portrays slaves using conjure (and ordinary trickery that they claim is conjure) while the indulgent master looks on “with true Saxon incredulity” and self-satisfaction (“Conjuring Contest,” 254). Taken together, Dunbar's stories for the Post, many of which were

later collected in his third short fiction volume, In Old Plantation Days (1903), focus on enslaved or workingclass African Americans generally content with the racial and economic status quo. As has been well documented, Dunbar came to resent editors' and readers’ demand for his dialect writing rather Page 86 → than his works in standard English.7 He recognized that he had gotten into tight places in terms of writing about African Americans in ways that appeared racially essentialist, as well as artistically stultifying. In comparison to his fiction in the Post, Dunbar's essay “Negro Society in Washington” calls into question black representation in American culture, including local and national periodicals. More specifically, the piece intervenes in the Post's ongoing discussion about the formation and realignment of classes in the turn-of-thecentury United States. Editor George Horace Lorimer's philosophy, evident throughout the magazine's pages, tended to reject the notion of a fixed class structure in favor of meritocracy and mobility. “Lorimer was in fact engaged in creating his own class revolution…replacing the aristocracies both of old money and the genteel professions,” Jan Cohn explains (Creating America, 12). Lorimer frequently printed editorials and serialized fiction about businessmen, touting the middle class as the future of American society while castigating the leisure class. However, the magazine seldom extended this line of class inquiry to consider the emerging black middle class. Rather than resolving questions of how “Negro Society in Washington” found a home in the Post, details about Lorimer's class leanings complicate the interpretation of Dunbar's piece. For if Lorimer expected an essay that could resonate with his own critique of the leisure class or one in keeping with Dunbar's usual humor, “Negro Society in Washington” lends a little of both. Dunbar does use occasional humor, as well as racial stereotypes of African Americans as natural “imitators,” in the piece that might be taken as a critique of black leisure, as in Sutton Griggs's Overshadowed (284). But by representing middle-class black Americans “who think and feel most deeply the needs of their people” as not always going “around being busy and looking serious,” Dunbar also humanizes his subjects beyond the detrimental, long-standing stereotype of the black middle class as conservative and emotionally repressed (282). Whether George Lorimer or Dunbar himself initiated the essay, it provided a richer sense of black society than elsewhere in the paper. Dunbar's essay self-consciously contemplates the proper textual space and tones for discussing class difference and racial uplift. In this, the longest, most developed nonfiction piece Dunbar ever published (Fishkin and Bradley, introduction, 241), he aims to strike the right balance between entertaining and informative content. Dunbar notes, “An article on Negro social life in Washington, perhaps ought almost to be Page 87 → too light to speak of the numerous literary organizations here, the reading clubs which hold forth,” but capitalizing on his opportunity, he describes black society's “season of literature, music, and art” as evidence of their cultural refinement (287). Dunbar's essay goes beyond offering a careful observation of black Washingtonians to encode a message about black Americans’ equality with whites. In particular, to combat the fear that upwardly mobile black Americans might be misclassified with the black lower class, he disabuses readers of the pejorative image of black social life “which the comic papers and cartoonists have made you familiar with” (285). “The Negro in Washington forms and carries on a social life which no longer can be laughed at or caricatured under the name ‘Colored Sassiety,’” Dunbar insists, “The term is still funny, but now it has lost its pertinence” (283). Though Dunbar himself contributes to such caricatures through much of his fiction, he also refutes those stereotypes through the force of real-life examples he profiles in the article on black society. The gesture that he makes in “Negro Society in Washington” by directing the piece toward a critical purpose as well as “light” entertainment begins to maneuver out of the tight places of representation to show a range of African American social classes. Contemporaneous black and white reader response to “Negro Society in Washington” attests to the article's effect in spurring public debate over black Americans’ ability to achieve and retain middle-class status. Thus as Dunbar broaches intraracial class differences in his Saturday Evening Post essay, he indirectly creates textual space elsewhere—in the newspapers of major cities, for example—for rethinking the boundaries and significance of class among black Americans. The fear of misclassification that Dunbar expresses is answered and reproduced in his readers’ reviews. In an article entitled “Wealth of Negroes,” a newspaper in Poughkeepsie, New York, notes that Dunbar's special-interest piece “recently startled the public by revealing the charming social conditions which prevail in Washington negro society.” Yet the Poughkeepsie paper rebuts Dunbar's account by arguing that

African Americans in the Muscogee Creek Nation are wealthier but less pretentious than black Americans at the capital. Fearing that blacks in Washington, D.C., might be regarded as the exclusive exemplars of the race, the reporter proposes another measure of class position: property ownership should be privileged over the conspicuous consumption modeled in the ballrooms of Washington. As the reporter notes, “Riches haven't made him proud and exclusive…. A Creek negro, the possessor of land which would make Page 88 → a plutocrat out of any western white farmer gives no thought as to what the morrow will bring forth.” By countering the terms of Dunbar's class designations, the New York writer reveals class as a comparative social function that is redefined from one location to another. But if Dunbar and his readers disagreed over who and what constituted a truly “rich Negro,” their class anxiety contributed to the print culture of fiction, reader reviews, and editorials that increased the black middle class's social visibility, a fact alone that some nineteenth-century commentators considered favorably. The connection between the black middle class's visibility and their political status was not overlooked in another reader reply. In a brief notice in the Religious Telescope (Dayton, Ohio) on December 25, 1901, an unnamed contributor applauds Dunbar's “Negro Society in Washington” as “one of his very best prose productions.” As the Telescope writer concludes, “Those who are wont to contend that it was a positive harm to the colored people to free them (and there are still a few such) will do well to read the highly instructive production…. What a crime it would have been to hold down any longer, in the position of a chattel…a people capable of such rapid progress in wealth, culture and intelligence” ([untitled article]). By pointing to middle-class markers to justify black civil rights, Dunbar's reader exemplifies how, as Kevin Gaines explains, postbellum leaders “claimed class distinctions, indeed, the very existence of a ‘better class’ of blacks, as evidence of what they called race progress” (Uplifting the Race, xiv). Both the content of Dunbar's essay and his own position as an ambitious black author verified the existence of a respectable “better class” desiring space for itself in American literature and culture.

Representational Spaces in Postbellum Black Fiction In Dunbar's fiction, characters’ movements through space—whether moving across the nation, across town into another neighborhood, or into the parlor reserved for receiving one's social class peers—are often motivated by the desire for material advancement or status recognition. These settings are representational spaces in and through which African Americans stage their class identifications, as well as other performances of race, gender, and sexuality. As social geographer Stephen A. Mrozowski explains, representational spaces are sites “such as museums, squares, or streets…that become the locus of social expressions and action Page 89 → such as theater, demonstrations, or riots” (Mrozowski Archaeology of Class, 14). The significance of Dunbar's strategy of mapping class appears by comparison with other late nineteenth-century black fiction writers. Eric Gardner compellingly has argued that contributors and editors of nineteenth-century African American periodicals such as the San Francisco Elevator and the Indianapolis Repository were “continually concerned with the proper practices of mobility to ensure racial elevation [and] citizenship” (Unexpected Places, 20). Aligning economic and geographic mobility in the “narrative of ascent,” authors trace black Americans’ physical relocation from the U.S. South to the Midwest or Northeast; the move represents a transformation from sites of stagnation and oppression to places of greater opportunity (Stepto, From Behind the Veil, 67). However, as I indicate in chapter 1, Frances Harper's strategy for delineating class emphasizes characters’ thought and speech so that external conditions, including physical surroundings, wealth, consumption, and property, bear little on one's social designation. Black Americans in Harper's fiction relocate South to North (and back again to the South, in the case of Iola Leroy) or traverse geographic boundaries between “better-class” and “lowly” African American neighborhoods while remaining inviolate to the economic and social conditions around them. Harper focuses on characters’ maturation and self-mastery to suggest that individuals may aspire to and be what she calls “aristocrats of the soul” regardless of the spaces they inhabit. Dunbar surveys space more deliberately than does Harper, but he was not alone in highlighting it as the index to black social relations. When the mixed-race protagonist of James Weldon Johnson's novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) encounters urban blacks in Atlanta for the first time, he feels ill at ease among those he designates as the “lower class.” On finding that the “unkempt,” “shambling” blacks he sees are contained

within the boundaries of certain neighborhoods in Atlanta, he explains, “I felt relieved, in spite of the size of the lower class…. These people aroused in me a feeling of almost repulsion” (36). While touring the city, the protagonist begrudges “lower-class” Page 90 → black Americans the freedom to move or loiter as easily as he does. He fears that idle blacks congregating in the streets unwittingly become the representatives of the race, as white passersby classify (or misclassify) them as exemplifying the entire black population. By migrating from South to North, congregating in urban spaces, and moving around cities, “lower-class” black Americans disrupt spaces reserved for publicly enacting black middle-class respectability. Hoping to safeguard his status from infringement, the not yet “ex-colored” man searches for “a place where respectable colored people who had money could be accommodated” (37). Like Johnson's protagonist, who identifies “respectable” moneyed people as the rightful face of black America, fit for performing gentility in public places, Dunbar highlights representational spaces as sites of struggle over economic, political, and cultural authority among black Americans as well as across the color line. Writers such as the editor and novelist J. McHenry Jones similarly expressed concern that observers, and especially white American authors and audiences, misclassified black Americans because they overlooked or disregarded the social boundaries between them. In Jones's novel Hearts of Gold (1896), the narrator proposes, “As all classes of Afro-Americans seem to mingle indiscriminately at public functions, it is often concluded that no line of separation exists. The initiated know better” (108). Even when segregation forced African Americans to share public space, those spaces could be cordoned off by invisible class lines that were less obvious to outsiders. Provoked by class anxiety, Jones's narrator arrests the story's action to offer prolonged asides about intraracial distinctions. One chapter describing a black society ball features an elaborate four-paragraph description of how different social “sets” retreat to separate areas of the ballroom to avoid trespassing “the fine shading of distinction unostentatiously made” (108). Alluding to William Dean Howells's novel An Imperative Duty (1892), one of Howells's few fictions to significantly feature black characters, Jones argues that white writers customarily misunderstand how class operates among their African American subjects. In Howells's novel, Rhoda Aldgate belatedly discovers her partial black ancestry and feels estranged from African Americans, whose darker complexions she reads as a sign of both racial inferiority and working-class status. But as Jones's narrator retorts, “Among these people [‘Afro-Americans’], as elsewhere, the marks of class difference are severely drawn; but worth, not complexion, forms the barrier of demarcation. It is from the point of public observation that writers like W. D. Howells and others fall into an excusable error” (108). Hearts of Gold aims toward authenticating black social relations from what one of its characters calls “a personal acquaintance with the tastes and peculiarities of the persons described” (108). Since Jones self-published his novel in West Virginia, he was less well positioned than Dunbar for his work to be read by a Page 91 → broader American public as a possible counterrepresentation to Howells's novel. Yet his spatial analysis in fiction tends toward the same end as Dunbar's: both begin to question mainstream literature's capacity for offering informed representations of the black middle class and their relation to other black and white social classes. Moreover, Jones's assertion gestures toward one reason that mapping class is a valuable literary strategy for black writers such as Dunbar: it offsets, or at least complicates, the usually more controversial focus on skin complexion as a class marker. Though both black and white nineteenth-century authors often depict mixed-race characters as possessing greater status than their darker-skinned counterparts, Jones suggests that such correlations are incidental and that instead “worth, not complexion,” is a primary basis of intraracial division (108). By emphasizing this point, he joins Harper and other postbellum black authors in self-consciously refuting the skincolor prejudices seemingly implicit in their focus on mulatto/a protagonists. But if the value of light skin too easily could be misconstrued and, moreover, linked to problematic turn-of-the-century assumptions about how blood and racial descent determined one's potential, spatial mapping offers an alternative. Through this strategy, Dunbar largely avoids the fraught matter of encoding class onto physical bodies and instead spatially shows how class permeates the social networks and places of black Americans’ daily experiences.8

Class Distinctions from Plantation to Parlor In order to illuminate black Americans’ lives, Dunbar works within and against the conventions of local color, a realist literary genre already predisposed to spatial analysis. One function of local color fiction was to romanticize

the American social world as static and contained, offering readers a reprieve from the concerns of immigration, urbanization, labor unrest, and racial strife that characterized the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. White local color writers in the plantation tradition such as Joel Chandler Harris and Thomas Nelson Page tended to omit from their tales any “troubling details, suggestive of ideological conflict,” offering instead a version of plantation life presumably free from the forces of history and economics (Grammer, “Plantation Fiction,” 69). But it is precisely by asserting “troubling details” about history, material disparities, and racism that Dunbar creates fissures in Page 92 → local color's underlying premises. Whether depicting black Americans who remain on the plantation or those who relocate elsewhere while clinging to the habits and attitudes of the rural South, Dunbar's texts take striking detours to negotiate the strained task of both representing black upward mobility and containing it to appeal to his readers. In the short fiction volume Folks from Dixie (1898), setting and spatial details indicate how free African Americans pursue and attain “better-class” status that complicates notions of their stasis. The story “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance” traces a reunion between an ex-slave Nelse Hatton and his former master, Tom Hatton, in an encounter that allows both men to note how emancipation has transformed their economic fortunes. The short story echoes the dynamics of master-slave reunions in popular autobiographical accounts, such as those by Frederick Douglass and Elizabeth Keckley, as fond affection between the black and white parties displaces resentment. As William L. Andrews has shown, such postbellum cross-racial reunions usually are initiated by the former slave, who returns to his or her southern origins to face the painful and happy memories of the past (“Reunion,” 12). Like these narratives, “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance” emphasizes the freedman's lack of bitterness. In fact, Nelse charitably supplies his impoverished former master with food, clothing, and money. But departing from the model, Dunbar relocates the site of the reunion from the former plantation to the freedman's northern home. Whereas Keckley and Douglass return to the South and present their own well-dressed bodies as representative evidence of their self-possession and upward mobility, in Dunbar's story, the former master enters the black home to witness firsthand the fuller scope of Nelse's economic achievement. By elaborating the story's opening description of buildings and land in the town of Dexter, Ohio, the narrator emphasizes property ownership as the basis by which characters within the text, as well as readers, should measure Nelse Hatton's postbellum status. Though the story presents Dexter as a pastoral setting, wherein harmonious social relations appear to abide, the story also maps class difference by identifying residents' three styles of houses: “Those [Dexterites] who had porches drew their rockers out on them…. Others took their more humble positions on the front steps, while still others, whose houses were flush with the street, went even so far as to bring their chairs out upon the sidewalk” (59). Here, porches are signs of status. Extending the dimensions of the house, porches demand a larger share of real estate and thus reflect the Page 93 → owner's additional financial investment. More important, the spatial hierarchy distinguishes between classes based on each resident's physical proximity to the street, a public space that nineteenth-century domestic rhetoric often aimed to distinguish from the private sphere of the home. But if the extended discussion of porches strikingly draws readers’ attention to the spatial contours of class difference, the passage diverts attention from the missing racial signifiers that readers would have expected as part of the opening characterizations in short stories by a black writer. Where a reader immediately expects to find race, instead there is class. This momentary delay resonates with what Jarrett elsewhere identifies as Dunbar's “truancy” from William Dean Howells's prescription for African American literary representation. While Howells and other literary brokers expected for black authors to write about distinctively black subjects, Dunbar sometimes “encoded the markers of class and region while submerging that of race” (Jarrett, Deans and Truants, 53). In “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance,” the title character is revealed as one of the “most highly respected citizens…a coloured man” only after the narrator establishes that Nelse's home is positioned on prime real estate “among the homes of his white neighbours” (59).9 The author avoids immediately coding the central character by race, a practice that he would deploy even more dramatically in his “anomalous” novel published during the same year, The Uncalled (1898), in which the characters remain racially unidentified throughout the text (Jarrett, Deans and Truants, 53). In the short story, the fact that Nelse Hatton has “arisen to the dignity of a porch” sooner than his neighbors shifts the expected racial hierarchy that would relegate African Americans to the margins of white

social space (59). Details about the Hatton home invite readers, especially white middle-class readers, to identify with African American characters through their shared investment in property ownership and commodity culture. References to household contents such as an “immaculate white [table]cloth” and a “neatly appointed little front room” are more than extraneous details (60, 62). Instead, as Claudia Tate has proposed, late nineteenth-century African American fiction renders domestic interiors as evidence of “middle-class decorum, professionalism, family economy, and tasteful consumer consumption,” allegorical markers of “black political desire, public and private” (Domestic Allegories, 101). By representing African Americans as capable of bourgeois respectability, evinced as much in the careful arrangement of the home as in one's bodily self-control Page 94 → and deportment, authors refute a history of black Americans’ perceived lack of civilization. In the midst of describing the Hatton family's comfortable abode, the narrator offers an aside: If this story were chronicling the doings of some fanciful Negro, or some really rude plantation hand, it might be said that the “front room was filled with a conglomeration of cheap but pretentious furniture, and the walls covered with gaudy prints”—this seems to be the usual phrase. But in it the chronicler too often forgets how many Negroes were house-servants, and from close contact with their master's families imbibed aristocratic notions and quiet but elegant tastes. (62) Drawing on the long-held assumption that black class differentiation derives from the antebellum social order on southern plantations, the narrator ascribes superior status to formerly enslaved “house-servants.” In this case, intraracial difference is not only demarcated by the distinction between kitchen and parlor, as Dunbar mentions in his Post essay, but also harkens back to the separation of plantation house and field. While Nelse and his family are the only black Americans among neighboring whites in Dexter, the passage evokes the “fanciful Negro” as a counterpoint against which Nelse's higher status can be judged. More strikingly, this digression announces its intent to move into a literary space beyond popular racial caricatures that fail to account for intraracial differentiations. Implicitly, the passage takes up the question that Dunbar's nonfiction essay, as well as the present chapter, pursues: how does one claim space for black class ambition amid literary and sociopolitical constraints that aim to retain the “really rude plantation hand”? Like the moment in “Negro Society in Washington” when Dunbar calls attention to the essay's tone, asserting that one must analyze black society objectively, this conspicuous passage in “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance” interrupts the story's progression to lodge a literary critique. Animated by the fear of misclassification, the narrator censures prevailing literary stereotypes of black Americans as unwitting consumers whose “cheap but pretentious” accoutrements copy the white middle class but who lack its capital and tastes. The passage refutes the expected formula of black Americans as objects of fancy or imagination—as literary and symbolic constructions that may bear little resemblance to their real-life black counterparts. Page 95 → Dunbar's story shifts the means of postbellum identification from race to class, as Nelse and Tom Hatton initiate a fraternal relationship based on shared habits and animosities. In the usual plot of “national reunification” in postbellum U.S. literature, white Americans from the North and South displace their regional hostilities by bonding over a shared aim, the “expulsion of blacks from the national family” (Kaplan, “Nation, Region, and Empire,” 245). Changing this pattern, Nelse and Tom share regional and personal allegiances that align them against lower-class whites. Even before Tom reveals his identity as a once powerful slaveowner, “there was something in his manner” that convinces Nelse that the visitor is not “a common tramp” but instead is a “hungry gentleman” (60). Crediting Tom with his antebellum high status, Nelse prefers to have Tom ask for assistance from him, a well-to-do black man, than to associate with “these poor white people ‘round here” (61). Rather than recollecting fully the tragic moments of slavery, the two men shift their attention to a childhood memory of when they “stoned the house of old Nat, the white wood-sawyer” (62). Even as children, Nelse and Tom recognize class distinctions between the white Hatton family (whose status Nelse reflects as slave property at the time) and the white working class. By pelting the wood-sawyer's home, the children affirm their social position. As grownups

recalling their childhood mischief, Nelse and Tom divert their anger from each other toward the “poor white” Other. As Tom recalls his former class position, and Nelse speaks from his present condition, class affinity solidifies the Hatton men's relationships. For as much as the narrative works to establish class-based fraternity between the black and white Hattons, the text also undercuts this dynamic by reinforcing Nelse's deference, in effect defusing the possible threat to white economic dominance that his class ascendancy represents. Nelse initially contemplates killing Tom or at least giving him “one good whippin'” in retaliation for former abuse (63). But by instead praying and quelling his anger, Nelse bears out the pattern of former slaves in master-slave reunion narratives who, as William Andrews explains, show themselves as “moral leaders,” eager to exhibit their postbellum advancement and move forward by reconciling with white southerners (“Reunion,” 12). While not enacting physical violence upon Tom, Nelse presents the more material threat of black class achievement that risks unsettling both the economic and ideological bases of white superiority. Following his change of heart, from vengeance to sympathy, Nelse is diminished from his initial description as a “well-preserved, well-clothed Page 96 → black man” in the narrative's opening pages to what his wife Eliza calls “a good-natured, big-hearted, weak-headed ol' fool,” articulating one stereotype of black masculinity expected by Dunbar's readership (59, 65). The incongruence between the narrator's earlier intrusion, which elevates Nelse's status, and the conclusion that humbles him brings Dunbar's story back to the tight space of local color representation. If Dunbar in “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance” answers the fear of misclassification by attempting to elucidate distinctions between the black middle class and the “peasant or servant class,” elsewhere he also addresses the contrasting fear of estrangement between upwardly mobile black Americans and their broader African American communities. In his travel essay “England as Seen by a Black Man” (1897), Dunbar uses the occasion of his promotional tour of England to dissuade southern African Americans’ more permanent relocation abroad or even to the U.S. North to pursue better opportunities. Dunbar chides “my black brothers who have come to the North and prospered, and in prosperity forgotten the parental cabin in Kentucky or Virginia or Tennessee,” proposing instead that “the good of the whole is the primal thing” (253). In this regard, his writings value African Americans who remain fixed to their southern roots and family obligations. Dunbar uses the strategy of mapping class to delineate intraracial distinctions, but while doing so, he also presents the physically and economically mobile black subject as the source of concern for both white and black Americans. Dunbar's fiction and nonfiction analyses of African American mobility and space-making may be considered literary analogs to the visual maps and studies that emerged in the early twentieth century as sociology became a professionalized field. W. E. B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899) offered streetlevel maps of African American communities, distinguishing the ward's inhabitants into classes, or what Du Bois calls “grades.” To explain the differently shaded areas of the maps at the heart of The Philadelphia Negro, Du Bois's legend enumerates four categories: “the ‘middle classes’ and those above,” “the working poor—fair to comfortable,” “the poor,” and the “vicious and criminal classes” (60–61). Du Bois not only correlates class with space, but in the case of his final designation of “vicious and criminal,” he also assesses the moral character associated with a space and its inhabitants. Works such as The Philadelphia Negro were, in part, responses to how black migration changed the landscape of cities in the post-emancipation era through the early twentieth century. Literal and Page 97 → figurative mobility were central concerns for African Americans who considered class advancement a means of enacting the full liberties and opportunities of American citizenship. By one account, in the decade after emancipation, “68,000 African Americans left the rural South and this number increased every decade of the Gilded Age, culminating in the 1890s when 185,000 left their homes” (Shrock, Gilded Age, 3). Many former slaves traveled north; those who remained in the South after freedom, as most did, sometimes moved away from plantations to congregate in cities or form new rural communities beyond the surveillance of their former masters. Numerically speaking, black Americans’ migration and mobility in the immediate postEmancipation era was negligible compared to the twentieth-century Great Migration, when black Americans relocated from the South to the urban North, primarily to pursue work in the World War I wartime industries. Nevertheless, post-emancipation and post-Reconstruction black migration was significant in its own regard, posing a recurring topic for creative writers such as Dunbar.

Less than two weeks after Dunbar's essay “England as Seen by a Black Man” appeared, Dunbar began publication of a series of four dialect sketches of “Real Darky Life in New York,” published in the New York Journal and Advertiser in 1897. In the first of the four stories, “Buss Jinkins Up Nawth,” young Mat Jenkins begins disenchanted with her life in the southern province of Parkersville and fantasizes about a place where she might instead “come and go as you please” (401). After relocating to the North to work as a servant, Mat initially thrives until, homesick, she begins to steal from employers to accrue extra funds for her return trip home. Charged as a criminal, she is sentenced to rehabilitation in a northern mission for “the fallen of [her] sex” (403). Instead, her southern boyfriend unexpectedly intervenes to pay her court fines, rescue her from urban degradation, and escort her back to the South. Plotting Mat's failed initiation into the city, the story shows that her misplaced desires move her through a trajectory from migration and consumerism to criminalization and finally domesticity. Although “Buss Jinkins Up Nawth” concludes by suggesting that Mat's repatriation to the South saves her from imprisonment, the real turning point occurs in an earlier scene, which pauses to contemplate the gravity of Mat's race and class positionality in the North. Midway through the sketch, when Mat accompanies her new friends to the ice cream shop, she suffers a temporary disorientation, startled by how her purchasing power in the urban North gives her a new sense of self. A Page 98 → single sentence asserts, “The Southern girl looked on and joined her friends with half-frightened admiration as they walked into ice cream parlors and ordered what they wanted ‘just like white folks’” (402). Set off from the more developed paragraphs above and below it, this sentence draws attention to itself through its placement in the narrative. Within the span of this sentence, the narrator encodes a number of assumptions about race, social space, and class. Mat understands the new possibilities of being an African American wage-earner through the process of consumption. Walking into the ice cream parlor, she occupies space as a consumer in ways presumably denied her in the segregated southern market. She demonstrates her self-possession by ordering objects, rather than by being ordered around like an object in the South, as she expresses in the narrative's opening pages (401). African American reformers responded to black migration and urbanization with concerns about regulating the work ethic and sexuality of mobile black Americans, but in Dunbar's story, it is black Americans’ class desire, rather than sexual desire, that may have appeared more threatening for his readers.10 Mat's new experiences of gazing, purchasing, and occupying space culminate in acting “just like white folks.” The slippage of economic privilege into the language of racial equality is significant here. The narrator posits Mat's movement as one that allows her to enact the rights and privileges that white Americans take for granted. This focus on race and class in public spaces parallels Nelse Hatton's realization of class superiority over his white former master at his private abode. Yet Mat's awareness is more astute and her end more final. After all, in “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance,” though Nelse is humbled by the end of the narrative, he continues to enjoy the social and economic privilege he has accrued in Ohio while Tom returns to the South. Meanwhile, the present story rescinds Mat's privileges of traversing social space in the North. Instead, Mat's growing race and class awareness seem to catapult Mat and the narrative itself back toward tight places. Perceiving the limits of the forms in which he wrote, Dunbar speaks from the tight places between blacks' class mobility and racial integration. Following Mat's revelatory moment in “Buss Jinkins Up Nawth,” the narrative resumes a predictable plot. As Mat prepares for her return to Parksville, she learns that her hometown recently has opened an ice cream shop, though it is unclear under what conditions she may patronize it. This resolution accords with Thomas L. Morgan's observation that Dunbar does not “destroy the city as an alternative space for black representation. Page 99 → He merely strips the city of its false illusions, presenting the space of the urban North as a mirror image of the pastoral South—no more, no less” (“City as Refuge,” 221–22). Mat can have some of the luxuries that she enjoyed in the North, while returning to the protective governance of her lover and mother, within a community divided along racial lines. In this story, the powerful moment of mapping class in the ice cream shop becomes, after all, only a compensatory narrative strategy in an isolated moment.

Disorienting Spatial Boundaries in The Heart of Happy Hollow One of Dunbar's most striking examples of mapping class appears in his fourth short story collection, The Heart of Happy Hollow (1904). From its opening pages, the volume announces its intent to destabilize symbolic geographies that polarize North and South. The preface to the volume begins:

HAPPY HOLLOW; are you wondering where it is? Wherever Negroes colonise in the cities or villages, north or south, wherever the hod carrier, the porter, and the waiter are the society men of the town…there—there—is Happy Hollow. (315) By generalizing the location of Happy Hollow, indicating that it exists everywhere or “wherever,” the passage suggests that such a space can exist nowhere, except primarily in the imaginary. As Eric Bulson shrewdly notes, “Defining limits, laying out, marking boundaries: locating is a process of negation. You know where you are, in other words, by figuring out exactly where you are not” (Novels, Maps, Modernity, 24). A playful inversion of the collection's title reveals this conclusion more poignantly: the stories are less about a geographic location named “Happy Hollow” than about a version of hollow happiness that black Americans enact in Dunbar's fiction. Dunbar relies on these strategies of orienting and disorienting readers to black Americans and their lived experiences in order to move beyond the “fanciful” characterizations that his stories appear to offer. While Dunbar's representation of Happy Hollow claims to familiarize readers with the general category of “Negroes,” the stories in the volume focus most specifically on the black working class. Here, Dunbar offers Page 100 → less of a spectrum of African American character types than in his earlier volume, The Strength of Gideon (1900). Peter Revell observes that in Happy Hollow, “the aspiring young black politician and would-be lawyer [character types featured in The Strength of Gideon] are less evident than the poor but striving city-dweller, the old preacher, and the washerwoman” (Paul Laurence Dunbar, 115). The catalog of manual labor occupations outlined in the preface—hod carrier, porter, and waiter—differ from the “society men of the town” in Dunbar's description of “Negro Society in Washington.” Of the stories in The Heart of Happy Hollow, one story goes further toward presenting a range of black Americans. “The Scapegoat” focuses on the upward class mobility of African American protagonist Robinson Asbury, who becomes an unwitting scapegoat when he collaborates with corrupt white and black politicians. The narrative traces the social spaces he traverses during his tumultuous development through entrepreneurship, election fraud, imprisonment, and finally political organizing among the black working class. In “The Scapegoat,” the first and longest story in the volume, Dunbar claims space within the collection to engage issues of intraracial class differences, spatial divisions, and black political mobilization. By placing this story first, Dunbar's arrangement of texts in this volume departs from a pattern he uses elsewhere in his short fiction collections. Gene Andrew Jarrett and Thomas Morgan propose that “Dunbar's decision about where to place such stories within the collections demonstrates his conscious effort to soften those stories' inherently scathing critiques” (introduction, xx). In the collection The Strength of Gideon, Dunbar relies on the “frontloading of stereotypical stories” to immediately appeal to readers’ expectations for apolitical, entertaining stories, reserving stories that “test the political limitations African Americans faced” for later in the collection (Jarrett and Morgan, introduction, xx). As I suggest, however, Dunbar uses the opposite approach in the Heart of Happy Hollow, positioning “The Scapegoat” first as though to critique the volume's depiction of “Happy Hollow” as both a location and a supposed state of contented black experience. Dunbar himself recognized the value of privileging the story when, writing to his agent Paul Reynolds in 1901, he defended “The Scapegoat,” along with another story (“The Mission of Mr. Scatters”), as “really the best short stories that I have done in the last five years” (Revell, Paul Laurence Dunbar, 109). “The Scapegoat” provides one of Dunbar's fullest depictions of a diversified black community within his short fiction. Set in the town of Cadgers, Page 101 → the story surveys black homes, barbershops, law firms, courtrooms, and public squares, as well as white neighborhoods, which are delineated to a lesser degree. Dunbar alludes to racial inequality as the specter that lingers over black social spaces, setting their outer parameters and intensifying both the conflicts and the alliances within their boundaries. As the narrator explains, black Americans follow “their usual tendency to colonise, a tendency encouraged, and in fact compelled, by circumstances…. Here in alleys, and streets as dirty and hardly wider, they thronged like ants” (316). By asserting this passage that appears to be a straightforward exposition of setting, Dunbar maps class to introduce a more troubling account of African Americans’ residential patterns. In the span of this description, the narrator shifts from presenting black Americans’ living arrangements as a voluntary “tendency” to instead gesturing toward racial segregation and impoverishment as structural inequalities that proscribe social spaces. But as the vague term “circumstances” only

hints at the full force of this argument, Dunbar adheres to the tight literary spaces apportioned to him for providing entertaining, rather than polemical, fictional representations. At once ambiguous and accusatory, this instance of mapping class provokes readers to deeper social observations without asserting conclusions. By determining how their social spaces will be apportioned within the boundaries of the “Negro quarter,” the residents of Cadgers demonstrate the difference between what geographer Henri Lefebvre terms “conceived space” and “lived space.” Though the former indicates how the engineers, architects, city planners, policy makers, or others in institutional authority plan for a space to be used, the latter indicates how those who inhabit it may subvert these intentions through alternative meanings and spatial practices. As Andy Merrifield adds, summarizing Lefebvre's concepts, “Lived space is the experiential realm that conceived and ordered space will try to intervene in, rationalize, and ultimately usurp” (“Henri Lefebvre,” 174). Individuals have agency over space, then, both at the conceptual level and through lived experience. Within segregated areas, black Americans in Cadgers attempt to protect themselves from white oversight and intrusion. Several of the southern migrants gather in the same part of town to preserve their regional background. Moreover, these spatial arrangements become the basis for African American class formations. Building on dualities, Cadgerites associate downtown with “the heart of the black district” (321) and uptown with “the better class of Negroes” (318). As black Americans express their anxiety Page 102 → over the spatialization of class inequalities, as well as sociopolitical alliances, the text returns at least four times to the question of where Asbury's home and the “Equal Rights Barber-Shop” will be located. This instance of repetition draws attention to fear of estrangement, the concern that intraracial class divisions will compromise emotional ties between friends or kin with dissimilar class affiliations. As sociologist Mary Pattillo-McCoy observes in describing the residential patterns of the black middle class, “African Americans, like other groups, have always tried to translate upward class mobility into geographic mobility, but remain physically and psychically close to the poorer neighborhoods they leave behind” (Black Picket Fences, 23). The conflicting emotions that characterize Asbury's decisions—his fear of estrangement contending with his desire for greater status—exemplify the personal conflicts that attend black upward mobility. Following Asbury's multistep professional advancement from bootblack to porter, from barbershop owner to lawyer, the story represents the black community sentiment in chorus, setting up tensions between the individual will and collective good. The narrator chronicles, “‘Now he will move uptown,’ said the black community, ‘Well, that's the way with a coloured man when he gets a start’” (317). But as Asbury opens his business, he “placed it where it would do the most good,” resisting the temptation to relocate to a classier neighborhood (316). Motivated by a sense of duty, he determines, “I will never desert the people who have done so much to elevate me…. I will live among them and I will die among them” (317). Robinson Asbury establishes his neighborhood as a cross-class space that resists the polarities of working-class and “better-class” antagonism. Characters’ self-conscious movement through social space punctuates the narrative's progression. Following Asbury's decision to locate his business among his working-class clientele, Mr. Bingo, a self-identified “betterclass” black leader, attempts to dissuade him. As the two men debate over their social responsibilities to facilitate racial advancement and combat the city's racist exclusion or tokenism of black political participation, Mr. Bingo begins the following discussion: “I confess that I haven't always thought that you were doing the wisest thing in living down here and catering to this class of people when you might, with your ability, to be [sic] much more to the better class.” “What do they base their claims of being better on?” Page 103 → “Oh, there ain't any use discussing that…. So I, for one, have decided to work with you for harmony.” (319) The quick change of topic here indicates the fear of misclassification as the speakers negotiate the exact standards

for describing class difference. This scene creates a tense moment of class mapping in order to reveal the moral and spatial meanings encoded in class designations. Inquiring into the comparative category “better class,” Asbury highlights the subjective, unstable criteria behind the language Mr. Bingo takes for granted. Bingo evades the question, covering over inequality with the reconciliatory language of “harmony.” As Mr. Bingo's language echoes the claims of harmony and cooperation that white politicians offer to discontent black Cadgerites, the story cautions how class-based divisions within all-black neighborhoods paradoxically replicate—and indeed, intensify—white Americans’ exclusions against all blacks in the public sphere. The story depicts social spaces as sites for negotiating power and recognition both across the color line and among different classes of black Americans. Though Dunbar often presents self-contained black communities as spectacles for white readers, in this case, he indicates how black Americans transform their marginal spaces into a base for overthrowing the corrupt political system. As the story progresses, the narrative shifts its attention from intraracial class divisions to racial solidarity as residents in “the black district” vote in bloc (324). In this regard, the “colonized” segregated area of town becomes an important representational space of resistance. Noting how voters move across segregated space to enact their enfranchisement at the public polls, the narrator explains, “Their [black voters’] organisation was perfect. They simply came, voted, and left, but they overwhelmed everything” (324). Performing the role of engaged citizens, the black working class move from the proverbial kitchens and tight places of subjection to the center of both the fictive city and Dunbar's narrative. As Dunbar maps class throughout his fiction, he makes space for the black middle class in public representation but also retains a professional and personal interest in working-class subjects. Dunbar's stories offer differing opinions about whether it is feasible and desirable for African Americans to sustain internally stratified black communities. Dunbar's class-inflected spatialization, especially as the narrative voice of stories such as “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance,” presents class identification as a Page 104 → substitute for racial identity, while stories such as “The Scapegoat” warn against privileging status over collective racial action. Dunbar's interests in the social spaces represented within his fiction have as much to do with his own claims to space as an author. Just as the marginalized, “undignified but still voting black belt” (318) assert themselves into the municipal and political spaces where least expected in “The Scapegoat,” Dunbar as a dignified writer of presumably “undignified” black folk experience indicates how the spaces of his texts can serve as race and class critiques, as well as commercial tales. By focusing on the spatial dynamics that inform individuals' decisions about moving to and through certain spaces, Dunbar broaches the larger issues of classification that continue to preoccupy African American writers at the turn of the century.

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4 BLOOD AND THE MARK OF CLASS Pauline Hopkins's Genealogies of Status The reason we are held in so low esteem by the world is due not so much to our poverty nor our previous condition either as to the fact that the world knows little about any other than the lowest class of Negroes…. if we cannot bring our best people into contact with the world socially, then let us talk to the world from printed pages. Let us develop a race literature; let us give to the world some of the grand thoughts, noble sentiments, profound feelings which go to make up the subjective life of the high-type Negro, than whom there is no truer aristocrat, no more gallant gentleman, no keener scholar in all the world. —Common Sense, column in the Christian Recorder, 1889 Writing in the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder on January 31, 1889, a contributor argues that African American literature needed to increase the public visibility of the “high-type Negro” as distinguished from the black “lowest class.” Taking the pseudonym “Common Sense” to recommend his or her approach as pragmatic, the unidentified columnist envisions “race literature” as a proxy that can circulate beyond the color line that bars black Americans; their words, in bold black letters slashed across the white page, ideally could speak for the race by infiltrating spaces and places where racially determined black bodies remained unwelcome. As outwardly facing propaganda, race literature could refute notions of black inferiority by representing “high-type” African Americans’ class attainments and respectability. But apart from informing “the world,” race literature also had a social purpose within African American communities: to present a mirror for the “best people” to authenticate themselves against poseurs. As Common Sense adds, “A parvenu with wealth, who tries with money to Page 106 → make up for a lack of gentility, who seeks to hide his vulgarity behind robes of costly stuff, is about as contemptible an object as one might wish to see” (“Don't You Lazy Fellows,” 4). While invalidating wealth and apparel as faulty, external signs of class, the writer instead locates class onto and into the body, displayed in traits of intelligence and gentility assumed to be essentialized. By using “type,” as in “high-type Negro,” as nearly interchangeable with “class” throughout the essay, Common Sense's observations about intraracial stratification share in the concurrent late nineteenth-century discourse of classification. In fields ranging from biology to political economy and sociology, intellectuals classified humans into groups and analyzed how such groups came into being, whether through environmental conditions, genetics, personal agency, or some combination of them all. In Common Sense's terms, “high-type Negroes” constitute not only an economic class but also a biological type whose gentility is inimitable by parvenus. Turn-of-the-century novelist Pauline Hopkins shares Common Sense's prerogatives for race literature to highlight African Americans’ “high-type” character. Echoing the language of Common Sense's 1889 appeal more than a decade later, Hopkins prefaces her first novel, Contending Forces (1900), with a call for new fiction to intervene in the public representation of black Americans: “No one will do this for us; we must ourselves develop the men and women who will faithfully portray the inmost thoughts and feelings of the Negro” (14, original emphasis). According to critic John Gruesser, Hopkins's fiction, and her serialized novel Of One Blood (1902–3) in particular, contributes to race literature by offering “an Afrocentric Fantasy for a Black Middle Class Audience” (Gruesser, “Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood,” 74). In focusing his essay on the Afrocentric and fantastical plot elements of Hopkins's novel, however, Gruesser delves less into the latter part of his observation—that Hopkins writes for the tastes of a “black middle class audience.” Yet rather than accepting the middle-class status of Hopkins's audience as a settled or secondary matter, I want to contemplate how the author contributes to the literary formation of a class that, as Common Sense perceives, needed to look to African American literature for a sense of its boundaries, responsibility, and authenticity relative to the “lower class” and “parvenus.”

For detractors who would misclassify the “high-type Negro” by disregarding intraracial distinctions, Hopkins's novels Contending Forces and Of One Blood trace the biological and social formation of the black Page 107 → middle class, or in the parlance of the era, the “better class.” Playing on the title of Charles Darwin's work Origin of the Species (1859), a text with which Hopkins's works appear conversant, one might say that Hopkins's narratives perform the cultural work of offering the “Origin of the Black Better Class.” Just as the nineteenthcentury eugenicist Francis Galton traces genealogy to explain the occurrence of exceptionalism or “genius” among certain races or families, Hopkins examines the extent to which characteristics of intelligence, morality, manners, and aesthetic beauty are inherited and, furthermore, how those traits accrue economic and social value. In her works, class identification often figures as a quality that is passed down through one's bloodline, much like a physiological trait. Her texts not only examine whether “blood will tell” its racial heritage, a preoccupation of the period's racial passing narratives, but also whether blood will tell its class origins and potential. Understanding Hopkins's interest in human evolution and eugenics means that, when examining class in her fictions, we must be attentive to scientifically informed terms for expressing class difference. In addition to invoking the conventional postbellum class terminology such as “rich,” “poor,” or “aristocrat,” Hopkins refers to “blood,” “nature,” “genius,” and “intelligence,” as well as descriptions of physiognomy, to signify class identification. In Of One Blood and Contending Forces, she depicts mixed-race Americans as enjoying greater intelligence and class attainment than so-called pure blacks; in this, the texts suggest that one's bloodline predisposes one to greater class attainment, thereby inadvertently conceding to essentialist notions of white genetic superiority. Though nineteenth-century black authors often seem to privilege lighter-skin characters over darker ones, so much as to make such characterization perhaps appear unremarkable, what is striking here is that Hopkins's novels so directly analyze the scientific racialism that gives rise to this pattern. Critics have disagreed over the implications of Pauline Hopkins's attention to blood, genealogy, and class. Shawn Michelle Smith views Hopkins as “dismantl[ing] the convergence of blood, race, and character” by which Galton and other scientists theorized black racial inferiority (American Archives, 188).1 In Smith's assessment, Hopkins uses the tropes of racial passing and interracial kinship specifically to show that neither scientists nor lay observers can verify racial differences by visual inspection alone. By contrast, still other critics propose that Hopkins's novels are less successful at refuting scientific racism than Smith contends. Page 108 → In Martin Japtok's terms, Hopkins remains “caught in the meshes” of the “Darwinist hierarchical logic” that she intends to challenge (“Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood,” 411). In the course of refuting ideas that people of African descent are inferior to whites, Hopkins faces additional representational challenges when presenting mixed-race Americans of African descent in intraracial social stratifications. In this regard, her project of tracing bloodlines risks reinforcing race and class hierarchies that privilege pedigree and whiteness over blackness. I wish to explore more fully how Hopkins's focus on blood and race is triangulated with class and how this bore differing implications for the black and white readerships to which she appeals.2 This chapter situates Hopkins's novels among scientific accounts, novels, speeches, and narratives that appropriate theories of evolution and heredity to analyze how classes evolve, biologically as well as socially, among African Americans. Hopkins's brief biographies of successful black Americans, published in the Colored American Magazine, demonstrate how she analyzes the genetic and environmental conditions that might produce exceptional representatives. These biographies are significant in that they show Hopkins offering two competing explanations for how the black middle class emerges: through individuals' work ethic or through heredity that predisposes some individuals to greater class attainment. As the chapter's final two sections show, the potency of work ethic and heredity remain in tension throughout Contending Forces and Of One Blood, leading to moments of misclassification in which characters disagree over how to differentiate social classes. As I argue throughout Dividing Lines, in order to represent class differences and the anxiety they arouse, African American writers devise thematic and formal patterns for balancing generic conventions, reader expectation, and the authors' own polemical agenda. For Hopkins, narrating the origins of the black “better class” gives rise to a shared plot trajectory in Contending Forces and Of One Blood: both novels conclude with the recovery of rich and royal roots meant to verify the black better class's exceptionality. The usual plot runs like this: the central characters of African descent live modestly but possess traits of cultural refinement that seem contrary to their

economic means. These prove to be cases of hidden or mistaken identity, in which the signs of the protagonists' “true” class identity have been delayed, displaced, or disguised by the effects of time or deliberate manipulation. By the conclusion of the novels, protagonists discover their kinship to British aristocracy and African royalty. In this case, they not only regain their extended families and communities Page 109 → but also gain wealth and power; notably, the protagonists seldom find that they descend from lower-class stock. In addition to recuperating middle-class black Americans’ genealogies, Hopkins shifts the setting of her novels from the United States, with its class structure presumably based on meritocracy, to alternative locations with systems of hereditary rank. Since nineteenth-century black Americans were being denied full U.S. citizenship and other privileges on the basis of race—that is, since blackness itself has the effect of negating black Americans’ merit in the U.S. meritocracy—Hopkins removes her protagonists to nation-states where they are hereditarily entitled to their social position. Hopkins plots out the storyline of rich and royal roots by blending multiple genres, a move that indicates her anxiety over both the proper form and the message for addressing black intraracial distinctions. In one regard, her fictions draw on elements of the adventure novel, as people of African descent quest for greater wealth or esteem, particularly in Of One Blood. Second, by using what one scholar calls the “racial discovery plot,” in which characters belatedly learn or confess their genealogical background, Hopkins invokes historical romance to show how individuals gain or lose social status based on their heritage (Bussey, “Whose Will Be Done?” 300). She also interjects the third element of scientific discourse, making her narrators and characters conversant with turn-ofthe-century Social Darwinism and scientific racialism. Through their scientific explanations of the class order, Hopkins's novels contest claims that black Americans’ economic disadvantage, compared to Anglo-Saxons', derives from an essential inferiority. One might conjecture that in Hopkins's compositional process, each time she asserts a certain method for explaining African American class conditions, she anticipates the benefits of an additional approach and shifts to another strategy. The narrative fissures that result from this sometimes abrupt amalgamation of textual styles show the story of black class formation as not easily contained by a single form. The novels ultimately advance Hopkins's emphasis on creating a distinctive black middle class, for whom blood and heredity serve as the mark of class.

Heredity and the Origin of the Black “Better Class” Looking briefly at the scientific milieu at the turn of the twentieth century, we can understand Hopkins's difficult representational task of refuting scientific racism without becoming complicit in it. Charles Darwin's Page 110 → Origin of the Species (1859) and Francis Galton's Hereditary Genius (1869) were among the dominant texts that established the basis for scientific racism in the second half of the nineteenth century. Though Darwin's works focused mainly on animal species, his followers extended his evolutionary findings about organisms further to human development. Galton would coin the term “eugenics” in 1883, but his earlier volume Hereditary Genius (1869) began the work of explaining how patterns of what he considered “natural abilities” recur in families and, more broadly, in races across generations. The greater part of Galton's inquiries about bloodlines and inherited traits focus on differences of nation, class, and family (Kevles, In the Name of Eugenics, 8). Focusing on the incidents of exceptional intelligence in some families, as well as notable criminality in others, Galton's hypothesis is that genetics contribute to individuals' class outcomes. In this regard, his project is as concerned with intraracial differences as with interracial ones. But Galton paid little attention to intraracial distinctions among black people, choosing instead to treat them as a single type. His cursory attention to what he called “the Negro race” made short work of confirming his own theories about black mental inferiority. “The average intellectual standard of the negro race is some two grades below our own,” Galton conjectured, writing with an Anglo-Saxon audience in mind; “the number among the negroes of those whom we should call half-witted men is very large. Every book alluding to negro servants in America is full of instances” (Hereditary Genius, 394, 395). Crediting books for his impression of black Americans, Galton demonstrates the pernicious role of literary stereotypes in informing the medical, scientific, and political classification of black Americans. Taking his sources at their word, he reproduces his scientific justification for white supremacy not only by equating black Americans’ mental capacity with their servitude—a suspect method that ignores how racial discrimination relegated even the most intelligent black Americans to

menial occupations—but also by considering only “negro servants” as his specimen. By doing so, he conflates black laborers with black Americans in other occupations and classes. Because racist notions of black inferiority circulated through white-authored written discourse, including Galton's works and the unspecified sources he mentions, black Americans called for black-authored writing to supply countervailing representations. As Common Sense proposes in the Christian Recorder editorial, black literature could Page 111 → aim to refute misclassification by presenting evidence of the biological and social reality of the “high-type Negro.” In Unnatural Selections: Eugenics in American Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, Daylanne K. English notes that critical studies of African American literature and culture have sometimes proceeded as though the “Negro problem” of racial inequality was the singular preoccupation of black thought, underestimating how African Americans engaged the pressing scientific concerns of their time (Unnatural Selections, 22). Indeed, black intellectuals' scientific inquiries often subtended racial uplift efforts. In the course of refuting claims of black inferiority, African American social thinkers promoted rival claims that exceptional black representatives best embodied the race's intellectual and moral potential. However, these theories left in place class-based assumptions that working-class and more upwardly mobile black Americans were distinguished by their inherited physical and mental traits. These sentiments may be frowned upon as biased or illogical today, but as English cautions, eugenics “must be seen in its historical context as a progressive ideology, one with the widely shared, utopian aim of improving the national or racial stock by conscious intervention” (18, original emphasis). Under the guise of black advancement and larger social reform, African American leaders recommended eugenic strategies for breeding the most intelligent, healthy black Americans, creating a race of people who more easily might integrate into mainstream, middle-class American society. Even before the period of the 1910s and 1920s on which English focuses her study, African American race leaders, club women, and creative writers in the postbellum-pre-Harlem Renaissance era were appropriating hereditary science for the purpose of racial uplift. As Hopkins and other writers considered the link between black advancement and social classification in the 1890s, their work coincided with the renewed attention to Galton's Hereditary Genius, which was reprinted with a new introduction in 1892. Writing in the same year, Frances E. W. Harper replicated some of Galton's methods in her speech “Enlightened Motherhood,” drawing a cause-and-effect relationship between genetics and economic outcomes. Just as Galton traces the statistical occurrence of “genius” and “imbecility” in family lines, Harper cites evidence from a case study of six sisters whose descendants, generation after generation, were prone to sexual promiscuity and “trailed the robes of their womanhood in the dust” (“Enlightened Motherhood,” 290). According to Page 112 → Harper's estimation, out of hundreds of people “sharing the blood of these unfortunate women,” a notable number demonstrated behavior that she deemed deviant: “nearly one-tenth paupers; twenty-two had acquired property, and eight had lost property…and one sister was the mother of distinctively pauperized lines” (290). Though the percentage of impoverished or downwardly mobile individuals in this example may seem small, Harper considers the correlation between blood and poverty significant enough to warrant concern. Translating statistics into pragmatic advice about mating and marriage, she urges women to ensure that sexual incontinence, a tendency toward poverty, and other unfavorable traits do not pass through their blood as what she calls the “stamp on an antenatal life” (289). Yet rather than reading the effects of blood entirely deterministically, Harper suggests that with the benefit of moral instruction, especially under the tutelage of the “better class,” one could overcome even the kind of disgraceful “antenatal history” that she ascribes to her character Annette Harcourt in Trial and Triumph (260).3 Though born to an unwed mother who dies young, Annette emulates the middle-class model of womanhood and develops into a respectable teacher and wife. Harper's hopefulness, displayed through her rehabilitation of the fictive Annette, concludes that environmental conditions, which may be adapted through social reform, determine African Americans’ outcomes to a greater extent than does heredity. Still, environment and heredity remain inextricably related in Harper's writing. For other African American thinkers of the time, efforts toward mentoring, self-cultivation, and charity seemed mere palliatives for the effects of heredity. In the opinion of Adella Hunt Logan, an instructor at Tuskegee Institute, individuals could inherit character traits such as homicidal tendencies just as they inherited physiological traits such as hair color.4 Delivering a lecture entitled “Prenatal and Hereditary Influences” at her alma mater,

Atlanta University, in 1897, Logan emphatically states the inevitability of genetic predisposition, declaring, “There can be no suspending of the influences of heredity…. No, there is no choice!” (212). Like Harper, Logan notes that all classes of people are prone to hereditary weaknesses, as well as strengths. Logan proposes, “Legacies of money seem to fall in the most cases to those who are already fortunate. Not so with the more enduring legacies of body and soul. Whether we will or no they come” (213). Logan's rhetorical move of disassociating inherited wealth from inherited biological and mental traits is striking, especially when considered alongside Hopkins's writings, which often Page 113 → depict people as inheriting economic status and biological traits similar to those of their ancestors. Hopkins shows the effects of wealth and what Logan calls the “legacies of body and soul” as converging over time in individuals atop the black social structure. This convergence is apparent in how Hopkins editorializes the personal histories of exceptional African Americans in two series of brief biographies she penned for the Colored American Magazine (1900–1904): “Famous Men of the Negro Race” and “Famous Women of the Negro Race.” Hopkins apparently senses the need to provide more than what she calls “dry biography…within the narrow limits of a magazine article” (Hopkins, “Toussaint L'Ouverture,” 11). Instead, she moves beyond descriptions of her subject's birthplaces and accomplishments to more broadly engage American thought about class, human progress, and racial history. Surveying black statesmen, entrepreneurs, and artists among her profiles, Hopkins offers two primary explanations for exceptionality: one, the importance of self-making that results from a mix of “pluck” and benevolence; and two, a heredity predisposition to greatness in certain black men and women. Significantly, these two models differ with regards to the importance of bloodlines in developing the black middle class. When offering narratives of black self-made men and women, Hopkins presents lineage as inconsequential to one's class ambitions or achievement, true to the myth of American classlessness. For example, Hopkins emphasizes a rags-to-relative-riches trajectory in one biography tellingly titled “Charles Winter Wood; or, From Bootblack to Professor.”5 Wood overcomes an unprivileged childhood, including adverse circumstances that Hopkins calls “those forces over which we have no control, and which carve out our destiny from the cradle to the grave” (259). But despite the determinism the statement implies, Hopkins instead concentrates on the agency Wood exercises in transcending his humble origins to rise to greater status. Hopkins poses, “Is it not true that the fate of the Negro is the romance of American history? It seems so when we have read the pathetic story of this little bootblack with its wonderful ending after twenty short years” (261). As Lois Brown elucidates in a biography of Hopkins, “For her, romance was a state of existence that persisted in the face of oppression” (Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 291). More specifically theorizing the conventions and cultural function of upwardmobility stories, whose main mode is romance, Bruce Robbins discerns that “disadvantages like gender and ethnicity become (among Page 114 → other things) a kind of resource, a means by which the protagonist's social status can be renegotiated upwards” (Upward Mobility, xii). Thus Hopkins's sketches transform social conditions of lack into the premise for upward mobility. The implicit lesson is that, like Professor Wood, individual African Americans could engineer their own mobility into a higher class or secure their present position through hard work and determination.6 Though Hopkins shows how a diligent work ethic can afford “wonderful endings,” she also offers an alternative rationale by attributing black Americans’ class attainment to forces such as “nature,” “Providence,” and “blood.” In her account “Hon. Frederick Douglass,” Hopkins cites Douglass's life under bondage as an example of the principle that “great men” are often born “in the solitude of poverty” (“Hon. Frederick Douglass,” 23). Later in the course of the narrative, however, Hopkins complicates this claim by associating Douglass's exceptionality with his heredity, proposing, “We can easily believe that in the veins of this man ran the best blood of old Maryland families, mingled with the noble blood of African princes” (25). As Hopkins takes creative license to reconstruct or speculate on Douglass's fragmentary genealogy, what interests me here is less the historical veracity of her claims than her romanticized recuperation of black social status, as well as her implicit presumptions about superior genes leading to exceptional offspring. Hopkins's editorializing move to reconstruct Douglass's heritage appears clearly when contrasted with other black biographers' methods. In including a sketch of Douglass's life in the compendium Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (1887), the black minister William J. Simmons describes Douglass's parentage more objectively: “His mother he knew very little…. His master was supposed to

be his father” (Simmons, Men of Mark, 66). Conversely, for Hopkins, Douglass does not descend from a nondescript white master or average African countryman; rather, the claim to African princedom extends chronologically and geographically beyond antebellum southern slavery for the fount of “noble” black blood. While summed up in a single sentence in the Douglass biography, the coupling of the “best blood” of whites and the “noble blood” of blacks becomes a more extended meditation in Hopkins's fictional depiction of the black higher classes. In devising long narratives that could reconcile possibly competing literary aims—to commend black individualism, depict black Americans’ sometimes dire class realities, and reclaim mythic black nobility— Page 115 → Hopkins explores the effects of blood from a number of literary angles, including realism, romance, and adventure. In a study of eugenics in American literature, editors Lois A. Cuddy and Claire Roche propose, “literary realism and naturalism provided the means within popular culture by which African American authors could represent their lives and express the hope for human progress denied them by Darwinian and eugenic theories and by a society which embraced those principles” (introduction, 33).7 Yet rather than assuming that Social Darwinism wholly denied black Americans “hope for human progress,” as Cuddy and Roche presume, Hopkins appropriates scientific thought to motivate and legitimate black Americans’ class desire. In addition, rather than relying solely on realism and naturalism, literary trends that were especially in vogue in American literature during the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Hopkins adopts romance to wed “the strange and marvelous and the familiar and real that often characterizes the genre” (Peterson, “Unsettled Frontiers,” 178). While one task of realism is to narrate social conditions in the present or most immediate past, by contrast, romance may cover a broad chronology and geography. Drawing on the latter form, Hopkins spins a complicated genealogy of the “high-type Negro,” a genealogy that links black Americans’ past, present, and future status across the continents of Europe, Africa, and North America. Aided by the plot devices of romance, such as coincidences and mistaken identities, the black Americans in her novels lay claim to an inherited class status they had not known or had been unable to claim. By relying on the trope of blood to link the dual plotlines of reconstituting genealogy and questing for material gain, Hopkins heightened the class anxiety for both her white and her black readers. In a letter to the Colored American Magazine, Cornelia Condict, a disgruntled white reader, objected to the periodical's apparent literary preoccupation with miscegenation. Condict proposed that by pursuing a topic more significant (and less controversial) than interracial alliances, African American writers could have a greater social impact and perhaps enjoy a wider audience. “What [Charles] Dickens did for the neglected working class of England,” Condict suggests, “some writer could do for the neglected colored people of America” (qtd. in Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 542). Condict uses the term “class” loosely, referring at times to racial groupings as classes and, at other times, to socioeconomic groups. Yet the slippage between the term's usages indicates how she conflates workingclass whites along with black Americans of any economic class Page 116 → as suffering similar forms of disadvantage. In doing so, she collapses the class differentiations that remain pronounced in Hopkins's fiction. In her published editorial reply to the reader, Hopkins retorts, “I am glad to receive this criticism for it shows more clearly than ever that white people don't know what pleases Negroes” (qtd. in Brown, Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 543). Hopkins acknowledges the tension between meeting the expectations of what she calls her “white clientele” and deciding to “cater to the demands of the Negro trade” (543). Though Condict presumes that Hopkins's narrative choices reflect her admission of white superiority, “what pleases Negroes” for Hopkins is not whiteness, but greater social and political clout for black Americans. Hopkins's use of interracial sex not only challenges the absolutism of the color line but also attempts to grant her characters additional social mobility and wealth. That such class privilege is granted primarily as a function of one's whiteness (or proximity to it) is precisely the point of Hopkins's critique. For people of African descent, the effects of slavery, U.S. social and legal customs, and dislocation complicate the practice of genealogy. In her now-classic essay “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe,” Hortense Spillers explains that “Family” in its nuclear, Western figuration does not extend to black Americans under subjection. The Western model of “Family,” with a capital “F,” functions as “the vertical transfer of a bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of ‘cold cash,’ from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free

exchange of affectional ties between a male and a female of his choice” (“Mama's Baby,” 270). This patrilineal and patriarchal model of family did not function for black families under slavery, especially because U.S. law and custom held that “the child shall follow the condition of the mother.” By rerouting genealogy along maternal lines, the law of partus sequitur ventrum benefited white men who could claim their multiracial offspring as chattel or even exclude freeborn biracial children from their wills. As Hopkins addresses questions of genetic and economic inheritance, her novels echo other nineteenth-century black fictions in which the figure of the rich white ancestor features significantly. By disclosing the relation between presumably black characters and higher-class ancestors—often a wealthy plantation owner, politician, or even U.S. president—nineteenth-century African American novelists indict American institutions of politics, law, and religion, embodied in the white male progenitor. One of the earliest African American novels, William Wells Brown's Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), features Page 117 → this plotline as the enslaved Clotel leaps over Long Bridge in sight of the White House, former residence of her father, Thomas Jefferson.8 The scene starkly juxtaposes the White House, the seat of U.S. governmental power, with Clotel, an enslaved woman who is among the most powerless of the nation's subjects in terms of wealth and political agency. But more specifically, this characterization notes how the offspring of interracial intimacy cannot accrue the status presumed in the nuclear family. As Brown explores through Clotel, mixed-race individuals who aim to identify with the name of the White Father or claim figurative and literal inheritances of freedom, opportunity, and wealth usually attain tragic endings, including insanity, remorse, and death. By contrast, novelist Sutton Griggs depicts offspring who live as black and only later discover their genealogical connection to white U.S. politicians, including senators and state governors, as do characters Bernard Belgrave in Imperium in Imperio (1899) and Erma Wysong in Overshadowed (1901). Both Bernard and Erma garner additional status and social opportunities when their biracial patrilineal heritage is confirmed. Like Griggs, Hopkins affirms matrilineal genealogies while allowing her characters nonetheless to access the titles, real estate, or wealth associated with the law of the Father. In order to do so, Hopkins plots transatlantic genealogies in which the circulation of higher-class blood, black and white, produces and conserves a “better class.”

What Pleases (Naturally Selected) Negroes: Genetic and Economic Inheritance in Contending Forces In Contending Forces, Hopkins addresses issues of inheritance, blood, and class through the Smith family, descendants of the aristocratic Montforts. In the first section of the novel, set in the 1790s, the slaveholder Charles Montfort resists abolition in the British colony of Bermuda by relocating his wife, two sons, and chattel to the United States, where slavery remains in effect and he can retain slaves as his property. In North Carolina, Montfort is the envy of his neighbors, who desire both his wealth and his “creamy”-complexioned wife, Grace, who is suspected of having an unacknowledged “black streak” of blood (40, 41). By leaving the rumor of Grace's black ancestry unsubstantiated, Hopkins shows that the hint of interracial sex and black social ascendancy is enough to inspire white southerners' anxious retaliation and desire. Neighbors kill Page 118 → the Montfort couple, confiscate their property, and kidnap their sons to be sold into slavery. One son is rescued and migrates abroad, while the other escapes slavery and assumes a free black identity in the North. Resuming a century later in the 1890s, the main body of the novel follows one of the Montfort descendants, known affectionately as Ma Smith, and her family in a black community in Boston, Massachusetts. The late patriarch of the family, a freeborn southerner who possessed “a naturally intelligent manner,” has died before the story begins, but not before imparting “his ambitions” to his son and daughter, Will and Dora (82, 83). Though Hopkins's novels are concerned with origins, which often are revealed at the novel's conclusion, the body of Contending Forces likewise focuses on identifying class backgrounds. Hopkins's depiction of communal settings, including a boardinghouse, a church bazaar, and an anti-lynching meeting, among other locales, make the novel an apt study in intraracial class relations. In describing African Americans who congregate in these settings, Hopkins avoids relying on totalizing language that would allow readers to label characters’ class by a single designation such as “rich” or “lowly.” Rather, just as her contemporary Frances Ellen Watkins Harper uses the circumlocution “neither the best nor worst class of colored people” in Trial and Triumph (196), Hopkins identifies

the owners of the boardinghouse as neither rich nor poor. Instead, the narrator explains that the bottom floors of the house would have served as the “dining-room and kitchen of a moderately well-to-do family living in this class of house” (104). The fact that the Smiths rent out their rooms for additional income places them below this “moderately well-to-do” category, but above the equally ambiguous economic condition of their tenants: Sappho Clark, a stenographer; Mrs. Ophelia Davis and Mrs. Sarah Ann White, entrepreneurial laundresses; two unnamed dressmakers; and Reverend Tommy James, a divinity student. We can read Ma Smith's boardinghouse as a site from which black Americans enact their class mobility over the course of the novel; as each transient tenant experiences better or worse financial conditions, he or she may relocate. But during their tenure in the shared space of the boardinghouse, tenants exist in “settings where men and women and different classes mix” and where “chance encounters made possible by boarding house architecture—its dining rooms, parlors, hallways, and entrances became a source of anxiety” (Klimasmith, At Home in the City, 44). More significantly, by placing black Americans of differing classes in close proximity in a shared space, Hopkins establishes the prime experimental Page 119 → conditions for testing the effects of environment versus heredity in determining class outcomes. For instance, though the widowed Mrs. Davis and Mrs. White determine that the Smith residence provides them appropriate accommodations for setting up their laundry business, which requires ample operating space, the narrator attributes to the laundresses a more personal interest in residing in the Smith house. The two women are amenable to self-cultivation and desire to benefit from Mrs. Smith's “known respectability”; more specifically, as the narrator notes, the laundresses determine that in the Smith residence “they could there come in contact with brighter intellects than their own; for, strange to say, it is a very hopeless case when a colored man or woman does not respect intelligence and good position” (104–5). Though such details might otherwise appear tangential to the women's characterization, in a text in which Hopkins accentuates the Smith family's inherited talents, the comparison of intellects is central to the description of each party's possible class position; in the novel, one can reach no further up the social ladder than his or her natural capacities allow. In an introduction to a reprint of Contending Forces, Richard Yarborough suggests, “Hopkins's own elitist views mar her treatment of lower-class black characters like Sarah Ann White and Ophelia Davis,” the two washerwomen who rent rooms on the bottom floor of the Smith boardinghouse (introduction, xli). Presented as less than the intellectual and social equals of the Smith family, these two women still occupy a class position above the truly unemployed and underemployed black Bostonians who are completely absent from Hopkins's text. How then are we to classify Mrs. Davis and Mrs. White as the joint owners of what they call “The First-class New Orleans Laundry”? What class position do they obtain based on Hopkins's own criteria for delineating class? Neither woman possesses a rich or royal heritage, but by the narrator's admission, the two women “prospered in their enterprise” and endeavor to have “their ideas of life and living enlarged” (106, 104). Hopkins presents these women as possessing a mixture of economic stability and progressive views on gender, entrepreneurship, and racial integration in keeping with the black middle class. On one hand, Hopkins's representation of the financially self-sufficient working women offers a more flexible, morally based definition of class and the potential for upward mobility. Still, Hopkins faces the challenge of envisioning intraracial differentiation without replicating the hierarchical class structures she otherwise appears interested in challenging. In her personal politics, Hopkins Page 120 → often supported black laborers and analyzed their conditions within “the history of a global economic power struggle,” (O'Brien, “Blacks in All Quarters,” 246), but within her fiction, working people become the comic outlets.9 Much of what Hopkins describes in her novel's preface as the “exquisitely droll humor peculiar to the Negro,” which she intends to “give a bright touch to an otherwise gruesome subject” of lynching, occurs at the expense of darker-skinned laboring women (16). Hopkins's pattern of depicting mixed-race characters as the most likely to succeed runs counter to her endorsement of laborers, many of whom were the least likely to have mixedrace heritage in African American literature.10 Though these two prerogatives—valuing white ancestry and endorsing black labor—are not diametrically opposed, few laborers in Hopkins's novels can attain the status she ultimately affords to Americans whose blood is the mark of their superior class status. In describing the formation of class divisions within black communities, Hopkins ultimately subordinates the narrative of self-making and meritocracy, represented by the entrepreneurial ex-slave women Mrs. Smith and Mrs.

White, to introduce a competing account of inherited status. This conflict between independently earned income and pedigree leads to one of the novel's central scenes of intraracial conflict, set at a church fundraising event. While volunteering at the church fair, laundress Mary Ann Robinson experiences class anxiety when faced with what she considers the territorial intrusion of the “colored 400” as “outsiders” who, though collaborating toward the shared aim of soliciting charitable donations, also represent competition. This church fair scene indicates how class anxiety disrupts the expected progression of the novel. Sister Robinson spews out epithets against the “hightoned colored folks,” “white-folksey colored ladies,” and people of leisure “too lazy to work” (186). Her expressed resentment over the bases of intraracial stratification becomes loud and vehement enough to elicit the attention of other working women, who draw near her, “anxious to learn what the trouble could be” (185). By fixating on the skin color of her antagonists, even more so than on their leisure, Sister Robinson reveals that what causes her the most unease is not the condescension that she anticipates from them. Rather she fears that the value of white skin, a form of biologically inherited social capital, cannot be trumped by personal labor alone. Strikingly, Sister Robinson's logorrhea over class divisions spans nearly five pages of the novel, indicating that as Hopkins devotes additional Page 121 → space to addressing this matter, she perceives it as central to the novel. Moral respectability seems an insufficient match for the potency of blood, as Sister Robinson recognizes. Mrs. Davis and Mrs. White associate with black middle-class models but fail to flawlessly adapt their more ingrained tastes and behavior. Both Mrs. Davis and Mrs. White retain their southern dialect, even after living in the North under the tutelage of the Smiths. But even that point becomes less salient when, later in the book, Mrs. Davis is able to sublet the boardinghouse from the Smiths and manage it in their absence. With this transfer of property, Mrs. Davis ascends to the next stratum of black community, marked by managing one's own property. Significantly, however, the physical space of the building as well as the social space as community leader is made available to Mrs. Davis only when vacated by those atop the social ladder. By relating Davis's procurement of marriage and property within the humorous context of her failed performance of gentility, Hopkins diminishes the value of an uneducated working woman gaining the vacated place of the biracial bourgeoisie. In the same conversation during which Mrs. Davis announces her engagement and asks to rent the house, she recounts her recent failed attempt to learn to ride a bicycle. While awkwardly performing middle-class leisure, Mrs. Davis crashed the bicycle and additionally damaged or lost her corset, false bangs, gloves, and false teeth, all the external accoutrements of the style she naturally lacks. By framing the passage with humor, Hopkins dissolves the possible threat of black working folk usurping the esteem reserved primarily for lighter-skinned characters. Furthermore, if Hopkins's interest in human evolution and eugenics attunes us to biological accounts of class, her authorial selection of those characters who do or possibly could reproduce allows for class divisions to remain strikingly stable. Though Contending Forces offers a progressive depiction of middle-aged female sexuality as the widow Ophelia Davis marries a man several years her junior, this intergenerational marriage is unlikely to lead to the blending of good genes through reproduction. Past her prime childbearing age, Davis defensively insists that she is “all of thirty-five,” but Mrs. Smith estimates that she is closer to fifty years old (364). As such, Mrs. Davis is unlikely to leave generational wealth to any biological offspring. Lacking higher-class family origins, she also lacks the promise of reproducing and expanding her class. Without biracial Page 122 → heritage, pure black women remain biologically closed out of the class-based advantages of (partial) white blood. Hopkins's propensity for linking biracial characters to elevated parentage not only marginalizes black families that bear no relation to white roots but also disqualifies mixed-race Americans who derive from white parentage that is deemed unfit or less than aristocratic. John Pollock Langley, the antagonist in the latter section of Contending Forces, is one of the few exceptions to the conventional characterization of biracial lineage in the period's fiction, as I earlier outlined. While most African American characters who discover their partial white heritage derive from aristocratic southern planters or British landowners, Langley descends from the greedy white landowner Anson Pollock, whose racial terrorism originally fractured the Montfort family in North Carolina. By assigning the antagonist role to John Langley, Hopkins shows moral bankruptcy passing down the line so that the sins of the fathers reemerge as the sins of the sons. John and his white male ancestor—whose surname, Pollock, is embedded in the younger man's full name, John Pollock Langley—share an appetite for money and illicit sex. In characterizing John, Hopkins's novel reassesses the importance of status and character being passed down as

heritable traits. Though John is able to perform black middle-class respectability, he cannot overcome the weaknesses of his foreparents, as forecast in the novel's first descriptions of him as “a descendant of slaves and Southern ‘crackers.’” (90).11 The narrator adds, “We might call this a bad mixture—the combination of the worst features of a dominant race with an enslaved race” (90–91). To provide foreshadowing clues for attentive readers, Hopkins reveals John's heritage through telltale references to his physiognomy. One observer, Mrs. Davis, shrewdly describes John as being “sickly, peeky lookin'” and having “a downish sort o' look” that reveals his disreputable origins and behavior (362). By the end of Contending Forces, John Langley's greed leads him on an tragic expedition. As John is excised from the text through his death, Hopkins posits nature as working to select the fittest candidates for legitimate status in the black middle class. Recognizing Hopkins's theories of blood and race as intertwined with class also helps to explain formal elements of the novel that initially appear enigmatic. One of the novel's most provocative discussions of interracial blood relations appears amid a description of genteel African Americans’ cultural tastes. In Blood Talk: American Race Melodrama and the Culture of the Occult, Susan Gillman contends that this discussion of Page 123 → evolution and blood appears “something of an interruption…taking off suddenly” from the preceding focus on black cultured lifestyles (66).12 However, the narrator's invocation of “the law of evolution” is less an interruption than an elaborate rationale for the origin and survival of the black middle class. As though anticipating that some readers may misclassify refined black Americans, Hopkins offers an extended description to account for how the black middle class has attained its income, taste, and moral character. When quoted at length, the passage proves more cohesive than Gillman surmises: With about every avenue for business closed against them, it is surprising that so many families of color manage to live as well as they do and to educate their children and give them a few of the refinements of living,—such as cultivating a musical talent, gratifying a penchant for languages or for carving…. We may well ask ourselves how this is done…. Man has said that from lack of means and social caste the Negro shall remain in a position of serfdom all his days, but the mighty working of cause and effect, the mighty unexpected results of the law of evolution seem to point to a different solution of the Negro question…. Then again, we do not allow for the infusion of white blood, which became pretty generally distributed in the inferior black race during the existence of slavery. Some of this blood, too, was the best in the country…. This is a mighty question. (86–87) Preceded by a description of social status, the description of the “law of evolution” is followed by a passage equally invested in matters of class. The narrator concludes that “the Negro question” is as central as “the heated discussions of tariff reform, the parity of gold and silver, the hoarding of giant sums of money by trusts and combinations” (87). By divorcing the passage about blood from its preceding and subsequent discussions, prior interpretations have chosen to read this as a narrative hiccup of sorts, a misplaced pronouncement. Yet such a reading underestimates the ways that Hopkins is linking social status, genealogy, and the broader U.S. political economy. Trusting Hopkins's narrator as a skilled rhetorician, rather than a rambling storyteller, I suggest that the passage focuses not centrally on blood, but on three distinct but related forms of capital: cultural, biological, and material. The economy and eugenics thus are not matters that Page 124 → only coincidently preoccupy turn-of-the-century social thinkers; rather, bloodlines and the economy are connected quite intimately, especially in terms of interracial sexuality, reproduction, and genealogy. Although this interpretation does not contradict Gillman's and Nickel's finding that Hopkins implies the superiority of Anglo-Saxon blood, it does underscore how the author marshals white blood in the service of her narrative of the origin and aims of accomplished black Americans. Countering claims that black Americans lack the “means and social caste” to gain public legitimacy, Hopkins plots a narrative trajectory by which the protagonists gain both wealth and status by rediscovering that they derive from blood that is “the best in the country” (67). When readers learn in chapter 21, “After Many Days,” that the Smith family is related to Mr. Withington, a liberal-minded British gentleman, the passage likely elicits a nod of recognition and confirmation. Hopkins devises an ever-disclosing plot, in which patronymics reveal to the knowing reader the kinship of people on either

side of the color line; Dora and Will bear their ancestors' names as their middle names. Though romances such as Contending Forces lend themselves to discoveries and hidden identities, Mr. Withington and the Smiths' shared connection is not simply a perfunctory fulfillment of genre conventions. Rather, the fact that Mr. Withington and Smith are kin has much to do with Hopkins's construction of class distinctions. Throughout the narrative, the Smiths' hidden family origins are reflected not only in their physiognomy and skin color, ranging from “delicate brown” to “a complexion the color of an almond shell,” but also in the family's decorum, self-possession, and taste (80, 90). Though the Smiths sometimes experience depressed economic conditions, their deportment registers long-lost but unmistakable higher-class blood. Though meant to feel entirely inevitable, the moment of recognition between Mrs. Smith and her estranged cousin is facilitated through Hopkins's close narrative control over the markers of class and social relations. Hopkins avoids any intrusion upon the complete, mutual recognition between the British gentleman and the black Boston elite. After escorting Mr. Withington, a “tall, elegant white man of distinguished address,” into the room, Mrs. Davis “closed the door behind him and vanished” (370). More than being courteous by allowing privacy to Mrs. Smith and her guest, Mrs. Davis takes on the manners of a servant, whose job it is to “vanish,” to remain invisible in the presence of her recognized betters. That is, before Mr. Withington, a political economist, Page 125 → might wrongly classify Mrs. Smith and Mrs. Davis as similar types of black Americans, Hopkins hastily limits his exposure to the latter. Both Mr. Withington and the audience are made to dis-identify with the upwardly mobile but not completely polished black laundress. Maintaining intraracial hierarchies while challenging racism, Contending Forces advances certain light-colored people of African descent across the color line, where, as one of Hopkins's characters says, black Americans might be “associated on equal terms with men of the highest culture” (389). But if Hopkins hastily disposes of distractions, she lingers on the details that build affinity between Mr. Withington and his host, making misclassification of the black middle class less likely. Examining the black household with a kind but curious investigative gaze, the British gentleman sums up the content of Mrs. Smith's character according to her refinement. As he surveys the room and sees well-appointed flowers, dishes, and a piano, “the good taste, even elegance of the apartment, appealed strongly to the artistic sense of the cultured gentleman who had been reared in the luxury of ample wealth. Mrs. Smith herself was a revelation to him” (371). Before the lines of biological kinship are confirmed between the Smiths and Mr. Withington, he identifies with the Smiths on the basis of shared class tastes. Mr. Withington and Mrs. Smith are, in this moment, not bound by polarities such as white and black, male and female; instead, the two are mutual admirers of bourgeois culture, as class identifications supplant other measures of difference. The conversation between Smith and Withington indicates how Hopkins forwards an argument about the black middle class's hereditary genius. Recognizing the investment in commodity culture he shares with his hostess, Mr. Withington follows with a non sequitur about family history, presuming that Mrs. Smith's lineage accounts for class-inflected traits of taste and manners. “Madam, how is it that you maintain so excellent an address and manner,” Withington inquires, “and from whom, may I ask, without being considered impertinent, did you inherit your superior intelligence?” (373). In her own haste to raise the issue of heredity, Hopkins attributes to Mr. Withington a curious impertinence that nearly transgresses polite conversation as he abruptly shifts the topic. Rather than excusing Mr. Withington's question, the passage self-consciously draws attention to itself as hastening the story's pace toward a retelling of the origins of the black middle class. As Mrs. Smith narrates her version of the family history for Mr. Withington, he adds detail to the story to confirm their kinship. Later in the novel, he supplies legal Page 126 → documents to provide the “perfect chain of evidence” to verify the Smith family as the Montfort descendants (384). However, the first link in that chain is established in the scene described above, as Mrs. Smith and her guest share in the beauty of middle-class culture. Since this reconnection between the family members eventuates in the Smith family gaining wealth, being properly classified is a step toward attaining greater material status. That is, because the Smiths bear the mark of higher class, Mr. Withington easily can identify them and grant them an economic endowment to confirm their social status. Hopkins's reliance on the narrative of rich and royal roots is not without ideological complications that both Hopkins's contemporary readers such as Cornelia Condict and modern critics have recognized. As Carla Peterson

notes, Hopkins's reunion of the Smiths and Montforts offers a romantic ending by evoking coincidental events to conclude the narrative. Yet by “silencing the fact that the Smiths' newfound inheritance is tainted by the evils of British colonization detailed in the first chapters, the narrative chooses instead to focus on the purely marvelous aspects of the family's history” (“Unsettled Frontiers,” 192). In this respect, by silencing or excising certain details, while fabricating others to fill in the gaps of African American history, Hopkins crafts genealogical accounts to offer the most flattering representation of the origins and future trajectory of the middle class, much as she had done in the biographical sketches she penned as editor of the Colored American Magazine. By considering the plot not taken, we can observe how Hopkins presents class markers as inherited and incontrovertible. One wonders whether Mr. Withington could or would have identified his kin among any but the black middle class. Could the business-minded but dialect-speaking washerwomen in the basement as easily have been his cousins? By foreclosing such narrative options, Hopkins retains a closed circuit of resources and reciprocity among the black and white middle classes. In keeping with her argument about intelligence as inherited, Hopkins reserves “superior intelligence” as a marker of freeborn or mixed-race heritage (Contending Forces, 373). In the Montfort/Smith descendants, gentility distinguishes the family from others and facilitates relatives' mutual recognition. To again draw on Adella Logan's language of “legacies of money” and “legacies of body and soul,” both economic and hereditary legacies align to establish a distinguished “better class” in Hopkins's novel. Page 127 →

Rich and Royal Black Roots in Of One Blood Though in Contending Forces Hopkins allows her protagonists to gain wealth and status by embracing the Law of the Father, embodied in the aristocratic British gentleman, Mr. Withington, in Of One Blood, she reroutes the search for status. Of One Blood privileges black matrilineal kinship by featuring African royalty, rather than rich whites alone, as the source of exceptional biological and economic inheritance. In this novel, three siblings occupy different class positions and racial identities until their “true” bloodline is revealed. Reuel Briggs, a poor Harvard medical student, lives as an upwardly mobile black man passing as white; Dianthe Lusk lives as a cultured, Hampton-trained musician until, as a result of amnesia, she forgets her racial identity and unwittingly passes as white; and the privileged Aubrey Livingston believes that he is the purely white son of a former plantation owner. One meaning of Hopkins's title, Of One Blood, refers to the central characters’ belated realization that they are full siblings, offspring of the slaveholder Aubrey Livingston Sr., and his slave Mira, a descendant of the Ethiopian kingdom of Meroe. Reuel, the only one of the three to survive through the novel's end, travels to the hidden city of Telassar, where he inherits through his mother's bloodline the royal rank of King Ergamenes. By featuring siblings who share their genetic makeup yet enjoy different conditions in the United States, Hopkins indicts the material and social constrictions under which black Americans live. Reuel determines the need to pass as white to attain national recognition as a doctor, recognizing that racial discrimination would prevent his unhindered upward class mobility as a black man. Meanwhile, thinking himself secure in his wealthy, white masculinity for most of the novel, Aubrey acts on the privileges of his identity by sexually propositioning Dianthe. Knowing Dianthe's racial background while she forgets it, Aubrey considers himself entitled to the mulatta as prey. The trope of racial passing and the concept of monogenesis, which links all the siblings across the color line, serves well in exposing racial indeterminacy. But while Hopkins deploys the trope of blood to challenge the supposedly impenetrable color line, blood remains a fairly reliable mark of class, reinforcing the current social order. While the siblings' conditions in the early parts of the novel range from genteel poverty to lavish wealth, Hopkins characterizes each figure as possessing what Common Sense Page 128 → calls “the superior stuff,” inherited traits that make each one prone to greater class attainment. This point is exemplified when Dianthe, whose position is the most transitory throughout the novel, involuntarily passes and must rely on her previous training, as well as her supposed natural gentility, for a convincing performance of whiteness. Of One Blood is suffused by the anxiety that usually attends racial passing narratives, as characters remain nervous about their mixed racial identity being revealed. However, one scene

lucidly shows how concerns over race reinforce class anxieties; race and class identities become mutually constitutive and are equally transparent or equally covert in the passer. In order for Dianthe to pass as “white,” she must also pass as a “lady”: Livingston and Briggs watched her with some anxiety; would she be able to sustain the position…. But both breathed more freely when they noted her perfect manners, the ease and good-breeding displayed in all her intercourse with those socially above the level to which they knew this girl was born. She accepted the luxury of her new surroundings as one to the manner [sic] born. (490) While Dianthe is involuntarily passing, her observers Reuel and Aubrey are worried not only that she will expose herself as black but also that she will expose herself as not possessing enough higher-class taste to be taken as white. In this case, whiteness becomes conflated with class privilege. Whether Hopkins intends “manner” or its homonym “manor,” the passage presents Dianthe's amnesiac condition as opening an opportunity. Not only can she be reinvented as a white woman, but as strikingly, she can access a social position more in line with her previous “manners” and training as a cultured black woman. As would Charles Chesnutt, Hopkins indicates that one of the main reasons to pursue racial passing is for the social status that is denied to even the most refined African Americans. By allowing her transnational families to derive status from England and Africa, Hopkins appeals to foreign social structures that are based on rank and caste, respectively, rather than on class. As Oliver Cox illuminates in his historic study Caste, Class, and Race, caste and class are functionally different: “In a class system it is the family or person who is the bearer of social status; in the caste system it is the caste…. We do not define an individual's status by first determining his class position, but rather we determine his class position by ascertaining his status” Page 129 → (302). In British rankings, hierarchies based on birth are less penetrable, whereas the class system in the United States theoretically admits to an individual's potential to occupy alternate class positions. Hopkins may have preferred to imbue her characters with caste privilege because, in the United States, class advantage too easily could be revoked by laws forbidding people of mixed heritage from claiming primogeniture from white ancestors. To allay the fear of downward mobility that would jeopardize middle-class status, Hopkins circumvents the reversals of law or fortune by claiming that people like the Smiths or Reuel Briggs derive status from an irrevocable system that allow heirs to resume their elevated status at any time. Beyond social position being inherited as a birthright—an entitlement to the rights and resources accruing to kin—Hopkins further presents entitlement via Reuel's visible birthmark. In this regard, one's race and class origins are indelibly written onto the body, as well as being transmitted through the blood. Significantly, however, this bodily history can only be read aright by people privileged with additional historical context. By limiting the power for reading the raced and classed body to privileged observers, Hopkins refutes the idea that ocular proof alone might distinguish among individuals. Like Hopkins's novel, Sutton Griggs's Unfettered (1902) features a birthmark as the key to confirming the protagonist's bloodline and social origins. In Griggs's novel, Dorlan Warthell is revealed as an American-born, displaced African prince whose birthmark signifies his distinction from the blacks surrounding him. Importantly, Griggs places the climactic moment of Dorlan's revelation about his heritage immediately after Dorlan experiences intense pangs of class anxiety. While observing a street parade, Dorlan is caught between the fear of misclassification, which makes him to want to dissociate with the black lower class, and the fear of estrangement, which compels him to reaffirm his identification with the crowd. Projecting his condescension onto the “unsightly mass,” Dorlan reflects, “Now those Negroes are moulding sentiment against the entire race…. The classes must love the masses, in spite of the bad name the race is given by the indolent, the sloven and the criminal element” (Unfettered, 160–61). Immediately afterward, an African emissary disrupts the parade by identifying Dorlan by his birthmark as a long-lost royal heir. In order to devise classifications in favor of Dorlan, Griggs pauses the action to introduce an unexpected character, the African ambassador, and storyline; this narrative disjuncture illustrates how discussions of intraracial distinctions Page 130 → interrupt the narrative. Dorlan's class anxiety is relieved as his own rich and royal roots are confirmed. On the basis of his birthmark, Dorlan gains the material inheritance to move to greater prominence and work toward political equality with whites in the United States.

Hopkins's movement toward Africa as a restored home for Reuel Briggs turns to an alternate space to imagine a society whose order is not determined by racial polarities of black and white, as in the United States. Of One Blood is among the first African American fictions to feature an African setting and African characters (Gruesser, “Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood,” 77). Meroe's kingdom models the responsible preservation and consumption of natural resources. Yet by setting the novel in Africa, the author does not subscribe to a notion of the continent as a natural paradise, unravaged by time or colonialism. Instead, the very presence of Reuel and his exploratory party indicates the nation's vulnerability to intrusion and imperialism. Martin Japtok observes, “One may notice that Reuel only fully decides to embrace his African heritage once his heritage assures him an elevated social and economic position” (“Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood,” 409). Japtok diminishes the importance of this issue, however, by suggesting that Hopkins was more interested in the “psychological role African ancestry plays for African Americans” (409). This reading has the effect of subsuming economic concerns to racial ones, while I argue instead that Hopkins specifically seems to be proposing the reverse: that white supremacy has been effected through black economic underdevelopment so that in order to displace racism, it is necessary to demonstrate the material as well as cultural value of blackness. Hopkins's investment in rich and royal roots is a strategic part of her reclamation of black heritage, as well as her formation of a black middle class. Reversing the ending of Contending Forces, in which the Smiths ultimately derive status from their white slaveholding relatives, Hopkins in Of One Blood traces rich and royal roots back through an African matrilineal genealogy. In doing so, she disrupts the expected literary convention and historical custom of associating whiteness with property and instead reclaims both the material and the affective value of black family ties. Unlike what P. Gabrielle Foreman calls “‘white’ mulatta genealogies,” in which racially indeterminate offspring long for the privileges of “the patriarchal, the phallic and juridicial Law of the (white) Father” (“Who's Your Mama?” 505), Of One Blood instead shows Reuel eventually committing to his black maternal heritage. By taking an Page 131 → “anti-passing” stance in favor of black identification, Reuel may be said to join characters such as Harper's Iola Leroy who willfully “recuperate an economically, legally viable and racially inflected motherhood” that extends freedom and advancement to African American families and communities (Foreman, “Who's Your Mama?” 507). Though all three siblings in Of One Blood assume whiteness and its material benefits at some point in the narrative, Reuel's resolution allows him to claim wealth while also recovering his genealogical and spiritual kinship with other diasporic blacks. Hopkins searches for civilizations whose social order challenges the model of U.S. and Western power, but Meroe is similarly marked by inequality, although along bloodlines rather than race or gender. Colleen C. O'Brien argues that if Hopkins's nonfiction social theory and journalism may be said to reflect her personal politics, those writings reveal her as more hostile to capital than critics usually admit when pegging her as a fairly conservative middleclass author. According to O'Brien, “To read Hopkins as a socialist or anticapitalist goes against the grain” of scholarship, but may more accurately reflect the author's interest in political economy (“Blacks in All Quarters,” 246). What complicates O'Brien's socialist reading, however, is that Hopkins retains an appreciation for the concept of aristocracy and royalty. As Reuel ascends to the throne, displacing white colonizers as ruler, the alternative civilization that Hopkins envisions remains locked in hierarchy, much like the interactions among black Bostonians led by the Smiths and the black “better class” in Contending Forces. Reuel's royal ascendancy does not complete a narrative of “radical equality,” as O'Brien proposes, but rather perpetuates a lingering inequality, albeit with the power and superiority accruing to a black patriarch. As one critic suggests, Hopkins's novel is “carthartic, eliciting a needed emotional response” from readers of the Colored American Magazine, especially given that the novel ultimately shows that “one of the affluent white characters is forced to answer to black power” (Gruesser, “Pauline Hopkins' Of One Blood,” 75). If so, the novel not only topples white affluence and militaristic power but also celebrates blacks' expanding economic power to which they are entitled by blood. To the extent that the author ascribes power, leadership, and genetic fitness to black agents rather than white ones, both Contending Forces and Of One Blood counter the most obvious fallacies of white supremacy to propel “naturally” selected African Americans to a higher position in the social order.

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5 CLASSING THE COLOR LINE Class-Passing, Antiracism, and Charles W. Chesnutt What we can justly ask of white Americans is not only that they cease to practice social discrimination against colored people, but that they begin to practice social discrimination among colored people—they do so already to a limited extent—that they give to colored people an opportunity to demonstrate their social value, and then recognize it as it appears. —Charles W. Chesnutt, “Social Discrimination,” 1916 In a key passage of the address “Social Discrimination,” Charles W. Chesnutt makes a minute syntactical change that registers a critical shift in how Americans could conceptualize discrimination. Exchanging the preposition “against” for “among,” he recommends that rather than treating “colored people” as a racial whole, white observers should differentiate among them to discern their individual worth (424). Delivering his speech to black and white activists at the Amenia Conference, a foundational meeting sponsored by the burgeoning National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Chesnutt clarifies that he objects to any form of prejudice that denies political rights to all African Americans. Beyond issues of politics, however, he suggests that Americans could practice “social discrimination” with “a narrower meaning, that is, to apply to the more intimate, personal association of human beings which we refer to as social intercourse” (424). In defending black Americans’ civil liberties, Chesnutt does not resort to the familiar premise that segregation should be dismantled because blacks are “created equal” to whites and should be guaranteed rights under the law. Rather, he contends that what is so disruptive about Jim Crow policies is that they impede cross-racial relationships, the kind of “inspiring friendships, the mental and spiritual stimulus which comes from meeting… Page 133 → others of kindred standards of thought and feeling” (424). When African Americans are no longer excluded from whitesonly public accommodations and private gatherings, Chesnutt suggests, whites will find that their black compeers who “prove themselves, because of their intellect, character, talent or social charm” are “not only tolerable but desirable socially” (424, 425). In order to offset race-based discrimination, Chesnutt assents to class distinctions as a preferable mode of social division. By emphasizing commonalities between black and white Americans with “kindred standards of thought and feeling,” he highlights what contemporary scholars might call class by another name. As editors Paul Lauter and Ann Fitzgerald surmise in the collection Literature, Class, and Culture, “To say it another way, class involves not just what you ‘have’ or even what you ‘are,’ but what Raymond Williams calls ‘a structure of feeling’: how you look at the world, what you see there, how you experience what you perceive—and how all of that differs from what other groups of people look at, see, and experience” (introduction, 3). That Chesnutt gestures toward this understanding without using the term “class” outright typifies how African American writers often defer or mediate possibly fraught discussions of class, as well as offer indefinite explanations of the concept. According to Chesnutt, social discrimination is “the most difficult and delicate subject on the program” for the Amenia Conference, and accordingly, he takes extra care when associating discrimination with class inequality, filtering his meaning through seemingly neutral terms like “feelings” and “thoughts.” Nonetheless, behind Chesnutt's cool, rational rhetoric is class anxiety: more specifically, the fear of misclassification, a defensive concern over being categorized among an unfavored class. He resents that individual blacks who possess the means to live “perhaps as well…or better” than their white neighbors must remain indiscriminately grouped among black Americans more generally (“Social Discrimination,” 425). If, as Sian Ngai proposes, anxiety expressed in American literature signals “situations marked by blocked or thwarted action” (Ugly Feelings, 27), then Chesnutt's works expose African Americans’ thwarted attempts to attain civil equality via the class achievement of black individualism and collective uplift. His works anxiously fixate on the

important, yet limited purchase of black middle-class status in the face of Jim Crow segregation. Contemporary scholars have remained uneasy with Chesnutt's social Page 134 → theories and fictional representations that seem to challenge racial disparity while reinforcing other inequalities, such as class. Like several other postbellum black writers and thinkers, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson, Chesnutt maintains what early U.S. sociologists have called a “functionalist theory of stratification” that assumes that social divisions inevitably must exist in order for societies to function (Warner, Meeker and Eells, “What Social Class Is,” 64). The question for Chesnutt is not whether differences will remain in a democratic culture, but on what grounds those divisions should exist. Moreover, he maintains that rather than discrimination being an entirely pejorative concept, as when it refers to racial bias, discrimination based on taste and feeling instead could serve as the bedrock of an antiracist American social order. In Kenneth Warren's estimation, this stance “accepted too readily a view of class distinctions as a natural division among human beings. In many respects, the efforts to emphasize class distinctions rather than racial ones differed little from tactics of conservative Southerners” who were invested in racial hierarchy (Black and White Strangers, 79). From another perspective, however, Chesnutt's privileging of class over racial identity contributes to the “deracialized discourses” that constituted “a crucial phase in American democratic thinking” near the turn of the twentieth century as prominent reformers and intellectuals worked not only toward the end of racial segregation but also, more radically, toward the end of racial designation (Wonham, “What Is a Black Author?” 832). Chesnutt delivers “Social Discrimination” a decade after the height of his published fiction between 1899 and 1905, but the essay crystallizes ideas implicit in works from that period. The speech offers an interpretive key for analyzing his short story collection The Wife of His Youth and Other Stories of the Color Line (1899) and the novel The Marrow of Tradition (1901). Both volumes discredit color-based divisions as arbitrary and morally unsound by dramatizing the tensions that arise along the color line—whether the color line between blacks and whites or the related, intraracial color line among people of African descent based on skin-color gradations. Chesnutt inscribes these tensions not only in the literal violence that erupts in the race riots of The Marrow of Tradition but also through more subtle disruptions in characters’ speech, behavior, and personal relationships in both the novel and the short stories. While Chesnutt presents cross-class solidarity within segregated black or white communities as tenuous, by contrast, interracial collaborations among Page 135 → class peers—what he calls “inspiring friendships”—emerge as a harmonious alternative for the nation's future (“Social Discrimination,” 424). The Wife of His Youth and The Marrow of Tradition both stage Chesnutt's social principles, but the differences between these texts reveal the representational challenges of addressing the intersection of race and class. In the Blue Vein stories, a cluster of three interrelated tales in The Wife of His Youth, Chesnutt uses skin complexion as the sign and metaphor of the larger concept of race that he problematizes. By focusing on the colorism of lightskinned black elites who alienate themselves from darker-skinned blacks, the Blue Vein stories reveal the practice of color-based prejudice as detrimental when practiced by both black and white Americans. Addressing multiple agendas and audiences concurrently, Chesnutt devises these stories as what P. Gabrielle Foreman in a different context calls “simultextual” narratives: works that invite various interpretations, depending on the situated knowledges that readers bring to the text. Simultexts “produce multivalent meanings that, rather than being subtextually buried beneath” an overt message, instead exist alongside one another, equally “available at the primary level of narrative interpretation” (Foreman, Activist Sentiments, 6). For Chesnutt's African American readers, the narratives on one hand address the fear of misclassification that leads “better-class” blacks to assert their class superiority within the race. On the other, the stories acknowledge black readers’ fear of estrangement, the concern that intraracial stratification and individual upward mobility jeopardized racial unity. Meanwhile, for Chesnutt's largely middle-class white readership, the Blue Vein stories allegorically indict color-based social policies that attempt to wholly exclude African Americans from entry into dominant society. To advance double-edged critiques of how color prejudice proscribes black Americans’ class ambitions both within black communities and cross-racially, Chesnutt employs what may be called the trope of class-passing. Unlike what is touted as upward mobility gained openly through one's effort in a supposed meritocracy, classpassing is characterized by self-conscious calculation that allows the passer to transgress seemingly fixed social

boundaries. In the Blue Vein stories, ambitious African Americans class-pass to gain access to the highest levels of color-conscious black society from which they otherwise would be excluded. Rendered textually, such acts are signified by verbal slippages, narrative gaps, irony, and ambivalence as the passer remains vulnerable to his or her class origins being divulged or current conditions being reversed. Page 136 → Chesnutt depicts class-passing as justified but ultimately limited in its effect because those who achieve their desired end seldom change the system that rewards their passing; rather, the author envisions that widespread social change should be enacted by legally and culturally dismantling the racial stigma that drives some black Americans who desire class status to the extreme of passing. As discussed later, Chesnutt's original readers did not grasp the importance of his class-passing narratives, misreading the Blue Vein stories' colorism and snobbery as symptoms of black self-hatred rather than as the author's critique of the privileges ascribed to whiteness. Though related, these two interpretations differ in that the latter targets white supremacy as the main culprit in need of transformation. In this way, Chesnutt refutes what Saidiya Hartman has called “the equation of responsibility with blameworthiness” that “encumbered” free black people by blaming them for the perceived pathologies and failures in their communities (Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 6). Instead Chesnutt highlights colorism among black Americans as signaling the much deeper need to eradicate institutional and ideological racism. He would make this argument more potently in The Marrow of Tradition by displacing the subtle trope of class-passing and overtly dramatizing the martial and personal violence racism entails. Compared to the chaos caused by the color line, interracial middle-class collaboration is meant to appear as a reasonable alternative at the end of The Marrow of Tradition. Expressing the class anxieties that Chesnutt shared with many of his protagonists and readers, both texts surmise that descent-based racial divisions not only limit African Americans but also prevent bourgeois whites from gaining middle-class blacks as social allies.

Class-Passing and Class Desire In emphasizing class identification, Chesnutt offers an alternative to Jim Crow segregation, which made race the primary basis of social closure. Building on the work of Max Weber, sociologist Frank Parkin describes social closure as “the process by which social collectivities seek to maximize rewards by restricting access to resources and opportunities to a limited circle of eligibles…. Virtually any group attribute—race, language, social origin, religion—may be seized upon provided it can be used for ‘the monopolization of specific, usually economic opportunities’” Page 137 → (Parkin, “Social Closure,” 175). In the post-emancipation United States, economic opportunities, as well as political and social access, remained relatively closed to nonwhite Americans. Recognizing how U.S. culture legitimated what Cheryl Harris calls “whiteness as property” (“Whiteness as Property,” 1714) at the expense of black economic and social development, Chesnutt attempts to pry class opportunity free from the descent-based category of race. In the course of denaturalizing whiteness and its attendant privileges, however, Chesnutt also unsettles the correlating construction of authentic blackness that had constrained but also mobilized African American communities. While American law and custom ascribed blackness as a state of inferiority or degradation, many African Americans reframed black identity positively as the basis of racial pride and community. Contrary to the notion that black Americans are (or should be) unified to challenge racism, so as to rely on their collective numbers in mobilizing protest and mutual support, Chesnutt foregrounds intraracial class differences to expose the ideal of black solidarity as dangerously complicit in perpetuating segregation. Addressing the Boston Literary and Historical Association, an African American intellectual circle, in June 1905, Chesnutt tackles “Race Prejudice: Its Causes and Cures” by first insisting, “I do not believe that the current notion of race has any logical or scientific ground, or that it is, in its essence, a matter of very much importance” (214–15). Though this rhetorical stance soundly contests racism, it also tests the salience of race and black identity itself. Chesnutt cautions that black Americans’ insistent racial pride seemed counterintuitive to their aims toward full social equality. Like two sides of the same coin, racial prejudice and racial pride shared an erroneous willingness “to accept the purely fictitious lines and cleavages between races as something fixed and eternal” (“Race Prejudice,” 215). Indicting what he considers the equivalent practices of “race prejudice, or race antagonism, or race feeling, or whatever you may call it,” Chesnutt concludes that the focus on race inhibited consensual relations across the arbitrary color line

(216). Moreover, segregation reinforced allegiances among people who apparently shared a racial background but may have otherwise held little in common. Deflecting the more self-affirming sense of racial kinship conveyed in the metaphor of African-descended people as “family,” Chesnutt questions the material and ethical responsibility that many African Americans felt that they shared with other blacks. If, as recent critics Page 138 → have argued, several modern black intellectuals have waned nostalgic about the interdependence and pride that supposedly characterized all-black communities before integration, Chesnutt resists such romanticizing gestures.1 He refutes the idea that black solidarity was, at least, a positive effect of the otherwise detrimental Jim Crow system. As Wonham concludes, the full trajectory of Chesnutt's writings, including his speeches, essays, personal correspondence, and posthumously published works, “represent him as a writer suspicious of race consciousness in any form” (“What Is a Black Author?” 830). Instead Chesnutt suggests that African Americans’ ability to identify as racially unmarked Americans would serve as a better gauge of social progress. Under such a revised U.S. social order, he admits, “Grave questions there would be, of poverty, of ignorance, and of other things; but the Negro would have no special grievance” (“Race Prejudice,” 216). Interpreting the end of racism as a positive good in its own right, he leaves class inequalities as less immediately remediable. Chesnutt envisions that given unhindered opportunities to acquire education, culture, and property, the black middle class will distinguish itself from the broader black population and further identify with the white middle class, not as imitators but as social peers. In conceptualizing class formation as an evolutional process by which intraracial social divisions would become more fixed over time, he shared the perspective of the early W. E. B. Du Bois and other black intellectuals. Prescribing “The Talented Tenth” (1903) as a top tier of liberally trained black leaders, Du Bois admitted that in comparison to a longer Anglo-Saxon history, black Americans as yet had “no long established customs, no strong family ties, no well defined social classes. All these things must be slowly and painfully evolved” (“Talented Tenth,” 54). Echoing Du Bois's assessment, James Weldon Johnson attributes a similar sentiment to the protagonist of his novel The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912). Situating himself as a lay sociological observer, the unnamed narrator concludes that in the era before World War I, African Americans were still developing well-defined intraracial class distinctions. Johnson's peripatetic narrator bases his informal theories on black communities he observes in his small hometown in Connecticut, as well as the more urban Atlanta, Jacksonville, Harlem, and Washington, DC; the last of these had the most established black elite enclave. Though the narrator recognizes class stratifications as specific to each locale, he generally describes the African American middle class as “possessing discriminating Page 139 → tendencies which become rules as fast as actual conditions allow” (Johnson, Autobiography, 51, emphasis added). But, as the narrator suggests, mere “tendencies” toward intraracial social closure could develop into established “rules” only when the existing laws of Jim Crow segregation are displaced. In Chesnutt's writing, as in Johnson's novel, discussions of social closure among and against African Americans accompany discussions of passing, emphasizing that the process of closure is never totally complete. Though often addressed in relation to racial boundaries, the trope of passing also offers a provocative metaphor for understanding how class is at once structural—operating through networks, material disparities, access, and exclusions—and performative, enacted corporeally and discursively. Class-passing depends on performatively reconstructing the physical self, as well as the narrative of one's self, through what Daphne Brooks calls “a politics of opacity,” comporting one's body, speech, and material resources to assert “the opaque as an aesthetic device, as a method of contestation and self-invention, and as a form of social mobility” (Bodies in Dissent, 137). By not being entirely transparent about class origins or ambitions, the class-passing subject devises an opaque selfrepresentation to negotiate a seemingly impenetrable social terrain.2 Through this means, the protagonists in Chesnutt's Blue Vein stories attempt to exploit rigid social hierarchies by maneuvering into status groups from which they ordinarily would be excluded on the basis of their dark skin, indiscreet sexual past, menial occupation, or former enslavement or servitude. As a nineteenth-century thinker who anticipates the more recent theoretical insights into the concept of passing, Chesnutt continually rethinks its relation to class subjectivity. By the time The Wife of His Youth was published in 1899, Chesnutt had been long at work interrogating the legal and social constructions of different identities. He

began the manuscript tentatively titled “Rena Walden,” which later developed into The House Behind the Cedars, as early as the 1880s by examining Rena's complex motivations for passing as white (Andrews, Literary Career, 24). As a woman of mixed-race heritage, Rena is “a poor young girl, who has the hill to climb”; she surmises, however, that as a white woman, she might be “some rich young lady, who lives on the Hill” (Chesnutt, House Behind the Cedars, 281). The compelling gains of passing entail an act of maturation (from “girl” to the classinflected term “lady”) as well as spatial repositioning (from the bottom to the top of the Hill). Rena Walden Page 140 → transforms into Miss Rowena Warwick, an ostensibly white “lady” eligible for a profitable marriage, through simultaneous racial passing and class-passing. Recognizing Rena's ambitions as facilitated via whiteness, rather than in pursuit of whiteness itself, acknowledges what Phillip Brian Harper identifies as the “specifically material and socioeconomic concerns” of “entry and access” at stake in passing (“Passing for What?” 386). Chesnutt proposes that passing is not motivated so much by self-loathing, as many critics both in the author's own time and more contemporarily argue, as by a desire to gain the access one otherwise is denied. The distinction between these two motives—angling for greater class status versus wanting to repudiate blackness—is crucial in shifting the focus away from the passer's reputed psychosis. Chesnutt needed to differentiate between these intents to court his audiences' sympathy, rather than their ire, toward the passer's admirable desire for class opportunity, a reputed American value. But if the conflation of racial passing and class-passing makes the latter less perceptible in The House Behind the Cedars, Chesnutt makes a significant step toward conceptualizing class-passing in “The Passing of Grandison” (1899), a story that does not invoke the conventional black-to-white racial pass. Rather, the enslaved title character gains freedom by strategically earning his master's trust, then escaping with his entire family. In this story, Chesnutt presents passing as both “narrative and textual strategy,” that is, as not only a multivalent theme within the story, but also the narrative's intended effect on the reader (Cutter, “Passing as Narrative,” 39). While the story initially appears to assent to the racial status quo, it ironically challenges its foundational premises of ontological difference, racial legibility, and transparency. As readers belatedly learn in the final passages of the story, Grandison passes to create opportunities that eventually allow him to exchange his performative slave act for the status of ambitious freeman. Never aiming to pass as white, Grandison instead is a model of class-passing because his escape does not depend on a shifting interpretation of his body's racial coding (he is always understood as black), but on how observers misinterpret his desire for freedom and upward mobility. Playing up his role as submissive servant to impress his master, Grandison does not pass as another identity; more favorably, he may be said to “pass on” class ambitions. As P. Gabrielle Foreman argues, understanding passing in relation to “the prepositions that modify it” can reveal additional meanings of the concept (Foreman and Sherrard-Johnson, “Racial Recovery,” 159). In particular, while passing Page 141 → is often disparaged as an apparent desire for whiteness and its privileges, by contrast, “passing on” conveys a desire “to pass on, to share…relatively favored economic status” to benefit black families and communities as the end recipient (161). By executing his final escape with his entire family in tow, Grandison ideally can retain the value of his labor as a freeman and thus pass on generational wealth to other black Americans. In these cases, class-passing is a strategic shortcut to accessing the social power and economic resources, whether a claim to gentility in Rena's case, to freedom in Grandison's, or to uninhibited opportunities for achievement in America's putative meritocracy. In underscoring class-passing as a covert practice represented in Chesnutt's works, I differ from scholars who understand class-passing and upward class mobility as interchangeable terms. While upward class mobility positively connotes ideas of America as a “land of opportunity” and meritocracy, class-passing reveals how some individuals achieve relative mobility only by circumventing the institutions, social mores, and economic structures that, on one hand, extend the promise of advancement and, on the other, hold that promise in abeyance for certain citizens. By contrast, cultural studies critic Gwendolyn Audrey Foster proposes, “Class-passing is in some ways like race-passing, gender-passing, or straight/gay-passing, but class-passing, like whiteness, is not often noticed or examined. It is essentially viewed as normative behavior, especially in America, where one is expected to do as much class-passing as possible, regardless of one's race, gender, or economic circumstances” (Performing Whiteness, 102). Drawing class-passing exemplars from twentieth-century popular culture, Foster refers to figures as varied as Oprah Winfrey, George W. Bush, and Britney Spears, who, over the course of their lives, move dramatically from obscurity to celebrity, embodying the “desire for a fetishized class mobility” (Foster, Class-

Passing, 13). But if passing becomes normative, is it still passing? “Passing is not about class antagonism per se,” Peter Hitchcock rejoins, “but it can be used to identify elements of the struggle over class” (“Passing,” 24). A reading of class-passing as expected and even state-sanctioned, as Foster proposes, ignores the element of social conflict that necessitates passing in the first place. I contend that class-passing exposes the structural barriers and economic competition that is euphemistically obscured in “upward class mobility.” Moreover, though resembling each other in some regards, class-passing and racial passing are not entirely analogous, a fact that made Page 142 → the former useful for Chesnutt's depictions. The difference between the two often rests on the role of the body in passing. While racial passing remains limited to a numerically small proportion of individuals who, though legally classified as nonwhite, possess physical characteristics that can be read as white, acts of class-passing presumably depend less on inherited bodily traits than on acquired habits, tastes, and resources. As class studies scholar Rita Felski surmises, “As a signifier, class seems to differ from race and gender, which often mark identity inescapably. One can change one's class in a way that one cannot, for the most part, change one's sex or race” (“Nothing to Declare,” 38). Writing from and about twentieth-century America, Felski notes that class is (or is thought to be) the mutable category. But it is precisely here that Chesnutt's Jim Crow-era texts expose both the promise and the preclusions of class mobility for black Americans. In one regard, while African Americans could not alter their race, they could aim toward class achievement. Yet, as the mixed-race protagonists of Chesnutt's fiction eventually realize, African Americans’ attempts to improve their class status is systematically countered by white prejudice, violence, and intimidation, as well as by the intraracial fear of estrangement that privileged black unity over the possibly alienating effects of individual upward mobility and integration. Understood in these terms, class remained inextricably tied to racial descent so long as Jim Crow remained in place. Chesnutt presents class-passing as a justifiable means of attaining the social and economic opportunities that were safeguarded both within segregated black communities, in which middle- and upper-class blacks sought to distinguish themselves, and in white society, which denied legitimacy to ambitious black Americans. But Chesnutt also indicates that for all its subversive potential, passing remains a limited means of long-term or collective social reform. As Amy Robinson ultimately concludes, “the social practice of passing is thoroughly invested in the logic of the system it attempts to subvert” (“Forms of Appearance,” 237). Though Grandison triumphs with his family intact, Rena's dual racial-and class-passing, which consequently ends in her death, points to the losses entailed in the practice: class-passing often incurs broken families, duplicity, or retaliatory violence, all effects that Chesnutt insists can be avoided only by a more thorough ideological and sociopolitical transformation. By indicating how passing often culminates in traumatic public disclosures, Chesnutt argues that intraracial and cross-racial social intercourse would proceed more harmoniously if black Americans could Page 143 → attain status without resorting to passing. He envisions that Americans, beginning with his immediate reading audience who encounter his literary representations of the black middle class, instead can learn to discriminate not by the color bias that perpetuates passing but by “kindred standards of thought and feeling.”

Class-Passing among the Blue Veins Constituting a full third of the nine stories in The Wife of His Youth, the cluster of three Blue Vein tales—“The Wife of His Youth,” “A Matter of Principle,” and “Her Virginia Mammy”—traces black communities in transition, moving from informal to more formalized systems of stratification.3 Each story is set during Reconstruction, a period when the class structure among African Americans underwent significant change as blacks pursued professions, especially in politics and the civil service, that provided the economic base for a postbellum black middle class. Reconstruction's promise was demonstrated through the social ascendancy of exceptional figures such as Blanche K. Bruce, a biracial man of slave origins who became a U.S. senator. The story “A Matter of Principle” alludes to Bruce to indicate the kind of high society African Americans with whom the Blue Veins associate. The stories are set in Groveland, generally acknowledged as Chesnutt's fictional version of Cleveland, Ohio, one of the urban centers where a prosperous black American niche had developed by the turn of the century. Using irony and humor, the stories expose the dilemmas and biases of class-conscious African Americans bound

to racial solidarity by practical, familial, and ethical reasons. In “Her Virginia Mammy,” Solomon Sadler articulates a policy of social closure that seems so much the collective thesis of the three Blue Vein stories that it is worth quoting here at length: The more advanced of us are not numerous enough to make the fine distinctions that are possible among white people; and of course as we rise in life we can't get entirely away from our brothers and our sisters and our cousins, who don't always keep abreast of us. We do, however, draw certain lines of character and manners and occupation…. We must have standards that will give our people something to aspire to. (119) Page 144 → As a minor character who reappears in each of the three stories, recounting Blue Vein history for the characters and, by extension, the reading audience, Sadler seems best identified with Chesnutt's authorial voice. By allotting this character so much textual space over the course of the stories, Chesnutt elaborates the class anxieties that compel upwardly mobile black Americans in two seemingly contradictory directions. Sadler proposes that in the post-emancipation period, when many blacks had not recovered from the effects of slavery, social class delineations among African Americans needed to be flexible enough to support community building. But in equivocating on the importance of class distinctions, Sadler aptly summarizes the delicate balance between the fear of misclassification, which leads him to differentiate “more advanced” black Americans as racial representatives, and the fear of estrangement that reinforces cross-class affiliations between real or fictive kin (119). “The Wife of His Youth” further elucidates social closure among African Americans as a gradual and unpredictable process. The Blue Vein Society develops from an improvement organization designed “to establish and maintain correct social standards” to a more exclusive clique that institutionalizes class hierarchy within Groveland's black community (101). The omniscient narrator presents the history, purpose, and criteria for membership in the organization as a matter of rumor rather than uncontested fact. Though “those who were not of the favored few” charge the group with basing its membership on complexion, “the Blue Veins did not allow that any such requirement existed for admission to their circle, but, on the contrary, declared that character and culture were the only things considered” (101). Rumors about the Blue Vein society's guidelines function as what Audrey Elisa Kerr terms “complexion lore”: speculation that circulates among blacks about how skin color gains or denies them access to resources within or beyond the black community (Kerr, “Paper Bag Principle,” 271). Whether the lore is “true” often is immaterial; more important is its folkloristic function of translating the seemingly mysterious formation of class distinctions and group closure into more tangible, comprehensible rules (271). Early in the text, the narrator emphasizes how class distinctions are based on subjective standards that, because of their very arbitrariness, remain indefensible and incite anxiety. Through the extended discussion of Blue Vein membership qualifications, Chesnutt simultextually signifies on the imperfect American legal system that attempted to designate racial differences. Just as the Page 145 → Blue Veins base access to their group on little more than rumor about the importance of skin color, American segregation similarly depended on color and what Chesnutt elsewhere notes as the “fiction of race.” As he describes in “Race Prejudice: Its Causes and Cures,” race and racial integrity “seems to me a modern invention of the white people to perpetuate the color line” (232). As characters within “The Wife of His Youth” note that colorism perpetuates “the very prejudice from which the colored race had suffered most” (101), the story conveys a possible moral to both black and white readers. The Blue Veins refute the alleged prerequisites of color and free birth by stressing that “character and culture” are the proper guidelines but admit that “light-colored” people, “as a rule, had had better opportunities to qualify themselves for membership” (101). For Chesnutt's audience, the Blue Veins' contradictory rules about color may have brought to mind one of the most contradictory edicts of the postbellum period: “separate, but equal,” as mandated by Plessy vs. Ferguson. For while the ruling paid lip service to equality, its measures reinforced the value of whiteness. In some respects, the color-based prejudice among the Blue Veins and in broader society alike is governed by labyrinthine laws and qualifications that the author aims to repeal.

To expose how the Blue Veins protect their class investments through color-based exclusions, much like Jim Crow laws that maintain white economic privilege, Chesnutt situates the protagonist Mr. Ryder as a class-passer. According to its members, the Blue Vein organization comprises “individuals who were, generally speaking, more white than black” simply “by accident, combined perhaps with some natural affinity” (“Wife of His Youth,” 101). Though intended to convey liberality, this rhetoric nonetheless exposes deeply held values that align class with inherited “natural” affinities. Yet partially fluid class lines provide enough of a fissure for Ryder's entry. None of his peers knows his full background, including his age or his former condition before he arrived in the city and “worked himself up to the position of stationery clerk” (102). The narrator deftly describes Ryder's carefully managed performance of propriety. Maintaining impeccable dress, manners, and morals, he masters the “genteel performance, a system of polite conduct that demanded a flawless self-discipline practiced within an apparently easy, natural, sincere manner” (Halttunen, Confidence Men, 93). As the Blue Vein Society's “recognized adviser and head, the custodian of its standards, and the preserver of its traditions,” Ryder draws the lines of social distinction so as to accentuate his qualifications for membership, and Page 146 → with the anxiety characteristic of passers, he takes personal responsibility for protecting class boundaries from the intrusion of others (102). Though Chesnutt characterizes class as indexed by thoughts and feelings in works such as “Social Discrimination, ” by highlighting Ryder's worries over the visceral aspects that may undermine his passing act, the author exposes the body as an unstable signifier of class. Corporeal and linguistic signs indicate that Ryder's cultivated classpassing is not entirely seamless. His complexion is “not as white as some of the Blue Veins,” and his hair, though “almost straight,” is not entirely so (102). Most provocatively, though Ryder organizes the entertainment for the social group and often renders poetic readings, “his pronunciation was sometimes faulty” (102). Even after his having migrated to the city years ago and “forming decidedly literary tastes” (102), Ryder's class performance retains cleavages through which emerge remnants of his former status as a freeborn mulatto who grew up speaking southern dialect. The threat that Ryder's complexion, hair, or speech might ordinarily disqualify him as a Blue Vein or lead to his misclassification motivates him to zealously guard his own status and the group's. Yet by illuminating Ryder's indeterminate body as enabling but also potentially sabotaging his class ambitions, Chesnutt begins to suggest why class opportunity cannot be tied to color, physical features, or other traits derived from descent. For Ryder, black middle-class status is only an incremental stage toward a racially unmarked bourgeois identity. His efforts to class-pass into the Blue Veins facilitate his long-term goal of cultural and ontological “absorption by the white race” (104). Since economic wealth alone does not allow for middle-class African Americans to fully exercise their class privileges in postbellum U.S. society, Ryder aims to marry a light-complexioned wife to gradually whiten his family line. His intended fiancé, Mrs. Dixon, is a young widow who is “whiter than he, and better educated,” possessing more of the conventional traits of colored aristocracy and, moreover, a closer phenotypical semblance to “pure” whiteness than Ryder (103). Hoping that his progeny can lay claim to legitimate whiteness, Ryder plots, “His ball would serve by its exclusiveness to counteract leveling tendencies, and his marriage with Mrs. Dixon would help to further the upward process of absorption he had been wishing and waiting for” (104). The ball he hosts will publicly mark a significant stage of his successful class-passing. Page 147 → In “The Wife of His Youth,” as in his fiction elsewhere, Chesnutt consistently represents light-skinned black people, whom he customarily calls “mulatto” or “colored,” as attaining higher status than those he terms “genuine” or “true Negro[es]” (“What Is a White Man?” 69). Based on this pattern, critics often have charged the author with elitism and accommodation.4 Others, however, consider his works as radical in proposing eugenic breeding as a means of obliterating the color line.5 Before Ryder can confirm his upward mobility into the mulatto elite (and ultimately into the white race through whiter offspring), he encounters his foil: ’Liza Jane, a darkskinned formerly enslaved woman searching for her long-lost mate Sam Taylor, whom both readers and ’Liza herself will later discover as Mr. Ryder. Chesnutt mines the irony of the initial cross-class encounter between ’Liza Jane and Ryder so that just as Ryder looks up from reading his book of poetry that heralds a pale heroine, he sees the approaching visitor as the very antithesis of his aesthetic ideal: “She was very black—so black that her toothless gums, revealed when she opened her mouth to speak, were not red, but blue” (105). Untransformed by

freedom, ’Liza Jane “looked like a bit of the old plantation life, summoned up from the past by the wave of a magician's wand” (105). The description of ’Liza Jane, emphasizing her skin color, dialect, and homely appearance, seems consistent with Chesnutt's often comical portrayal of dark African Americans. Class-passing proves doubly apt for Ryder, for he conceives of his former class status not only as a boundary to be trespassed but as an identity that has passed away or died; Sam Taylor is buried in Ryder's memory for twentyfive years, only to be resurrected by ’Liza Jane's plaintive story of how she has longingly searched for her husband who left her during slavery to avoid being sold down river. Claiming control over the narrative of his origins and selfhood, Ryder writes (or more accurately, speaks) himself into the elevated class identity that he desires. Ryder cannot be said to lie at any point in his exchange with ’Liza Jane. Rather, making opacity the signature of his selfnarrative, he performs verbal acrobatics to elude her identification: “I don't know of any man in town who goes by that name,” he said, “nor have I heard of any one making such inquiries. But if you will leave me your address, I will give the matter some attention, and if I find out anything I will let you know.” (109) Page 148 → Ryder indeed does not know a man who goes by the name of Sam Taylor, since much like Frederick Douglass (née Bailey) and other fugitives from the South, he has adopted a new nomenclature in the North. The new name at once serves to prevent recapture and extradition to southern bondage and, further, marks a moment of selfmaking. Though the theory and practice of passing assume that the body is difficult to read, Ryder's class-passing body retains signs that, in the proper context, give way to categorization. Hearing ’Liza Jane's story is one incident that provokes Ryder's later revelation that he is her long-lost husband, but in developing the plot of class-passing and revelation, Chesnutt also relies on scenes that involve visual inspection—a strategy similarly used in narratives of racial passing. To aid her in her search, ’Liza Jane carries around a daguerreotype of her husband's image. When looking at the picture, Ryder claims no recognition. After the woman departs, however, “he went upstairs to his bedroom, and stood for a long time before the mirror of his dressing case, gazing thoughtfully at the reflection of his own face” (109). The scene of gazing and recognition anticipates one in Johnson's Autobiography of an ExColored Man, as the young protagonist interrogates his own image in the mirror, realizing for the first time that he is not entirely white. But while Johnson's narrator searches for the supposed phenotypic marks of authentic blackness, Ryder recalls a history of bondage, servitude, and manual labor usually associated with “authentic” blacks’ working-class conditions. In this, the first of the three Blue Vein stories, Ryder's linguistic code switching highlights language as the most telling device through which Chesnutt signals crucial moments of class-passing to his readers. At the ball where Ryder initially planned to announce his proposal to Mrs. Dixon, he recounts ’Liza Jane's sentimental story of searching for her husband for twenty-five years. Importantly, Ryder tells ’Liza's story in first-person, “in the same soft dialect, which came readily to his lips,” although he presents Sam Taylor's perspective in third-person (110). Some critics have interpreted Ryder's dialect narrative as the height of artificiality, intended only to add authenticity to his telling and arouse his listeners. In one critic's estimation, “Ryder's performance is an elaborately structured dance of the veils, which relies upon concealment and several kinds of artifice to ensure that his truth will be received as he wishes it to be” (Fienberg, “Charles W. Chesnutt's,” 224). Yet in the context of class performance, Ryder's use of “the soft dialect, which came readily to his lips,” is a return of the repressed. Speaking hypothetically, Ryder asks his Page 149 → Blue Vein listeners whether their consciences would advise an upwardly mobile man who “has qualified himself, by industry, by thrift, and by study” to acknowledge his uncultured former partner after a long separation (111). When Mrs. Dixon, his intended, and the guests agree that acknowledging the woman would be the morally acceptable thing to do, Ryder brings out ’Liza Jane as the wife of his youth. Through Mr. Ryder's eventual revelation, Chesnutt presents social identity as the sum of one's corporeality and

self-defined narrative, a performance whose success is determined by the audience. Rather than being a matter of truth or falsity, Ryder's class subjectivity is a matter of perspective. As Robinson suggests, “identity politics is figured as a skill of reading” in which readers and observers make meaning based on what they desire or expect to see (“It Takes One,” 716). Ryder's ability to class-pass exposes the Blue Veins biased expectation that someone with his tastes and appearance could not have originated from servitude or have a formerly enslaved wife. Rather than presenting Ryder merely as a confidence man who deliberately foists himself onto a “real” black elite with longer historical roots (and whiter skin, straighter hair, and better pronunciation), Chesnutt infers a different object lesson by shifting responsibility for Ryder's revelation onto the other Blue Veins. He reveals himself only after his audience recommends it as the right thing for the hypothetical character to do. While Ryder relates ’Liza Jane and Sam Taylor's condition, his audience “listened attentively and sympathetically,” recalling similar situations they “had heard their fathers and grandfathers tell, the wrongs and suffering of this past generation” (110). In this way, the narrator highlights the attitudes and social climate that inspired Ryder to repress his former conditions but also shows the Blue Veins as sympathetic to Ryder's driving ambition. By ending with a climactic moment, rather than allowing the plot to advance into the falling action and resolution, Chesnutt denies the reader a clear impression of how the reunion between Ryder and ’Liza Jane might proceed. As one critic proposes, if converted from the bond of the past to a sanctioned marriage, Ryder and ’Liza Jane's reunion might constitute “a sort of re-immersion in slavery, or what early in the story the narrator derisively calls a ‘servile origin’” (Duncan, Absent Man, 135). In contrast, would ’Liza easily accept the changes to her speech, dress, and demeanor that Mr. Ryder might encourage or even demand in order to effect her middle-class identity? Would Ryder become a mediator between the darker, working-class black community and the mixed-race Page 150 → affluent one? Leaving such practical questions unanswered heightens the story's sentimentality. But I want to suggest that by resisting closure, Chesnutt also expresses his own unwillingness to fully imagine and inscribe a cross-class union. Like the audience of Blue Vein listeners within the story's final scene, Chesnutt's actual audience of black and white readers applauded Mr. Ryder's choice, a choice that both deterred him from usurping whiteness on one hand and reinforced his apparent black affiliation on the other. But Chesnutt himself remained less compelled by his character's choice. Even years after the publication of “The Wife of His Youth,” Chesnutt would reflect that his intent was to underscore Ryder's dilemma as a sacrifice that ambitious black Americans ought not to have to make, except that the existing social order privileged racial difference and reinforced black solidarity.6 The ambiguous ending of “The Wife of His Youth” critiques the social order that necessitates Ryder's passing in the first place and then overdetermines his final outcomes. In “A Matter of Principle,” Chesnutt shifts the focus from the passer to one who fears being trespassed against, showing the psychological and social tensions that the fear of misclassification induces. Were “A Matter of Principle” and “The Wife of His Youth” more of a direct continuation of one another, readers might imagine protagonist Cicero Clayton sitting around the banquet table as Ryder discloses his history and introduces the wife of his youth. Clayton, however, would not be among the Blue Veins who assent to Ryder's decision to affiliate with a dark-skinned black person. Rather, as Clayton anxiously polices class boundaries, he does so to confirm his own social position, claiming that because of his partly white ancestry, “he himself was not a negro” (149). While Ryder determines that a broadened sense of family and faithfulness supersedes status privileges associated with light and white skin, Clayton remains inflexible, insisting on distancing himself from “pure Negroes” in an attempt to gain acknowledgment from “the better class of white people” (149). The fear of misclassification leads Clayton to defensively explain and reassess his identifications. Unapologetic about his colorism, he goes so far as to resist being categorized as “Negro,” for in the “clearer conception of the brotherhood of man” that he conceives, he qualifies as white (149). Clayton's emphatic speech becomes so repetitive that “the younger members of the [Blue Vein] society sometimes spoke of him,” teasingly imitating his “oft-repeated proposition” (149). Yet in his attempt to subvert the existing delineations between “white” and “Negro,” he perpetuates Page 151 → the dichotomous thinking that reiterates racism and classism. When explaining his deliberate estrangement from poorer or darker African Americans, Clayton uses the exact vocabulary that customarily functions in racist discourse: “principles,” “distinction,” “discrimination,” and “prejudice” (163). By noting the repetitiveness of Clayton's rhetoric, Chesnutt implies how (per)forming an

identity is as much an assertive process as it is a defensive posture; that is, one defines himself or herself, in part, by negating other possible classifications. The author uses a number of ironic cues to underscore the anxiety and hypocrisy underlying Clayton's frenzied verbal reiterations. In one instance, Chesnutt draws attention to the slippage between Clayton's rhetoric and his behavior. Though Clayton insists that he does not apply the term “Negro” to people of nearly white appearance such as himself, he refers to his peer group by the more colloquial term “darkeys” at a point when he fails to keep up his self-presentation or, in other words, forgets his lines. Drawing attention to this moment, which parallel's Ryder's occasional faulty pronunciation, the narrator highlights: It will be noted that in moments of abstraction or excitement Mr. Clayton sometimes relapsed into forms of speech not entirely consistent with his principles. But some allowance must be made for his atmosphere; he could no more escape from it than the leopard can change his spots, or the—In deference to Mr. Clayton's feelings the quotation will be left incomplete. (158) By omitting the final phrase of the quotation—or the “Ethiopian change his skin”—Chesnutt's paralipsis ridicules Clayton's desire to obscure any trace of African descent (Bryant, “Blue Veins,” 75). As the narrator suggests, understanding the force and failure of Clayton's rhetoric “may safely be left to the discerning reader” (150). By showing Ryder and Clayton as both unable to overcome their physical features or speech patterns, Chesnutt mocks the Blue Veins' pretensions. But the story's larger and more implicit critique is toward the American social structure that would require that in order to move up the social ladder, people of color alienate themselves from their immediate family relations and lineage by attempting to pass. Since Clayton cannot change his skin (save perhaps through temporary cosmetic adjustments), the narrative underscores the need to revalue racial construction. Cicero Clayton is not the prime class-passer in the text, however. Page 152 → Rather, by deploying a marriage plot in all three of the Blue Vein stories, including “A Matter of Principle,” Chesnutt indicates how African Americans’ intraracial discriminations structure their most intimate social relations. For Cicero Clayton's daughter, Alice, attempting to maintain color- and class-based distinctions proves disadvantageous. Alice is the “queen of her social set” and possesses all the benefits of breeding, beauty, and wealth, but her choices for a suitable marriage partner are limited severely by her parents’ insistence on their superiority to darker people of color (150). A potential long-distance suitor, Congressman Hamilton Brown, writes requesting to visit Alice in Groveland, but having met Brown only once briefly, she cannot remember the crucial detail of his skin color. Assured by an acquaintance that Brown is acceptably pale, Clayton makes elaborate plans to receive the congressman. At the train station, however, he confuses the congressman (who actually is light) with a “palpably, aggressively black” man in the waiting room and spins a number of excuses—including the claim that his house is being quarantined because of diphtheria—to avoid hosting him (161). Beyond showing Clayton's misjudgment of Brown as a simple case of mistaken identity, Chesnutt complicates the plot by including a case of class-passing. Clayton is preoccupied with protecting his family and the private space of his home from infiltration from without, but the class-passer in the story proves to be Clayton's young cousin Jack. Though Jack has been raised by the Clayton family, Cicero treats him as a servant, relegating him to “a class of work that kept fully impressed upon him the fact that he was a poor dependent” (152). As Clayton's helper, Jack accompanies his uncle to the train station and misleads him to believe that Brown is the dark passenger in the waiting room. The conclusion of the story hints that with the competition for Alice effectively diminished, Jack will gain Alice's favor and inherit his uncle's catering business, expediently ascending the social ladder by marrying up. Jack achieves the upward mobility portended at the story's end primarily by class-passing, relying on miscommunication, duplicity, and a calculated manipulation of existing social structures in order to circumvent them. His consummate skill as a class-passer is foreshadowed earlier in the text as the narrator explains that Jack “had early learned the law of growth, that to bend is better than to break” (152). By appearing to “bend” or accede to his uncle's color prejudices, Jack exploits them to his own benefit. Like the title character of “The Passing of

Grandison,” Jack masks his class aspirations, feigning complete contentment with his Page 153 → subordinate status, only later to gain entry into the Clayton family's elite social circle. Yet Jack's successful class-passing depends not only on his performance but also on Clayton's inability as observer to understand the social situation except through his own unbending color prejudices. By showing Jack as having to resort to extreme measures of class-passing to gain his uncle's respect, Chesnutt highlights that prejudices such as Clayton's not only perpetuate social conflict in the public sphere but also pervert domestic and familial relations. Chesnutt extends a similar moral in “Her Virginia Mammy,” in which the layered story lines portray how class distinctions operate in three different but related social contexts: among upper-class white Americans, in crossracial relations, and among middle-class black Americans. While the frame story introduces the presumably white Clara Hohlfelder ruminating over the class implications of a marriage proposal, another story line focuses on how her class anxiety leads her to confuse her genealogical background and unwittingly disown her mulatta birth mother. In a third story line, members of a Blue Veins dance class, which Clara teaches, convey their own fears of estrangement and misclassification in relation to other black Americans. Juxtaposing these contexts, Chesnutt builds a dramatic platform for examining how individual characters’ class identifications inform their everyday decisions, framing everything from decisions about marriage to employment and social engagement. Unlike the other two Blue Vein stories, “Her Virginia Mammy” features instances of class-passing aligned with the traditional racial passing narrative. Clara Hohlfelder, raised by German adoptive parents, hesitates to marry her insistent white suitor because she is uncertain of her birth heritage. Clara perceives that she has “warmer, richer blood coursing in [her] veins than the placid stream” of her adoptive parents, but she attributes this to temperament and has little reason to believe that she is not entirely white (115). She confesses her courtship dilemma to a mulatta seamstress, Mrs. Harper, whom readers recognize as her long-lost mother, though Clara remains blind to the fact. Mrs. Harper partially reveals Clara's genealogy, assuring the young woman that she descends from one of the white first families of Virginia, but Mrs. Harper obscures her own kinship to Clara. The conclusion hints that Clara will proceed with her marriage, thinking herself secure in her whiteness and aristocratic background. By framing Clara's dilemma as a concern about class differences among white Americans, Chesnutt begins to move in a direction that Page 154 → he pursues in The Marrow of Tradition, showing the social performances necessary for white Americans to cling to their race and class identities. Clara does not immediately accept her suitor's marriage proposal because she fears that her unknown pedigree does not match his New England heritage that traces back to the Mayflower. Constantly fretting about being, by her own account, “a Miss Nobody, from Nowhere,” Clara nearly misses the chance to marry a man who seems devoted to her (116). After Mrs. Harper confirms that Clara's father was an educated, cultured man whose family owned a plantation, Clara exults so much in her newfound class origins that she boasts to her future husband that her ancestors actually looked down upon his. Clara's repeated assertions about the importance of social standing indicate how she values status based on pedigree over unconditional affectionate ties with her fiancé and unwittingly, with her long-lost mother. As Clara shares her class-related concerns with the friendly Mrs. Harper, the elder woman realizes that Clara is the daughter she was separated from during a shipwreck. Mrs. Harper narrates Clara's family history in third person. Chesnutt uses elliptical speech to facilitate for Clara and indicate for readers the moments of passing; such instances occur frequently in the conversation between Clara and her unacknowledged mother: “And how did you know about [my parents]?” asked Clara. “I was one of the party. I was”— “You were the colored nurse?—my ‘mammy,’ they would have called you in my old Virginia home?” “Yes, child, I was—your mammy…and my heart loved you and mourned you like a mother loves and mourns her firstborn.” (127–28) As Eric Sundquist notes, the dashes in the dialogue mark Mrs. Harper's hesitation, suggesting that she, as much as

her daughter, is acting out an alternate identity. “The dash is the sign of passing,” Sundquist explains, “the orthographic representation of secrecy written into textuality” (To Wake the Nations, 401). Just as Chesnutt consistently uses linguistic signals in the other two stories—highlighting Mr. Ryder's evasion of ’Liza Jane's direct questions, for example—the author allows characters to choose which version(s) of subjectivity to disclose to listeners and observers. Mrs. Harper plays the role of servant and willingly renounces Page 155 → her kinship to Clara to enable the young woman's successful racial and class-passing through marriage. In the story line concerning the Blue Vein dance class, Chesnutt depicts mixed-race African Americans specifically expressing their fear of misclassification, though the Blue Veins concomitantly express a fear of estrangement from the self-same black Americans from whom they apparently wish to disassociate. The recurring character Solomon Sadler, situated as chaperone of the Blue Vein dance class in this story, offers Clara an overview of life along the color line by explaining how intraracial class divisions occur through a process marked by progressive stages of closure. Clara observes that the Blue Veins are careful about their self-presentation in and out of the dance class: “Their manners were good, they dressed quietly and as a rule with good taste, avoiding rather than choosing bright colors and striking combinations—whether from natural preference, or because of a slightly morbid shrinking from criticism, of course [Clara] could not say” (119). The conflict of “natural preference” versus social expectation is a question that Chesnutt raises throughout the Blue Vein stories, repeatedly alerting readers that tastes, habits, and speech that appear natural are nonetheless acculturated. Yet the characters in the stories, and critics as well, replicate the distinction between authenticity and imitation that Chesnutt deconstructs. For example, in his reading of “Her Virginia Mammy,” Dean McWilliams indicts the black middle class for being derivative of whites. He explains, “Thus these mulatto dance students mimic white society's color prejudice, just as they imitate white notions of genteel entertainment” (McWilliams, Charles W. Chesnutt, 111). However, such apparent imitation is complicated by the fact that Clara—the dance teacher and model of “genteel entertainment”—is not herself entirely white according to nineteenth-century social and legal standards. By blending class-passing and racial passing in “Her Virginia Mammy,” Chesnutt shows each act as motivated by a shared aim: the passer's desire for the greater social and economic opportunity denied him or her. But Clara's outcome also indicates white resistance to the proper terms of social discrimination, as Chesnutt outlines them, and the limits of passing as a means toward significantly shifting the status quo. As Phillip Brian Harper notes specifically of racial passing, “for an instance of passing to register as a challenge to the logic of racial identification, it might disclose itself as an instance of passing in the first place” (“Passing for What?” 382). Clara's successful passing, accomplished unwittingly, Page 156 → compromises her willing capacity to alter the power structures from which she continues to benefit. Indeed, after she confirms her (partly) white aristocratic heritage, she is quick to assert her social superiority over her husband and her colored “mammy,” albeit facetiously. The difference between the outcome of “The Wife of His Youth” and “Her Virginia Mammy” is that Clara never feels the fear of estrangement from racial kin that characterizes African Americans’ upward class mobility. If Mr. Ryder's final public reclamation of his wife constitutes his failure to continue to class-pass, such failure also affords him the needed critical distance to challenge the Blue Vein Society's strictures based on skin complexion and background. Not constrained by the ethical dilemmas over individual versus collective class mobility that Mr. Ryder faces, Clara attains the property of whiteness at a cost that only Mrs. Harper and Chesnutt's readers realize. In Chesnutt's three Blue Vein stories, class-passing offers the passer possibilities to delegitimize hierarchies and to reinforce them. For Mr. Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth,” class-passing allows him to enter the black elite and wield authority that, after his change of heart, may enhance his peers' openness to extending social relations beyond the homogenous realm of the Blue Vein Society. Converted from his initial plans to pursue individual upward mobility, Mr. Ryder passes on access and privilege to his working-class, darker-skinned former wife. On the other hand, Clara's passing, which is accomplished without her knowing, does nothing to change her basic beliefs in social hierarchy. By weaving the marriage and kinship plot through each of the narratives, the Blue Vein stories dramatize how individual social ascendancy must be accompanied by responsibility for others, especially for one's family. Chesnutt manipulates and dislocates the color line but also goes further to expose class as a performance maintained by customs—customs that, as he suggests, can be reinterpreted according to a basis that

promotes the advancement of ambitious African Americans.

For “those who think negroes are all alike” In recounting the difficulties that Chesnutt faced with the reception of The Wife of His Youth, scholars have cited racial miscegenation, as gestured to in “Her Virginia Mammy,” as the most volatile subject that risked alienating the author's audience. To be sure, turn-of-the-century Page 157 → reviews critique Chesnutt's “stories of the color line” for broaching the indelicate matter of interracial kinship. However, I want to suggest that Chesnutt's dual focus on race and class difference may account for the significant anxiety his works met with by both black and white audiences. By imagining a black middle class that, not incidentally, was comprised primarily of mixed-race people, Chesnutt struck a nerve with audiences on both sides of the color line. As Andrews surmises, “there can be little question” that Chesnutt's Blue Vein stories “that spotlighted the urban mulatto subculture for the first time in mainstream American fiction” helped gain him literary attention (Literary Career, 109). Reading (between) the lines of reviews indicates how Chesnutt needed to work within and against popular misclassifications of African Americans to present their experiences in fiction. In the relationship between text and audience, a ripple of class anxiety reverberates from the fictional world of Groveland (based partly on black class relations in Cleveland) to actual readers who identify with or distance themselves from the Blue Veins. The Blue Vein stories in The Wife of His Youth serve, in part, to familiarize Chesnutt's white audience with black social ambition, or as the author phrased it in now well-known passages from his early journal, to effect the “elevation of the whites” and “lead them on gradually to a desired state of feeling” about African Americans (Journals, 139, 140). Reviewers such as William Dean Howells detected this strategy, noting that Chesnutt's portraiture presents mixed-race Americans as mediating the polarizing effects of the black-white social divide. Chesnutt “dealt not only with people who were not white,” Howells observes, “but with people who were not black enough to contrast grotesquely with white people—who in fact were of that near approach to the ordinary American in race and color” (“Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories,” 232). Throughout the review of “Mr. Charles W. Chesnutt's Stories,” originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in May 1900, Howells repeatedly claims to evaluate Chesnutt's fiction according to color-blind literary standards, judging the texts' settings and originality, as well as the author's narrative handling (233). Yet Howells's personal curiosity about light-skinned middle-class people betrays his intended objective professionalism. More than once, his critical analysis lapses into wide-eyed wonderment at the genteel African Americans. “They [Blue Veins] have within their own circles the same social ambitions and prejudices,” Howells apprises his readers. “We may choose to think them droll in their parody of pure white society, but perhaps it would be wiser to recognize that they are like us” (234). Page 158 → In the Blue Vein stories, Chesnutt presents a class of African Americans that many whites considered threatening because, through their social, political, and economic success, ambitious blacks aimed to disprove claims of racial inferiority, gradually eroding a central tenet of white privilege. The depiction of black elites whose social lives included balls, literary clubs, fine dining, and clothing demanded that many of Chesnutt's white readers stretch their racial and class tolerance. Howells's sense that the Blue Veins perform a “parody of pure white society” deflects two deeper conclusions that some of his readers may have hesitated to admit: first, “that they [the Blue Veins] are like us” (234). By acknowledging the similarities between white and black bourgeois Americans, who were alike in defending their social status from perceived offenses, Howells gestures toward the cross-racial middle-class alliances that Chesnutt would model at the end of The Marrow of Tradition. But the second conclusion that Howells attempts to avoid—though central to Chesnutt's own analysis—is that “white society” is far from racially “pure.” Howells intended his remarks as a compliment—and Chesnutt accepted it as such, writing to thank Howells for his “appreciative review” (“To Be an Author,” 146)—but the tone of the evaluation indicates how Chesnutt's audience could be disarmed by his serious treatment of a stratified black community. Like Howells's well-known assessment, other responses to the Blue Vein stories indicate that even when Chesnutt moves beyond the most common racial character types, such as the dialect-speaking storyteller Uncle Julius in his earlier short fiction, Chesnutt still encounters a minefield of stereotypical representations. The Blue Vein stories

function within and against misclassifications of middle-class black Americans as merely “putting on airs” or “acting white.” In nineteenth-century popular culture, minstrel shows, literature, and cartoons transmuted figures of upwardly mobile black Americans into caricatures of the black dandy, a self-important social climber whose affectations, conspicuous fashion, and exaggerated speech signified on white upper-class taste. In one sense, the figure of the dandy encoded complexly layered projections of white Americans’ anxiety over the precarity of their own social positions. In the spectacle of black dandies, such as the antebellum character Long Tail Blue or the later, more insidious figure of Jim Crow (Lewis, “Daddy Blue,” 258), white readers and onlookers parodied the black middle class as desiring unattainable class distinction.7 Yet, as Monica Miller reminds us, far from being an entirely comic or pejorative practice, “black dandyism” Page 159 → represents “moments of mobility and fixity, depending on who is looking” (Slaves to Fashion, 3). As resistant observers, African Americans often chose to understand dandyism as a way to demystify white exclusivity over proper taste. Thus in Chesnutt's fiction, dapper, self-conscious black Americans such as Mr. Ryder or Solomon Sadler could expose the presumed dividing lines between white and black, real and artificial, as strikingly arbitrary. In an unsigned review in the Illustrated Buffalo Express in December 1899, a reader notes that in The Wife of His Youth, the array of black character types, “rich and poor, light and black, cultivated and ignorant,” usefully complicates the usual monolithic depiction of blackness. “They [the stories] should be read by those who think negroes are all alike,” the reviewer concludes (“Some Short Stories,” 30). Yet other readers detracted that intraracial stratification, especially based on skin-color gradations, exposed black Americans as complicit in fetishizing whiteness. As a contributor to the Boston Evening Transcript proposes, “Even though the stigma was removed which differentiates the black race in the estimation of the white, their own class distinctions, based on shades of color, will carry on the evils of the situation indefinitely” (“Chesnutt's Tales,” 25). Given that blackness continues to be stigmatized well into the twentieth century (and arguably to the present), the Boston correspondent too hastily celebrates the turn of the twentieth century as a relatively color-blind historical moment. Presumably penned by a nonblack American, as signaled by the third-person pronoun “their,” the review suggests how postemancipatory liberalism conceded that black Americans could be equal to whites but also easily concluded that they never were, all the while obscuring how white supremacy ensured that outcome. By blaming black Americans for the colorism within their communities, as well as for their lack of parity with whites, the Boston reviewer denies what Saidiya Hartman identifies as “the tragic continuities in antebellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness” (Scenes of Subjection, 7). In this regard, emancipation served as an artificial marker that belied how much antebellum racial attitudes still prevailed. Far from being “removed,” as the reviewer suggests, the stigmatization of blackness that framed postbellum law and culture reinforced whiteness—and within black communities, near whiteness—as a coveted property. Yet the reviewer's misreading suggests that literary representations of the black class order could inadvertently reinscribe, rather than challenge, the force of racial discrimination. Page 160 → Recognizing this, black audiences often were anxious over the sociopolitical implications of how Chesnutt represented intraracial class distinctions. Scholarship has tended to pay greater attention to Chesnutt's appeal to genteel whites, but his reception among the black constituency that Elizabeth McHenry would call regrettably “forgotten readers” shows that his simultextual narratives spurred debate over black fiction's role in public representation.8 Just as Boston clubwoman Addie Jewell critiques Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces for depicting class antipathy among church members, Chesnutt's black readers considered whether his portrayals of the Blue Veins air the “dirty laundry” of racial disunity. An exchange between two opposing reviewers is notable in this regard. In the Odd Fellows Journal, the national publishing organ of the black fraternity of Odd Fellows, editor John C. Asbury resents that Chesnutt misspends his “splendid ability” in discussing the privileged rather than representing the broader concerns of black America (quoted in “Timely Topics Tallied,” 14). As Asbury adds, the “coterie of colored people in Cleveland, Ohio” on whom Chesnutt bases his fictional characters has “long been the butt of ridicule of the entire race,” and by portraying them, Chesnutt exposes the foibles of the black middle class to white readers. In a direct retort to Asbury on January 27, 1900, a contributor to the Colored American newspaper argues instead that Chesnutt's short stories offer a necessary intervention in the limited

literary depictions of black Americans. The unnamed Colored American staffer argues: Mr. Asbury forgets that Mr. Chesnutt, like [Paul Laurence] Dunbar, writes for the reading constituency, that constituency thus far has shown more interest in…the contented masses, not helped by culture than those of the classes who are bent on civil and social recognition. Let Mr. Asbury be patient. The ‘jim crow’ and the ‘blue veined’ will not be the only types to interest the reading public. (“Timely Topics Tallied,” 14) Though the reviewer does not racially mark the “reading constituency” or “reading public” as primarily white, these comments allude to the literary constraints that critics often have associated with Chesnutt's and Dunbar's crossover popularity. While the Colored American reviewer envisions that patience will do the work of maturing readers’ interests in additional black character types, African American readers such as Asbury fear that rather than complicating the depiction of blackness, Page 161 → Chesnutt offers up yet another single-dimensional figure for the cultural imagination: not the “black rapist,” “happy darky,” or “tragic mulatto/a” this time, but a blue-veined elite whose interests are more superficial than substantive, more about colorism than civil liberties. Responses such as Asbury's show how Chesnutt's stories provoked the fear of upwardly mobile black Americans being estranged from less privileged ones, a concern marked elsewhere in black literary and artistic representations of light-skinned African Americans. In the specific context of black cultural production, the many stories, poems, and songs that parodied “blue-veined” blacks assumed a different function than when produced or consumed by white arbiters, as described earlier. Intraracial critiques of light-skinned aristocrats of color, based on their real or imagined slights against darker and/or poorer African Americans, emphasized collective racial advancement over case-by-case instances of race- or class-passing. As historian Kevin Gaines has noted, “mulatto-baiting” or “mulatto-bashing” censored the supposed treachery of mixed-race people accruing wealth, talent, and privilege without accepting responsibility for and claiming relation to the black masses (Gaines, Uplifting the Race, 118). Chesnutt departs from this tradition of mulatto-bashing, however, by sympathetically rendering his class-passers. The author himself belonged to the Cleveland Social Circle, an organization of middle-class African Americans much like the one he describes in the Blue Vein stories. “I shared their sentiments to a degree,” Chesnutt admits, explaining his relation to the group's exclusionary principles, “though I could see the comic side of them” (quoted in Andrews, Literary Career, 111). Chesnutt represents the black middle class as neither an object of mockery, as in minstrelsy and mulatto-bashing, nor an idealized model of selfless racial leadership, as in Frances Harper's Iola Leroy (1892), in which the mostly mulatto “better class” convene at the conversazione to strategize racial uplift. Since prosperous people of color could be read as suspect by both black and white audiences, why would Chesnutt have chosen to use the Blue Veins as the subject of his fiction, exposing their foibles, insecurities, and performances? Howells had noted how the Blue Veins consciously perform and guard their class status, but he missed the underlying social critique Chesnutt inscribes in the stories: racial bigotry motivates ambitious African Americans to extreme measures of class-passing within black communities and racial passing (when possible) in order to gain additional privileges. Page 162 → In order to grasp fully the stories' implications, Chesnutt's original readers, as well as contemporary scholars, have to recognize the slippage between how class lines and racial categorizations operate. However, Chesnutt's ironic analysis of class formation among black Americans risks being mistaken, leading one critic to read “A Matter of Principle,” for example, as the author's all-encompassing denouncement of discrimination. Earle V. Bryant proposes, “Discrimination is discrimination, Chesnutt is arguing in the story, and intraracial racism is no less odious nor more excusable than white racism simply because black people are the ones discriminating against each other” (“Blue Veins,” 77). However Bryant's nearly synonymous use of “discrimination,” “intraracial racism, ” and “white racism” does not allow for Chesnutt's careful reappropriation of certain forms of “discrimination” as functional and indispensible. Chesnutt would make this argument more evident in The Marrow of Tradition by showing how social exclusions and affiliations based on class affinity would prove less violent and disruptive to both intraracial and interracial relations.

From Race to Class: Class Affinity and the End(s) of Discrimination The Marrow of Tradition dramatizes the social conflicts that arise when deeply entrenched racism in the post-Civil War South trumps the class-oriented paradigm that Chesnutt proposes. Set in Wellington, North Carolina, the pseudonymous site of the 1898 riot in Wilmington, North Carolina, the novel tells the story of mounting racial tensions when white Democrats try to regain political power against what they perceive as “Negro domination,” that is, black participation in local and state electoral politics. The city's leading white power brokers, the Big Three, orchestrate a violent plot against the black community, which organizes in self-defense. In this racially polarized society, middle-class Wellington citizens such as the black Miller family and the white Carterets who otherwise might collaborate remain alienated. Meanwhile, people who share a racial background often associate across awkward cross-class affiliations, lacking what Chesnutt elsewhere calls “kindred standards of thought and feeling.” By modeling functional class affinities alongside dysfunctional racial solidarity, Chesnutt promotes interracial alliances between “better-class” whites and blacks who collaborate as the guardians of society. Page 163 → In staging two alternatives for the American social order—one class based, the other race based—Chesnutt situates a pivotal scene in a Jim Crow train car, a setting that recalls legal contestations in the 1890s over racial segregation, especially aboard public conveyances. When Dr. William Miller travels south from New York to North Carolina, he initially occupies a first-class rail car, in which he unexpectedly meets his former mentor, Dr. Alvin Burns. As the two men renew their acquaintance, discussing medical journals, the Negro problem, and their recent international travels, the scene focuses on their shared lifestyles and values, only belatedly revealing each man's racial identity. As the narrator explains, only when “looking at these two men with the American eye, the differences would perhaps be more striking…for the first was white and the second black, or more correctly speaking, brown” (502). By postponing details about Dr. Miller's background as the son of “a thrifty colored man, ” Chesnutt plays on his readers’ likely association of middle-class status with whiteness (503). Instead, his description emphasizes the two doctors' commonalities, modeling how readers, too, might disregard their racial difference. By assuming that interracial social relations between like-minded men such as Drs. Miller and Burns may lessen the severity of racial discrimination, Chesnutt asserts what cultural anthropologist John L. Jackson Jr. identifies as an enduring antiracist strategy among the black middle class, well into the era of integration. While “anonymity breeds potential drive-by racial stereotyping,” Jackson notes, using a modern turn of phrase, “the comforts of interracial social intimacy help to beat back some of the harsh vulgarities of John/Jane Doe racism” (“In Medias Race,” 37). Chesnutt explores this possibility by foregrounding interracial friendship and kinship in The Marrow of Tradition. When a train porter explains that black people can only ride in the first-class car in the capacity of servant, Dr. Burns defends Dr. Miller by objecting, “The gentleman is not my servant, nor anybody's servant, but is my friend” (506). Attentive to the designations Dr. Burns uses to elide social inequality, the porter retorts, “I'm sorry to part friends, but the law of Virginia does not permit colored passengers to ride in the white cars” (506, original emphasis). By italicizing “friends” as a key term in the exchange, Chesnutt shows how the color line disrupts what he elsewhere calls “mental stimulus” and “inspiring friendship” (“Social Discrimination,” 424). In his portrayal, such voluntary relationships are the sign of unhindered access that reflects a thoroughgoing shift in both racial policies and individuals' attitudes towards race. By contrast, the color line induces subtle Page 164 → violence as well as physical brutality, for even though Dr. Miller is not forcibly ejected from the first-class car, one may say that his ego suffers violence when he is compelled to leave his white colleague and remove to the unkempt “Colored” section. In emphasizing class affinity as the preferable form of social difference, Chesnutt highlights the existing structure of racial division, and its corollary, black solidarity, as problematic by comparison. Being “something of a philosopher,” Dr. Miller determines that racial discrimination is not simply unethical but impractical (511). Through a little quick number-crunching, he concludes that the rail company needlessly expends extra fuel by carrying a separate Jim Crow car (512). Moreover, and of more immediate concern to him, segregating the cars according to “white” and “colored” disregards the social differences within each race, forcing erudite and unlearned, well-dressed and dirty, rich and poor to jostle along together and tolerate each other's company. Dr.

Miller proposes, “Surely, if a classification of passengers on trains was at all desirable, it might be made upon some more logical and considerate basis than a mere arbitrary, tactless, and by the very nature of things, brutal drawing of a color line” (512, emphasis added). He begins by meditating on the possible expediency of racial equality and integration. But he concludes by contemplating some alternative basis of classification, preferably one that would separate him from the company of “a party of farm laborers, fresh from daily toil” (511). Dr. Miller's extended philosophizing in the Jim Crow car exemplifies one narrative pattern that African American writers use to express class anxiety. To represent the fear of estrangement that upwardly mobile individuals feel from the black majority, postbellum fiction often features lone intellectuals contemplating their social belonging through reveries, asides, or internal dialogues. Against the action of the moving train, Chesnutt brings the narrative to a relative standstill by turning to Dr. Miller's thoughts. The doctor initially feels a sense of kinship with the other black passengers, declaring them “his people” (511). But he is shocked out of sentimentality for the “noisy, loquacious, happy and malodorous” group and concludes that “personally, and apart from the mere matter of racial sympathy, these people were just as offensive to him as to the whites” (511). In depicting the doctor's ambivalent identification with the larger black community, this scene in The Marrow of Tradition resonates with similar passages of black intellectuals' introspection and estrangement in fiction by Johnson, Du Bois, Sutton Griggs, and Paul Page 165 → Laurence Dunbar. In an instance that most resembles Dr. Miller's reflections aboard the Jim Crow car, the educated minister in Dunbar's “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope” (1898) descends from a segregated rail car questioning his likeness to the surrounding rural blacks. Reverend Dokesbury considers, “Was he, after all, different from the majority of the people with whom he was supposed to have all thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common?” (16). He attempts to quiet his fear of estrangement by motivating working-class black Americans’ economic growth, thereby trying to “uplift” them to his standards. But Dunbar's momentary focus on the minister's class anxiety challenges easy assumptions about whether racial background alone constitutes “thoughts, feelings, and emotions in common” (Dunbar, “Ordeal at Mt. Hope,” 16). Indeed, Chesnutt employs the similar phrase “kindred standards of thought and feeling” to posit class rather than race as the basis of commonality (“Social Discrimination,” 424). In The Marrow of Tradition, Dr. Miller's extended contemplation slows the plot's pace and moves the action internally to the thoughts and feelings that Chesnutt presents as a more logical basis “than a mere arbitrary, tactless…brutal drawing of a color line” (512). In addition to revealing how Jim Crow artificially aggregates black Americans, Chesnutt shows how the system accredits uncultured whites with a greater class status than they otherwise could claim. Just as scenes set in Jim Crow train cars are a staple in anti-segregation literature, so, too, is the character type of the poor, immoral, or uncouth white American who shores up the comparative social superiority of the black middle class. Captain McBane, who orders that Dr. Miller be removed to the Jim Crow car, is described as a “broad-shouldered, burly white man” known for his profanity and his gaudy, but nonetheless slovenly, appearance (506). The narrator implies that in terms of respectability, Dr. Miller proves a more fitting first-class passenger than Captain McBane. Were it not for his intense racial hatred for blacks, Captain McBane would perhaps find himself more comfortably seated among the farm laborers. Chesnutt's description of Captain McBane bears an uncanny likeness to a similar train car scene in Anna Julia Cooper's nonfiction collection, A Voice from the South (1892). In her essay “Woman versus the Indian,” Cooper recounts her encounter with a gruff white man, casting her authoritative gaze to mock the white passenger: But when a great burly six feet of masculinity with sloping shoulders and unkempt beard swaggers in, and, throwing a roll of tobacco Page 166 → into one corner of his jaw, growls out at me over the paper I am reading, “Here gurl,” (I am past thirty) “you better git out ’n dis kyar ’f yer don't, I'll put yer out,”—my mental annotation is Here's an American citizen who has been badly trained. He is sadly lacking in both “sweetness” and “light.” (“Woman versus the Indian,” 94–95, original emphasis) Cooper caricatures her white accuser's dialect and slovenly appearance to contrast her public performance of middle-class taste, signified by her formal speech and reading. Implicitly arguing for the practicality of class distinctions over racial ones, both Cooper and Chesnutt note the taste, intelligence, and restraint of middle-class African Americans who are assigned seats worse than those of less genteel passengers. As Chesnutt creates a

survey of travelers—ranging from Captain McBane, to a Negro nurse seated beside her white mistress, to a white dog—he indicates how jarring it is to have these passengers sorted according to the conventional means of color. Dr. Miller represents one of the few instances of a black American climbing the social ladder; he descends from an enslaved grandfather who purchased his own freedom and a freeborn father who thrived as a businessman. Yet even the Millers’ “better-class” status remains an unenviable social position, for the violent plot hatched by Carteret, Major Belmont, and Captain McBane aims most directly at middle-class blacks, whom whites consider a threat to the racialized social hierarchy. Chesnutt underscores how, as Amy Lang denotes, “as the central signifier of African American social and economic mobility, black-owned property serves as the lightning rod for racist attack” (Syntax of Class, 49). As white marauders burn the hospital Dr. Miller built with his father's money, they reinforce southern restrictions on black class ambitions. As Chesnutt delineates the strata of African Americans in Wellington, presenting representatives of some classes in greater detail than others, his uneven characterization reveals much about his vision of class relations. “Although they are not all developed as characters with equal effectiveness,” Sundquist suggests, “the blacks of The Marrow of Tradition represent a wider range of class and type than any other such fictional group of the period” (To Wake the Nations, 447). The bottom rung of black society in Wellington is occupied by a broad unskilled laboring class, represented most visibly by Josh Green, a stevedore who works at the docks for Dr. Miller's brother and, during the riot, leads black men in Page 167 → self-defense. In characterizing Josh, Chesnutt addresses a number of stereotypes about the black working class as either carefree and unthinking or, conversely, bitter and violent. At points throughout the novel, Josh embodies each of these attributes. He impulsively fights an immigrant coworker who calls him a “damn' low-down nigger” (550) and plots to kill Captain McBane, the white man partly responsible for the death of his father. Yet Chesnutt does not depict Josh as entirely prey to his emotions and circumstances. In occasional appearances in the novel, Josh Green appears more complex and humane than most of the working-class male characters presented elsewhere in Chesnutt's fiction. Described alternately as “a huge negro” (510) and “a black giant” (550), Josh possesses the physical type of the infamous “black beast” of postbellum white imagination. In actuality, however, Josh is not a misfit lurking and waiting to violate a defenseless white woman (an accusation erroneously leveled at an African American personal servant, Sandy Campbell). Chesnutt depicts the retainer class (Sandy Campbell, Mammy Jane, and her grandson Jerry Letlow) as most vulnerable to attack from the white patrons who afford their relative privilege. As the personal servant to an old aristocrat, Sandy is “a survival of an interesting type. He had inherited the feudal deference for his superiors in position, joined to a certain self-respect which saved him from sycophancy. His manners had been formed upon those of old Mr. Delamere, and were not a bad imitation” (566). As Monica Miller suggests through a savvy reading of Sandy's dandified apparel, his suit of mismatched clothes, including a gentleman's castoff blue coat along with his own more recently purchased pants, is “an embodiment of Sandy's history and his modest ambitions” (Slaves to Fashion, 127). Yet however much Sandy seeks to share his master's values and deportment, his class ambitions have little purchase when young Tom Delamere secretly impersonates him to perform a blackface cakewalk and murder a white woman, Polly Ochiltree. Sandy's clothes, which signify his class desire, are props that enable Tom's disguise. In order to execute his morally and legally transgressive acts, Tom counts on the fact that the public will assume there is little difference between black class climbers and criminals. Indeed, there is little coincidence that Sandy, recognized as a “gentleman in ebony” by his paternalistic employer, is instead framed as an oversexualized black brute (485). As a result of Tom's blackface actions, Sandy spirals downward: from favored, self-respecting servant to inebriate among manual laborers and, finally, falsely charged criminal. Page 168 → In the virulently racist southern setting of The Marrow of Tradition, African Americans derive little agency from the conventional means of class advancement, such as performing middle-class manners, practicing thrift, or pursuing a profession. In addition to dramatizing this dilemma in Sandy's case, the novel highlights the similarly thwarted ambitions of a formally educated African American nurse who is unfairly fired by the Carterets. First

described as “a neat-looking brown girl, dressed in a calico gown,” the young woman who has been trained by Dr. Miller is a New Negro who self-consciously defines her status based on respectability and ambition (497). Unlike her predecessor Mammy Jane, who conforms to the stereotype of the loyal black servant, the trained nurse instead considers her relation to the white family as “purely a matter of business; she sold her time for their money. There was no question of love between them” (498). Resisting the conflation of physical and emotional labor that Mammy Jane practices, the nurse bases her work for the Carterets on a cash nexus rather than on white paternalism. But rather than affording her additional job opportunities, the nurse's education and self-perception make her less marketable because she lacks the requisite subordination that her white employers demand. Mrs. Carteret terminates the nurse after the young woman takes her ward, Dodie Carteret, for a visit at Dr. Miller's household, where her sister works as a servant. The nurse's errand highlights the parallels between middle-class blacks and whites since the Millers, like the white Carterets, employ a housekeeper. Mrs. Carteret resents this parallel when she hears that her infant son has unwittingly transgressed the spatial boundaries between the “better classes” of both races while in the nurse's care. The nurse is fired not for any professional inadequacy, but because the Carterets feel threatened by the black middle class to which she aspires. By describing the nurse's outcome, Chesnutt considers the class anxieties of African Americans who are striving toward, but have not yet achieved, middle-class status. Drawing attention to the narrative construction of his novel and the larger history of the New South, Chesnutt inserts the young woman as a counterpoint to Mammy Jane, the deferential servant type portrayed nostalgically in turn-of-the-century popular culture. As a representative of “the younger generation of colored people,” the nurse is “entitled to a paragraph in a story of Southern life” (497). But by leaving the young woman unnamed and granting her story little more than a paragraph of ink, Chesnutt dismisses her fear of misclassification as an undesirable, heightened response to class transformations Page 169 → that were particularly volatile in the post-emancipation era. Rather than fitting easily into a finite class position, the young nurse is “standing, like most young people of her race, on the border line between two irreconcilable states of life,” scornful of those she calls “old-time Negroes” and yet lacking the “unconscious dignity” of freeborn people (497). In a southern society shifting to a capitalist economy from the “feudal atmosphere” in which Mammy Jane reflects the status of her white employers (498), each woman remains sensitive to defending her social position. The narrator conceptualizes racial and class advancement as evolutionary stages in social formation and summarizes the young nurse as being “in what might be called the chip-on-the shoulder stage, through which races as well as individuals must pass in climbing the ladder of life,—not an interesting, at least not an agreeable stage, but an inevitable one” (497). Presumably, after the self-conscious “chip-on-the-shoulder stage, ” educated young black women such as the nurse may be free to pursue upward mobility without fear of critique from “old-time Negroes” such as Mammy Jane or retaliation from conservative whites. The Marrow of Tradition suggests that few opportunities exist for African Americans to subvert the South's rigidly set social system through class-passing. Though Chesnutt attends to intraracial tensions between Mammy Jane and the rest of the Carterets' African American staff, such as the young nurse, his greater focus on interracial conflict indicates how racial solidarity generally supersedes the importance of class differences in the South. By contrast, in the Blue Vein stories set in Ohio, class-passers manipulate the fissures in Groveland's social structure so that Mr. Ryder in “The Wife of His Youth,” for example, can work his way up the professional ladder by demonstrating work ethic, thrift, and skill. In the North, his occupation and cultivated taste allow him to blend in with the black elites and aspire to “the upward process of absorption” among whites (“Wife of His Youth,” 104). Chesnutt depicts the South, however, as less responsive in rewarding black people's display of middle-class values. As Sandy Campbell, the black nurse, and other African Americans discover when their jobs are terminated and lives are threatened, at each turn racism obviates the economic and social power that black people attempt to gain through their adherence to middle-class ideology. Chesnutt retorts the possible assumption that upwardly mobile African Americans are the mere imitation of white Americans, instead revealing how whites stage fiendish attempts to reinforce their racial privilege. Chesnutt significantly shifts the expected relations of black and white, Page 170 → appearance and reality. Howells faulted The Marrow of Tradition as a “bitter, bitter” exaggeration of the moral character of white Americans, and the reading audience guided by his evaluation seemingly were unwilling to interrogate whiteness as a precarious

performance maintained, in many cases, through the sheer force of violence (Howells, “Psychological CounterCurrent,” 882). Through scenes of white Americans struggling to retain unstable markers such as “gentleman,” Chesnutt particularly points to white aristocracy as an imitation for which no original exists. Stephen Knadler proposes that for Chesnutt, “Whiteness is not only a ‘cultural fiction’ but also a performance that is always in the process of (but never quite successful at) imitating and approximating itself” (Knadler, “Untragic Mulatto,” 428). Chesnutt's analysis of class among white southerners details the postbellum transition from a slavocracy, complete with white aristocrats such as the elder Mr. Delamere, to a stratified class system that depends on breeding, birth, and increasingly money. Chesnutt's most masterful representation of class performance occurs in chapter 8, “The Cakewalk,” as Tom Delamere appears in blackface, dressed as his grandfather's manservant Sandy. Chesnutt contrasts the ease with which Tom acts as a black performer with his difficulty acting as an upper-class white man. Described as possessing a “certain element, feline rather than feminine, which subtly negatived the idea of manliness,” Tom fails to embody the status of “gentleman” to which he is entitled by his lineage (Marrow of Tradition, 478). His habits of drinking, gambling, and borrowing money from his servant reveal Tom as unable to maintain the required façade of his class position. Meanwhile, when Tom performs for northern visitors who want to gain a well-rounded impression of the southern race problem, he in fact excels working-class African American dancers in executing the steps of the cakewalk. As Tom Delamere later dresses up as Sandy to kill and rob a white woman, Polly Ochiltree, his deception relies on stereotypes of black Americans’ criminal character. Ironically, however, Tom Delamere inadvertently implodes the argument of racial regression, which proposed that cultivated African Americans merely masked their instinctive savagery, since it is Tom, and not Sandy, whose real self is corrupt.9 As Dean McWilliams notes, Tom's overacting of blackness exposes his own failed performance of whiteness. “Exaggeration is the key to the psychological power of this stereotypical representation and a tip-off to its falsity” (Charles W. Chesnutt, 163). Tom's cross-racial disguise is less about his performance of blackness than about his performance of whiteness. Page 171 → Chesnutt further explores the idiosyncrasies of the race and class matrix in the South through Captain McBane, whose attempts at upward mobility cannot achieve even the feeble appearance of gentility attempted by Tom Delamere. Despite his money, the parvenu McBane is lacking in manners, morals, and aesthetic sensibilities. The narrator highlights McBane's inability to class-pass successfully, for his social performance undeniably conveys his poor white origins. As one African American waiter describes McBane, “He ain’ nothing’ but po’ wi'te trash nohow; but Lawd! Lawd! Look at de money he's got,—livin' at de hotel, wearin’ di'mon's, an’ colloguin’ wid de bes' quality er dis town!” (492). The waiter's observations note that McBane's new wealth and, moreover, his whiteness partly compensate for his lower-class origins. However, the novel also underscores the superficiality of the relationships between white men on the basis of race alone, for while McBane collaborates with aristocrats to plan the riot, he is not welcomed as their social peer in private settings. In a chapter entitled “The Social Aspirations of Captain McBane,” Chesnutt distinguishes between the economic and the aesthetic components of class. The captain's unabashed self-assertion lacks the stealthiness characteristic of passing, for he aggressively asserts his ambitions with little self-consciousness. Still, when McBane attains leverage over Tom Delamere because of a gambling debt, he manipulates Tom into recommending him for membership in the elite Claredon Club: Delamere was annoyed at this request. His aristocratic gorge rose at the presumption of this son of an overseer and ex-driver of convicts. McBane was good enough to win money from, or even to lose money to, but not good enough to be recognized as a social equal. (586–87) Tom's reaction to McBane's request indicates, as Max Weber explains, that “the status order would be threatened at its very root if mere economic acquisition and naked economic power still bearing the stigma of its extra-status origin could bestow upon anyone who has won them the same or ever greater honor as the vested interests claim for themselves” (“Class, Status, Party,” 53). Furthermore, Chesnutt shows the status order as threatened by racism,

which forces ill-bred white men into awkward collusion with upper-class whites in the name of racial solidarity against blacks. In this respect, racism poses a threat not only to the black Americans Page 172 → at whom it is directed but also to whites such as Tom Delamere and Carteret whose class privilege is infringed upon by racist, ruthless men such as McBane. Chesnutt's characterization of McBane is important in this respect because he shows how McBane's “social aspiration” to assert himself among the old aristocracy poses more of a threat, and is less merited, than a similar upward move by middle-class blacks like the Millers. In this regard, the novel proposes that affiliations between better-class whites and blacks should seem preferable to cross-class encounters between dissimilar white men on the sheer basis of race. The principle of class affinity as friendship also helps to interpret the conclusion of the novel, as the Millers and Carterets finally encounter one another face to face and determine whether kindred interests will triumph over racism. Chesnutt attributes middle-class African Americans with exchange value within the South's social economy. Unlike the nurse, the butler, and the series of untrained or semitrained servants who interact with the Carterets as subordinates, Miller as an educated man shares both his professional labor and his social leadership with the New South. Unlike the collegial rapport between Drs. Burns and Miller, the embittered relationship between the Carterets and Millers comes to a life-threatening crisis before the black family can be accepted, even temporarily, into social equality. When the Carterets require a doctor to save their son Dodie's life, all the white physicians are unavailable, many of them detained by circumstances related to the riot that Carteret and his colleagues initiated. In a fit of desperation, the Carterets seek Dr. Miller's medical assistance, which he agrees to offer only if his wife, Janet, consents. Framing his encounter with Miller as a business exchange rather than a social call, Carteret explains that he approaches the black man “as a physician, to engage your professional services for my child” (711). Though Carteret realizes his folly in starting the riot and previously refusing to admit Miller to his home, the two men cannot move past reason toward the “inspiring friendship” that Chesnutt aims to promote. In this case, the Carterets find that aligning themselves with people of the same class serves them better than pursuing strained relationships with people like Tom Delamere and Captain McBane in the name of race. By relaxing their adherence to the color line, the Carterets gain access to additional resources in the midst of their crisis: Dr. Miller's medical services and Janet Miller's emotional empathy. Through the interaction between the two women of the feuding families, Chesnutt underscores how affective ties create stronger relationships Page 173 → between middle-class whites and blacks. More so than their husbands, the half sisters Olivia Carteret and Janet Miller determine whether “kindred standards of thought and feeling” can withstand the power of racism. After her husband's failed attempt, Olivia seeks out the doctor and her half sister. Although readers cannot know whether an “inspiring friendship” will ensue between the two families, given that the novel concludes just after Janet grants her husband permission to serve the Carterets’ child, there is between the two women “the mental and spiritual stimulus which comes from meeting” (Chesnutt, “Social Discrimination, ” 424). Janet underscores this “stimulus” by divulging her motivations. Though her own son has been killed, Janet explains to Olivia that she will allow her husband to render his services, “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” (Marrow of Tradition, 718). In the end, Olivia is the subject on stage at her sister's feet, begging that Dr. Miller might save young Carteret's life. At once keen to the performative exchange and the shift of authority from white to black, Stephen Knadler envisions, “Onto the vacated pedestal, the black women step up to evoke the affective ties of a reimagined twentieth-century interracial community” (“Untragic Mulatto,” 437). Janet's emergence “onto the vacated pedestal” distinguishes her as a figure of upward mobility in the novel.10 While racism effectively negates other African Americans’ efforts to cultivate social status in the town, Janet is able to undermine racism by allowing her gracious thoughts and feelings to prevail. By the novel's end, following the riot, the Millers are the only named black characters alive and remaining in Wellington. As representatives of the black middle class, Dr. and Janet Miller serve as the Talented Tenth of their race who will lead social relations at the turn of the century. Chesnutt promoted black class attainment, using privileged men such as Ryder, Mr. Clayton, and Dr. Miller as his protagonists, but multiple paradoxes complicate a class-based approach to attaining black civil liberties. As the Blue Vein tales show, one paradox is that as individual African Americans gained upward mobility within their own communities or, less frequently, across the color line, these middle-class subjects risked becoming estranged

from the larger black community. Chesnutt does not read this estrangement as an unwarranted loss, but he does indicate how it might jeopardize African American community-building, which enabled blacks to cope, thrive, and affirm themselves under adverse racial conditions. Another paradox is that under the hostile regime Page 174 → of Jim Crow, black class achievement attracts the retaliatory violence of whites. In The Marrow of Tradition, black Americans are subject to white violence regardless of their class status. This fact was a reminder that Chesnutt's proposal of class-based social discrimination would remain impossible for exactly the reasons his book title suggests: white supremacy is embedded in the marrow of tradition.

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EPILOGUE Beyond the Talented Tenth W. E. B. Du Bois's essay “The Talented Tenth” (1903) offers what has become one of the most (in)famous paradigms for black intraracial class relations. As Du Bois envisioned it, the Talented Tenth comprises an educated cadre of African Americans responsible for mobilizing less privileged blacks toward social and economic advancement. Du Bois's manifesto appeared in The Negro Problem, a compilation of essays by nationally recognized African American social thinkers and writers, including Charles W. Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar.1 Contrary to the volume's title, however, Du Bois surmises that the nation erroneously assumed that “Negroes”—and not the concept of race or racism itself—was the real problem facing America. If observers considered black Americans a “problem,” Du Bois suggests, those observers had not carefully enough considered the refined black Americans he mentions in his essay: Talented Tenth representatives such as Phillis Wheatley, Frederick Douglass, physician James McCune Smith, and Congressman John Mercer Langston. Du Bois asserts, “You misjudge us because you do not know us” (“Talented Tenth,” 34). Du Bois's concern over the proper identification of the Talented Tenth resonates with the class anxiety of fiction writers and texts studied throughout Dividing Lines. More specifically, Du Bois's sense that the Talented Tenth was being “misjudged” is an iteration of the recurrent fear of misclassification in African American letters. Presuming the power of language to both reflect and constitute social relations, narrators and characters spiritedly refute class designations that conflict with their own self-identification. Thus when Du Bois wrote the “The Talented Tenth,” with a Harvard PhD and sociological expertise to authorize his social observations, he entered debates over the vocabulary of class and the function of stratification that were ongoing in the pages of African Page 176 → American fiction and black periodicals throughout the postbellum-pre-Harlem Renaissance era. Like Frances Harper, Sutton Griggs, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Pauline Hopkins, and Charles Chesnutt, Du Bois considers writing about class, and especially the black middle class, as central to the public representation of black Americans. Du Bois theorizes how “better-class” black Americans, with immediate social influence within segregated communities, might prove worthy of citizenship rights within an integrated United States. Though he outlines his theory of the Talented Tenth in essay form, he also turns to the genre of fiction to dramatize the class anxiety that accompanies the Talented Tenth's social position. Fiction writing offers Du Bois access to his black subject's thought processes, allowing him to show the personal fears and social interactions associated with individual classes. Du Bois's short story “Of The Coming of John,” the single fictional chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, chronicles John Jones's passage from boyish frivolity to manhood, from innocence to racial consciousness. But more strikingly for my purposes, “Of the Coming of John” is also a meditation on the potency—and limitations—of black class mobility as a means to attaining greater civil liberties. Taken together, “The Talented Tenth” and “Of The Coming of John” cogently show the fears of misclassification, downward mobility, and estrangement under study in Dividing Lines. Du Bois's assertion—“you misjudge us because you do not know us”—may be considered the refrain of postbellum African American writers inviting their black and white audiences to “judge” and “know” the intraracial class order that otherwise remains subsumed within the supposed “Negro problem.” Du Bois's sentence establishes a triangular relation among the addressee or reader (“you”), the Talented Tenth (“us”), and the black masses (the implied “them”) to persuade readers that for a select group of African Americans, class refinement should supersede the disadvantages associated with their race. In addition, Du Bois's statement is provocative for a second reason. When read across time, his assertion also might be addressed to a secondary audience: contemporary scholars of early African American literature who have neglected a more objective study of class divisions. As I have argued here, scholarly assumptions about Talented Tenth elitism have resulted in oversimplified assessments of the political and aesthetic intents of black middle-class writing.

The social philosophy behind the formation of an educated elite is not original to Du Bois.2 African American thinkers throughout the Page 177 → nineteenth century were attuned to intraracial class differences and designated middle-class racial leaders to guide social and political mobilization. For example, in briefly examining the social structure in Philadelphia in 1882, nearly two decades before Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro (1899), city commissioner H. Price Williams reiterated the mission of the black “better class.” In his editorial “The Organization of Colored Society,” Williams insists that the “better class” should serve as “walking mirrors” for other classes to “look and pattern after.” As he surmises, “The example of a refined, educated society tends to benefit the masses and inspire young men and women to seek the best associates” (1). Yet Du Bois's alliterative moniker “the Talented Tenth” and his innovations to the concept have been most enduring. Du Bois presents black education and intraracial stratification as crucial concerns for the nation's broader conundrum of class. If African Americans were being denied legal and social privilege based on their perceived lack of cultivation or socioeconomic value to the nation, Du Bois seeks to correct that misjudgment: Do Americans ever stop to reflect that there are in this land a million men of Negro blood, welleducated, owners of homes, against the honor of whose womanhood no breath was ever raised, whose men occupy positions of trust and usefulness, and who, judged by any standard, have reached the full measure of the best type of modern European culture? Is it fair, is it decent, is it Christian to ignore these facts of the Negro problem, to belittle such aspiration? (“Talented Tenth,” 44) Rather than assuming that his audience was deliberately indifferent or hostile toward black achievers, Du Bois assumes that his readers only need further information such as his survey could supply.3 In the course of the essay, he suggests that the leadership responsibilities entrusted to the Talented Tenth, based on their education and class affiliation, serve to alleviate the pressures of racial strife. By 1903, Du Bois was perhaps the “most widely published black essayist in the history of African Americans” since Frederick Douglass (Gates, “Parable of the Talents,” 119). Yet Du Bois turns to the short story form in “Of The Coming of John” to dramatize the anxiety-ridden experience of the black middle class denied political opportunities. In his rural hometown of Altamaha, John begins as “a good boy,—fine plough-hand Page 178 → …always good-natured and respectful” (Souls of Black Folk, 220). But though his laid-back personality wins him the affection of his black neighbors and the satisfied condescension of whites, John's character traits frustrate his academic performance when he enrolls at Wells Institute. After a brief school suspension, John studiously returns to graduate from Wells, “transformed” into a “tall, grave man” who understands “the Veil that lay between him and the white world” (222). Following a school-sponsored trip to New York after graduation, John ambivalently returns to his stifling hometown, where powerful whites counter his efforts to introduce a liberal curriculum in the local African American public school. At the story's end, John awaits a lynch mob after killing a white man who assaults his sister, Jennie. With its tragic ending, “Of the Coming of John” shows that John's attainment of education and manners fails to protect him from white social indignities, political exclusions, and violence. By tracing John's evolving awareness, Du Bois reveals that class distinction is less a matter of tangible acquisition than what Charles W. Chesnutt calls “standards of thought and feeling” (“Social Discrimination” 424). The story dramatizes John's class awakening, aided in part by a physical relocation away from the South, a space that symbolizes economic and intellectual stagnation, despite the development of “better-class” enclaves such as Wells Institute. After graduating from Wells, on his sojourn to New York, he witnesses and imbibes the genteel performance of “many of the richer and brighter” northerners: He scanned their rich and faultless clothes, the way they carried their hands, the shape of their hats; he peered into the hurrying carriages. Then, leaning back with a sigh, he said, “This is the World.” The notion suddenly seized him to see where the world was going. (222–23) John displaces the parochial perspective he had gained from his rural southern black community with a heightened awareness of highbrow culture. Though he appreciates the accoutrements that the passersby possess, his class ambition takes the form of desire for the demeanor—such as bodily posture—taste, and culture of the elite. Importantly, John spends his last five dollars not on consumer goods that outwardly signal class but on a ticket to

the theater, where he is awakened to an appreciation of classical music. After experiencing what he recognizes as “the Page 179 → World,” John returns to the South, perceiving his homecoming as a regrettable instance of downward mobility. Du Bois posits the conflict between John and his family as arising in part from the two groups' contrasting interpretations of the effects of education. As they anticipate John's homecoming, the town's black folk conceptualize greater education as directly affording greater material consumption. Envisioning new furnishings and renovations, his family and friends muse that when John returns, “what new furniture in the front room, —perhaps even a new front room; and there would be a new schoolhouse, with John as teacher” (220). While his supporters expect John to return equipped for teaching conventional subject matter that prepares young scholars for industrial trades and service jobs, he instead attempts to inculcate in his students an appreciation of what he calls “The World.” John Jones expresses his fear of estrangement through contemplative pangs of regret or guilt about relating ineffectively to other African Americans across class divides. Feeling ill at ease with other black Altamaha residents, John wonders, “What on earth had come over him?…He had come to save his people…and had outraged their deepest feelings…. He found it so hard and strange to fit his old surroundings again, to find his place in the world about him” (226–27). Such moments are marked by the character's introspection but also, as I have argued throughout this book, with narrative fissures. As the narrator explains John's thoughts, em-dashes punctuate the temporal slip between John's frivolous past as a “good boy” and his present as a melancholy Talented Tenth representative. Thinking back to his hometown experiences before school, John reflects, “The world seemed smooth and easy then. Perhaps,—but his sister came to the kitchen door just then and said the judge awaited him” (227). As his sister emerges from the judge's kitchen, where she works as a domestic servant, John recalls his separation from her and from the position of servility she fills and symbolizes. Du Bois concludes “Of the Coming of John” by signifying that upward class mobility entails anxiety as well as the more positive feelings of hopefulness one might associate with ascendancy. John's final action and demise are predicated on the racial tensions of the South because, when educated out of class affinity with his hometown, John lacks a way to sustain the social position to which he aspires. As Priscilla Wald writes, “His education, which stands between the Jones of his memory and the man awaiting lynching, has effected a dramatic change, cutting him off Page 180 → from his legacy, from the way he is constituted within his community” (Constituting Americans, 178). When John later kills a white man to protect his sister, Du Bois presents John as awakened to the principle of manly self-sacrifice that underlies the formulation of the Talented Tenth. The irony is that in one way, the white men who suggested that John would be ruined by his education are proven right. Rather than being prophetic, the men's works are almost inevitable. Racist logic prompts white men to forecast John's ruination and to enact the sexual violence and lynching that fulfill the claim. Like Du Bois, the African American authors I have studied here often depict class anxiety as a mode of social criticism that undercuts a more idealistic depiction of class mobility and cross-class collaboration. This suggests black writers' pessimism about class outcomes or the means of achieving them. In postbellum fiction, many black Americans pursue class advancement, if not through pecuniary gain then through greater respectability and esteem in the black community, as in Harper's Trial and Triumph. However, as Dunbar's and Griggs's works indicate, black writers also were aware of how patterns of discriminatory hiring and other racist practices ensured class immobility among African Americans, so much so that John Wysong in Griggs's Overshadowed enacts violence to defy his forced downward class mobility. In the conclusion of these novels, contestations of class are sometimes resolved through marital unions or social alliances. But more often, nearly each narrative reveals that even the “happy endings” entail some form of psychological, corporeal, economic, or familial loss for African Americans. In the fiction, African Americans gain class mobility by severing their relationships with families, temporarily accepting low-paying jobs, leaving the United States through voluntary or involuntary exile, or giving their literal lives to entrust to their descendants an improved quality of life. Each of the nineteenth-century African American authors I have examined affirms the need for class delineations and social stratification. Whether adhering to the religious principles of sowing and reaping, as articulated in

novels by Harper and Hopkins, or examining the sociopolitical implications of class-based “social discrimination, ” as does Chesnutt, African American writers accepted social classification as inevitable. In Harper's Iola Leroy, Dr. Latimer articulates this best as he asserts, “I know of no place on earth where there is perfect social equality, and I doubt if there is such a thing in heaven” (Iola Leroy, 228). Latimer concedes to classification as a function of sociopolitical and economic Page 181 → conditions in the United States—and perhaps also as a function of nature and the divine, as his reference to heaven implies. Class anxiety does not dissipate in the early twentieth century, but black Americans' concerns over intraracial class divisions thereafter take on additional forms, some of which historians and literary scholars already have begun to explore. As Michael Fultz suggests, “the black middle class and professional group's search for identity was more clearly defined in the 1920s than in the 1900s. ‘Signposts’ in the form of clearly delineated social and moral ‘duties’ were no longer needed” (Fultz, “‘Morning Cometh,’” 106). Yet the expectations of the Talented Tenth's moral duties and regulatory function were not dismissed wholesale; rather, black Americans' fear of misclassification continues to give rise to defensive postures. Candice Jenkins lucidly has shown that black Americans' preoccupation with what she calls the “salvific wish,” the desire to save the race through representing and exercising sexual propriety, may be read as one outgrowth of class anxiety (Private Lives, 13). What may most strikingly characterize twentieth-century black intraracial class dynamics is black Americans' skepticism about upward class mobility as a social maneuver bearing political resonance. While nineteenth-century black writers wanted genteel performance as a class-based strategy to prove their deservedness for civic and political rights, later racial discourse shifted from a model of “bourgeois respectability” to “a more masculine ideology of self-determination” (Wolcott, Remaking Respectability, 2). Thus the need to show African Americans as “aristocrats of the soul,” as in Harper's formulation, who behave themselves and attempt to lift the masses, gave way to increased activism, and literary production among the working classes themselves. If Du Bois at the turn of the century feared that the Talented Tenth might be “misjudged,” maligned, or taken for granted, then he anticipated the perspective that has characterized several twentieth-century evaluations of the black middle class in scholarship across disciplines. From E. Franklin Frazier's sociological study The Black Bourgeoisie (1957), to sociologist Michael Eric Dyson's more recent charge that perhaps the “Afristocracy” or “black middle class has lost its mind” (Is Bill Cosby Right? xiii), critiques of the black middle class are often couched in the language of neuroses and racial self-loathing. Such discussions frequently are accompanied by or embedded within emotionally saturated discourse, whether the denial, self-righteousness, and accusation that motivates many African American(ist) scholars' celebration of African Page 182 → American working-class folk and vernacular culture or a mixture of shame, pride, and ire. Postbellum black literature derives much of its subject and force from black Americans' class anxiety, both their anxiety over the relative benefits and responsibilities of middle-class status and their frustration over how little currency that status afforded in the face of white supremacy. Black writers and readers considered their focus on class divisions as central to their attempts to negotiate, reaffirm, and advance relations in black communities and across the color line. By eliding the differences that emerge among African Americans, or by treating “class” as if shorthand for or synonymous with “working class,” twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship repeats the conflation of race and class that nineteenth-century black writers resented as denying their individuality and impeding their civil rights. We might instead consider how class anxiety proves generative, serving as a catalyst for postbellum African American literary production.

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NOTES Introduction 1. Jewell's unpublished review, dated Jan. 13, 1900, is included in a letter to well-known black journalist John E. Bruce. Though Jewell's review is one of the most detailed extant responses to Contending Forces, Hopkins likely never saw or replied to it. As Lois Brown notes, with the exception of Jewell's review, “all of the reader responses to Contending Forces appear to have been published in the pages of the Colored American Magazine. As a rule, these reviews were not formal critical responses to Hopkins's work but rather comments included in letters to Hopkins and to her colleagues at the Colored American Magazine” (Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 278). An accessible transcription of Jewell's handwritten letter also appears in the appendix of Brown's Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins. 2. Throughout this study, I use the designations “African American” and “black” interchangeably. I retain the historical terms “colored,” “Negro,” “mulatta,” and “mulatto” when they appear in primary documents or to indicate intraracial distinctions based on skin color and mixed-race genealogy. 3. Jewell's “higher plane” status can be deduced from her later tenure in 1904–5 as vice-president of the Boston Literary and Historical Association, which Elizabeth McHenry describes as “a group of relatively successful members of Boston's black professional class with a keen sense of political purpose” (Forgotten Readers, 166) (hereafter cited in the text). Similarly, Lois Brown identifies Jewell among “well-known Bostonians and active club women” (Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins, 410). 4. By “class identification,” I refer to the volitional expression of one's class. In “Nothing to Declare,” Rita Felski usefully elucidates, “Identifications, in other words, need to be clearly distinguished from identities. Social status, position, and life chances are shaped by multiple factors, but only under certain conditions do some of these factors become willed points of affiliation and public affirmation” (42). I read literature as a medium through which black authors and their readers affirm their self-described social-class affiliations. 5. Charles Shepherdson's comparative analysis synthesizes Freud's and Lacan's psychoanalytic definitions, summarizing anxiety as “a response when the ego is threatened with some danger” (foreword, xx [hereafter cited in the text]). I use the terms “anxiety,” “nervousness,” and “fear” interchangeably, disregarding Freud's more precise Page 184 → accounting of fear as a natural defense mechanism and anxiety as a generally maladaptive affect (Shepherdson, foreword, lv). Instead, as I propose, anxiety proves generative, rather than inhibiting, in African American literary formation. 6. Major universities such as the University of Chicago and Columbia University instituted formal sociology departments in 1892 and 1893, respectively (Calhoun, Sociology in America, 1). As Craig Calhoun adds, “Class conflict, and indeed socialism, figured more prominently for early American sociologists than is sometimes thought. But in the United States, the problem of order became to a large extent the problem of integration—how to assimilate immigrants, how to overcome (or at least deal with) racial division” (3–4). 7. Adapted from the title of Chesnutt's 1931 essay “Post-Bellum—Pre-Harlem,” the phrase has become one of the competing designations for the literary period between 1877 and 1919. In the collection Post-Bellum, Pre-Harlem, editors Barbara McCaskill and Caroline Gebhard provide a concise account of scholars' longunsettled ruminations over how to name the period, whether as “the nadir,” “the New Negro Renaissance,” “the Age of Accommodation,” or otherwise (2). Each title registers “the intensity of competing agendas, visions, and histories” at play during the era and in scholars' subsequent framing of it (2). 8. By maintaining the terms “middle class” and “better class,” I deliberately defer to the ways that many postbellum African Americans identified themselves, rather than continuing to deny them the classifications that they sought. By contrast, historian Kevin Gaines supplants the use of “black middle class” with “elites,” noting that racial leaders were elite only in comparison to other black Americans, but that in relation to the dominant economic structure, the “material condition of many blacks with these aspirations was often indistinguishable from that of impoverished people of any color” (16). As Gaines explains, mainstream society “relentlessly denied black Americans both the material and ideological markers of bourgeois status”

(14). Meanwhile, in Righteous Propagation, Michele Mitchell prefers the term “aspiring classes” to differentiate “African American strivers from contemporaneous middle-class white Americans and to acknowledge the quickening of class stratification within African American communities” (xx). While intending to offer greater taxonomic precision, Gaines's and Mitchell's practices replicate African Americans' historical exclusion from the category of “middle class.” 9. Regenia Gagnier usefully summarizes the multiple approaches to class that circulate in recent criticism: “The usages we might consider are: class as subjectivity or identity; as an objective relationship to the economy or division of labour; as a discourse or myth, in Roland Barthes's sense of myth as a historical construction that conceals its own contingency, depoliticizes and naturalizes; as a postmodern ‘hyphenization’ with race, gender, sexuality…; and as a performance” (“Functions of Class,” 39). One might say that the contrasts and tensions between these approaches have been a source of scholarly anxiety, making class what Wai Chee Dimock and Michael Gilmore consider perhaps “the most capacious as well as the most incendiary of topics” (Rethinking Class, 4). 10. Historical scholarship has concentrated on two predominant classes of black Americans in the nineteenth century: the elite or upper class, situated mainly in the Northeast, and working-class blacks in the South. Studies of elite African Americans Page 185 → include Gatewood, Aristocrats of Color; Cromwell, Other Brahmins; and Winch, Philadelphia's Black Elite and Elite of Our People. A second trend in historical research addresses the distinctive culture developed among African American laborers. See Kelley, Race Rebels; Gerald Jaynes, Branches without Roots. 11. Brief surveys such as Amiri Baraka's essay “Afro-American Literature and Class Struggle” tend to classify post-Reconstruction black literature as either embarrassingly “capitulationist” or, in contrast, subversively “revolutionary” (5). Leftist scholars of African American literature and class, including Bill V. Mullen, Barbara Foley, and William Maxwell, have largely concentrated on the twentieth century rather than the nineteenth. See Foley, Spectres of 1919; Maxwell, New Negro, Old Left; Mullen, Popular Fronts; and Smethurst, New Red Negro. 12. Baker's dismissal of nineteenth-century black women novelists in his 1991 monograph is a precursor to what has become his sustained critique of the black middle class, beyond literary studies and into contemporary cultural politics. His more recent volume, Betrayal, cites Martin Luther King Jr.'s “alliance with the working-class black majority” as a needed model for modern black public intellectuals (xi). Yet as Rolland Murray argues in a review of Betrayal, Baker's “broad suspicion” of the black middle class and intraracial class divisions projects his desire for a “rather utopian vision of black solidarity [that] does not fully describe any African-American community that actually existed historically” (“African-American Literary Studies,” 927, 929). Elsewhere Murray considers the salience of class divisions in late twentiethcentury black literature, a project consonant with my study of an earlier period. See Murray, “Time of Breach.” 13. For similar observations on the paradoxical relationship between racial authenticity and the black middle class, see V. Smith, Not Just Race; Favor, Authentic Blackness; E. P. Johnson, Appropriating Blackness; and Young and Tsemo, From Bourgeois to Boojie. 14. While literary and cultural studies recently have begun to examine the (new) black middle class as a marked category needing analysis, rather than a self-evident one, several sociological studies have pursued the subject. Bart Landry specifies that transformative changes of the 1940s and 1950s, including “the lowering of the job ceiling, integration in the armed forces, increased integration in civilian life in the North, and the growth in the number of black college graduates and college students,” set the stage for the post1960s “emergence of a new black middle class” (New Black Middle Class, 66). For more recent studies, see Pattillo-McCoy, Black Picket Fences; Lacy, Blue-Chip Black. 15. See F. S. Foster and May, “Class”; McHenry, Forgotten Readers; and Santamarina, Belabored Professions (hereafter cited in the text). 16. Whereas Peterson uses the designation “elite” here and elsewhere in her scholarship, I assert my stake in the terms “middle class” and “better class” for reasons outlined in an earlier note. Peterson does imply the flexibility of “elite” when, in Doers of the Word, she describes “the elite, exemplified by Sarah Parker Remond, Charlotte Forten, and even Frances Ellen Watkins Harper” (8) (hereafter cited in the text). By qualifying Harper's inclusion with “even,” since Harper did not claim quite the elevated genealogy of the other two exemplars, Peterson signals how classifications such as “elite” are relative and comparative,

rather than definite. I agree with her general Page 186 → sentiment about the inattention to class in African American studies and reserve finer-tuned distinctions of class vocabulary for chapter 1, which addresses Harper at length. 17. For studies of black masculinity and middle-class leadership, see Carby, Race Men; and Ross, Manning the Race. For more on black women's domestic, institutional, and professional construction of bourgeois respectability, see Tate, Domestic Allegories; Foreman, Activist Sentiments; and duCille, Coupling Convention. 18. My work is indebted to several class studies that feature only one to two chapters on black-authored texts, including Lang, Syntax of Class; Vogel, ReWriting White; and Schocket, Vanishing Moments. 19. In considering the relationship between class and anxiety in literature, my work is congruent with recent scholarship that associates class with a range of affect—from shame and loss to ambivalence and guilt. For instance, as Pamela Fox argues in a study of shame as a mode of affect in working-class fiction, shame can be “emancipatory” in that “in the process of revealing the shame of being shamed, often one is exposing oppressive societal norms and values as well” (Class Fictions, 16). Though shame and anxiety have distinct critical histories, they serve similar functions in disclosing social conditions that the anxious or ashamed subject is poised to address. See also Felski, “Nothing to Declare.” 20. In My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass lucidly registers his assessment of status distinctions within the plantation economy, describing house servants as “a sort of black aristocracy” distinguished from field slaves “in dress, as well as in form and feature, in manner and speech, in tastes and habits” (71). This observation does not appear in the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and as Douglass revises the account in 1855, he admits the rhetorical risks of exposing black intraracial stratifications. As he reveals the prejudices of house slaves toward slaves in the quarters, Douglass anticipates his readers asking, “Who, but a fanatic, could get up any sympathy for persons [house slaves] whose every movement was agile, easy and graceful, and who evinced a consciousness of high superiority?” (72). Antebellum slave narratives more often argue that whether domestic servants, field hands, or skilled workers allowed to hire their time, all slaves were relegated to the same monstrous system that needed to be eradicated. 21. Consider another example: in Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Linda Brent's position between bond and free, disadvantaged and privileged, relies on what Carol E. Henderson terms the “critical matrix of caste, class, and color” (“Critical Matrix,” 49). Brent enjoys certain advantages because her grandmother is a freed, mulatta businesswoman with connections to influential whites. However, in the chapters “The Flight” and “Months of Peril,” the narrator implies that Linda benefits most by disregarding social distinctions. Cooperation among field and house slaves, as well as cross-class collaboration between free blacks and sympathetic local whites, enables Brent to plot and execute her escape from slavery. 22. Burke, Conundrum of Class (hereafter cited in the text). Burton Bledstein explains that British society considered ranks “to be a given in the cosmic ordering of the social structure. To transgress the cosmic geography was synonymous with original sin.” A person generally remained in his or her inherited rank of gentry or commoner, seldom trespassing those boundaries (Bledstein, “Storytellers,” 3). American spokespersons Page 187 → proposed that by contrast, “class” in the United States “mapped the way stations along the route from pauperism to wealth open to each white, male American” (Lang, Syntax of Class, 1). 23. This sense of social classes as historically specific social formations reflects in the titles of studies that cite the “making,” “emergence,” and “rise” of the American middle and working classes throughout the nineteenth century. See Blumin, Emergence of the Middle Class; Roediger, Wages of Whiteness; and J. O. Jewell, Race, Social Reform. 24. For a fuller account of black writers' engagement with the major literary genres of the postbellum era, see A. N. Williams, “African American Literary Realism.” 25. Contemporary studies of mulatto/a figures by M. Giulia Fabi, Cassandra Jackson, Eve Allegra Raimon, and Teresa Zackodnik all point to critic Sterling Brown's 1937 disparagement of the “tragic mulatto” as casting its long shadow over the critical study of interracial characters. Jackson cites Deborah McDowell and Houston Baker as reiterating Brown's thesis in the 1990s (Barriers between Us, 3). See also Fabi, Passing; Zackodnik, Mulatta and the Politics. 26. A number of historical and social scientific studies have examined the nineteenth-century correlation between light skin color and class privilege that African American fiction addresses. Historian Willard Gatewood's Aristocrats of Color offers a most engaging social history of the postbellum period. Looking to

earlier 1860 U.S. census records in which residents are differentiated as “black,” “white,” and “mulatto,” economists Howard Bodenhorn and Christopher Ruebeck find that mulatto-headed families earned the equivalent of 50 percent of white families' earnings, while black-headed families reported only 20 percent of the wealth of white ones. Predictably, these findings show people of color altogether earning less than their white counterparts, but more significantly, the results lend credence to claims that colorism gave mixed-race Americans an advantage over black ones and “demonstrates that the economic consequences of colorism were (and likely are) far reaching” (Bodenhorn and Ruebeck, Colorism, 4).

Chapter 1 1. Harper's novels Minnie's Sacrifice (1869) and Sowing and Reaping (1876–77), both serialized in the African Methodist Episcopal Christian Recorder, also include characters apparently of different class backgrounds. Yet those novels center on the controlling themes of Reconstruction, temperance, and slavery, focusing less on the internal dynamics of postbellum black communities. Additionally, since Sowing and Reaping focuses on racially indeterminate characters, the class divisions outlined in the text cannot be said to apply explicitly to African American communities. 2. Barbara McCaskill provides a comprehensive definition of respectability, which black leaders suggested could be attained by adhering to the values of racial uplift: “Uplift emphasized self-reliance, patriotism, philanthropy, civil rights, political activism, social reform, educational and material attainment, investment and thrift, bourgeois tastes and respectable manners, good citizenship, pan-Africanism, black history and heritage, modernity, urbanization, industrialization, hygiene, temperance, Page 188 → suffrage, culture, ethics, entrepreneurship, coalition-building, and Christian morality and wholesomeness” (“To Labor,” 168). Kevin Gaines, in Uplifting the Race, contends that the uplift initiative led by middle-class African Americans was not a cohesive program, but multiple rhetorical, organizational, and political strategies all claiming to discern and advance the best interests of African Americans. Uplift reformers sometimes maintained conflicting agendas, privileging certain of the values that McCaskill lists over others. 3. Elizabeth A. Petrino suggests that these two attitudes toward class are not mutually exclusive. As she explains, although Harper was decidedly bourgeois, “Harper also aligned with former slaves and poor whites and envisioned a classless society” (“We Are Rising,” 133). I depart from Petrino's interpretation, however, by suggesting that Harper does not endorse classlessness; rather, she determines class distinctions along different lines. The central distinction I am drawing here stresses that Harper's rhetoric and fiction are not as egalitarian as Petrino supposes. 4. See James Christmann's discussion of standard English and dialect speech as “competing voiceparadigms” in Iola Leroy (“Raising Voices”). 5. For an extended study of the concept of class and its shifting lexicon in the United States, see Burke, Conundrum of Class. 6. In an earlier account, William P. Harrison, a Methodist minister who promoted economic renewal in the New South, also expressed concern over “working class” as an ambiguous term. In an 1877 article in the Christian Recorder, Harrison concluded that the vocabulary of class unnecessarily polarized socioeconomic classes: “It is a fatal error which regards the ‘working classes’ as only those who labor with the hands. Every man worthy the name of man is a workman of some sort” (“New South,” 1). 7. In a recent reprint of Willson's volume, editor Julie Winch titles her scholarly edition The Elite of Our People: Joseph Willson's Sketches of Black Upper-Class Life in Antebellum Philadelphia. This renaming displaces the now somewhat obsolete phrases “higher classes” and “colored people” in Willson's original title. 8. For more on how the principle of moral economy transformed from practice to cultural rhetoric, see Hilkey, Character Is Capital. 9. Tate's 1992 study predates the reprint of Harper's three serialized novels, edited by Frances Smith Foster, in 1994. Thus, though Domestic Allegories does not account for Trial and Triumph in its analysis of “eleven extant domestic novels” written between 1890 and 1901, I contend that Trial and Triumph, as well as Harper's serialized novels Minnie's Sacrifice and Sowing and Reaping, fit Tate's prescriptions (4). 10. Gilbert Anthony Williams estimates that during part of the period when Harper published in the pages of

the Christian Recorder (1853–1911), its subscription base ranged from a high of 8,000 in 1876 to a reported 5,500 in 1884 and 1890; however, its circulation among nonsubscribers may have been much larger since readers often shared copies (G. A. Williams, Christian Recorder, 19). 11. Proposing a much earlier chronology, Martin Burke explains, “While not yet in widespread use, the term ‘middle class’ was in circulation by the mid-1780s” (Conundrum of Class, 24). Aron's reference shows how the word's appearance in the dictionary indicates that “middle class” was increasingly canonized in the latter half in the nineteenth century.Page 189 → 12. Luke 12:48 states, “For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required.” Harper alters the scripture to read ironically. 13. While the titles of Petry's and Naylor's novels emphasize urban environments as nearly personified characters that influence the protagonists, Harper refrains from titling her novel according to its setting. In this way, she maintains that the characters’ environment has limited effect on them; their primary trials and triumphs concern their internal development or self-mastery. 14. Amy Lang, in Syntax of Class, notes this pattern of racializing labor as blackness in Elizabeth Stuart Phelps's The Silent Partner (1871). Eric Schocket traces this pattern to an earlier decade. As he proposes, Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861) is the “genesis of the American labor narrative” that relies on the blackened representation of white labor (Vanishing Moments, 34). 15. As Stuart Blumin explains, in the mid-nineteenth century and thereafter, temperance was one determinant of a developing middle-class identity. “Liquor dealers and others in the infernal trade would disqualify themselves from even the outward appearance of respectability” (Emergence of the Middle Class, 200). Harper was deeply invested in the Women's Christian Temperance Union. In addition to mentioning temperance briefly in Trial and Triumph and Iola Leroy, she makes temperance the central theme of several of her poems, the short story “The Two Offers” (1859), and the serialized novel Sowing and Reaping.

Chapter 2 1. In lyrics by Sullivan Pugh, verses 2 and 3 alternately assert that “the life I live” and “the service I give” should indicate the speaker's worth. 2. The terms “labor” and “work” appear interchangeably in this chapter unless otherwise specified. “Occupations” and “jobs” are specific kinds of paid work or employment. I intend the general term “class studies” to include “working-class studies,” which is sometimes considered a separate scholarly field. Recent studies of work in turn-of-the-century American fiction appear in Hapke, Labor's Text, and Schocket, Vanishing Moments. 3. In Contending Forces, Hopkins critiques how hiring discrimination limits black Americans' occupational choices. The narrator notes, “The masses of the Negro race find for employment only the most laborious work at the scantiest remuneration” (83 [hereafter cited in the text]). The novel features a number of workers, from Will Smith, an educated hotel employee saving money for college, to formerly enslaved laundresses; yet Hopkins's treatment of the latter differs from her more wholly flattering representation of Sappho Clark, a stenographer whose work is more genteel than laundering. Hopkins ultimately subordinates labor concerns to the novel's romantic plot. By contrast, Colleen C. O'Brien suggests that in Hopkins's nonfiction essays and journalism, the author more consistently considers black labor “within the history of a global economic power struggle” (“Blacks in All Quarters,” 246). Likewise, Chesnutt does not elaborate on the plight of black North Carolina farmhands in his best-known novel, The Marrow of Tradition (1901). But in his nonfiction essay, “Peonage, Page 190 → or the New Slavery” (1904), published in the Voice of the Negro, the author demands for southern laborers fair wages accompanied by political rights. In addition, his last published novel, The Colonel's Dream (1905), traces a white industrialist's attempt to revitalize the economy of his southern hometown; the plot exposes how labor relations in the New South exploited black and white workers, often exacerbating the tensions between them. 4. Arlene Elder, Wilson Moses, and Finnie Coleman all feature Overshadowed in their studies of Griggs's full body of fiction. With the exception of these critics' work, however, only one published critical essay has focused on Overshadowed. See John Vassilowitch Jr.'s “Example of ‘Horace Christian.’” Griggs's last three novels—Unfettered (1902), The Hindered Hand (1905), and Pointing the Way (1908)—also have received

little sustained attention. 5. Contemporary critics are just beginning to revise the assessment posed by one of Griggs's early reviewers, Hugh Gloster, who applauds Griggs as “outstanding for his productivity and influence” but “weak according to artistic standards” (“Sutton E. Griggs,” 337, 343). 6. Coleman further asserts that though scholars usually read Griggs as a “political novelist…he was more of a political thinker who used the novel as a vehicle for his political activism than he was a novelist with an active interest in politics” (Sutton E. Griggs, 38 [hereafter cited in the text]). I sense that both Coleman and Moses try to mitigate criticism of Griggs's artistry by suggesting that fiction was only incidental to his political writing career. 7. Abelmann focuses on South Korean melodrama, but her conclusions aptly relate to melodrama's function in other literary traditions, including African American literature. 8. Texts such as Rebecca Harding Davis's Life in the Iron Mills (1861)—a much-cited exception to the rule of labor's invisibility in antebellum fiction—anticipate a shift in labor fiction during the post-Civil War era. When turn-of-the-century naturalists such as Stephen Crane or Theodore Dreiser exposed the work-worn, besotted, or sexually primed bodies of menial workers, unemployed men, or undereducated women, they offered labor depictions not as easily idealized by sentimentalism. 9. See examples from previously cited novels by Harper, Hopkins, and Chesnutt, as well as J. McHenry Jones's Hearts of Gold (1896). 10. Though scenes in Griggs's fiction also take place in the North or in international settings, the major action of all five novels occurs in locations including Louisiana, Texas, Tennessee, Mississippi, and Virginia. 11. Laws and social custom in both the North and the South often distinguished between jobs reserved for whites and those reserved for blacks, but black labor patterns took on additional complexity in the postemancipation South. Set in Richmond, Virginia, rather than the rural South, however, Griggs's novel does not account for southern blacks' agricultural work, which continued to be the primary mode of black labor after slavery's end. As Foner argues, many black Americans viewed landownership as a sign of status, “leading them to prefer tenancy to wage labor” (104). 12. As economists and sociologists explain, the terms “class” and “status” often are used interchangeably but have different functional meanings. In Max Weber's formulation, Page 191 → “class” applies explicitly to economic groupings, while “status” more aptly refers to socially derived rankings and rewards, whether material or immaterial (“Class, Status, Party,” 44). Griggs uses a less exact vocabulary, alternating among terms including “station,” “standing,” “status,” “strata,” and “class” in keeping with common parlance. 13. Both male and female spokespersons contributed to public forums, essays, and fictions focused on “woman's work.” For example, the subject is reflected in the titles of Gertrude Mossell's The Work of the Afro-American Woman (1894) and Katherine Tillman's “Afro-American Women and Their Work” (1895). 14. See the transformation that washerwoman Delia Jones undergoes as a result of both domestic abuse and hard labor in Zora Neale Hurston's “Sweat” (1936). Delia was once “young and soft…but now she thought of her knotty, muscled limbs, her harsh knuckly hands” and her “work-worn knees” (199, 202). 15. Griggs first addresses the concerns of women's labor in Imperium in Imperio. College-educated but unable to find a job, Belton Piedmont disguises himself as a female nurse, accepting the work readily available to black women. Pursued by white men who have “a poor opinion of the virtue of colored women, ” Belton manages to escape rape only by disclosing his male identity (92). Though Griggs addresses sexual predation in earnest, the cross-dressing scene might be misread as comic, detracting from the point. By crafting his second novel with a female protagonist, Griggs addresses women's labor as a topic that, though invoked in the earlier novel, is much more central to Overshadowed. 16. I note, however, that Griggs's text also does not mention the expected noise of an industrial workplace. This lack is resounding when compared to an earlier African American fiction of labor, John Blye; or, Trials and Triumphs of the White-washer's Son, which appeared in the Christian Recorder in weekly installments between July 11 and Nov. 21, 1878. Eric Gardner's impressive archival research identifies the novel's pseudonymous author “Will” as the “New Jersey-based William Steward” (Unexpected Places, 17). Set primarily in an undisclosed northern town, John Blye depicts its protagonist in the industrial work space rather than alluding to labor that remains out of sight and hearing. For example, in chapter 5, printed in the Sept. 19, 1878, installment, “Will” portrays Blye's increasingly complex and indispensable labor in the

factory among his white peers: Busy hands and hammers were flying in the Eagle works. Belts and wheels and pulleys whizzed and hummed while fire and blast blazed from forge and foundry. Great bars of red hot iron were being drawn between heavy rollers, while other huge bars and bolts were being forged under ponderous trip hammers into the shape designed for them. Castings for wheels and pulleys were being turned and polished, while bed pieces and housings and shoulders in various shapes were being drilled and chiseled full of holes and slots, and brasses were made and bored out for bushings for journals, &c. (John Blye, 4) While this passage goes further to describe work than do some other African American fictions, the narrator uses passive voice throughout the description, shifting attention from the “hands” to the mechanical parts in action.Page 192 → 17. John's homicide interestingly diverges from actual black labor history in Richmond. By including the master workman's visit in its plot, Griggs's novel set in Richmond may recall a visit that Terence V. Powderly, the country's best-known labor activist, made to Richmond in Jan. 1885 as part of a southern promotional tour. However, Powderly went to the city to extend union privileges to black workers, not to deny them. In Richmond in the 1880s, over three thousand black workers were members of both segregated and integrated labor assemblies (Rachleff, Black Labor in the South, 118; Kann, “Knights of Labor,” 54). By inverting the intent and the outcome of the master workman's visit in his novel, Griggs uses creative license to develop a more startling account of labor history. 18. Throughout this chapter, I refer to the first edition of the novel. The 1971 reprint of Overshadowed by Books for Libraries (Freeport, NY) does not include the two-page epilogue that foretells that Astral Herndon Jr. will return to the United States. It is unclear whether this omission occurs as a technical error or as a deliberate, politicized omission by the modern-day editor; read without the epilogue, the text privileges Astral Sr.'s militant denunciation of racism.

Chapter 3 1. I refer here to Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), Douglass's Narrative of the Life (1845), and William Wells Brown's Clotel (1853), which highlight how slavery prevents its subjects from claiming space or enacting domesticity in the ways idealized by mid-nineteenth-century American culture. The most striking exception in antebellum black fiction is Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends (1857), in which parlors constitute a central site of free black Americans' display of gentility and class aspirations. 2. On the strategy of masking in Dunbar's writing, also see, among others, Keeling, “Paul Dunbar and the Mask of Dialect”; Black, “Literary Subterfuge”; G. Jones, Strange Talk; and Candela, “We Wear the Mask.” 3. While I employ the term “social geography,” Eric Bulson pithily summarizes the range of theoretical approaches that similarly focus on literary space. Bulson explains, “Think of Raymond Williams's ‘knowable community,’ Edward Said's ‘imaginative geography,’ Frederic Jameson's ‘cognitive mapping’ (taken from the urban theorist Kevin Lynch), and Franco Moretti's ‘literary geography.’…Despite their different approaches and conclusions, they all emphasize that spatial representations in the novel are ideologically charged” (Novels, Maps, Modernity, 19). 4. The 2007 special issue of African American Review dedicated to Paul Laurence Dunbar exemplifies the disproportionate scholarly focus on the author's poetry. Among the twenty-four provocative contributions in the volume, only two substantially address Dunbar's short fiction. See African American Review 41, no. 2 (2007), guest edited by Shelley Fisher Fishkin et al. 5. What distinguishes my work from Griffin's “Who Set You Flowin'?” is my greater emphasis on the class implications of migration, dislocation, and mobility. Like Griffin's study, Rodgers's Canaan Bound considers Dunbar's novel as an early precursor of Page 193 → black writers' more sustained attention to geographic movement from the South to the North in the 1910s through the 1950s. 6. Following Baker's partly psychoanalytical theory of “tight places,” one might suggest further that

Dunbar's own psyche constituted a tight place; critics and biographers have read Dunbar as depressive, subject to bouts of violence and anger, and haunted by double consciousness. Like critics Peter Revell, Herbert Woodward Martin, Ronald Primeau, Shelley Fisher Fishkin, and others, I note the author's biographical constraints, but my historicized approach accounts mostly for the social and professional conditions that impacted Dunbar's career and writing. 7. Studies often defer to James Weldon Johnson's preface to the Book of American Negro Poetry (1922). As a personal acquaintance of Dunbar, Johnson recalls, “Often [Dunbar] said to me: ‘I've got to write dialect poetry; it's the only way I can get them to listen to me’” (preface, 709). Additional evidence appears throughout Dunbar's personal correspondence. 8. William Dean Howells lionized Dunbar as a dark-skinned “man of pure African blood” whose intelligence and upward mobility seemed to disprove African descendants' perceived inferiority (quoted in Jarrett, Deans and Truants, 40). But as Gene Jarrett argues in analyzing Howells's implicitly racist assumptions, whether the “discourse of blood” was asserted in favor of black blood or white supremacy, it rested on faulty “notions that one could subject racial identity to biological measurement” (41). 9. British spellings appear throughout Dunbar's volume Folks from Dixie; cited instances in my chapter appear as in the original. 10. See Hazel Carby and Marlon B. Ross for analyses of how these concerns over migrants' sexuality take on particular gendered forms. In Cultures in Babylon, Carby traces how reformers police the sexuality of urban female laborers, who were perceived as being more vulnerable to wantonness when not monitored in a stable domestic setting (23). Meanwhile, Ross in Manning the Race cites narratives of male migration that endorse “the positive aspects of black men's robust sexual appetite” as the basis of “prosperous racial progress” (26).

Chapter 4 1. Pauline Hopkins's novels recently have been the subject of several literary studies interested in eugenics, phrenology, mesmerism, and other turn-of-the-century scientific and paranormal developments. See Otten, “Pauline Hopkins and the Hidden Self”: Kassanoff, “‘Fate Has Linked Us Together.’” 2. In an essay primarily focused on Hopkins's endorsement of black military superiority, Martin Japtok notes that the protagonist of Of One Blood accepts wealth but mostly values the cultural heritage he gains. John Nickel has noted how Hopkins plots marriage among characters of the same social class in keeping with eugenic theory. My attention to inheritance, blood, and class throughout this chapter benefits from their scholarship. See Japtok. “Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood; and Nickel, “Eugenics and the Fiction of Pauline Hopkins.” 3. In Trial and Triumph, Annette seems to have inherited anxiety, though not specifically Page 194 → class anxiety, as evidence of her illegitimate birth. One observer in the novel conjectures that Annette's “restlessness and sensitiveness” derive from “causes over which she had no control” (260). 4. Both Harper's and Logan's inquiries blend eugenics with what historian Daniel Kevles identifies as an older, less scientific “law of maternal impressions—a commonplace assumption, rooted in folk belief and Lamarckian theory” that children's traits were shaped not by blood alone, but specifically by the “experiences of the pregnant mother” (In the Name of Eugenics, 66, emphasis added). Later in her speech, Logan suggests that if a woman is depressed by an unwanted pregnancy, she transfers deleterious emotional energy to her unborn child, marring its mental and moral capacity. 5. Hopkins published this profile using her nom de plume “J. Shirley Shadrach.” 6. Describing Hopkins's attempt to endorse black class accomplishment while critiquing Booker T. Washington's acquisitive program, Alisha Knight explains that though Hopkins “subscribed to the concepts of affluence, eminence, and social mobility as traditional success indicators,” she also “revised the definition of success by enhancing the meaning of social respectability to include freedom from racial discrimination” (43). 7. Hopkins tends to refer to her works as “romances” rather than “realism” or “naturalism,” though her works aim toward the same end as Cuddy and Roche specify. 8. In subsequent revisions of the novel, Brown does not specify Thomas Jefferson as the heroine's negligent

father; instead, he replaces Jefferson with an unnamed statesman in Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864) and Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine (1865). What remains consistent, however, is that Brown characterizes white politicians as exploiting racial and sexual relations in their favor, abusing the power they might otherwise direct toward truly effecting freedom and democracy. 9. As O'Brien notes, however, Hopkins's endorsement of labor is expressed most clearly in her journalism and nonfiction work. O'Brien points to Hopkins's A Primer of Facts, as well as her essays “Munroe Rodgers” and “Toussaint L'Ouverture.” 10. By my account, few working-class Americans of mixed racial background appear in nineteenth-century African American fiction. In Harriet Wilson's fictionalized autobiography Our Nig (1859), Frado is the daughter of a white mother and black father, left to work as an unpaid indentured servant in a northern white household. Among postbellum black authors, Paul Laurence Dunbar's fiction likely features the greatest number of working folk; yet as I note in chapter 3, Dunbar seldom describes lighter-skinned African Americans as characters. 11. In his study of what he terms antebellum “cracker culture,” historian Grady McWhiney insists that the term “cracker” is not a class-specific term but rather reflects a regional culture. Yet McWhiney acknowledges the long history and shifting meanings of the word. In definitions drawn from The Oxford Universal Dictionary on Historical Principles, “cracker” refers to a liar or braggart in seventeenth-century parlance. Yet definitions beginning with the 1767 entry more specifically denote cracker as “a name for the ‘poor whites’ in the southern United States” (McWhiney, Cracker Culture, vii). Hopkins's usage is more in keeping with the latter, as she contrasts John Langley's cracker roots with the Smiths' aristocratic background. 12. John Nickel similarly identifies this passage as a “narratorial intrusion,” citing the text at length, though without the surrounding information about the black middle Page 195 → class that I consider significant to interpreting this passage. See Nickel's “Eugenics and the Fiction of Pauline Hopkins,” 49.

Chapter 5 1. For more on post-integration nostalgia and recent critiques of this posture in African American studies, see King, “‘You think like you white’; Murray, “African-American Literary Studies”; Moses, “Segregation Nostalgia and Black Authenticity”; Warren, What Was African American Literature? 2. In a further development of the theory of class-passing, Eric Schocket proposes the term “class transvestism” to refer specifically to temporary (rather than sustained) episodes of downward class-passing. Schocket traces a trend among turn-of-the-century white middle-class authors and sociologists who disguised themselves among the lower classes to gain firsthand research. As Schocket argues, for writers such as Stephen Crane, downward class-passing is motivated by a self-conscious desire “to close epistemological gaps through cross-class impersonation” (Vanishing Moments, 106). 3. After “The Wife of His Youth” was accepted for the July 1898 edition of the Atlantic Monthly, Chesnutt wrote to the magazine's editor, Walter Page Hines, recommending arrangements for publication. Highlighting the obvious link between the stories, Chesnutt suggested, “Or, if ‘A Matter of Principle’ could be used, it might be published with the ‘Wife of His Youth’ under the general heading ‘The Blue Veins’” (Chesnutt, “To Be an Author,” 97). 4. During the growth of Chesnutt scholarship in the 1970s and 1980s, critics began to examine the author's possible biases. Most notably, John Edgar Wideman, Trudier Harris, and SallyAnn Ferguson note Chesnutt's seeming dismissal of dark-skinned characters. Ferguson assesses Chesnutt as “essentially a social and literary accommodationist who pointedly and repeatedly confines his reformist impulses to the ‘colored people’—a term that he almost always applies either to color-line blacks or those of mixed races” (“Chesnutt's Genuine Blacks,” 109). See Harris, “Frank Fowler”; Wideman, “Charles Chesnutt and the WPA Narratives.” 5. In works such as “The Future American,” a three-part series theorizing a plan of gradual racial amalgamation, Chesnutt proposes that interracial marriage will yield a racially homogenous population, thereby dissolving “pure” whiteness as the exclusionary sign of legal, economic, and social privilege. 6. In 1906, Chesnutt gave permission for Celia Parker Wooley to adapt “The Wife of His Youth” into a

play. Writing to Wooley on July 11, 1907, Chesnutt disagreed with some of her changes to the text, explaining, “My own idea of dramatizing the story would not have taken the action back to the days of slavery, but would have begun with some preliminary development concerning the relations between Mr. Ryder and Mrs. Dixon, emphasizing the difference between Mr. Ryder and his old wife, and thereby of course enhancing the sacrifice which he made for a principle” (Exemplary Citizen, 28). 7. Eric Lott's investigation into white working-class consumption of minstrelsy adds dimension to this point. As Lott argues, white workers, lacking socioeconomic class privilege, affirmed their whiteness through belittling the class position to which Page 196 → black Americans aspired. See Lott, Love and Theft. W. T. Lhamon's Raising Cain adds that blackface performance was as much an expression of class-consciousness as one of racial animosity: “blackface distanced working-class youth from both the bourgeois and black” (43). 8. In identifying genteel white northeasterners as Chesnutt's primary audience, critics have underestimated the size, racial composition, and class diversity of his actual readership. Charles Johanningsmeier astutely reminds us that Chesnutt's fiction often was originally published or syndicated in regional and national periodicals including “low-cost magazines such as Puck” and the Virginia-based Southern Workman, edited by African Americans at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) (“What We Can Learn,” 90). As he suggests, a more thorough account of Chesnutt's periodical publishing and subsequent reviews may render “significant insights into the trajectory of Chesnutt's career, his actual audience, his authorial strategies, and how his readers might have interacted with his works” (86). 9. As a form of “scientific” evidence marshaled to support white supremacy, arguments about racial retrogression proposed that when freed from the supposedly civilizing effect of slavery and white paternalism, “the doomed [black] race…declined morally, physically, and economically” (Fredrickson, Black Image, 258). Under certain circumstances, the argument ran, even the most outwardly cultivated person of color would revert to presumably primitive patterns of violence, emotionalism, and sexual immorality. 10. For a related reading of Janet's moral decision as a sign of her class superiority, see McGowan, “Acting without the Father.”

Epilogue 1. Booker T. Washington often is assumed to have been the editor of The Negro Problem, but David Levering Lewis contests that “a now unidentifiable white editor” compiled the volume (W. E. B. Du Bois, 288). 2. Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham notes that Henry Morehouse, an officer of the American Baptist Home Mission Society, used the phrase “the talented tenth” in an 1896 article (Righteous Discontent, 25). However, according to David Levering Lewis, Du Bois's foremost biographer, Du Bois may have been developing the notion of the Talented Tenth as early as 1887, though he did not articulate the concept fully until 1903 (W. E. B. Du Bois, 73). 3. Du Bois's stance, posited as a mixture of logic and obvious financial need for the funding of black schools, attempts to mediate the relation between white America and African Americans by making the latter more palatable for participation in free society. The most immediate audience for his text was “men of America,” likely white philanthropists who dispersed financial support to industrial schools such as Tuskegee and Hampton but wavered as to whether supporting black liberal education was wise. Yet Du Bois also addresses African Americans who, especially after Washington's reception following the Atlanta Cotton States Exposition in 1895, considered seriously his proposition for economic progress at the expense of enfranchisement.

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INDEX Abelmann, Nancy, 56, 190n7 “acting white,” 7, 43, 158 activism, 181 political, 73, 187n2, 190n6 affirmative action policies, 8 Africa, 130 African American Review, 192n4 African Methodist Episcopal, 18, 28, 105, 187n1 Alexander, Bryant Keith, 7 alienation, 70 amalgamation, 109, 195 Andrews, William L., 92, 95, 157 antebellum period black southern women in, 51, 52 class differences in, 13, 32, 94, 95 “cracker culture,” 194n11 legal aspects, 159 literary representations of, 13, 32, 34, 58, 79, 80, 158, 190n8, 192n1 slavery in, 12, 114, 186n20 aristocrats, 16, 17, 94, 105, 107, 122, 127, 153, 156, 170, 171 of the soul, 21, 30, 31, 36, 39, 44, 89, 181 Asbury, John C., 160–61 Atlantic Monthly, 81, 157, 195n3 Baker, Houston, 6, 7, 27, 185n12, 187n25 “tight places,” 83, 84, 86, 193n6 Baraka, Amiri, 185n11 Barthes, Roland, 184n9

better class, 26, 28, 31, 43, 103, 184n8, 185n16 antagonism, 102 blacks, 14, 17, 24, 42, 67, 88, 101, 108, 135, 176, 177 emergence of, 23, 109–17 in Chesnutt's texts, 162, 166, 168, 172 in Harper's texts, 35, 46, 47, 52 in Hopkins's texts, 107, 126, 131 ideology, 50 Jim Crow era, 18 mulatto/a characterization, 20, 161 social designation, 4–5 status, 38, 92 of white people, 150 See also middle class black characterization, 16, 81, 90, 116, 119, 159, 160, 173 black community, 2, 4, 8, 10, 19, 30, 61, 63, 67, 81, 100, 102, 118, 121, 144, 158, 162, 164, 173, 180 geographic boundaries in, 89 romanticized, 9, 185n12 southern, 178 working-class, 149 black intellectuals, 48, 111, 138, 164 black masculinity, 96, 186n17 black middle class, 4, 7–8, 11, 56, 65, 69, 77, 83, 86, 91, 113, 126, 130, 138, 157, 158, 176, 181, 184n8, 194n12 attitudes toward, 7, 185n12 blood, 109 Chesnutt's views, 161, 163, 165, 168, 173 denigration of, 6, 160 derivatives of whites, 155 Page 214 →

differences with working class, 22, 96 Du Bois's views, 177 family, 74 heredity, 121, 123, 125 leadership, 186n17 misclassification, 125 new, 8, 185n14 paradoxical relationship with racial authenticity, 185n13 politics, 177 postbellum, 14, 143 public representation, 88, 103, 143 residential patterns, 102 respectability, 90, 122 status, 133, 146 survival, 123 Talented Tenth, 19, 24, 138, 175–77, 180, 181, 196nn2–3 women, 119 work ethic, 108 black writers, 2–6, 8, 18, 34, 45, 53, 84, 91, 93, 97, 115, 180, 181, 182, 187n24, 192n5 antebellum, 34 class anxiety, 7, 12, 17, 32, 79, 90, 133, 175 female, 35, 68 postbellum, 16, 17, 22, 55, 89, 134, 176 representational dilemmas, 1, 9–11, 49, 58, 91, 108 blood, 84, 91, 105–31, 177, 193n8, 193n2, 194n4 Blumin, Stuart, 13, 189n15 Bodenhorn, Howard, 187n26 bodies, 67, 69, 105, 112, 113, 126 class and, 106, 129, 146

laboring, 21, 53, 57, 70, 74, 75, 190n8 passing and, 139, 140, 142, 148 physical, 22, 44, 59, 91 well-dressed, 92, 95, 167, 178 women, 75 physical, 68 working, 57 boojie, 8 Boston Evening Transcript, 159 Boston Literary and Historical Association, 137, 183n3 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17, 28 Boyd, Melba Joyce, 27 Brent, Linda, 186n21 Brooks, Daphne, 139 Brooks, Peter, 57, 66 Brown, Lois, 113, 183n1, 183n3 Brown, Sterling, 187n25 Brown, William Wells, 58 Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States, 194n8 Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine, 194n8 Clotel; or, The President's Daughter, 116–17, 192n1 Bruce, Blanche, K., 14, 143 Bruce, Dickson, Jr., 4, 6, 8 Bruce, John E., 183n1 Bryant, Earle V., 162 Bulson, Eric, 99, 192n3 Burke, Martin, 13, 188n11 Calhoun, Craig, 184n6 canon, 6, 54, 188n11

capitalism, 13, 34, 71, 73 Carby, Hazel, 10, 193n10 Castronovo, Russ, 75 Century, 84 Chesnutt, Charles W., 2, 4 Blue Vein stories, 18, 135–36, 139, 143, 157, 158, 160, 161, 169, 173, 195n3 class-passing among, 143–56 class affinity and discrimination, 162–74 The Colonel's Dream, 189n3 from race to class, 162–74 “The Future American,” 195n5 “Her Virginia Mammy,” 141, 143, 153, 155–56 The House Behind the Cedars, 58, 139, 140 “A Matter of Principle,” 143, 150, 152, 162, 195n3 The Marrow of Tradition, 23, 54, 134, Page 215 → 135, 136, 154, 158, 162–70, 174, 189n3 “The Passing of Grandison,” 140, 152–53 “Peonage, or the New Slavery,” 189n3 “Race Prejudice,” 137, 145 reception, 156–62, 196n8 “Rena Walden,” 139 respectability, 165, 168 “Social Discrimination,” 132, 134, 146 “The Wife of His Youth,” 19, 143, 144, 145, 147, 150, 156, 169, 195n3, 195n6 The Wife of His Youth, 23, 134, 135, 139, 143, 157, 159 Christian Recorder, 18, 28, 30, 33, 37, 40, 48, 187n1, 188n6, 188nn9–10, 191n16 Common Sense, 105–6, 110–11, 127–28 Christmann, James, 188n4 citizenship, 30, 45, 73, 75, 89, 97, 109, 176, 187n2 civil rights, 3, 8, 19, 21, 85, 88, 182, 187n2

disenfranchisement and, 56 integration and, 17, 98, 119, 138, 142, 163, 164, 184n6, 185n14 post-integration, 195n1 social equality and, 2, 16, 23, 137, 172, 180 Civil War, 13–14, 22, 30, 33, 59 post-, 26, 162, 190n8 Clamorgan, Cyprian, 32 The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis, 33 class anxiety, 3, 7, 9, 11, 12, 14, 28, 43, 56, 72, 77, 83, 88, 90, 115, 120, 128–30, 133, 136, 144, 153, 157, 164, 165, 168, 175, 176, 180–82, 193n3 and the aesthetics of black fiction, 15–24 classlessness, 8, 13, 113, 188n3 conditions, 11, 48, 72, 84, 109 conflicts, 12, 13, 21, 47, 54, 120, 169, 184n6 differences, 2, 3, 9–12, 15–16, 17, 24, 25, 27, 69, 87, 91, 94, 100, 102, 103, 110, 119, 137, 138, 155, 181, 183n2, 185n12 hierarchies, 2, 125, 176 identifications, 3, 7, 10, 21, 26, 27, 49, 53, 56, 88, 103, 107, 108, 125, 128, 136, 147, 149, 153, 154, 183n4, 189n15 mobility, 13, 22, 23, 57, 62, 69, 71, 72, 76, 80, 98, 100, 102, 118, 127, 141, 142, 156, 176, 179, 180, 181 relations, 1, 118, 175 class-passing, 23, 44, 58, 107, 127, 128, 131, 135–43, 161, 169, 171, 195n2 among the Blue Veins, 143–56 and class desire, 136–43 club movements, 30, 158, 183n3 Cohn, Jan, 85, 86 Coleman, Finnie, 190n4, 190n6 Colored American Magazine, 18, 108, 113, 115, 126, 131, 160, 183n1 Colored National League, 1 community, black. See black community

community-building, 9, 30, 173 concubinage, 1 Condict, Cornelia, 115–16, 126 conspicuous consumption, 60, 87 Cooper, Anna Julia, 59 “Colored Women as Wage-Earners,” 61 A Voice from the South, 165–66 Cox, Oliver, 128 criminality, 62, 110 cross-class relations, 13, 47, 102, 134, 144, 147, 150, 162, 172, 180, 186n21, 195n2 Cuddy, Lois A., 115, 194n7 Cummins, Maria The Lamplighter, 35 Darwin, Charles Origin of the Species, 107, 110 See also Social Darwinism Davis, Rebecca Harding, 45 Life in the Iron Mills, 189n14, 190n8 Dimock, Wai Chee, 184n9 domesticity, 46, 50, 67, 97, 192n1 consumer goods, 40, 178 private sphere, 8, 74, 93 Page 216 → double consciousness, 80, 193n6 Douglass, Frederick, 14, 34, 58, 92, 114, 148, 175, 177 My Bondage and My Freedom, 186n20 Narrative of the Life, 186n20, 192n1 Du Bois, W. E. B., 59, 134, 164, 176–78, 179 double consciousness, 80

“Of the Coming of John,” 24, 179–80 The Philadelphia Negro, 14–15, 96, 177 “The Talented Tenth,” 19, 24, 138, 175–77, 180, 181, 196nn2–3 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 2, 18, 22–23, 49, 160, 175, 176, 180, 192n2, 192nn4–5, 193nn6–8, 194n10 “Buss Jinkins Up Nawth,” 97, 98 class distinctions in fiction, 91–99 “The Conjuring Contest,” 85 “England as Seen by a Black Man,” 96, 97 Folks from Dixie, 79, 92, 193n9 The Heart of Happy Hollow, 99–104 In Old Plantation Days, 79, 85 Lyrics of Lowly Life, 79, 84 mapping class, 78–104 “Negro Society in Washington,” 78–79, 82, 86–88, 94, 100 “Nelse Hatton's Vengeance,” 16, 92, 93, 94, 96, 98, 103–4 Oak and Ivy, 84 “The Ordeal at Mt. Hope,” 165 “Real Darky Life in New York,” 97 reception, 83–88 “The Scapegoat,” 100–101, 104 The Sport of the Gods, 82 The Uncalled, 93 “We Wear the Mask,” 80 education, 62, 84, 138, 168, 177, 178, 179–80, 187n2 access to, 34, 53 as class marker, 29, 33, 42, 49, 50, 60, 65 industrial, 59, 60, 83 liberal arts, 70, 196n3 of mothers, 48

Ehrenreich, Barbara, 18 Elder, Arlene, 190n4 elites, 8, 14, 26, 31, 33, 42, 43, 56, 65, 81, 135, 138, 149, 153, 156, 158, 169, 171, 176, 178, 184n8, 184n10, 185n16 Blue Vein, 18, 147, 161 Boston, 124 emancipation, 26, 29, 48, 59, 92, 97, 159 post-, 96, 97, 137, 144, 169, 190n11 English, Daylanne K., 111 Ernest, John, 4, 9, 34 eugenics, 23, 107, 110, 111, 115, 121, 123, 147, 193nn1–2, 194n4 evasion, 3, 15, 23, 154 evolution human, 107, 110, 121 racial, 69, 123 social class, 108, 110, 138, 169 Fabi, Maria Guilia, 15, 187n25 fear of downward mobility, 17, 18, 19, 22, 56, 129 fear of estrangement, 17, 19, 50, 96, 102, 129, 135, 142, 144, 155, 156, 161, 164, 165, 179 fear of misclassification, 17, 18, 26, 56, 63, 65, 83, 87, 94, 96, 103, 129, 133, 135, 144, 150, 155, 168, 175, 181 Felski, Rita, 142, 183n4 feminism, 10, 65, 67, 69, 170 Fishkin, Shelley Fisher, 82, 193n6 Fitzgerald, Ann, 133 Foley, Barbara, 36, 185n11 folk black, 9, 25, 104, 121, 179 culture, 6, 8, 43, 194n4 dialect and, 85 representation, 47, 48

white, 98 working-class, 182, 194n10 Foreman, P. Gabrielle, 10, 35, 130, 135, 140 Forten, Charlotte, 185n16 Foster, Frances Smith, 8, 18, 188n9 Foster, Gwendolyn Audrey, 141 Page 217 → Fox, Pamela, 186n19 Frazier, E. Franklin, 7, 181 freedom, 21, 33, 39, 48, 51, 59, 75, 89, 97, 117, 131, 140, 147, 166, 194n6, 194n8 Freud, Sigmund, 183n5 Fultz, Michael, 181 Gagnier, Regenia, 184 Gaines, Kevin, 5, 60, 88, 161, 184n8, 187n2 Galton, Francis, 108 Hereditary Genius, 110, 111 Gardner, Eric, 89, 191n16 Garland, Hamlin, 45 Gates, Henry Louis, Jr., 3, 6 Gatewood, Willard, 5, 184n10, 187n26 gender, 11, 50, 88, 113, 131, 141, 142, 184n9 class mobility and, 69 femininity, 10, 65, 67, 69, 73, 119, 170 intersectional approaches and, 5, 6, 11 labor and, 69, 71 masculinity, 10, 96, 127, 186n17 race and, 54, 83 genre, 3, 4, 10, 16, 35, 55, 56, 66, 79, 80, 82, 91, 109, 115, 176, 187n24 geography, 79, 115, 186n22, 192n3

Giddens, Anthony, 43 Gilded Age, 35, 53, 97 Gillman, Susan, 122–24 Gilmore, Michael, 184n9 Goldsby, Jacqueline, 4 Great Migration, 97 Griffin, Farah Jasmine, 82, 192n5 Griggs, Sutton, 2 Imperium in Imperio, 54, 70, 117, 191n15 marriage, 69 Overshadowed, 22, 23, 53–77, 86, 117, 180, 190n4, 191n15, 192n18 respectability, 67 Unfettered, 129 Gruesser, John, 106 Harley, respectability, 61 Harper, Frances E. W., 2, 23, 58, 89, 91, 111–12, 156, 176, 181, 185n16, 188n3, 188n10, 189n12, 189n13, 190n9, 194n4 class taxonomy, 28–35 fictionalizing class discourse, 35–37 Iola Leroy, 13, 18, 20, 21, 26, 47–52, 112, 118, 131, 180, 188n9, 189n15, 193n3 Minnie's Sacrifice, 51, 187n1, 188n9 nonfiction essays and oratory, 27–34 respectability, 27–36, 38, 39, 40, 46, 49–50 Sowing and Reaping, 187n1, 188n9, 189n15 Trial and Triumph, 38–47, 112, 118, 180 “True and False Politeness,” 34 “The Two Offers,” 33 Harper, Phillip Brian, 140, 155 Harris, Cheryl, 137 Harris, Joel Chandler, 91

Harris, Trudier, 62, 195n4 Harrison, William P., 188n6 Hartman, Saidiya, 9, 136, 159 Henderson, Carol E., 186n21 Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks, 30, 196n2 “higher plane,” 1, 2, 183n3 Hitchcock, Peter, 6, 141 Hopkins, Pauline, 15, 20, 44, 58 blood, 115, 120, 122, 124, 127 “Charles Winter Wood; or, From Bootblack to Professor,” 113 class differentiation, 116, 120, 124, 125, 129, 160, 194n6 class mobility, 23 Contending Forces, 1, 2, 3, 4, 12, 23, 40, 54, 68, 106, 107, 108, 117–27, 130, 131, 160, 183n1, 189n3 “cracker,” 194n11 economic status, 109, 113, 114 genealogy of the black “better class,” 22, 105–31 hiring discrimination, 189n3 “Hon. Frederick Douglass,” 114 human evolution and eugenics, 121, 193n2 interracial sex, 116, 117 labor, 194n9 Page 218 → middle class status, 106–8, 109, 123, 126, 131, 176 “Munroe Rodgers,” 194n9 Of One Blood, 23, 106–7, 108, 109, 193n2 rich and royal black roots in, 127–31 plots, 109, 124, 193n2 A Primer of Facts, 194n9 racial passing, 128

romance, 109, 113, 115, 124, 194n7 scientific racialism, 107–8 self-made people, 113, 120 settings, 109, 118 social classification, 111, 116 “Toussaint L'Ouverture,” 194n9 white superiority, 116, 124, 130 work ethic, 114, 119, 121 Howells, William Dean, 84, 93, 157–58, 161, 170, 193n8 An Imperative Duty, 90–91 Illustrated Buffalo Express, 159 immigrants, 30, 45, 184n6 Indianapolis Repository, 89 intraracial class conflicts, 1, 12, 13, 47, 54, 120, 169 class differences, 2, 3, 9, 10, 11, 12, 15–16, 17, 24, 25, 27, 53, 56, 69, 87, 90, 91, 94, 96, 100, 102, 103, 106, 109, 110, 119, 125, 129, 137, 138, 155, 160, 176, 181, 183n2, 185n12, 186n20 color biases, 21, 134, 152, 161 cross-class relations, 28, 48, 118, 142, 169 fear of estrangement, 142 social closure, 139 Jackson, Cassandra, 51, 187n25 Jackson, John L., Jr., 163 Jackson, Mahalia “May the Work I've Done Speak for Me,” 53, 74, 77 Jacobs, Harriet, 34 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 186n21, 192n1 Japtok, Martin, 108, 130, 193n2 Jarrett, Gene Andrew, 11, 81, 82, 93, 100, 193n8 Jefferson, Thomas, 117, 194n8

Jenkins, Candice, 8, 181 Jewell, Addie Hamilton, 1–2, 12, 15, 24, 160, 183n1, 183n3 Jim Crow, 5, 18, 132, 133, 136, 138, 139, 142, 145, 158, 160, 163, 164, 165, 174 John Blye; or, Trials and Triumphs of the White-washer's Son, 191 Johnson, James Weldon, 134 The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, 89–90, 138–39, 148, 164 Book of American Negro Poetry, 193n7 Johnson, Patrick, 7–8 Jones, Gavin, 49 Jones, J. McHenry, 58 Hearts of Gold, 90–91 Keckley, Elizabeth, 10, 92 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 185n12 labor, 27, 31, 34, 40, 45, 46, 57, 110, 184n10, 189nn2–3, 190n8, 190n11, 191n14, 192n17, 194n9 agricultural, 28, 164, 165 authorial, 76 class and, 54 domestic, 19, 42, 50, 64, 68, 77 hiring discrimination and, 13, 19, 22, 53, 54, 75, 180, 189n3 industrial, 28, 191n16 manual, 10, 21, 22, 49, 54, 55, 100, 148, 166, 188n6 prison, 54, 74 professional, 22, 54, 172 racializing, 189n14 unions, 69, 71, 92, 192n17 unpaid, 55, 59, 70, 194n10 unrest, 91 women, 57–77, 120, 191n15, 193n10 work ethic and, 10, 23, 26, 62, 108, 114, 169

Lacan, Jacques, 183n5 Landry, Bart, 185n14 Page 219 → Lang, Amy Schrager, 38, 166, 186n18, 189n14 language of class, 21, 28, 31, 43, 47–52 dialects, 27, 28, 49–50, 80, 81, 85, 121, 126, 146, 147, 148, 158, 166, 188n4 Lauter, Paul, 133 Lee, Benjamin, 37 Lefebvre, Henri, 101 leisure, 19, 29, 43, 58, 61, 74, 78, 86, 120 class, 60 conspicuous, 54, 121 desire and, 62–72 Lewis, David Levering, 196nn1–2 Lhamon, W. T., 195n7 Lippincott's, 84 local color fiction, 16, 80, 91, 92, 96 Logan, Adella Hunt, 112–13, 126, 194n4 Lorimer, George, 84, 85, 86 Lott, Eric, 195n7 lynching, 19, 120, 179, 180 anti-, 118 mammy, 50, 52, 156 marriage, 35, 44, 46, 47, 61, 69, 71, 73, 76, 112, 121, 140, 152, 155, 156, 193n2 cross-class, 13 intergenerational, 121 interracial, 195n5 middle-class, 69, 72

proposal, 153, 154 sanctioned, 149 Marx, Karl, 28 Maxwell, William, 185n11 McCaskill, Barbara, 184n7, 187n2 McHenry, Elizabeth, 8, 18, 160, 183n3 McWhiney, Grady, 194n11 melodrama, 22, 55–56, 63, 66, 67, 70, 72, 73, 74, 75, 76, 77, 190n7 sentimental, 69 women's work, 57–62 Merrifield, Andy, 101 middle class, 2, 6, 10, 24, 36–37, 38, 42, 58, 86, 96, 111, 121, 138, 163, 166, 173, 184n8, 185n16, 188n11, 189n15 authors, 131, 195n2 class awareness, 43 domesticity, 50 lower, 41 marriage, 69, 72 morals and manners, 16, 168 readership, 18, 55, 85, 93, 94, 135 sensibilities, 50, 126, 169 status, 38, 87, 106–8, 109, 123, 126, 129, 176, 182 See also black middle class migration black, 96, 97, 98 class implications of, 192n5 male, 193n10 northern-bound, 22 novel, 82 minstrelsy, 161, 195n7

miscegenation, 1, 115, 156 Mitchell, Michele, 184n8 morality, 7, 27, 52, 107, 187n2, 196n9 Morehouse, Henry, 196n2 Morgan, Thomas, 82, 98, 100 Moses, Wilson, 55, 190n4, 190n6 Mrozowski, Stephen A., 88–89 mulatto/a, 13, 26, 27, 58, 59, 147, 153, 155, 183n2, 186n21, 187n26 characterization, 20, 28, 44, 51, 68, 91 freeborn, 146 paternity, 130 as prey, 127 subculture, 157 tragic, 161, 187n25 Mullen, Bill V., 185n11 music, 123, 178 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), 132 Naylor, Gloria, 189n13 Women of Brewster Place, 41 The Negro Problem, 175 New Negro, 168, 184n7 New South, 56, 75, 168, 172 economy, 188n6 labor relations, 189n3 Page 220 → New York, 67, 82, 88, 163, 178 See also Poughkeepsie New York Journal and Advertiser, 97 Ngai, Sianne, 11, 16, 133

Nickel, John, 124, 193n2, 194n12 North, 50, 97, 118, 169, 185n14, 190n10 debates, 48 geographic movement from the South, 192n5 laws and social custom, 190n11 life in, 12 social space, 98–99 whites, 95 O'Brien, Colleen, 131, 189n3, 194n9 Odd Fellows, 160 Odd Fellows Journal, 160 Page, Thomas Nelson, 91 Parkin, Frank, 136 patriotism, 31, 48, 187n2 Pattillo-McCoy, Mary, 102 Peterson, Carla, 8–9, 10, 29, 48, 55, 126, 185n16 Petrino, Elizabeth A., 188n3 Phelps, Elizabeth Stuart, 45 The Silent Partner, 189n14 Philadelphia, PA, 13, 40, 42, 45 black Americans' status, 12, 52, 177 class order, 60 Plessy v. Ferguson, 5 post-Bellum—pre-Harlem era Charles Chesnutt, 4, 184n7 class anxiety, 12 conflict and classification, 12–15 literature, 24, 111, 175–76 post-Reconstruction era, 4, 10, 36, 75, 97, 185n11

Potter, Eliza, 10 Poughkeepsie, NY, 87 poverty, 29, 30, 31, 39, 41, 50, 67, 105, 112, 114, 127, 138 proletarian, 36, 41 property, 46, 67, 89, 112, 118, 121, 130, 138, 166 destruction of black, 19 higher classes, 32 ownership, 87, 92, 93 slaves, 95, 117 whiteness as, 137, 156 protest, 5, 137 Puck, 196n8 Pugh, Sullivan, 189n1 race color line, 2, 23, 26, 34, 90, 105, 116, 124, 125, 127, 134, 136, 137, 145, 155, 156, 157, 163, 164, 165, 172, 173, 182, 195n4 passing, 23, 44, 58, 107, 127, 128, 131, 135–43, 161, 169, 171, 195n2 racial authenticity, 7–8, 19, 106, 155, 185n13 racial indeterminacy, 20, 44, 127, 130, 146, 187n1 racial solidarity, 3, 9, 21, 25, 42, 48, 103, 143, 162, 169, 171 racial uplift, 2, 10, 13, 16, 21, 30, 37, 46, 48, 53, 54, 58, 59, 61, 65, 86, 111, 161, 187n2 Rael, Patrick, 17 Raimon, Eve Allegra, 20, 187n25 readership, 37, 56, 79, 96 black, 8, 9, 18, 37, 48, 54, 55 black and white audiences, 3, 55, 108 middle-class, 18, 55, 85, 93 135, 196n8 white, 1, 17, 81 working-class, 55 realism, 16, 80, 81, 115, 194n7

Reconstruction, 5, 14, 21, 29, 48, 143, 187n1 reform, 36, 43, 54, 77, 134, 193n10, 195n4 African American, 98, 187n2 female, 30 middle-class, 37 race and class relations, 28, 30 social, 16, 38, 111, 112, 142, 187n2 tariff, 123 Religious Telescope, 88 Remond, Sarah Parker, 185n16 Page 221 → repetition, 3, 15, 81, 102 respectability, 8, 21, 44, 60, 105, 119, 180, 189n15 black middle-class, 90, 122 bourgeois, 93, 181, 186n17 Chesnutt's use of, 165, 168 Grigg's use of, 67 Harley's use of, 61 Harper's use of, 27–36, 38, 39, 40, 46, 49–50 McCaskill's definition of, 187n2 moral, 20, 26, 121 politics, 28–35 privilege, 52, 194n6 retrogression, 58, 196n9 Reynolds, Paul, 85, 100 Robinson, Amy, 142, 149 Roche, Claire, 115, 194n7 Rodgers, Lawrence R., 81, 82, 192n5 romance

Grigg's use of, 56 historical, 16, 109, 113 Hopkins' use of, 109, 115, 124, 194n7 Ross, Marlon, 10, 193n10 Ruebeck, Christopher, 187n26 San Francisco Elevator, 89 Santamarina, Xiomara, 8, 10, 33, 53–54, 61 Saturday Evening Post, 78, 79, 83, 84–86, 87, 94 Schocket, Eric, 74, 186n18, 189n2, 189n14, 195n2 sentimentalism, 55, 190n8 sex, 26, 67, 83, 88, 97, 98, 127, 139, 181, 184n9, 190n8, 194n8 coerced, 65 commodity, 51 illicit, 66, 111, 112, 122, 196n9 interracial, 64, 116, 117, 124 middle-aged female, 121 migrant workers, 193n10 neutering, 69 predation, 57, 191n15 rape, 191n15 reproduction, 121, 124 themes, 8 violence, 20, 180 vulnerability, 61, 64, 66, 73 working women, 22–23, 52, 57, 68 Shepherdson, Charles, 12, 183n5 Simmons, William J. Men of Mark, 114 skin complexion, 91, 124, 144, 146, 156

Chesnutt's use of, 135 creamy, 117 light-skinned, 58 dark-skinned, 42, 90 prejudices, 20, 42 See also mulatto/a slavery, 5, 13, 32, 48, 51, 61, 83, 84, 95, 117, 118, 123, 147, 149, 186n21, 187n1, 192n1, 195n6 chattel, 21, 39, 114 demoralization, 9 effects, 116, 144, 196n9 post-, 190n11 See also antislavery Smethurst, James, 80 social closure, 136, 139, 143, 144 Social Darwinism, 31, 58, 109, 115 social geography, 82, 88, 192n3 spirituality, 30, 62 status, 38, 87, 109, 113, 114 black middle class, 133, 146 genealogies of status, 22, 105–31 middle class, 106–8, 109, 123, 126, 176 Sumner, William Graham What Social Classes Owe to Each Other, 31 Talented Tenth, 19, 24, 138, 173, 175–77, 179, 180, 181, 196n2 taste, 22, 37, 123–25, 128, 134, 155, 158, 159, 166, 169, 178 Tate, Claudia, 10, 36, 46, 73, 93, 188n9 temperance, 26, 29, 42, 49, 187n1, 189n15 Thompson, Lisa, 8 Tillman, Katherine, 67

“Afro-American Women and Their Work,” 191n13 Page 222 → Clancy Street, 64–65 “Paying Professions for Colored Girls,” 64 Tsemo, Bridget Harris, 7 Tuskegee Institute, 112, 196n3 “ugly feelings,” 11, 16 urbanization, 13, 30, 91, 98, 187 Veblen, Thorstein, 14, 60, 63 violence, 95, 142, 170, 178, 193n6 death, 56, 74–77, 117 Griggs's use of, 56, 72–77, 180 murder, 71, 73, 77, 167 patterns of, 196n9 racial, 56, 122, 134, 135 retaliatory, 142, 174 sexual, 20, 180 subtle, 163–64 white, 13, 48, 174, 178 Voice of the Negro, 189n3 Wald, Priscilla, 179–80 Warren, Kenneth, 3, 134 Washington, Booker T., 60, 83–84, 194n6 “Industrial Education for the Negro,” 59 The Negro Problem, 196n1 “Washington's Colored 400,” 17 Webb, Frank J. The Garies and Their Friends, 12, 192n1 Weber, Max, 14, 15, 136, 171, 190n12

Weinstein, Cindy, 58 white supremacy, 5, 60, 95, 110, 116, 130, 131, 136, 159, 174, 182, 193n8, 196n9 Williams, Gilbert Anthony, 188n10 Williams, H. Price “The Organization of Colored Society,” 177 Williams, Linda, 56 Willson, Joseph, 33 Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia, 32, 188n7 Wilson, Harriet, 34 Our Nig, 194n10 Winch, Julie, 188n7 Wooley, Celia Parker, 195n6 working class, 10, 22, 27, 30, 31, 34, 58, 65, 69, 72, 102, 111, 115, 156, 182, 187n23, 188n6, 194n10, 195n7 accents, 50 African American dancers, 170 blacks, 7, 81, 83, 85, 99, 100, 103, 148, 149, 165, 167, 184n10, 185n12 black readers, 55 England, 115 ethics, 42 expressions of, 6 fiction, 186n19 folk, 182, 194n10 men, 64 respectable, 14 studies, 189n2 subjection, 45 whites, 95, 115, 195n7 working women, 22–23, 52, 57, 68 writers, black. See black writers

Yarborough, Richard, 119 Young, Vershawn Ashanti, 7 Zackodnik, Teresa, 187n25 Zandy, Janet, 68