Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South

By Christin Marie Taylor

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the Popular Front produced a significant era in African American literary radicalism. While scholars have long associated the black radicalism of the Popular Front with the literary Left and the working class, Christin Marie Taylor considers how black radicalism influenced southern fiction about black workers, offering a new view of work and labor.

At the height of the New Deal era and its legacies, Taylor examines how southern literature of the Popular Front not only addressed the familiar stakes of race and labor but also called upon an imagined black folk to explore questions of feeling and desire. By poring over tropes of black workers across genres of southern literature in the works of George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright, Taylor reveals the broad reach of black radicalism into experiments with portraying human feelings.

These writers grounded interrelationships and stoked emotions to present the social issues of their times in deeply human terms. Taylor emphasizes the multidimensional use of the sensual and the sexual, which many protest writers of the period, such as Richard Wright, avoided. She suggests Henderson and company used feeling to touch readers while also questioning and reimagining the political contexts and apparent victories of their times.

Taylor shows how these fictions adopted the aesthetics and politics of feeling as a response to New Deal–era policy reforms, both in their successes and their failures. In effect, these writers, some who are not considered a part of an African American protest tradition, illuminated an alternative form of protest through poignant paradigms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Apr 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781496821799

Christin Marie Taylor

Christin Marie Taylor is assistant professor of English at Shenandoah University. Taylor’s work has appeared in Southern Quarterly, Southern Cultures, American Literature in Transition: 1960–1970, and the Encyclopedia of Hip Hop Literature as well as Teaching the Works of Eudora Welty: Twenty-First-Century Approaches, published by University Press of Mississippi.

Book preview

Labor Pains

Labor Pains

New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South

Christin Marie Taylor

University Press of Mississippi / Jackson

Margaret Walker Alexander Series in African American Studies

Cover illustration by Elginia McCrary. For more images, please contact [e-mail].

The University Press of Mississippi is the scholarly publishing agency of the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning: Alcorn State University, Delta State University, Jackson State University, Mississippi State University, Mississippi University for Women, Mississippi Valley State University, University of Mississippi, and University of Southern Mississippi.

www.upress.state.ms.us

The University Press of Mississippi is a member of the Association of University Presses.

Copyright © 2019 by University Press of Mississippi

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

First printing 2019

∞

Portions of chapter 1 previously appeared as "Cultivated Desire: Black Women’s Work in George Wylie Henderson’s Ollie Miss," Southern Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2014).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Taylor, Christin Marie, 1982– author.

Title: Labor pains : New Deal fictions of race, work, and sex in the South / Christin Marie Taylor.

Description: Jackson : University Press of Mississippi, [2019] | Series: Margaret Walker Alexander series in African American studies | First printing 2019. | "Portions of chapter 1 previously appeared as ‘Cultivated desire: Black women’s work in George Wylie Henderson’s Ollie Miss,’ Southern Quarterly 51, no. 3 (2014)." | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

Identifiers: LCCN 2018047467 (print) | LCCN 2018053741 (ebook) | ISBN 9781496821799 (epub single) | ISBN 9781496821782 (epub institutional) | ISBN 9781496821812 (pdf single) | ISBN 9781496821805 (pdf institutional) | ISBN 9781496821775 (hardcover : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781496824073 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: African Americans in literature. | African Americans—Fiction.

Classification: LCC PS173.N4 (ebook) | LCC PS173.N4 T39 2019 (print) | DDC 810.9/96073—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018047467

British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available

To my parents and their parents:

thank you for your labors,

thank you for your love.

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction • Black Folk Work: New Deal–Era Feeling and Desire

Chapter 1 • Cultivating Feeling: Black Women’s Work and Desire in George Wylie Henderson’s Ollie Miss

Chapter 2 • Steel Feeling: Black Masculinity under Pressure in William Attaway’s Blood on the Forge

Chapter 3 • Feeling in the Light: Race, Fear, and Desire in Eudora Welty’s Popular Front Fiction

Chapter 4 • Feeling Rejected: National Denial of Black Working Mothers in Sarah E. Wright’s This Child’s Gonna Live

Conclusion • Feeling Shame: Black Southern Workers and Popular Culture

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgments

To teach and write about literature for a living is a labor of privilege and love. This privileged labor is only made possible through the generous fellowship, resources, and support of a network of teachers, mentors, colleagues, family, and friends. I am fortunate to have such a group of committed and caring individuals in my life. Their contributions have been integral to this book. My work is possible because of their work.

A word of thanks seems insufficient to express my gratitude to my mentor and teacher Dr. David Wyatt. He has unselfishly shared his vast knowledge of American literature, and he has given me advice and guidance throughout the writing process. Thank you for encouraging me to sit with the unconventional nature of my book from its beginnings. You teach and inspire me to let the texts speak for themselves, to let them reveal their secret histories, and to let them show us how to read them. To Dr. Wyatt, thank you for your time and for your work. I am unendingly grateful for your support.

I am also grateful to Dr. Mary Helen Washington for her dedication to scholarship on African American literature and the literary Left. Thank you for your insights into the twentieth-century formations, influences, and significances of black radical traditions. I appreciate Dr. Zita Nunes for sharing her knowledge of racial discourses in African American and diasporic literatures and their intersections with feminist and postcolonial contexts. Thank you for your work and for counseling and supporting me in the profession. I must also thank Dr. Carla Peterson. She has been influential in her wisdom about the continued significance of W. E. B. Du Bois as well as nineteenth-century African American literary formations.

I am thankful for Dr. Ira Berlin. I appreciate his belief in me and his support of my work. His passion for social history inspires me to seek the knowledge and power of seemingly marginal voices, and his passing marks the loss of a great scholar and a kind soul. I hold in loving memory his generosity, his grace, and his spirit.

I am grateful for Dr. Lisa Woolfork. Her courses were my first introduction to African American literary traditions and her teaching over the years helped crystalize my love of black women writers and African American women’s literary traditions. I also appreciate Dr. Harriet Pollack for her unselfish support of my work on Eudora Welty’s fiction and for including me in forums on Welty and race. Thank you so much for your encouragement.

I thank the National Agricultural Library for granting me access to their George Washington Carver papers and the National Archives for their assistance. I must also thank Ms. Schuyler Allen, relative of George Wylie Henderson, for her time. And thank you to Mr. Joseph Kaye, husband of Sarah Elizabeth Wright, for your unapologetic investment in furthering the appreciation for your wife’s work.

Many thanks to the anonymous reviewers of this book for their feedback. Words cannot convey my gratitude for the openhandedness of an anonymous reviewer who offered comments on my manuscript and shared a breadth of knowledge about African American literature and black radicalism. I would also like to thank Ms. Diane Ross for her editorial suggestions on my previous article on George Wylie Henderson’s Ollie Miss, which is now a part of this book. Additionally, I thank Ms. Lisa McMurtray of the University Press of Mississippi for interacting with me throughout the editorial process and Mr. Joseph Muller for his careful copyediting and attention to detail. I am tremendously appreciative of Mr. Vijay Shah of the University Press of Mississippi for his support of this book from its earliest stages. Thank you for your ongoing interest in this project and for opening the opportunity for me to publish with your press.

I am deeply moved by the fellowship of colleagues, friends, and family who so readily offer up a place of refuge for my weary feelings. I am grateful to the research and writing group at Shenandoah University for their collegiality, celebration, and commiseration. I appreciate the support of Deans Jeffery Coker and Cindia Stewart of the College of Arts and Sciences at Shenandoah, and I am grateful for the mentorship, support and friendship of the former chair of the English Department, Dr. Michelle Lynn Brown.

I feel revitalized by the company and counsel of my friends Wende E. Marshall, Laura C. Williams, Kara A. Morillo, and Ayla Olson. Dr. Marshall’s anthropological research on the agency and resistance of dispossessed communities inspires me and informs the fiber of my work. You were the first professor to mentor me and to cultivate my interest in social justice and the power of black radical traditions. Thank you for your labor, teaching, mentorship, nurture, and faith. To Drs. Williams and Morillo, I am grateful for your knowledge and camaraderie. Laura, thank you for reading my work, offering feedback, and sharing your depth of understanding of African American literary formations of the Cold War era. Kara, thank you for your lens into feminism and gender studies. To Ayla, thank you for believing in me when at times I don’t believe in myself and for always rejuvenating my enthusiasm for this work. Marshall, Kara, Laura, and Ayla, you enrich my thinking, but most of all I am thankful for your friendships.

To my partner Arthur Burgess Jr., you bolster my spirits. Your love, patience, constancy, and understanding provide a safe haven that helps me weather many storms. I love you for who you are. Thank you for loving me for me.

Finally, I humbly thank my parents Lloyd and Kilja Taylor for their work. As teachers, they have dedicated their labors to supporting and uplifting their communities. Their work reminds me to honor the labor of my forbearers and all that they gave and forfeited so that I might comfortably follow. You were my first teachers and the first to subtly ensure that I learn the history of southern black working folks when, in the early nineteen-nineties, you gifted me a copy of Mildred D. Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (1976). Your insistence on making me an avid reader of black southern fiction and your own work as educators has led me to this path. And, as you probably now regret, your passion is the reason that you have labored through the pages of this book. To my parents, thank you for your love, thank you for tending to me, thank you for sheltering my soul. You are my best friends and my greatest inspirations. I love you more than you can know.

Labor Pains

Introduction

Black Folk Work

New Deal–Era Feeling and Desire

In the 1930s there was a sharp uptick in the reference to and articulation of an American working class. This surge was in no small part because the New Deal–era Popular Front relied on the idea and the romance of the worker. This working class became the centerpiece of a range of artistic expressions. New Deal–era images are perhaps the clearest examples of a national focus on everyday people at work. Representations of laborers appeared in a variety of mediums, at times to signal a united nation on the brink of a brighter tomorrow, and at other times to challenge the nation.¹

Many of these artistic expressions specifically concentrated on an African American working class. The African American laborer in particular would be used to capture the experience of the nation, to inspire a democratic promise abroad, and to raise questions about national belonging.² While we often think of New Deal–era representations of African American workers in terms of northern industry and urban labor, the radicalism of southern black folk workers also generated unuttered feelings during the Popular Front.

Black Men Work at Large Machine, National Youth Administration, 1938. Courtesy of the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

The Popular Front era marks a time when forms of literary and political radicalism were used to combat the racism and classism that persisted from the interwar years through the 1960s.³ Scholars of the literary and political Left have charted the impacts of radical traditions, activists, writers, and artists. Cedric Robinson uncovered the radicalism of African American political traditions of thought leading up to this period in Black Marxism (1983), and Barbara Foley would consider its literary dimensions in Radical Representations (1993). William Maxwell’s New Negro, Old Left (1999) examined the entwined goals and commitments of black authors and communists, an interracial cooperation that Bill V. Mullen also appraised in Popular Fronts (1999). Pushing temporal boundaries of the Popular Front, Alan Wald’s Exiles from a Future Time (2002) surveyed the hopes and experiences of writers who formed the literary Left of the 1920s through the 1960s.

Scholars of the Left have insisted upon a continued expansion of the Popular Front period. Where Brian Dolinar has argued for a wider, more fluid view of the time frame that encapsulates Popular Front–era radicalism in The Black Cultural Front (2012), Mary Helen Washington has tested the borders of convention in The Other Blacklist (2014), insisting on the important tensions between leftist protocols and modernism.⁴ The urgency of continuing to consider Popular Front–era American literature rests in the dynamic ways a range of American men and women used their craft to speak to political, economic, racial, and gendered oppressions during one of the most tumultuous centuries in US history. While scholars of the Left do the vital work of literary history and archival recovery to show the diversity of radical literatures, I aim to highlight the subtle ways Popular Front radicalism seeps into southern modernism.⁵

Labor Pains: New Deal Fictions of Race, Work, and Sex in the South is about southern modernist fictions centered on the imagined lives of black folk workers from the 1930s to the 1960s. This period encompasses the clashes surrounding New Deal–era policy reforms and their legacies as well as a surge in Popular Front artistic expressions from the Depression to World War II to the civil rights era and following. Labor Pains sets out to show that black working-class representations of the Popular Front not only address the stakes of race and labor but also call upon an imagined black folk to do other work. I consider tropes of black folk workers across genres of southern literature to demonstrate the reach of black radicalism and how the black folk worker was used to engage the representative feelings we think we know and the affective feelings that remained unsaid.

The affective dimension of Popular Front–era southern modernism has yet to be fully explored.⁶ Labor Pains pivots from a focus on labor representation to include a more malleable examination of feeling and desire. Feeling and desire allow for an alternative view of the span and importance of black literary radicalism, as well as of the form and function of writings on black work. Labor Pains emphasizes the feeling, namely the sensual and the sexual, imbued in narratives that call upon tropes of the black folk worker. This book centers on southern modernists George Wylie Henderson, William Attaway, Eudora Welty, and Sarah Elizabeth Wright. They situate their narratives in social and historical contexts that critique New Deal–era discourses and policies. While these writers display varying degrees of radicalism in their works, they each employ tropes of black folk workers to get a fuller picture of gender and desire during this time. As a result, they provide a glimpse into feminist and gender-aware aspects of the outgrowths of black radicalism, those labor pains pertaining to matters of sexuality that many Popular Front–era protest writers of the period purposefully avoided.

First, this introduction will define the use of the term black folk as it will be understood throughout this book. We will then consider the ways the idea of a black folk has been engaged throughout the long twentieth century, giving special attention to the use of a southern black folk in radical traditions of the Popular Front. As the introduction will explain, clashes between writers on seemingly opposite poles of African American literary traditions—radicalism and folk modernism—have overshadowed the centrality of feeling. By looking at southern fiction that takes the black folk worker as a central character, we find the materialist politics we expect alongside affective dimensions that raise new questions all their own.

Defining a Black Folk

The American literary imagination has had a long-standing fascination with the romance of a black folk.⁷ This preoccupation was in no small part because a black folk has served as a placeholder for social anxieties and social strivings related to a seemingly inchoate black mass—a group of poor southern-born African Americans, some of whom travelled north, others of whom remained south at the turn of the century.⁸

The term folk has therefore included a concrete concept as well as an abstract idea, becoming shorthand for a host of related and overlapping meanings. On one hand, an African American folk has been rendered historically concrete, for a black folk, like any folk group, is said to emerge out of a peasant, impoverished, or indigenous context. William Stott proposes that the folk are the worker, the poor, the jobless, the ethnic minorities, the farmer, the sharecropper, the Negro, the immigrant, the Indian, the oppressed and the outlaw (53). For our purposes, an African American folk will be defined as a southern peasant class, wage-earning or non-wage-earning southern laborers, southern migrant workers, and significantly, a group unrealized as a working class.

An African American folk has been considered geographically and historically derivative, coming out of the American South and a chattel slavery system. The end of chattel slavery gave rise to a black folk in the southern United States or the so-called Black Belt region. Social historian Lawrence Levine views the folk as the bulk of black Americans (xi) in the twentieth century due to heavy concentrations of African Americans in the South (or generational connections to southern culture and experiences, even for people who migrated north). What’s more, says Levine, black Americans were constituted as folk because their social contributions and achievements had been long omitted from historic records. The folk, though quite articulate in their lifetimes, were rendered historically inarticulate for they had not been in the mainstream of American society and politics (Levine ix). And yet the folk had their traditions: Songs, folktales, proverbs, aphorisms, jokes, verbal games, and long narrative oral poems known in Afro-American culture as ‘toasts’ (Levine xi–xii). These traditions would become an inspiration for mainstream literary enterprises centered on black folk culture.

The folk has therefore been used to define authentic blackness. According to Henry Louis Gates and Gene Jarrett, Romanticized as ahistorical, lower-class, and authentically black, the folk served as a metonym or synecdoche of the African American community (9), particularly for the romantic culturalists of the Harlem Renaissance. Sw. Anand Prahlad goes on to suggest that folk becomes primarily a class designation, and lore a referent to unconsciously transmitted traditions that persist over time (569). This romance has been foundational to African American literary traditions. As Robin Lucy demonstrates, seminal studies in African American literature posit the folk, folklore, or vernacular culture generally as the literal or metaphorical ground for the origins or essential features of African American literature (258). Hazel Carby has criticized this practice, insisting that such a romance, particularly an unevolving literary rendering of southern black vernacular, becomes ahistorical for its failure to distinguish from antebellum-era periodization, culture, and experience (127). Rather, as Carby and others contend, the folk reflect ever-changing historical contexts and contests, such as the Great Migration (Lucy 258; Nicholls 7; Favor 4–9).

Black Folk Modernity: The Great Migration and the New Negro

For twentieth-century African American writers, the Great Migration marked a sea change in their imaginings of the folk. The idea of a black folk spread as persons constructed as folk themselves spread to rural and urban centers. Uprooted by forces beyond their control or uprooting themselves to harness their control, some six million African Americans voted with their feet, migrating to northern, midwestern, western, and industrial locales to escape poverty, to escape violence, and to better their futures. Nearly two million African Americans journeyed to urban and northern centers between 1910 and 1930, and another three million remained in the US South as farmers and sharecroppers.⁹

Writers of the early to mid-twentieth century thought this migration and its many waves and steps meant futurity and new forms of labor. According to scholar of modernism David Nicholls, "[a]s millions of black Americans left agricultural settings to pursue employment in urban centers, the folk seemed an appropriate term to describe the masses of former sharecroppers and farmhands who were moving across the landscape (3; emphasis in original). Popular Front–era writers, such as Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, focuse[d] on the meaning of the Great Migration for people historically rooted in southern soil, a condition that for these writers, and for many of their contemporaries, defined the black folk (Lucy 258). In a paradoxical sense, then, the folk was further elaborated following the Great Migration precisely because the movement of people from the South was thought to create a new people and a New Negro" born out of an imagined folk past. On one hand, a new system of urban and industrial labor exploitation made a previous life—a folk life—an authentic cultural inheritance. On the other hand, these labor situations meant writers imagined the folk in stages of becoming something different, including a working class.

Despite the realities of historical conditions, the folk is therefore a modern social and artistic construct and a product of modernism. As David Nicholls points out, [t]he historical conditions that give rise to modernity also provoke the discourse on the folk (3–4). Robin D. G. Kelley had previously explained that terms like ‘folk,’ ‘authentic,’ and ‘traditional’ are socially constructed categories that have something to do with the reproduction of race, class, and gender hierarchies and the policing of the boundaries of modernism (1402). The modern American literary imagination has articulated, appropriated, and repurposed a black folk as a marker of race and the potential for the makings of a modern African American.¹⁰ The folk has been the subject matter of modernists who sought to articulate the New Negro through a wide spectrum of expressions, from provocative primitivism to political propaganda to everything in between. Across the political spectrum, folk aesthetics elevated social outcasts and plain folk to heroic stature, according to Bernard Bell (112). The folk became synonymous with the black masses. There were heated debates among writers and intellectuals of how to best represent everyday African American working people, and to what end.

Before delving into the twentieth-century uses of and debates over the folk, it is important to note the concept’s foundations in the nineteenth century when the folk was used as a discursive tool of resistance. According to literary scholar David G. Cox, late nineteenth-century folk culture "was commonly conceptualized as a gauge of racial character and potential; in consequence,