Yours for Humanity: New Essays on Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins

By John Cullen Gruesser, John Cyril Barton, Elizabeth Cali and 9 more

Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins (1859–1930), African American novelist, editor, journalist, playwright, historian, and public intellectual, used fiction to explore and intervene in the social, racial, and political challenges of her era. Her particular form of cultural activism was groundbreaking for its time and continues to influence and inspire authors and scholars today. This collection of essays constitutes a new phase in the full historical and literary recovery of her work.

JoAnn Pavletich argues that considered from the broadest of perspectives, Hopkins’s life work occupies itself with the critique and creation of epistemologies that control racialized knowledge and experience. Whether in representations of a critical contemporary problem such as lynching, imperialism, or pan-African unity or in representations of African American women’s voices, Hopkins’s texts create new knowledge and new frames for understanding it. The essays in this collection engage this knowledge, articulating nuanced understandings of Hopkins’s era and her innovative writing practices, opening new doors for the next generation of Hopkins scholarship. With contributions from well-established Hopkins scholars such as John Gruesser (editor of The Unruly Voice) and Hanna Wallinger (author of Pauline E. Hopkins: A Literary Biography), the collection also includes important new scholars on Hopkins such as Elizabeth Cali, Edlie Wong, and others.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Release date: Dec 15, 2022
• ISBN: 9780820363158

John Cullen Gruesser

JOHN CULLEN GRUESSER is a professor of English at Kean University in New Jersey. He is the author of White on Black and Black on Black and the editor of The Unruly Voice.

Book preview

PART 1

Texts and Contexts

Strun ’Em Up fer a Eggsample to the Res’

LYNCH LAW’S RHETORIC OF EXEMPLARITY AND PAULINE E. HOPKINS’S CONTENDING FORCES

John Cyril Barton

In a historic vote on February 26, 2020, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Emmitt Till Justice for Lynching Act, a bill that would enable the federal government to prosecute racially motivated acts of mob violence for the first time ever. On March 7, 2022, the bill was approved by the Senate and now waits to be signed into law by the president of the United States. Over fifteen years earlier, on June 13, 2005, Congress officially apologized for its failure to pass such legislation, even though over two hundred anti-lynching bills were presented before the Senate or House from the early 1890s through the 1920s (Curtius). Three of those bills had passed in the House, but none ever made it out of the Senate. The most famous of those proposals was the Dyer Bill, first introduced in 1918 and vigorously debated on several occasions in Congress until its ultimate defeat in the Senate by filibuster in 1922. One of the earliest of such anti-lynching proposals, however, was the 1894 Blair Bill, which requested $25,000 in federal funds and called upon the national government to investigate, ascertain, and report (New York Times, September 11, 1894) facts and circumstances concerning alleged acts of rape and racially motivated mob violence from the previous decade. Noted African American activists supported the Blair Bill, including T. Thomas Fortune, the influential journalist and editor of the New York Age, and Ida B. Wells, the tireless race crusader who championed the bill in the concluding chapter of her second anti-lynching pamphlet, A Red Record: Tabulated Statistics and Alleged Causes of Lynching in the United States (1894).

Around the turn of the twentieth century, when Congress was first seriously considering a federal solution to racial lynching, several prominent Black writers turned to fiction, particularly the novel, to attack the systemic problem of white mob violence.¹ W. E. B. Du Bois, for instance, concluded Of the Coming of John—the penultimate chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) and the only work of fiction in the book—with an imminent lynching to express symbolically the problems of the color line in the starkest terms. Sutton E. Griggs, a prominent Baptist minister, activist, and compatriot of Du Bois in the Niagara Movement, penned four novels between 1899 and 1905 that significantly involved or revolved around acts of mob violence. Likewise, Paul Laurence Dunbar, unquestionably the period’s most famous Black poet, turned from poetry to fiction to analyze the psychology of white mobs in Tragedy at the Forks (1898) and especially The Lynching of Jube Benson (1902). Charles W. Chesnutt, the most distinguished Black novelist of the day, left his successful legal stenography business and budding career in law to pursue literature full time, writing two novels in which lynchings or near lynchings figured prominently.

Elsewhere, I have explored at length Chesnutt’s work in the context of anti-lynching legislation, giving special attention to The Marrow of Tradition, which, I argue, drew from Ohio’s successful passage of a state anti-lynching bill to make a case for a federal law modeled after it. Building on what I call lynch law’s cultural rhetoric of legitimation, that is, the narratives, tropes, and arguments through which participants in and apologists for lynching justified the mob murder of African Americans and other minorities (Barton 27), this essay examines Pauline E. Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900) in light of an important literary antecedent and in relation to anti-lynching activism, an important goal of which was the passage of a federal anti-lynching bill. Working both within and against this broader cultural rhetoric, the present essay focuses on lynch law’s rhetoric of exemplarity, what I define here as dramatic representations of mob violence that not only self-consciously call upon the judgment of readers but overtly thematize the idea of example as pattern, punishment, or model. For the means and modes of persuasion in any discourse that condones or condemns lynching often hinge on references, descriptions, or citations of particular acts of mob violence presented with particular audiences in mind.

My formulation of this term owes much to the insightful theoretical work of Alexander Gelley and the contributors to his collection, Unruly Examples: On the Rhetoric of Exemplarity, especially what Gelley identifies as the performative and ethical aspect of a rhetoric of exemplarity (13). The example, in Gelley’s words, is oriented not only toward a conclusion, a truth or principle that the speaker may have in view . . . but also . . . to an interlocutor, an addressee, for whom the example has, to a certain extent, been selected and fashioned (4). This act of selection and refashioning, as we shall see, is crucial to lynching’s rhetoric of exemplarity in African American literature because it forces judgment and solicits a response from readers, thus rendering the lynching scene much more of a performative act than a constative description or a so-called report. As Gelley goes on to theorize exemplarity by virtue of performativity, The rhetorical force of example is to impose on the audience or interlocutor an obligation to judge. Whether it be in argument or narrative, the rhetoric of example stages an instance of judgment, and the reader . . . occupies, however provisionally, the seat of judgment (14).

It is precisely this staging of judgment, this obligation to judge, to which overt depictions of lynching rhetorically appeal in African American literature. Such scenes, I would argue, are always overdetermined sites, reverberating with residues of injustice and dramatizing the conflict between Black subjectivity and white (supremacist) authority in its starkest terms. Historically and symbolically laden with signification, the lynching scene presents writers with an ethical and aesthetic conundrum. After all, with the high stakes of representing white violence and the display of the murdered, often tortured, Black body before them, how are writers to represent the violence? Realistically, surrealistically, sentimentally, ironically, or sardonically, to name only a few narrative modes? And from whose perspective should the scene be seen: the narrator, the white press, a member of the mob, a Black witness, the victim’s relative, and so on? Or is it best not to dramatize the violence in the first place, lest one gratifies the perverse desires of some readers? Whether taking place onstage or off, lynchings in African American literature constitute critical nodes in a literary work’s dramatic form, often providing the structural center around which a narrative turns or the climax or dénouement toward which it builds. Whereas Chesnutt’s The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Griggs’s The Hindered Hands (1905), and Hopkins’s Contending Forces exemplify the former, Du Bois’s Of the Coming of John (1903), Dunbar’s The Lynching of Jube Benson (1903), and James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1911) illustrate the latter. In each of these works, however, examples qua examples of mob violence play an essential role in criticizing lynching’s cultural rhetoric of legitimation, given that lynch logic can only be fully expressed by way of the example, through a particular illustration or instance. For without the example—the exemplification or instantiation of lethal and extralegal racial violence— lynch law itself would be merely rhetorical, a figure for an abstract principle rather than a historical practice whose examples are legion.

Concentrating on the two acts of lethal and extralegal violence that help to structure Contending Forces, in what follows I read Hopkins’s first published novel in light of an important literary antecedent and alongside fiction by like--minded contemporaries who engaged with and criticized the concept of lynching’s exemplarity. The first of these acts in Contending Forces constitutes what we might think of as the novel’s primal scene of racial violence, which is expressed through mob murder and a sublimated rape scene in the Old South Before the War, as Hopkins puts it in a chapter title. The Montfort Tragedy, as the event is called, marks the climax of the novel’s historical frame, which is set in North Carolina at the turn of the nineteenth century. The second act, which transpires a century later in Boston, unfolds at the structural core of the narrative proper and is communicated through a turn-of-the-twentieth-century syndicated lynching report from the white southern press. Culminating in a comparative analysis of these two disparate, albeit historically and symbolically entwined events in Contending Forces, I begin with a close examination of lynch law’s rhetoric of exemplarity in William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) for two reasons. First, I suggest that Brown’s lynching scene provided a model, an example, for later African American writers, particularly Hopkins, a great admirer of Brown.² Second, I show that racialized mob violence against African Americans has a history and presence well before the Civil War, the traditional starting point for the vast majority of historians and literary critics who study anti-Black lynching, with most scholars concentrating on the period between 1880 and 1940, during which at least thirty-two hundred African Americans were put to death by white mobs.³

In fact, such scholarship from across disciplines has almost exclusively examined the topic as a postbellum phenomenon for obvious and important reasons. Enslaved people, after all, were valuable property and sources of profit for their owners, who had a vested interest in protecting them from lethal violence (while, of course, subjecting them to all sorts of nonlethal violence). Moreover, enslaved persons who committed capital crimes could be lawfully executed by the state, which would often compensate slaveholders for their loss of property. Even so, at least fifty-six mob executions of blacks in the South [occurred] in the years 1824–1862 (34), as historian Michael Pfeifer documents in The Roots of Rough Justice, the only book-length study to date with an emphasis on racial lynching before Emancipation.⁴ Hopkins’s beloved Brown wrote about two of those lynchings. One was the infamous 1835 public burning of Francis McIntoch in St. Louis, an event Brown directly referenced in his 1846 Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave and about which he provided supplementary press clippings in the appendix to the revised 1848 edition of his Narrative. The second was a gruesome 1842 lynching report published in the southern white press that Brown included in his revised Narrative’s appendix and from which he extensively quoted in the narrative of Clotel, reframing it for rhetorical purposes. Brown’s repurposing of this report provides my starting point because of how it influenced and helped to shape, as I shall argue, subsequent representations of lynchings by later Black writers—again, Hopkins in particular. Writing in the antebellum period, Brown of course could not have anticipated the horrors of so-called lynch law during the (post-)Reconstruction period; nonetheless, his early reckoning with lethal and extralegal mob violence helps to establish a historical link between racialized lynching before and after the Civil War—a connection Hopkins strove to reinforce by interlinking the two lynching scenes, one in the 1790s and the other in the 1890s, that serve as structural poles or organizing principles in Contending Forces.

He Must Be Made an Example

Depictions of white mob violence against Blacks abound in African American literature, as any reader familiar with the tradition can readily attest. One of the earliest references to anti-Black Lynch law, however, occurs in Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, when Douglass describes a mob beating to which he was subjected in a shipyard that could have easily turned fatal had he not fled. Jeered and attacked by a group of white men while working in the Baltimore shipyard, Douglass fights back, but to strike a white man is death by Lynch law, Douglass informs readers about his decision to run away, and that was the law in Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard; nor is there much of any other out of Mr. Gardner’s ship-yard (Narrative 102).

If Douglass provided an early reference to Lynch law, the first out-and-out depiction of what today we would define as lynching—summary punishment (usually execution) by a mob—in African American literature appears in Brown’s Clotel, itself the first published novel by a Black writer.⁵ The scene in question accounts for the climax of chapter 3 of Clotel, The Negro Chase. This early and horrific scene, perhaps more than any other in the novel, epitomizes the terrors and savagery of slavery. It also provides a model or pattern, an example for later Black writers, offering an archetype of sorts for representing racialized lynch law, thus establishing some of the conventions and rhetorical strategies one finds at play in lynching or near lynching scenes dramatically rendered in later works by Wells, Hopkins, Chesnutt, Dunbar, and Griggs. We can see how those conventions were established by looking closely at Clotel’s lynching scene in the context of such later depictions; doing so will also enable me later to show how Hopkins in particular drew from Brown in subtle yet significant ways in fashioning the central lynching scene toward which the drama of Contending Forces builds.

The lynching graphically depicted in The Negro Chase from Clotel is indeed exemplary in how Brown selected and fashioned a particular historical incident—well documented in the antebellum press—to represent, exhibit, and stand in for the generalizable practice or principle of racialized lynch law. To begin with, Brown’s description sets the stage for scenes to come by emphasizing the obvious inhumanity and barbarity that transpire when two enslaved men run off owing to severe punishment (96). Throughout the chase, Brown emphasizes how the two runaways are dehumanized, treated like prey (99) and pursued by so-called negro dogs, bloodhounds trained to attack a negro at their master’s bidding and cling to him as the bull-dog will cling to a beast (96). At the same time, however, Brown humanizes and sympathizes with the enslaved men as victims of unchecked tyranny. Later, Brown lets the horror of mob violence speak for itself, narrating the capture and subsequent lynching of one of the runways from a detached, matter-of-fact perspective and then quoting extensively from an 1842 Natchez paper reporting an actual lynching.

One finds all of these strategies—citation from the white press, sympathy with a dehumanized victim, and use of a detached narrative voice—not only in Contending Forces, as we shall see in detail, but also in works by Dunbar, Chesnutt, Wells, and Griggs. In The Lynching of Jube Benson, for instance, Dunbar dramatized a chase in which the story’s titular Black victim is depicted as a human tiger and hunted as quarry by a white mob itself likened to a pack of hungry tigers (234–35), whereas use of the white press and a detached, ironic perspective constitute hallmark strategies of Wells’s influential anti-lynching campaign. Other Black writers similarly drew from Brown’s playbook. Griggs, for instance, closely based the primary lynching scene in The Hindered Hand on an actual double lynching in 1904 reported in a Nashville paper; moreover, he sardonically framed the scene by introducing it from the perspective of a young white boy eager to witness the violence. Chesnutt likewise sustained a detached, ironic point of view to register the horrors and hypocrisies of lynch law in The Marrow of Tradition. In fact, this tone and perspective dominate two chapters at the center of the novel that satirize lynching’s exemplarity. Whereas the first, The Necessity of an Example, offers a sardonic critique of an ideology of white supremacy that legitimates lynching as a necessary example, the second, How Not to Prevent a Lynching, provides a negative example à la the Dickensian parody of "how not to do it" (in Little Dorrit), thus mocking the legal, political, and social institutions that foster mob