‘I’se regusted’

Wildcat Marsden, Jeff Poindexter, Widow Duck or Mush and Poke — they aren’t as recognizable as Jay Gatsby, Ma Joad, Todd Hackett or Sam Spade. But they were compatriots on the printed page, fictional characters who vied for readers’ attention in North America’s dynamic literature of the 1920s and ‘30s.

These characters are lost to history today because they fed, advertently or not, into Jim Crow-era racism.

It’s a very narrow sub-genre of literature: Short-form humorous fiction featuring continuing black characters, written by white authors. But given that these stories appeared in wide-circulation, general-interest periodicals and major city and regional newspapers, their impact was enormous.

A good example is Octavus Roy Cohen’s Florian Slappey stories. Set in Birmingham’s Darktown, they appeared in The Saturday Evening Post (166 stories) and other publications (151 stories) for more than three decades beginning in 1918. The writer depicted a fantasy world of brash hustlers, seductive women and jiving musicians that Southern readers found safe and Northern readers believed to be accurate.

Cohen and others were generally capable writers who, eager for a steady market, wrote story after story laden with vernacular conversations and stereotyped characters of the type greatly (and thankfully) now out of vogue. 

The stories aren’t incitefully racist, but in their time they reinforced Jim Crow etiquette. They spread concepts of black inferiority into the American north and west. The Northwest Corner has had a largely white population since blacks fled to neighboring Massachusetts where slavery was essentially abolished in 1781. Connecticut didn’t end slavery officially until 1848, New York state in 1841.

The influx of newly freed blacks after the Civil War particularly in the Midwest heightened demand for jobs, and, coupled with a general unfamiliarity with people of a different race, inspired a less formal set of rules, but an etiquette nevertheless.

“There were those who railed against the image,” historian-scholar Joseph Boskin said, “and its acceptance by a majority of the populace. Yet their energies were not enough to prevent the figure [stereotype] from assuming iconic proportions.”

The stereotypes emerged as a white justification of black slavery, perpetuating the myth that blacks were incapable of fending for themselves and needed the strictures of the master-slave culture to survive.

In their time, the fiction stories were taken as routine, no harm meant. Today’s readers find them embarrassing at the very least, and generally repugnant.

Occasionally acknowledged in academic writings and news stories of the day, the role of these selected popular short fiction writers in the decades up to and through World War II — such as Cohen, Roark Bradford and Hugh Wiley, also Amos ‘n’ Andy creators Charles Correll and Freeman F. Gosden, even Booth Tarkington — is instructive of not only how blacks were portrayed, but of how white writers fit into the pervasive Jim Crow paradigm.

Periodicals for a mass audience, The Saturday Evening Post and its sisters, rose to circulation heights. The Post, Collier’s, American and other slick paper periodicals could be found on the remotest of newsstands, were affordable, carried broad offerings and from time to time comfortably included stories about non-whites. 

Regional newspapers enlarged their offerings through self-generated or syndicated fiction. The Macon Telegraph in Georgia ran Bridges Smith’s Yamacraw stories in his regular column, for example. The State in South Carolina printed Ambrose E. Gonzales’ Gullah tales. 

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These white writers persuaded readers they knew the black mind, character and ambition. Few blacks agreed. However empathetic they might be, white writers never lived inside black skin. Only rarely did a writer — Cohen, for example, or Irvin S. Cobb — even acknowledge there existed two worlds, the white world and the Jim Crow world, for African Americans. 

Sterling A. Brown, in his essay “Negro Characters as Seen by White Authors,” griped that Cohen’s characters spoke in a dialect never heard in real life. Arthur K. Akers resorted to “irate shrews and ‘Milquetoast’ husbands, with razors wielded at departing parts of the anatomy,” and Wiley was “another creator of the farce that negro life is too generally believed to be.” He allowed that Bradford could write good humor, but “he has a definite attitude to the Negro to uphold. His stories of the easy loves of the levee (frequently found in Collier’s) concentrate upon the comic aspect of Negro life, another observer might well see the tragic.”

Jim Crow boundaries were enforced on all races in the South. For story series about blacks to have a chance, they not only had to have cardboard characters, they had to show the blacks as little-educated, superstitious, conniving, unreliable, lustful and lazy (not necessarily all in the same story). The stories had to be “funny.” Funny, that is, to white readers. Black readers may have read them, may have tolerated them. But they found little funny in them.

Later black writers Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes included dialect in their poems and stories — and were criticized for being “too racial” by whites who were offended and by blacks who saw dialect as a holdover of Jim Crow etiquette. However, just the fact black writers have employed dialect — reaching for authenticity — suggests a legitimacy to using vernacular speech. If done right. Which, in the case of white writers, is subject to debate.

Is there a value in these stories simply because they introduced blacks to the mainstream? Even through the Jim Crow filter, Bradford’s Bugaboo Jones and Correll and Gosden’s Amos ‘n’ Andy (radio characters who also appeared in print) emerged as real people — as real as their fictional white contemporaries, that is.

Dialect and pathetic character, then, accounted for much of the humor in these stories. Fortunately, the better writers also showed an increasing ability to create situational humor, to weave their hapless fictional figures into interesting plots.

“It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity,” W.E.B. Du Bois wrote. “One ever feels his twoness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

We can’t lose sight of what was going on, in racially tense times. Blacks were (and continue to be) held apart because of their skin color, their ethnic origins. And that shouldn’t be.

The author’s book “Black Stereotypes in Popular Series Fiction, 1851-1955: Jim Crow Era Authors and Their Characters” is included on the American Library Association’s 2016 Outstanding Reference Sources List. He will participate in a program about hometown Great Barrington influences on civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois at the Stagecoach Tavern on Undermountain Road in Sheffield, Mass., on Feb. 28 at 6:30 p.m.