The novel Contending Forces seems fairly episodic. Hopkins' intentions involve discussing differences between Southern and Northern blacks in the Reconstruction and Post-Reconstruction era. Her comments display her intents: "I have presented both sides of the dark picture -- lynching and concubinage -- truthfully and without vituperation" (15).
The first tale involves a slave-owning planter who decides to move from the Bahamas to North Carolina when the Brits outlaw slavery. Mysteriously, the man makes this move despite his intention to free these same slaves in a few years, though this cannot possibly be reasonable economically.
In NC, skanky white neighbors displeased with his too-noble ways and covetous of his wife make up a story that she's black, lynch him for freeing slaves, whip her with scarce-hidden sexual overtones to their pleasure, auction off his property and take his sons into slavery. If any irony suggests that such practices were unusual, I missed it.
In the next story, a romance is contrived between northern and southern African-Americans. Hopkin's characters go on and on and on with various ideas about various difference between different combinations of black and white genes. In places, it's unclear just how much of this Hopkins herself buys. Passages like the following are not clearly attributable to one character or another:
"Langley's nature was the natural product of such an institution as slavery. Natural instinct for good had been perverted by a mixture of 'cracker' blood of the lowest type on his father's side with whatever God-saving quality that might have been loaned the Negro by pitying nature. This blood, while it gave him the pleasant features of the Causasian race, vitiated his moral nat ure and left it stranded high and dry on the shore of blind ignorance . . . " (221).
One of the more durable curses slavery seems to have put on African-Americans is this business of analyzing their responses in terms of their whiteness or blackness.
Come to think of it, this endures even in such a talent as Langston Hughes. In the last story of The Ways of White Folk, Hughes describes the homecoming of a prodigal son of interracial concubinage. In the only scene detailed from the boy's childhood, the white father beat the "black" son horribly for calling him "Papa" in public, though no one stood in much doubt as to his parentage. The boy has predominantly white features, and on several occasions is described as having inherited much of his father's obnoxious character. The boy stands up to his father, expecting to be shot, but the father fails to shoot him and dies in the scuffle, as though from a heart attack.
Part of the point for Hughes appears to be that there's a balance in that the old man's evil has reproduced itself in his son, and the final point, that the man "left no heirs," is of course deeply ironic. For Hughes, the violence has occurred because the boy has inherited a white character and white attitudes.
At the same time, many's the time these narratives go out of their way to describe how close to white certain black protagonists are. It always is done as a way of making them appear more attractive and even more deserving -- which represents an appalling degree of acceptance of the value system of the slaveowners. The same kind of thing operates to this day among the population of Mexico, where a woman is called "guera," or fair, as a compliment.
...
Going on, Hopkins describes an African-American politician, sucked deep into compromises in which the majority of the African-Americans gain little if anything despite promises.
. . . . As a continuation of the previous imminent lynching issue,
The ending brings the threads together in true soap-opera serial style. Will, who wishes to marry Sappho, the girl who flees rather than admit she has born a child to a rapist,
As a whole, it's written with fair competence, but remains unexciting fiction because the author's aims are almost strictly polemic and present themselves as mostly obvious to anyone not beset by the peculiar brand of racism that she writes against.
Thumbnail plot:
- Engand would outlaw slavery.
- Slaver Montfort, in English protectorate, flees to N. Caroline with his brown-eyed wife.
- Jealous cartoon southerners make up a story that his wife is black. They kill him, rape and beat her, and enslave their kids.
- A man buys one kid to liberate him, probably because he's white.
- The other kid remains a slave and eventually marries a slave; they have children, one of whom has children Will and Dora.
- Will has trouble with Sappho because she has been violated by descendents of the men who ruined the Montforts. She runs away rather than reveal her misfortune
- Everybody meets up and lives happily ever after
It's interesting to see that the recurrent themes of slave narratives constantly involve family matters. There are always relatives lost -- sold, escaped, or transplanted by violence. But also the black children of white slavers or bosses are also a constant fixture. Interestingly, the authors invariably take the white features to be good-looking, but generally consider white ancestry to be bad blood otherwise -- that is, contributing to violence, unnatural pride, and even insanity.
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