of the upper South. In unraveling the threads of racial dependency and domination, Cash stated: -416-
And in this society in which the infant son…was commonly suckled by a black mammy, in which gray old men were his most loved story-tellers, in which black stalwarts were among the chiefest heroes and mentors of his boyhood, and in which his usual, often practically his only companions until he was past the age of puberty were the black boys (and girls) of the plantation — in this society in which by far the greater number of white boys of whatever degree were more or less shaped by such companionship, and in which nearly the whole body of whites, young and old, had constantly before their eyes the example, had constantly in their ears the accent, of the Negro, the relationship was by the second generation…nothing less than organic. Negro entered into white man as profoundly as white man entered into Negro — subtly influencing every gesture, every word, every emotion and idea, every attitude.
Cash's delineation is both personal and relative, but he attempted to account for one result of racial interaction in the South as he perceived it.
White Southern writers, such as T. S. Stribling, Julia Peterkin, and DuBose Heyward, depicted African Americans in a central space in their novels, perhaps out of recognitions comparable to those Cash identified. They may also have written racial portraiture out of an awareness of cultural shifts and of H. L. Mencken's attack on the South as a literary wasteland in 'The Sahara of the Bozarts,' published in the New York Evening Mail (November 13, 1917) and collected in Prejudices, Second Series (1920). Editor of The Smart Set (1908-24) and of The American Mercury (1924-33), Mencken saw a vacuum in literary production in the South and issued a challenge to Southerners to explore the realities of their region and to create a viable art. While his influence cannot be linked directly to all Southern creative literature treating race after the appearance of 'The Sahara of the Bozarts,' his prominence in the literary world and his strident call for new voices from the South surely impacted upon the nature of subsequent novels issuing from the South. Mencken specifically aided the developing careers of both Julia Peterkin and DuBose Heyward by praising their work for its more complex treatment of Southern blacks.
Peterkin drew upon her observations of Gullahs from coastal South Carolina to create the stories and sketches of Green Thursday (1924) and the novels Black April (1927), Scarlet Sister Mary (1928), -417- and Bright Skin (1932). Peterkin's attention to the beliefs and practices of the Gullahs helped to legitimize folk portraiture and to identify a viable market for unsentimental fiction treating Southern blacks. Her portrayal of an African American female, who struggles to sustain herself in a debilitating world and who triumphs by using her wit, sexuality, and strength, earned Peterkin a Pulitzer Prize for Scarlet Sister Mary, but her study of a mulatto in the novel Bright Skin was not well received.
DuBose Heyward attended to another aspect of race in South Carolina, the urban African American community struggling against poverty and marginalization. In his best-received novel, Porgy (1925), he explored the interactions among the black residents of Charleston's Catfish Row. Following the success of Porgy and its adaptation for the Broadway stage, Heyward wrote Mamba's Daughter's (1929), which, though continuing the focus of his first novel, was less well received, in part because by the end of the 1920s African Americans were producing more complex portraits of their own people and culture.
Significantly, Mencken's identification of the South as a field for fiction awaiting discovery can be linked to the turning to racial material in writers outside the South. Waldo Frank and Jean Toomer are two of the writers who turned for the matter of their fiction to the richness of the South and to race as a complication in realistic explorations of the region. Frank and Toomer traveled together through the South with the intention of gathering materials for their writing. Frank's novel Holiday (1922), tracing the interracial attraction and the psychological dimensions of Southern life that culminate in lynching, appeared first, but its mild success could not have predicted the impact that Toomer's Cane (1923) would have. While not a financial success, Toomer's avant-garde novel combining prose, poetry, and song in three large sections was a major breakthrough in the conception and representation of Southern blacks, particularly in their relationship to the soil and their heritage. Toomer captured in Can e the emotions he had recognized during a three-month sojourn in Sparta, Georgia: 'Georgia opened me,' he remembered of his 'initial impulse to an individual art' based in the soil. In pointing to 'the soil every art and literature that is to live must be embedded in,' Toomer also identified a folk spirit that he thought was 'walking in to die on -418- the modern desert.' He responded to the folk songs and to the landscape itself, so much so that he believed 'a deep part of my nature, a part that I had repressed, sprang suddenly to life.' Cane recovered both the beauty and the pain of African American life in the South, and as a celebration of racial self-discovery it recuperated an identity that had been undermined and distorted by racial oppression and economic victimization.
In three interconnected sections, Toomer traced the social, moral, and psychological limitations of Southern folk life along with its creative power and spiritual essence. The first section concentrates the dual edge of black Southern existence imaged in pine needles, cane fields, and cotton flowers and in the stories of women who are victims of religious hypocrisy, social rigidity, and sexual oppression. The women, ripened too soon, like the men destroyed by bigotry, feel their way through racist economic and cultural forces that would mute and crush them. Brief, imagistic poems and lyrics function to underscore the thematic idea of a people who have the strength and determination to change their own lives, but who have little chance of transforming themselves or their environment; for example, in 'Cotton Song,' men at work sing: 'We aint agwine t wait until th Judgment Day!…Cant blame God if we dont roll,/ Come on, brother, roll, roll.' The second section utilizes the urban environment of the North to underscore the dilemma of Southern blacks alienated from their roots in the soil. Conspicuous materialism, bourgeois consumerism, class snobbery, and color consciousness all function to impede interaction and communication. In the third section, entitled 'Kabnis,' a return to the South is a harbinger of transformation. The ritualized search for identity and meaning evident in the first two sections has its greatest opportunity for completion in the survival strategies of religion and education characterizing the Southern folk. In the text as a whole, however, Toomer insisted that the Southern folk existence and oral heritage were essential for representing the complex truth of African American life. In doing so, he foreshadowed the Harlem or New Negro Renaissance and illustrated how the past, including the African cultural homeland and Southern chattel slavery, might be envisioned so that modern African Americans could reclaim their history and heritage yet maintain personal dignity and racial pride. -419-
Cane appeared a year after the watershed of 1922 in which the publication of fiction positioned at the intersection of region (the South) and race (the 'Negro') proliferated. For example, Hubert Shand's White and Black, T. S. Stribling's Birthright, Clement Woods's Nigger, and Ambrose Gonzales's Black Border are only a sampling of the texts appearing in 1922. From that point to the end of the decade, the thematic intersection of race and region, along with writerly interconnections, would become a major part of the flowering of modern American fiction.
Interconnections were perhaps inevitable at a time when both Southerners, situated as a regional minority in cultural achievement, and African Americans, marginalized as a racial minority in literary achievement, were rewriting the dominant views of their insignificance. Stribling's novel Birthright, for example, provoked a discussion among Mencken, Walter White, and Jessie Fauset regarding who could best portray the reality of African American life in fiction. In asking White to review Stribling's novel, Mencken had not anticipated objections to its sympathetic treatment of race and Southern race relations. As African Americans, White and Fauset, along with Nella Larsen, pointed to the shortcomings of a white outsider's perspective on African Americans, and accepted Mencken's challenge of writing their own novels. Of the three, only Walter White was a Southerner, and only his The Fire in the Flint (1924) of those novels initially produced by the three was confined to the South as setting. In responding to Stribling's novel, White, Fauset, and Larsen were not only confronting the issue of authenticity regarding African American materials in fiction but were also seizing authority and agency by shifting the dominant perspective inside the racial group and by acquiring control of the representations and the stories told. Each, of course, assumed a different subject position in the resulting novels. White's The Fire in the Flint traces the idealism of an African American physician, Dr.
