C AROLYN L. K ARCHER Bricks Without Straw: Albion W. Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” Albion W. Tourgée’s 1880 novel about Black Reconstruction in North Carolina, Bricks Without Straw, opens with a chapter-long monologue in which an ex-slave named Nimbus, who has conquered his freedom by escaping to the Union army and joining its ranks, reflects on the changes of identity he has undergone since the outbreak of the Civil War. “I’m dod-dinged now ef I know who I be ennyhow,” exclaims Nimbus at the climax of his monologue (10). The device of letting an African American voice introduce the “strange queries which freedom had so recently propounded to him and his race” (11) announces that Tourgée is presenting the turbulent era of Reconstruction through the eyes of the freedpeople and that he is placing African Americans at the center of his narrative - an endeavor we can recognize as anticipating W.E.B. Du Bois’s monumental revisionist history, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Tourgée was writing only three years after Reconstruction officially ended with the withdrawal of the last federal troops from the South in 1877, yet he was already facing the same problem Du Bois would confront half a century later: that although the Confederates had lost the Civil War militarily, their propagandists had won it ideologically by fastening their version of history on the white American imagination. The Confederate, or white supremacist, version of history travestied Reconstruction as the rape of the South by hordes of ignorant and brutish ex-slaves, unleashed by greedy carpetbaggers and abetted in their depredations by villainous scalawags, the epithets applied respectively to northern emigrants and southern collaborators. Thus, Tourgée’s Bricks Without Straw, like Du Bois’s Black Reconstruction, had to counter these pernicious stereotypes in order to reframe Reconstruction as the struggle of African Americans and their idealistic white allies to build a new society on the basis of genuine freedom and equality. The novel’s title articulates its argument. Just as the children of Israel were ordered by Pharaoh to perform the impossible feat of producing bricks without the straw needed to temper them (Ex. 5.7-18), so the four million emancipated slaves whom the nation had abandoned upon the collapse of Reconstruction were being required to transform themselves into independent citizens with no assistance from the government and no protection against their foes. This essay will examine Tourgée’s fictionalized account of Black Reconstruction in relation to the documentary sources and real-life models on 242 C AROLYN K ARCHER which he draws for his plot and characters, the racial ideologies he seeks to refute, and the representations of African American life that his white and Black contemporaries produced. Read in its historical and literary contexts, as I hope to demonstrate, Bricks Without Straw not only offers an unparalleled inside view of Reconstruction by a white participant closely allied with African Americans, but ranks among the most powerful examples of “race fiction” in the 19 th -century American corpus. Few white writers possessed better qualifications than Tourgée for setting the historical and literary record straight. He had had more extensive contact with African Americans in a non-menial capacity than any but a few radical abolitionists. His encounters with fugitive slaves in the Union army during the Civil War had taught Tourgée to respect their bravery as soldiers and their political acumen as spokesmen for their people. Emerging from the war committed to “a fundamental thorough and complete revolution & renovation” of US society, Tourgée had emigrated to Greensboro, North Carolina, where he had championed Black Suffrage, played a prominent part in writing a more democratic state constitution, and organized an unusually effective Radical Republican coalition of African Americans, northern settlers, and white southern Unionists (Tourgée Papers #454, 1863; Olsen, Carpetbagger’s Crusade; ). 1 As a state Superior Court judge whose district saw some of the period’s worst Ku Klux Klan violence, Tourgée had also taken depositions from countless victims, Black and white, and gained an appreciation of African Americans’ courage in defending their newly won rights. These experiences inspired the creation of the strong, three-dimensional Black characters who people Bricks Without Straw, distinguishing it from most other novels by white Americans. Chief among Bricks’ Black characters is Nimbus, whose soliloquy about being forced to adopt an unwanted second name when mustering into the army, formalizing his marriage, and registering to vote for the first time, sets the novel in motion. As Tourgée makes clear, Nimbus equates naming with establishing an identity. To Nimbus, freedom offers the opportunity to define his identity for himself, which is why he resists white authorities’ attempts to assign him a surname. He views the single name he has borne since “ole slave times” not as a badge of shame but as a mark of distinction, differentiating him from whites as well as from his fellow slaves, to each of whom his master had given a name shared by no one else. “I mind now dat 1 The Albion W. Tourgée Papers are held at the Chautauqua County Historical Society in Westfield, New York and are also available on microfilm. They are arranged in chronological order by item number. A large proportion of Tourgée’s letters are undated drafts. I am grateful to the CCHS for permission to quote from the Tourgée Papers. Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 243 all de pore white folks hez got some two tree names, but I allus thought dat wuz ’coz dey hedn’t nuffin’ else ter call dere own,” Nimbus comments (10-11). Although he does not want to change the name his master conferred on him at birth, because he has never known himself by any other, Nimbus strenuously objects to having his master’s surname imposed on him. “I ain’t a-gwine ter brand my chillen wid no sech slave-mark! ” he protests (54). Tourgée’s description of Nimbus clearly indicates awareness of working against prevailing stereotypes: He was a fine figure of a man despite his ebon hue, … [with] his straight, strong back, square shoulders, full, round neck, and shapely, well-balanced head. His face was rather heavy - grave, it would have been called if he had been white - and his whole figure and appearance showed an earnest and thoughtful temperament. He was as far from that volatile type which, through the mimicry of burntcork minstrels and the exaggerations of caricaturists, as well as the works of less disinterested portrayers of the race, have come to represent the negro to the unfamiliar mind, as the typical Englishman is from the Punch-and-Judy figures which amuse him. The slave Nimbus in a white skin would have been considered a man of great physical power and endurance, earnest purpose, and quiet self-reliant character. Such, in truth, he was. (26-27) Point by point, Tourgée reverses both the clichés of minstrelsy and the falsifications of racist ideology. Unlike the “burnt-cork” stage Negro, Nimbus is no comic figure. “Grave,” “earnest,” “thoughtful,” and “quiet,” he does not shuffle or jump Jim Crow, but holds himself manfully erect. His head is not ape-like, as caricatured in such proslavery texts as Josiah C. Nott and George R. Gliddon’s Types of Mankind (1854), but “shapely” and “well-balanced.” His “self-reliant character” gives the lie to claims that the Negro cannot manage without white supervision. While discrediting the stereotypes that “have come to represent the negro to the unfamiliar mind,” Tourgée simultaneously draws attention to the racializing process that the white mind goes through on seeing a human being in a black skin. The white reader, he implies, cannot recognize a “fine figure of a man” in “ebon hue”; instead, the white mind automatically perceives the same traits differently under a different racial exterior, even resorting to a different vocabulary to register its impressions, for example by translating “grave” into “heavy.” Hence, the very person who “in a white skin would have been considered a man of great physical power and endurance” is pictured by the white imagination as a savage brute once the skin color changes to black. Tourgée specifically dispels the image of the Black man as a savage brute in a scene that shows Nimbus demanding his rights and shielding himself against violence, but not retaliating in kind when his former master bran- 244 C AROLYN K ARCHER dishes a cane over his head. “Don’t yer try dat, Marse Desmit,” warns Nimbus as he parries the blow and wrests away the cane. “I’se been a sojer sence I was a slave, an’ ther don’t no man hit me a lick jes cos I’m black enny mo’” (105). Loath to harm an “ole man,” he leaves Desmit on the ground “where he had fallen or been thrown” in the tussle - an ambiguity that heightens Nimbus’s self-restraint - and decides to lodge a complaint and “let de law take its course” (106). It is not the freed Blacks who violate the rule of law, Tourgée indicates, but their disgruntled erstwhile masters. The leadership role Tourgée ascribes to Nimbus in the African American community exemplifies one route to empowerment for the ex-slaves. Having helped defeat the Confederacy, “stricken at last most fatally,” Tourgée underscores, “by the dark hands which she had manacled” (33), Nimbus invests his military bounty money in land, which he develops into a flourishing tobacco farm. Soon he begins selling small parcels of his plantation to freedmen anxious to follow his example of home ownership and selfemployment. He also donates a portion of his land and timber to building a church and school. Thanks to his economic independence and community spirit, Nimbus enjoys high status among his fellow African Americans, whom he encourages to stand up for their rights and vote for politicians supportive of their interests. He himself refuses to run for office, however, on the grounds that he “hain’t got no larnin’” and understands tobacco cultivation better than governance (186). Tourgée modeled Nimbus on several Black men he had known during his stints as a Civil War soldier and Reconstruction politician and judge. Nimbus’s first and most obvious real-life prototype is “William, an colored American citizen of African descent,” whose entry into Tourgée’s “pay and employ” as commanding officer of Company E, 105 th Ohio Volunteers, is noted as the “great event of today” in the diary he kept of his military service (October 24, 1863, Tourgée Papers #577; Olsen 24). A fugitive slave who had fled to Union Army lines, William, “not knowing his ‘oder’ name, was immediately christened Nimbus, by which ancient and honorable appellation he is hereafter to be known,” Tourgée had recorded in his diary - an incident he would parallel by having the fictional Nimbus christened “George Nimbus” by the officer who swears him into “the service of the United States” in Company C of the ___ Massachusetts Volunteer Infantry (33). True, Tourgée had known William primarily as a body servant, yet he had also observed African Americans as soldiers. Along with a comrade named Joe, Tourgée had attended a “meeting of the ‘Cullard population’ of the Brigade,” which had impressed him enough to prompt him to request a transfer (never granted) to a Black regiment. “I know there is little hope of any mercy being shown” to a captured soldier “connected with the colored troops,” Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 245 Tourgée had mused, but “[i]t is certainly the place for men who would serve the country best” (June 7, 20, 22, and 23, 1863, Tourgée Papers, #577). Two additional models on whom Tourgée based his portrait of Nimbus, according to historians, were the local Black Republican organizers Wyatt Outlaw and Harmon Unthank. Outlaw, like Nimbus, had served in the Union Army, contributed to building a church (in his case on land he had helped purchase), and played an active role in mobilizing African American voters after the war (Troxler 405-409, 413). As with Nimbus, “standing up to intimidation was a feature of Outlaw’s leadership” (Troxler 416). His woodworking and wagon-repairing shop, like Nimbus’s tobacco farm, “became a gathering place for blacks” and consequently, a hub for political strategizing (Troxler 414). Marginally more literate than Nimbus, Outlaw could “probably read” but “consistently marked his signature with an ‘X’” (Troxler 411). His political leadership went well beyond the speechmaking and rallying in which Nimbus engages. It included attending the 1866 North Carolina Freedmen’s Convention, organizing the Alamance County Loyal Republican League, which brought together “black and white workingmen,” serving as a town commissioner, and joining an “armed night patrol of five black and white men in response to Ku Klux attacks” (Troxler 416). Targeted by the Klan because he succeeded so well at forging crossracial alliances, Outlaw fell victim to a mob that dragged him from his home in front of his screaming child, “bludgeoned” him in the street, slashed his lips to advertise the fate all “mouthy” Blacks could expect to meet, and hanged him from a tree limb pointed mockingly toward Tourgée’s Alamance County court house, “less than a hundred feet away” (Troxler 404, 417; Olsen 161). Less controversial than Outlaw, the third model for Nimbus, Harmon Unthank of Greensboro, survived the turmoil of Reconstruction unscathed. Also an ex-slave, but not a Union Army veteran, he achieved prosperity as a carpenter and recognition as the “uncontested ‘boss’ of the black community” (Hamlin 173). Like Nimbus, he helped fellow African Americans to purchase property and thus start out on the road toward economic independence (Hamlin 166-67). Highly literate, as his letters to Tourgée demonstrate, Unthank participated, along with Outlaw, in the Freedmen’s Convention of 1866 and cooperated with Tourgée during North Carolina’s 1868 Constitutional Convention and the Republican and Union League campaigns the same year (Hamlin 166, 173). Nevertheless, he took a more moderate political stance than Tourgée, Outlaw, or the fictional Nimbus. For that reason, as well as because he “owned no businesses, held no [paid] political office, represented no obvious competition to white labor, and wanted no trouble from his white Conservative neighbors,” with whom he 246 C AROLYN K ARCHER managed to maintain “‘good’ relations,” Unthank escaped being perceived as a threat to whites (Hamlin 197-98). 2 If Tourgée’s interactions with all these men enabled him to portray Nimbus with striking realism, no one-to-one correspondence links any of them to his fictional hero. As Tourgée explained to a reader who had asked him to identify the historical originals of the characters in his best known novel about Reconstruction, A Fool’s Errand (1879), widely believed to be a roman à clef, his “characters were all creations pure and simple,” but “built upon actualities” that had come under his observation. In incorporating historical events into his novels and drawing on his “knowledge … of locality and incident to give verisimilitude, flavor and … interest,” he merely sought to provide a “true picture of the time,” not to “depict individuals” (undated draft, Tourgée Papers, 1893, #6688). Though Nimbus is the most memorable of the African American protagonists in Bricks Without Straw (and indeed in Tourgée’s entire œuvre), a comparable freedom from stereotyping marks the treatment of Nimbus’s childhood friend and fellow community leader Eliab Hill and of Nimbus’s wife Lugena. Tourgée’s description of Eliab invites comparison with such representations of mulattoes as Stowe’s George Harris in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Rebecca Harding Davis’s more complex, but problematic, Doctor Broderip in Waiting for the Verdict (1867): He was a man apparently about the age of Nimbus - younger rather than older - having a fine countenance, almost white, but with just enough of brown in its sallow paleness to suggest the idea of colored blood, in a region where all degrees of admixture were by no means rare. A splendid head of black hair waved above his broad, full forehead, and an intensely black silky beard and mustache framed the lower portion of his face most fittingly. His eyes were soft and womanly, though there was a patient boldness about their great brown pupils and a directness of gaze which suited well the bearded face beneath. The lines of suffering were deeply cut upon the thoughtful brow and around the liquid eyes, and showed in the mobile workings of the broad mouth, half shaded by the dark mustache. The face was not a handsome one, but there was a serious and earnest calmness about it which gave it an unmistakable nobility of expression and prompted one to look more closely at the man and his surroundings. 2 Yet another real-life model historians have suggested for Nimbus is Jourdan Ware, a “renter-farmer living near Rome, Georgia,” and a “prominent” and influential leader of the local African American community. Though Tourgée did not know him personally, he would have read about him in the 13-volume Congressional Report on Klan atrocities that he cites elsewhere in Bricks Without Straw. The name “Ware” provides the most conspicuous link between the two men: when registering to vote, Nimbus takes the surname of his former overseer, Silas Ware, to avoid being assigned that of his master. See Magdol 910. Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 247 The shoulders were broad and square, the chest was full, the figure erect, and the head finely poised. … One comprehended at a glance that this worker and learner was also deformed. … Yet so erect and self-helping in appearance was the figure … that one for a moment failed to note in what the affliction consisted. Upon closer observation he saw that the lower limbs were sharply flexed and drawn to the leftward … [as well as] shrunken and distorted. (52-53) Unlike Stowe and Davis, Tourgée characterizes Eliab not as a racial type but as an individual. He does not attribute Eliab’s “erect,” manly carriage to his white blood, as Stowe does George Harris’s, nor does he ascribe Eliab’s “womanly” traits and physical weakness to the taint of black blood and the ill effects of miscegenation, as Davis does Broderip’s. 3 Instead, Tourgée traces the “suffering” etched on Eliab’s face to an “affliction” resulting from a childhood “cold … which settled in his legs … producing rheumatism” (apparently polio or rheumatic fever [66]). The severely impaired mobility this affliction has caused - not his racial heritage - Tourgée later specifies, accounts for Eliab’s predisposition toward the passive, “womanly” courage of a martyr rather than the “aggressive,” masculine courage of a soldier: “[H]e had been so long the creature of another’s will in the matter of locomotion that it did not occur to him to do otherwise than say: ‘Do with me as thou wilt. I am bound hand and foot. I cannot fight, but I can die’” (284). In the same breath, Tourgée pointedly underscores that Eliab is no Uncle Tom. Far from being religiously “averse to taking life in self-defense,” Eliab reacts to a Klan incursion by wishing he had a good repeating rifle, so that “he might not only sell his life dearly, but even repel the attack” (284). While avoiding the overt racial theorizing to which Stowe and Davis resort, Tourgée subtly controverts racist ideology. He depicts Eliab, like Nimbus, with a “broad, full forehead” and a “finely poised head” rather than the misshapen cranium generally imputed to the Negro (a feature Davis reproduces in Broderip’s “low, heavily marked forehead” [161]). He offsets Eliab’s “womanly eyes” with a masculine “directness of gaze” that suggests pride in his identity rather than the sense of inferiority Broderip displays when he “cow[s] before the white skin and Saxon features” of a rival and assumes the “defeated, shrunken look” of a man who sees himself as “but a mulatto” (Davis 417). And once again countering the image of the Negro as a perpetual child, incapable of providing for his own needs, Tourgée accentuates the “self-helping” character Eliab shares with Nimbus, 3 The proud, handsome George Harris illustrates the racial theory Stowe puts in the mouth of Augustine St. Clare: “Sons of white fathers, with all our haughty feelings burning in their veins,” are more prone to rebellion than full-blooded Africans (274). Davis depicts Broderip as undersized, sickly, and effeminate, but also “brutal” in temper (135-37, 140, 144-45). For a fine analysis of Verdict’s racial subtext, see the introduction by Dingledine. 248 C AROLYN K ARCHER which impels him to leave his former master’s service because he does not want to burden a man who cannot afford to pay him (73). Besides preventing the casual observer from noticing his crippled legs, the “self-helping” impulse that marks Eliab’s appearance enables him to earn his living as a shoemaker and to serve the African American community as a preacher. Eliab represents an alternative route to African American empowerment - the acquisition of literacy - that historically complemented or substituted for the economic advancement Nimbus has attained. Exerting a powerful influence over his people ever since his days as a slave, when his indulgent mistress taught him to read, Eliab also personifies what Tourgée calls the “inseparable” fusion of religion and politics among African Americans, whose “religion is tinged with political thought, and their political thought shaped by religious conviction” (184). As with Nimbus, Tourgée based his portrait of Eliab on a combination of real-life models. He found Eliab’s chief prototype, a crippled preacher from Clay Hill, South Carolina, named Elias Hill, in the 13-volume collection of testimony on Klan atrocities officially titled Report of the Joint Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the Condition of Affairs in the Late Insurrectionary States (1872). Hill is there identified simply as “colored” (a term often connoting mixed ancestry) and described as “crippled in both legs and arms, which are shriveled by rheumatism,” dating from his seventh year, as in the case of Tourgée’s Eliab. The real-life Elias Hill, though he shared his fictional namesake’s “finely developed intellectual head” and “unusual intelligence,” was too disabled to appear “self-helping”: “he cannot … help himself,” notes the transcriber of Hill’s testimony before the Select Committee, but “has to be fed and cared for personally by others” (Report 1: 44). Foisted on his self-emancipated father as a “burden of which his master was glad to be rid,” Hill had displayed his drive toward independence not by mastering a trade and striking out on his own, but by learning to read and write with the assistance of school children and by becoming, like the fictional Eliab, a teacher, preacher, and Union League organizer after the war. Tourgée also wove aspects of Harmon Unthank, Wyatt Outlaw, and a crippled white schoolteacher named Alonzo Corliss into his portrait of Eliab. Tourgée’s relationship with the literate Unthank, a leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church, known for “maintain[ing] law and order at all times” in the congregation (Hamlin 186), may have helped flesh out his characterization of Eliab as a preacher on whom the Yankee schoolteacher relies to keep order among her charges, both in and out of the classroom. More suggestively, coupled with his “unknown” paternity (66), Eliab’s “almost white” complexion, not mentioned in the account of the real-life Elias Hill, may link him with either Outlaw, who seems to have been the unacknowledged son of a white man, or with the white Corliss, “who, like Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 249 Outlaw, was a leader of the Loyal League in Alamance County” and like Hill, was brutally beaten by the Klan despite his crippled condition (Troxler 406, 408). Whether or not Tourgée superimposed the facial features of his North Carolina acquaintances on the sketch of Elias Hill that he derived from the Congressional Reports of Klan outrages, his departure from his historical source in translating “colored” into “almost white” cannot be accidental. Nor can it be accidental that Tourgée simultaneously renders Eliab as more “self-helping in appearance” than his historical prototype and as dependent for physical aid not on his biological family, unlike Elias Hill, but on a comrade from slavery days whose skin-color, black as a “thunder-cloud” (23), contrasts strikingly with Eliab’s. These revisions convey the image of an African American community reliant for survival on the solidarity of mulatto and Black, literate and illiterate, needy and prosperous. “The colored people must stand or fall together” (202), preaches Eliab. His lifelong bond with Nimbus and the twin leadership roles the two play literalize that message. Articulating as it does a vision of racial unity embodied in the partnership of its Black and mulatto protagonists, Bricks Without Straw aligns itself more closely with such African American novels as Martin Delany’s Blake (1859) and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) 4 - though Tourgée never seems to have read either - than with any white-authored work of its era. Like Harper, Tourgée emphasizes his African American characters’ relations with each other and correspondingly de-emphasizes their relations with white benefactors. And like both Harper and Delany, he roots his Black and mulatto protagonists firmly in the African American community and centers his novel on the collective fate of the African American people. Bricks Without Straw traces the freedpeople’s progress toward economic self-sufficiency and political autonomy, their spirited resistance to the tactics white supremacists use to regain hegemony - voter intimidation, poll taxes, employer cabals, vagrancy laws, chain gangs, Ku Klux Klan attacks - and their ultimate relapse into semi-slavery once their resistance is crushed. The initial phase of the action unfolds during the period the Freedmen’s Bureau exercises its guardianship by arbitrating disputes between the races, furnishing teachers and schools, and presiding over the electoral 4 Delany develops the idea of a partnership between Blacks and mulattoes in chapter 61 of Blake, “The Grand Council,” where he puts it into the mouth of the mulatto poet Placido: “I hold that colored persons, whatever the complexion, can only obtain an equality with whites by the descendants of Africa of unmixed blood” (260). Harper embodies it in the friendship of the light-skinned Iola with the pure black Lucille Delany and in the marriage of Lucille with Iola’s brother Harry. 250 C AROLYN K ARCHER system. When, for example, Nimbus approaches his former master Desmit to purchase a tract of apparent wasteland that he recognizes as ideally suited to tobacco-growing, he turns to the Freedmen’s Bureau to facilitate the transaction after Desmit tries to beat him and refuses even to pay the wages Nimbus’s wife Lugena has earned. Later, Nimbus and Eliab arrange for the Freedmen’s Bureau to establish a school on Nimbus’s land, where Eliab suggests building a church that can house a classroom. The Bureau also engages a Yankee teacher, Mollie Ainslee, who devotes her spare time to tutoring Eliab so that he can eventually replace her. Most crucially, the Bureau registers African Americans to vote and oversees elections to guard against fraud and violence. As the initial phase of the action reaches its climax, a thriving African American community of enterprising artisans has formed around Nimbus and Eliab; many, “[e]ncouraged by [Nimbus’s] example, … [have] bought parcels of his domain” (136); and the newly enfranchised African American citizens “commemorate their first exercise of the electoral privilege” by “march[ing] in a body to the polls with music and banners” (149). The second phase of the novel focuses on the white supremacist subversion of Reconstruction and the African American community’s response to it. Although mutterings and threats against “sassy niggers” augur violence even at the outset (48, 147, 152), trouble does not actually erupt until the march to the polls. There angry whites, convinced that the marchers plan to “kill all the white men, burn the town, and then ravish the white women” (152), shoot into the procession and almost precipitate a bloody clash. Tourgée based the incident on an actual “riot” or “massacre” that had taken place in the village of Camilla, Georgia, in September 1868, but he significantly recast his sources, giving his fictionalized version a dramatically different outcome. The Camilla procession was heading not toward the polls but toward a political meeting at which the white (not Black) Republicans in its vanguard were to address the crowd. Ignoring assurances of the parade’s “peaceful intentions,” however, a mob of “400 armed whites, led by the local sheriff, opened fire … and then scoured the countryside for those who had fled, eventually killing and wounding more than a score of blacks” (Foner 342; “Evidence in the Camilla Massacre”; “Recent Riot at Camilla”). Tourgée instead allows the Yankee schoolteacher Mollie Ainslee to avert such a massacre by mediating between hostile whites and militant Blacks. Galloping to the front on the black horse that symbolizes her power to tame the ex-slaves - the horse on which her soldier brother “fought for [their] liberty,” as she reminds them - Mollie asks Eliab to provide an eyewitness account of the outbreak and relegates Nimbus to the task of “keep[ing] order” while she charges off under a flag of truce to negotiate with the white townsmen (156-57). “You provoked this affray by your foolish love of Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 251 display,” she scolds the hitherto dauntless Nimbus, from whom she metaphorically seizes the reins. Her “nerve” succeeds in disarming the enraged whites as well, and the sheriff himself gives Mollie three cheers, calls off the volley, and agrees to let the procession continue unimpeded. Is Tourgée implying (in the teeth of contrary historical evidence) that the mediation of a cool-headed northern white might have accomplished better results than the African American community’s “display” of militancy, by preventing rather than unleashing the bloodshed that had occurred in Camilla? Or is he simply attempting to “sweeten the hellishness of that epoch” through a fictional device (the purpose of the “love incidents” in A Fool’s Errand, as he explained to a correspondent [Tourgée Papers #6688, 1893])? Whatever the reason for its departure from historical fact, the episode foreshadows the disempowerment Tourgée’s African American characters undergo after the overthrow of Reconstruction, a development reflected in the plot’s shift away from them and toward their white benefactors. By the time of the next election two years later, the Freedmen’s Bureau has shut down and violence has become endemic as white supremacists determine to “redeem” their state. The white supremacist campaign starts with plantation owners’ threats to discharge and blacklist all workers who attend Radical Republican meetings (a documented practice with “widespread … support” in Tourgée’s judicial district [Trelease 193]). As the African American community debates how to react to such threats, Nimbus advocates a general strike and vows to underwrite the striking plantation workers until their white employers back down. “Ef we don’t stan’ togedder an’ keep de white folks from a-takin’ away what we’s got, we nebber gits no mo’. In fac’, we jes goes back’ards instead o’ forrards till yer can’t tell de difference twixt a free nigger an’ a rale ole time slave,” he argues (198). Eliab agrees that the freedpeople must “face [their] danger like men” and urges cooperation between those able to endure the hardship of a strike and those unable to do so: “we must work together, aid each other, comfort each other, stand by each other,” he counsels (201-202). As a result of their role in fortifying the African American community’s resolve, Nimbus and Eliab receive a warning from the KKK, in the form of a coffin lid with a letter attached: “The white folks is going to rule Horsford, and sassy niggers must look out. … Now just sell off and pack up and git clear off and out of the country before we come again. … If you’re here then you’ll both need coffins” (255). Once again, the African American community upholds “the plan advocated by Nimbus and Eliab, to stay and fight it out” (265). Only one member demurs, Lugena’s cousin Berry, who has stumbled on a Klan meeting in the woods and seen that almost every white man in Horsford, including the sheriff, belongs to the organization, making for overwhelming odds against successful self-defense. 252 C AROLYN K ARCHER Meanwhile, Nimbus learns that he can no longer rely on the law to maintain his rights. When Berry is evicted from the plantation without pay for having attended a Radical meeting, the lawyer Nimbus consults, a former Freedmen’s Bureau officer, informs him that Berry stands no chance of getting a judgment in his favor by a white jury; and when Nimbus hires Berry, the sheriff shows up to serve Nimbus and Eliab with a criminal indictment and a civil suit for enticing away someone else’s laborer (a provision of the 1865 Black Code, suppressed by the Radicals and revived by their Conservative opponents). If Nimbus will sell his land to the sheriff, the latter adds “with a wink,” the charges will be dropped (272). Betokening the African American community’s helplessness in the face of a white majority that now controls the courts, exerts an economic stranglehold, and rules through terror, the threatened Klan attack materializes before the expected date, thwarting plans for self-defense. The masked assailants begin by torching the church and school that embody the institutional means of the freedpeople’s uplift, then fan out in quest of the leaders they have targeted for assassination. While depicting the Klansmen’s brutality and hinting at the sexual violence they commit, Tourgée highlights the freedpeople’s heroic resistance. That resistance takes forms ranging from passive to aggressive. Nimbus’s wife Lugena, “writh[ing] in agony” as blows rain down on her naked body, refrains from disclosing the whereabouts of Eliab (282). Eliab himself reveals his own whereabouts to save Lugena from further abuse. Transcending his fears of death and suffering, he prays for his enemies in Christ-like accents as they kick and batter him, his “forgiving words mingling with the curses of his assailants” (288). Nimbus, who has ironically been away attending his old master’s funeral, bursts on the scene swinging his army saber like an “ebon angel of wrath” and dispatches a Klansman with it (289). Lugena, seeing a Klansman aim his revolver at her husband, seizes an axe and brings it crashing “down through mask and flesh and bone,” cleaving the head of their foe (289). In answer to her husband’s question about whether she has been sexually assaulted, she minimizes her ordeal “for fear of raising his anger to a point beyond control” and thus endangering his life (290). Even Berry, who had insisted that neither fighting nor praying would avail his brethren now, any more than in slavery times, reappears shooting a rifle that disperses the remaining Klansmen. Once the invaders have withdrawn, Nimbus carries Eliab three miles through the woods to a safe hiding-place at the home of his former master, Hesden Le Moyne, and then disappears, taking with him the contents of his tobacco barn to sell in a distant county. Comparison of this episode with its sources in the Congressional Reports on Klan atrocities confirms Tourgée’s focus on resistance rather than vic- Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 253 timization. In the original, which describes the beating of Elias Hill and his family in much more graphic detail, it is Hill’s sister-in-law who points the Klansmen to his house after they have struck her “five or six licks.” Hill cooperates with his attackers, though he parries their interrogation with dignity, denying that he has preached “political sermons” or incited “the black men to ravish all the white women.” He also asks them not to kill him and complies with their order to “pray for them.” When his sister-in-law finally takes him indoors, after he has lain outside in the cold until “chilled” to the marrow, she does so at the behest and under the lash of the Klansmen. Hill’s testimony emphasizes the tortures to which he and his family members have been subjected, not the gestures of resistance they have made - an emphasis dictated by the purpose of the Congressional hearings, which served to collect evidence of Klan violence and thus establish the need for stringent laws against political terrorism. Hill exercises his agency before and after rather than during the Klan attack - before the attack by acting as president of the local Union League and using his “influence for republicanism,” which, he asserts “comes nearer to God’s will and universal love and friendship in this world” than any other political philosophy; after the Klan attack by arranging to lead a party to Liberia because he and his associates no longer “believe it possible, from the past history and present aspect of affairs, for our people to live in this country peaceably” (Report 1: 45-47). Obviously, Tourgée cannot endorse such a conclusion without betraying his own republican faith and commitment to equality and justice for all. Not only does Tourgée grant the fictional Eliab greater agency than his historical prototype and bring his career to a different culmination, as we shall see, but he assigns Lugena a starring role in repelling the Klan raid. Modeled on another incident mentioned in the Congressional Report, about which Tourgée had personal knowledge - a local North Carolina woman’s successful defense of her home by “wield[ing] an ax with such proficiency against a Klansman” as to split his skull open (Trelease 194; Olsen 159), Lugena’s feat establishes her and Nimbus as equal partners in their family. She continues to demonstrates her fortitude after Nimbus’s flight by maintaining her trust in his ability to elude his pursuers. “‘Gena ain’t feared. She knows her ole man too well fer dat! ” she assures the schoolteacher Mollie Ainslie, pointing out that Nimbus has a gun and that he would put up a “terrible fight” before he would let himself be captured (334, 336). Despite all the resourcefulness with which Tourgée credits his African American characters, he proves unable to sustain his vision of Black Reconstruction. The Klan attack marks a turning point for the African American community of Bricks Without Straw and ushers in the third and last phase of the novel. From this point on, the Black protagonists lose their agency and white rescuers come to dominate the action, as if Tourgée could no longer 254 C AROLYN K ARCHER conceive of how the defeated freedpeople could help themselves in an era of white supremacy. Nimbus bitterly recognizes that abstract rights mean nothing unless enforced. “I’se larned dat de right ter du a ting an’ de doin’ on’t is two mighty diff’rent tings, when it’s a cullu’d man ez does it,” he tells Hesden Le Moyne. “I hed a right ter buy a plantation an’ raise terbacker; an’ Liab hed a right ter teach an’ preach; an’ we both hed a right ter vote for ennybody we had a mind ter choose. An’ so we did; an’ dat’s all we done, tu. An’ now h’yer’s what’s come on’t” (313). Though Nimbus doggedly keeps on fighting as he flees from one southern state to another, his pugnaciousness only lands him first in jail and then in neo-slavery: fined for striking back at a white boss, he is “auctioned off” to pay the fine and repeatedly caught when he tries to escape (485-86). He resurfaces many years later a “broken” man, with the look of “furtive wildness which characterizes the man long hunted by his enemies” (480). Meanwhile Lugena, too, concludes that “‘Tain’t no use” to stand up to white southerners because “Dey’ll hab dere will fust er last” (338). Metamorphosing with disconcerting suddenness into an abject dependent, she entreats Mollie to take her and her children to safety before the Klan avenges the man she has bludgeoned, and “catching the hem of the teacher’s robe,” she “kisse[s] it again and again” (341). Mollie obliges by settling the family in Kansas, where she founds a settlement for Black refugees, thousands of whom were embarking on a mass exodus to Kansas as Tourgée was completing Bricks Without Straw. Paralleling Mollie’s rescue of Lugena, Hesden Le Moyne nurses the badly wounded Eliab back to health and eventually spirits him off to college in the North. Of the African American protagonists, Eliab alone grows “more self-reliant,” illustrating Tourgée’s belief that education will ultimately accomplish the racial uplift that Reconstruction failed to secure by legislative means: “His two years and more of attendance at a Northern school had widened and deepened his manhood as well as increased his knowledge” (480). 5 Yet Eliab’s debt to Hesden for his education limits his independence much in the way Lugena’s debt to Mollie does hers. Though an opportunity arises for him to teach at a “colored school” in the North, Eliab renounces it when Hesden asks him to take charge of Mollie’s former school, which Hesden has had rebuilt. There Eliab finds that even education has lost its liberating potency. “Somehow the life and hope seem to have gone out of our people, and they do not look forward to the future with that confident expectation which they used to have,” but instead exhibit the “dull, plodding hopelessness of the old slave time,” he observes in a letter to Mollie (445). 5 Tourgée promoted education as a solution in his non-fictional An Appeal to Caesar (1884), as well as in letters to US President James G. Garfield. A Fool’s Errand ends with a similar appeal: “Make the spelling-book the scepter of national power” (346). Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 255 Unable to provide an imaginary solution to the problem of a stymied Black Reconstruction - and certainly unable to foresee a time when African American intellectuals would meet to debate solutions of their own to the race’s continuing oppression, as they do in the “Friends in Council” chapter of Harper’s Iola Leroy (1892) - Tourgée reorients his plot toward addressing the issue of national reunification in lieu of Black self-determination. “Can the South and the North ever be made one people in thought, spirit, and purpose? ” he asks through a fictional spokesman (502). This question had already generated a flourishing literary genre, dubbed by Nina Silber “the romance of reunion,” which featured a marriage of northerner and southerner, generally involving the conversion of one partner to the other’s political viewpoint. Thus, it is not surprising that Tourgée arranges a marriage between Mollie Ainslee and Hesden Le Moyne to indicate how “New England Puritanism and Southern Prejudice” can “be reconciled” (318). Tourgée’s version of the North-South marriage trope does not fit the “depoliticized” pattern of what Silber calls the “culture of conciliation,” however (Romance of Reunion 110). On the contrary, both Mollie and Hesden experience a political awakening when they confront the meaning of the events that climax in the Klan attack. Temporarily seduced by the charms of the Le Moyne household during a brief sojourn there - just as the northern public was being seduced by southern propagandists - Mollie returns to find her schoolhouse a smoldering ruin. Instead of following the lead of her “weak, vacillating nation,” which she realizes “with shame” has broken its “promise of freedom” to its wartime allies and “shut its eyes and turn[ed] its back … in their hour of peril,” Mollie reconsecrates herself to the freedpeople, whom she now feels “almost like calling … her people” (381, 402). Similarly, as Hesden gazes at the lacerated body of Eliab, he begins “to doubt the infallibility of his hereditary notions; to doubt the super-excellence of Southern manhood, and the infinite superiority of Southern womanhood; to doubt the incapacity of the negro for self-maintenance and civilization”; and to question for the first time “whether the South might not have been wrong - might not still be wrong … in the principle and practice of slavery” (311). The collapse of his world view ultimately turns Hesden into a Radical Republican. In marrying Mollie, he marries the ideals she personifies. Yet even by shifting the focus of the novel to his white characters and resorting to the fictional formulas of a conversion and a marriage, Tourgée does not manage to bring Bricks Without Straw to closure. His fourteen years in North Carolina had taught him that no one who espoused the rights of African Americans, no matter how secure his social position, could escape “the baptism of fire which every Southern man must face who presumes to differ from his fellows upon political questions” (412). Such is the fate Hesden meets once his Radicalism becomes apparent. Notwithstand- 256 C AROLYN K ARCHER ing his gallant record as a Confederate soldier and his loss of an arm in his motherland’s defense, he is tarred as “a renegade and a traitor to the cause for which he had fought” and is treated as an “enemy by all who had been his former associates” (412-13). The “storm of detraction and contumely” grows into a “tornado” when Hesden, like Tourgée (and like Tourgée’s southern Radical friend Thomas Settle), runs for political office on a platform advocating respect for African Americans’ Constitutionally mandated voting rights: “The newspapers overflowed with threat, denunciation, and abuse” (474). 6 In short, all too aware that the intransigence of the South’s white supremacist majority prevents any meaningful change in the racial and political status quo and drives dissenters into silence or exile, Tourgée ends his novel leaving his characters at an impasse and his plot at loose ends. Symptomatically, he abandons fiction for polemic in the last two chapters, “What Shall the End Be? ” and “How? ” Speaking through the mouth of Hesden and addressing northern politicians through Hesden’s interlocutor, the Honorable Washington Goodspeed, M.C., Tourgée pleads for the measure he has come to consider “the only remedy” for the nation’s ills: a federal education bill that would circumvent state control and racial inequity by donating funds directly to southern schools and tying the amounts to need and good management (516-17). If, as Fredric Jameson has argued, the function of narrative form is to invent “imaginary or formal ‘solutions’ to unresolvable social contradictions” (Political Unconscious 79), the formally unsatisfactory denouement of Bricks Without Straw suggests that Tourgée’s commitment to truth did not allow him to gloss over the unresolvable contradiction between egalitarian ideals and white supremacist practice. Despite its formal failings and compromised vision of Black Reconstruction, Bricks Without Straw remains an extraordinary achievement. No other white author of his time (and few in our own time) portrays African Americans with as much sensitivity as Tourgée does Nimbus and Eliab, and none shows greater insight into a historical period that continues to shape our political realities today. Indeed, Bricks Without Straw prefigures two of Du Bois’s main conclusions in Black Reconstruction: first, that although they have been pushed a “long step backward toward slavery … black folk … have made withal a brave and fine fight” (Du Bois 708); and second, that white supremacist southerners and their northern sympathizers have “falsified” the “facts” of Reconstruction history and “barred from court” the “chief witness” of the trial, “the emancipated slave” (711, 721). Neither Tourgée nor Du Bois succeeded in dislodging the myth of Reconstruction 6 On Tourgée’s run for Congress in 1878 and its humiliating failure, see Olsen, Carpetbagger’s Crusade 218-20; and Current, Those Terrible Carpetbaggers 369-72. On Settle, see Crow, “Thomas Settle Jr.” Bricks Without Straw: Albion Tourgée’s “Black Reconstruction” 257 as the rape of the South - a myth that still exerts a tenacious hold on the national imagination, as the undying popularity of Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind testifies. Only within the past few decades have historians vindicated Du Bois by reinterpreting Reconstruction as “America’s Unfinished Revolution” and acknowledging Blacks as “active agents in the making” of this revolution (Foner xxi, xxiv). Scholars have yet to accord Tourgée the same recognition. Bricks Without Straw awaits rediscovery as an eyewitness account of how a revolution that promised so much was suppressed - an account eerily relevant to the struggle we are waging more than a century later as we, too, confront the subversion of our civil liberties. Acknowledgments This essay is drawn from the introduction to my forthcoming annotated edition of Bricks Without Straw, to be published by Duke University Press. I thank Duke for permission to publish this extract from the introduction in REAL. I also thank the Chautauqua County Historical Society for permission to quote from Tourgée’s papers. 258 C AROLYN K ARCHER Works Cited Crow, Jeffrey J. “Thomas Settle Jr., Reconstruction, and the Memory of the Civil War. Journal of Southern History 62 (November 1996): 689-726. Current, Richard Nelson. Those Terrible Carpetbaggers. New York: Oxford UP, 1988. Davis, Rebecca Harding. Waiting for the Verdict. Ed. Donald Dingledine. 1867. Albany: NCUP, 1995. Delany, Martin R. 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