[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]
.Feeling distraught and isolated byher family s division, Dora takes solace in the companionship of the male slavePicter, who, despite being freed by Dora s mother at the onset of war, does notabandon the Darley family.Picter initially leaves to serve as a cook in an Ohioregiment, but, on seeing Dora again soon afterward, remains by her side forthe duration of the war.There is perfect harmony between the former slaveand Dora, as Dora takes on nursing duties in the regiment and relies on Picterfor assistance.This story is at once antislavery Dora s mother declares herhatred for slavery on freeing Picter but still reluctant to envision a place forPicter in wartime society that is separate from his white family.His dedicationto that family, in fact, is a virtue, as Picter helps Dora secure the release of herbrother after his capture by the Ohio regiment and assists her in her travelsnorth, where the Darley siblings reunite with their long-lost Northern aunt.Although this story does not end in a marriage, thanks to the support of theloyal Picter, Dora is able to reunite with her Confederate brother as well as toreconcile her Virginia and Massachusetts kin.24African Americans are a part of these stories of national reunion, but onlyas slaves, as willing and loyal enablers of the reconciliation of white people.They make reunion possible, but they are not reunited themselves.Theirwelfare, their future, and their freedom so central to the war itself areall subordinated to the reconciliation of white Americans.In Dora Darling,we never know what happens to Picter, such as where he finds employmentafter the war and whether he starts his own family.Other tales do not featureAfrican Americans at all.The national family imagined in all of these stories ispredominantly white, as African Americans are connected to, but not an equalpart of, this national family at war with itself.This trend is less pronouncedbut still evident in the works of more racially progressive writers.In 1865Epes Sargent, a white Northern novelist whose stories were among the mostsympathetic to blacks during the war, wrote Strategy at the Fireside. Here, 202 emancipationa slave s death provides a wake-up call to a Confederate woman about the evilsof Southern society and motivates her to seek out and marry a Union man.Sargent does not go so far as to romanticize the Confederacy or slavery, butthe slave is still the pivot around which the story turns, making possible butnot entirely participating in the reunion of North and South.25Such characterizations essentially whitewashed the past, to borrow thewords of historian Nina Silber, allowing white Americans to forget the con-tentiousness surrounding emancipation and black freedom.Both Silber andhistorian David Blight have documented how the literature of the late nine-teenth century especially of the 1880s and 1890s emphasized sectionalreunion at the expense of black progress, consigning African Americans topositions of servility, subordination, and, most commonly, the familiar roleof the loyal slave.As Blight puts it, How better to forget a war about slaverythan to have faithful slaves play the mediators of white folks reunion? Whatis striking about this scenario in the fiction of the immediate postwar periodexamined here is that it appeared earlier than often assumed, coinciding with,rather than resulting from, Reconstruction.The speed with which Northernwriters joined their Southern counterparts in endorsing these portrayals ofblack Americans as early as the 1860s and 1870s underscores the anxieties thatwhite Americans experienced as nearly four million African Americans hadtheir freedom guaranteed by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.Black libera-tion clearly challenged the racial hierarchy so long reinforced by slavery andso long relied on by white Americans, Northern as well as Southern
[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]