At the Foot of the Racial Mountain: Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad

Abstract

At the Foot of the Racial Mountain:Pauline Hopkins's Literary Exodus in Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad Rod Taylor George S. Schuyler denied that black art existed separate from white art in his 1926 essay "The Negro-Art Hokum." Working within the vibrant New Negro movement, he asserted that Because a few writers with a paucity of themes have seized upon imbecilities of the Negro rustics and clowns and palmed them off as authentic and characteristic Aframerican behavior, the common notion that the black American is so "different" from his white neighbor has gained wide currency. (97) Schuyler controversially argued that since the social, political, and economic conditions of the United States were similar for both white and black Americans, it did not create the conditions for a distinctly African American literary and cultural aesthetic. Instead, he believed that African American art and culture were subsumed in the American mainstream. Decades prior, at almost twenty years old, Pauline Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam, or The Underground Railroad (1879). It is a drama that weaves popular minstrel tropes with subtle commentary against the legacy of slavery and the current social state of African Americans. It employs song, dance, stock characters, and African American minstrel stars such as the famed Sam Lucas to present a message that differed from most nineteenth-century minstrelsy to challenge the reductive forms of depiction that had come to sully the imaginations of theater-goers in the United States.1 Because of Hopkins's dramatic work, [End Page 423] Schuyler's assumptions fall flat: her use of rusticity and the legacy of slavery as the locus of her content gave credence to a separate culture with its own complex histories that shaped her career as a writer in the early twentieth century. Hopkins is best known for her literary endeavors that engaged with the progressive representations of African Americans in the postbellum moment. Her 1900 novel Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Live North and South receives the lion's share of critical attention, but she was also prodigious in her production of essays, short fiction, and serialized novels such as Hagar's Daughter, Winona, and Of One Blood that appeared in the Colored American Magazine between 1900 and 1904. In Peculiar Sam, however, Hopkins was able to develop progressive ideas that subsequently emerged in her later fictions of race. In "Reinventing Slavery, Family, and Nation in Peculiar Sam" (2019), Marvin McAllister refers to both W. E. B. Du Bois's and David Blight's historical visions from Black Reconstruction (1935) and Race and Reunion (2001), respectively, to express how Hopkins "advanc[ed] progressive African-American modernity as a model for a nation in the process of rebuilding" to liberate her enslaved characters (394). I slightly deviate from McAllister on what Hopkins is attempting to liberate. I suggest that in Peculiar Sam, Hopkins desires to free her content from the constraints of the plantation and, instead, lay a foundation for the literary and cultural style that came to be associated with the Harlem Renaissance. For instance, Hopkins wrote Contending Forces in 1900, entirely abandoning the southern landscape as a setting in favor of a racially progressive Boston. Hazel V. Carby asserts in The Magazine Novels of Pauline Hopkins (1988) that Hopkins's writing in the Colored American Magazine would create "a black renaissance in Boston" (xxxi). For Hopkins, Boston is a setting where African Americans can safely advance politically, socially, and economically, removed from the watchful and oppressive eye of Jim Crow by showing that any place other than the South is acceptable. This literary work was also evident in Hopkins's later fiction. Still, the groundwork for Hopkins's black renaissance began on the stage before the ideologies of Du Bois and Washington had a chance to influence black intellectual thought. According to James V. Hatch in his introduction to The Roots of African American Drama (1991), Hopkins wrote Peculiar Sam "for her [End Page 424] family's troupe, the Hopkins' Colored Troubadours; she employed the current minstrel dialect as well as song and dance to engage her audience in the serious subject of emancipation" (31). An examination of Hopkins's musical...