James Corrothers Reads a Book; or, the Lives of Sandy Jenkins

Abstract

In recent years, such critics as Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (xx-xxi), Houston Baker, Jr. (Blues 1-2), and Robert Stepto (xv-xvi) have issued call for reading of African-American texts in terms of larger African-American tradition, replete with internal concerns, themes, and intertextualities that give meaning to those texts. They, and others, have looked at examples from within that tradition, reading individual texts in ways that lend support to their cases and that show, persuasively, how an understanding of specific dynamics of an African-American tradition, going back to its beginnings, can give real insight into meaning and significance of works of black American writers. No less important, however, are ways in which such an understanding can help critics and historians address some of more problematic texts within African-American literature. One such text is James D. Corrothers's 1902 dialect novel The Black Cat Club. Growing out of an earlier series of newspaper pieces, and set in Chicago ghetto, Corrothers's book focuses on antics and adventures of distinctly lower-class and not-too-literary literary society, led by self-taught dialect poet named Sandy Jenkins, also known as Doc. An episodic account of what Corrothers himself called the humorous side of life (7), it is one of most complex works to be found in turn-of-the-century dialect writing. On one hand, as its subtitle promises, it is heavily based on humor and folklore, and with more fidelity than most other works from period. Corrothers's episodes are structured around club meetings, focus of which tends to be story-telling, and many of stories are easily traceable to folk sources. The club members tell their tales in manner that fully captures forms of banter and verbal play often identified with African-American folk communities. On other, The Black Cat Club frequently lapses into stereotyped-based situations and, especially, characterizations that owe more to minstrelsy than to African-American life, creating images of ignorance and vulgarity that caricature as much as they represent that life Corrothers claims to have revealed. What to do with book is far from obvious. It was not poorly received at time of its publication, not even by such sensitive black critics as William Stanley Braithwaite, who found it praiseworthy and faithful depiction of a sort of elemental Negro (151,152), while recognizing difference between that elemental character and more urbane middle class, of which both Braithwaite and Corrothers were members. Nevertheless, for readers of later time, caricatures are so broad, and stereotypes so pervasive, that, despite its ties to folk sources, The Black Cat Club has been very hard to fit into most historical paradigms for African-American writing, particularly those emphasizing, rightly, issues of protest and liberation. Within such model, as Richard Yarborough has argued so well (360-62), book seems almost betrayal of African-American interests and concerns, an impression reinforced by Corrothers's own comment in his 1916 autobiography, In Spite of Handicap, that he had come to exceedingly that it was published (139). Interestingly, if Corrothers's assessment is to be believed, his regret did not grow out of changing attitude toward dialect writing as such. Although he was, for time, one of leading exponents of dialect (In Spite 137, Wright), he claims always to have been ambivalent about it. And he claims to have been particularly sensitive about burden of stereotyping dialect carried with it, recalling his chagrin, even before he began his career, at its use in newspapers to represent speech of virtually all African Americans, even of middle-class professionals whose speech was, in fact, both standard and impeccable (In Spite 82-84). …