"The Elephant and the Race Problem": Sterling A. Brown and Arthur P. Davis as Cultural Conservators

Abstract

“The Elephant and the Race Problem”: Sterling A. Brown and Arthur P. Davis as Cultural Conservators Deborah H. Barnes (bio) Interestingly, Sterling A. Brown and Arthur P. Davis, longtime friends, Howard University colleagues, and renowned raconteurs, both employ elephant parables to record and to interpret African-American cultural specificities in their prose works. Their anecdotes are intriguing, not only for their embedded symbolic truths, or even because they suggest that great minds really do work alike—apparently both men are hopeful that their stories, like the mythical elephant’s memory, will be unforgettable—but moreso for what they reveal about the cultural work to which Brown and Davis dedicated their careers. The elephant, a totem for cultural memory, symbolizes their primary scholarly purpose—to counter racial and racist discourses affecting how Black people perceive themselves and how they are perceived by others. Despite their common aim and their mutual appreciation for and interests in the vernacular culture, their curatorial enterprises differ—Brown uses his craft to authenticate African-American discourses, while Davis interprets African-American discursive culture. Both men, however, strive to document, to conserve, and to validate through their prose works the Negro’s perceptions of, participation in, and contributions to the American literary and social experience. Veritable cornerstones at the “capstone” of Negro education, Howard University, Brown and Davis enjoyed long and productive scholarly careers. Both men were master teachers and groundbreaking literary critics. Brown was also an important African-American poet, and Davis, a dedicated anthologizer. Thus, scholarly critique tends to center on their more accessible contributions: their respective pioneering criticisms of African-American literature, Brown’s folk idiom authenticating poetry, and Davis’s canon-shaping anthologies. Consequently, their equally provocative contributions—the radical transformations of longstanding, racist stereotypes concerning the Negro and the correction of Black people’s self-perceptions of and regard for the American Negro’s culture, character, and history irrespective of class, color, or geography, particularly in literature—have been sorely underappreciated by contemporary scholars. This study examines the nexus between the greater and lesser examined areas of critical inquiry to find that Brown’s and Davis’s lauded scholarship and pedagogy are, in fact, the fruits of a radical cultural agenda to “uplift” the Negro and his cultural forms. Sterling Brown’s “elephant tale” appears in the “Introduction” to his ground-breaking critical study of the African-American character and author, The Negro in American Fiction—a work identifying and discrediting the ways and means by which [End Page 985] Black people are distorted, misinterpreted, and misconceived in American literature. He writes: The blind men gathered about the elephant. Each one felt the part of the elephant’s anatomy closest to him, the trunk, tusk, eyes, ear, hoof, hide and tail. Then each became an authority on the elephant. The elephant was all trunk, or all hoof or all hide, or all tail. So ran their separate truths. The single truth was that all were blind. This fable, pertinent to our study, might be continued to tell how some of the blind men returned to their kingdoms of the blind where it was advantageous to believe that the elephant was all trunk or tusk. (1) The anecdote reveals Brown’s contention that the Negro’s historic oppression is closely linked to his discursive distortion by whites—that is, the malign way Blacks are inscribed in American narratives. Seemingly, legions of “blind men,” either intentionally or ignorantly, have misconstrued the Negro’s character and history to “justify his exploiters” as well as his exploitation. American writers, Brown finds, are “blinded” by timeworn racist stereotypes suggesting “the Negro is all this, that, or the other” (1), stereotypes obscuring the “complete, complex humanity . . . denied him” (3). Brown’s parable suggests that the “truth” about the Negro, like the truth about the elephant, must be attained through a comprehensive, collaborative study of African-American life and culture. In the hands of white authors, publishers, and editors—Brown’s “blind men”—social discourses, defining among other things historical “truths,” social character, and human value, served as culling devices which differentiated among residents of this country assigning them to one of three categories: “Americans,” immigrants, and social pariahs...