The Graphic African, the Illustrator’s Gaze, and The Grandissimes

Abstract

The Graphic African, the Illustrator’s Gaze, and The Grandissimes Adam Sonstegard A set of images from a novel set in New Orleans at the turn of the twentieth century both invokes and deflects interracial seductions. In one of these images, a nearly naked enslaved man lies sensuously recumbent as he returns the viewer’s gaze (Fig. 1). In a second, a mixed-race woman almost reciprocates that same gaze as she lies in her sickbed (Fig. 2). Bras Coupé, the man in the first image, may potentially embrace a white infant who is toddling into his threatening, brawny arms. Palmyre, the voodoo priestess in the second, may potentially invite another viewer, whom we do not see, to join her in bed. These images, by artist Alfred Herter, seem surprising for an illustrated book published in 1899, for they anticipate a later era’s understanding of racial identity, depictions of sexuality, and willingness to show racially intermediate figures. They belong to the earliest set of illustrations ever rendered to accompany George Washington Cable’s novel The Grandissimes, first published, without illustrations, in 1880, and recounting a historical narrative set in 1803. In the novel, these characters marry without reproducing; in the imagery, they appear only in separate picture frames. The images do not conform to the hypersexual “brute” or the “tragic mulatta” stereotypes, but are, rather, what I call “graphic Africans”: artistic recreations by Herter, a white graphic artist, they are textual accompaniments for Cable, a Caucasian novelist. Both men worked with existing conventions for treating “race” in what counted as multimedia book publication in 1899. At that time, nine in ten whites, but only five in ten blacks, were literate; whites dominated book and magazine publishing and buying markets, as well as receptive reading audiences. Graphic Africans, then, were only black or biracial by several removes, as images of, but not by or for, African American readers or [End Page 195] viewers.1 These images only purport to cast seductive gazes across color lines. Complexions suggest families’ mixed-race heritages, but actually manifest the artist’s fine shading techniques. The images objectify these bodies as spectacles, even as the characters depicted seem human enough to return the viewer’s gaze. As “graphic Africans,” they so depart from Cable’s verbal descriptions of Creole, racial intermarriage, that they demand an article-length exploration. This illustrator’s gaze, as I term it, does not merely adapt the novel visually but revises the narrative’s optics and discretion for depicting historic New Orleans. The artist lightly renders biracial complexions, leaving reader-viewers with “invisible blackness,” undetectable in Herter’s pictures, but very real to Cable’s characters. The images segregate Cable’s characters and interrupt seductive, hypnotic gazes—even when Cable’s passages feature those races and castes inter mingling. The skin tones Herter renders in other images scarcely distinguish Caribbean Creole from mulatto from Euro-American, making the illustrations grayscale caricatures of a society that once took barely perceptible racial differences much too seriously. Graphic Africans blur black/white lines, guiltily reminding many of precisely what they did not wish to see: forebears’ fathering of mulattos and octoroons, ancestors’ introduction of shades of gray, literally and figuratively, into “pure” Caucasian categories. The illustrator, working in the days of Jim Crow segregation, increased disenfranchisement, and Plessy vs. Ferguson ’s “separate but equal” legislation, screens out an earlier era’s interracial transgressions, illuminates “pure” citizens, and obscures biracial half-castes. Beginning a revisionist history of Cable’s novel, the illustrator’s gaze overrides the verbal artist’s narrative eye in the prose, staying discreetly on one side of a color line that the author managed tentatively to have his characters cross. This set of images is in fact more of a crossing of paths than a fully egalitarian artistic collaboration. Active from 1890 through the 1920s, Herter painted portraits, book illustrations, and civic subjects for patrons, museums, and civic bodies: murals for the Massachusetts and Wisconsin capitol buildings, King Arthur and Merlin illustrations for children’s fictions, even posters for Red Cross relief efforts during [End Page 196] World War I. His paintings and murals, some commissioned by the Daughters of...