Critics have already paired Sutton E. Griggs with Thomas R. Dixon, not least because of their biographical commonalities. Both men were Southern Baptist preachers turned novelists and took as their subject the racial politics of (post-)Reconstruction. Both wrote romances. Hanna Wallinger, for example, begins with their commonalities before studying how Griggs responded to Dixon's Jim Crow politics in The Hindered Hand (1905).1 But I want to take Wallinger's pairing even further to pose something counter-intuitive. I want to read Dixon through Griggs. The standard reading of the two writers is that Griggs’ 1905 novel explicitly rebuts Dixon, but I argue here that we can also interpret the arch-racist Dixon through the Black activist Griggs. Following Brook Thomas, who frames Albion Tourgée's earlier Reconstruction fiction as preemptively responding to Dixon's later work, I suggest we interpret Dixon's debut novel The Leopard's Spots (1902) as a reply to Griggs’ debut novel Imperium in Imperio (1899), even though Dixon surely never read Griggs.2 But Dixon did seek to counter the prospect of Black freedom promised by Reconstruction and imagined by Griggs. What results from my reading is a better understanding of these authors and texts, the mystifying racial politics of the period, and the discursive power of romance: it provided a literary mode for Black writers and white revanchists alike to contest Reconstruction.Writing in 1899 and after, Griggs and Dixon coincided with what Nancy Glazener terms a “romantic revival,” a “reaction against realism” as the emerging arbiter of literary culture.3 Despite whatever elements of realism either author employed, Griggs and Dixon primarily worked in romance's heightened mode. Yet neither author's first novel seems to belong to a struggle over “literary authority” or the eight-hour day, which Glazener argues drives romance's revival.4 Indeed, because Glazener ignores Reconstruction as historical context for literary trends, including for romance, Griggs and Dixon would appear to have nothing to do with the romantic revival she theorizes. Still, Dixon writes his Klan romances partly in rejection of a multiracial modernity promised by Reconstruction; his romantic whiteness promises an alternative to Black threat in the “real world” of tentative racial democracy. Griggs, meanwhile, belonged to a recognizable cluster of Black romancers who have traditionally fallen outside of assessments of the period as the “rise of realism,” including the early Chesnutt, Hopkins, and Du Bois.5 How then do these two opposing writers, Reconstruction, and romance all fit together?As an alternative to realism, the romantic revival actually served as a terrain for contesting Reconstruction and the period's racial formations. Griggs and Dixon sought not merely to portray things as they were, although in some ways they did that, but to open up discursive space for how things could be different. In that sense, the two writers produced romances with a shared social function but for differing ends—producing, too, what feels like a dialogic call and response. We could even say, contra Glazener, that romance in these years was significantly about Blackness. Consider that if Griggs and Dixon sought to reach large audiences, then choosing the ostensibly “high-brow,” increasingly professional realist mode would only have limited their readerships. The Black romancers who have seemed so marginal to the so-called rise of realism are therefore less out of place than critics long thought because they fit their literary form to the political needs of their present.Scholarship on Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio has hit on this point in focusing on the novel's ambiguous ending: put simply, does it advocate a measured but muscular reformism or a militant proto-Black nationalism? The answer matters less than the question in Griggs’ fiction. As John Ernest has written about The Hindered Hand, Griggs deliberately positions the reader within Black freedom struggle.6 In Imperium in Imperio, Griggs appears to do this through the prospect of race war between the U.S. and the all-Black “nation within a nation,” the Imperium.7 The novel ends with the Imperium's looming insurgency to overthrow the U.S. government and achieve Black civil rights, but just what this means or whether Griggs advocates some form of militancy remains unclear. It is not simply the looming violence that implicates readers, though, asking them to align with militancy or accommodation. Rather the novel invites its Black readership to define itself in wholly new ways, as a new “combination,” to use Griggs’ often repeated word, capable of struggling against Jim Crow.In the long historical tradition of secret societies among free Black people, Griggs’ Imperium fashions a collective racial identity and sense of shared struggle. Joanna Brooks explains that the so-called Prince Hall Freemasons, for instance, appropriated the metaphysical symbolism of traditional masonry to create “a template for race consciousness.”8 The secret Imperium similarly gives formal shape to a diverse and expansive Black community—one no longer significantly defined by chattel slavery—with rituals, taboos, and mutual aid. Despite the looming threat of “race war,” the debate between the Imperium's leaders, Belton and Bernard, comes down to whether to maintain their secrecy. Whereas Belton seeks to announce their existence, Bernard wants to remain hidden. Following Belton's rebuttal of a resolution for war with the U.S., Bernard drafts a “Plan of Action for the Imperium in Imperio” and achieves it by way of backdoor dealing and “a secret, formidable combination” of Imperium senators.9 Above all, Bernard urges the Imperium's congress to maintain secrecy, reflected in his proposal's language: “Quietly purchase all Texas land contiguous to states and territories of the Union. . . . place rapid fire disappearing guns in fortifications. . . . All of this is to be done secretly.”10 The fortification of Texas would coincide with clandestine talks with hostile nations and infiltration of the navy by Black saboteurs, setting the stage for a surprise coup.11The obverse of secrecy is publicity: when debating the Imperium's secrecy, Belton and Bernard are really debating how to define their community, not what that community should do next. Belton and Bernard both seek to determine how the Black Imperium circulates in national discourse and, in turn, how it relates to the racist U.S. Belton's proposal concludes by resolving to temporarily avoid confrontation with whites, while Bernard's concludes by resolving to wage war immediately. Yet the plans begin with entirely contrasting resolutions regarding the Imperium's secrecy.12Imperium in Imperio itself is framed as a part of the debate. As a found manuscript written by the whistle-blower Berl Trout and published by one “Sutton E. Griggs,” the novel supposedly exposes Bernard's war plan in hopes of disarming the Imperium's threat. Even the first words of the text, announcing the Griggs character's prefatory note framing the novel as a found manuscript, are obversely about the problem of secrecy. They read, “To the Public.” From its first page to its last, then, Imperium in Imperio signals its investment in secrecy, publicity, and thus who gets to be in on the secret. The Imperium's members are confronted with the question, what should Black people be? Do they continue trying to be “Americans” or do they commit to becoming a true secret—and separate—society?Because Griggs’ literary method implicates his readers, the concluding dilemma is directed outward to them. In debating the Imperium's secrecy or publicity, Belton and Bernard bring to a head the problem of shared identity inherent to a “nation within a nation” and prompt the audience to answer the question for themselves. Such direct, challenging address surely fits a Black Baptist preacher like Griggs. And his utopian vision justifies situating Griggs within an early tradition of Black speculative fiction, as scholars like M. Giulia Fabi have often done.13 But I also think that the novel's open-ended sense of possibility—to say nothing of its almost gothic secrecy motif—marks the novel as romance. Griggs doesn't aim to faithfully portray the everyday details of Black life so much as to provoke readers to imagine what that life should look like. Romance for Griggs makes the unrealistic imaginable.A few years after Griggs, Dixon writes his own secret rebellion as a way to shore up white supremacy's regime, reacting to the promise of Black political power and equality embodied in Reconstruction. Dixon's first novel, The Leopard's Spots (1902) offers what reads like a reply to Imperium in Imperio, an answer to Griggs’ open-ended question about the racial formation called Blackness. Or we could say it's a response to Griggs’ call, albeit the wrong response. Instead of prompting readers to fashion for themselves a new shared Black identity, Dixon asserts a rigidly hierarchical white one. Griggs attempted to be almost pedagogical in the way he implicated readers, and for that reason his novel leaves us with a sense of multiplicity, possibility, even heterogeneity. Dixon takes a different approach. To call it argumentative misses the point: his argument itself forecloses and constrains multiracial solidarity and a more capacious “white” identity.14Indeed, as the title of chapter XIV of The Leopard's Spots plainly shows, Dixon regarded Reconstruction as a “Negro Uprising,” making the novel fundamentally about what we can call white “counter-uprising” or, given the revolutionary character of Reconstruction, “counter-revolution.” Crucially, however, it's this counter-revolution that produces the white identity that Dixon envisions: it organizes disparate and defeated ex-Confederate revanchists into a unified political force. This occurs in two stages. In a well-known plotline, Dixon first uses a romanticized version of the KKK as the vehicle for secret rebellion.15 Given the KKK's prominence in our own cultural imagination, attention toward the novel has especially centered on this section. But there is a less stylized yet functionally similar white rebellion later on, built not around the KKK but the “Red Shirts.” Appearing at the end of Reconstruction, the Red Shirts acted as a paramilitary wing of the Democrats, enforcing white supremacy through violence and intimidation. Infamously, they helped propel Wade Hampton into office as Governor of South Carolina. The red shirt became “the new badge of uncompromising resistance to radicalism” and “the symbol of a Confederate nationalism which blossomed during the [South Carolina gubernatorial] campaign of 1876.”16 The second half of The Leopard's Spots fictionalizes the historical role of the Red Shirts when Dixon's hero Gaston leads them to physically intimidate Black Republicans and wrestle control of the Democrats from his rivals. The ostensibly secret insurrections represented by the KKK and the Red Shirts forge a triumphant white Southern identity in the face of Black political power.The first iteration of the Ku Klux Klan that existed from 1866 to the mid-1870s reveals much about The Leopard's Spots. Of course critics must always distinguish the historical Klan from the one that Dixon fashions on the page as well as from the Klan operating in the American cultural imagination (although the latter owes much to Dixon).17 Still, this first Klan was the only version of the KKK that had existed by the time that Dixon wrote his novel. According to Elaine Frantz Parsons, the first Klan was less an organization than a “decentralized pattern of violence” given meaning and circulation through discursive practices.18 Yet Dixon appears to offer readers precisely the opposite in the form of a coherent, highly structured secret society that is preceded by a stable white male Southern identity rather than a group that actively creates that identity. I say “appears”: in Dixon's novel, just as in the real world, the KKK and the Red Shirts give shape to a whiteness that is actually amorphous and contingent.19 If slavery could no longer unite conflicting white constituencies, then the vigilante and paramilitary arms of the Democratic party would have to. The counter-revolution of The Leopard's Spots follows this trajectory as the whites of Hambright transform from defeated and disorganized into a victorious political force.20Dixon was as concerned as Griggs with how his readers’ collective racial identity should be defined—and for that reason, his novel likewise constantly toggles between secrecy and publicity. His counter-revolution takes the form of two secret societies, thus granting his revanchists the appearance of a natural, almost elemental white identity with a justified place in the racial order.21 At the same time, readers can discern how that identity must be constantly recreated and then circulated in order to exist. Their secrecy itself has to be public. The KKK insurgency in The Leopard's Spots comes into being not as a spontaneous display of existing white identity but rather as deliberate acts of spectacular racial terror. In this, Dixon's Klan resembles the media-savvy early Klan. Like the Klan's first incarnation, they achieve success primarily through rumor, spectacle, and exaggeration. Which is to say, they lack the very substance that they seek to project.22 Of course their acts of violence are real and severe. Yet their violence achieves a chilling effect beyond the immediate target because that violence is projected outward as spectacle. This is the point of political terror. And because terror contains that discursive element, terror also serves to make relatively small forces appear large, fluid appear solid, and weakness appear as strength. Following their lynching of Tim Shelby, the Klan makes a show of force that stages both their mystery and their spectacle. The procession was a “sight,” one intended to be witnessed and enhanced by the Klan's ritual costume and mystery. News about the procession spreads instantaneously as if everyone had always been in on the secret. The group's victory here lies not in material power but in that they circulate their own mythic image: later reports grossly inflate the KKK's size and strength.23Although less violent or extensively described, Gaston's Red Shirts in the novel's second half function in the same way by giving shape to a reactionary white identity, but that shape is again less substantial than it initially appears. Indeed, the Red Shirts repeat the KKK from Book I as an ostensibly spontaneous, organic uprising. While lacking the same ritualistic secrecy as the Klan, the Red Shirts rely on their own combination of mystery and spectacle.24 The repetition becomes clearest when the Red Shirts hold a procession that mirrors the Klan parade earlier in the novel.25 The Red Shirts repeat the work of the KKK, albeit without living on in the cultural imagination like the KKK has. And like the hoods of the KKK, the uniform of the Red Shirts gives definition to a white identity being built during a period when Black political power was partially and briefly achieved.26 But despite what Dixon or his insurgents would claim, that white identity was always contrived, bestowed with meaning by the very symbols it deployed in order to publicize itself. Murders without a mysterious note signed “K.K.K.” or a lynching remain too obscure to send a public message; a sudden uprising without red shirts is just a riot. Such acts bestow significance to the people who perform them. They organize disparate reactionaries into a coherent, homogenous force. The novel's trajectory in both halves moves from disorganized, disaggregated ex-Confederates to a resurgent whiteness formed under the auspices of the Klan or the Red Shirts. Those groups come to embody the argument implied by the novel's title, which Dixon makes explicit throughout the text. Because “the Ethiopian” cannot “change his skin or the leopard his spots,” whites are under constant threat in the social jungle.27 They must resort to violence in order to survive.Dixon was right that if whites don't actively, violently maintain the racial hierarchy, they will cease to exist as a political category. As both Dixon and Griggs suggest, race is never settled, a given, but rather always up for grabs and waiting to be secured. Which is also to say that with seriousness and effort and luck, we could make our social world differently. In the midst of a romantic reaction against realism, Griggs and Dixon turned to romance for its speculative power. They responded to the contingency of race that Reconstruction underscored, and in romance they found a literary mode that could depict what that contingency might make possible—for good or bad. The tenuous whiteness at the edges of The Leopard's Spots necessarily implies that whiteness, and therefore white supremacy, can be ended. On some level Dixon understood this even though he derived from it the wrong lesson. Perhaps we can instead rethink the tenuousness of whiteness as an open-ended prompt to readers in the style of Sutton E. Griggs.Interpreting Dixon through Griggs, it becomes clear that the latter took the contingency of race as a chance to pose a question that he expected his readers to answer for themselves. Dixon, though, desperately answered that question by reasserting racial hierarchy. Countless writers, radicals, and revolutionaries have answered differently.28 For them, as for Griggs, the contingency of the racial order offers an opportunity. By refusing the wages of whiteness, fleeing its shelter, and betraying its political project, so called white people can help dis-order and ultimately overthrow the racial hierarchy.29 White supremacy began in “Pan-European”30 alliances against indigenous Americans and enslaved Africans; we will end it by building a new, multiracial solidarity, although solidarity always requires real risk and action. Reading Dixon through Griggs reveals what's at stake for both authors—the always available possibility of racial re-formation. And if we creatively misread Dixon in terms of Griggs’ romancing, then we even discover how to make Dixon's worst nightmare a reality.