"So strangely interwoven": The Property of Inheritance, Race, and Sexual Morality in Pauline E. Hopkins's Contending Forces.

Representing middle-class, "moral" African Americans in Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South (1900), Pauline E. Hopkins challenged mainstream race discourses that maintained Jim Crow's social and political inequalities. With one eye on that social work, critics have singled out Hopkins's narrative and thematic achievements in the novel--her first, and the only one published as a novel rather than serially. But scholars have also criticized Contending Forces both before and since it was republished in the 1988 Schomburg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers, arguing that the novel insufficiently challenged a white patriarchal hegemony. Her female characters are too submissive, they charge, as the conventional marriage plot subsumes almost all of Hopkins's women. Critics also read the novel as implicitly arguing an assimilationist politics because her Black characters--many of whom are "mulatto"--are too physically and socially "white." [1]

Still, given turn-of-the-century race, gender, and sexual politics, we can recognize that Hopkins's attempts to destabilize the primary social categories of race and gender, and to challenge sexual mores, pushed socio-cultural limits that the white patriarchal hegemony needed desperately to maintain. As Elizabeth Ammons has insightfully noted in the "Afterword" of the first scholarly book dedicated solely to Hopkins, the principles operating in Hopkins's work are her "venturesomeness, defiance of categories, resistance to received tradition, and determination to articulate new forms not to contain stories but to release new possibilities and paradigms" (212). Such resistance is not surprising given that Hopkins wrote in a turbulent era, when lynchings grew horrifyingly numerous as a (white) attempt to control both race and sexuality, and when a burgeoning rhetoric of biological racial difference imagined through a dichotomy of white superiority and Black inferiority found new fire in discourses of eugenics, i mmigrant exclusion, the doctrine of "separate but equal," Egyptology, and psychology. [2]

Writing in this milieu and through a national discourse that had long understood the metaphoric and actual importance of "the family" in (re)producing the white patriarchal hegemony and in maintaining control of property through "lines of descent," Hopkins attempted to reconstitute a national identity by providing new "possibilities and paradigms" that erased race- and gender-based inequalities and complicated the tangled threads of familial relationships and inheritance. [3] As she wrote in her "Preface" to Contending Forces, the novel is a "simple, homely tale, unassumingly told, which cements the bonds of brotherhood among all classes and complexions. Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs--religious, political, and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation" (13-14). Hopkins recognized that the divided "American house" must be reunited to stand because the U.S. was historically and undeniably a homestead of "mixed" racial heritage. The novel itself also recognizes the U.S. as an estate whose prosperity required equally both its male and female caretakers. Thus, while Contending Forces is laudable for its challenge to national hegemonic definitions of race and sexuality, as critics have noted, the novel is all the more fascinating because of how Hopkins represents issues of race and sexual morality as inherently connected to each other and to issues of property and inheritance. Race and sexual morality, like forms of tangible property such as money and estate, have value as forms of intangible property that can be conferred, retained, stolen, and reclaimed. Given the then ongoing debate between the political camps of Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, turning partially on the extent to which material gain and the accumulation of property were necessary for "racial uplift," Hopkins's emphasis on issues of property was quite pertinent, though largely ignored.

Property and the African American Community

By determining citizenship, guaranteeing the political franchise, and establishing (white) male privilege, property has been fundamental to the United States since the founding. Property owners--as property owners--had access to social, legal, and juridical power in ways that the poor did not because land entitled one to the privileges of citizenship. However, given the appropriation of Native American lands for national expansion and the developing system of slavery that became increasingly maintained through a rhetoric of biological racial inequality, the idea of "race"-and, more specifically, "whiteness"-vastly complicated the relationship between property and citizenship. [4] Under the race-based slave system that continued to expand until the Civil War, race and property were fundamentally connected through access to the actual, legally literal right to own one's self. As the narrator notes in the beginning section of Contending Forces, "Some [slaves], in their simple ignorance, may not have known why th ey were sad, but, like the captive bird, their hearts longed for that which was ever the birthright of man-property in himself" (60). For African Americans, gaining and retaining ownership of one's self was of primary importance not only for its implicit psychological value, but also because it made possible the transformation within U.S. socio-cultural and legal systems from an object position (as human chattel) to a subject position (as thinking person) and thus guaranteed (nominally at least) certain "inalienable" social and legal rights, if not always the franchise. [5] Owning the self further entailed the possibility of owning other forms of property, even though the enforcement of Black codes and the relatively unchecked reign of white supremacist violence made that ownership tenuous.

From Reconstruction to the turn of the century, the focus of African American discussions of property shifted from the issue of owning the self to placing more emphasis on owning and protecting from white violence and appropriation the forms of property that granted access to socioeconomic gain and political entitlement. In Contending Forces, Hopkins represents these discussions through the rhetoric of Will Smith and Sappho Clark (who voice a Du Boisian position) and Dr. Arthur Lewis and Dora Smith (who argue Washington's), as well as a plethora of minor characters who express various alternative positions on Black enfranchisement, education, and "social equality." Although Hopkins includes these disparate political voices throughout the novel and claims in her "Preface" to have set out to "tell an impartial story, leaving it to the reader to draw conclusions" (15), many readers have argued that the combined Du Boisian politics of Will and Sappho embody Hopkins's own political leanings. [6] In "The Fair--conc luded," a chapter focused largely on how greed for material wealth can divide the Black community, the narrator notes that "expediency and right must go hand in hand. There is no room for compromise" (202) [7] Such a statement rejects Washington's famous 1895 "Atlanta Compromise" and its accommodationist approach to race relations. Washington emphasized technical and manual training in order to accumulate property, and the basic physical and social benefits such wealth could bring, at the expense of immediate political and social equality for African Americans. For Du Bois, such a compromise was unacceptable, although he did recognize the necessity of acquiring property. Indeed, his "Of the Quest of the Golden Fleece" in The Souls of Black Folk analyzes the desperate financial situation of rural Black Americans as a result of a cyclical, racist tenant system that prevented African Americans from owning, working, and profiting from their own land. However, Du Bois also believed that property gains could too ea sily threaten the more needed focus on equal political representation and advanced educational opportunities. He argued that the South (and the Black South specifically) must not

dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread; it is replacing the finer type of Southerner with vulgar moneygetters; it is burying the sweeter beauties of Southern life beneath pretense and ostentation. For every social ill the panacea of wealth has been urged--wealth to overthrow the remains of slave feudalism; ... wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of truth, beauty, and goodness, wealth as the ideal of the public school. (61)

Here, Du Bois understands "moneygetting" as a temptation distracting African Americans from paths of real social and political advancement. In Contending Forces, the villain John P. Langley succumbs to the dangers of "moneygetting." He sacrifices his own integrity and betrays the socio-political causes of "his race" for his own personal and financial gain by accepting career advancements and cash rewards from white politicians in exchange for "controlling" the tenor of the Black community. Fittingly, Langley dies alone in a vast field of whiteness--a snowstorm "in the new Eldorado--the Klondike gold-fields" (398). Although the novel thus warns against unchecked greed for "moneygetting," it also posits alternatives: African Americans who can gain material wealth through both manual trades and "professional" fields without sacrificing the greater socio-political causes of African Americans.

Regardless of their socioeconomic class, the main characters in Contending Forces understand the complex connections among material gain, education, social equality, and political representation. Ma Smith and her daughter Dora run a "respectable" boardinghouse, complete with a furnished parlor and piano, not only to support themselves in relative comfort, but also to create an encouraging, homelike environment for Blacks who aspire to improve their socioeconomic condition. [8] Dora will additionally marry the educated Dr. Arthur Lewis and help establish an African American technical school in New Orleans. Will Smith, the romantic "hero" of the novel, works as a bellhop so that he can--by novel's end--earn a law degree from Harvard and eventually establish his own European, non-industrial school for African Americans. The romantic "heroine" of the novel, Sappho Clark, is a stenographer capable of supporting herself in relative comfort who, through her marriage to Will Smith, will also ultimately work toward ed ucating Blacks. Even Ophelia Davis and Sarah Ann White, whom Richard Yarborough names as the "lower-class" characters (xli), "progress" from slaves to business women running their own reputable laundry service. Ophelia, with her much younger husband-to-be, the Reverend Tommy James, will also take over the Smith boarding house and presumably continue the politically minded Ladies Sewing Circle organized by Ma Smith. [9]

Although the majority of characters are able to succeed financially and achieve relative material prosperity through their own efforts, Hopkins plots even greater wealth for the Smiths. The main romance plot between Will and Sappho itself is framed by a story of dispossession and repossession of the Montfort estate. Typical of Hopkins's work, it is in the intergenerational relationship between the two stories that we find her more complex treatment of property issues and (white) national responsibility for financial restitution. The novel begins in 1790 as the tale of the ostensibly white Montfort family, who move from Bermuda to North Carolina in order to avoid bankruptcy under the British plan of emancipation. Charles Montfort's plan is to establish himself in the United States, "gradually free his [700] slaves without impoverishing himself, bestow on each one a piece of land," and retire to England a wealthy man (24). But Montfort's objective ultimately fails. Three years after the Montforts arrival in Nor th Carolina, Charles is murdered when the "committee on public safety," led by malicious and scheming Anson Pollock, hears of Montfort's plan to emancipate his slaves and to establish them as landowners. The vague charge of "inciting insurrection" among the slaves legally justifies the murder; however, it is not enough legal justification to repossess the Montfort land and slaves from his wife (Grace) and their children (Charles and Jesse). In order to claim Montfort's property, the "committee on public safety" must have another, more persuasive excuse: the only rumored claim that the beautiful and "creamy-skinned" Grace Montfort (and thus her sons) have "negro blood." Such an accusation not only legitimates claiming Montfort's lands and slaves but also serves to put Grace and her sons into slavery by reducing them from rightful (white) heirs to assessable (Black) property. They, like their own "legal" slaves, become part of the "booty" divided among the presumably white men who raid their estate. Through Pol lock's act of publicly naming them Black, Grace and her children not only lose their material wealth and land, they also lose the property of their selves and can themselves be owned, sexually violated, physically abused, sold, or destroyed.

This total dispossession sets the stage for the primary and entangled plot involving the descendants of Jesse and Charles, ultimately ending (after some lucky encounters and a lengthy legal process) in the restitution of the monetary equivalent of the original Montfort estate by the U.S. government. The courts return tangible property to the rightful heirs, who succeed in avoiding the pitfalls of material wealth Du Bois feared. Still, not even the courts can restore the intangible property of whiteness. Although the descendants of (the son) Charles Montfort, through his early "rescue" by a wealthy Englishman, have reestablished their whiteness, the descendants of Jesse Montfort, through marriage with African Americans, remain legally Black despite their physical whiteness.

The Property of Race

This framing story of dispossession and repossession--and the resulting intricacies of interracial familial relations--evidences Hopkins's recognition that U.S. property issues were much more complex than who owned material wealth. By depicting how the allegedly Black Grace and her children can lose their rights to property, the novel recognizes that under slavery and during its aftermath African Americans had no guarantee that their material, tangible property would not be reclaimed by whites: If one were not white, then one's property had no social, legal, or juridical protection. However, Hopkins expands the conception of property beyond the Washington-Du Bois debate to include the intangible property of one's racial status. Writing almost 100 years after Hopkins, Cheryl I. Harris theorizes what Hopkins's novel narrates: Whiteness itself became a form of property that privileged and protected the material property of self and land. Harris argues that,

although by popular usage property describes "things" owned by persons, or the rights of persons with respect to a thing, the concept of property prevalent among most theorists, even prior to the twentieth century, is that property may "consist of rights in 'things' that are intangible, or whose existence is a matter of legal definition." Property is thus said to be a right, not a thing, characterized as metaphysical, not physical. (1725)

By tracing the ante-bellum relationship between race and property, Harris establishes how the intangible "thing" of race--or, more specifically, "whiteness"--became a form of property that could be, and often had to be, defended in courts, a form of property that afforded its owner invaluable access to social and legal privilege because it designated the owner as "not-Black" and consequently not a (possible) slave who would have had no legal right to own property, even the property of self. Thus, Harris explains in a passage worth quoting at length:

Because whites could not be enslaved or held as slaves, the racial line between white and Black was extremely critical; it became a line of protection and demarcation from the potential threat of commodification, and it determined the allocation of the benefits and burdens of this form of property. White identity and whiteness were the sources of privilege and protection; their absences meant being the object of property. Slavery as a system of property facilitated the merger of white identity and property. Because the system of slavery was contingent on and conflated with racial identity, it became crucial to be "white," to be identified as white, to have the property of being white. Whiteness was the characteristic, the attribute, the property of free human beings. (1721)

Within a race-based slave system, whiteness indeed had value; but although whiteness functioned as the property that supplied "privilege and protection," as property it simultaneously became "something" that an individual could possess or lose. This is exactly how whiteness functions in Contending Forces, whether or not Hopkins understood it in Harris's terms. In the story of the Montforts, for example, whiteness clearly provides its possessors with social "privilege and protection": As long as Grace Montfort and her children possess it, they are immune from Anson Pollock and the "committee on public safety." However, once stripped of their intangible property (their whiteness), the Montforts are easily and legally dispossessed of their tangible property (their land, slaves, and selves).

But how is that dispossession possible? How, after all, does one lose one's whiteness? In Contending Forces, the loss is ostensibly incurred as a result of a rumor started by a lower-class white man upon first seeing Grace Montfort as she arrives from Bermuda with her family and their possessions. Hank Davis, one of the rural "idlers" among the dockhands, admits to Bill Sampson that he has "'never seed sich a booty in [his] life,"' to which Sampson "meditativeiy" responds," 'Strikes me, Hank, thet thet female's got a black streak in her somewhar'" (41). What strikes me in this passage is that Sampson answers his friend's comment on the immense "booty" of the Montforts with a comment on Grace's racial status, a rhetorical move that juxtaposes "property" and "Grace" upon her very arrival on U.S. shores. Their dialogue perfectly represents the elision from tangible to intangible property. As striking is the apparent reasoning behind Sampson's declaration. He explains that" 'thar's too much cream color in the fac e and too little blud seen under the skin for a genooine white 'ooman. You can't tell nothin' bout these Britishers; they're allers squeamish 'bout thar nigger brats'" (41). In thus constructing a socially determined racial identity for Grace, this short passage translates Grace from a "genuine" white woman with creamy skin to, essentially, a "nigger brat." Sampson has planted the seeds of violent dispossession that will be reaped in the raid on the Montforts' estate and on Grace's body.

In referencing Grace's "blud" and the "cream color" of her face, Sampson draws on established nineteenth-century discourses of race as a biological category, discourses that, in turn, maintained the legal and social system of white domination and thus maintained whiteness as property. Harris reminds us, as did Hopkins in much of her work, that whiteness was governed legally through hypodescent, the transference of blood,

which itself was predicated on the pseudo-sciences of eugenics and craniology that saw their major development during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The legal definition of race was the "objective" test propounded by racist theorists of the day who described race to be immutable, scientific, biologically determined-an unsullied fact of the blood rather than a volatile and violently imposed regime of social hierarchy. (1739)

In the country in which "all men [sic] are created equal," a reliance on such pseudo-sciences that "objectively proved" African Americans to be biologically and "naturally" inferior to "whites" was fundamental because it justified the maintenance of the slave system, as well as the post-bellum system of social, legal, and juridical segregation. However, what the social "blackening" of Grace Montfort and her children shows us is that employing the discourse, making the accusation alone was "proof." Rumor is "proof" enough when the socioeconomic system itself--indeed, even a national way of life--operates through and maintains the "color line." In such a totally bifurcated world the claim of "dark" blood alone could justify the dispossession of whiteness, especially when doing so works toward the economic advantage of the community and, in Anson Pollock's case, fulfills a member's sexual lust, a consequence I will discuss further in the next section. With Grace and her children named Black and consequently clai med as slaves, still-white members of the community can, in turn, claim the Montfort estate, which includes several hundred acres, 700 slaves, the sexualized body of Grace Montfort, and "'plenty o' whiskey an' stuff in the cellur'" (56).

In Contending Forces Hopkins depicts clearly the socioeconomic motivation sustaining the U.S. system of racial classification. Further, in representing how easily a "white" woman can be dispossessed of whiteness, Hopkins simultaneously exposes the tenuous and socially constructed nature of social categories. Grace and her children "become" Black without any change in their "real" (biological) racial heritage; they have simply been dispossessed of white identity as a social and legal property. The novel thus disrupts the belief that one's biological race heritage determines one's socio-legal race designation.

But Hopkins extends her investigation of race in two additional ways which, together, work to distinguish further biological racial traits from a socio-legal racial classification and thus allow whiteness to function as a form of property. The first of these additional challenges to the U.S.'s system of racial classification, and perhaps the most ingenious element of her treatment of race in the novel, is the initial uncertainty over the biological racial heritage of Charles and Grace Montfort. The narrator tells us quite early in the novel that "there might have even been a strain of African blood polluting the fair stream of Montfort's vitality, or even his wife's, which fact would not have caused him one instant's uneasiness" (23). With these few words, the narrator articulates the Montforts' racial identity much as Bill Sampson does. The important difference lies in the systems each uses socially and legally to "race" the Montforts. Describing the racial system in Bermuda, the narrator notes that "in many cases African blood had become diluted from amalgamation with the higher race, and many of these 'colored' people became rich planters or business men (themselves owning slaves) through the favors heaped upon them by their white parents" (23). The text clearly states that in Bermuda's system of racial classification Charles and Grace Montfort can possess whiteness regardless of their "bloodlines." Refraining the narrative from within the American system, Hopkins has Bill Sampson admit that he has" 'hern tell that they think nuthin of ejcatin' thar black brats, and freein' 'em, an' makin' 'em rich'"(41). The repetition of this narrative in the text indeed makes possible the presence of "black blood" in the Montforts. However, it also exposes the "artificial" nature of racial classifications by juxtaposing the two systems.

Furthermore, because Hopkins's narrator never reveals the Montforts' "true" biological racial heritage, the novel can further expose and upset the artificiality of American racial classifications. Because the reader can't know whether the Montforts are "really" Black or "really" white, any attempt to maintain race classifications in the text necessarily must fail. As Harris explains. "The acceptance of the fiction that the racial ancestry could be determined with the degree of precision called for by the relevant standards or definitions rested on false assumptions that racial categories of prior ancestors had been accurately reported, that those reporting in the past shared the definitions currently in use, and that racial purity actually existed in the United States" (1740). The system requires knowing each individual's actual and complete biological racial heritage, an impossibly complex task. Under the U.S. system, if neither of the Montforts had "black blood," then Charles Montfort-Withington, the white Englishman who helps to restore the Montforts' repossessed fortune and the descendant of (the son) Charles Montfort, is indeed "white." If, however , either of the Montforts did have even a trace of "black blood," then under the "one-drop" rule Withington is Black and unintentionally passing as white. Similarly, if the Montforts were "untainted" by "black blood," Jesse Montfort would "really" be "white," despite the socio-legal loss of his whiteness, and therefore only passing for Black when he is "absorbed into that unfortunate race" (79).

But Hopkins complicates Jesse's racial status even further. The narrator notes that, "in his character of a fugitive slave, the lad from the first cast his lot with the colored people of the community" (78). But we know that Jesse is visibly white enough to be "absorbed" into the "white" race. Once he has escaped Anson Pollock, why does he choose to assimilate into a socially and legally proscribed race rather than the dominant one? The reader never learns why or how he makes his choice, although we do know that Jesse lost his "white" legal status while still a young child and thus grew to "manhood" as an African American slave. Feasibly, then, Jesse understood himself to be Black regardless of his biological history, the "truth" of which he could not have known. Yet why compose such an extremely unlikely, complicated genealogical plot? Because it enables Hopkins to emphasize that social and legal race classifications are distinct from biological racial heritage: The Withingtons and the Smiths are either Blac k or white according to the social and legal designations assigned to them. As in the title of a later Hopkins novel, the characters are "of one blood" despite the socio-legal racial classifications.

Hopkins's second strategy to Illustrate the distinction between socio-legal race classifications and biological racial inheritance also involves the members of the Montfort-Smith-Withington family, as well as many of her other characters. The "mulatto" characters illustrate that, if scientific or legal means cannot maintain the American system of racial classification, neither can the more common means of visual recognition. Indeed, in making the point that as a result of "miscegenation" we cannot accurately read race on the body, the widower race-woman, Mrs. Willis, claims that "'it is an incontrovertible truth that there is no such thing as an unmixed black on the American continent. Just bear in mind that we cannot tell by a person's complexion whether he be dark or light in blood'" (151). The complexion of the main characters in Contending Forces, indeed, works to destabilize the notion that one can always accurately determine race by "reading" physical traits. Although all are legally and socially Black, the majority are very light-skinned. Sappho Clark is "tall and fair, with hair of a golden cast, aquiline nose, rosebud mouth, soft brown eyes veiled by long, dark lashes which swept her cheek" (107). Her son, Alphonse, is "a beautiful boy... with golden curls and dark blue eyes" who is so visibly white that (legally) white people "gazed with surprise upon the child, and could not be convinced when told that he was a Negro, and identified by ties of blood with the blackest men and women" (203). Additionally, Will Smith is "tall and finely formed, with features almost perfectly chiseled, and a complexion the color of an almond shell. His hair was black and curly, with just a tinge of crispness to denote the existence of Negro blood" (90). Even John P. Langley is "very fair in complexion.... his hair was dark and had no indication of Negro blood in its waves; [and] his features were of the Caucasian cut" (90). Although other characters, such as Dora, have "brown skin," Hopkins populates her novel largely with characters who could (but don't) "pass" for white. [10]

Many readers have criticized Hopkins for creating--as did so many nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century writers--Black protagonists who are visibly white. [11] Although visibly "whitening" her Black protagonists may, to a certain extent, work to maintain a racial hierarchy, I agree with Ann duCille that "the near-white [characters] ... --no matter how distasteful their pale skin, piety, and purity may be to modem readers--served important political and literary functions" (qtd. in Marcus n27). These "white-skinned" Blacks are visibly white characters who do not possess the socio-legal property of whiteness. Admittedly, this strategy fails to present positive dark-skinned Black characters, but it succeeds at destabilizing biological race categories. [12]

Although the novel rejects the U.S. system of biologically based race classifications, it does not altogether reject the notion of biological inheritance. Susan Gillman explains that, "in the midst of this pervasive racialization of the sciences of the mind [that was taking place at the turn of the century], Hopkins, like so many American psychologists, embraces the notion that mental capacity is hereditary" (75). In fact, the novel represents many traits, including intelligence, morality, and character, as inheritable. For instance, John P. Langley, later revealed to be John Pollock Langley and the grandnephew of the despicable Anson Pollock, has inherited from his ancestor both his "good looks" and his "bad nature." The narrator explains that he is "a descendant of slaves and Southern 'crackers.' We might find this a bad mixture--the combination of the worst features of a dominant race with an enslaved race." As a result, Langley has "a revengeful trait of character... [and] a mercenary streak" (91). And we are told again later in the novel that his "natural instinct for good had been perverted by a mixture of 'cracker' blood of the lowest type on his father's side with whatever God-saving quality that might have been loaned to the Negro by pitying nature. This blood, while it gave him the pleasant features of the Caucasian race, vitiated his moral nature and left it stranded high and dry on the shore of blind ignorance" (221). Langley is, in large part, the product of his biological inheritance. [13]

By linking main characters with their ancestors through biological inheritance, Hopkins illustrates that one may indeed inherit "features" through blood. But the terminology itself exposes what seems to be racial inheritance as partially socioeconomic in nature: Langley is not just the descendent of "whites" and "Blacks," but of "slaves" and "crackers"--terms that recall socioeconomic groups of lower educational levels. The novel juxtaposes direct, biological inheritance of character traits to the complicated process of social race inheritance and legal race designations. In other words, physical racial characteristics and personality traits may be and indeed often are genetically transmitted, but whiteness may only be inherited if the law and social custom allow it. The novel does not represent race as inessential to a person's identity or socioeconomic position; indeed, it clearly understands how membership in a race affects one's sense of self and "place." The argument instead focuses on how we determine a nd maintain as forms of property social and legal race classifications.

The Property of Sexual Morality

Any discussion of property issues in the novel must also address how Hopkins further complicates the issues of racial inheritance and familial relations with sexual morality--after all, it is Grace, and not Charles, whose socio-legal racial identity is changed, even though the rumor of "tainted blood" originally includes Charles as well. Prior scholars have already shown how racial classifications of female characters help determine the social representations and understandings of their sexual morality. [14] Because white men regularly raped Black women both for the purpose of white male sexual gratification and as a means of increasing the white man's property under the race-based slave system, Black women have had to contend with a very distinct history of race-based sexual violence and the resulting social stigma of sexual licentiousness, despite the fact that they had neither legal right to deny nor legal means to resist unwelcome white (and sometimes Black) sexual advances. In the turn-of-the-century pol itical context of racial uplift, many Black women's texts deal directly with this paradox and attempt to dispel the negative understanding of Black female sexuality by providing for their readers moral, virtuous, and "respectable" Black women. Hopkins was no exception. Indeed, she weaves throughout Contending Forces a discussion about Black women's putative responsibility for "the illegitimacy with which [the Black] race has been obliged, as it were, to flood the world." The emphatic message of the text is that, in Mrs. Willis's words, Black women" 'shall not be held responsible [by God] for wrongs which [they] have unconsciously committed, or which we have committed under compulsion. [They] are virtuous or non-virtuous only when [they] have a choice under temptation'" (149). Given such conversations and the novel's emphasis on white male rape of Black women, it seems clear that Hopkins was concerned with "rais[ing] the stigma of degradation" from her sex as well as from her race.

As we have seen, once dispossessed of their whiteness and named Black, Grace and the children "who follow the condition of the mother" not only lose their claim to property, they also become property. For women, however, that dispossession incurred an additional loss (in the eyes of the white public) of sexual morality. More specifically, the loss of Grace's whiteness enables, as Hazel V. Carby puts it, the "transition from the pedestal of virtue to the illicit object of sexual desire" (131; my emphasis). Such a transition occurs, Carby argues, because "black women were not represented as the same order of being with their [white] mistresses; they lacked the physical, external evidence of the presence of a pure soul" (26). That external evidence" was whiteness. Harris explains: "The direct manifestation of the law's legitimation of whiteness as reputation is revealed in the well-established doctrine that to call a white person 'Black' is to defame her" (1735). Here, Harris is discussing the reputational inter est of sexual virtue and the moral defamation that occur when a white woman is "called" Black, concepts that clearly apply in Contending Forces. Indeed, Harris could have been explaining the social defamation that Grace undergoes at the moment she is dispossessed of her whiteness.

As a propertied white woman--a woman possessing the intangible property of whiteness and the tangible property of estate--Grace is accepted into the elite ranks of Southern society: "Everyone voted her the dearest and most beautiful woman they had ever known" (45). She is an ideal specimen of "true womanhood." [15] But Hopkins shows how this social status is fundamentally grounded on her white racial identity. Whiteness protects her from Anson Pollock's "determination to possess [her]...at all hazards" and legally allows her to resist his initial request for "her friendship [and] her love," a coded request for a sexual relationship (45, 51). Once dispossessed of her whiteness, she has no social protection from the figurative (or literal) rape at the hands of Pollock and his goons, Hank Davis and Bill Sampson. As a Black woman, Grace can legally be "bound to the whipping post as the victim to the stake, and lashed with rawhides alternately by the two, strong savage men," a scene with obvious overtones of rape. [16] As Davis and Sampson rip away her clothes, the narrator tells us:

the air whistled as the snaky leather thong curled and writhed in its rapid, vengeful descent. A shriek from the victim--a spurt of blood that spattered the torturer--a long, raw gash across a tender, white back. Hank gazed at the cut with critical satisfaction, as he compared its depth with the skin and blood that encased the long, tapering lash.

The whipping continues until the men have "satiated [their] vengeful thirst," and until "the blood stood in a pool about her feet" (69).

Yet this scene of Grace's whipping/rape reveals more than just white male sexual violence. As Lisa Marcus argues, "By substituting a 'white' woman for the commonly circulated abolitionist image of a black slave being beaten, Hopkins cogently exposes the engendering of race and the racializing of gender: the woman is racialized by her very placement in the scene of violence, and she is engendered in her sexualized exposure under the lash" (120). In this scene the whipping post, traditional site of white discipline and humiliation of Black slaves, becomes the site for sexual violence, made possible through a change in the character's social and legal race classification rather than any change in either her "true" sexual morality or biological racial heritage. Beyond the novel's insistence that the "mixing" of races has resulted from white rape of Black women, it also makes clear that Grace is only subject to such violence as a Black woman who no longer possesses whiteness. Grace's "rape" further illustrates tha t, because whiteness can be repossessed, all women are subject to the danger of sexual violence. [17]

In short, then, as long as she possesses whiteness, Grace can stand as a paragon of womanly virtue. Dispossessed of whiteness, however, Grace enters into a new social relationship with sexuality that excludes a claim to morality, a position in which she does not choose to live. The narrator tells us that, "shortly after these events [the raid on the estate and the assault on her body], Grace Montfort disappeared and was never seen again. The waters of Pamlico Sound tell of sweet oblivion for the broken hearted found within their soft embraces" (71). However, because Grace's biological racial heritage is obscure, the text effectively destabilizes the popular notion that race governs sexual morality. Regardless of whether she is biologically "Black" or "white," Grace responds to the loss of "reputational interest" in her sexual morality by the only "proper" social and psychological response allowed within the confines of "true womanhood," suicide. Her death, then, works to make distinct the property of whitenes s and the property of sexual morality by showing that the conflation of the two is a result of social discourses rather than biological inheritance. The novel thus exposes the speciousness of the social discourses that worked to maintain the notion that Black women did not and could not possess sexual morality. Instead, through Grace, the reader can see that one's "true" sexual morality is independent from the social and legal recognition--or denial--of that morality, just as one's biological racial history may or may not coincide with one's socio-legal racial classification.

But even while claiming for all women access to a sexual morality consistent with the doctrine of "true womanhood," the novel also simultaneously critiques the doctrine's tenet that it was better for a woman to die than to live after suffering such sexual and moral "outrage." [18] Indeed, such a critique coincides with the novel's running argument that society should not hold Black women morally responsible for white rape perpetrated upon them. By committing suicide, Grace not only submits to the restrictive discourses of "true womanhood" and ends her own life, she also leaves her children to suffer in "bewilderment at so much sorrow, [with] the numbness of black despair... ever with them" (71), an act that clearly has negative ramifications for the Black family. If the novel clearly denounces suicide as an acceptable response to white rape of Black women, it is equally emphatic in positing an alternative in its heroine. Sappho Clark embodies the novel's complex and strangely interwoven arguments of property, race, and sexual morality. Sappho is a politically engaged, visibly white, socio-legally Black, sexually moral, unwed mother who was the victim of white male rape. Upon her body converge all the social and biological discourses of hypodescent, eugenics, and true womanhood that maintain(ed), and were maintained by white patriarchal hegemonies.

As a light-skinned, golden-haired "mulatto," Sappho challenges the U.S. system of racial classification because she is visibly white in a society that refuses "privilege and protection" to those with a "mixed" biological racial heritage. Lacking this social "privilege," she is abducted by her white uncle, raped, and left pregnant as a sexual slave in a house of prostitution. We first hear Sappho's hidden history from Luke Sawyer, the character who rescues the "poor, ruined, half-crazed creature," then named Mabelle Beaubean, from the "vile den" of prostitution (260). According to Sawyer, when Mabelle's Black father confronts his white half-brother with the crime, the guilty man faces the charges without remorse and admits that

"whatever damage I have done I am willing to pay for. But your child is no better than her mother or her grandmother. What does a woman of mixed blood, or any Negress, for that matter, know of virtue? It is my belief that they were a direct creation by God to be the pleasant companions of men of my race. Now, I am willing to give you a thousand dollars and call it square." (261)

This passage succinctly applies the various discourses that conflated biological racial inheritance with socio-legal race classifications, the defamation of the "mulatto," the assumption that Black women cannot possess sexual morality, and the social conception of the Black female body as property. But money cannot make restitution for the social and psychological property the young girl loses at the moment of her abduction and rape.

However, rather than committing suicide as Grace does, the "ruined, half-crazed creature" gives birth to her baby, places him in the care of her aunt, changes her name, learns a trade that ensures her material prosperity, and begins life again with a new social identity. Her transition is not a morally easy one: Out of fear and shame, Sappho initially hides her sexual past from the new friends she finds at Ma Smith's boarding house, even though questions of her own moral responsibility in the rape, questions that extend to her feelings of passion in general, plague her. She wonders whether it is right to marry Will Smith knowing that, according to the doctrines of "true (white) womanhood," she is sexually and morally "polluted." The narrator tells us that "she was not happy in her knowledge [of her past].... Oh, for death, the solitude of the grave and self-forgetfulness" (182). In her misery, she agonizes aloud," I love this man; I know it now! I want his love, his care, his protection.... Oh, my God, help m e, help me! ... I cannot! It must not be! So good, so noble! Oh, the happiness of home and love! must I be shut from them forever?' "(182). In this scene and many others like it, we see her moral struggle in trying to come to terms with her sexual past, as well as the value she places on those things which any "true woman" should value: husband, protection, home. Sappho thus evidences a sense of sexual morality equivalent to that of a "true woman" despite her failure to commit suicide, her socio-legal status as Black, or her sexual history itself.

Sappho's moral conflict over her sexual history reaches a crisis when Langley guesses her "true" identity and threatens her with exposure if she does not succumb to his sexual advances. In her reaction to Langley's threat, Sappho, regardless of her social and legal classification as Black, claims for herself the "privilege and protection" that the property of whiteness provides. She recognizes herself as "an [innocent] victim!" (319), not a licentious, amoral woman. Indeed, she is so innocent that she at first understands Langley to be proposing marriage. When he admits that" 'ambitious men do not marry women with stories like yours!' "she is appropriately "speechless with disgust" (320). When she regains her voice, she orders him from the room even though she knows that her refusal must mean the end of her relationship with Will Smith, to whom only hours before she had become engaged. However, because she emphatically rejects Langley's sexual advances, she demonstrates her sexual morality when given any choi ce at all--even if that choice costs her her future happiness. She determines to leave the Smiths' boarding house so that, as she explains in the letter she leaves behind for Will, "disgrace shall never touch you or yours through me" (329).

From the Smiths' home, Sappho goes to her aunt's, where she is finally able to come to terms with the embodiment of her sexual history: her son Alphonse. hough she has always provided financial support for the child, she "had felt nothing for the poor waif but repugnance" (342). Now, reconciling her sexual history with a sense of sexual morality requires placing the blame squarely on the shoulders of white men rather than on a moral deficiency in her own nature. She can then forge a relationship with her child, the physical product of her violent history. By accepting her role as mother, she avoids abandoning her child, as Grace does through her suicide, and finds a way to reclaim a morally virtuous passion. [19] As she holds her sleeping child in her arms, "her shipwrecked life seemed about to find peace.... She gazed with newfound ecstasy at the rosy face, the dimpled limbs, and thought that he was hers. Her feelings of degradation had made her ashamed of the joys of motherhood, of pride of possession in he r child.... Again she kissed him passionately" (345). This recovery explains why, when Will Smith finally finds Sappho and Alphonse three years later in New Orleans, Sappho can accept his renewed proposal of marriage without fear of disgrace. Sappho finally occupies the social position of a "true and thus the novel can make distinct the properties of whiteness and sexual morality.

Restitution

The novel ends with the MontfortSmith-Withington family reconstituted, appropriate marriages made, and stolen fortunes restored. After the extensive private investigation and legal work necessary to prove in the U.S. court system the line of direct descent from Charles and Grace Montfort to the Smith family, the government awards monetary reparations to the rightful heirs of the Montfort estate. The newly reunited (white) Withingtons and (Black) Smiths sail off together for a tour of England. The ending, although typical of nineteenth-century sentimental fiction, in which all true lovers are rewarded and false lovers exposed, is at closer look more subversive than it might seem. [20] The novel challenges the master narrative of white patriarchal hegemonies by emphasizing the shortcomings of the systems by which we monitor, read, and assign classifications of race and sexual morality to individuals, and the interconnectedness of such categories to each other and to issues of property.

First, the reinstituted family resists racial classifications under the United States system: No characters are simply "white" or simply "Black," and the Withington family has embraced as social and biological equals the Smith family, recognizing their common heritage. Indeed, through the complex interracial familial relations and "mulatto" characters, the novel argues a distinction between social race classifications and biological racial heritage and reveals as implausible the discourse of eugenics, the theory of hypodescent, and the assumption that race can be accurately read on the body. Furthermore, the sexually "polluted" Sappho marries the morally upright Will despite her sexual history. The novel thus emphasizes the "right" of all woman, regardless of race, to claim and possess the sexual morality of the "true woman." Unlike the fate of so many nineteenth-century women (and Grace Montfort) who died rather than face the "ruin" that was "worse than death," Sappho, we are to suspect, has a successful and happy future ahead of her. And finally, property (or its monetary equivalent) has been restored to the socially Black descendants of the Montforts. Despite the original (although obscure) social classification of Charles and Grace as white, their grandchildren--who are now Black at the very least through interracial marriage in the intervening generation--have received significant monetary reparations from the U.S. government. Property is in the possession of successful, educated African Americans who further plan to use their inheritance to establish, on one hand, a technical school and, on the other, a university of higher education for African Americans. Thus on many levels Contending Forces actively and complexly participates in turn-of-the-century discussions over the importance of property in "uplifting" African Americans and rewrites Washington's metaphoric "five fingers" compromise into a metaphor of two hands (one Du Boisian, one Washingtonian) working together.

Julie Cary Nerad is a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Kentucky. She is currently finishing a dissertation that examines racial passing in nineteenth and twentieth-century U.S. texts, focusing specifically on how the family, with its attendant issues of genealogy, inheritance, and the transmission of property, functions in passing narratives to challenge and/or reify white hegemonies and U.S. ideologies of race. She would like to thank Steve Weisenburger, Melanie Dawson, Armando Prats, and AAR's readers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.

Notes

(1.) Perhaps the most oft-quoted critique is that of Gwendolyn Brooks in her 1968 "Afterword" to the first reprinted version of Contending Forces. Although Brooks recognizes "our inevitable indebtedness" to Hopkins and her work (437), she also argues that "Pauline Hopkins consistently proves herself a continuing slave, despite little bursts of righteous heat" (434). Also notable among negative assessments of Hopkins's work is that by Houston A. Baker, who claims that Contending Forces preaches "strict moral rectitude, white-faced mannerliness, and black northern achievement" and works as a "courtesy book for a new era" (28). In a less polemic reading, Richard Yarborough, in his "Introduction" to the Schomburg Library's 1988 reprint, notes that the novel is "far from an unproblematic text. At the very least, it should remind us of how difficult it was for Black writers to reject widely accepted concepts of race and culture that were frequently employed to denigrate Blacks and to justify racial oppression. Furt hermore, Hopkins's own elitist views mar her treatment of lower-class Black characters like Sarah Ann White and Ophelia Davis, and the neat resolution of the intricate plot may not sit well with modern readers weaned on psychological realism. These flaws pale, however, when viewed next to the book's virtues, many of which devolve from Hopkins's commitment to rendering in both political and consistently human terms a complex Afro-American community where ex-slaves, menial laborers, and middle-class blacks mingle" (xli). Yarborough's work is not the only "mixed" reaction to Hopkins's novel. Indeed, investigations of the novel which primarily laud Hopkins's work also ask questions such as "Why is Hopkins still a prisoner to an ideology that ultimately supports white superiority?" (Washington 79). In response to such criticism, Kate McCullough astutely suggests that such arguments "fail to take into consideration feminist work on the uses of the sentimental novel as well as specifically African American feminist critics" (24). I would further contend that many critics have too readily ascribed various characters' positions to Hopkins's own voice and fail to recognize the complexity with which Hopkins represents race, gender, sexuality, morality, nationality, religion, and class.

(2.) Thomas F. Gossett notes that, "by 1892, lynching reached its highest recorded point, with 69 whites and 162 Negroes suffering this fate....from 1893 to 1904, an average of more than a hundred Negroes a year were lynched as compared with an average of 29 whites" (269). Thus, it is not surprising that the issue of lynching is so prominent in Hopkins's novel. Also, for an in-depth investigation into the relationship between Hopkins's work (primarily in her serialized novel of 1902-03, Of One Blood: Or, the Hidden Sell) and Egyptology, see Gillman. For the relationship between her work and psychology, see Otten.

(3.) As Betty G. Farrell explains, "The family helps maintain social order first by its capacity to place people in social systems. It does so by providing them with identifiable kin and establishing lines of legitimate succession and inheritance that mark their economic, political, and social position in society. Because individuals are located in an established social hierarchy by their birth or adoption into a particular family group, the nature of power and access to resources in society remain largely intact from one generation to the next. Thus, one meaning of the family as a central institution of the social order is that it reinforces the political and economic status quo. Families ensure that the distribution of resources both to the advantaged and the disadvantaged will remain relatively stable, since the transmission of wealth, property, status, and opportunity is channeled along the lines of kinship" (7).

(4.) See Allen; Frankenberg; Gossett; Hale; Ignatiev; Jacobson; Lipsitz; and Nelson for in-depth and varied discussions of the history of "whiteness" in America.

(5.) Citing David Roediger's Wages of Whiteness, Cheryl I. Harris explains that "the franchise... was broadened to extend voting rights to unpropertied white men at the same time that Black voters were specifically disenfranchised, arguably shifting the property required for voting from land to whiteness" (1744). Thus, even as the U.S. eliminated one form of property as a requirement for the "privilege" of voting, a gesture toward a more egalitarian form of representation that weakened boundaries between socioeconomic classes, a simultaneous movement that restricted (or eliminated) voting privileges for non-whites worked to realign the "privilege" of political representation on the basis of race, thus investing whiteness with a distinct political value.

(6.) Hopkins's political position diverged significantly enough from Washington's that she was "relieved" of her editorship of the Colored American Magazine when its control passed into the hands of Washington's colleagues. See Greusser.

(7.) The particular placement of this comment further highlights the interconnectedness of economics, sexuality, and race within the U.S. It is located in the chapter detailing the church members' potentially dangerous greed for material wealth; however, it comes in direct response to the observation of Sappho's and her child's "fair complexion" amidst the other "black faces"-an observation reminding the reader of white male rape of Black female bodies, or, as the narrator puts it, the "cankering sore which is eating into the heart of republican principles and stamping the lie upon the Constitution." In the scene, Sappho sits quietly, "keeping a strict account of the moneys received" (202).

(8.) See Dawson for an in-depth discussion of the significance of the middle-class parlor in nineteenth-century texts. Writing about Contending Forces, Dawson notes that, "through the tasteful parlor, equals may recognize each other, allowing a British diplomat [Charles Montfort-Withington] (who is apparently white) to claim a common heritage with a [Ma Smith]" (179).

(9.) Ophelia Davis is also one of the key characters in the chapters detailing how the church fair becomes a contest for "prizes": a piano, a silver service, a gold watch, and ten dollars. Ophelia, who wins the piano and the ten dollars, determines to share her prizes and sends the ten dollars to her rival, Mrs. Robinson, who had, we are to assume, no intention of sharing the prizes had she won the contest. By contrasting these two women, one could easily read the church fair as a directive on how material possessions can either divide or unite the African American community. Sean McCann argues that in these two chapters "the power of class is raised and dismissed in negation, and working-class resentment is banished as a selfish and self-destructive lack of commitment to the racial community" (807). Ultimately, the church fair makes more than eight thousand dollars, which is enough for the community to clear the church "of all encumbrances" (219)-the initial purpose for holding the fair. Here, the fair also illustrates the connection between "moneygetting" and the ability to worship-owning the church property is important because the church is the site not only for religious worship, but also for cultural sustenance and political activism.

(10.) For further discussion on passing as a strategy of identity formation, see Ginsberg.

(11.) See Marcus; Carby; Tate, Domestic; and Washington for further discussion on the use of visibly white "tragic mulattos."

(12.) Such a move is fundamental to challenging our notions of race even today, when race remains in the public eye a category maintained in large part through visible embodied markers. Indeed, I would argue that representing only dark-skinned Black characters, although working constructively to present positive images of Black people, also maintains a system of racial difference that functions through a dichotomy reinscribed by visual codes.

(13.) It Is here important to note that Langley's moral shortcomings are not necessarily a result of the "mixture" of blood itself. The majority of "mixed"-race characters (which, according to Mrs. Willis, would be all of the Black characters) In the novel are model, "moral" citizens.

(14.) Carby notes that "Black womanhood was polarized against white womanhood in the structure of the metaphoric system of female sexuality, particularly through the association of black women with overt sexuality and taboo sexual practices" (32). See hooks; duCille; and Tate, Domestic for further discussion.

(15.) In Chapter Two of Reconstructing Womanhood, Carby argues that access to the cult of "true womanhood" was unavailable for Black women and that different sexual ideologies operated for Black and white women. More specifically, Kate McCullough suggests that, "as the cultural repository of all of the white bourgeois lady's denied sexuality, the stereotype of the black woman was seen as the true woman's opposite, her Other, thus disqualifying the black woman from occupying the space of virtuous Victorian lady" (22). It is precisely this conflation of race and sexual morality that the novel addresses.

(16.) Carby makes a convincing argument for this interpretation in Chapter Two of Reconstructing Womanhood.

(17.) Whiteness does not guarantee protection from sexual violence; men sexually assault "white" women as well. I mean only to draw a distinction between white and Black women's access to social "privilege and protection" which does not, of course, correspond directly to actual protection. Whiteness only provides its possessors with a greater amount of social protection and possible legal recourse to "justice."

(18.) As articulated in the novel by the "honorable" white politician Henry Clapp, such a tenet seems particularly harsh. In his address at a rally of the American Colored League, organized in response to yet another lynching of a Black man, he suggests that" 'surely as men we must have sympathy for the pure and virtuous woman who carries with her a living shame, in a living death, in a life all too long for its miseries, if it lasts but for a day'" (248).

(19.) For an in-depth discussion of the ways in which Hopkins engages with issues of motherhood in Contending Forces, see Berg.

(20.) For instance, Claudia Tate argues that, "if we view Contending Forces as Hopkins's dramatized expression of a tentative program for the advancement of black Americans in general and black American women in particular, we can surmise that black men and women must be responsible for the course of their own advancement and that duty, virtue, carefully controlled emotions, the institution of marriage, and the vote are the key components for directing social progress and achieving results" ("Pauline Hopkins" 59). See also n1.

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