"Suddenly and shockingly black": the atavistic child in turn-into-the-twentieth-century American fiction.

From at least the Civil War through the Harlem Renaissance, black and white authors alike regularly imagined interracial babies who grew lighter-skinned with each generation: the greater the proportion of white ancestry, the less obvious are signs of black ancestry. These writers thus follow the common understanding of racial interbreeding as tending toward, in Stephen Jay Gould's parlance, "a 'blending' or smooth mixture and dilution of traits" (24). The "natural grandson of a Southern lady, in whose family his mother had been a slave," Harper writes, "the blood of a proud aristocratic ancestry was flowing through his veins, and generations of blood admixture had effaced all traces of his negro lineage" (239). The blending, mixing, and dilution of African features of interracial characters occur across a wide swath of late 19th-century American fiction and answer to a wide variety of purposes, from the reconciliationist fiction of Lydia Maria Child, whose Romance of the Republic (1867) offers a model of national reconstruction in two generations of loving, moral, interracial couples who have white-skinned children, to the white supremacist tales of Thomas Dixon, whose The Clansman (1905) reifies the myth of the lascivious and tempting nature of black women via their whitened interracial offspring. And, of course, this blending model also creates the conditions for a staple trope of much white and African American fiction of the late nineteenth century and onward: racial passing.

Yet if the fiction of the time features this "amalgamation" model of heredity as embodied by Latimer (as well as Iola and her brother Harry), it also sees the emergence of a countervailing discourse of interracial heredity the specific effect of which throws a wrench into the mechanics of passing. In Iola Leroy, the eponymous heroine warns the white Dr. Gresham, her first suitor, that should they marry and procreate, her race could be revealed by an "unmistakeab[ly]" black child (117). An undeniable "throw-back" to a black racial past, such a child would result from the supposed process of "atavism" (in Latin, "a great grandfather's grandfather"). Submerged racial features were believed to skip generations only to recur farther down the family line, rupturing a smooth hereditary narrative of blending and exposing the parent's "true" race, always black and never white. In many novels and stories, atavism remains only a threat. However, in texts we examine below, atavistic children are actually born. These children range in appearance from simply showing signs of color to manifesting a monstrous, ape-like form, the fancied evidence of a supposed profound and irremediable racial pollution.

We argue specifically that the actual birth of grotesquely atavistic children in fiction, suddenly appearing at the turn of the twentieth century, is both historically bound and distinctly gendered: such children were usually the product of black male/white female sexual relationships that were seen by many whites as particularly threatening to white hegemonies at the historical moment. Various turn-of-the-20th-century authors use racial atavism, structured through a logic of contamination, to consolidate racial identity, maintain the color line, or bolster white supremacist discourse. The unidirectional logic of racial contamination, common throughout the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, fueled white racist propaganda for maintaining distinct racial categories and white hegemonies: black blood, once introduced into a family line, could be diluted, but never removed. Such mongrelization, white supremacists feared, would eventually lead to the disintegration of the white family and, consequently, the white nation. Framing these atavistic children or the threat of their appearance against their more common cousins, the light or white-skinned mulatto figure, we thus argue that they function as a dire warning both to black men of any shade and to white women whose wombs white men needed "uncontaminated" to (re)produce a white nation.

The idea of an apparently other-raced child, Werner Sollors tells us in an indispensable chapter of Neither White Nor Black Yet Both (1997), goes back to antiquity, during which an other-raced child was thought to prove adultery or, alternatively, to figure as a true wonder. In this ancient cultural setting, atavism could result in either a black or white child: such a child might be Natus AEthiopus, a black child birthed by white-appearing parents, or Natus Albus, a white child birthed by seemingly black parents. With one parodic exception, we find no instances of Natus Albus in the fiction of the late nineteenth or the early twentieth century. (1) Furthermore, according to Sollors, with the advent of a species model of race, the nineteenth century marks a change in attitude toward the idea of Natus AEthiopus, which he summarizes in his chapter's closing discussion of Robert Lee Durham's novel, The Call of the South (1900):

   In the hands of a racialist radical, the Natus AEthiopus changed
   into the white horror of horrors. Underneath the Gothic machinery,
   however, one ... recognizes the issues of the past in their
   transformation: atavism explains a child's color, but in a cultural
   context in which it could be asserted that black and white must
   never be related in a family structure. Wonder is replaced with
   horror ... ; adultery seems to have completely disappeared [as an
   explanation for atavism]; "essential" racial difference cuts even
   fully legalized family relations.... (66)

The present essay builds on Sollors's work by investigating what, aside from the species-inflected racial science and thinking that he identifies, lies behind this shift from wonder to horror, at the end of the nineteenth century. What, more precisely, governs the appearance in American novels of not just unexpected, dark-skinned babies, but grotesquely atavistic ones, and to what ends?

Racial atavism surfaces at the end of the nineteenth century as a nodal point in a web of discourses on race. Racial identity was commonly thought to be inherited through the "blood" (or semen as its vehicle). (2) When it came to black blood, late 19th-century white Americans largely held to a model of fluid contamination in which primitive African blood, even in infinitesimal proportion to white blood, pollutes irremediably. (3) While visual signs of black racial identity may not be apparent, a black pollutant still poisons the blood and, moreover, so such thinking goes, an essential black identity will eventually manifest itself in the physical form of an atavistic child. (4) There is a constitutive irony here: the physical markers of race are recognized as unstable, so discourses of blood emerge to vouchsafe identity; these discourses then allow, through atavism, for embodied race to return to the scene. Thus, one can see how the atavistic child myth serves as a powerful addition to anti-miscegenation discourse: a mistaken choice of mate might result, as Joel Williamson puts it, in "the birth of [a] child suddenly and shockingly black" (103).

The belief that atavism would reveal black blood through embodiment (falsely) guaranteed whites some measure of assurance: blacks passing as white would eventually be identified, if not by their actions or physical minutiae, then by their children's skin. The irrepressibility of black blood thus also served as a warning to blacks and to any individuals knowingly contemplating an interracial union. A 1931 article reporting on the eugenic studies of Charles Davenport illustrates how the fear of atavism held the power to constrain interracial marriage within a Jim Crow society and help maintain the color line well into the twentieth century. That is, the fear of atavism serves as both a barrier to would-be miscegenators and a policing agent against potential passers: "The fear of becoming the parent of a distinctively negro child is all that keeps many young octoroons of both sexes from crossing the color line matrimonially; the same fear keeps many young white men from marrying young women to whom they are strongly attracted but who, they have reason to suspect, have a strain of negro blood" (C. Johnson 526). (5) Only the fear of exposure through atavism keeps blacks and whites from marriage and the procreation that would follow.

Stories that engage atavism as a threat (but not as an actual event) often begin with precisely this type of interracial romance: a distinguished white man marries or couples with a light-skinned woman of mixed-race ancestry, sometimes his slave or exslave and sometimes a woman passing as white. These authors, however, specifically invoke atavism as a potential barrier to interracial relationships. The couple would marry but for the disruption and exposure that atavistic progeny would cause. Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) and William Dean Howells's An Imperative Duty (1891) both feature such a use of the threat of atavism, although they mobilize it for distinctly different ends.

Howells's Imperative Duty depicts characters who overtly discuss the possibility of atavism. In a pivotal scene early in the novel, Mrs. Meredith, who has raised her mixed-race niece Rhoda as white, agonizes over her "duty" to reveal Rhoda's "black blood" to a young, rich, white suitor, the Reverend Mr. Bloomingdale. Despite, or perhaps because of, the remoteness of Rhoda's connection to a black relative, she fears that Rhoda's ancestral traits and tendencies might recur in her children. Mrs. Meredith asks the white Dr. Olney, a yet-undeclared suitor for Rhoda, whether he believes in "the persistence of ancestral traits; the transmission of character and tendency; the reappearance of types after several generations" (35-36). Olney is skeptical, responding that cases of atavism are

   not so very common, and they're not so very well ascertained....
   Take the reversion to the inferior race type in the child of
   parents of mixed blood--say a white with a mulatto or
   quadroon--.... Why, it's very effective as a bit of drama. But it
   must be very rare--very rare indeed.... The chances are so
   enormously against it. The natural tendency is all the other way,
   to the permanent effacement of the inferior type. The child of that
   child and a
   white is a thirty-second blood. The chances of atavism, or
   reversion to the black great-great-great-grandfather are so remote
   that they may be said hardly to exist at all. They are outside of
   the probabilities, and only on the verge of the possibilities. But
   it's so thrilling to consider such a possibility that people like
   to consider it. (36-37)

Olney describes as "thrilling" and "effective bit[s] of drama," the cultural vogue of stories of atavism that in the late nineteenth century respond to the horror of racial fears that Sollors notes, rather than the wonder of such stories in earlier centuries. Olney continues to argue that in race-mixing, the "tame, civilized" race--implying the white race--will eradicate the "strong ancestral proclivities ... especially toward evil" that lurk within, the implicit suggestion goes, the black race (38).

Yet, though he seems the skeptical scientist who would dismiss atavism as both a valid theoretical possibility and verifiable phenomenon, Olney never categorically denies the potential for atavism. Perhaps because of this indeterminacy, Olney's reassurance fails to deter Mrs. Meredith from what she sees as her duty. Wracked with guilt and indecision, she hints that some dark secret stains the fair young Rhoda; Olney, despite their immediately preceding conversation on atavism, conjectures that the girl descends from a "family of criminals" (43). This possibility fails to mar his image of her beauty or deflect his own romantic interest in Rhoda. But when Mrs. Meredith reveals the truth--that Rhoda descends from black ancestry--Olney "recoiled from the words, in a turmoil of emotion for which there is no term but disgust. His disgust was profound and pervasive" (44). He feels repulsion and rejects her beauty, innocence, and helplessness, markers of the true (white) woman. Olney does not seem to repent and overcome his repulsion with Rhoda's entrance to the room; however, his reversal of attitude, which for some saves the book from reifying white racism, is undercut by the persistent recurring images in the novel of primal, savage traits that lurk beneath the skin and recall the specter of atavism.

For instance, Olney's reasoned retraction of his "unscientific" racist reaction is promptly followed by Rhoda's own repulsion when she learns the truth about her mother's family. After her powerfully negative initial reaction to the news, Rhoda writes a letter ending her nascent relationship with Bloomingdale, then sets out to post it. As night approaches, she journeys into a racial hell in which the previously kind, beloved "darkies" regress into atavistic caricatures: "She never knew before how hideous they were, with their flat wide-nostriled noses, their out-rolled thick lips, their mobile, bulging eyes set near together, their retreating chins and foreheads, and their smooth, shining skin; they seemed burlesques of humanity, worse than apes, because they were more like [them].... Impish black children swarmed on these uphill sidewalks" (85). (6) Although Olney ultimately wins Rhoda's hand in marriage, Rhoda never loses her new (and, to her, more accurate) image of blacks. Because Rhoda and Olney, who together distance themselves from late 19th-century US racialized panic altogether by moving to Rome, do not have children before the novel ends, Howells ultimately sidesteps a final word on atavism. What resonates at novel's end is not the white male/black female marriage--a not uncommon pairing in 19th-century literature--or Olney's earlier, half-hearted rejection of atavism, but Rhoda's own self-hatred and the repeated images of atavistic traits and black caricatures throughout the text.

Harper's Iola Leroy (1892) also ends its tale of romance without producing children. Unlike Imperative Duty and the white supremacist novels of the period, however, Iola Leroy invokes the specter of atavism to prevent further intermixture with whites and thus reconsolidate a black identity and community. On learning Iola's racial heritage, Dr. Gresham quips with a telling pun that this knowledge "changes the whole complexion of affairs" (58). Yet he nonetheless proposes to Iola and asks her to pass as white, noting that her "complexion is as fair as [his]" (116). Gresham dismisses Iola's repeated refusals until she conjures the possibility of atavism: "'Doctor,' she said, and a faint flush rose to her cheek, 'suppose we should marry, and little children in after years should nestle in our arms, and one of them show unmistakable signs of color, would you be satisfied?'" The "irresolution on his face" admits a weakness in Gresham's fantasy of a happy white marriage (117). His family might have accepted Iola if she passed as white, but a child that exhibited "unmistakable signs of color" would force the Greshams to face social ostracism. What truly changes the "complexion of things" for Gresham, then, is not the knowledge of Iola's racial heritage so much as the fear that her blackness will manifest itself suddenly and unmistakably in their children. (7)

Although Iola's parents' interracial union was a loving one that would seem to work toward destabilizing biological racial hierarchies, Harper employs the threat of atavism essentially to reverse the whitening of the black race and to reconsolidate a black identity through the construction of a black family. (8) In her rebuff to Gresham, Iola symbolically rejects all potential white suitors and later seeks instead to reconsolidate black blood through marriage to the light-skinned Latimer. Here, the threat of atavism becomes, rather than a racial bogeyman, a hopeful possibility. Moreover, given that two light-skinned mulattoes may indeed have children darker than either parent, Iola and Latimer's marriage holds the possibility of darker-skinned children who would begin to heal the split between corporeality and legal racial identity. Indeed, Iola's marriage is but a small part of a community-wide project of reconsolidating blackness: Iola and Harry, her light-skinned brother, declare their kinship with darker-skinned family members; Harry marries a black woman whose blood is "untainted" by whites; and all the main characters return to the South, reconnecting themselves with black communities in leadership roles. (9) As in Imperative Duty, the novel ends before the couples reproduce, leaving the complexion of any future children to the reader's imagination, yet here there is an implied reversal of the white supremacist novels of the period. Iola Leroy resists continued "dilution" of black blood rather than demonstrating a concern with the purity of white blood. While white supremacists were concerned with protecting the white family from contamination of black blood, Harper is concerned with the opposite: miscegenation is a threat to blacks by continually diluting black blood while atavism is potentially a saving grace.

That the myth of atavism emerges in a wide range of novels makes sense, given the period's fixation on the discourses of blood, the idea of racial purity, and the legally entrenched system of segregation, yet the texts that actually produce atavistic children are in fact striking for their rarity. Indeed, the arguably overwhelming presence of light- or white-skinned mixed-race children in interracial fiction, even in those that include the threat of atavism, prompts us to ask what governs the appearance of those few mixed-race infants who actually show black racial traits. We suggest that these children often materialize within particular narrative constructions. Two turn-of-the-century stories, both again involving racial passing and featuring comparatively mild incidents of atavism, suggest that narrative's contours. In one, Kate Chopin's widely-read 1893 short story "Desiree's Baby," a presumably white woman commits suicide and infanticide, and in the other, Pauline Hopkins's "Talma Gordon" (1900), a mixed-race woman survives, but her male child dies. (10) In Chopin's story, Desiree, herself a woman of "obscure origin," marries Armand, the son of a respected family, only to produce a baby--a son--who has black racial characteristics. Unclear as to what this appearance could possibly mean, she queries her husband, who replies: "it means that you are not white" (176, 179). Befuddled by this revelation since her complexion is lighter in shade than her husband's, but accepting his judgment against her, Desiree walks into the swamp with her infant, presumably committing infanticide and suicide. The story ends not here, however, but with Armand's discovery of a letter written to his father from his long-deceased mother, explaining that Armand has black heritage. This discovery reverses the common narrative construct of the white male/black female coupling. Instead, the story offers us a black male/white female pairing that actually produces in very mild form an atavistic (male) child. (11) Pauline E. Hopkins's short story "Talma Gordon" (1900) also offers a case of a mildly atavistic child. Although the child issues from the more common white male/black female pairing, the child, who has physical characteristics that identify him as having African heritage, is again male. The child dies from disease while still an infant, while his two older, physically white sisters survive. What we begin to see in these two stories of mild atavism is a gender dynamic that further complicates narrative embodiments of grotesquely atavistic children.

First, the atavistic children, who rarely live past infancy, are usually male. Second, and especially in cases of grotesque atavism, these male children emerge specifically from the loins of white women "polluted" with black semen. Rather than following a logic complementary to a system in which the children "follow the condition of the mother," here the black male carries a virulent race pollutant that determines racial identity. The logic of blood contamination allows one drop of black blood to pollute white blood while disallowing the reverse; at the same time, this gender dynamic similarly polices miscegenation unidirectionally. That is, while various authors--black and white, male and female--used the fear of atavism to discourage interracial sex or passing for white, the punishment of bearing a grotesquely atavistic child was reserved for the more transgressive--and less fictionally frequent--black male/white female couplings: white women risk insanity and/or death if they procreate with black men because the act of bearing a black child threatens the very existence of whiteness.

Of course, not all black male/white female fictional pairings of the era produced atavistic children. For instance, Pactolus Prime in Albion Tourgee's Pactolus Prime (1890), John Walden Warwick in Charles W. Chesnutt's The House Behind the Cedars (1900), and James Weldon Johnson's narrator in The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (1912) all have white-skinned children who live as white. Like Chopin's "Desiree's Baby," these texts attempt to destabilize the color line and expose the artificiality of race categories rather than maintaining them through the myth of atavism. But even in texts such as Chopin's, Tourgee's, Chesnutt's, and Johnson's, white mothers do not fare well. Desiree presumably commits suicide and infanticide; John Walden's wife dies while their son is yet a young child; the wife of Johnson's narrator dies in childbirth; and Prime's wife is involved (either voluntarily or by force) in a relationship with Prime's white half-brother and former master. Regardless of any progressive race agenda, these novels punish white women who marry or procreate with black men even when the women do not know their respective partner's complete racial heritage. And by producing white-skinned children, these texts throw into relief even more the few novels that actually birth grotesquely atavistic children in the first decade of the twentieth century.

What turned the threat of atavism into the embodied, beastly atavistic child at the turn of the century were some of the same white fears that fueled the proliferation of Jim Crow laws, lynching, and race riots: the myth of the black beast rapist, coupled with irrational anxieties of a white "racial suicide" ultimately consequent on the US's extending full civil rights to blacks. Purportedly, the newly freed black man, in search of political and social equality (or, in some constructions, superiority) and fueled by natural, unavoidable aggression toward his ex-masters, would seek revenge and sociopolitical control through physical mastery of vulnerable white women. (12) Resisting the "rising tide of color" and ensuring the integrity and dominance of the "great [white] race" were both endeavors dependent on protecting the purity of the white womb. (13) The physical deformity of the racially atavistic child--an embodiment of degeneracy--frames black male/white female sex acts as sexual perversion that will ultimately overwhelm white moral normalcy. The "human-beast hybrid," Dana Seitler observes in another turn-of-the-century context, "performs the unnaturalness of sexual alterity, acting as a persistent and threatening reminder of how far society could fall if perverse sexual activity is allowed to continue unhindered" (530). Perverse sexual activity--here, interracial sex, be it consensual or forced--produces a human-beast hybrid that

threatens the white social order.

Into this context, and near the historical peak of lynching, Benjamin Rush Davenport and Robert Lee Durham enter as novelists. (14) In both Durham's The Call of the South (1908, 1914) and Davenport's Blood Will Tell (1902, 1908), the white heroines' respective husbands are white-skinned men of mixed-race ancestry. (15) Drawing on various mid-19th-century racialist scientific theories, the novels argue that the amalgamation responsible for white-skinned blacks leads to black male regression. Although at the outset they seem to be honorable, educated, moral men, Durham's Hayward Graham and Davenport's Walter Burton ultimately regress and submit to the insatiable, primitivistic urge to rape white women. Their regression (for Graham, to his great-grandfather Guinea Gumbo, and for Burton, to his great-grandmother Mother Sybella) is embodied most dramatically and disastrously, however, in the production of unviable atavistic children. These doomed children are graphic results of the black beast rapist's "unnatural" and perverse desire for white women, undeniable evidence of black primitivism, and, thus, the black man's unfitness for citizenship. The white heroines (even when they have been raped) fare even worse. They are punished first with "suddenly and shockingly black" children, whose birth almost kills them, and then with madness. The novels' depictions of the grotesquely atavistic child thus serve as warnings both to would-be male passers and to the white women who might be tempted to marry them. In both texts, guarding the racial integrity of the white family from the black beast rapist who lurks concealed among whites, ready to pollute the wombs of white women, becomes essential for maintaining the white nation. Relaxing segregation, the novels suggest, would ultimately destroy the nation because it would destroy (physically, morally, intellectually, and financially) its individual white families.

In Durham's novel, Helen Phillips, daughter of the liberal President of the United States, falls in love with and, although secretly and without consummation, legally marries Hayward Graham, a white-skinned man of mixed-race ancestry, a Harvard alumnus, and a decorated enlisted soldier who serves as a footman to the President. (16) They await only Hayward's impending commission to make their marriage public. All goes well until Helen begins to attract the attention of white scion Harry Lodge, Graham becomes insanely jealous, and his wife begins to tire of her secret marriage. In response to Helen's cooling affections and her regret for having married Graham in the first place, Hayward's black blood finally manifests itself. Driving home one day with Hayward acting as Helen's official escort, they are caught in a frightful storm that dashes their carriage, injures them both, and kills their driver. The two manage to find shelter in a rickety shack. Here, after a verbal confrontation over the attention that Helen receives from Lodge, she glances back into the storm and sees the mutilated driver with "the blazing wire lying against the back of his head, from which [rose] the vapour [sic] of burning flesh" (289-90). Disoriented and sickened from the image, which recalls the violence of lynching, she reaches out to Hayward for support. Her "surrender," as he reads it, fuels his heretofore absent carnal urges and stimulates his ancestral black passion. For a few moments, she lies "quiescent" in his arms "suffering" his caresses, when, "In a flash of light she sees it--distorted! With a shriek of terror she wildly tries to push him from her: but the demon blood of Guinea Gumbo is pitiless, and against the fury of it, as of the storm, she tights and cries--in vain" (290). Reinforced by the violence of the storm around them, the text makes clear that Hayward's actions constitute rape. Through a hereditary imperative, Hayward's rape of Helen is represented as inevitable: the savage Guinea Gumbo had kidnapped, raped, and murdered his master's daughter (see Fig. 1). (17)

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

As a result of Helen's rape, Graham's regressive traits become embodied in a grotesquely atavistic child, the abominable countenance of which the reader sees through the eyes of Helen's father, President Phillips. Blood and body--past and present--come together in a "reversion in type":

   It was a negro baby: the color that was of Ethiopea, the
   unmistakable nose, the hair that curled so tightly, the lips that
   were African, the large whites of the eyes. Verily a negro baby:
   and yet in an indefinable way a likeness to Helen, a caricature of
   Helen, a horrible travesty of Helen's features in combination
   with--with whose? Not Hayward Graham's. But whose, then? ... Mr.
   Phillips could not answer his own question--he had never seen
   Guinea Gumbo. (385)

At the sight of his grandson, the President collapses and dies of a heart attack at his desk. To Helen's horror, in the marginalia of a speech on race mixture recorded in the Congressional Record, the President has scribbled the word "unthinkable" in response to the question: "how shall sickly sentimentalities solace your shame if in the blood of your mulatto grandchild the vigorous red jungle corpuscles of some savage ancestor shall overmatch your more gentle endowment?" (397). Only at that moment--in response to her father's solitary and uncompromising word--does she realize the magnitude of her sin. She had "Despoiled herself!--polluted her blood beyond cleansing!--brought life to a mongrel fright, and brought death to her father!" (397).

Thereafter institutionalized, Helen screams manically at Hayward when he comes to see her, "Go away! Go away! The poison of your blood is in my veins and will not come out! It is polluted, for ever polluted! A knife--a knife! Give me a knife, doctor, that I may let it out. Please give me a knife.... Kill me--save me! My blood is unclean, and he did it! My baby was black, black!--and its negro blood is in my veins! A knife, doctor! A knife!! Oo-o-a-ugh!! I'll tear it out, then!" (437). Articulating Durham's racist logic, Helen's doctor tells Hayward that, in these moments his wife is not insane, but on the contrary, quite sane: "It is in her sane moments--in her lucid intervals, when she is fully conscious of her condition and situation--that she raves and cries out against the devils that are torturing her. It is in such moments that her eyes have the light of reason in them" (438). In Durham's narrative, then, miscegenation threatens to reduce the white woman to a kind of oxymoronic reasonable insanity, on the one hand. "Feeling quiet and peaceful and happy" after having participated in miscegenation, on the other hand, is unadulterated madness (438).

Helen, however, is not the only one punished for her willingness to advocate black equality. The death of the President, who understands too late the latent danger of his liberal race politics (in which he does not personally believe), stands as a warning to the white nation itself: black political equality will lead to white genocide. The pollution of the white womb will be the death of both white father and son. Ultimately, then, Durham's "call of the South" becomes a call for vigilance--and likely even violence--against the black beast rapist that wanders at large over the United States: instead of being punished for his transgression, Graham re-enlists in the military (earlier he has received an honorable discharge) and requests to go "anywhere [his] country needs a man" (439). In the racially-volatile culture of the first decade of the twentieth century, even the fictional representation of a black man unpunished for the rape of a white woman could spark, at best, increased racial tension, and, at worst, white on black violence.

As does Durham's Call of the South, Davenport's aptly-entitled Blood Will Tell: The Strange Story of the Son of Ham illustrates turn-of-the-20th-century beliefs about racialized inheritance, positing race as an ultimately irrepressible pollutant transmitted through blood, and imagines the dreaded outcome of the "unthinkable" sanctioning of marriage and, thus, of procreation, between black men and white women. Davenport therefore narrativizes within a northern setting the infamous question, but would you want one to marry your daughter? If, as Peter Bardaglio explains, "the deepest fear of southern white men was that one of their daughters might marry a black man" (49), then one purpose of Davenport's novel is to mark white fear of amalgamation as both southern and northern, and, as Thomas Dixon's novels attempt to do, reconsolidate wrote identity across the regional divide.

This racist, cliched question that writers such as Davenport and Durham explore posits black sexual pollution as specifically a masculinized threat. (18) As we saw in The Call of the South, black men's semen can permanently taint white women's blood, wombs, and even their minds. In Blood Will Tell, however, Davenport is more lenient with his polluted heroine, Lucy Dunlap, who marries Walter Burton, another white-skinned mixed-race graduate from Harvard and the manager of Boston's oldest shipping house. Lucy's ignorance of her husband's racial identity--as opposed to Helen's awareness of Hayward's blackness--redeems her. After a temporary madness and the death of her atavistic child, Lucy is finally united with her cousin Jack Dunlap and reinserted into the white nation as white wife and mother. The novel foreshadows Lucy's innate, and finally incorruptible, racial purity through her aversion to a black baby whom she encounters on her honeymoon. She exclaims to Burton, "how horrid they are! ... How dreadfully black and brutal they are" (95). When Burton insists, re-articulating her words, that "the dreadful little black thing was only a harmless baby," Lucy responds, "I thought it was an ape or some hideous little imp! Baby! ... I didn't know Negroes looked like that when babies. I would not touch that loathsome, horrid thing for worlds" (97). Lucy responds in similar fashion later in the novel when she first sees her own "impish" black baby.

The novel's turning point, and Davenport's primary illustration of the dangers of black male/white female miscegenation is the birth of Lucy and Burton's atavistic child. Two weeks after a near-fatal, unnaturally difficult labor, the slowly-recovering Lucy demands repeatedly to see her baby, but her requests are denied. To build the suspense, moreover, Davenport lets the reader know only that something terrible has happened and denies even readers a look at the child until Lucy sneaks into the baby's room under cover of darkness. Gathering him in her arms and carrying him into the lit hallway, she discovers the shocking truth: "Now, Oh! Mother of the Lord look down! Oh! Christ, who hanging on His cross for the thief could feel pity, have pity now! The thing she held upon her milk white breast was Black--Black with hideous, misshapen head receding to a point; with staring, rolling eyes of white set in its inky skin; and features of an apish cast, increased the horror of the thing. My God! That shriek!" (215-16). The shriek that peals through the house and over the grounds, ringing "like scream of tortured soul in hell," precipitates the mother's madness (216). Unable to accept the baby as her child (or a child at all), she believes that her grandfather, doctor, and husband have stolen her son and replaced it with the black "thing" she had seen on her honeymoon.

White supremacist fears of race equality--which would necessarily lead, so they believed, to racial amalgamation--are realized, resulting not only in black deformity, but in the potential end of the white family, and by extension, the white nation. Lucy's grandfather James Dunlap, dying from a stroke caused by his reaction to the baby's birth, confesses to his twin brother that his misinformed notions of race equality have potentially caused the ruin of the Dunlap family. He whispers to John: "Lucy's baby is black and impish. The negro blood in Burton caused the breeding back to a remote ancestor, as, John, you warned me might be the case. It has driven my granddaughter insane and will cause her death. God have mercy on me!" (225). James, bastion of whiteness and white economic prosperity, has failed in his duty by advocating race equality and allowing Lucy to marry Burton.

After the misshapen baby dies and Lucy has gone insane, Burton, the father, begins his own downward spiral of debasement foreshadowed in the birth of his atavistic child. That is, the child serves as physical, visible, proof of Burton's own biological inferiority and highlights the ultimate impossibility of escaping such a destiny, despite any amount of education and refinement. Burton cannot help but return to his mother's race, not because he feels an emotional or sociological connection to the black family, but because of biological regression. The nay-sayers in the text, those who have responded with derision to racialist scientific beliefs, are proven most dangerously wrong. The text warns that any person contaminated with black blood, no matter how little blood and no matter how well-educated, refined, or physically white, will eventually suffer from an unavoidable return to a primitive state.

The remainder of the novel follows Burton's regression: the slow physical, religious, and moral decline from the heights of "white refinement" into a savage being who eventually participates in a blood-drinking, human-sacrificing (of a naked virgin), Haitian voodoo ritual led by his maternal great-grandmother, Mother Sybella, a shriveled, toothless, repulsive, coal-black voodoo Priestess. (19) Before the Dunlap party leaves Haiti, where they have gone to remove Lucy from an environment full of painful memories that impair her recovery, Burton has almost completely reverted to his "real nature." Although the sacrifice scene goes on for several pages, a short excerpt (echoed in Durham's description of Guinea Gumbo) serves well enough to convey Davenport's depiction and to link Burton directly to his atavistic child:

   The lid was lifted from hell's deepest, most fiendish caldron. A
   crew of damned demons was spewed out upon the earth. With demonic
   screams that rent the calmness of the night, they beat and gashed
   themselves, their slabbering, thick lips slapping together as they
   gibbered, like insane monkeys, sending flying showers of foam over
   their bare and bleeding bodies. Human imps of hell's creation fell
   senseless to the ground or writhing in hideous, inhuman convulsions
   twined their distorted limbs about the furious dancers who stamped
   their hellish faces and brought the dancers shrieking to the earth.
   (275)

Into this mass of howling animals leaps a savage Burton who can no longer restrain himself: "Those refined, aesthetic features that had made the man 'the observed of all observers' ... in Boston, had scarcely been recognized as the same in the strangely flattened nose, the thickened lips, the popped and rolling eyes" (276). Burton has undergone the first step in his retrogression: a physical reversion to racial type predicted in both the birth of his deformed child and the science of the day. After returning to Boston, Burton's inherited racial traits finally denude him of his "borrowed mantle of whiteness," and Burton takes the second and third steps (religious and moral) in his unavoidable retrogression. The degenerative process culminates in an enactment of the threat of both the passer and the black male rapist par excellence: the rape and murder of a 15-year-old white girl. (20) When Lucy hears her husband being accused of murder, she faints, awakening shortly thereafter, her sanity finally restored. (21)

At his trial for rape and murder, Burton dramatically confesses his crime, then swallows a lethal powder. The narrator interprets his act as "the parting gleam of the nobility begotten by the blood of the superior race within his veins" because "the predominance of animalism in the negro nature precludes the possibility of suicide in even the extremest cases of serious debasement (333). (22) In essence, Burton's white blood lynches his black blood. But as Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson warns, you can't kill just half of a barking dog, so Burton dies in a dramatic swoon. Before Burton commits suicide, however, Davenport manages to use him for one final attack on racialized equality. Burton argues that white liberality and education, along with the assumption of an artificial identity, drove him to a psychological crisis. To a stunned courtroom, he cries:

   I tell you all that I am guilty of the crime as charged, and
   further, I hurl into your teeth the fact that by your accursed
   affectation of the social equality between the White and Negro
   races, which can never exist, you are responsible in part for my
   crime, and you are wholly answerable for as much agony to the most
   innocent and blameless of mortals on earth. Your canting, maudlin,
   sentimental cry of social intercourse between races has caused
   wrong, suffering, sorrow, crime, and now causes my death. (332)

His charge makes white men responsible for the black rape of white womanhood and defines white men who believe in racial equality as race traitors. It also illustrates the racist slippery scientific slope between social equality and sexual intercourse.

Davenport uses the rape/murder not only to condemn black men as sexual aggressors and therefore to validate scientific racism, but also to consolidate whiteness further. Although Burton is not technically lynched by other whites, a threatening mob appears before his trial begins, and a secondary character justifies any action it might take toward "bringing to justice" the perpetrator of the "unspeakable crime." Framed in the language of family, he claims that Bostonians would react as southerners do to defend white womanhood: he confesses that he couldn't bear "a father's feelings under such circumstances, and I don't imagine there is a great difference between the paternal heart in Massachusetts and in Mississippi" (298). Although John Dunlap begins to argue against lynching as an acceptable form of justice, he, too, admits that "it would be quite a different state of mind with which [he] should regard this crime if one of [his] own family were the victim of the brute's attack" (298). It is, of course, to Dunlap's horror that one of his own family--albeit by marriage--is not the victim but the perpetrator. Kevin K. Gaines explains what the novel so well illustrates: "the equation of miscegenation with the negro rapist constituted a pornographic theodicy that provided a moral justification for lynching, which otherwise might have seemed to many reasonable people a patently evil practice" (72). By linking the stereotypes of the mulatto, the black beast rapist, and the atavistic child, Davenport justified lynching as an appropriate means by which to "govern" black male sexuality and to eliminate blacks as sexual, economic, and political competition. At the novel's end, Burton is dead, and Lucy and her cousin, Jack Dunlap, marry, and, we are left to infer, live happily ever after, continuing the house of Dunlap through the production of legitimate white children. White manly virtue ultimately consolidates whiteness and ensures the reproduction of the white family, while the black male threat in essence destroys itself through its own unavoidable biological degeneracy.

The manner in which individual authors have engaged the trope of the atavistic child--as evidence of an everlasting barrier between the races, as warning not to transgress or pass over the color line, as strategy for solidifying race categories and white hegemonies--suggests that the trope of the atavistic child functions as the bearer of certain kinds of what Jane Tompkins has called cultural work the functional relation of a piece of literature to its immediate historical conditions and the answer to the question "what kind of work is this novel trying to do?" (38). Throughout the nineteenth century, novels that explored "the race question" did significant cultural work by helping to shape our national politics. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin is perhaps the best-known example of the impact that a novel can have in our cultural imaginary. By the turn of the twentieth century, the novel had perhaps an even greater impact on the public. As Lee Baker explains, "The mass media played an integral role in shoring up the ideological demarcation of the color line. Technological advances and rising literacy rates increased the circulation and decreased the prices of magazines, newspapers, and books. By 1905, stereotypes that had previously been reinforced by folklore or expensive texts were now voraciously consumed by the public in the mass media" (38). The graphic racist novels by whites in the first decade of the twentieth century promulgated negative stereotypes about African Americans, using the atavistic child as a nodal point for articulating the discourses of miscegenation, white supremacy, racial passing, black male/white female sex, the mythic black beast rapist, and lynching. These novels, in essence, reinforced anti-miscegenation sentiment in a particularly unidirectional way to maintain the color line and to deny black civil rights. While white male/black female sex may have been considered immoral--by many people, black and white--it ultimately failed to destabilize cultural hegemonies. Not so with black male/white female sex, which whites considered much more dangerous because it disrupted the reproduction of whiteness. White men, so novels such as Lee's and Davenport's conclude, must strenuously guard the white womb against race pollution and perversion, corruptions marked by the birth of a degenerate atavistic child. Punishing black men who dare pollute those wombs works to consolidate whiteness across a North-South regional divide.

Thus, in spite of the seeming randomness of atavism--one never knows when black blood will reassert itself--the pattern of appearance of atavistic children in late 19th- and early 20th-century US fiction is anything but random. What we glean, in particular, about turn-of-the-century racism from these depictions of the grotesquely atavistic child helps us understand the American public's engagement with the color line, including contemporaneous conceptions of inheritance and racial identity. First, the body of the atavistic child appearing at this moment specifically evinces white racism's increasing virulence in the first decade of the twentieth century. It coincides with the reification of the color line, the peak of lynching, and the entrenchment of Jim Crow segregation, all symptoms of the peak of white anxiety about losing control over racialized roles and relations. As African Americans made significant gains in the areas of education, economics, property ownership, and effective sociopolitical organization, white racists undergirded the idea of fundamental race differences through biology. If, in other words, the distance between blacks and whites was beginning to narrow in other key areas, then biological difference had to be reasserted with increasing vehemence. The fallacious reasoning, then, ran like this: Negroes might get a university degree, eat dinner at the White House, or buy a home or business that affords them some vestige of social or cultural power, but essentially they remain inferior because their sociocultural progress is only superficial. Their innate tendency toward biological regression, as witnessed by the seemingly inevitable appearance of an atavistic child, demands continued vigilance on the part of all whites. These grotesquely deformed and physically unviable children were the ideal means to convey this message because they graphically inscribed the threat of blackness on the sole means through which whiteness could be produced and promulgated: the children of white women.

Ironically, women posed one of the greatest dangers to the sanctity of the color line because of their central role in the reproduction of whiteness. White women held the biological key to maintaining and increasing the white race, and thus fortifying white hegemonies because only white women could produce white children. Their race loyalty alone made possible the continuation of white male authority that insured white privilege. If white women's bodies served as the vessels for reproducing whiteness, they had to remain "pure" from the corrupting taint of blackness. The grotesquely atavistic child that drove its mother to insanity and/or death became a graphic symbol of the punishment of racialized transgression and one that starkly highlights white men's anxiety over controlling the reproductive powers of white women. Thus, while woman's importance in cultural production was elevated above other cultural factors, it also remained linked to their racial identity and to their biological role as mother and the age-old attempt to govern female sexuality. The grotesquely atavistic child's appearance at this moment stems from the same white fear that fueled the industry of lynching in this decade.

Finally, these fictional children reflect the race politics of a particularly volatile moment in US history when the "science" that had undergirded the color line was just beginning to question the long-held beliefs of hereditary traits transmitted through the blood. That is, they reinscribed the blood-body connection in a moment when modern genetics was beginning to expose the fallacies of such a system. These popular literary productions encouraged people, especially whites, to believe in inherited race characteristics that are innate, inescapable, and irreversible. They sent the message that having sex across the color line was ultimately impossible to conceal just as the popular and related genre of racial passing, a genre that peaked during the Harlem Renaissance, often argued that "blood will tell."

Although, as modern genetic studies show, the inheritance of traits through some demarcated category of race or racial gene is practically impossible, the belief in atavism was central to popular race thought at least into the 1930s. (23) Despite scientific studies debunking the atavistic child myth, the fear of atavism survives yet in the literary imagination throughout the twentieth century. Elizabeth Atkins Bowman's romance novel of passing and miscegenation, Dark Secret (2000), for instance, turns on the protagonist's fear of having a dark-skinned baby. Belief in atavism continues outside the pages of fiction as well: in a recent study, white women reported at a rate of 63% that they "agreed with the belief that a white woman and a light-complexioned Afro-American man could have a child with a darker complexion than the man" (Tenzer 1). Such beliefs continue to reify the color line. Although the grotesquely deformed atavistic child has largely disappeared from the literary landscape--by the Harlem Renaissance, it recedes back to a threat--the tenacity of the trope of the atavistic child and its currency as a subject of scientific, literary, and popular discussion secure for it an important place in American literary history and help us to recognize the persistent effects of racism and to understand the assumptions of "race" that continue to shape ideologies of race in the US. But putting these atavistic children back into the historical moment at which they appear also helps us to see them as products of the anxieties of their cultural moment. And so, those deformed, dark-skinned children who were born and who died within the pages of fiction continue to help us understand the complex history of US race relations.

The authors wish to thank the readers of African American Review for their careful reading of the manuscript and their insightful revision advice. They thank as well Jan Gabler-Hover, Carla Peterson, Jonathan Auerbach, Robert S. Levine, and Steven Weisenburger for their special attention to and advice on earlier versions of the manuscript.

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Notes

(1.) In the satiric Imperium in Imperio (1899), Griggs offers a sudden and shockingly white baby born to a "brown" mother and a "dark" father (136). However, the baby grows darker as he grows older, until he is darker than his "dark" father.

(2.) See Stokes, who observes that "the force of white racism in America, especially in the late nineteenth century, depended on an obsession with the miraculous properties of blood--its imagined ability to shape and define not only a distinct identity but a specific kind of person" (119). Also see Harris, who notes that race was governed legally through hypodescent, the transference of blood: "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).

(3.) As Miller notes in his recent study on disgust, "The polluting powers of the low are usually stronger than the purifying powers of the high" (9). One subject participating in a study conducted by Paul Rozen captured the point vividly: "A teaspoon of sewage will spoil a barrel of wine, but a teaspoon of wine will do nothing for a barrel of sewage (qtd. in Miller 9).

(4.) Not apparent, that is, to persons uninitiated in the ways of race. Frequently in novels of passing, one's "true" race will be betrayed by a subtle physical trait--blue "moons" on the fingernails, blue tints to gums, an underdeveloped calf, ever-so-slightly-yellowed eyes, and so on. These "clues" reinscribe race as physically visible to the trained eye. Regardless of the "invisibility" of blackness, such hints suggest that race is always embodied.

(5.) Ironically, Caleb Johnson here exposes the prevalence of interracial sexual attraction.

(6.) Such passages as these make it difficult for some readers to accept the novel as forwarding the kind of progressive racial politics that would seriously dismiss atavism. For instance, a few sentences later, Rhoda finds herself in a black church where she sees all around her "repulsive visages of a frog-like ugliness [that] added to the repulsive black in all its shades" (93). See Nerad. For a more sympathetic reading of the novel, see Boeckmann, or see Fabi.

(7.) Other black-authored texts written near the turn of the twentieth century also address the fear of atavism in relation to blacks passing as whites. More common than Iola's use of atavism to reconsolidate a black identity and discourage a white suitor is the passing protagonist's fear that a child will expose her blackness. For instance, in Nella Larsen's Passing (1929), Clare Kendry says, "1 nearly died of terror the whole nine months before Margery was born for fear that she might be dark. Thank goodness, she turned out all right. But I'll never risk it again. Never! The strain is simply too--too hellish" (168).

(8.) On reconstructing the black family, see Reid-Pharr.

(9.) Because the white-skinned Harry marries a very dark-skinned black woman (the only couple in the novel that actually appears interracial), Harper's text is unique. Very few 19th- or early 20th-century texts offer interracial couples with vastly differing skin colors.

(10.) Sollors offers more detailed readings of both of these texts in Chapter Two of Neither Black Nor White within his genealogy of the Natus AEthiopus theme. He does not explore the gender-race dynamic of the atavistic child's parentage.

(11.) Desiree's own "obscure origin" suggests the possibility of both parents having black ancestry; however, Sollors argues that there is no textual evidence to support the belief that Desiree also has African heritage (71).

(12.) For instance, in The Plantation Negro as Freeman (1889) Bruce alleges a threatening moral and physical regression among freedmen that has resulted in a significant increase in white women raped by black men: such a man is "not content merely with the consummation of his purpose, but takes that fiendish delight in the degradation of his victim which he always shows when he can reek revenge upon one whom he has hitherto been compelled to fear; and here, the white woman in his power is, for the time being, the representative of that race which has always over-awed him" (84).

(13.) References are to two common and influential texts that illustrate white racial fears of eradication: Grant (1916) and Stoddard (1920).

(14.) Gossett claims that lynching peaked in 1892: "Thereafter the number declined, though for the next twelve years, 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).

(15.) Durham's novel was originally published in 1908 in Boston by L. C. Page. Its cover boasts a white figure reminiscent of Columbia pointing over the top of a deformed black phallic figure. The novel was reissued in 1914. Mencke calls Durham's novel "[n]ext to [Thomas] Dixon, perhaps the most forceful statement of the radical view of the mulatto and the question of race mixture" (217). Davenport's novel was originally published in Cleveland in 1902 by Caxton. The novel was reissued in 1908 by the Permanent Pub. Co., and finally again in 1972 by the Books for Libraries Press in the Black Heritage Library Collection.

(16.) Sollors discusses the presence of Natus AEthiopus in Durham's novel, primarily using the text to demonstrate the movement from wonder to horror in the nineteenth century (64-66). Building from that work, we are here interested in the racialized gender dynamic of the parental couple, the rape that produces the child, and the impetus behind its appearance at a precise moment in history.

(17.) The particular strain of criminally-inclined atavism on display here connects with the vogue at the turn of the century for the theories of criminal atavism posed by Lombroso, who offers a series of "well-marked signs of retrogressive atavism." These signs include "complete callousness extending even to moral insanity, deadened sensitiveness of touch and insensibility to pain, a restricted range of vision, sometimes--indeed very often--distorted sense of hearing, and in many cases an interchange of sexual characteristics (absence of beard, &c.), above all, very commonly perverse, ignorant children" (42). Lombroso argued that primitive behaviors (such as the desire to kill) may originally have allowed for human survival but were patently out of place in "civilized" society. He concluded that retrogressive individuals would rarely produce offspring in a type of natural selection that prohibited the spread of regressive traits.

(18.) That is, seldom heard is the counterpart: "Would you want one to marry your son?" The answer, of course, would still be a resounding "No" for white supremacists; however, the question is less pressing.

(19.) Talbot, who produced a study on interracial degeneracy and physical deformities, argues what Davenport illustrates: persons of mixed-race ancestry are likely to "relapse into voodooism and cannibalism [as did] the Hayti and Louisiana French hybrids and the Anglo-Saxon hybrids of Liberia" (qtd. in Mencke 60). Mencke explains that "Images of Africa (and to a lesser extent Haiti) as a land of wild, sexual excesses, superstitious religious practices, and widespread cannibalism greatly influenced how white Americans saw and understood the black people around them" (61).

(20.) Unlike in Durham's novel, the rape, as well as the murder, happens off-stage. The reader learns of them as a news story reported in the novel.

(21.) The reader never learns how a sane Lucy would have responded to the knowledge of her husband's racial heritage, as his death saves her from having to face Burton.

(22.) Otten explains the scientific supposition that "people of mixed blood are savages at heart, but white blood provides them with an awareness of their own degenerate impulses, making recognition of their mixed racial identity all the more painful" (231). Burton's courtroom scene enacts this supposition.

(23.) We no longer think of heredity exactly in the same terms of blood, but through the particular model of inheritance that finds its foundation in the 1900 recovery of Gregor Mendel's canonical studies of inheritance in pea plants. The term "genetics," used in the biological sense, first appeared in 1846 in France and was later adopted by Charles Darwin (Sollors 63.) In the context of early 20thcentury genetics, which seizes on the Mendelian model, recessive genes seemed to explain a host of inherited characteristics, physical and behavioral. However, skin color (to say nothing of "race") is not determined by a single gene pair, as is eye color, for example. Still, the recessive gene model operates, in eugenicist thinking and in contemporary popular misunderstandings of inheritance, along frighteningly similar lines as the pollution model of blood. Nevertheless, by the 1970s geneticists had repudiated atavism. Rothwell, a geneticist, argues that "if one parent is white and thus carries no effective pigment genes, no children can be darker than the darker parent" (177). Writing in 1973, Stern concurs, observing that "in spite of the popular belief that 'black' (= very dark) children may be born to 'white' parents one or both of whom had segregated out in the offspring of a black-white cross," such an occurrence is not born out in scientific studies. It is worth noting, however, that Stern also does not utterly discount the "the possibility that, in marriages of whites and near-whites, children somewhat darker than their near-white parent could be produced" (448).

J. Michael Duvall is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Charleston. He teaches courses in 19th-century American literature and has published articles on late-19th-and early-20th-century American fiction.

Julie Cary Nerad is Assistant Professor at Morgan State University. She teaches courses in 19th- and 20th-century American literature and has published articles on African American writers in the American Renaissance, racial passing, and racial inheritance.