Rumors of Grace: white masculinity in Pauline Hopkins's contending forces.

Through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of colors on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom. (Morrison, Playing 7; my emphasis)

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Though mainly outlining what she calls a "Romance Illustrative" of black American life at the advent of the twentieth century, Pauline Hopkins nevertheless begins the story of Contending Forces long before 1900 and far from America's shores. On Bermuda around 1800, white English planter Charles Montfort defies the winds of change soon to emancipate slaves in the British empire. Possessed of a benign heart but ruled by a conservative desire for economic security, he moves his household (wife, children, chattel) to the United States, where slavery strengthens its grip. But as soon as he and his family abandon Bermuda, Hopkins reveals Charles's folly: Not only is his decision to remain a slaveholder tragically weak, immoral, and unethical, but it is also the downfall of his house. By the end of Chapter IV, Montfort and his wife are dead, their children, chattel, and property scattered. These incidents, the preface tells us, "actually occurred. Ample proof of this may be found in the archives of the courthouse at Newberne, N.C., and at the national seat of government, Washington D.C." (Hopkins 14).

Though I have not yet been able to find confirmation of such claims to historical veracity (such a search indeed constitutes grounds for another essay), the novel's historicized beginning accomplishes several feats. (1) For this essay's purposes, I wish to focus on one particular reason why these chapters are important in and of themselves: Functioning as a novelistic record, they provide a vehicle through which burgeoning, early-twentieth-century African American middle and working classes could acquire, learn, and pass on what Toni Morrison calls "new information that has got to get out" ("Rootedness" 340). (2) In Contending Forces, the strategic information that must get out is less the putative fact of the event itself than it is Hopkins's cautionary, careful fictive rendering of the process by which such an event might be realized. For through these chapters, Hopkins traces exactly how the house of Montfort falls, a process that perhaps yields little historical information about 1800 but much about that which those whom Claudia Tate would call the book's first readers would have needed to know at the edge of the twentieth century (5). In recounting vividly how rumor destabilizes and forcibly reconstructs Montfort's "white" wife, Grace, Hopkins insists that her readers understand one way that women's identities as "black" and "white" could be differentiated. Of course, for African Americans in 1900, that "black" and "white" identities had been differentiated was not necessarily new information in and of itself. (30 What was perhaps new, and certainly urgent, was the link that Hopkins appears to have discerned between the gendered features of racialized identity production and an important beginning phase in the move toward an American modernity characterized by ostensibly fluid sociopolitical hierarchies through which human beings supposedly could move with ease. Specifically, she illustrates how being able to participate physically and discursively in such differentiation was crucial for plebeian white men who sought, perhaps somewhat paradoxically, both to embrace and resist the democratization that such modernity seemed to promise.

What Hopkins calls a "motley crowd of rough white men and ignorant slaves" looks on as the Montforts' ship arrives at Newbern, North Carolina (40). As those assembled wait for the boat to dock, the white men's conversation metonymically links Montfort's arrival with imminent political and social change stateside. When one white man, Bill Sampson, relates that British political shifts have made the pursuit of livelihood" 'too hot fer [Montfort] back that' " in Bermuda, his compatriot, Hank Davis, replies worriedly that there has been" 'talk 'bout a risin' among the American slaves' " (35). This seemingly idle talk among idlers commences what Francesca Sawaya has termed "an odd set of scenes ... demonstrat[ing] the way Hopkins envisions lower-and upper-class [white] unity being achieved in the United States" (86n17). Embedded within these scenes is Hopkins's careful attention to interactions among white men, the crucible in which the rumor of Grace will take place and be given meaning.

Regaling each other with "wus an' wus" tales of social and political disruption (racial amalgamation, white men wrongly jailed), Sampson and Davis testify clearly that "whiteness," however nebulously defined, thrashes about in a state of threatened flux. For Hopkins, the men's anxiety establishes a necessary narrative precedent; indeed, in order to chart the "how" of Montfort's fall (rather than the more difficult and seductively misleading "why," to use Morrison's distinction), whiteness itself--a construct usually hidden behind the veil of normativity--must be coaxed out. (4) To do so, Hopkins illustrates her understanding of what had been the construct's particular stage of siege at the beginning of the nineteenth century, for as Aida Hurtado has observed, whiteness both materializes and "begins to matter when it is decentered and its privileges threatened" (138). The overseas threat of emancipation and the more local threat of slave uprisings signal to the two white men that such decentering is imminent. With Montfort's arrival, "wus an' wus" draws ominously near to the very worst that the two men can imagine: Emancipation for the slaves seems to promise also the loss of provisionally bestowed white privilege for men like Sampson and Davis.

Derrick Bell and others have articulated how disenfranchised whites benefitted from American chattel slavery even as they suffered under the sway of upper-class whites:

   The creation of a black subclass
   enabled poor whites to identify with
   and support many of the policies of the
   upper class. Moreover, large landowners,
   with the safe economic advantage
   provided by their slaves, were willing
   to grant poor whites a larger role in the
   political process. Thus, paradoxically,
   slavery for blacks led to greater freedom
   for poor whites, at least when
   compared with the denial of freedom
   to African slaves. (Bell 188)

Certainly, in these first few chapters, Contending Forces bears out Bell's account, as well as Sawaya's. For instance, Sampson enjoys membership in what Hopkins terms wryly Newbern's "committee on public safety," a secret, neo-terrorist organization whose response to tremors within the plantation social structure is a relatively democratic one that moves across class lines to unite the forces of varying white masculinities (53). Anson Pollock, scion of Newbern's local aristocracy, also belongs to the committee, thus allowing workingman and aristocrat to toil side by side for the larger (white) public interest. (5)

At the same time, however, Hopkins suggests that this union is actually less democratic than it seems (Sawaya 86-87n17). Bill, for example, represents the committee publicly and performs its work openly (complete with his highly visible rawhide whip) while Pollock, on the other hand, plays only a clandestine role; as the narrator points out, "certainly no one would ever have suspected the elegant Anson Pollock of being connected with such an organization" (53). Not only does the aristocrat play a leadership role within the group, seemingly calling the shots from behind the scenes, but he is also Sampson's employer. Through careful--if again somewhat "odd"--scene construction, Hopkins exposes Pollock's methods of influence, methods that manage to get around Sampson's conscience when it comes to the committee's "big" jobs--in this case, bringing down the house of Montfort. In order to steer Sampson, Pollock utilizes both dire warnings about the loss of "'our institutions'" if "'niggers are tolerated in any way'" and small, leftover helpings of fine cigars, liquor, and other material spoils that poorer men like Sampson otherwise might not be able to provide for themselves (Hopkins 54-55). Though these men are allied within the committee's confines, Hopkins makes it clear that Pollock not only calls the shots but also distributes with careful precision the small properties that signal the accoutrements of an enfranchised citizen. And, most importantly, Pollock allows Sampson and Davis to count themselves as white, an invaluable property in itself. As Hopkins observes in Contending Forces, slavery denied men and women of African descent "the birthright of man--property in himself" (60); that same institution, Bell asserts, also "provided many propertyless whites with a property in their whiteness" (188).

Sawaya recognizes this intersection within the system of chattel slavery and the way that, in Contending Forces, aristocrats like Pollock sought to manage such an intersection to their own advantage: Davis, she writes, might be "vicious, but he is also a pawn of the upper class channeled by that class through the racism that both classes share" (87). Accordingly, Hopkins demonstrates carefully that possessing whiteness as property is both just enough and not enough for Sampson and Davis, who toil caught in a sort of limbo between loyalty to and resentment against a class that bestows whiteness. But Hopkins goes further, illustrating how in 1800 that limbo was already deteriorating so quickly that, by 1900, white men like Davis and Sampson had become something much more than mere "pawns." Contending Forces thus may be read as imagining for its readers a crucial moment at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the appeasement of just enough yielded to the unrest of not enough. After all, at the edge of the 1900s, Hopkins wrote with hindsight's advantage, knowing that Pollock's white planter aristocracy would lose eventually the ability to channel and stanch its poorer brethren's resentment merely with the fringes of the wages of whiteness. (6) Thus for Hopkins, such figures as Davis and Sampson embody a warring blend of both insurgency and conservatism. Desired sociopolitical developments that promise to dismantle hierarchies of intraracial difference (i.e., ones that place Sampson and Davis under such men as Pollock) emerge simultaneously as feared ones that threaten to dismantle hierarchies of interracial difference (i.e., ones that place Sampson and Davis over black chattel). (7) It is into this complicated and quickly shifting milieu, seen from the novel's particular twentieth-century vantage point, that members of the Montfort family disembark their ship, and Hopkins makes clear the need for her twentieth-century readers to understand the link between the rumblings of class destabilization among whites and the racially specific construction of women's identities through discourse, represented in Contending Forces as the rumor of Grace.

As part of the work of Critical Race Theory (the important contemporary movement in legal studies with which Bell is associated), Cheryl I. Harris engages more fully legal, political, and social precedents for treating whiteness as property. If, Harris writes, whiteness can be interpreted and treated as property, and if "property rights are traditionally described as fully alienable," then whiteness, as property, might be understood as alienable--a mutable, discursive construct that can be taken away and made to signify something else (281). Significantly, I think, Harris's analysis would likely find literary precedent in Contending Forces. Standing on the waterfront, Davis assures the already agitated Sampson that" 'we jes dont' spec' to hav' no foolin' 'bout this yer question of who's on top as regards a gentleman's owning his niggers, an' whomsoeveder goes ter foolin' with that ar pertickler pint o' discusshun is gwine ter be made a eggsample of, even ef it's a white man'" (Hopkins 36). Acknowledging an investment in maintaining the status quo, Davis's threat to make an "eggsample" of any white man who threatens the chattel system carries within it at least an implicit awareness of whiteness's alienability (rather than its immanence), and this awareness, I think, powers Davis's conservatism, his insurgency, and the struggle between the two impulses. In order to preserve his own property in whiteness, he appears to reason that he must alienate someone else's. As the Bermudan ship docks, Hopkins establishes that the someone will be Charles Montfort, who represents both the upper-class interests keeping Davis in thrall and the dreaded possibility of emancipation.

The means through which the protection, privilege, and normativity of Montfort's whiteness will be divested is Grace, his wife. As Grace steps from the ship to the wharf, Hopkins reveals her as always in the process of construction and reconstruction. Though understood as a white Englishwoman aboard ship, Grace causes a "murmur of involuntary admiration [to run] through" the spectators as soon as she disembarks, for they interpret her not as an Englishwoman, but as the ideal of a Southern white woman:

   a dream of beauty even among beautiful
   women. Tall and slender, her form
   was willowy, although perfectly molded.
   Her complexion was creamy in its
   whiteness, of the tint of the camellia;
   her hair, a rich golden brown, fell in
   rippling masses far below the waist
   line; brown eyes, large and soft as
   those seen in the fawn; heavy black
   eyebrows marking a high white fore
   head, and features as clearly cut as a
   cameo, completed a most lovely type
   of Southern beauty. (Hopkins 40)

Hopkins emphasizes Grace's rapturous physical appearance for several reasons. For instance, the intersection of "Grace" with a camellia's "creamy," chaste beauty yields an icon of womanhood that will enable those readers acculturated to identify with such a representation to feel the terror and injustice of the holocaust that will come later in Chapter IV, appropriated titled "The Tragedy." Ironically, too, in one of the novel's most cagey twists, Hopkins suggests that the beauty that the spectators recognize and laud might be the result not only of the leisure, security, and virtue that Grace enjoys but also of what had been earlier hinted as her family's uncertain "racial" background. Speculates the narrator, "... there might even have 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" (Hopkins 23). Nowhere in Contending Forces does Hopkins either confirm or deny this possibility, but certainly there is reason to be wary of it, especially given what Mia Bay documents as some black intellectuals' vacillating relationship to racialist thought (39). And indeed, as Kevin Gaines observes, throughout Contending Forces and other works, "Hopkins's use of 'race' cuts both ways, both resisting and replicating racist mythologies" of blood and identity (434).

Such readerly wariness appears merited, certainly, as the Montforts disappear from sight, and Sampson and Davis resume their aborted conversation. Immediately, the exchange slides fluidly from Montfort's social disruption to his wife's physical beauty. Declares Davis, " 'Ef they haint' got an overseer, I'm goin' to ply fer the job; ... never seed sich a booty in my life'" (Hopkins 41). Here, Davis's syntax conflates Montfort's lack of (white) manly control of his chattel with Grace's bodily appearance. As if taking a cue from Davis, Sampson replies after meditating a moment, "'... thet ar female's got a black streak in her somewhar.... tha's too much cream color in the face and too little blud seen under the skin fer a genooine white 'ooman'" (29). Given the narrator's earlier speculation about Montfort blood, it may perhaps be tempting to read Sampson's suspicions as troublesomely asserting Grace's true "identity" rather than as charting "the emergence of a new identity as a discursive event" (Scott 34).

Ultimately, of course, how one should read this cat-and-mouse game of Grace's putative identity is unknowable. In the face of such uncertainty, then, it is helpful to interpret the scene as of necessity revealing little about Grace herself--who remains a present absence throughout the book's beginning--but much about Davis and Sampson. For Hopkins uses the uncertainty of Grace's reconstruction not so much, I think, to represent her "as an exemplar of cruelly assaulted black womanhood" as to allow her to function as both cause and effect of Davis's and Sampson's burgeoning agency and political subjectivity (Yarborough xxxi-xxxii). First, Grace's appearance both enables and impels Davis to presume and assume agency: to decide when and where he shall enter politically (to twist Anna Julia Cooper's words). Though the position of Montfort overseer that Davis literally speaks into being would constitute a relatively lowly one within the plantation's white hierarchy, the point here is that Davis dares declare a need for his services. In doing so, he declares performatively a lack of abstract and concrete potency within the Montfort political province.

That Davis's performative declaration is effective testifies to his nascent political agency: Identifying a lack and positioning himself via words to fill that lack, he opens up a heretofore nonexistent political and economic space that effectively usurps agency from Montfort himself. True to his resolve, Davis soon visits the new Montfort plantation, an institution that, in Hopkins's careful and dryly witty narrative machinations, just happens to exist on the "old Pollock homestead." Accosting the Bermudan, Davis proactively offers his services both as an overseer and as a liaison to the "commoonity" unsettled by the political liberalism--however feckless--that Montfort is taken to represent. Davis, Hopkins writes, "formally applied ... for the position of overseer" (56), wording that Sawaya reads as a supplicant's request (86n17). I would suggest, however, that it is fruitful to note that, as the scene draws on, Davis's speech act moves tonally from one of subordination to one of outright insurgency. First, Montfort reacts immediately and defensively: "'What makes you think that I wanted an overseer?'" he asks angrily. In reply, Davis carefully, indirectly, and observantly begins to dictate to Montfort the "'certain rules in this commoonity that we all must' 'bide by ef we want t'void trouble.'" Accordingly, Montfort becomes even more infuriated, particularly at what he reads as Davis's insinuation "that a man cannot do as he will with his own property" (Hopkins 57).

It is here that Davis makes his most calculated and audacious rhetorical move both by insisting upon an abstract equality between himself and Montfort and by assuming control of the narratives (i.e., rumors) circulating about Montfort. Continues Davis, "'Wall, no; not eggsactly, but it's jes' hyar, to speak plainly as 'tween frien's ... the plain fac' is: I want the job of drivin' yer niggers, an' you'll want me to keep the commoonity fren'ly to yer now it's got out thet yer a-gwine ter set the gang free byme by'" (57; my emphasis). Drawing upon his own class privilege within whiteness, Montfort becomes enraged at what he takes to be Davis's insubordination ("offending" action by an "offender") and "administer[s] a sound flogging" to Davis (57). Ironically, Hopkins implies, it is as high moral dudgeon authorizes an act of righteous anger and Montfort behaves most like the white aristocrat that his waning agency becomes most evident. As Davis staggers away injured, the planter watches the man's departure and finds himself overcome by a "real shudder of physical fear" that he does not understand. Worse, he not only fails to discern clearly the threat that this new enemy poses, but he also fails to investigate any further: "Surprised by himself, he turned to enter the house, dismissing the whole incident as a piece of impudence which he had done well to chastise" (58).

Montfort's lack of critical acumen here is significant, for it serves to intensify Hopkins's implicit historical claim that, as the United States struggled openly at the beginning of the nineteenth century with desires to both preserve and dismantle the new nation's system of race and class privilege, Anglo and American aristocratic houses began to wane. The mutuality of this decline becomes evident as Montfort and Pollock witness each other's imminent fiscal, moral, and genealogical dissolution without being able consciously to register what is happening to them. As a prominent member of one of Newbern's oldest families, for instance, Pollock commands respect and money. Montfort's arrival, however, weakens that command, for not only does the Bermudan symbolize the abolitionist sentiments (however gradual) that would jeopardize the North Carolinian's way of life, but, in purchasing the ancestral Pollock homestead, he represents a more immediate threat, that of encroaching older money, higher status, and greater potential for establishing patrimonial lineage on Pollock's terrain. Hopkins emblematizes this complex threat in the scene in which Pollock watches young Jesse Montfort building little houses with his father's gold coin. "'Golden eagles given to a child to play with,'" Pollock muses enviously as Hopkins notes dryly that such a thing is "a little beyond" both Pollock's material means and his intellectual comprehension (49). In fact, dazzled by and envious of this carelessly used wealth that promises to unman him, Pollock overlooks Jesse's bleat of plaintive, ironic clairvoyance as the little boy's building efforts fail: "'See, papa, all my houses tumble down'" (48). Similarly blind, Montfort's own predilection for "ingenuousness" causes him to labor under the genteel delusion that no man is his enemy; thus even as he fails to understand the threat posed by Davis, he begins a friendship with Pollock, the man who has himself resolved to demolish him.

Each blind to the precariousness of the other's position, Montfort and Pollock also share what Hopkins articulates as a management strategy that, though it may once have been effective, was becoming increasingly unpredictable: Both aristocrats use gendered tactics not only to maintain white supremacy but also to preserve and mask differences within white masculinity. Struggling, for instance, to maintain his fragile rule over his lower-status white men even as he attempts to distance himself from their activity, Pollock attempts to feminize his cohorts. When Montfort nervously asks Pollock if he has heard the rumors of Grace "being of African descent," Pollock replies, " 'I have heard the rumors about Mrs. Montfort, but that is nothing--nothing but the malice of some malicious, jealous woman'" (52). Knowing quite well, of course, that the rumor's source is Sampson, Pollock reveals clearly his sentiments about the men to whom he gifts little luxuries and trinkets in order to have them do his dirty work. Ultimately, however, the joke is on Pollock. Rumor, as the narrator asserts two pages previously, may be "a lying jade" (itself a feminized epithet), but it is a lying jade that nevertheless carries substantial power to construct perceptions of material reality in ways that exceed those that Pollock's limited intelligence allows him to imagine. Within Hopkins's complex representation of this historical moment, Sampson and Davis respectively symbolize threats that the likes of Pollock and Montfort neither understand nor fear sufficiently. And well ought Montfort to be frightened, for the narrator reports that Davis reads Montfort's attack as "personal violence of a character that was most galling to the spirit of any free-born Southern man--an ordinary cowhiding, such as he would mete out to his slave" (58). What Davis understands to be a feminizing (and racializing) assault galvanizes him and causes the disenfranchised white man to grow "more and more filled with a desire for vengeance,--not the ordinary kind, but something extraordinary" (59). By the end of the fourth chapter, Davis's desire will come to fruition, and Grace will be there again at the physical exercise of his agency as she was there at its discursive inception.

Importantly, Davis's shift in agency exists also in relation to Sampson's. Glimpsing Grace on the wharf leads Sampson quite quickly to the attainment and exercise of a strain of Enlightenment subjectivity that derives its authority from larger assumptions that visual "observation and notions of orders based on comparisons of identity and difference" could yield knowledge that the body was the origin of racial truth" (Wiegman 28). Certainly, Sampson's putatively clinical observation to Davis that "'tha's too much cream color in the face and too little blud seen under the skin fer a genooine white 'ooman'" brings to mind Thomas Jefferson's racialist theory as worked out in Notes on the State of Virginia, particularly in the familiar and infamous Query XIV, "The administration of justice and the description of the laws."

Contemplating what he considered as the difficulties of emancipating and then embracing Americans of African descent given the "deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites [and] ten thousand recollections, by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained," Jefferson inventoried through what he understood as careful, rational, objective visual observation the "physical and moral" reasons why free blacks would not be able to live in the same nation as whites (41). Within the category of physical difference between black and white, Jefferson wrote that "the first difference which strikes us is that of color," which, in his reasoning, manifests itself both as excess and lack:

   Whether the black of the negro resides
   in the reticular membrane between the
   skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin
   itself; whether it proceeds from the
   color of the blood, the color of the bile,
   or from that of some other secretion,
   the difference is fixed in nature, and is
   as real as if its seat and cause were better
   known to us. And is this difference
   of no importance? Is it not the foundation
   of a greater or less share of beauty
   in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures
   of red and white, the expressions
   of every passion by greater or less suffusions
   of color in the one, preferable
   to that eternal monotony, which reigns
   in the countenances, that immovable
   veil of black which covers the emotions
   of the other race? (137)

As Robyn Wiegman reminds us, "Jefferson's position lacks the scientific authority ascribed to the natural historian" (although it is worth noting that a good portion of Notes on Virginia is intended to function as natural history), but "his articulation of a vast and inseparable division between Africans and Anglo-Americans partakes in the scripting of the visible from which race was established as the observational detail of the skin" (214n20).

As a mass, the wharf's spectators interpret Grace's female body as "completing a most lovely type of Southern beauty," but Sampson's rather singular gaze draws a conclusion quite different. Similar to Jefferson, Sampson through ostensibly disinterested observation interprets Grace as being composed of both perceived bodily excess used to deny enfranchisement to women of color most especially (in this case, ironically, "too much cream color") and perceived bodily lack (here, what can be read as a putative inability to blush). His analysis leads immediately from Grace to the larger context of the national identity she shares with her husband, and then to the rumor of the social disruption that her husband will cause: " 'You can't tell nothin' 'bout these Britishers; they're allers squeamish 'bout that nigger brats.... I've hem tell that they think nuthin of ejcatin' thar black brats, and freein' 'em, an' makin' 'em rich'" (Hopkins 41). In this scene, then, shifts in agency and subjectivity among otherwise disenfranchised white men yield rumor. And rumor discursively renders Grace as both raison d'etre for and the medium through which otherwise warring white political desires--those of insurgency and conservatism--will be converted by the end of Chapter IV to a shared, if always unstable, revanchism that will function to alienate the house of Montfort--and, tellingly, the house of Pollock-- from property-in-whiteness.

Within Contending Forces, it is significant that the rumor about Grace comes from Sampson, a lower-status white man who sees the rumor as a political tool to preserve his precarious privilege as "white" within a plantation aristocracy that otherwise subordinates and excludes him. I think, however, that Hopkins's careful staging illustrates that the relationship between a white aristocracy and a white working class hinges upon something more than the shared ground of white supremacy and/or the aristocracy's managed subordination of disenfranchised white masculinity. In fact, emphasizing solely Davis's and Sampson's subordination might obscure another point that Contending Forces seems to take pains to drive home: Davis and Sampson represent a shift within white masculinity's balance of power, for they--not Anson Pollock--generate both the theory and the practice that gives Pollock the ability to dismantle Montfort and his house. In other words, through Contending Forces' opening holocaust, the decline of both white aristocrats is hastened by Davis and Sampson. Montfort and Pollock are literally and figuratively unmanned: their property-in-whiteness divested, their privilege and subjectivity compromised and usurped. Davis and Sampson accomplish the unmanning; Grace Montfort functions both as their cause and their medium for doing so.

Davis's rage at being assaulted by Montfort enables the execution of the public safety committee's previously laid plan to bring down the Bermudan's house. Sampson tells the enraged Davis that the "'riginater'" of the plan was Pollock, who had gotten himself" 'dead set onter a piece of caliker,'" an interesting metaphor by which to refer to Grace, who had earlier rebuffed Pollock's lustful advances. As Sampson talks on, however, he reveals that he himself had provided the plan's theoretical underpinnings (i.e., by disseminating the story that Grace has "black blood") and its practical application (i.e., Sampson divulges his "knowledge" as a recommendation to Pollock only after he learns of the aristocrat's lust). And once he hears Davis's angry tale of assault, Sampson decides the time is "'good an' ripe' " and initiates the plan. Thus on a "clear and resplendent morning," "a crowd of angry men" with Pollock as its figure-head invades the Montfort estate. Quickly, Davis shoots Charles Montfort to death. "... grasped by rude hands," Grace is forced to the veranda, where, seeing her husband's dead body and Pollock's "sensual face," she promptly faints (Hopkins 6567). The plan dictates that Davis's and Sampson's "boys" will pillage the estate while Grace is reserved as a prize for Pollock, who assumes, thanks to the rumor he did not generate, that he will be able to possess her both literally and figuratively, racially and sexually. But immediately after Montfort's murder, Pollock becomes distracted (foolishly, Hopkins implies) by "money and papers in the safe" and leaves Davis unattended with Grace's collapsed figure.

It is at this moment that Davis--steps forward to doubly displace the two white aristocrats:

   Suddenly an evil smile lighted up his
   countenance. Now was his time. This
   woman's husband had flogged him--he
   would have a sweet revenge. Those
   lily-like limbs, the tender flesh that had
   never known aught but the touch of
   love, should feel the lash as he had. (67-68)

Hopkins emphasizes this last phrase herself, signaling it as something more than merely the petulant sentiments of an individual who feels he has been wronged intolerably. For what Davis constructs here is a complicated equation encompassing revenge, democracy, and inequality. From his point of view, the violent revenge he seeks to enjoy constitutes an intraracially democratizing act through which he may both claim the role of punishing agent and gain access to Grace, she who had been held heretofore in reserve by both Montfort (as his wife) and Pollock (as the spoils of conquest). What may have been understood especially by Montfort and Pollock as a polarized contest solely between two white aristocratic antagonists (albeit featuring Sampson and Davis as bit players) is in this moment revealed as having become a polygonal contest among a larger, increasingly equivalent population of white men. At the same time, however, Davis's revenge, wreaked as it will be across the body of a woman now constructed as "black," is also an act that reinforces hierarchies of interracial inequality, hierarchies that Davis perceives to be endangered by the same forces (i.e., the decline of aristocratic efficacy) that make the longed-for intraracial democratization possible. And, indeed, as Davis and Sampson brutally bind and then whip Grace Montfort, they mark her body with whip-weals that might be understood as emblematizing the very crossroads between desire and resistance at which they stand.

For critics, understandably, the whipping itself is overdetermined, Carby, for instance, reads it as a metaphorically communicated rape, suggested especially by the rather phallic whip (132); in turn, Sawaya builds on this interpretation and factors in Davis as well, who, she asserts, "is also figured here as a vengeful slave . meting out revenge on the 'lily-like limbs' of a master" (87). And Lisa Marcus reads the flogging as an act of "writ[ing] race upon [Grace's] body as if it were a blank page" (124).

For me, however, what is most provocative about this wrenching, graphic scene is its close attention to the technological aspects of the men's attack--or, more precisely, its close attention to the men's pride in the technological aspects of their attack. After the first blow, for instance, Hopkins emphasizes that "Hank gazed at the cut with critical satisfaction, as he compared its depth with the skin and blood that encased the long tapering lash," while Sampson vows to "go [Davis] one better" and proceeds to "sight the distance and exact place to make his mark with mathematical precision" (69). Indisputably, the scene is brutal, gory, inhuman. But it is also profoundly methodological: Sampson and Davis wield the whip clinically, and they take a critical satisfaction in their method. This critical ability and precise, technological affinity are characteristics unlike any of those that either Montfort (drawn mostly in terms of faintly liberal na'ivete) or Pollock (sketched largely in terms of lusts and obsessions) possess. The fact that Davis and Sampson are able to lash crossroads into Grace's back constitutes Hopkins's most vivid imagining that, by 1800, the balance of power within white masculinity was already shifting as these up-and-coming white men brought something different from the old plantation violences to the table: an independent ability to disseminate narrative efficiently and publicly; a technologically enabled, methodological precision; and a keen drive to determine the competitive standards by which such precision night be measured as economically and politically advantageous merit.

The violent rise of this twisted meritocracy seems to be at least part of he cautionary "information" that Hopkins wishes her first readers to contemplate. Of course, the technological abilities and meritocratic drives that Davis and Sampson display were not possessed solely by white men, nor would such abilities and drives lead always to holocaust. Nevertheless, Hopkins contends, they were qualities that would later--not least in the early twentieth century during which Hopkins wrote--become dangerously effective at terrorizing and thwarting, at least temporarily, black citizens' aspirations for a better life. Though Davis and Sampson vanish from the narrative, the effects of their theory and practice entangle the rest of the novel's plot. Even as Pollock apparently wins victory (he leaves with Grace, her children, and her sister/slave Lucy), the end of Contending Forces shows that his "line" fails. Later in the novel, John Langley, Pollock's son by Lucy, dies alone and penitent, having failed to replicate with light-complected Sappho Clark the violence of rumor that Sampson and Davis managed. Montfort's own children are resignified as "black" after Grace commits suicide, and, as the novel ends, the black sons and daughters of young Jesse achieve good character, financial justice, and domestic bliss, thus providing readers at last with the "pleasurable self-affirmation that reflected their racial and gender aspirations to live in a world where such stories were possible" (Tate 6). Demonstrating a critical ambivalence about democratization, Hopkins suggests, then, that Davis's and Sampson's technologized, discursive violenCe appears to represent a form of white masculine power posing grave consequences for black people (and, indeed, all humanity) in the twentieth century.

Even as she lauds the value of reading literary texts in order to discern the process of historical formation, Sharon Achinstein acknowledges that "literary sources are always a shaky ground on which to build history" (131). The ground is shaky not least because contemporary scholars often read literary sources using perhaps the very process that Hopkins herself used to read the putative historical record of 1800, something similar to that which historians call "upstreaming," the interpretation of the past in light of developments noted in later periods. Writing about Native Americanist historiography, Scott Michaelsen has written compellingly about what he calls the "rather obvious" hazards of upstreaming: oversimplification, romanticization, recovery of a desired past through critical wish fulfillment (222). Yet Hopkins demonstrates, I think that there can sometimes be substantial value in willfully and consciously employing such upstreaming as a creative and critical tool. Indeed, in sketching the drives (technological, meritocratic) that spurred Davis and Sampson to physical and discursive violence against a woman rendered "black," Hopkins seems to have wished her readers to contemplate 1900 as much as 1800. Grace's fate, for instance, seems to have as much to do with the pathological narratives that rising disciplines such as sociology could circulate about black people as with the bodily brutality historically perpetrated upon them by white mobs; indeed, by 1903, W. E. B. Du Bois (him self a sociologist) had to write dryly of sociologists' "glee" in counting black "bastards and ... prostitutes" even as white-driven race riots and lynchings commanded his attention (42). From the vantage point of the new millennium, Grace's fate seems to herald such intersections of discursive and bodily violence as the Moynihan Report's theories about black matriarchy, the forced sterilization (e.g., the "Mississippi appendectomy") of women of color and poor white women, as well as the highly visible assaults on and killings of black men and women by New York City police throughout the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (Roberts 90).8 Arguably, such violences are now understood as being perpetrated not only by individual white men or even by abstract white masculinity; rather, they are seen also as the effects of an agentless, rather Foucauldian matrix of power about which little can be done. Yet an upstreaming look at Contending Forces can help to imagine how Davis and Sampson--with their insurgency and conservatism, their technological affinities and meritocratic drives, their relative anonymity and pastlessness--were ripe for absorption into new institutions, ones based not necessarily on genealogy but on the methodological calculations of merit now taken to be one of the prime--if rather indirect--vehicles for violence against people of color. (9)

Notes

(1.) My thanks to Jeri Wetherington of Heritage of Craven County, North Carolina, for helping me to begin the historical search. Carla Peterson asserts that the only "actual historical figure [in] the romance" is the mention of black poet James Whitfield, whose daughter the escaped Jesse Montfort marries (182). Other critics have speculated extensively upon these chapters' multiple functions. Hazel Carby, for instance, has observed that Hopkins sought both "to make visible a colonial relationship that applied equally to North American imperialist ventures and to represent blacks as a colonized people" (134). Additionally, Hopkins strove to establish "the economic profitability of the system of slavery ... as ... the cause of the events and conditions" (131) of the novel's desire to materialize what Claudia Tate terms an "a collective racial desire for enlarged social opportunity as full-fledged American citizens" (7).

The functions of these first chapters extend beyond the novel's confines, as well. Jane Campbell argues that Contending Forces "encourages interest in and re[s]pect for investigating personal history, anticipating contemporary writers such as Alex Haley, Toni Morrison, and David Bradley" (33). And I suspect that by emphasizing the book's narrative roots in North Carolinian murder and concubinage, Hopkins sought to both challenge and trivialize what apparently has been one of twentieth-century North Carolina's favorite perceptions of itself as a state: that because North Carolina held fewer slaves than other neighboring Southern states (namely Virginia and South Carolina), the state's virtue was somehow less tarnished. See, for example, Watson; Federal Writers' Project; Lefler and Powell; and especially Tise, who writes that "slavery in North Carolina was both one of the most complex issues ever faced by the people of the state and a harsh reality that affected the lives and aspirations of nearly everyone--enslaved and enslavers, Indians and free blacks, and the thousands of persons who never owned slaves or lived in slaveholding regions of the state. Nevertheless, the North Carolina experience with slavery was fundamentally different from that of other Southern colonies and states, not in the ways it affected the enslaved or the enslavers but in its effect on the society and on North Carolinians' perceptions of their state, America, and the world. Except that it was a system that considered men as chattel, slavery in North Carolina cannot be seen as a mere extension of the institution elsewhere in the South" (Tise 94). On an even larger level, such an initiatory strategy permitted Hopkins to play with the very idea of history, using the narrative to goad readers (and researchers) into uncertainty as to the very nature and location of "history," much in the way that, for example, Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo would later do.

(2.) In her own preface to the novel, Hopkins acknowledges the job that fiction performs for any group, particularly at this time for Americans of African descent: "Fiction is of great value to any people as a preserver of manners and customs, religious and political, and social. It is a record of growth and development from generation to generation" (13-14).

(3.) As Mia Bay has documented, not all black thinkers regarded race as an "audacious fiction," a construct or a discursive product. Some intellectuals felt that the idea of "race" as used to explain human differences "held some ideas that [they] found difficult to altogether escape.... "Bay continues: "Rejecting the values assigned to the races in white racial thought, the African Americans who wrote ethnology refused to be placed at the bottom of a hierarchy of the races. Yet they did not always rule out the possibility of racial differences--the citizens composed of brass and iron might still be distinguished from the classes made of silver and gold, provided all the metals were precious" (39).

(4.) This distinction, of course, Morrison makes in The Bluest Eye. Specifically, the quote reads "There is really nothing more to say--except why. But since why is difficult to handle, one must take refuge in how" (6).

(5.) According to Watson, the Pollocks were indeed a prominent family in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century New Bern, though my research has not revealed yet an Anson among them.

(6.) The phrase constitutes the title of David Roediger's influential The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1991). The title-phrase itself comes from Du Bois.

(7.) A good emblem of this dynamic can be found in Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition, in which the character McBane galls his upper-class white brethren with his gaudy diamond but is nevertheless among them to stay.

(8.) In addition to Roberts, Stephanie Athey's bibliographic essay "Reproductive Health, Race and Technology: Political Fictions and Black Feminist Critiques 1970s-1990s" (SAGE 22.1 [1997]: 3-27) provides a good overview of recent scholarship on such topics.

9. Perhaps the most vivid example of such calculations may be found in Hermstein's and Murray's The Bell Curve.

Works Cited

Achinstein, Sharon. "Women on Top in the Pamphlet Literature of the English Revolution." Women's Studies 24.1-2 (1994): 131-64.

Bay, Mia. The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People, 1830-1925. New York: Oxford UP, 2000.

Bell, Derrick. "The Real Costs of Racial Discrimination." African Americans and the Living Constitution. Ed. John Hope Franklin and Genna Rae McNeil. Washington: Smithsonian Institution P, 1995. 183-93.

Campbell, Jane. Mythic Black Fiction: The Transformation of History. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1986.

Carby, Hazel. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. Ed. and intro. David W. Blight and Robert Gooding-Williams. Boston: Bedford, 1997.

Federal Writers' Project. The North Carolina Guide. Ed. Blackwell P. Robinson. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1955.

Gaines, Kevin. "Black Americans' Racial Uplift Ideology as 'Civilizing Mission': Pauline E. Hopkins on Race and Imperialism." Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. Ed. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. 433-55.

Harris, Cheryl I. "Whiteness as Property." Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement. Ed. Kimberle Crenshaw, et al. New York: New P, 1995. 276-91.

Hopkins, Pauline E. Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South. 1900. New York: Oxford UP, 1991.

Hurtado, Aida. The Color of Privilege: Three Blasphemies on Race and Feminism. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.

Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. 1785. New York: Harper, 1964.

Lefler, Hugh T., and William S. Powell. Colonial North Carolina: A History. New York: Scribner's, 1973.

Marcus, Lisa." 'Of One Blood': Reimagining American Genealogy in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces." Speaking the Other Self." American Women Writers. Ed. Jeanne Campbell Reesman. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1997. 117-43.

Michaelsen, Scott. "Resketching Anglo-Amerindian Identity Politics." Border Theory: The Limits of Cultural Politics. Ed. Michaelsen and David E. Johnson. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997. 221-52.

Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. 1970. New York: Plume, 1994.

--. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. 1992. New York: Vintage, 1993.

--. "Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation." Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation. Ed. Mad Evans. Garden City: Anchor, 1984. 339-45.

Peterson, Carla. "Unsettled Frontiers: Race, History, and Romance in Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces." Famous Last Words: Changes in Gender and Narrative Closure. Ed. Alison Booth. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1993. 177-96.

Roberts, Dorothy. Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty. New York: Pantheon, 1997.

Sawaya, Francesca. "Emplotting National History: Regionalism and Pauline Hopkins's Contending Forces." Breaking Boundaries: New Perspectives on Women's Regional Writing. Ed. Sherrie A. Inness and Diana Royer. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1997.72-87.

Scott, Joan Wallach. "Experience." Feminists Theorize the Political. Ed. Judith Butler and Scott. New York: Routiedge, 1992. 22-40.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire: The Black Heroine's Text at the Turn of the Century. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Tise, Larry E. "Confronting the Issue of Slavery." The North Carolina Experience: An Interpretive and Documentary History. Ed. Lindley S. Butler and Alan D. Watson. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1984. 193-200.

Watson, Alan D. A History of New Bern and Craven County. New Bern: Tryon Palace Commission, 1987.

Wiegman, Robyn. American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Yarborough, Richard. "Introduction." Hopkins xxvii-xlviii.

Beth McCoy is Associate Professor of English at SUNY-Geneseo and is currently completing a book on paratextuality and African American literature and culture.