Bricks Without Straw: A Novel
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Bricks Without Straw: A Novel
464eBook
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Overview
Bricks Without Straw is Tourgée’s fictionalized account of how Reconstruction was sabotaged. It is a chilling picture of violence against African Americans condoned, civil rights abrogated, constitutional amendments subverted, and electoral fraud institutionalized. Its plot revolves around a group of North Carolina freedpeople who strive to build new lives for themselves by buying land, marketing their own crops, setting up a church and school, and voting for politicians sympathetic to their interests, until Klan terrorism and the ascendancy of a white supremacist government reduce them to neo-slavery. This edition of Bricks Without Straw is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s introduction, which sets the novel in historical context and provides an overview of Albion W. Tourgée’s career, a chronology of the significant events of both the Reconstruction era and Tourgée’s life, and explanatory notes identifying actual events fictionalized in the novel.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780822392347 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Duke University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/01/2009 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 464 |
| File size: | 1 MB |
About the Author
Albion W. Tourgée (1838–1905) was a soldier, journalist, attorney, judge, and prolific author of books, including the novel A Fool’s Errand, by One of the Fools (1879). As the lead attorney for the plaintiff in the landmark Supreme Court case Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Tourgée argued against the “separate but equal” doctrine. Carolyn L. Karcher is Professor Emerita at Temple University, where she taught English, American studies, and women’s studies. Among her books are The First Woman of the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child and A Lydia Maria Child Reader, both also published by Duke University Press.
Read an Excerpt
Bricks Without Straw
A NovelBy ALBION W. TOURGÉE
DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2009 Duke University PressAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4395-0
Introduction
Carolyn L. Karcher
ALBION W. TOURGÉE's Bricks Without Straw, set in Reconstruction-era North Carolina, cries out to be rediscovered as one of the most powerful race novels ever written by a white American. The throngs of readers who rushed to purchase it when it came off the press in October 1880 certainly recognized its power. Bricks Without Straw sold 50,000 copies within a year-an extraordinary figure by today's standards-and Tourgée's publishers had to make a duplicate set of plates to keep pace with the demand, which averaged more than a thousand copies a day and seven thousand a week for the first six weeks. Although Tourgée's better-known Reconstruction novel, A Fool's Errand (1879), sold three times as many copies, Bricks Without Straw in fact surpasses it both conceptually and artistically. Conceptually, Bricks Without Straw accomplishes the rare feat of envisioning Reconstruction from the black community's standpoint-a more ambitious undertaking than fictionalizing an author's own experience, as Tourgée does in A Fool's Errand. Artistically, Bricks Without Straw features an array of complex, fully rounded characters; a plot that successfully integrates the political action centered on African Americans with the love story centered on whites; a sophisticated narrative technique that relies on flashbacks rather than linear progression; a self-conscious use of dialogue and dialect to give voice to the voiceless; and an experimental open ending that calls attention to the problems history has left unresolved.
THE UNCLE TOM'S CABIN OF RECONSTRUCTION
The literary achievement modern readers will prize most highly in Bricks Without Straw is its revolutionary approach to depicting African Americans. Casting off the blinders that so drastically limited white perceptions of African Americans, Tourgée defies conventions of racial stereotyping ubiquitous in the writings of his predecessors and contemporaries, who either embraced these conventions uncritically or resorted to covert strategies for undermining them. No other white writer of Tourgée's time-and few since then-portrayed African Americans with such realism, treated them as independent political agents instead of as menials attached to whites, and accorded them dominant roles in the plot.
Tourgée knew that the story he wished to tell demanded a new type of novel, as perfectly adapted to impelling the northern public to complete the work of Reconstruction as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852) had been to inspiring its antebellum readers to fight against slavery. Stowe's "literary marvel," Tourgée asserted in his tribute "The Literary Quality of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin'" (1896), had wrought its magic by painting "a slavery which the free man could understand and appreciate" and by embodying it in characters familiar to the northern mind because they were "essentially New Englanders" or "blacked Yankees." Curious to learn what the emancipated slaves themselves thought of the book that had so "vividly ... impressed [his] own young mind," Tourgée had questioned many about it. Nearly all had found Stowe's sketches of blacks and master-slave relations untrue to life. "Seems like that Uncle Tom must have been raised up North!" Tourgée quoted "one of the shrewdest and most thoughtful" freedmen as commenting. Yet far from branding the "non-realistic" mode of Uncle Tom's Cabin a defect, Tourgée identified it as the secret of the influence the novel had exerted. An "absolutely 'realistic' ... delineation of the master and the slave" would not only have failed to move readers, he argued, but would have gone over the heads of the majority "who did not, and do not yet, comprehend" the institution that had so fatally shaped southern society.
If the crusade against slavery required an Uncle Tom's Cabin, Tourgée believed, the challenge the country faced in 1880 required a radically different fictional vehicle for mobilizing public opinion. Fifteen years after the war, the South remained engulfed in violence, white supremacy again reigned unchecked, and the freedpeople groaned under forms of bondage almost as oppressive as the one the country had abolished. These conditions persisted, according to Tourgée, because Northerners still viewed the South through the prism of Uncle Tom's Cabin. They had expected to regenerate the South through a mass religious conversion, and when it had not materialized, they had let the region work out its own salvation, confident that white and black Southerners would eventually reach an accommodation similar to that of Stowe's benevolent masters and lovable slaves.
To awaken the northern public from its slumber and summon it back to the unfinished task of liberating African Americans from white domination, Tourgée created a novel that combined the prime attribute of Uncle Tom's Cabin-its "power to touch the universal heart"-with the social realism it conspicuously lacked. Through realism, Bricks Without Straw corrects readers' misconceptions and equips them for promoting effective policies in the South. Tourgée replaces Stowe's saintly Uncle Tom and comical Topsy with three-dimensional black characters endeavoring to forge new lives for themselves. He shows them interacting primarily not with whites but with each other, and he traces the development of a free, self-dependent African American community. Tourgée's realism illuminates the world of southern whites as well. Bricks Without Straw reveals the complexity of southern society, provides glimpses of the relations between poor whites and blacks, and probes the psychology of the former slaveholders.
Realism does not in itself arouse readers to action, however, as Tourgée's running quarrel with its literary proponents indicates that he discerned. He therefore infuses the emotional appeal of Uncle Tom's Cabin into Bricks Without Straw. Speaking through a narrator appalled by the nation's moral torpor, he strives to ignite in his readers the same fervor Stowe had sparked in hers. Stowe's readers had gone to war to free the slaves. Tourgée wanted his readers to fulfill that war's promise by rededicating themselves to the forsaken goal of Reconstruction.
WHOSE RECONSTRUCTION?
Reconstruction, the turbulent twelve-year period stretching from 1865 to 1877, derives its name from the ideal of rebuilding the post-Civil War South on a foundation of freedom and equality rather than slavery. The government program implementing this ideal originated with the Radical wing of the Republican Party, whose roots lay in the prewar antislavery movement. Reconstruction has gone down in public memory, nonetheless, as a spree of vengeance against a defeated people, because the program's fiercest opponents-the South's former slaveholding aristocrats-overthrew it by violence and captured the national media. Through the mainstream northern press, and later through such works as Thomas Dixon's The Clansman (1905), D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind (1936), and the multiple tomes produced by professors of the "Dunning School," the white South's propagandists fastened their version of history on the popular imagination. As a result, generations of Americans have supposed that after the Civil War, the "prostrate" South endured a gang rape by hordes of ignorant and brutish ex-slaves, unleashed by greedy "carpetbaggers" and abetted in their depredations by villainous "scalawags"-the epithets applied respectively to emigrant Northerners and renegade Southerners. Only within the past few decades have these tenacious stereotypes begun to yield to the consensus of present-day historians, who now characterize Reconstruction, in Eric Foner's words, as "America's Unfinished Revolution."
Published a mere three years after Reconstruction officially ended, and aimed at counteracting the very stereotypes historians have recently discredited, Bricks Without Straw offers an unparalleled inside view of this contentious epoch. As a Radical Republican, Tourgée had worked closely with African Americans and poor whites in the struggle to transform North Carolina's racial and class politics. He had also seen the ravages of the Ku Klux Klan at first-hand, braved death threats to bring the perpetrators of Klan atrocities to justice, and fought to the last against what he called the "counter-revolution" that destroyed Reconstruction (Bricks 394). Thus, Bricks Without Straw pulsates with the immediacy of lived history.
Tourgée places the newly freed slaves at the center of this history and presents the conflicts over Reconstruction primarily through their eyes-an enterprise that anticipates the African American scholar W. E. B. Du Bois's monumental revisionist study, Black Reconstruction in America (1935). Indeed, it is not too much to call Bricks Without Straw Tourgée's Black Reconstruction. The very words Du Bois uses to describe his project apply to Tourgée's. Both identify the "emancipated slave" as the "chief witness in Reconstruction," challenge a public record that had "almost barred" this crucial witness "from court," and emphasize the African American people's courageous striving for self-determination in the teeth of insuperable odds. Both also show how African Americans were driven "back toward slavery." Unlike Du Bois, however, Tourgée could exploit the mask of fiction and the authority he possessed as a white participant in Reconstruction to express his outrage at the nation's abandonment of African Americans. Grimly chronicling the "counter-revolution" that so swiftly eliminated the rights the freedpeople had won with the help of their white supporters, he excoriates the northern public for succumbing so credulously to the white supremacist propaganda campaign against Reconstruction. In the process, he articulates insights as relevant to the present as to the past.
Tourgée could assume his nineteenth-century readers' familiarity with the main contours of Reconstruction politics, as covered in the leading newspapers of the North. Hence, he concentrated on refuting myths about "Negro rule" and exploding the illusion that a new day of peace and harmony had dawned in the South since its ruling elites had been allowed to regulate race relations without federal interference. For twenty-first-century readers, on the other hand, an overview of Reconstruction history and of Tourgée's career, so inextricably intertwined with it, can enhance appreciation of his talents as a political novelist by revealing the factual basis of his gripping plot.
THE MAKING OF A RADICAL
Tourgée's life qualified him exceptionally well for setting the historical record straight so that the nation could undo its mistakes-the mission he undertook in Bricks Without Straw. Born in 1838 in Ohio's Western Reserve, a region burning with the abolitionist zeal its settlers credited to their New England heritage, he grew up exposed to many of the radical ideas he would later champion. Two of the nation's most committed antislavery politicians, Joshua R. Giddings and Benjamin F. Wade, both from Tourgée's native Ashtabula County, represented Ohio in the House and Senate. Though an "ardent disciple" of Giddings, as he afterward recalled, the youthful Tourgée did not act on his convictions that blacks were fellow human beings and slavery was "damnable." As late as February 1860, when his fiancée Emma Kilbourne announced that she had "become quite a rabid little petticoated Black Republican" (as members of the fledgling Republican party were labeled to associate them with African Americans), Tourgée made fun of her. "Will you require your Fiancée to swear fealty to your political views, and pledge himself, in black & white to vote for all Republican candidates and none others, as some others of your sex have done?" he demanded. In hindsight he berated himself as an "egregious ass" for having held himself aloof from the abolitionist movement he portrayed so admiringly in his mature writings.
It was Tourgée's contact with fugitive slaves and black soldiers in Union army camps during his Civil War service that converted him into an impassioned advocate of racial equality. He enlisted as soon as the war broke out, driven like most early volunteers by a desire to prove his manhood and his patriotism. The battle of Bull Run left him paralyzed from the waist down after the wheel of a gun carriage struck him in the back during the Union army's frenzied rout. Regaining mobility nine months later by sheer force of will, he signed up as a recruiter and joined the regiment he had raised, the Ohio 105th Volunteer Infantry, made up of men who "carried the antislavery fervor of the Western Reserve with them to the warfront." Hardly had the 105th arrived at its first destination in Lexington, Kentucky, than its members confronted the anomaly of an " 'abolition regiment' in a loyal slave state," as Tourgée put it in his history of the 105th, The Story of a Thousand (1896). Along the march route, he reminisced, "colored men came, one by one, and offered to bring water, to carry guns or knapsacks,-anything, if they could only follow us" and thereby hasten their own liberation and the downfall of slavery. In their wake came irate masters seeking to reclaim their runaway property. Because Kentucky was siding with the Union, the Lincoln administration's policy obliged soldiers to surrender runaways to "loyal" claimants-orders "abhorrent" to men whose families in Ohio had been sheltering escaped slaves from the human bloodhounds on their trail. Tourgée cited several instances of soldiers and officers who defied their superiors by protecting the fugitives in their midst, provoking the Kentucky general commanding the 105th to shout, "You are all Abolition nigger-stealers."
The opportunity to rub elbows with black men under wartime conditions taught Tourgée to respect a race he had hitherto considered inferior, as he subsequently admitted. For example, while performing picket duty on a "dark and rainy night" in January 1863, shortly after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, Tourgée was startled by the approach of a "trembling slave, who, when he had assured himself of kindly treatment, drew from secure concealment in his dusky bosom a paper containing a copy of [the president's] message, and asked-Please sir will you tell me-is this true." (We do not know what Tourgée replied, but the Emancipation Proclamation did not in fact free slaves in loyal states, though it did enable thousands to win their freedom by enlisting in the Union Army.) The encounter sharpened Tourgée's awareness of how attentively the slaves were following the war news. It also convinced him that despite draconian laws against allowing slaves access to literacy, some managed to learn to read and used that skill to free themselves and their fellows. On another occasion, Tourgée and a comrade attended a "meeting of the 'Cullud population' of the Brigade," as he recorded in his diary on 7 June 1863. What he saw there of African Americans as political agents apparently impressed Tourgée enough to prompt him to request a transfer two weeks later to a black regiment. "I know there is little hope of any mercy being shown" to a captured soldier "connected with the colored troops," he mused, but "it is certainly the place for men who would serve the country best."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Bricks Without Straw by ALBION W. TOURGÉE Copyright © 2009 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
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Table of Contents
Acknowlegments ixIntroduction / Carolyn L. Karcher 1
Chronology 65
Bricks Without Straw 87
Annotations 433
Index 447