ABSTRACT
In Life’s Demands; or, According to Law (1916), African-American novelist, preacher, and essayist Sutton Griggs refl ects on the role that he wants his fi ction to play in national politics. After arguing that art proves the innate abilities and progress of a people, Griggs pinpoints the overarching effect of literature as the “development of the spirit of patriotism” (Griggs 1916: 98). Now Sutton Griggs’s novels, if they are at all read today, are often too easily summarized, and shelved away, as early expressions of black nationalist thought.1 So looming has been the plotted rebellion to create Texas into a black separatist state in Imperium in Imperio that critics often ignore that the novel ends with the image of one of the novel’s two male protagonists, Belton Piedmont, “shrouded in an American fl ag” (261) in an image that clearly echoes the conclusion to Nathan Hale’s famous 1863 short story “The Man without a Country,” in which the former traitor Philip Nolan dies under a shrine of “stars and stripes.”2 While discussions of African-American intellectual history at the turn of the twentieth century often start by invoking W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous question in the “Conservation of Race” (1897)—“Am I American or am I a Negro? Can I be both?”—to explore the debate over integration versus separatism, an American or pan-African identity (Du Bois 1996: 15), I want to argue we too often leave unexamined , as if it were somehow preexisting, natural, reifi ed, the “patriotic” or national identifi cation that African Americans could have-would have-“internalized” should they have chosen, as most of Griggs’s characters do in the end, to stay in America. In contrast, in
Life’s Demands, Griggs knew that patriotism was a political subjectivity that would have to be cultivated through, as he says in an odd choice of metaphors, the “embalming” of representations in the collective memory of the American people:
They who would foster the patriotic spirit so needful for the advancement of mankind must have a way of embalming the memories of those who thus serve their fellows, . . . The future progress of the Negro race calls for an awakening on the part of the people to the necessity of cultivating the habit of reading and a stimulation of the art of making literature as indispensable aids to the development of the spirit of patriotism. (98)
Griggs was not alone in wanting to constitute a representative fi gure of black patriotism. Particularly between the Spanish-American War and World War I, many African-American leaders such as Booker T. Washington drew on a long history of romantic racist imagery, from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin to the more recent plantation fi ction of Thomas Nelson Page (Moses 1978: 25), to portray African Americans as patriotic “Citizen Toms.” Due to their greater racial instincts toward affection, loyalty, self-sacrifi ce, and submissiveness, these Citizen Toms, it was implied, were more “natural” (than naturalized) American patriots and could be counted on as a “storehouse of loyalty” to support the troops, whether at home or overseas in Cuba and the Philippines. In his essay “The Trope of the New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr., has examined how various fi gures of the New Negro, in addition to talking back to derogatory stereotypes of African Americans, served as sites of struggle within the community over the meaning of black identity and citizenship (Gates 1988: 32). While Gates reminds us that there were different and competing tropes of the “New Negro,” these images, I want to underscore, functioned to defi ne a political subjectivity as well as a cultural and social identity for African Americans. In the 1890s and the early 1900s, when the United States was experiencing, as Cecilia Elizabeth O’Leary argues, a nationwide shift toward a sentimental mass patriotism (O’Leary 1999: 171-92), the fi gure of Citizen Tom arose as a way to name and include the African American within specifi c scenes and political discourses about a sentimental patriotism that was emerging to mark the boundaries of political and civic membership in the imagined community of America. Most of the modern rites and rituals of an expressive style of US patriotism, from the hanging of fl ags in public schools, the recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance, the observation of national anniversaries, to laws against the burning of the fl ag, grew out of patriotic movements beginning in the 1880s and 1890s, which pushed the socialization of mass patriotism in the wake of immigration and an emerging corporate culture that needed a national (as opposed to simply local or regional) consumer
market. By calling on the African-American artist to “embalm” patriotism, then, Griggs identifi es the work of his novels as the narrative shaping of a counterrepresentation of a “patriotic” African-descent US citizen at a historical moment of patriotic fervor and crisis.
