On Caroline Lee Hentz's "The Planter's Northern Bride"

Throughout Caroline Lee Hentz’s The Planter’s Northern Bride, nothing is more misunderstood and grossly misrepresented than the history of Africa. “For thousands of years past,” writes Hentz, “the Africans have existed in their own country as a separate people, free, as they came from the hands of God; yet what one solitary step have they taken in the great march of civilisation, beneath whose majestic tramp the universe is resounding?” Here, and elsewhere, Hentz fails to communicate the single most important fact which the history of Africa holds dearest: human civilisation and human existence began there. Archaeological discoveries throughout the Sahara and other parts of Africa predate anywhere else on Earth by thousands of years.

In addition to this, the biggest change Africa ever witnessed was what we might call ‘the coming of the white man.’ True, the European trader did not bring the concept of slavery with him: it had been a common practice throughout Africa for thousands of years, as it had throughout the Arab world. The Arab slave traders were trading in African flesh before the white man had barely conceived of a world beyond the Mediterranean. Quite how Hentz can call Africa “separate” when they traded flesh and other goods with Arab peoples is frankly bewildering.

The earliest Portuguese missionaries and explorers took Christianity with them to what was then the Kingdom of the Kongo. This imperial federation of the fifteenth century had approximately two to three million people, and surprised the white evangelists by how similar its social structure was to social stratification back in Europe. There was a monarch; the monarch was chosen by an assembly of clan leaders; the king had in his possession symbols of royal authority; he reviewed his troops; he sat on a throne; away from the king, distances were measured by marching days; and for longer periods of time the lunar month was used. The Portuguese grudgingly recognised in the kingdom a sophisticated and well-developed state.[1] Since then, “the great march of civilisation” as Hentz uses it has left a scar from east to west and from north to south on the breast of Africa, carved there not by native African implements, but by European revolvers and pistols, and by the financial greed and material desire of ‘men’. If Hentz is unwilling to recognise the sophistication and progress of chiefdoms such as the Kingdom of the Kongo, then her blindness to historical fact renders her manuscript void.

1 Adam Hochschild. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Colonial Africa. London: Macmillan, 1998.

On Kara Walker's "Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart"

The last part of Kara Walker’s installation Gone, An Historical Romance of a Civil War as It Occurred Between the Dusky Thighs of One Young Negress and Her Heart from 1994 shows a black silhouette literally flying away. Under such a title as the one above, this figure encapsulates the leaving of slavery from the South: it rises up and is banished. Apologies for the quality of the following image.


On another level, however, the figure encapsulates the African American myth / folklore of the slave who, without growing wings or feathers, took off and flew back to his spiritual homeland, and out of bondage. This myth acts as the crux of Toni Morrison’s 1977 novel Song of Solomon, and in many ways this section of Walker’s installation acts as a depiction of the final scene from that novel.

The figure in the air represents the character of Milkman, leaping as Shalimar had, to ride the air. On top of the rock, there sits a round object with possibly a rose coming out of it, which can be understood as the bag Pilate had carried the bones in to bury them. The figure in the bottom left hand corner which looks like a head rising out of the water is Guitar, shrouded in mystery as he tries once again to kill Milkman. The large unorthodox protruding stomach of Milkman’s figure represents the weight of his family history, literally the burden of all he has learnt of his eccentric family history.

White-Indian Relations, Cherokee Removal, and the Supreme Court of the United States

To what extent did the verdicts in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. Georgia (1832) reflect wider and / or popular views in Jacksonian America about White - Indian relations?

Within the remit of this essay, I will demonstrate that, through the precise wording of the opinions given in the Supreme Court cases of Cherokee Nation v. The State of Georgia (1831) and Worcester v. The State of Georgia (1832), the Justices of the court, under Chief Justices John Marshall, refuted more than they endorsed certain critical aspects of President Andrew Jackson’s federal Indian policy. It is my intention to further demonstrate that the relationship between white civilisation and American Indian civilisation, after being a ‘political football’ for some time, was manipulated by the Jackson administration, and that the Supreme Court decisions in the aforementioned cases failed to fulfil the Court’s constitutional remit of trying to keep the executive in check.

I will initially establish that the language they used with regard to the ‘civilising’ force of (Eurocentric) American society placed them at odds as a body with President Jackson and his administration, in that the Supreme Court did not align itself to the necessary Jacksonite preamble of removal to west of the Mississippi River for such a change to occur.

From the first European settlers in North America, the white man had tried to ‘civilise’ the ‘savage’ Indian: this fact alone acts as a marker of difference between the two cultures. Therefore one can expect that Western ideas of sovereignty with regard to the Indian tribes and nations would not fit comfortably with the latter: it is my intention to illustrate that not only was sovereignty (or supposed sovereignty) a central concern (albeit implicitly) of the Justices, but that their efforts to uphold it fell woefully short due to the Court misunderstanding the importance of tribal sovereignty to the Cherokees. Such a disaster was made worse in the face of hostility from both the Federal Government and the State Government of Georgia towards the Cherokees.

The debate over tribal sovereignty is critical as it composes a key element of the ‘foreign nation’ issue. Attacks upon Cherokee sovereignty were attacks upon their very right to call themselves a ‘nation’. Certainly the Jacksonites refused to acknowledge them as such, and Georgians and Georgia state legislators even less so.[1] I further show that Marshall and the Justices acted in the best interests of the Cherokee Nation (in terms of morality), even in the 1831 case, and would have announced the Cherokees ‘foreign’ if it were not for the commerce clause in the Constitution.

I then conclude that, although the Cherokees sought a friend in Chief Justice John Marshall, they indeed found a man very different from Old Hickory in the White House who was trying to remove them forcibly from their spiritual lands. Nevertheless, regardless of their acceptance of aspects of white culture (including the ratification of a constitution), their ties to sovereignty, and their ability to govern themselves, they were, in the end, let down and betrayed by the highest court in the United States. The body of the U.S. Government designed to curtail excessive executive and legislative extremes within the borders of the United States failed to define the white - Indian relationship explicitly and conclusively enough, allowing the other two branches of Government to ravage a nation which had once sought protection under it.

Chief Justice Marshall, it ought to be noted, was not unaccustomed to presiding over constitutionally significant Supreme Court cases (Marshall was in charge for Marbury v. Madison in 1803, let us not forget). As his judicial stint drew towards a close, he took it upon himself to define, for the benefit of the Federal Government, the apparently novel political relationship of the tribal nations with the United States.[2] This striving towards an almost conclusional definition of an undoubtedly complex relationship requires close scrutiny of Marshall’s cases involving American Indian tribes. Emphasis upon the refutation and verification of popular notions of White - Indian relations is necessary to place the cases and Marshall within the wider historical context of Jeffersonian America. How does the peculiar relationship between the American Indian tribes and the United States manifest itself in Supreme Court cases through the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a century which was engulfed initially by the issue, and later the execution of, both forced and voluntary removal of indigenous peoples?

Ever since Europeans had ‘discovered’ North America, they generally considered themselves as being more ‘civilised’ than the Native tribes and nations they found there. They defined their ‘civilised’ way of life through the existence of this new ‘savage’ Other. After the United States had won its freedom from Great Britain, president after president had spoken of ‘civilising’ the Indians. When Jackson assumed the presidency, he continued the country’s quest to civilise the Natives, but his method of doing so was inextricably linked to their prior removal west of the Mississippi. Whereas separation had once been one of a number of options for southern Indian tribes, Jackson made it compulsory. More extreme than Jackson were the politicians who advocated removing the Indians and leaving them there. Some, known as gradualists, emphasised the need to ‘civilise’ the natives. Jackson put the two together. As Weeks notes, “[o]nce physically separated from Americans, Indians would no longer impede white settlement and enterprise. At that point Gradualists would have sufficient time to implement their civilisation measures successfully.”[3]

The Marshall court had to take into account the manner in which ‘white civilisation’ was being constantly pushed on the Cherokees. At the very least, the Justices had to acknowledge that it was a force of some magnitude, due to Samuel A. Worcester, the named defendant in the second of the Cherokee cases, being a missionary trying to spread western ‘civilisation’ in the Cherokee nation when his initial detention was made. Nevertheless, specific mentions of the quest to bring Eurocentric ‘civilisation’ to that particular nation were made by the Justices. In delivering the opinion of the Court, Chief Justice Marshall observed that the Cherokee Nation was “in a state of pupilage. Their relation to the United States resembles that of a ward to his guardian.”[4] Embedded in the word ‘pupilage’ is the notion not only of a hierarchical relationship, but a relationship where one nation assumes the role of the teacher, and the other nation becomes the pupil. Marshall’s use of the word ‘pupilage’ is fundamental because education was critical to the entire programme of civilisation. On a national scale, Marshall invokes the idea that the Cherokees were currently in a learning process, guided by the United States, and this ideology was as present on the ground as it was in the upper echelons of the U.S. Government. By the time the second Cherokee case was decided by the Supreme Court, the education of Indians was being funded by the Federal Government to the tune of $21,000 a year.[5] Chief Justice Marshall kept the judiciary in line with the legislature in speaking of the Cherokees assuming a position akin to pupilage: since 1818 education had been seen by the House Committee on Indian Affairs as a useful means of influencing future Indian - white relations.[6] This position gained strong momentum with the appointment, within the executive, of Thomas McKenney to the head of the Indian Bureau as Andrew Jackson first assumed office in 1828.

Some doubt may remain as to whether Marshall, in delivering the opinion of the court, was merely making an observation as to the current state of things, or whether he was actively supporting such a position in doing so. If some doubt remains, a firmer endorsement of such a position can be found in the supporting opinion of Justice Johnson. With regard to agricultural education, Johnson observes: “it is said, that we have extended to them the means and inducement to become agricultural and civilized. It is true: and the immediate object of that policy was so obvious as probably to have intercepted the view of ulterior consequences.”[7] The means and ways of agriculture were undoubtedly a characteristic of Western civilisation if the hunter-gatherer culture was the survival method of the ‘savage’ Indians. Unlike the theoretical overall goal of ‘civilisation’, agricultural living could be more easily observed and taught and measured. To that extent, the introduction of farming had been something of a success among the Cherokees.[8] So much so, in fact, that Jeremiah Evarts, the secretary of the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, used this newfound agriculture as a theme against Indian removal to west of the Mississippi. His argument was based around fears that such removal to vast open land would counteract the Cherokees adaptation of Western farming methods.[9] Evarts was the Christian talisman of the campaign against the removal of the Cherokees to west of the Mississippi. Justice Johnson’s statement puts him in alignment with the man who, as Francis Prucha has put it, “became the single most important opponent of President Jackson on the Indian removal issue.”[10]

How did this new ‘civilised’ behaviour of the Cherokee nation change white - Indian relations, if at all? Justice Thompson comments in his dissenting opinion that “[the Cherokee nation] retains its usages and customs and self government, greatly improved by the civilization which it has been the policy of the United States to encourage and foster among them.”[11] If these tribes ‘retained their customs,’ then one has to ask: is a conflict here between American and Cherokee customs? It appears that, for Thompson, the federal policy with regard to The Civilisation Programme is yet to have a usurping effect with regard to traditional / historic Cherokee life. In his view, the two work together in equality, each one contributing to a life ‘greatly improved’ than the one which preceded it.

The peculiarities of this equality were not unique, however. Indeed, this opinion aligns itself among other views of the time: it garners support in the face of the force of white supremacy, and its unquestioned superiority to every other race. At a time when the ideology of white supremacy was making the enslavement of Africans the norm, some men of influence still managed to question the effect of white supremacy towards American Indians, especially the five ‘civilised’ tribes. In 1830, the Daily National Journal of Washington, D.C. began an editorial-style analysis of the current situation with: “If there be really that unmeasurable moral and intellectual difference between the citizens of the United States, and the Cherokee and other civilised Indians, which the Georgia and Jackson logicians pretend that there is, we think it ought to be evident in the intercourse which takes place between us.” This cuts to the heart of the debate, asking to see, once and for all, the difference - the visible, tangible difference - between the ‘civilised’ Cherokee, and the ‘civilised’ American. The editorial draws distinct parallels between the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix and the United States Secretary of War, freely mentioning them in the same breath, as if they were cut from the same cloth. As the article continues, it openly invites the reader to draw comparisons between the two (and exclude any differences there may be), thus attacking the current relationship between Indians and Americans as cultivated by federal and state legislative and executive policy makers:

The letter which we publish a few days since from the Secretary of War to the Cherokee nation, is, we presume, intended by the Government of the United States, to be the standard of our intellectual and moral capacity. Whether high or low, it is to be received as the standard on the one side. On the other, the Editor of the Cherokee Phoenix has exhibited the Indian standard of moral and intellectual character, and as our readers have formed their opinions of Mr. Eaton’s letter, we think it due to the Indians that the language of their Editor should also be read. It may be mortifying to our pride, as we set ourselves so far above our red brethren, and consider them beyond the reach of civilization, to see our Secretary of War put here [illegible] by a Cherokee Editor - not with the tomahawk and scalping knife, or any such savage appendage, but with the pen, that only weapon to which moral and intellectual capacity resorts, either for offensive or defensive warfare; but we must bear the mortification. Let our readers peruse the criticism of the Cherokee, and make their own comments.

We published in our last copy a letter from the Secretary of War to the agent of the Creek nation, and which was forwarded to the agent of the Cherokees as [illegible] applicable to them. It is indeed applicable to the people of this nation, if the criterion which Mr. Eaton sets forth is to be taken as correct …

It is for the candid reader to say whether such logic is worth any thing, or, in other words, whether the refusal of the terms contained in the Indian bill will make the Indian a perfect savage. And put him beyond the possibility of reform; for the whole communication is but a series of false premises and arguments to prove that an “Indian will still be an Indian,” - that he cannot be civilised … [12]

There can be little doubt that political motivations were present when composing such a piece as this. One has to enquire, though, if a newspaper editor would be willing to question the unquestionable by probing the validity of white supremacy, just to spite a president who’s popularity was, at the time, definitely under the microscope?[13] It seems to me more likely the unforgiving nature of the policies put into effect by the Jacksonites were raising such difficult questions within the factions of American society left rueing the initial election of Jackson himself.

Regardless of how this sudden scepticism of white supremacy arose, the author of the piece (who remains unnamed) asked for readers to ‘bear the mortification’ of seeing themselves in the same light as the Cherokees: he highlights the indifference between the white man and the red man, but instead of dwelling upon it, he asked the reader to move on, to look to the future, to ‘peruse the criticism of the Cherokee, and make their own comments’ and their own judgement by considering both, equally.

The alleged savagery of the Cherokee nation is considered by both the author of the newspaper piece and the Justices of the Supreme Court as being a previous state of existence. The change, they agree, has been made. Justice Thompson speaks of “the progress made in civilization by the Cherokee Indians”[14] in the past tense, acknowledging that any possible social change white America could ask the Cherokees to make has been done: to the same end, the newspaper article of the previous year states that no longer is warfare done ‘with the tomahawk and scalping knife, or any such savage appendage, but with the pen, that only weapon to which moral and intellectual capacity resorts.’ The progress of the Indians in the direction of Eurocentric American life, whether it was the adoption of Western methods of farming, the establishment of a constitution, the use of the pen as a diplomatic weapon in place of a knife, or the retention of aspects of traditional culture as parallel to adaptation to certain aspects of white American life - this progress was a strong line of argument for the anti-Jacksonites in the presidential campaign of 1832, and for the twenty four previous months and longer they highlighted it, in order to suggest that the policies of the Jackson administration, the Federal Government, and the state of Georgia were warped into a condition where Indian removal was the only possible outcome, regardless of whatever action had been taken / was to be taken in the future by the statesmen of the Cherokee nation. From the wording of their opinions in the Cherokee cases, the Justices aligned themselves within this school of thought, along with publications such as the Daily National Journal and, of course, the Cherokee Phoenix: John Marshall, a long-time critic of Andrew Jackson’s, was quite at home there.

By 1832 the Cherokee issue was in the presidential election debating circle dwarfed, admittedly, by the debate over the national debt and Jackson’s attitude and actions towards the second Bank of the United States. It remained, however, a campaign issue, and ultimately cost the incumbent some votes. Most of these votes were in the north east of the United States, and thus mattered very little, but it was there, among northern philanthropists, that the idea of letting the Cherokees stay garnered the most support. Justice McLean, being only an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, could take a more outspoken stance than John Marshall, who, as Chief Justice delivering the opinion of the Court, had to walk a finer line - McLean was able to sum up the developments of the Cherokee nation and speak openly about letting them stay on their ancestral land. In his opinion in the Worcester case, he wrote: “are not those nations of Indians who have made some advances in civilization, better neighbours than those who are still in a savage state?”[15] The word ‘neighbours’ has connotations of the Cherokee nation becoming a state of the Union, alongside and separate from Georgia. Regardless of whether he meant to imply this or not, Justice McLean now felt confident to manipulate the ‘civilising’ adaptations of the red man as a vehicle for allowing him to stay upon him spiritual home.

In his American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court, David Wilkins suggests two main dimensions of tribal sovereignty: the first is a political/legal dimension, and the second is a broader cultural/spiritual dimension.[16] The breadth of this second element does not always stop it from being easily lost amongst the finer legal and political details of studies focusing on Supreme Court cases involving American Indian tribes. When sovereignty is so largely and strongly assumed from cultural and spiritual traits unique to the indigenous North American nations, the sovereignty manifests itself in ways not akin to Western legal thought and can appear out of place in Western legal procedures.

Chief Justice John Marshall observed in 1831’s Cherokee Nation v. Georgia opinion that “the relation of the Indians to the United States is marked by peculiar and cardinal distinctions which exist no where else.”[17] This peculiarity, I believe, was derived as much from the uniqueness of the construction of American Indian sovereignty as it was from the fumbling attempts of the United States judiciary (and the wider Federal Government) to wrestle some meaning out of it. At a time when two of the three branches of the Federal Government (as well as State Governments such as Georgia) were pushing hard for the removal of the Cherokee nation, these ‘peculiar and cardinal distinctions’ become of the utmost importance and today they demand a lot of attention with regard to how they work in favour of but also against the sovereignty of the Indians in question.

The crusade towards the removal of American Indian nations was well under way by the time Chief Justice Marshall re-examined and reiterated his Doctrine of Discovery in 1832’s Worcester v. Georgia case. The formal positioning of the Federal Government at the time of the opinion was far from one of outright hostility towards the Indian tribes: up until the last five years, Indians usually sold lands to the settlers as they demanded it, allowing the President and Congress to portray the cession as one which had been voluntary. The treaties the Indians signed showed no signs of the agitation and threats which had often preceded its writing.[18]

The treaty remained the central form of communication and interpretation of power between Indian tribes and the Federal Government, but with the election of Andrew Jackson to the presidency in 1828 their importance was dented somewhat: for years, Jackson had considered the making of treaties with the Indians a farcical activity at best, and in March 1817 he complained to the then President James Monroe of the absurdity of making treaties with the Indians.[19] Nevertheless, treaties remained of great significance to the judiciary, even if the head of the executive had little time for them. This difference in attitudes is imperative: not only does it highlight the political gulf between Marshall and Jackson, it also serves as an identifier as to each man’s stance on the question of Indian sovereignty. Jackson loathed the concept of the treaty because it suggested the Indians had jurisdiction, power, authority, and legitimate sovereignty over where they resided.[20] Marshall liked the concept of the treaty for the very same reason, as is evident in the Cherokee case opinions. In ruling on Worcester v. Georgia, Marshall carefully describes his Doctrine of Discovery through his reciting of the Treaty of Hopewell from 1785. His description of the wording is worth noting:

The English, the French, and the Spaniards, were equally competitors for their friendship and their aid. Not well acquainted with the exact meaning of words, nor supposing it to be material whether they were called the subjects, or the children of their father in Europe; lavish in professions of duty and affection, in return for the rich presents they received; so long as their actual independence was untouched, and their right to self government acknowledged, they were willing to profess dependence on the power which furnished supplies of which they were in absolute need, and restrained dangerous intruders from entering their country.[21]

Marshall’s emphasis of the Cherokee’s ease with acquiring any title which the settlers were wishing to apply to them should be considered only alongside his later observation that “it [is] reasonable to suppose, that the Indians … could not write, and most probably could not read [and] certainly were not critical judges of our language.”[22] Whether he intended to or not, Marshall implies that those who were wording the treaty - the settlers - did so in a way which gave two different meanings to the settlers and the Indians. To use Marshall’s example, the Indians would not distinguish between ‘allotted’ and ‘marked out’ land. The inclusion of the former rather than the latter would be interpreted by judicial authorities as land which had been given from one party to another (from the settlers to the Indians) rather than just assumed by the Indians.

Also manifested in the above quote is the notion that the Cherokees were, in fact, ‘domestic dependent nations.’ It was this assertion a year earlier in Cherokee Nation v. Georgia that resulted in Marshall deciding not to decide the case, so to speak. It was a case in which he could not agree with the counsel’s argument that the Cherokee’s were a sovereign foreign nation as defined by the Constitution, yet nor could he agree with the administration’s defence (although no counsel for Georgia turned up to either of the Cherokee cases) that the tribes were at the mercy of Georgia.[23] For a Supreme Court Chief Justice who had set out to contextualise and give substance and meaning to the relationship of the Federal Government to the American Indians, Marshall’s inability and unwillingness to conclusively rule either way in the first of the two Cherokee cases led him to undertake two unusual measures. First, he urged the dissenting Justice Thompson to write an opinion (which he initially did not plan to do), and, second, he included in his own opinion guidance for how to bring another case before the Supreme Court.[24]

On initial inspection, Chief Justice Marshall’s examination of sovereignty in relation to the Cherokee nation and its relationship to the United States appears inconsistent from one case to the next. In 1831’s Cherokee Nation case, he writes that “[t]hey never have been recognised as holding sovereignty over the territory they occupy,”[25] but twelve months later he was quoting Swiss philosopher Vattel and asserting that “‘Tributary and feudatory states,’ says Vattel, ‘do not thereby cease to be sovereign and independent states, so long as self government and sovereign and independent authority are left in the administration of the state.’”[26] How can the two co-exist together? Had Marshall’s personal opinion altered so much in less than twelve months?

The critical difference between the two centres on the way in which each case came to the Supreme Court. In 1831 the Cherokee nation filed as a sovereign nation independent of the United States (hence the case name), but Marshall felt that the Commerce clause (“To regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States, and with the Indian Tribes”[27]) of the Constitution was proof enough that the Cherokees were not, in the eyes of the Constitution, a foreign nation. So while they were not a sovereign, independent nation, they did still retain the right to sovereign authority and self-government.

Nevertheless, Marshall later asserts that it “cannot be questioned that the right of sovereignty, as well as soil, was notoriously asserted and exercised by the European discoverers.”[28] Marshall’s observation is purely that: an observation. This observation was, however, a desired reality for many pro-Jackson newspapers. In 1830, the Louisville Public Advertiser, which at the time was the most powerful newspaper in Kentucky,[29] showed no willingness to halt the sweeping away of the ‘red man’ by the ‘white tide’. In support of removal to West of the Mississippi River, the Advertiser remembers that “the increase of the whites … caused the tribes of the north to be swept from the face of the earth, as with a “sweeping pestilence” - and the tribes of the south must inevitably “share the same fate,” unless they consent to emigrate beyond the Mississippi.”[30] The lack of sentimentality for the loss of many indigenous peoples and so many varied and numbered unique cultures further emphasises the force of the white invasion of North America: one which, for not only the Louisville Public Advertiser, but for many Jacksonites, was set to continue in the coming decade.

Moreover, Marshall’s brief historical observation is not followed by any statement asserting that such a trend either does or should continue by 1831. The statement holds within it one word upon which it pivots: notoriously. The word carried with it the same meaning in 1831 as it does today: “with depreciative or unfavourable connotations.”[31] Without the word, the statement becomes ambivalent towards to Indians, but with its inclusion, Marshall takes a stance against the prolonging of such policies, highlighting their ‘notoriousness’. He takes the first tentative steps towards defending Indian sovereignty, which was nullified under European sovereignty, but in a case where he was ruling them not a sovereign nation in the guise of the Constitution, he was limited in what he could say.

The Jacksonites’ acceptance of the utter inevitability of the indigenous peoples of the south suffering the same fate as the tribes who used to inhabit the north of the United States is not shared by the Justices of the Supreme Court. It is against such single-minded views that they were writing. Through the entire editorial, at no point is assimilation and the retaining of their historic sovereignty over their ancestral lands even thought of as a possible alternative solution to annihilation. Indian claims to sovereignty appear utterly futile in the face of such harsh sentences, but newspapermen who opposed the Jacksonites understood the situation differently.

The Norwich Courier newspaper took an educated stance towards Chief Justice Marshall’s non-decision in the 1831 Cherokee Nation case. It understood the legal correctness of the decision taken by Marshall, but observed that it did not really matter at all. [32] What should be of the utmost concern was the morality of the Cherokee cause. Chief Justice Marshall was in full agreement with this, as early on he stated that “if courts were permitted to indulge their sympathies, a case better calculated to excite them can scarcely be imagined.”[33] As the contention of the sovereignty of the Cherokee nation got in the way of the morals, a new case seemed inevitable, and once it came in the form of Worcester v. Georgia, Marshall intended to indulge himself.

As the debate over the Cherokee nation’s claim to sovereignty with regard to their spiritual lands continued through 1830, the Baltimore Republican dragged up old sentiments of John Quincy Adams from 1802, in which he asks: “[b]ut what is the right of a huntsman to the forest of a thousand miles, over which he has accidentally roamed in quest of prey?”[34] This is another instance where the cultural divide between the European immigrants to North America and the native peoples manifests itself in relation to the definition, understanding and execution of ‘sovereignty.’ Whereas white Americans had established individualism as a fundamental trait of life in the New World, inherent as it was in ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,’ such a term as ‘individualism’ was most foreign to tribesmen who were living in a culture where the tribe was sovereign. Adams was spectacularly missing the point in asking what the relationship of the huntsman to the forest was, for the huntsman himself had no sovereignty over the forest in the slightest. The emphasis of such a question should have been on the relation of the collective to the land.[35] Tribal nations, whether Adams cared to admit it or not, carried with them a measure of inherent sovereignty.[36]

Adams’s failure to grasp, understand, and implement tribal sovereignty to any significant degree is far from unique. Within Supreme Court rulings there is a long history of a failure to recognise it, and it dates back to 1831’s Cherokee Nation v. Georgia case.[37] It was in his opinion of this case that Chief Justice Marshall made an unwise (and racist) comparison to sovereignty among different European nations: “[t]hey have in Europe sovereign and demi-sovereign states and states of doubtful sovereignty. But this state, if it be a state, is still a grade below them all.”[38] For a man who had already come to the fair conclusion that their relationship to the United States was that of a ‘ward to a guardian’, Marshall implies that their tribal sovereignty, and the tribes claim to this land which was now considered to be a part of the state of Georgia, is simply not equal to the sovereignty of European nations. Wilkins is quite clear that tribal sovereignty is different from European notions of sovereignty, but Marshall makes it worthless in the face of the latter, stating it is ‘a grade below them all’.

This lack of recognition for the value of tribal sovereignty and complete misunderstanding of the concept, along with its comprehensive difference from European sovereignty, was rife throughout America in the 1830’s. As one historian, Marques James, has noted, “on a frontier the violation of an Indian treaty was regarded as a prerogative of the superior race.”[39] Indian sovereignty could not be expected to fair any better. The Supreme Court’s inability to defend what it could only misinterpret made it, at best, ineffective, and at worst, ignorantly racist. What James also touched upon here, is the notion of dominance that the Federal Government carried out of such treaty-making negotiations, and such ascendancy was infused in Justice Baldwin’s opinion of the Cherokee Nation case (Baldwin’s opinion concurred with Marshall’s opinion). “To correctly understand the constitution,” wrote Baldwin, “we must read it with reference to this well known existing state of our relations with the Indians; the United States asserting the right of soil, sovereignty, and jurisdiction, in full dominion; the Indians oecupant [sic], of allotted hunting grounds.”[40]

But not everybody was so enthralled by the state of current events. One Mr. Adams,[41] in a memorial for a large number of citizens from New York to Congress, described a changed American attitude towards white - Indian relations to the legislature at the same time that Chief Justice Marshall decided Worcester v. Georgia case in 1832. The Carolina Observer happily published the text of what was said, with statements pertaining to Georgia’s “equal disregard for the Union, and the rights of the Indians.”[42] Both Indian rights, including their sovereignty, and the state of the Union were, in the eyes of Mr. Adams and the other memorialists, equally tarnished. Whilst it is too big a leap to presume that these men considered regard for the Union and regard for Indian rights and Indian sovereignty as being due equal consideration, it is clear they understood that there was a relationship between the two: a crushing of Indian rights would be a severe blow to Federal Government, as Indian rights were (supposedly) protected in countless treaties between the two, and independent from State Governments. In 1832 the American Revolution and the war against ‘big’ Government were still within living memory, but some men, such as these memorialists, realised that a Union between the separate states still had to have some power drawing them together as one.

The relationship between the Cherokees and the whites is undoubtedly a complex one. Chief Justice Marshall’s willingness to consider and acknowledge the effect of the ‘civilising’ force of western methods of farming gave him a broader view than Jackson afforded himself. Justice Johnson’s alignment with humanitarian Jeremiah Evarts gave himself (and the wider Supreme Court bench) a position confounding the federal policy being churned out by the executive and the legislature; and Justice Thompson went as far as giving an opinion with the beginnings of questioning white supremacy. To speak of savagery as a previous state of existence credited the Cherokee nation with the ability to evolve in ways which the European Americans thought to be progressive. The Supreme Court Justices acknowledged and recognised it, but could do nothing to enforce it.

Ultimately, the Justices lack of clarity with regard to sovereignty in the face of Jackson’s hostility let the Cherokees down. Whilst it is true the Justices did not share the same opinion of some Jacksonite newspapers that the annihilation of the southern tribes was a forgone conclusion, they did not define tribal sovereignty explicitly enough to take a meaningful stance against such an outcome. The Bench’s willingness to consider the text of treaties (especially the Treaty of Hopewell) carefully was more than Jackson was willing to do, but their failure to draw meaningful conclusions in favour of Indian sovereignty as existing on behalf of the Cherokee nation made their efforts yet another step on the road towards the Trail of Tears. As Rogin put it, “white policy makers imagined Indian destruction as an abstracted and generalized process removed from human control and human reality.”[43] The branch of the Federal Government which is supposed to keep the executive and legislature in check failed to make them think again and recognise both the strength of tribal sovereignty and the strides in ‘civilisation’ the Cherokees had taken to remain on their land. Their failure with regard to the former stemmed from their inability to comprehend it.

Notes
1 Gagnon writes: “[p]rior to his [1828] election as President, Jackson had already decided to treat the numerous Indian tribes, and their citizens, within the borders of the United States as citizens of the United States rather than as sovereign and independent nations.” Joshua A. Gagnon, “The “Great American Desert”: The Congressional Debate on the Indian Removal Act of 1830,” thesis, University of Maine at Farmington, 2006.
2 David Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice, (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997): 21. Although Wilkins makes this point specifically in relation to the case of Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, it applies, I feel, to a number of major cases involving Indians, certainly all the cases he presided over mentioned here in this paper.
3 Joseph Weeks, Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States in the Nineteenth Century, (2nd edn.: Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2001): 42.
4 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1, 5 Pet. 1, 8 L.Ed. 25 (1831) 17.
5 Donald N. Satz, American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era, (2nd edn.: Norman, OK: Red River Books, 2002): 247.
6 Ibid., 247.
7 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 23.
8 For a thorough account of Indians and the introduction of Western farming methods, see Janet A. McDonnell, The Dispossession of the American Indian: 1887 - 1934, (Indianapolis, IN: Indian U.P., 1991), esp. Ch 2, “Putting the Land to Work: Indian Farming and Stockraising.”
9 Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father volume 1: The United States Government and the American Indians, (London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1984): 203.
10 Francis P. Prucha, “Protest by Petition: Jeremiah Evarts and the Cherokee Indians”, in Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society 97, (1985): 46.
11 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 60.
12 “The Cherokees,” Daily National Journal (Washington, DC). Nov. 9, 1830.
13 Kenneth Penn Davis notes, with regard to the election of 1832, that “[i]t was suggested by many that Jackson would be defeated by Henry Clay,” illustrating that Jackson’s popularity was far from universal throughout his entire time in office. Kenneth Penn Davis. “Chaos in the Indian Country: The Cherokee Nation, 1828-35.” The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History. Ed. Duane H. King. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1979: 138.
14 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 55.
15 Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515, 6 Pet. 515, 8 L.Ed. 483 (1832) 590.
16 David Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court, 20.
17 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 16.
18 Joseph C. Burke, “The Cherokee Cases: A Study in Law, Politics, and Morality”, in Stanford Law Review 21, 3 (Feb. 1969): 501.
19 Francis P. Prucha, The Great Father volume 1, 192.
20 Ibid., 192.
21 Worcester v. Georgia, 546-7.
22 ibid., 552.
23 Satz, 45.
24 Burke, “The Cherokee Cases,” 516.
25 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 22.
26 Worcester v. Georgia, 561.
27 “The Constitution of the United States,” Article 1, Section 8, Clause 3.
28 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 22.
29 John E. Kleber, The Encyclopaedia of Louisville, (Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001): 655.
30 “Indian Sovereignty,” Louisville Public Advertiser. Feb. 26, 1830.
31 “notoriously, adv.” OED Online, Sept. 2009, Oxford University Press, Jan. 17, 2009,
32 The Norwich Courier article is reprinted under the heading “Indian Question,” Cherokee Phoenix. Apr. 30, 1831. “[T]his decision affects not in the slightest degree the moral question as to the treatment of the Indians,” wrote the editor of the Courier.
33 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 15.
34 Reprinted under the title “Indian Title to Sovereignty,” Louisville Public Advertiser. July 13, 1830.
35 Asking such a question as this would have drawn Adams closer to the answer that the tribe was sovereign over the forest, not the individual huntsman. Such an answer of course, would have been most undesirable towards the policy of his administration in 1802.
36 David Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court, 19-20.
37 Ibid., 126.
38 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 26-7.
39 Marquis James, The Life of Andrew Jackson, (New York, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1940): 549.
40 Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 40.
41 This Mr. Adams is not John Quincy Adams, for he was deceased six years before this. This Mr. Adams remains unnamed.
42 “Congress: House of Representatives,” Carolina Observer. Mar. 13, 1832.
43 Michael P. Rogin, Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian, (New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975): 247-8.

Bibliography
Brady, Cyrus T. The True Andrew Jackson. London: J.B. Lippincott Co., 1906.

Burke, Joseph C. “The Cherokee Cases: A Study in Law, Politics, and Morality.” Stanford Law Review. 21. 3 (Feb. 1969): 500 - 531.

Cave, Alfred A. Jacksonian Democracy and the Historians. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 1964.

Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, 30 U.S. 1, 5 Pet. 1, 8 L.Ed. 25 (1831).

“Congress: House of Representatives.” Carolina Observer. Mar. 13, 1832: np.

Davis, Kenneth Penn. “Chaos in the Indian Country: The Cherokee Nation, 1828-35.” The Cherokee Indian Nation: A Troubled History. Ed. Duane H. King. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press, 1979. 129 - 147.

Gagnon, Joshua A. “The “Great American Desert”: The Congressional Debate on the Indian Removal Act of 1830.” thesis. University of Maine at Farmington. 2006.

Gammon, Samuel R. The Presidential Campaign of 1832. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins Press, 1922.

“Indian Question.” Cherokee Phoenix. Apr. 30, 1831: np.

“Indian Sovereignty.” Louisville Public Advertiser. Feb. 26, 1830: np.

“Indian Title to Sovereignty.” Louisville Public Advertiser. July 13, 1830: np.

James, Marquis. The Life of Andrew Jackson. New York, NY: Garden City Publishing Co., 1940.

Kleber, John E. The Encyclopaedia of Louisville. Louisville, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2001.

McDonnell, Janet A. The Dispossession of the American Indian: 1887 - 1934. Indianapolis, IN: Indian U.P., 1991.

“notoriously, adv.” OED Online. Sept. 2009. Oxford University Press. Jan. 17, 2009. http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00327592?single=1&query_type=word&queryword=notoriously&first=1&max_to_show=10>

Prucha, Francis P. Indian Policy in the United States: Historical Essays. London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1981.

---. The Great Father volume 1: The United States Government and the American Indians. London: The University of Nebraska Press, 1984.

---. “Protest by Petition: Jeremiah Evarts and the Cherokee Indians.” Proceedings of the Massachusetts Historical Society. 97 (1985): 42 - 58.

Rogin, Michael P. Fathers and Children: Andrew Jackson and the Subjugation of the American Indian. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1975.

Satz, Donald N. American Indian Policy in the Jacksonian Era. 2nd edn.: Norman, OK: Red River Books, 2002.

“The Cherokees.” Daily National Journal (Washington, DC). Nov. 9, 1830: np.

Weeks, Joseph. Farewell, My Nation: The American Indian and the United States in the Nineteenth Century. 2nd edn.: Wheeling, IL: Harlan Davidson, 2001.

Wilkins, David. American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 1997.

Williams, Robert A. The American Indian in Western Legal Thought: The Discourses of Conquest. Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1990.

Worcester v. Georgia, 31 U.S. 515, 6 Pet. 515, 8 L.Ed. 483 (1832).

Hollywood and Historical Fact

Gone With The Wind remains one of the most watched and celebrated films of all time, and its popularity today is encapsulated by a 70th anniversary edition DVD release. The film endures for the same reasons it was an instant success at the box office in 1939 (the romantic love triangle in the face of adversity, nostalgia for a bygone, apparently simpler, era, etc.), and the very fact that it continues to enjoy such popularity is perhaps telling of the United States true inability to fully recover from the civil war. Furthermore, for a film which premiered in Atlanta, GA, and thus barred Hattie McDaniel and the other black actors and actresses from attending its first screening, Gone With The Wind embodies the perpetuating covert racism which will seemingly forever endure in the United States.


As Edward Campbell has noted, the 1960’s and the on-set of the Civil Rights Movement allowed Hollywood to reconsider the plantation film in a more honest light. Yet the fact that a more historically accurate (and honest) portrayal of plantation life for African Americans has not even reached half the heights of Gone With The Wind underscores that, when faced with a choice between the comforting myth and the harsh reality, Americans will almost always sacrifice historical fact.

The State of the Game: April 2010

The county cricket season has opened once more, this time at the earliest ever point in the calendar year, and it is worthwhile considering the current state of cricket in England and Wales. We need to ask some difficult questions: what is good about the current domestic setup? What systemic problems are there? And how can we improve the domestic game to help England improve as a cricketing nation?


It is useful to begin by looking at two foreign setups, and the function they fulfil: baseball in the United States, and cricket in Australia.

In the United States, the whole system is constructed with one thing in mind: making the best players better for each individual ball club. How many times have you heard announcers (that’s American for commentators, for all you who are not accustomed with American sports terminology) say that such and such a player has “come through the minors,” or they “got sent back to triple A, but since coming back to Wrigley Field they’ve been much improved”? The entire minor league setup is built around garnering the best talent for the major league ball clubs. The top minor league is triple-A; below that is double-AA; and below that is class A which is broken down again into three more tiers. Minor league ball clubs are affiliated with one team and one team only in the majors. Most major league ball clubs have associates at every level. This “farm system” is ruthless. This farm system works. The best players learn their trade in the minors; they polish their skills and are made as ready as possible for the big leagues.

If a similar setup was implemented in English domestic cricket, the most talented cricketers would be procured for Test level at a higher level than they are at the moment. The purpose of the English County Championship has to be to produce the best cricketers to represent England in Test matches. In effect, the County Championship has to become, to a greater extent, what minor leagues are to major league baseball. It has to be the top minor league. Every single player in the County Championship has to have his sights set on representing England at Test Match level.

One of the easiest ways to improve the domestic game in England is to make it as close a mirror of Test match cricket as is possible. Some alterations are easy to spot: we’re talking five day matches; ninety overs in a day; a new ball after eighty overs. Five day matches are a good idea because more matches will be won and lost, i.e. not drawn. Cricketers would get a better sense of how to win a Test Match. That might sound silly. But think back to England’s tour of the West Indies in the winter season of 2008 / 09, and twice England failed to win from two very dominant positions.

Of course, five day matches would mean fewer games could be played. That’s no bad thing. The best alteration made to the County game in the 1990’s was the two division system. There are eighteen counties, so why not go one step further: three divisions of six. Think of the top tier as triple-A, the middle tier as double-A, and the bottom tier as class-A. Each County would play ten County Championship matches through one season. That means a maximum of fifty days cricket a season with five day matches. Therefore, there should not be the nonsense of “resting” players as player fatigue should simply not be an issue. Fifty days of Championship cricket leaves space for the shorter competitions built in around the Championship, but the Championship has to take precedent over twenty20 cricket and other limited overs forms of cricket.

The current bonus points system in the County Championship is nothing short of a joke. It is pathetic. There has to be a bonus points system, but it does not have to be so complicated. Teams still have to be encouraged to try and win a game of cricket. Therefore, let us have twenty points for a win. But it rains a lot in England; sometimes a result is not always possible. Therefore, six points for a lead on first innings and six points for a drawn match. Under such a system, there is still the incentive to win the match.

One of the big debates in recent years has been the issue of overseas players. I am of the opinion that overseas players are, to a certain extent, good for the development of English cricketers. In my opinion, a maximum of two overseas players should be able to take to the field for a single county. The COLPAC regulation has blurred the meaning of “overseas”. As long as nine of any one County Championship side are eligible to represent England in Test Match cricket, I do not care whether they are called overseas, COLPAC or foreign.

There are issues left unresolved here. What about England players with central contracts? How do they fit into the system? We surely cannot abolish central contracts; they have proven to be one of the best innovations of the Duncan Fletcher era. They have to stay. And to be honest, I am not sure there is a conflict of interests between the system I have proposed and central contracts, but I am sure there are issues which I have not covered here.

Much of the success of Australia in world cricket over the past two decades (though as an Englishman it feels like much longer) has been attributed to the strength of their first class game, the Sheffield Shield. This competition is contested by six state sides (the same number of teams, you’ll notice, who would make up the top division of my plan, above), and competition is fierce to get into those sides. Australia is a big country with a large pool of cricketing talent; in the Sheffield Shield, the best play the best. Regularly. That is what we need in England. Television coverage is central to highlighting the top division of three Championship tiers in England. At present, I think only two County Championship matches are broadcast on Sky Sports through the whole of the summer. That is not enough. Increased television coverage of a competition which is contested by the top six counties would throw emphasis upon that competition and make it of greater importance: players would get used to playing in front of television cameras and get used to the in-depth scrutiny that only Sky Sports can provide.

How Is Transgressing One Boundary Of Identity Inextricably Linked With Transgressing Other Boundaries In Nella Larsen’s Novels Quicksand And Passing?

The debate as to whether Nella Larsen’s work can be rightly tagged as ‘tragic mulatto’ fiction is a complex one. And while this is an important argument to consider, the issue of class in Larsen’s Quicksand and Passing has often been put to one side. It remains, however, a critical factor and a key concern of Helga Crane, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, whether they are conscious of it or not. The factions of race, class and gender are all interwoven and inextricably linked within the texts, and cannot (and should not) be considered in isolation from one another. The issue of class feeds into the racialisation of the novels and is of at least equal significance as to whether or not Quicksand and Passing should be labelled as ‘tragic mulatto’.

It is therefore necessary to first consider the relationship between ‘race’ and ‘class’, bearing in mind the historical period in which Larsen was writing (Quicksand first appeared in 1928, with Passing just a year later). I will then define ‘white America’ in relation to both Quicksand and Passing, and contextualise its stratifying forces with regard to, firstly, African American society as a whole, and secondly, to the smaller communities Helga Crane transgresses into and out of, and I will define where she is placed within that stratification.

Without approaching the issue monocausallly, it has been observed that the strongest and singularly most important bond between the two stratifying forces of race and class is that of skin tone. As Verna Keith and Cedric Herring have observed, “light skin color continued to be a distinctive characteristic of upper-class status and to shape the opportunity structure in the black community well into the 1920s” [1] (emphasis mine). At the close of the Civil War, light skinned African Americans emerged at the top in terms of social stratification in black communities (they held a monopoly in that position for the next 50 years, according to Keith and Herring), and their occupations were one of a small number: the small businessman; the skilled labourer; service workers with white clientele; or a sprinkling of professionals. [2] Larsen’s manipulation of this long and widely understood set of conventions is indisputable: Irene’s husband Brian is a doctor (playing the role of the professional), and Clare, in her younger days, is described as “the daughter of Mr. Bob Kendry, who, it was true, was a janitor, but who also, it seemed, had been in college with some of their fathers.” [3] In some instances the class structure as defined by one’s occupation usurps race in importance, i.e. connections are made across the colour line through ties of class similarities. Larsen utilises this complexity in the minor character of Gertrude, another light skinned African American, who, when she married Fred Martin (a white man), was marrying a man who inherited from his father the local meat market, making him a small businessman. Indeed, on account of its moving to the more lavish sounding Maryland Avenue from the more ordinary Cottage Grove, the meat market appears to be doing an exceptional trade. [4] Nevertheless, the fact that this complexity is of very little significance to the structure, plot and outcome of the story reflects that, in the late 1920’s, such crossings of the colour line based on class (and more specifically occupation) were extremely rare. It is here where the novels of Quicksand and Passing gain their ‘depth’ with regard to class: Larsen manipulates these given understandings of the social fabric in a way which intertwines with, encroaches on, and (more often than not) eventually refutes the white world.

But what is the ‘white world’? And why is it refuted? If one looks at the United States in the 1920’s, one sees the nation becoming indisputably the richest country in the world, with share prices constantly rising and with no sign of them ever falling. Even if one had no money, the ‘hire purchase’ was there to supply the goods instantly, with payment spread across the coming months and years. This was an America based around modern consumerism and unprecedented consumption of material goods. Whether it was refrigerators, wirelesses or Ford Model T automobiles, happiness, it appeared, was quite for sale, even if you did not have the money just at that time.

At least, this is what the high school history learning resources say. [5] For those with the blood of former slaves running through their veins, reality often afforded no such pleasures. With the repealing of reconstruction came disfranchisement. Second class citizenship became the norm through Jim Crow legislation, and extremely limited access to the nation’s growing wealth was thus part of the raw deal for African Americans. Added to which, the fear of lynching and the rule of the mob in many southern states cemented African Americans as being less than whites, and very often less than human. Those of mixed heritage, however, were, as has been described previous, closer to the white standing in the stratification of the social order of the United States as a whole than darker skinned African Americans. Their ‘passing’ into and out of the ‘white world’ gave them more access to (or at the very least a better glimpse of) ‘white privilege’ and ‘wages of whiteness’ (to use David Roediger’s phrase), than their darker skinned brothers.

The life of Helga Crane in Quicksand is one mixed with varying degrees of contact with white values, standards, and norms. By the time the novel comes to a close, she has limited contact with whiteness. Whilst Helga was portrayed as somewhat apprehensive about returning to the United States from Denmark, she has a sudden revelation on the streets of Harlem once she was there: “these were her people” [6] (Larsen’s emphasis). From then on, she heads along a confused path, culminating in her residing in rural Alabama as the wife of Reverend Mr. Pleasant Green. Her physical move to the south is an authentic journey away from white economic superiority in New York City, which provides the financial underpinning of white values and beliefs. She literally turns her back on these and walks in the opposite direction. From early on in the story, her lack of concern for financial wellbeing sets her apart from a lot of her fellow instructors at Naxos:

She hated to admit that money was the most serious difficulty. Knowing full well that it was important, she nevertheless rebelled at the unalterable truth that it could influence her actions block her desires. A sordid necessity to be grappled with. With Helga it was almost a superstition that to concede to money its importance magnified its power. Still, in spite of her reluctance and distaste, her financial situation would have to be faced, and plans made, if she were to get away from Naxos with anything like the haste she now so ardently desired. [7]

Helga’s journey can therefore be seen as one of refutation of consumerism, economic power, white power structures, and white values and beliefs: she heads back into the heart of what used to be the black belt, where the white man built an uncivilised society on the foundation of slavery.

The journey in Quicksand is one through distinctly different locations, and the novel observes her closely in each. Naxos, Chicago, New York, Copenhagen in Denmark, New York again, and finally a small village in the depths of Alabama each act as a different canvas and backdrop to put Helga Crane in different places within the social stratification. [8] Helga’s overall journey, when viewed in terms of her standing within the social stratification in relation to class, is one down the social order, regardless of the fact she illustrates an immense capacity of mobility throughout the story which would almost certainly have been beyond the possibilities of most African Americans in the United States. This journey down the social order sets Quicksand at odds with Passing, as no such clear cut path is travelled in that narrative by either Irene or Clare. Indeed, on the face of it, Passing offers a journey-ending conclusion far more destructive than Quicksand, but I will return to this confused resolution later in the paper.

Nevertheless, if we consider Helga in each of the different settings as a separate entity, then another, radically different picture becomes clear. At the start, she lives the life of yet another English teacher at a southern institution geared towards the uplift of a race. I would suggest that her desire for material possessions, which is emphasised very clearly at this point, acts as a signifier of Helga’s inability to completely separate herself from whiteness. She acts as just another instructor at Naxos through her materialism: “[m]ost of her earnings had gone into clothes, into books, into the furnishings of the room which held her.” [9] The fact that they hold her, as well, places her in the palm of a ‘white world’: Helga no longer holds the goods: they hold her in conjunction with the room, which has become an imitation of ‘white’ life.

Helga’s escape from this leads her to Chicago, where it is spelled out to the reader in breathtaking clarity exactly how alone she is: she has no father and her mother is deceased. The reader is given reason to believe that she has only one relative alive in the United States, one Uncle Peter. When his new wife turns Helga away, she literally has no family left (in America at least). As Helga has no siblings, and no parents, and whilst this may not be by choice, it is in stark contrast to the white nuclear family. At this point she is further away from white America and its beliefs and values than at any time she was at Naxos. And, “oddly enough, she felt, too, that she had come home. She, Helga Crane, who had no home.” [10] A new sense of belonging holds Helga in its grip, even though she has apparently never ‘belonged’ anywhere before in her life. Significance rests, also, on the start of this utterance. What comes ‘oddly enough’, is this new sense of an ‘Other’, and this ‘Other’ is her and her life in Chicago: a sensation unique to the African American and absolutely foreign to anybody white. It’s ‘oddly enough’ arrival is made stark to her by the time she was at Naxos, which masked her form such a sensation.

Her nomadacy, of course, continues as the story progresses, as she soon ends up in New York, transfixed by the community in Harlem. The Harlem Larsen describes, and Helga’s relationship to it, is one built outside economic fundamentalism. As Cheryl A. Wall has observed, “for black artists [like Larsen] coming of age in the 1920's the unprecedented urban migrations and the increased freedom of city life provided the background for a spiritual awakening which celebrated the glories of a rediscovered African past and the unique lifestyle of Negro Americans.” [11] The vitality which is bound up and centred around this rediscovered spirituality creates a new America, with new beliefs, goals and dreams, separate from main America where one president declared in the 1920’s that “the chief business of the American people is business.” [12] Harlem is thus set as a black space in the heart of modern economic potency, seemingly hollow due to a strange rejection of money which enthrals Helga: ““But,” said Helga Crane, “what of it? Money isn’t everything. It isn’t even the half of everything. And here we have so much else - and by ourselves. It’s only outside of Harlem among those others that money really counts for everything.”” [13] Helga suddenly shows an awareness of a community which, through its lack of caring about money, distinguishes itself from the white community: it is not specifically a black community; it is explicitly not white. There is no mention of Helga craving for material goods in New York, as she sees a large African American population existing on a deeper level than white consumerism. The shallowness of white consumption is made clear to Helga as she grapples with “a sense of freedom, a release from the feeling of smallness which had hedged her in,” first in Chicago as a child, and later in Naxos. [14] The bonds which tie the fabric of Harlem together as a community are not drawn from wealth and financial power, and hence the stratification of the community in terms of a class structure is drastically altered, though Larsen gives no explicit description of this. Helga appears on the edge of certified classification, and this is something which broadens as a theme once she reaches Copenhagen.

Her expectation of life in Copenhagen is of an even greater freedom. When we see her heading across the Atlantic, we meet her “revelling like a released bird in her returned feeling of happiness and freedom, that blessed sense of belonging to herself alone and not to a race.” [15] The lure of Copenhagen is its ability to make her unclassifiable within the given social stratification while she is there. The status she entertained whilst she was in the United States simply cannot be transferred to Danish society. When Helga tells one old Copenhagener lady she is an African American, Helga notices that the old lady had “become indignant, retorting angrily that, just because she was old and a countrywoman she could not be so easily fooled, for she knew as well as everyone else that Negroes were black and had woolly hair.” [16] If this old lady’s portrayal of Copenhageners’ views towards African Americans is anything close to accurate, Helga’s skin tone twists their racialised understanding so much so that it shatters into pieces: their comprehension of what an African American looks like is destroyed; her racial appearance, centred around the light colour of her skin, makes her unplacable in relation to Danish social order. Her race takes precedent over her class in that it manages to put her outside and beyond the comprehension of the standard organising forces in Denmark. Helga’s race made her unclassifiable. And whilst Danish society in the 1920’s could classify everybody else, it allowed them to gaze out upon this new Other, and Helga does not feel, in the beginning, at least, any resentment about being exhibited. Helga’s position outside the social order gives her more freedom than she has ever had before in her life, and she becomes “incited to make an impression, a voluptuous impression … and after a little while she gave herself up wholly to the fascinating business of being seen, gaped at, desired.” [17] She comprehends the gazing of Copenhageners differently to the gazing of white Americans: the gazes of the former are not, to Helga, inherently abusive, whereas the gazes of the latter are bound up in connotations of ‘keeping one in one’s place’, and thus reinforcing the social structure.

The influence of Copenhagen, an overwhelmingly white European city, plays itself out on the character of Helga. Her transition from the white desire of goods at Naxos to life in Harlem which gave her no such cravings is played out in reverse: “[a]lways she had wanted, not money, but the things which money could give, leisure, attention, beautiful surroundings. Things. Things. Things.” [18] It is important that this remembering of material desires occurs in Copenhagen, and not while Helga is still in Harlem. She is no longer protected from rediscovering her white desires and cravings for consumerism, and the Danes soon set about adorning her physical body with emblems of financial wealth and (white) sophistication. Helga has barely been in Denmark a number of hours before her hosts are telephoning Garborg’s, the local jewellers, and purchasing earrings and bracelets for her. [19]

When the novel ends, Helga is, in terms of location, in a place similar to Naxos: back in the south of the United States. Her residence in a small rural Alabama village places her in another (apparently) entirely black community, yet it is wholly unlike Harlem in terms of landscape, culture and social stratification. Helga’s position is a privileged one, as the private resentment of the other townswomen shows. [20] In this sense, it differs from Naxos. Whilst she may no longer be striving towards ‘racial uplift’ at Naxos, she is very close to the top of the social order within this small community, and garners the face-to-face respect of the washerwomen who are clearly subservient to her. If we consider this position with regard to the stratification of the entire African American population in the late 1920’s, it is safe to say it is one below where she was when we first joined her story: she no longer shows signs of higher education (her life, now, does not require such a liberal education); she no longer shows any concern whatsoever for ‘racial uplift’; and she resides in a small rural village in the deep south still reeling from the abolition of slavery.

Adam Meyer speaks for a number of scholars when he comments that “writers more often than not castigate the very characters who try to cross the line, either killing them off … or having them return to their "proper" place on the "Black side".” [21] Such an observation does not suffice with regard to Helga’s position at the conclusion of Quicksand, though. Whilst it is accurate to state that our protagonist moves from a black community (Naxos) to a white one (Copenhagen) and then back to a black community (rural Alabama), the two black communities are not equal in terms of their positions within the social fabric, and so a fundamental transition has occurred.

So the searching of Helga Crane is one borne out of rebellion against white values and white standards of ‘civilised’ and ‘respectable’ life. When we first join the novel, Helga is an uninspired teacher at the fictional Black southern college of Naxos, although the institution bares strong resemblance to Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute. Like Tuskegee, it is described as having “grown into a machine. It was now a show place in the black belt, exemplification of the white man’s magnanimity, refutation of the blackman’s inefficiency. Life had died out of it. It was … a big knife with cruelly sharp edges ruthlessly cutting all to pattern, the white man’s pattern.” [22] As Anna Brickhouse has noted, “the prevailing ideology of whiteness in the literary territory of Naxos (an anagram of Saxon, as critics have observed) is inseparable from its aesthetic priorities.” [23] Helga’s desire to leave her job as a teacher in the English department (a professional position) even though she consciously realises she will almost certainly be unable to get another teaching job, is one with implications as regards her class status. While it is worth remembering again that one’s class is certainly not entirely dependent upon one’s occupation, it is one of the main markers of social standing. The ease with which Helga puts her position within the social stratification in the balance highlights a disdain for social order pertaining to class. As the novel proceeds, the reader is painted a picture of how she takes the same stance with regard to the social order in terms of race.

Helga’s desire to leave Naxos is a consequence of her frustration with the school’s teaching methods and its stifling curriculum -- a desire to avoid being cut to the white man’s pattern. Indeed, with the strict enforcement of some of its regulations, Naxos appears to adhere more formerly to white standards than a great many white people do. Helga’s love of clothes catches “the hawk eyes of dean and matrons,” as she adorns the correct attire with “old laces, strange embroideries [and] dim brocades.” The authority figures, narrates Helga, “felt that the colors were queer; dark purples, royal blues, rich greens, deep reds, in soft, luxurious woolens, or heavy, clinging silks.” [24] Larsen manipulates Helga’s desire for bright, flamboyant clothing as a vehicle for emphasising the character’s uneasiness with this potential assimilation with white standards: Helga is understood through this passage to not find white middle class values -- the values which Naxos (and Tuskegee) teaches and holds dear -- as being in any way desirable. Helga Crane encapsulates what the Harlem Renaissance was about for a lot of African Americans: finding a new ‘Africanness’ attractive, and finding it enviable and uplifting in a way which the assimilation of whiteness could not offer. In essence, the Harlem Renaissance offered a higher class existence equal to what the white world could offer for those who cared to ‘pass’, yet it did so in a way which did not cast the ‘African consciousness’ into any subservient position.

During the brief period Nella Larsen was a central figure on the Harlem literary scene, W.E.B. Du Bois was known to hold her in extremely high regard;[25] without putting words into Dr. Du Bois’s mouth, I would suggest that this is partly due to Larsen’s ability to work Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness into her fiction, as she does here. Helga Crane explicitly steps outside Washingtonian uplift and actively searches for her place in the Talented Tenth, a group Du Bois always saw as separate and apart from the Black middle class. [26]

Nella Larsen’s second novel Passing has two main characters whose lives are very different (though not completely polarised), but each lives life in a way that Helga cannot. As Wall puts it, “each assumes a role Helga Crane rejects: Irene is the perfect lady, and Clare, the exotic Other.” [27] Irene’s lifestyle is one centred on her family life. She has a loving husband with a respectable profession, and a young child whom she puts most of her time and effort into caring for. In essence, Irene manages to maintain a white pattern of family life, and her attitudes and behaviour adhere to the white middle class pattern. [28] Furthermore, the transformation into a white structure of life is one which is so complete for Irene that race is, for the majority of the story, of little significance. Indeed, Claudia Tate writes:

The work’s central conflict develops from Irene’s jealousy of Clare and not from racial issues which are at best peripheral to the story. The only time Irene is aware that race even remotely impinges on her world occurs when the impending exposure of Clare’s racial identity threatens to hasten the disruption of Irene’s domestic security. Race, therefore, is not the novel’s foremost concern, but is merely a mechanism for setting the story in motion, sustaining suspense, and bringing about the external circumstances for the story’s conclusion. [29]

Nevertheless, Tate goes too far in her analysis and ends up understating the role race plays in Larsen’s work. After all, it is the transgression of the racial line which gives the novel its thrust and is the reason for the dramatic scene at the end of the book. Whilst it is not the novel’s foremost concern, it is a mechanism for setting the story in motion, it remains an ever-present undercurrent influenced by class, gender and sexuality.

The differing reactions to ‘passing’ from Black people and whites have often a profound effect upon how the person ‘passing’ becomes to be understood. In Passing, the minor character of Felise, who struggles to ‘pass’ is with Irene when she bumps into Clare’s white racist husband Bellew in the street. The racial identity of Irene and Clare is laid bare by the presence of Felise; her reaction once Bellew has gone is one of ambivalence: “Aha! Been ‘passing’ have you? Well, I’ve queered that.” [30] Her reaction is not one of striking judgement and condemnation. Why is this? The white reaction is certainly one borne out of fear, in that it becomes an expression of danger based upon a shift in social culture and challenges social norms: the rationality of such a fear is questionable, though, as whites have no firsthand experience of the phenomenon, and thus their reactions are based on distortions and stereotypes. [31]

In contrast, it is important to consider the depiction of Felise’s reaction as speaking solely on behalf of herself and not for all African Americans. Being careful that we do not generalise, we can read a sense of surprise (“aha!”) quickly followed by the verbalisation of a common deed (“Been ‘passing’, have you?”).The ending of the utterance leaves space for broad interpretation (“Well, I’ve queered that”). From the following conversation, Felise is apologetic for any insult she has made towards Irene. She is not angry at her for ‘passing’, and she shows no sign of bitterness that Irene should ‘pass’ while she is unable to. Ultimately, Felise offers no criticism that she should ‘pass’ into the white world and then out of it once more. The final utterance is loaded with shared knowledge between Irene and Felise: the understanding that this ‘passing’ has happened before in history, that it is happening again now, and that it will undoubtedly happen again in the future. On one level, it is communicated as a shared sin, but it can also be understood as a prideful thing to do, that the transgression and queering of the colour line which Irene (and also Clare) is able to undertake is a gesture of race pride in that some African Americans can achieve it, benefit from it (benefit according to white standards, though), and then cross back into the Black world and be Black and proud once more.

That much, for sure, is revealed through the contextualisation of ‘queer’ here. [32] On one level, Felise’s reaction seems to reinforce Adrian Piper’s generalised observation that African Americans “do not ‘out’ people who are passing as white in the European American community.” [33] Piper’s pitying remark that those who ‘pass’ are “already in so much pain that it's just not possible to do something that you know is going to cause [them] any more” [34] is misguided with regard to Larsen’s portrayal of Felise here. There is no acknowledgment from Felise of weakness and neediness on the part of her light skinned companion(s), and the crux of this is built around a notion of rebellion against the system. ‘Passing’ becomes, for some African American observers, including Felise, an act of rebellion not against whiteness, the Othering effect of whiteness or even white America as a whole, but against the system because the system is a white one. The system is made white because it is white people who held a monopoly with regard to the power structures which set the boundaries, whether those boundaries were concerned with the ‘one drop’ rule, or the drawing up and enforcement of Jim Crow legislation.

Furthermore, the “I’ve queered that” relies entirely upon the vagueness of the definition of ‘queer’ for its ambiguity. The Oxford English Dictionary offers no set explanation as to what ‘queer’ means: as an adjective, it means “[s]trange, odd, peculiar, eccentric. Also: of questionable character; suspicious, dubious.” The same entry further down offers “[o]ut of sorts; unwell; faint, giddy” as another definition. [35] To further complicate matters, ‘queer’ has a second entry in the OED, offering “[b]ad; contemptible, worthless; untrustworthy; disreputable” as a definition. [36] Larsen manipulates the distinct lack of clarity afforded to the word ‘queer’ and uses it consistently throughout both Quicksand and Passing a total of twenty three times. Judith Butler’s observation that it “did not yet mean homosexual, but it did encompass an array of meanings associated with the deviation from normalcy which might well include the sexual” is one useful explanation. [37] Therefore the lack of clarity based upon meanings associated with deviations from normalcy serves conjunctively between the transgression of both racial and sexual boundaries. It is upon this one word which these boundaries become confused. Examples of this are not hard to find, and in Passing they often share adjoining pages, and yet the contextualisation of ‘queer’ alters its meaning from one to do with race to one linked with sexual desire. [38]

But what about boundaries of class? Does class even apply to the dynamic described above? Rosemary Hennessy has written that, “[l]ending a new elasticity to the categories “lesbian” and “gay”, “queer” embraces a proliferation of sexualities … and the compounding of outcast positions along racial, ethnic, and class, as well as sexual lines - none of which is acknowledged by the neat binary division between hetero- and homosexual.” [39] Although Hennessy deals with ‘queer’ in an explicitly sexualised way (which, it would appear, is now the norm), even Larsen’s employment of the word breeds new elasticity into concepts of race and sexual desire. This newfound flexibility impacts upon how class works in conjunction with (and against) the two. An ‘outcast position’ along class lines undoubtedly means a lower status in terms of that stratifying force. From the beginning through the end of Larsen’s Passing, this is not yet the case: the sexual desire remains spoken / is not discovered by surrounding characters, thus class status is in no way compromised.

Fictional accounts of ‘passing’, whilst just that (fictional), remain of great value to historians and also contemporary cultural critics. Berzon is quite correct to establish a firm link between fiction and reality: “fictional accounts of the black bourgeoisie … have a corresponding historical reality.” [40] Helga Crane’s encapsulation of the African essence of the Harlem Renaissance and its capacity for ‘uplift’ is symbolic of what was happening within the African American community during the 1920’s, and the problems of ‘passing’ so forthrightly dealt with in Larsen’s second novel are the markers of a then-emerging new black culture -- one with class distinctions built on and around racial pride. At the time, this new black culture may have been a response to hegemonic (and repressive) white society, but it soon became a movement on its own, thanks in part to the dynamic fiction of writers such as Nella Larsen, Langston Hughes, James Weldon Johnson and countless others. Larsen’s portrayal of Helga Crane as a chameleon-like person who could be one thing in one setting and another in entirely new surroundings -- this in itself cannot be achieved in the fullness Larsen describes by simply crossing one single boundary. Moreover, the boundary of race is blurred by Helga on so many occasions and in so many different ways that it relies upon and impacts upon her social stratification in terms of her class. Larsen’s sharp use of language, like the word ‘queer’ in both her works, confound an elasticity amongst all ontological categories that they almost always grow malleable together.

Notes
1 Verna M. Keith and Cedric Herring, “Skin Tone and Stratification in the Black Community”, in The American Journal of Sociology, 97, 3 (Nov., 1991): 764.
2 Ibid., 763.
3 Nella Larsen, Quicksand & Passing (London: Serpent’s Tail, 2001): 154
4 Ibid., 166-7.
5 . Accessed December 30, 2009.
6 Larsen, 95.
7 Ibid., 6.
8 Larsen was not reinventing the genre of the passing narrative by manipulating the use of different locations. Quicksand is set partially in Europe, something which bears great similarity not only to Larsen’s own life, but to the narrative of James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man (London: Dover Thrift, 1995). Johnson is considered to be the first writer to seriously employ Europe as a space for change in this genre.
9 Larsen, 6.
10 Ibid., 30.
11 Cheryl A. Wall, “Paris and Harlem: Two Culture Capitals”, in Phylon, 35, 1 (1st Qtr., 1974): 64.
12 This statement by Calvin Coolidge is very often mis-quoted as “the business of the government is business.” The following two sentences of this speech given before a group of national newspaper editors in 1925 further emphasise white America’s love affair with consurism and fiscal wealth: “[t]hey are profoundly concerned with producing, buying, selling, investing and prospering in the world. I am strongly of opinion that the great majority of people will always find these are moving impulses of our life.” Calvin Coolidge, “The Press Under a Free Government.” Jan 17, 1925. Calvin Coolidge Memorial Foundation. January 11, 2010. _under_a_free_governm.html>
13 Larsen, 46.
14 Ibid., 46.
15 Ibid., 64.
16 Ibid., 76.
17 Ibid., 74.
18 Ibid., 67.
19 Ibid., 69.
20 Ibid., 119.
21 Adam Meyer, “Not Entirely Strange, but Not Entirely Friendly Either: Images of Jews in African American Passing Novels through the Harlem Renaissance”, in African American Review, 38, 3 (Autumn 2004): 442.
22 Larsen, 4.
23 Anna Brickhouse, “Nella Larsen and the Intertextual Geography of Quicksand”, in African American Review, 35, 4 (Winter 2001): 539.
24 Larsen, 18.
25 W.E.B. Du Bois is quoted as saying Larsen produced “on the whole, the best piece of fiction that Negro America has produced since the heyday of Chestnutt.”
26 W.E.B. Du Bois, “The Talented Tenth,” in The Negro Problem.
27 Cheryl Wall, “Passing for What? Aspects of Identity in Nella Larsen’s Novels”, in Black American Literature Forum, 20, 1/2 (Spring - Summer 1986): 105.
28 Judith Berzon, Neither White Nor Black: The Mulatto Character in American Fiction (New York: New York U.P., 1978): 168.
29 Claudia Tate, “Nella Larsen’s Passing: A Problem of Interpretation”, in Black American Literature Forum, 14, 4 (Winter 1980): 143.
30 Larsen, 227.
31 Berzon, 145.
32 This is a case-in-point of Butler’s observation that queering works as the exposure within language of both sexuality and race, in Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (London: Routledge, 1993): 176.
33 Adrian Piper, “Passing for White, Passing for Black”, in Transition, 58 (1992): 14.
34 Ibid., 14-5.
35 “queer, adj.1” OED Online. Sept. 2009. Oxford University Press. Dec. 29, 2009. .
36 “queer, adj.2 and n.1” OED Online. Sept. 2009. Oxford University Press. Dec. 29, 2009. .
37 Butler, 176.
38 On page 171 of the Serpent’s Tail edition, ‘queer’ is used to express possible hidden sexual desire, as Larsen writes “[i]n Claire’s eyes … was a queer gleam, a jeer it might be. Irene couldn’t define it.” On the very next page, Larsen uses it as an expression to do with racial etiquette: “[f]rom Gertrude’s direction came a queer little suppressed sound…”
39 Rosemary Hennessy, “Queer Visibility in Commodity Culture”, in Cultural Critique, 29 (Winter 1994-5): 34.
40 Berzon, 163.

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(c) Daniel C. Wright, 2009. All Rights Reserved.