Lincoln: The Man was published in February 1931, just in time for Lincoln Day, and for a few weeks the icon-smashing poet became a new John Wilkes Booth. (“Booth’s bullet was the last one fired for States’ Rights,” wrote Masters.)
Edgar Lee Masters had grown up in Petersburg, Illinois, in a time and place where Lincoln was not yet a deity but just a man (and of course a prophet is always without honor in his hometown—leaving aside the question of whether the prophet was Lincoln or Masters). But by 1931 the sixteenth president was encased in myth even in Petersburg: angry Lincolnians threatened to erase Masters’s verse from Anne Rutledge’s tombstone, on which it had recently been incised. (Some regarded it as an insult to Mary Todd Lincoln anyway.)
Masters, something of a misanthrope and most emphatically not a cockeyed optimist, was not exactly shocked by the envenomed response to his book. In his own young adulthood, he confessed, “I had an admiration for Lincoln, even believing the falsehood that the War Between the States was inevitable and the result of an irrepressible conflict, though my grandfather, who knew Lincoln there in the Petersburg-New Salem country, had given me the materials for a very different judgment of Lincoln.” But while the poet had his grandfather, the rest of the country made do with Carl Sandburg’s hagiography.
As an old man, Masters dreamed of returning to Petersburg, the site of his Lincoln-washed youth. But he had long lost his prairie spirit; in his last years, he cocooned himself in a New York City hotel and refused even to cross the street. Only death took him home to Petersburg, where he is buried four graves down from Anne Rutledge, wedded to her not through union but through verse.
Jessie Fauset’s Birthright
The American Enterprise, 1995
For never let the thought arise
That we are here on sufferance bare;
Outcasts, asylumed ’neath these skies,
And aliens without part or share.
This land is ours by right of birth,
This land is ours by right of toil;
We helped to turn its virgin earth,
Our sweat is in its fruitful soil.
—James Weldon Johnson, from “Fifty Years 1863–1913”
The notion that African Americans are here on sufferance bare never once crossed the mind of Jessie Fauset, whose novels depicted a robust Negro middle class that was much more than George Babbitt in blackface.
Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in 1882 to a father who was a respected A.M.E. minister in Camden, New Jersey. The Fausets were on the fringe of stylish Old Philadelphia society; they were frayed gentility, polite and mannerly if occasionally behind on the grocery bill. (“There is no pride so strong, so inflexible, so complacent as the pride of the colored ‘old Philadelphia,’’’ wrote Fauset in Comedy: American Style.)
Hers was a close and loving family; she was raised, she later recalled, in a “very conservative, not to say very religious, household,” and she grew up with a sense of the dignity of her race. Of course when the white world impinged young Jessie met the usual slights. At the Philadelphia High School for Girls, “I happened to be the only colored girl in my classes . . . and I’ll never forget the agony I endured on entrance day when the white girls with whom I had played and studied through the graded schools, refused to acknowledge my greeting.”
Upon graduation from Cornell, Jessie Fauset taught French for a dozen years at Washington, D.C.’s storied Dunbar High (“The Greatest Negro High School in the World”), named after the turn-of-the-century black American poet best remembered for his exclamation, “I know why the caged bird sings!”
Fauset chose W. E. B. DuBois as her mentor. He, in turn, recognized his protégée as a distaff member of the “talented tenth” whose efforts DuBois believed would uplift the race. We must, Jessie lectured the usually unlecturable DuBois, “teach our colored men and women race pride, self-pride, self-sufficiency (the right kind) and the necessity of living our lives, as nearly as possible, absolutely, instead of comparing them always with white standards.”
Fauset wrote stories, reviews, and poetry for The Crisis, the NAACP flagship, before becoming full-time literary editor in October 1919. She worked alongside the prickly DuBois for seven fruitful years, though her own experiences of the richness of segregated black middle-class life kept her from swallowing whole the white-subsidized NAACP’s integrationist panacea.
Jessie Fauset disdained literary politics and petty jealousies. As a wise older brother counsels in her first novel, There Is Confusion (1924), “Our battle is a hard one and for a long time it will seem to be a losing one, but it will never really be that as long as we keep the power of being happy. . . . Happiness, love, contentment in our midst, make it possible for us to face those foes without. ‘Happy Warriors,’ that’s the ideal for us.”
Fauset walked it like she talked it. Her little kindnesses and generous praise encouraged the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. She was, arguably, the discoverer of Langston Hughes, who was forever grateful. (“I found Jessie Fauset charming—a gracious, tan-brown lady, a little plump, with a fine smile and gentle eyes. . . . From that moment on I was deceived in writers, because I thought they would all be good-looking and gracious like Miss Fauset.”) Even the rouge et noir bad boy Claude McKay said of Fauset: “All the radicals liked her, although in her social viewpoint she was away over on the other side of the fence.”
Few, it seemed, wanted to hear about Jessie’s side of the fence. There Is Confusion was rejected by one publisher because, Fauset was told, “White readers just don’t expect Negroes to be like this.” Her black characters are often prosperous doctors, caterers, and modistes: the sort who have, rather than are, domestic help. There is a staidness, a steadiness about them, but they are no Oreos. They are securely colored and securely American. Or as the dancer Joanna Marshall informs a theater full of nonplussed whites: “I hardly need to tell you that there is no one in the audience more American than I am. My great-grandfather fought in the Revolution, my uncle fought in the Civil War, and my brother is ‘over there’ right now.”
A French dance instructor in There is Confusion conjectures “that if there’s anything that will break down prejudice it will be equality or perhaps even superiority on the part of colored people in the arts.” But it has to be on colored people’s terms, in one of their own vernaculars. Jessie Fauset would not beam with pleasure if she knew that seventy years hence a blanched Michael Jackson would make millions of dollars for a Japanese corporation by singing “ain’t no difference if you’re black or white,” which she knew to be a lie.
Her four novels frequently feature tragic light-skinned African Americans who “pass” for white in a burlesque of the integrationist dream. “Emotionally, as far as race was concerned, she was a girl without a country,” Fauset mourned for one such woman in her final novel, Comedy: American Style (1933). “Later on in life it occurred to her that she had been deprived of her racial birthright and that that was as great a cause for tears as any indignity that might befall man.”
Jessie Fauset’s ardent hope was that African American boys and girls be raised in the fullest knowledge of that birthright. In There Is Confusion Joanna comes home from school and asks plaintively, “Didn’t colored people ever do anything, Daddy?” Her father then tells her “of Douglass and Vesey and Turner. There were great women too, Harriet Tubman, Phyllis Wheatley, Sojourner Truth, women who had been slaves, he explained to her, but had won their way to fame and freedom through their own efforts.”
It was for the Joannas of America that Fauset and DuBois edited The Brownies’ Book, an unprofitable monthly published from January 1920 until it folded two years later. This wholesome hodgepodge of homilies, lore, and biography was dedicated, Fauset rhymed:
To