Week 3, entry two

9/10 excerpt from Birthright

T. S. Stribling’s title appears a conscious selection devised to interplay with the predominant idea in white bohemia of the American black as the innocent primitive. As we discussed in class, several white artists used blacks and their culture as a means to comment on the broader culture of the United States. While Peter Siner contrasts Eugene O’Neill’s superstitious, bumbling Brutus Jones, the idea of racial uplift through atavism and rebirth surfaces in both texts. For Jones, as Robeson points out in his “Reflections on O’Neill’s Plays,” the character returns to a previous generation through his trek through the wilderness “throwing off one by one the layers of civilization until he returns to the primitive soil from which he (racially) came” (58). To me, the implication in atavism is that there is no reference to the direct preceding generation, but rather a link to the Romanticized ideal of ancestry. While Jones removes his clothing or rips it, becoming the primitive, Peter Siner seemingly takes on the layers of civilization, hanging his overcoat, suitcase, and hand-bag in the Jim Crowe car while sitting next to blacks in their military uniforms and other plain dress.

Both Jones and Siner appear reborn, conceived as varying portrayals of blacks by two different literary artists. Jones’ is an authentic atavism, a relationship with his ancestors, while Siner’s story surfaces little relationship to his ancestors, but rather an indication of the promising future to come for American blacks. Siner meditates on his ancestors, remarking: “He was coming back into the South, into his own country. Here for generations his forebears had toiled endlessly and fruitlessly…,” though he “shrugged away such thoughts and with a certain effort replaced them with the constructive idea that was bringing him South once more” (Stribling, 335).