James E. McGirt and Southern Boundaries: Dialects, Plantation Landscape, and Restricted Uplift

• In Event: Southern Exceptionalism Revisited: Constructing a Myth Through Negotiations and Collaborations

Abstract

Turn of the century African American writers like James E. McGirt sought recognition in the exclusive publishing world during a period of racial segregation and disfranchisement. To attain large readership and critical acclaim, McGirt submitted poems to various publications such as Fur News and Institute Tie. He also sent books to a number of periodicals for possible reviews. He did so while editing his own McGirt’s Magazine (1903-1909) that published writings by black intellectuals of the period, like John E. Bruce, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Kelly Miller and Mary Church Terrell. As he struggled to establish himself as a poet, McGirt continuously found his work categorized as that of a “young negro” writing in dialect, and consigned to the mythic southern landscape.　
African American writers, even after they had left the South, had to fight against literary segregation. William D. Howells, praising Dunbar’s dialect poems over those written in standard English, helped create the mythical African American landscape tied to the South and slave identity. McGirt’s poems, published immediately after Dunbar’s, were judged in reference to Dunbar’s “dialect” poems; that is, the verses that reveal “simplicity,” “tenderness,” and “humor” were praised. Northern critics believed that black writers’ familiarity with black people would make writing in dialect more acceptable; however, African American writers found it difficult to comply. In Avenging the Maine (1899), McGirt explained his little use of dialect because the masses no longer spoke it. Charles W. Chesnutt, too, acclaimed for his use of authentic “negro dialect”, had to ask his editor Walter Hines Page to provide some samples of dialect as models.
The literary critics’ focus on racial dialect reinforced southern exceptionalism, creating a unique space for African Americans. They quoted McGirt’s verses written in dialect as representative of his work, though only a quarter were written in dialect. They equated the race with the imaginary South using descriptions like “plantation atmosphere” and “sweet and charming.” To establish themselves as writers, black writers needed recognition by influential editors. Howells and Page helped launch the careers, but simultaneously they also helped construct the fictional South through their push for dialect. Moreover, critics tended to focus on McGirt as a “negro youth,” on his way to success, though “immature.” The northern publishers’ conception of an imaginary South relegated African American authors to one category: “negro dialect writers.”
This paper examines McGirt’s efforts to counter this problematic categorization where blacks were either happy slaves or working their way up through menial labor. Late 19th century African American writers are often examined in two separate spheres: that of mainstream white-owned publications and that of black audiences. In fact, the writers negotiated between the two worlds. They transformed the image of “southern” as “slave-like” or “immature,” to the image of “southern” as “diverse” and “extensive.” McGirt was not only writing for Northern whites but for a national audience. With poems and other writings McGirt tried to break boundaries.

Author

• Akiyo Ito Okuda, Keio University, Japan