Slouching toward Beastliness: Richard Wright's Anatomy of Thomas Dixon - Critical Essay

African American Review, Fall, 2001 by Clare Eby

As Cameron's talk of assimilation suggests, while the white reaction against black equality is often expressed in horror at the prospect of interracial contact between men, it is centered on fears of miscegenation. One of Dixon's most devious Negroes, the disturbingly named Silas Lynch, demands" 'the privilege of going to see [any white man] in his house or his hotel, eating with him and sleeping with him, and when I see fit, to take his daughter in marriage!"' (Clansman 275). Here lies the emotional center of Dixon: As a white character succinctly puts it in The Leopard's Spots, "'If a man really believes in equality, let him prove it by giving his daughter to a Negro in marriage. That is the test'" (237). The bizarre slippery-slope reasoning, by which political and social equality translates necessarily and inevitably into sexual contact of black men with white women, takes us to the core of the white fantasy of the black beast. In Leopard's Spots Dixon depicts the fancyman mulatto Tim Shelby (Stowe's Kentu cky Shelbys' free slave resurrected as a Negro organizer) as eager for a "'fair white bride'" (75). Shelby seems likely to get what he wants, for the Supreme Court passes a law that not only allows intermarriage but actually" 'command[s] its enforcement on every military post'" (74). The children resulting from this "amalgamation" of races, according to Dixon, "simply meant Africanization. The big nostrils, flat nose, massive jaw, protruding lip and kinky hair will register their animal marks over the proudest intellect and the rarest beauty of any other race. The rule that had no exception was that one drop of Negro blood makes a Negro" (197). In other words, one drop turns a white man into a "beast." Simply put, according to the Dixonian slippery slope, political and social equality leads inexorably to miscegenation, which leads to the "Africanization" (197) of white Americans, extending the reign of the beast. Martha Hodes explains the reaction: "White Southern politicians beg[a]n during the Civil War to c onflate the possibility of freedom...for black men with a fear of widespread sex." After the war, "because it was the men of the free black population who now gained formal political power and began to achieve economic independence, it was they who had enormous power to deny the South's racial caste system." Hodes sums up: "Political power, economic success, and sex with a white woman--all such actions on the part of the black man confounded the lines of racial categories...and therefore became unforgivable transgressions" (145, 147, 157).

Dixon's novels demonstrate that what John Hope Franklin calls "the mythical threat of 'Negro rule' as excuse for [white] lawlessness" (vii)--what I am terming the threat of the mulatto nation--expresses itself fundamentally in terms of sexual anxieties. But like other white supremacists of his time, Dixon painstakingly maintains a double standard. Shockingly, rather than condemn or even ignore the extensive history of couplings of white men and black women--extending back through slavery and the much more common sort of miscegenous relationship in American history--Dixon rationalizes it. When in The Leopard's Spots a deacon from Boston inquires about the offspring of white men and black women, he is informed that" 'this mixture...has no social significance.... It is all the result of the surviving polygamous and lawless instincts of the white male.'" Somehow a matter of instinct but not of race, "racial integrity remains intact" as long as no black man can choose a white woman for a mate (172).[10]