Rumors of Grace: white masculinity in Pauline Hopkins's contending forces

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Beth McCoy

Derrick Bell and others have articulated how disenfranchised whites benefitted from American chattel slavery even as they suffered under the sway of upper-class whites:

   The creation of a black subclass
   enabled poor whites to identify with
   and support many of the policies of the
   upper class. Moreover, large landowners,
   with the safe economic advantage
   provided by their slaves, were willing
   to grant poor whites a larger role in the
   political process. Thus, paradoxically,
   slavery for blacks led to greater freedom
   for poor whites, at least when
   compared with the denial of freedom
   to African slaves. (Bell 188)

Certainly, in these first few chapters, Contending Forces bears out Bell's account, as well as Sawaya's. For instance, Sampson enjoys membership in what Hopkins terms wryly Newbern's "committee on public safety," a secret, neo-terrorist organization whose response to tremors within the plantation social structure is a relatively democratic one that moves across class lines to unite the forces of varying white masculinities (53). Anson Pollock, scion of Newbern's local aristocracy, also belongs to the committee, thus allowing workingman and aristocrat to toil side by side for the larger (white) public interest. (5)

At the same time, however, Hopkins suggests that this union is actually less democratic than it seems (Sawaya 86-87n17). Bill, for example, represents the committee publicly and performs its work openly (complete with his highly visible rawhide whip) while Pollock, on the other hand, plays only a clandestine role; as the narrator points out, "certainly no one would ever have suspected the elegant Anson Pollock of being connected with such an organization" (53). Not only does the aristocrat play a leadership role within the group, seemingly calling the shots from behind the scenes, but he is also Sampson's employer. Through careful--if again somewhat "odd"--scene construction, Hopkins exposes Pollock's methods of influence, methods that manage to get around Sampson's conscience when it comes to the committee's "big" jobs--in this case, bringing down the house of Montfort. In order to steer Sampson, Pollock utilizes both dire warnings about the loss of "'our institutions'" if "'niggers are tolerated in any way'" and small, leftover helpings of fine cigars, liquor, and other material spoils that poorer men like Sampson otherwise might not be able to provide for themselves (Hopkins 54-55). Though these men are allied within the committee's confines, Hopkins makes it clear that Pollock not only calls the shots but also distributes with careful precision the small properties that signal the accoutrements of an enfranchised citizen. And, most importantly, Pollock allows Sampson and Davis to count themselves as white, an invaluable property in itself. As Hopkins observes in Contending Forces, slavery denied men and women of African descent "the birthright of man--property in himself" (60); that same institution, Bell asserts, also "provided many propertyless whites with a property in their whiteness" (188).