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

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Beth McCoy

Sawaya recognizes this intersection within the system of chattel slavery and the way that, in Contending Forces, aristocrats like Pollock sought to manage such an intersection to their own advantage: Davis, she writes, might be "vicious, but he is also a pawn of the upper class channeled by that class through the racism that both classes share" (87). Accordingly, Hopkins demonstrates carefully that possessing whiteness as property is both just enough and not enough for Sampson and Davis, who toil caught in a sort of limbo between loyalty to and resentment against a class that bestows whiteness. But Hopkins goes further, illustrating how in 1800 that limbo was already deteriorating so quickly that, by 1900, white men like Davis and Sampson had become something much more than mere "pawns." Contending Forces thus may be read as imagining for its readers a crucial moment at the beginning of the nineteenth century when the appeasement of just enough yielded to the unrest of not enough. After all, at the edge of the 1900s, Hopkins wrote with hindsight's advantage, knowing that Pollock's white planter aristocracy would lose eventually the ability to channel and stanch its poorer brethren's resentment merely with the fringes of the wages of whiteness. (6) Thus for Hopkins, such figures as Davis and Sampson embody a warring blend of both insurgency and conservatism. Desired sociopolitical developments that promise to dismantle hierarchies of intraracial difference (i.e., ones that place Sampson and Davis under such men as Pollock) emerge simultaneously as feared ones that threaten to dismantle hierarchies of interracial difference (i.e., ones that place Sampson and Davis over black chattel). (7) It is into this complicated and quickly shifting milieu, seen from the novel's particular twentieth-century vantage point, that members of the Montfort family disembark their ship, and Hopkins makes clear the need for her twentieth-century readers to understand the link between the rumblings of class destabilization among whites and the racially specific construction of women's identities through discourse, represented in Contending Forces as the rumor of Grace.

As part of the work of Critical Race Theory (the important contemporary movement in legal studies with which Bell is associated), Cheryl I. Harris engages more fully legal, political, and social precedents for treating whiteness as property. If, Harris writes, whiteness can be interpreted and treated as property, and if "property rights are traditionally described as fully alienable," then whiteness, as property, might be understood as alienable--a mutable, discursive construct that can be taken away and made to signify something else (281). Significantly, I think, Harris's analysis would likely find literary precedent in Contending Forces. Standing on the waterfront, Davis assures the already agitated Sampson that" 'we jes dont' spec' to hav' no foolin' 'bout this yer question of who's on top as regards a gentleman's owning his niggers, an' whomsoeveder goes ter foolin' with that ar pertickler pint o' discusshun is gwine ter be made a eggsample of, even ef it's a white man'" (Hopkins 36). Acknowledging an investment in maintaining the status quo, Davis's threat to make an "eggsample" of any white man who threatens the chattel system carries within it at least an implicit awareness of whiteness's alienability (rather than its immanence), and this awareness, I think, powers Davis's conservatism, his insurgency, and the struggle between the two impulses. In order to preserve his own property in whiteness, he appears to reason that he must alienate someone else's. As the Bermudan ship docks, Hopkins establishes that the someone will be Charles Montfort, who represents both the upper-class interests keeping Davis in thrall and the dreaded possibility of emancipation.