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

African American Review, Winter, 2003 by Beth McCoy

Importantly, Davis's shift in agency exists also in relation to Sampson's. Glimpsing Grace on the wharf leads Sampson quite quickly to the attainment and exercise of a strain of Enlightenment subjectivity that derives its authority from larger assumptions that visual "observation and notions of orders based on comparisons of identity and difference" could yield knowledge that the body was the origin of racial truth" (Wiegman 28). Certainly, Sampson's putatively clinical observation to Davis that "'tha's too much cream color in the face and too little blud seen under the skin fer a genooine white 'ooman'" brings to mind Thomas Jefferson's racialist theory as worked out in Notes on the State of Virginia, particularly in the familiar and infamous Query XIV, "The administration of justice and the description of the laws."

Contemplating what he considered as the difficulties of emancipating and then embracing Americans of African descent given the "deep-rooted prejudices entertained by the whites [and] ten thousand recollections, by the blacks of the injuries they have sustained," Jefferson inventoried through what he understood as careful, rational, objective visual observation the "physical and moral" reasons why free blacks would not be able to live in the same nation as whites (41). Within the category of physical difference between black and white, Jefferson wrote that "the first difference which strikes us is that of color," which, in his reasoning, manifests itself both as excess and lack:

   Whether the black of the negro resides
   in the reticular membrane between the
   skin and scarf-skin, or in the scarf-skin
   itself; whether it proceeds from the
   color of the blood, the color of the bile,
   or from that of some other secretion,
   the difference is fixed in nature, and is
   as real as if its seat and cause were better
   known to us. And is this difference
   of no importance? Is it not the foundation
   of a greater or less share of beauty
   in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures
   of red and white, the expressions
   of every passion by greater or less suffusions
   of color in the one, preferable
   to that eternal monotony, which reigns
   in the countenances, that immovable
   veil of black which covers the emotions
   of the other race? (137)

As Robyn Wiegman reminds us, "Jefferson's position lacks the scientific authority ascribed to the natural historian" (although it is worth noting that a good portion of Notes on Virginia is intended to function as natural history), but "his articulation of a vast and inseparable division between Africans and Anglo-Americans partakes in the scripting of the visible from which race was established as the observational detail of the skin" (214n20).

As a mass, the wharf's spectators interpret Grace's female body as "completing a most lovely type of Southern beauty," but Sampson's rather singular gaze draws a conclusion quite different. Similar to Jefferson, Sampson through ostensibly disinterested observation interprets Grace as being composed of both perceived bodily excess used to deny enfranchisement to women of color most especially (in this case, ironically, "too much cream color") and perceived bodily lack (here, what can be read as a putative inability to blush). His analysis leads immediately from Grace to the larger context of the national identity she shares with her husband, and then to the rumor of the social disruption that her husband will cause: " 'You can't tell nothin' 'bout these Britishers; they're allers squeamish 'bout that nigger brats.... I've hem tell that they think nuthin of ejcatin' thar black brats, and freein' 'em, an' makin' 'em rich'" (Hopkins 41). In this scene, then, shifts in agency and subjectivity among otherwise disenfranchised white men yield rumor. And rumor discursively renders Grace as both raison d'etre for and the medium through which otherwise warring white political desires--those of insurgency and conservatism--will be converted by the end of Chapter IV to a shared, if always unstable, revanchism that will function to alienate the house of Montfort--and, tellingly, the house of Pollock-- from property-in-whiteness.