Yet in this sweeping mechanistic interpretation, there is no room for the real plot of the story, for the clear mistake and guilt of rebuilding a new slavery of the working class in the midst of a fateful experiment in democracy; for the triumph of sheer moral courage and sacriice in the abolition crusade; and for the hurt and struggle of degraded black millions in their ight for freedom and their attempt to enter democracy. Can all this be omitted or half suppressed in a treatise that calls itself scientiic?
—W. E. B. DuBois, “The Propaganda of History”
Apart from its plots of disguise and mistaken identity, its melodramatic courtroom scenes bloated with the requisite exposés, and the various sen-sationalized snapshots of political debauchery and corrupt scheming as sor-did as any in he Quaker City, Hagar’s Daughter is principally a story about the unexpected disclosure of black blood, which has tragic consequences for both of the novel’s heroines. he irst part of the book is devoted to the plight of Hagar Enson, who falls victim to the machinations of her un-scrupulous brother- in- law, the inveterate gambler St. Clair Enson. An ob-sequious, scheming slave- trader who goes by the name of Walker is Hagar’s supposed owner, privy to Hagar’s black ancestry— the knowledge of which she is herself unaware. Walker demands payment from Hagar’s husband.
Recognizing that the law of the land “forbids me to acknowledge as my wife
a woman in whose veins courses a drop of the accursed blood of the Negro slave” (59), Ellis Enson resolves to abandon their Baltimore estate and travel abroad with his wife and their newborn child. hese plans go awry, however, when Ellis disappears and St. Clair is made heir to the estate. Hagar and her child are swiftly conducted to a slave block in the nation’s capital, and she escapes the fate that awaits her by linging herself of the Long Bridge, her infant daughter in her arms.
he focus of these early episodes is Hagar’s astonishing transformation in the wake of Walker’s shocking disclosure. Hopkins succinctly conveys this shift in the thoughts of her protagonist: “Only this morning she was his wife, the honored mistress of his home; tonight what? His slave, his concubine!”
(58). In an essay on Hopkins’s magazine iction, Rohrbach points out that a linguistic shift further demarcates the conversion of Hagar and her child into human chattel. he infant, once the “heiress of the hall,” is called a “pick-aninny” and “brat,” while the pure and spiritual Hagar becomes a “handsome polished wench” (Hopkins 39, 55, 72, Rohrbach 487). In Hagar’s Daughter, race is idiom and not color; racial identity, in turn, rewrites Hagar’s station, seizing her property and possessions as it consigns her to bondage.
Hopkins’s unmistakable critique of this arrangement lies in her depic-tion of slavery (rather than racial identity) as a “contaminated” institudepic-tion strutting about in the trappings of legitimacy. Walker, who regards Hagar as his property and prey, pulls his bill of sale from a “large sheepskin pock-etbook” (52), for instance, and when Ellis Enson repudiates the “God- given principle” that would condemn his wife and child to servitude, he sees slav-ery disrobed, as an “idol, stripped of its gilded trappings, in all its ilthiness”
(59). he text also emphasizes that slaves are not merely a source of labor but also what Nell Painter terms “embodied currency” (398). Stripped of rank and birthright, Hagar and her daughter generate wealth. Walker re-turns Ellis Enson’s family to him at the “bargain rate” of six thousand dollars.
Since “the child follows the condition of the mother,” the slave trader gloats,
“I scoop the pile” (Hopkins 56). And when, following the apparent suicide of his older brother, the disreputable St. Clair Enson inherits the family property, he liquidates the estate, escorting his slaves— including his new-est assets, Hagar and her daughter— to private pens in the nation’s capital, where “they would be assured of quick sales and large proits” (72). Between them, Walker and Enson devise a scheme that can “compass the impossible”:
creating capital where once there was none (29).
his pecuniary farce hints at the unexpectedly comic or absurdist
as-pects of Hopkins’s mystery, where depictions of senseless speculation (what we now call the irrational exuberance of the markets) are part of the sub-structure of an otherwise gloomy story, and one that shifts the text to the periphery of the detective genre. Moreover, the profound irony that attends race speculation paired with the burlesque of other attempted disguises in the aftermath of the Civil War (St. Clair Enson becomes General Benson;
his brother Ellis Enson passes as Detective Henson, and so on) generates a twisted structure of black humor. To clarify the arithmetic of this dark comedy, I will briely turn to the follies of Petroleum Vesuvius Nasby, the comic alter ego created by Ohioan journalist David R. Locke during the post– Civil War era.
As with Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter, an “impossible” economy— one generated from within the family— is an explicit focus of one of journalist and humorist David Locke’s “Petroleum V. Nasby” satires. Nasby, Locke’s coarse southern protagonist, is assembling the curriculum for his “Southern Classikle, heologikle, and Military Institoot uv Confedrit X Roads”; “Joe Bigler, the drunken Confedrit soljer” furnishes the following contribution to the college exams (Locke 397):
A high toned, shivilrous Virginian, twenty years ago, hed a female slave which wuz ez black ez a crow, and worth only $800. Her progeny wuz only half ez black ez a crow, and her female grandchildren wuz sui-ciently bleached to sell in Noo Orleans for $2500 per female ofspring.
Required. 1st. he length of time necessary to pay of the Nashnel debt by this means. 2nd. he length of time required to bleach the cuss of color out of niggers of the United States. (398)
An internal contradiction emerges from Locke’s after- the- fact appraisal of southern monetary policy: on the one hand, interracial, coercive pro-creation that produced wealth was a source of revenue in the antebellum economy, while its indispensable corollary, that “race tended to disappear in commercial intercourse— the term being chosen deliberately” (O’Malley,
“Specie and Species” 382), threatened a collapse of the market. Locke sneers at a people so preposterously thick they are unable to account for the unsus-tainable efects of “race- inlation” and an inevitable market crash. He also derides southern pretensions to “shivilrous” civilization, particularly any mythologizing of an “Old South” that proposed to heroically remedy the national debt and permanently resolve the “cuss of color.”
Just as Hagar’s Daughter underscores the depravity of southern
enter-prise, almost the entire Petroleum V. Nasby compendium plays up its un-relenting contempt for despicable transactions that were the mainstay of the antebellum slave economy. In “‘Psalm of Sadness’ for his friends South,” for example, the ill- mannered Petroleum Nasby recollects the “normal results uv the conkunbinage I sold,” which subsidized a sumptuous existence for the slave owner: “On the price thereof I played poker, and drank mint- juleps, and rode in gorgus chariots, and wore purple and ine linen every day” (Locke 194). he ixtures of this antebellum idyll, Nasby and his compatriots vary little from Hopkins’s “high toned” card sharp St. Clair, who must liquidate human assets in order to pay his gambling debts. In the war’s aftermath, how-ever, the fates of Nasby and St. Clair Enson part ways. His slaves now free laborers, his licentiousness curbed, and his dream “bustid,” Nasby laments,
“Now shel I hev to stain my hands with labor, or starve. In what am I better than a Northern mudsill?” (194). Locke implies that slavery alone hoisted the boorish southerner above his northern counterpart, but the terms of this analogy are evasive and suspect. If the end of slavery returned to the freed-man his labor value, though not the property owed him; if it made a “mudsill”
of the white southerner, placing him on par with the wage laborer; if the status of this wage laborer— undergirded by principles of legal equality and free contract broadly endorsed in the North as the cornerstone of “free labor civilization” (Cohen 29)— was suiciently degraded to be tainted with the stench of slavery and called by the name “mudsill,” then the rewards guaran-teed by the North’s free- labor ideology were at best dubious.
Not only does Nasby’s “Psalm” insinuate that the spoils of war redound upon the northern capitalists, whose iscal domain encompasses laborers in the North and the South, it also suggests one reason why the reach of Re-construction did not extend to the breach of property rights and the redistri-bution of wealth in the South: Northern capitalists could neither invent nor defend principles that distinguished their political economy from a southern aristocracy (Bensel 350). hus, the South and the North shared an invest-ment in a “suiciently” black subject: while antebellum southern wealth de-pended on the annexation of black bodies, northern Republicans— at least those who eschewed any radical extraction— would be joint parties to the separation anxiety precipitated by Reconstruction.
But both Hopkins’s and Locke’s treatments of antebellum slavery use the national government as a point of reference. Each scenario draws the fate of the entire nation into its orbit. A statist principle is wheedled into the irst “Nasby” anecdote, since its comic object is the southerner’s belief that coercive, incestuous intercourse could have wiped away that great “stain
upon the nation.” It is the tendency of “Joe Bigler, the drunken Confedrit soljer” to read black skin as a cosmetic setback that can be cleared, a “cuss”
that the white man can expiate while remaining indiferent to the sexual vio-lence upon which his racial arithmetic depends. Yet while it disregards the racism intrinsic to American slavery, Bigler’s curiously literalist bent leans toward an antiessentialist ideology, absolutely contravening the “one- drop rule,” which maintained a single drop of black blood could tarnish white-ness. What is more, Bigler characterizes interracial endogamy as iscal pa-triotism (a practice of ilial devotion used to settle up the “Nashnel” debt), thereby implicating federal trade policies alongside southern “industry” in an integrated economy. Hopkins’s evocation of the national government takes a diferent form. Hagar’s death scene very pointedly reproduces the sub-stance of William Wells Brown’s Clotel; or he President’s Daughter, in which homas Jeferson’s illegitimate mulatto progeny, the captured fugitive Clo-tel, inds the only way to evade her pursuers is to leap to her death: to crash into the “deep foamy waters of the Potomac” beneath that same Long Bridge,
“within plain sight of the President’s house and the capitol of the Union, which should be an evidence wherever it should be known, of the uncon-querable love of liberty the heart may inherit; as well as a fresh admonition to the slave dealer, of the cruelty and enormity of his crimes” (Brown 217).
Susan Hays Bussey points out that when she jumps over the bridge, “Hagar severs her generic ties to the passive white females of domestic iction, and joins rank with literary African American mothers” (307). Moreover, Hop-kins’s use of the Capitol as the backdrop for Hagar’s death reiterates Brown’s indictment of American political culture for its callous failure to extend civil rights to every person in the nation.
Like Locke’s “Institoot uv Confedrit X Roads,” Hagar’s Daughter con-ceives interracial union as inevitably recursive. However, while “Joe Bigler, the drunken Confedrit soljer” locates these strictly iscal afairs in a preem-pancipation era, Hopkins second picture of a truly afectionate and recipro-cal interracial relation moves the controversial union from South to North, and her narrative hurdles twenty years ahead. In the second part of the nov-el, set twenty years later, Hopkins revisits Hagar’s cataclysmic predicament.
A Washington debutant and “petted darling of society” named Jewel appears with her mother (Hagar Enson, now Estelle Bowen), only to discover, as her mother once did, that she too is of African descent. In the postwar era, Jewel is not confronted with the prospect of slavery; nevertheless she imagines the
“astonishment, disgust and contempt of her former associates when they
learned her story” (280– 81). Indeed, once their racial origins are made pub-lic, neither Jewel nor Hagar is received by Washington society. Jewel inds the heft of antebellum social prejudice intact, especially in the case of her husband Cuthbert Sumner. Sumner is appalled by Jewel’s revelation, though after a day’s length of “mental torture” he magnanimously declares that he will “overlook and forgive all” (282). Sumner’s change of heart is disastrously belated, however; Jewel and her family have left for the Continent. When, at the end of a brooding year, Sumner travels to Enson Hall to be reunited with his wife, he discovers that Jewel died abroad of Roman fever.
Cuthbert’s surname evidently alludes to the Massachusetts senator Charles Sumner, whose commitment to republican principles and racial equality entailed vehement opposition to state prohibitions against inter-racial marriage, which he helped to repeal in 1843. Cuthbert Sumner is a decafeinated, half- rate version of his predecessor, however. hough a son of New England, his allegiance to race equality is purely vacuous, and, more-over, Cuthbert makes his living as a government clerk and aide to General Benson (the erstwhile St. Clair Enson), with whose prejudices Cuthbert is apparently reconciled. Cuthbert’s attitudes make for a striking contrast with Charles Sumner’s.4 Sumner was mercilessly antagonized and insulted by the proslavery wing for his unyielding commitment to racial equality (not to mention his readiness to spout indelicacies rather than mince words). For instance, the South Carolina senator Andrew Pickens Butler confounded Sumner by enjoining the abolitionist to write a play about a “negro princess in search of a husband” and a white man’s repulsion by “her white teeth . . . black skin and kinky hair” (qtd. in Sinha 242). Hopkins’s character Cuth-bert Sumner, by contrast, openly confesses his repulsion for a woman “con-taminated” by a drop of Negro blood, observing that “the mere thought of the grinning, toothless black hag that was her foreparent would forever rise between us” (271). his ancestral, black- as- a- crow monstrosity is the scenery of his subconscious. Cuthbert Sumner’s tremendous bias against interracial intercourse suggests that his historical equivalent is Hopkins’s contempo-rary William Graham Sumner, a Harvard social Darwinist whose support for atomistic individualism and classical economics could be concisely sum-marized: “At bottom there are two chief things with which government has to deal. hey are the property of men and the honor of women” (Sumner qtd. in Cohen 150).
In the second iteration of Hopkins’s race drama, a Gilded Age so- called liberal who abandons his wife (Cuthbert Sumner) replaces the diabolical
son of the South who sells his sister- in- law (St. Clair Enson), and so Jewel’s story ends, as Hagar’s did, unhappily. hese distinctly unfortunate but re-markably similar developments are separated by an extraordinary ellipsis:
the twenty- year gulf between the onset of the Civil War and 1882, ive years after the Compromise of 1877 drew a curtain over Reconstruction eforts, revoking many of the legislative achievements of the Radical Republicans, and limiting reparations for freedmen to the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments. Hopkins’s explicit ellipsis here— a temporal leap forward to
“a ine afternoon in the early winter of 1882” as her heroine Hagar has only just plunged of the Long Bridge into the Potomac— joins the antebellum world to its late nineteenth- century counterpart, pointedly overlooking the tumultuous decades in between (75).
What is to be inferred from this unexpected acceleration is not a vacancy in the intermittent years, nor even that sort of inquiry into historical pos-sibilities which Gary Morson has called “sideshadowing”— the “appreciation of potentialities” or attention to alternative sequences by which a text makes clear that incontrovertibly real historical events “might just as well not have happened” (118– 19)— but that the continuity of the antebellum and post- Reconstruction moments is itself the fatal transgression the text aspires to elucidate. he “absent but real” story of the crime can only be grasped retro-actively; it is situated at the narrative’s temporal center. Whereas the typi-cal arrangement of the whodunit depends on the superimposition of only two temporal series (Todorov 45), the initial drama and the investigation that follows (which, in the detective novel’s “purest” form remain temporally distinct), Hagar’s Daughter supplements this formula with an additional quantity, a narrative antecedent that makes it possible to establish and then reconstruct the novel’s temporal abyss. In fact, the work of the novel hinges on this narrative portion and the subsequent ellipsis, which foregrounds a crime that would otherwise come into view only as socioeconomic inertia:
the antebellum status quo.
In this case, no ordinary analeptic strategy can secure the contents of the ellipsis. Instead, we can extrapolate the substance of this temporal eli-sion only if we take notice of its sylleptic character. As a narrative “unit” it serves a double syntactic function (modifying two adjacent propositions or, for our purposes, narrative vectors) and must be reassembled vis- à- vis both of its temporal bookends. he appropriate parallel here is Slavoj Žižek’s ap-praisal of the absent melodic line or “inner voice” (“innere Stimme”) in Robert
Schumann’s “Humoresque.” In order to account for the relation between the right- and left- hand piano lines, Žižek contends
one is thus compelled to (re)construct a third, “virtual” intermediate level, the melodic line, which for structural reasons, cannot be played. Its status is that of an impossible real which can exist only in the guise of the written. Its physical presence would annihilate the two melodic lines we efectively hear in reality. (Violence 169)
Žižek describes the absent melodic line as a constitutive lack that never materializes as such but, as in the “second phase” of fantasy in Freud’s “A Child Is Being Beaten,” exists out of necessity. Along similar lines, Hop-kins withholds access to an intermediate and occluded phase of events that mediates the second and the irst parts of the book; the ellipsis calls upon the reader to discern the meaning of the repeated motif. Some diference inhabits the sameness, and it is a diference that leads Hopkins’s most thor-ough biographer to conclude that a novel that almost completely avoids ref-erence to the failure of Reconstruction is nevertheless “a narrative account of a monumental battle to preserve and reinstitute bondage and chattel slavery, as well as of calculated and political eforts to taint and invalidate personal freedoms” (Lois Brown 329).
What diferentiates the irst and inal scenarios, establishing that Hop-kins has invented something other than a twice- told tale? We might take Hopkins’s double take for an instance of what Malcolm Bull dubs “epis-temic abjection,” wherein the strange continuity of the two narrative lines in Hagar’s Daughter denotes a paucity of knowledge to assist the knower, a dearth of the historical clues a detection text is duty- bound to provide.
What diferentiates the irst and inal scenarios, establishing that Hop-kins has invented something other than a twice- told tale? We might take Hopkins’s double take for an instance of what Malcolm Bull dubs “epis-temic abjection,” wherein the strange continuity of the two narrative lines in Hagar’s Daughter denotes a paucity of knowledge to assist the knower, a dearth of the historical clues a detection text is duty- bound to provide.