Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
Spring 2004
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 24, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 101-11.
Abstract
Aboard a train heading out of Minneapolis toward frontier North Dakota, Era Bell Thompson in her autobiography American Daughter (1946) describes a landscape that grows steadily bleaker with each mile farther west: "Suddenly there was snow-miles and miles of dull, white snow, stretching out to meet the heavy, gray sky; deep banks of snow drifted against wooden snow fences .... All day long we rode through the silent fields of snow, a cold depression spreading over us." Thompson's realistic winter landscape descriptions also allegorically represent the social situation of herself and her family. The phrase "this strange white world," which she uses to describe the view from the train window, refers to both natural and social environments. "Aren't there any colored people here?" her mother asks. "Lord, no!" responds her father, who has preceded the family to North Dakota. As the only black child in her school, Thompson soon discovers the difficulty of her situation in this strange white world: "When they ... called me 'black' and 'nigger' ... I was alone in my exile, differentiated by the color of my skin, and I longed to be home with the comfort of my family; but even with them I would not share my hurt. I was ashamed that others should find me distasteful."1
In American Daughter, the changed appearance of the physical world signals the crossing of the border from such settled and urban areas as Minneapolis to a frontier space recently opened for homesteading, and from a sense of belonging to an African American community to a sense of "exile" in a predominately white western settlement. Richard Slotkin argues that frontier narratives emphasize an opposition between "the frontier" and "civilization," or the "wilderness" and the "metropolis," that often falls along a geographical divide between the wild, unsettled American West and the urban East.2 Thompson revises this traditional opposition of frontier literature the essential difference between the wilderness and the metropolis-to symbolize what W. E. B. Du Bois describes as "double-consciousness," the psychological tension and turmoil the African American individual experiences as he or she attempts to maintain a sense of belonging to two worlds, one black, one white.3 Gerald Early comments that Du Bois "saw blacks as being caught, Hamlet-like, between" the choice of living as "an assimilated American" or as "an unassimilated Negro."4 In American Daughter, the metropolis represents the black world, the place of African American community and culture. Moving west to the frontier means assimilating into mainstream society, separating from the black community, and becoming part of a strange white world.
Although the role of black Americans in settling the West has not always been adequately acknowledged, contemporary historians are rapidly filling in the details of African American contributions to westward expansion- from the work of black soldiers and cowboys to the community-building efforts of groups of black settlers. According to Quintard Taylor, census data reveal that black cowboys had a widespread presence in the American West. In the late nineteenth century, the Exodusters became part of a wave of black migration that helped settle Kansas. When the Oklahoma Territory opened to settlement in 1889, "an estimated 10,000 blacks" were among the "Sooners" who raced to stake claims.5 Several African American writers who experienced frontier life firsthand have set down those experiences in autobiographies or fictionalized accounts of their own stories. As does Thompson's autobiography, these accounts primarily tell the stories of African American individuals or of single black families living as part of predominately white frontier communities. Nat Love's autobiography, The Life and Adventures of Nat Love, Better Known in the Cattle Country as "Deadwood Dick" (1907), recounts highlights of his career as a black cowboy in what he calls the "Wild and Woolly West." Oscar Micheaux (better known as the pioneering black filmmaker who began his career making all-black-cast silent movies) wrote several novels, including The Conquest (1913) and The Homesteader (1917), based on his own experiences as a farmer and homesteader in South Dakota. We also might note Montana-born Taylor Gordon, whose entertaining autobiography Born to Be (1929) begins in his hometown of White Sulphur Springs (where, he writes, "If God ever did spend any time here on earth, that must have been His hang-out, for every little thing that's natural and beautiful to live with is around White Sulphur") and follows his adventures as he travels around the country by train as the private porter for circus impresario John Ringling.6
Comments
Copyright 2004 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska-Lincoln