Annemarie Ewing

In Edward A. Johnson's little-known speculative novel Light Ahead for the Negro (1904), protagonist Gilbert Twitchell departs New York City in 1906 aboard a dirigible airship bound for Mexico City and awakens in Phoenix, Georgia, one hundred years later. He finds that a century's worth of changes include an abolished Congress, electric cars, and a legally protected form of African American citizenship still lacking in "social equality."¹ Born enslaved, Johnson penned this early example of Black speculative fiction while working in Eastern North Carolina's district attorney's office. The tension he creates as his text alternates between the turn of the century and the ostensibly utopian turn of the millennium aims to persuade. I argue that the formal features of Johnson's temporally complex, generically hybrid text work both to depict the contested nature of Black citizenship during and after Reconstruction and to challenge the prevailing historiography of Reconstruction in Johnson's time.

Set in the postwar South, Albion Tourgée’s most popular novels, A Fool’s Errand (1879) and Bricks without Straw (1880), depict the fraught racial politics of the reuniting nation. Tourgée intended his provocative novel Figs and Thistles: A Romance of the Western Reserve (1879) to be read alongside A Fool’s Errand and Bricks without Straw and three other historical novels as a series. Set in the area of Ohio known as the Western Reserve, Figs and Thistles reveals Tourgée’s geographically expansive intervention into Reconstruction politics and depicts the tensions of a country whose “Star of Ambition as well as Empire takes its course to the Westward.” A critical look at this rarely studied novel offers an opportunity to consider the role of the West in Reconstruction politics. Reconstruction did not just attempt to reunite the nation or rebuild the South. Instead, as the historian Heather Cox Richardson argues, Reconstruction also solidified national identity and positioned the United States as an empire. The national identity emerging during Reconstruction rooted itself in mythologies of the American West and was closely linked to both the emerging definition of citizenship and to government’s changing relationship to its citizens. Attending to the West, therefore, elucidates the paradox of “nineteenth-century Americans justify[ing] expansion of government activism and still retain[ing] their wholehearted belief in individualism.” During Reconstruction, this paradoxical ideology was deployed to exclude some from the rights of full citizenship while aiding others, including corporations, who then falsely appeared to succeed on the basis of merit alone. To better illuminate the potency of this emerging ideology, we might consider another novel with a purpose set in the West, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don (1885), which similarly revolves around depictions of the railroad’s construction and expansion. Set a decade after Figs and Thistles, Squatter portrays the longer-term consequences of the corporate and governmental corruption that Tourgée exposes. Tourgée’s and Ruiz de Burton’s novels powerfully delineate the role of the West in Reconstruction politics and its lasting effects on national identity and citizenship. These novels critique both the commonplace of the West as a land of self-made opportunity and the railroad as a symbol of American progress and prosperity. Instead, they frame the railroad’s construction and westward expansion as the government’s capitulation to the seductive power of imperialism and corporate greed. Moreover, these novels depict citizenship’s emerging ideological definition in this period as one located in congressional politics related to westward expansion, and they are both deeply concerned with reparative justice. Written after the injustices they identify, they invite readers to picture the moment of error, imagine an alternate future, and subsequently envision redress. By looking closely at several key moments in these novels, I show that Tourgée and Ruiz de Burton trace plotlines that begin with misdeeds and resolve in regret, confession, and reparative action. In so doing, they allegorize a call for national repair related to the injustices they expose.