Befo' de war - Echoes in negro dialect

First edition of T. N. Page’s second book, one of 1,500 copies printed (according to the Bibliography of American Literature).

Publisher’s binding, smooth spine in olive-green cloth, partially faded, head of spine worn away, cream paper boards speckled with pink, corners rubbed, endpapers browned.

Autograph inscription signed by Thomas Nelson Page at the head of the title page.

This is an openly racist work, and it is precisely as such that it stands today as a document. The poems give voice to former slaves, in a dialect transcribed by white authors, in order to make them long for the plantation and extol the greatness of their masters. The racial slur appears even in its titles. The book is a textbook example of the “plantation tradition” of which Page was the chief architect: an idealized antebellum Virginia, peopled with contented, devoted slaves and benevolent masters. This fiction served the myth of the Lost Cause and the rehabilitation of the Southern racial order after Reconstruction. Page pursued this discourse in Red Rock (1898). He took it up again in The Negro: The Southerner’s Problem (1904), in which he blamed the wave of lynchings on alleged crimes committed by Black men against white women. Much sought after by Northern magazines, this literary current left a lasting mark on the image of the South in the American imagination. Page ended his career as United States Ambassador to Italy from 1913 to 1919.

The “Negro dialect” of these poems derives from a literary convention largely established by white authors, from minstrel show songs to the regionalist writers of the South. It is not a jargon codified by an institution, like the « petit nègre » that the French Army prescribed to its officers in 1916 in Le français tel que le parlent nos tirailleurs sénégalais. It is the stylized transcription of an actual vernacular, an instrument which, as James Weldon Johnson put it, had only two stops: humor and pathos. Though grounded in contempt for its speakers, this convention later imposed itself on Black poets themselves, Paul Laurence Dunbar foremost among them.

A rare first edition bearing an autograph inscription by Thomas Nelson Page: a document of the first order on the literary fabrication of the Southern myth and its racial stereotypes.