The Author and the Sudden Striking Lack of Grace.
So. GLH is a writer I hail as a fairly egalitarian sort. We've been over her innate classism combined with her philanthropic belief that the lower classes should still be elevated; throughout her work runs the theme of making things pretty, pleasant, or generally better through hard work, thrift, artistic elegance, cleanliness, and fairy godmothers or godchildren.
That doesn't mean she always gets things right.
She bucked a lot of biases of the day. "Kerry," for example, is a girl of Irish heritage. She has brilliant red hair and is one of the typical innately high-class, genteel girls. During a train ride, another heroine sees a Gypsy family, whose matriarch she notes as being queenly in bearing and the whole family seems harmonious and looking out for each other. There are a number of poor Italian immigrants, a couple of whom have beautiful girls with some innate somethingism despite their poverty and lack of good choices, and one of whom leaps off a building into a river to escape the sexual harassment of her boss; a harried angel, as Grace writes it. Since Grace blithely writes in an anti-Italian slur that would raise eyebrows today and she certainly would have expurgated had she realized how offensive it would be, she seems to be pretty well a thinker of her time and actually I'm inclined, on the whole, to give her a pass on that one. Not because she's entitled to use it, but her heroines and kind characters don't and it seems to be reported as just a rude word you would hear at the time from rude people, no more.
Her treatment of black characters runs along the same lines. Although the feeling that segregation exists never quite goes away, Grace never specifically endorses it; not even in the same way that she upholds class boundaries while decrying artificial distinctions. The times when they aren't are the times they are mentioned as if they were part of the scene; a Negro coach-driver is mentioned as if he and the carriage together are an item worth note, and often children are treated as backgrounds. Occasionally they are given unfortunate stereotypical reactions to things.
Black characters also show up as upper-crust servants with their own social power and gatekeeping ability, such as porters that deny a shabbily dressed heroine access to the parlor-cars in "Rainbow Cottage," or a man who is never directly described but whose dialect seems to indicate he's black and who severely judges the ladies acting above their stations in "The Emancipation of Aunt Crete" (Aunt Crete is white.) These characters are aware of the social distinctions and, while not above their own stations as servants, are still very aware of where others stand in society. They are not so outside their stations as to deliberately put them in their places, but they seem to be of the mind that someone should, giving them a measure of social power that Grace seems to respect. While the heroine considers that the porter would have been kinder had she been better dressed, it's a universal condemnation of snobbish porters in general, not that particular one.
This respect tinges even religious spheres. In "The Story of a Whim" a man is trying to get a Sunday-School off the ground, and his early arrivals are the local black children of poor families and an elderly black man. The man knows how religious services should run, he prays for the group on request, he interjects "hallelujah!" where he sees fit, and although this amuses a few white non-believers he remains a fixture in the group. It's hard to get the feeling that Grace is sneering at him. He's certainly not upper-class, and I can't see her putting him in a Christian Endeavor meeting, but he is still written as if Grace sees him as a real person.
Grace even seems to catch on to human portrayals of God; when a little girl sees the picture of a white Jesus in Sunday School, she asks if that is the white teacher's father. Unfortunately, she isn't told that he's everyone's father and the painter never saw him. Instead, the question is taken as a revelation by the white folks. When she later points out that their heavenly Father is not dead, even though she says "your" and not "our" it's still a dramatic statement by the way the book takes it. This teeny oracle may be the youngest ever Magical Negro to grace literature and speak for the spiritual betterment of white folk.
So. Not altogether good, not altogether bad. Then Grace waltzes into writing about Native Americans and falls flat on her nose.
It's not universally bad. In "A Man of the Desert" the Indian population is treated with some respect; the heroine gets an elderly male guide who takes her to the missionary's home. He is described as "taking care of the women" at the fort and reputable, and no ill harm befalls her at his hands. The missionary himself inflicts himself on some Pueblo indians. It's not really clear who they are, Grace just describes them largely by architecture, and otherwise describes them in vague terms as stoic natives. They're kind of gray shapes that accept good ministering. It ends with the kind of feeling that someone could swap out a couple of her characters for literal wooden Indian statues and she wouldn't notice.
But "one of the men was alone with a heroine and did not imperil her" is, even for someone as prone to leaping at chances to imperil her heroines as Grace, damnation with faint praise. To compare a little further, in "Because of Stephen" an elderly Native woman is employed to come do housework. The treatment of her and Cherry is as different as night and day. She is given good food for her meals, but otherwise she gets a little cramped room off the shack that sounds like an add-on for firewood and comes in rarely to wonder over the happiness, refinement, and general good influence of the white folk, and once or twice because the plot needs her to mention the whereabouts of another character. It just lacks the fun of Cherry's appearances.
And now we get to the one I can't find.
I had this book bookmarked so that I could dig it out and go over the relevant scenes with the usual fine-toothed comb, but I lost it and that's fine with me. I think it was one of the free ones, because the publisher that picks these up wisely abandoned it. There's a pastor early on who has fallen from doctrine and shocks the heroine by not believing in hell. He preaches a sermon about not believing in hell. Afterward he is waylaid, kidnapped, dragged into a near-empty watering hole, and kept in the mud by yokels who want him to believe in hell. There's a little bit thrown in about how they know he's a criminal and a cheat really, and they'd let him not believe in hell but he shouldn't preach it in a Christian sermon, but it's too little too late and doesn't save the whole thing from being breathtakingly intolerant.
Later the heroine's rival hires a young Indian couple to lead the heroine into the wilderness and abandon her. There's a lot of racist stuff about the sorts of thoughts and behaviors Indians are prone to, and then he gets drunk (of course) and they desert the heroine in the night. She finds the Native American bride has left her the money she paid them to guide her, stricken by her conscience, and she feels sorry for a woman married to a man like that with no choice. Unfortunately, there was still a lot of racist crap beforehand, so while I appreciate the token there it's not enough to save the portrayal. I also can't help but notice it rather supports passive genocide to make half the population more naturally genteel and conscientious, therefore more acceptable to marry, and the other half naturally criminal and wild, therefore prosecutable. I don't think Grace ever put her mind towards the "Indian Question" from that angle, but it's hard to avoid the thought that she was around that kind of attitude, perhaps just reading other stories written from its cloud.
I would say that she decried vigilatism, except for the vigilantes mentioned handling the rogue pastor, forcing a recantation from him, and sending him back east. I don't recall other scenes like that in any other books. I don't know what happened there.
The general theme of Native Americans being not as people as other people happens wherever they show up. The ignorant Marcia of "Phoebe Dean" and "Marcia Schuyler" speaks of them as savages of the lowest possible social order. She's meant to be an example of someone good but belonging to the servant class herself, so this seems to just be part of her simple worldview... and then she's sent off as a missionary to inflict herself on the poor people, who've already been through enough.
So that's the whole of it that I've found so far. I don't want to give Grace a complete pass. It's a bit cruel to think she should have been better than her time, where the Civil Rights era was still twenty years from public thought and racism was just a part of the air she breathed. On the other hand, since I'm going over these books with a general air of fondness even when they go whackadoo and depart from all but dream logic, I don't want to brush anything under the rug. What she did right she did right, what she did wrong she did wrong. And I'm still reading her books.
That doesn't mean she always gets things right.
She bucked a lot of biases of the day. "Kerry," for example, is a girl of Irish heritage. She has brilliant red hair and is one of the typical innately high-class, genteel girls. During a train ride, another heroine sees a Gypsy family, whose matriarch she notes as being queenly in bearing and the whole family seems harmonious and looking out for each other. There are a number of poor Italian immigrants, a couple of whom have beautiful girls with some innate somethingism despite their poverty and lack of good choices, and one of whom leaps off a building into a river to escape the sexual harassment of her boss; a harried angel, as Grace writes it. Since Grace blithely writes in an anti-Italian slur that would raise eyebrows today and she certainly would have expurgated had she realized how offensive it would be, she seems to be pretty well a thinker of her time and actually I'm inclined, on the whole, to give her a pass on that one. Not because she's entitled to use it, but her heroines and kind characters don't and it seems to be reported as just a rude word you would hear at the time from rude people, no more.
Her treatment of black characters runs along the same lines. Although the feeling that segregation exists never quite goes away, Grace never specifically endorses it; not even in the same way that she upholds class boundaries while decrying artificial distinctions. The times when they aren't are the times they are mentioned as if they were part of the scene; a Negro coach-driver is mentioned as if he and the carriage together are an item worth note, and often children are treated as backgrounds. Occasionally they are given unfortunate stereotypical reactions to things.
Black characters also show up as upper-crust servants with their own social power and gatekeeping ability, such as porters that deny a shabbily dressed heroine access to the parlor-cars in "Rainbow Cottage," or a man who is never directly described but whose dialect seems to indicate he's black and who severely judges the ladies acting above their stations in "The Emancipation of Aunt Crete" (Aunt Crete is white.) These characters are aware of the social distinctions and, while not above their own stations as servants, are still very aware of where others stand in society. They are not so outside their stations as to deliberately put them in their places, but they seem to be of the mind that someone should, giving them a measure of social power that Grace seems to respect. While the heroine considers that the porter would have been kinder had she been better dressed, it's a universal condemnation of snobbish porters in general, not that particular one.
This respect tinges even religious spheres. In "The Story of a Whim" a man is trying to get a Sunday-School off the ground, and his early arrivals are the local black children of poor families and an elderly black man. The man knows how religious services should run, he prays for the group on request, he interjects "hallelujah!" where he sees fit, and although this amuses a few white non-believers he remains a fixture in the group. It's hard to get the feeling that Grace is sneering at him. He's certainly not upper-class, and I can't see her putting him in a Christian Endeavor meeting, but he is still written as if Grace sees him as a real person.
Grace even seems to catch on to human portrayals of God; when a little girl sees the picture of a white Jesus in Sunday School, she asks if that is the white teacher's father. Unfortunately, she isn't told that he's everyone's father and the painter never saw him. Instead, the question is taken as a revelation by the white folks. When she later points out that their heavenly Father is not dead, even though she says "your" and not "our" it's still a dramatic statement by the way the book takes it. This teeny oracle may be the youngest ever Magical Negro to grace literature and speak for the spiritual betterment of white folk.
So. Not altogether good, not altogether bad. Then Grace waltzes into writing about Native Americans and falls flat on her nose.
It's not universally bad. In "A Man of the Desert" the Indian population is treated with some respect; the heroine gets an elderly male guide who takes her to the missionary's home. He is described as "taking care of the women" at the fort and reputable, and no ill harm befalls her at his hands. The missionary himself inflicts himself on some Pueblo indians. It's not really clear who they are, Grace just describes them largely by architecture, and otherwise describes them in vague terms as stoic natives. They're kind of gray shapes that accept good ministering. It ends with the kind of feeling that someone could swap out a couple of her characters for literal wooden Indian statues and she wouldn't notice.
But "one of the men was alone with a heroine and did not imperil her" is, even for someone as prone to leaping at chances to imperil her heroines as Grace, damnation with faint praise. To compare a little further, in "Because of Stephen" an elderly Native woman is employed to come do housework. The treatment of her and Cherry is as different as night and day. She is given good food for her meals, but otherwise she gets a little cramped room off the shack that sounds like an add-on for firewood and comes in rarely to wonder over the happiness, refinement, and general good influence of the white folk, and once or twice because the plot needs her to mention the whereabouts of another character. It just lacks the fun of Cherry's appearances.
And now we get to the one I can't find.
I had this book bookmarked so that I could dig it out and go over the relevant scenes with the usual fine-toothed comb, but I lost it and that's fine with me. I think it was one of the free ones, because the publisher that picks these up wisely abandoned it. There's a pastor early on who has fallen from doctrine and shocks the heroine by not believing in hell. He preaches a sermon about not believing in hell. Afterward he is waylaid, kidnapped, dragged into a near-empty watering hole, and kept in the mud by yokels who want him to believe in hell. There's a little bit thrown in about how they know he's a criminal and a cheat really, and they'd let him not believe in hell but he shouldn't preach it in a Christian sermon, but it's too little too late and doesn't save the whole thing from being breathtakingly intolerant.
Later the heroine's rival hires a young Indian couple to lead the heroine into the wilderness and abandon her. There's a lot of racist stuff about the sorts of thoughts and behaviors Indians are prone to, and then he gets drunk (of course) and they desert the heroine in the night. She finds the Native American bride has left her the money she paid them to guide her, stricken by her conscience, and she feels sorry for a woman married to a man like that with no choice. Unfortunately, there was still a lot of racist crap beforehand, so while I appreciate the token there it's not enough to save the portrayal. I also can't help but notice it rather supports passive genocide to make half the population more naturally genteel and conscientious, therefore more acceptable to marry, and the other half naturally criminal and wild, therefore prosecutable. I don't think Grace ever put her mind towards the "Indian Question" from that angle, but it's hard to avoid the thought that she was around that kind of attitude, perhaps just reading other stories written from its cloud.
I would say that she decried vigilatism, except for the vigilantes mentioned handling the rogue pastor, forcing a recantation from him, and sending him back east. I don't recall other scenes like that in any other books. I don't know what happened there.
The general theme of Native Americans being not as people as other people happens wherever they show up. The ignorant Marcia of "Phoebe Dean" and "Marcia Schuyler" speaks of them as savages of the lowest possible social order. She's meant to be an example of someone good but belonging to the servant class herself, so this seems to just be part of her simple worldview... and then she's sent off as a missionary to inflict herself on the poor people, who've already been through enough.
So that's the whole of it that I've found so far. I don't want to give Grace a complete pass. It's a bit cruel to think she should have been better than her time, where the Civil Rights era was still twenty years from public thought and racism was just a part of the air she breathed. On the other hand, since I'm going over these books with a general air of fondness even when they go whackadoo and depart from all but dream logic, I don't want to brush anything under the rug. What she did right she did right, what she did wrong she did wrong. And I'm still reading her books.