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Gillman speculates that ties binding Charles Chesnutt and Oscar Micheaux extend to an unlikely candidate for a remake of "Marrow": Micheaux's "Within Our Gates."

WHO IS, OR ARE, Micheaux's Chesnutt(s)? Which of Charles Chesnutt's post-Reconstruction novels may Oscar Micheaux be said to have adapted in his films? To such seemingly obvious questions, there are some obvious answers. It is well known that Micheaux directed two film versions of Chesnutt's tragic novel of racial passing, The House behind the Cedars (1900): the first, in 1924, is entitled House behind the Cedars and is a faithful adaption that encountered difficulties with the censors; the second is the recently rediscovered Veiled Aristocrats (1932), a remake with a happy ending. It is less well known that around the same time, Micheaux may also have arranged to purchase the rights to Chesnutt's Marrow of Tradition (1901), a novel on the 1898 Wilmington, North Carolina, race "riot," with a parallel plot on the struggles in an interracial family over the legitimacy of the mulatto side. It is not clear whether the transaction was ever completed or whether the Marrow film was ever made.1 But together the two novels may be said to map the conflicting contours of and historical changes in representations of racial passing-not only Chesnutt's but also Micheaux's. Both novelist and filmmaker chart the crossing of the classic passing plot of discovery and subsequent acknowledgment or denial of "black blood," which shapes both Chesnutt's and Micheaux's House behind the Cedars, with nanatives of legitimacy-legal, social, and professional-central to Marrow of Tradition.2 In the process, the novel and the film suggest how the traditional tropes of racial uplift that undergird the search for middle-class respectability, in a kind of updated passing plot, should be thought of as an available narrative form rather than a coherent ideology.

Today I'd like to speculate, however, that the ties that bind Chesnutt and Micheaux extend further, to a perhaps unlikely candidate for a remake of Marrow: Micheaux's Within Our Gates (1919-20), a silent film that centers on the struggles of an educated mulatta to maintain a school for southern black children and stages a devastating critique of lynching and mob violence. Even without any evidence of a Micheaux-Chesnutt deal on Marrow, Micheaux's Gates and Chesnutt's novel make a remarkably resonant pair. Both works are exposes, anatomies from a black middle-class viewpoint, of the mythologies masking white racial violence. The novel demonstrates how the much-vaunted honor of southern white womanhood, as well as the canons of white supremacy itself, could be cynically manipulated in a calculated campaign of electoral intimidation and violence conducted by white Democrats seeking to regain local political control. The film reverses the black rapist-beast complex with images of a bestial white lynch mob and a white patriarch assaulting the mulatta schoolteacher. By yoking tactics of racial terror to dominant political and sexual ideologies, both novel and film go beyond the many other contemporary works that represent lynching, burning, and rape. Together they expose the racial violence of lynching and rioting as a wide-reaching means of economic, social, and political control.

Even the unusual provenance of Within Our Gates is a story involving a Marrow-esque "riot-lynching linkage" (to use the film theorist Jane Gaines's phrase), both real and imagined. Gates is one of the very few surviving films from Micheaux's silent period, 1918-31, during which he may have produced as many as twenty-five films; the recent rediscovery of two of these lost silents is currently producing a reevaluation of his extraordinary and tantalizing career (previously thought to have been mostly in talkies). Gates is perhaps the most exciting of the discoveries: the film scholar Thomas Cripps identified the film in an archive in Madrid in the mid1970s. Retitled La negra, the film had Spanish intertitles when it was returned to the Library of Congress in 1990. This "strange text;' which Gaines calls a work with "two cultural lives," at home and on the Continent, having crossed the Atlantic and returned to the US in changed form, is the only extant version of Within Our Gates. Moreover, there is disagreement in both the available primary and secondary sources over precisely what the film seen in 1920 was like. Viewers' accounts refer to different versions with different cuts at different showings, and film historians even disagree about the film's subject matter.3 Yet Gaines argues that our version is as much a Gates text as any of the "original" prints, which were all subject to different cuts by different censors in the cities where the film was released, in a climate of race riots and lynching the year after what the novelist James Weldon Johnson called the "red summer" of 1919, the culmination of a period of racial turbulence surrounding World War I and demobilization.

There are still more proximate historical connections between Micheaux's film and Chesnutt's novel. Both works have been recognized as possible responses to Thomas Dixon's Klan trilogy and the sensational film based on it, D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915). With the discovery of Gates in Spanish archives, scholars immediately began to say that the film was the "long lost answer" to Birth.4 Chesnutt's Marrow was sometimes seen, more tenuously and seemingly anachronistically, as an ante facto response to Dixon's The Leopard's Spots (1902), the first volume of the Klan triology. Both Chesnutt's and Dixon's novels represent the 1898 Wilmington riot, one of the key volatile issues and events on which they compete for interpretive authority, as a flash point in race relations. When Dixon's novel, an overnight success, came out, Chesnutt was advised by his friend Ohio Congressman Theodore Burton to send copies of Marrow to several members of the House of Representatives known to have already received Dixon's novel. Chesnutt also wrote to Booker T. Washington about sending a copy to President Theodore Roosevelt. The intent was to counter Dixon's representation of the Wilmington riotand the whole riot-lynching machinery of racial terror-with Chesnutt's. But, as Eric Sundquist remarks, Chesnutt's letters reveal that at most his novel seems to have been taken as an alternative to rather than a refutation of Dixon's Negrophobia.5

Marrow's failure to provide a meaningful literary alternative to Leopard's Spots may be gauged in the stark terms of its financial failure; sales were disappointing, despite Houghton Mifflin's energetic advertising campaign and national media attention. It is easy to imagine why Dixon's justifications of the spontaneous and uncontrollable violence of the lynch mob-his "thousand-legged beast"-might not have been effectively challenged, especially for mainstream readers, by Chesnutt's political analysis of the instrumentality of white supremacy. For Chesnutt white supremacy is a slogan, not a belief. As a manipulable slogan, it provides the racial linchpin of a carefully managed program of social control by the novel's Wellington (Wilmington) political power brokers, a classic conspiratorial group Chesnutt dubs the Big Three. Whereas Dixon's protagonist, a genteel white supremacist, is powerless to save the alleged black rapist, once his childhood slave companion, from the thousand-legged beast-a mob whose differences "melt into a great crawling, swaying creature [. . .] with a thousand legs, and a thousand eyes, and ten thousand gleaming teeth, and with no ear to hear and no heart to pity!"6-Chesnutt's Big Three, capping their campaign of electoral intimidation, are shown to succeed in engineering a riot, along with the lastminute rescue of the novel's intended black lynching victim. If Chesnutt portrayed white supremacists as powerful-and cynical-social managers, Dixon's white supremacy won over readers as an irresistible force that no one could control.

Both Chesnutt's Marrow and Micheaux's Gates respond to the Dixon-Griffith justifications of lynch law as preferable to the mob by unmasking lynching and rioting as open conspiracies, organized spectacles rather than the products of spontaneous mob violence. Even women and children are routinely in attendance at such events, as both works pointedly note. In Marrow, "The railroads would run excursions from the neighboring towns in order to bring spectators to the scene; [. . .] the burning was to take place early in the evening, so that the children might not be kept up beyond their usual bedtime."7 In the lynching scenes in Gates, the camera lingers on images of mothers with children among both the mob and its victims (the noose is thrown over the necks of Landry father, mother, and young son, but the child manages to get out of it and escape on horseback). We repeatedly see the image of paired ropes dangling from the scaffold, ready for the twin hanging of husband and wife, demonstrating that this racial violence is in all ways a family affair (fig. 3; see 1077).

Both the novel and the film hinge not only on what Gaines calls the "blood scenario," the search for the hidden one drop (whether to affirm or deny blackness and interracial kinship) so common in other post-Emancipation race novels and short stories (Pauline Hopkins's Of One Blood, Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson, Kate Chopin's "Desiree's Baby," George Washington Cable's Mme. Delphine), but also on narratives of bourgeois identity and professional aspiration.8 Chesnutt's frustrated Dr. Miller, a well-educated black physician, is good enough to join in consultation with the best-trained eastern specialists but is forced to ride in the Jim Crow car of the train and, at the novel's fiery end, to watch helplessly as his hospital is burned to the ground. Dr. Miller parallels with Micheaux's Dr. Vivian, successful, socially aware black doctor and suitor of the film's mulatta heroine, Sylvia Landry. Sylvia's part in the uplift scenario also allows for both virtuous suffering and active heroism, hers marked as specifically female and aspiring middle-class. Uplift in these works is thus usefully reinterpreted not as coherent ideology but as a narrative form, one of the plots common to late-nineteenth-century race melodramas. That it is more malleable and protean than the one-drop plot, dominated by the tragic mulatta, is suggested by the more varied conflicts and resolutions, nuanced by both gender and class, of uplift narratives.

Both works thus put the conventionally staid tropes and values of uplift to unfamiliar melodramatic and political uses. Novel and film aim to counter the violent image of the alleged black rapist, whose supposed sexual violence is actually very rarely shown, by Dixon or anyone else. Chesnutt answers Dixon's racist misreading of a controversial newspaper editorial by the black publisher Alexander Manly that attacked lynching by referring openly to the underground tradition of long- standing, consensual interracial relations that many whites preferred to forget. Micheaux graphically enforces the visibility of racial violence in a flashback at the film's end, crosscutting scenes of Sylvia's attempted rape by a white man, who turns out to be her father, with scenes of the lynching and burning of her foster parents. Not only are the usual players in Dixon-Griffith interracial rape scenes thus reversed and multiplied, but also the whole is safely framed within the confines of the flashback, in which Sylvia's history is recounted to Dr. Vivian by her cousin. In both novel and film, the secret of legally binding, interracial marriage replaces the repressed history of rape, illegitimacy, and tainted black blood narrated not only by Dixon and Griffith but also, with differing outcomes, by Hopkins, Twain, Chopin, and others. Chesnutt's estranged, interracial half sisters are, too late, reconciled by the white sister's acknowledgment that, to save her own reputation and patrimony, she had destroyed the evidence of her father's marriage to her sister's black mother. Micheaux's mulatta protagonist, acknowledging all along her black heritage and working to keep open the Piney Woods School, discovers her own legitimacy and is saved from incestuous rape through the revelation of secret marriage. Both Chesnutt and Micheaux thus harness the bourgeois uplift plot, known for promulgating mainstream sensibilities rather than a critical edge, to their anatomies and condemnation of racial violence in the practices of both rape and lynching.

The issue of the mulatta's legitimacy, however, is more complicated than this. First, as Gaines argues, Micheaux's film has it both ways with the heroine's rape, portraying her last-minute rescue after an extended chase scene in which her shirt is ripped and her breast exposed, both visual signs of violation (fig. 4). Her body must be bared to be saved; exposing the scar on her breast establishes her relation to the would-be rapist, her father. Moreover, the visual evidence of sexual violation is compromised by what Gaines calls the curious intertitle for this scene: "A scar that she had on her chest saved her dishonor because on discovering it Griddlestone knew that Sylvia was his daughter which he had in legitimate marriage with a woman of her race and later adopted by the Landry's." Does the scar prove that she is the daughter whom he is sexually assaulting? Is she saved by that mark from incestuous rape? Does the allusion to a secret marriage in the past guarantee the child's legitimacy in the present?9 The process of disavowal of interracial sexuality evident in the conflicting juxtaposition of text and image is repeated in the film's ambiguous commentary on Sylvia's legitimacy. So little is said, so late, of her parentage that the effect is to raise, without resolving, the question of her legitimacy. The tenuous reference to a legitimate past cannot cancel out the excruciatingly extended scenes of either incestuous rape or the lynching and burning of Sylvia's adoptive parents. Both Chesnutt and Micheaux thus yoke lynching and riots with the whole underground American history of sexual relations between whites and blacks, consensual and not, legitimate and illicit, joining the spheres of racial violence and erotics.

To my mind, however, Micheaux's Chesnutt emerges most powerfully in the film's curiously truncated and compressed references to race, nation, and empire through the two major foreign wars in which African Americans had fought since Emancipation, the Spanish-Cuban-American War and World War I. Creating interchangeable sites of war and empire at home and abroad, the film's brief epilogue concludes the preceding flashback to Sylvia's past on a note of the high hopes for African American participation in wars of empire. What is produced in the process is the imperfect happy ending characteristic of filmic melodrama, broadly speaking, and race melodramas, more specifically. Military service abroad is represented by the suitordoctor as a golden opportunity for patriotism at home among African Americans, cementing the bonds of the bourgeois couple as well as the professional aspirations of the black middle class and providing the essential counterweight to the film's most sensational depiction of black victimization and white violence in the lynching and rape scenes. As Sylvia and Dr. Vivian sit with hands clasped, her face averted from his, he declares, "In spite of your misfortunes, you will always be a patriot-and a tender wife. I love you!" (figs. 5 and 6). But as a putative happy ending, the doctor's romantic love of girl and country is manifestly imperfect and incomplete and brings about a proleptic and imaginary resolution, expressed in the intertitle only, consisting of purified, revolutionary violence in the present and seemingly effected when the film's powerful images of racial violence are pushed back into the past of the flashback-that is, the past of both the heroine and the race. "And a little while later we see that Sylvia understood that perhaps Dr. Vivian was right after all," reads the last intertitle. The film fades out as we're shown Sylvia (dressed in white) and Dr. Vivian, this time looking into each other's eyes, hands again clasped, in what could be a wedding scene (fig. 7). Once again, the disjunctions between text and image, reminding the audience of the reference to the twinned wars that closes the crosscut rape and lynching histories of the flashbacks, dictate that this can be a happy ending in name only.

As such, the film's epilogue establishes Gates as more than simply a response to Birth. The latter is, in any case, tellingly more veiled in representing the Spanish-Cuban-American War-through a compressed layering of both the 1898 and the 1914 foreign wars onto the Civil War-than is Dixon's Leopard's Spots.10 Micheaux's epilogue, both in formal location within the film and in content, takes shape around long-standing, conflicting interpretations of African American participation in the nation's wars. Gates maps out most of the well-known African American positions on both the SpanishCuban-American War and World War I, ranging from Chesnutt's oblique imperial commentary in Marrow, which takes place in the interstices of a local narrative putatively focused on the domestic US "race question," to W. E. B. Du Bois's explicit critique in "The African Roots of War" (a landmark essay published in Atlantic Monthly, May 1915, and later incorporated into Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil) of US racism at home and global imperialisms abroad. Micheaux has his patriotism both ways, concluding by endorsing American intervention in both the Spanish-Cuban-American War and World War I but doing so in the most perfunctory of epilogues that leaves loose ends ostentatiously hanging. Even the outcome of the romance is left hopeful but up in the air: Dr. Vivian argues that the African American presence on the national scene of war should exorcise the memory of the lynching of Sylvia's foster parents, enabling her to embrace him and her racial legacy in the present, while that national belonging is tied to a Washingtonian nativism. "After all, we were never immigrants," he says. Pairing 1898 and 1918, the epilogue notably repeats the same patterns associated with those two moments of initial endorsement, both enthusiastic and tentative, of black military service abroad, followed by deep disappointment at and criticism of the violent antiblack response to black veterans (and job seekers) at home. To juxtapose Micheaux's conflicted epilogue with the equally multivalent views of Chesnutt and Du Bois provides different models of an analysis linking racial violence in the US with wars of empire abroad-but how and in what variants does that equation work?

If the battlefields of Santiago in Cuba, Carrizal in Mexico, and Chateau-Thierry in France are located only at the outside edge of Gates, Marrow's imperial contours are similarly mapped on the fringes of textual consciousness, framed by a series of shadowy and enigmatic allusions to US interventions in the Philippines, Mexico, and even some apparently fictitious Central and South American locations.11 While the larger framework of analysis is the novel's pointed challenges to the chronology, the language, and the very status of the Wilmington riot, Chesnutt also connects deepening American involvement in imperialism with the race riots that erupted between 1898 and the summer of 1900; he based Marrow, he says in a newspaper article of 1901, on "two recent outbreaks," one in Wilmington and the other in New Orleans (1900).12 The riots were at the time often linked to the wars in Cuba and the Philippines and were either justified as inevitable responses to the threatening presence of uniformed black soldiers in encampments and towns around the South or decried as examples of the injustices committed against black citizens, despite their patriotism. The slaughter in Wilmington had its own particular associations with the war: Company K of the Wilmington Light Infantry, home from Cuba, where Wilmington's black soldiers still served in the Third North Carolina Regiment, joined the rioting mobs.13 Later, Dixon would reverse this history in The Leopard's Spots, blaming a regiment of demobilized black soldiers for inciting the violence. The point is that for each position on the racial spectrum there was a different way to connect domestic racial strife with foreign war.

Chesnutt questions the very terms by which the Wilmington disturbance was known and in the process unites revolution and rebellion at home and abroad. Marrow rejects the term riot, asserting that this was a "coup d'etat" and a "revolution" (243, 249) engineered by a group of "conspirators" calling themselves, "jocularly," the Big Three (80). Riding in the Jim Crow railroad car, Dr. Miller reads a newspaper editorial on "the inestimable advantages [brought] to certain recently acquired islands by the introduction of American liberty" (57)-but is interrupted by the intrusive presence of the cigar-smoking Captain McBane, poor-whitetrash member of Wellington's Big Three. McBane's high-toned coconspirator, General Belmont, "once minister, under a Democratic administration, to a small Central American state" (34), justifies the "revolution, not a riot" (249) that they are planning by reminding the anxious Major Carteret, classic southern gentleman and publisher of the town's main newspaper, of his earlier foreign experience. As they argue about the possibility of "unnecessary bloodshed" (250)-a riot and not a revolutionGeneral Belmont, the pragmatic aristocrat among the Big Three, appeals to his experience abroad: "Down in the American tropics, [. . .] they have a way of doing things. I was in Nicaragua, ten years ago, when Paterno's revolution drove out Igorroto's government. It was as easy as falling off a log. [Here, too, we] have the guns. The negroes are not expecting trouble and are easy to manage compared with the fiery mixture that flourishes in the tropics." "In Central and South America, [. . .] none are hurt except those who get in the way" (249-50),14 the general concludes, implicitly linking racial revolution at home with the frontiers of empire abroad, or at least suggesting that the latter serve as model for the former.

More than a regional southern campaign of disfranchisement, then, the Wilmington revolution properly belongs to a much broader national, and ultimately international, engagement with empire. "Public sentiment all over the country became every day more favorable to the views of the conspirators," the narrator of Marrow comments. "The nation was rushing forward with giant strides toward colossal wealth and world-dominion [... ]. The same argument that justified the conquest of an inferior nation could not be denied to those who sought the suppression of an inferior race" (238). But the novel's imperial underbelly does more than represent the white supremacist point of view; the hemispheric context of slave rebellion is invoked as an implicit reminder that blacks have fought backelsewhere, in the shadowy history of New World conquest, if not here at home. During the long, ominous silence on the streets of Wellington, just before "the storm breaks," the narrator muses on the lingering effects of slavery on the mind of the South. "In the olden time the white South labored under the constant fear of negro insurrections [. . .]. There was never, on the continent of America, a successful slave revolt; [. . .] yet never was the planter quite free from the fear that there might be one" (276). To locate the Wilmington episode in a transnational circuit of empire and rebellion, as Chesnutt does, is to invoke the long shadow of slave rebellion in the Americas and thus, ironically, make the absence of continental US models of slave revolt convey the unmentionable threat of black retaliation.

The context of a vaguely threatening, colonial, island location continues when the "Wellington riot" finally begins, in the chapter entitled "The Storm Breaks." It is on "a day as fair as was ever selected for a deed of darkness," under a sky clear except for a few light clouds floating "like distant islands in a sapphire sea" (274)-an echo of the disturbing dream the white Olivia Carteret (whose unacknowledged black half sister is now Dr. Miller's wife) has in the previous chapter, "The Shadow of a Dream." There she awakes suddenly from a "troubled dream" of sailing in a "beautiful boat across the sunlit sea" toward "the shores of a golden island," with her infant son, "a fairy prince of yonder kingdom." When a squall comes up, the boat is engulfed, and a small craft nearby, with her sister at the helm, fails to rescue them (268). The sisters exchange a gaze of "mutual recognition," but the rower, "after one mute, reproachful glance, rowed on" (268-69), and the child gasps for breath, finally sinking under the waves. Olivia's dream of revenge projects her guilt onto the avenging sister, who is her victim, cheated of both paternal legacy and legitimacy. "She had destroyed the marriage certificate, but its ghost still haunted her" (264).

The old South, too, was haunted by the nightmare of slave revolt, despite the overwhelming fact that there was never a successful uprising "on the continent of America." The island-shaped clouds on the day of the riot link the white woman's unconscious fears to shadowy national anxieties about black insurrection that tended to surface in association with the island nation of Haiti. No need to name it: the vaguely colonial geography is enough to evoke the history of slavery and rebellion in the Americas. Analyzing "the vague feeling of alarm" that day in Wellington's white neighborhoods, the narrator comments, "[K]nowing that [the white citizens] themselves, if in the negroes' place, would have risen in the effort to throw off the yoke, all their reiterated theories of negro subordination and inferiority could not remove that lurking fear, founded upon the obscure consciousness that the slaves ought to have risen" (275-76). Chesnutt's tropical islands ring Marrow's nation in a nightmarish presence that evokes Du Bois's famous formulation at the beginning of chapter 2 of The Souls of Black Folk: "The problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color-line: the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea."15 Like Du Bois's islands, I would argue, Chesnutt's imperial references are not just a set of locations but rather provide a whole frame for his nation-a frame that could convey both the unconscious fear and the subtle threat of retaliation by those darker races abroad and at home.

And now the Micheaux epilogue: the brief mention at the film's conclusion of patriotic African American support for wars of empire is one thing, signaling a potential rallying point of reconciliation in both public and private spheres of inter- and intraracial relations. But to juxtapose the main narrative of racial disturbance at home in the US with cryptic and shadowy imperial references, as do both novel and film (with the threat of riots overhanging the film's opening as an additional extratextual juxtaposition of the same), is another thing. Far from a source of reassurance resolving the conflict, such a yoking of racial violence-domestic and foreign, military and mob-as Du Bois (we'll see) demonstrates and the film's reception intimates, would have been, especially in 1920, following the end of World War I, deeply disturbing to both black and white audiences. It was a nagging pointer toward the repeated failures of black military service, from 1898 to 1918, to alleviate the rising tide of white violence as well as of the increasing pressures of a growing, urbanized black labor force.

Blacks in uniform may even be said to have fanned the flames. In what might be called the "Negro Question" of the Spanish-Cuban-American War, the figure of the black soldier became a flash point for both blacks and whites. Alluding in part to white hostility during the war when black troops were sent to southern embarkation points for Cuba, Du Bois comments in his Autobiography on "the deep resentment mixed with the pale ghost of fear which Negro soldiers call up in the breast of the white South. It is not so much that they fear the Negro will strike if he gets a chance, but rather that they assume with curious unanimity that he has reason to strike."ib The uniformed black man is the white conspiratorial imaginary's trigger, signaling the threat of secret organizing among blacks; the visible marks of manhood and patriotism translate into invisible insurrection. Du Bois's Darkwater: Voices from within the Veil (1920) explicitly links the phenomena of domestic lynching and rioting with global colonization and the failed possibilities of overseas service for economic and social rewards at home. Interweaving the local and the global, the economic and the political, Darkwater juxtaposes Du Bois's well-known essay "The African Roots of War," rewritten and entitled "The Hands of Ethiopia," with "Of Work and Wealth," a chapter on war, US economic exploitation, and the 1917 St. Louis riot. His analysis of World War I as fundamentally a colonial struggle of European nations for "possession of land overseas and the right to colonies" concludes with the prophetic assertion of a global black response:

Let me say this again and emphasize it and leave no room for mistaken meaning: The World War was primarily the jealous and avaricious struggle for the largest share in exploiting darker races. As such it is and must be but the prelude to the armed and indignant protest of these despised and raped peoples. [. . .] Japan, China, India, Egypt, the Negroes of South and West Africa, of the West Indies, and of the United States are awakening to their slavery. [. . .] Is, then, this war the end of wars? [I]t is but the beginning!17

In one of the juxtapositions characteristic of this multigenre text, Du Bois then reformulates his prophecy of global black violence on the grounds of the present moment. Chapter 4, "Of Work and Wealth," returns to the US and focuses on the East St. Louis riots of 1917, sparked, Du Bois says, by black urban immigration and the threat of competitive black labor. As such, this chapter should be paired with the preceding one ("Hands of Ethiopia"), which is parallel in its critique of world war and global economic exploitation and in its prophecy of impending decolonization. Du Bois catalogs the grotesque cruelty of the "hell flaming in East St. Louis"-white rioters' acts range from "dashing out the brains of children" to hanging "the helpless to the lighting poles"-and at the end of this description he observes simply: "The Negroes fought." Their resistance notwithstanding, he concludes, "It was the old world horror come to life again: all that Jews suffered in Spain and Poland; all that peasants suffered in France, and Indians in Calcutta; all that [. . .] they did in East St. Louis [. . .]." But the end was not so simple. [. . .] On the contrary, the problem raised by East St. Louis was curiously complex. The ordinary American, tired of the persistence of the "Negro problem," sees only another anti-Negro mob [. . .]. The student of social things sees another mile-post in the triumphant march of union labor; he is sorry the march should be marked by blood and rapine-but what will you? War is life! (530-31) Given the protean travel of the threat of racial violence, as Du Bois handles it, a threat that traverses explicit and indirect modes of oppression on the worldwide color line, and given the fears of rioting, expressed by both white and black communities, that greeted the 1920 opening of Micheaux's Within Our Gates, with its disturbing spectacle of the lynch mob, it is no wonder that the film contains the briefest of allusions to wars of empire within the margins of the epilogue, as a tenuous possibility, a virtual afterthought. It's also no wonder that Micheaux's Chesnutt, the author of Marrow, the historical novel on race rioting, rather than House, the tragedy of racial passing, should have always been so submerged or that he should say (what strikes us as) so very little with (what was to them) so much apparently explosive potential. Perhaps we can only conclude that Micheaux's Chesnutt tapped the nation's imperial unconscious and thus had it both ways with wars of empire and the revolutionary violence they barely contain at home.

[Footnote]

7Charles W. Chesnutt, The Marrow of Tradition, 1901, introd. and notes by Eric J. Sundquist (New York: Penguin, 1993) 219.

8 On the crossing of these two scenarios, see Gaines, "MixedBlood Marriage in Early Race Melodrama," Oscar Micheaux and His Circle. ed. Pearl Bowser, Gaines, and Charles Musser (Washington: Smithsonian Inst. P forthcoming 2000). 9Gaines, "Fire and Desire" 60. Interracial rape. Gaines says, is thus "both enacted and averted" in what she suggestively calls the "Nightmare Flashback," a "method of containing the horrors of lynching and protecting the contemporary uplift narrative" ("The Birth of a Nation and Within Our Gates" 186, 185). 10 See Amy Kaplan's article in this issue. 11 Carrizal was a particularly significant battle for African Americans; the film Trooper of Troop K, made by the black producers Noble and George Johnson's Lincoln Motion Pictures, was set against the backdrop of the heroism of black troops in this battle. I am indebted to Gaines for pointing out this, and so much more. to me.

12"Chesnutt's Own View of His New Story, The Marrow of Tradition," World [Cleveland] 20 Oct. 1901, magazine sec.: 5; rpt. in Charles W Chesnutt: Essays and Speeches, ed. Joseph R.

[Footnote]

McElrath, Jr., Robert C. Leitz III, and Jesse S. Crisler (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999) 169-70.

13See Glenda Elizabeth Gilmore, Gender and Jim Crow: Women and the Politics of White Supremacy in North Carolina, 18961920 (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1996) 11 , 14.

14Sundquist believes that Chesnutt must have invented the names, which refer to no real persons or events he has been able to document. However, according to one of my graduate students, Robert Kuwada, igorot is a derogatory term for bushmen colloquially used in the Philippines. This possible etymology preserves

[Author Affiliation]

SUSAN GILLMAN professor of literature at the University of California, Santa Cruz, is author of Dark Twins: Imposture and Identity in Mark Twain's America (U of Chicago P, 1989) and editor of Mark Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: Race, Conflict, and Culture (Duke UP, 1990). Her new book, American Race Melodramas, 1877-1915, is forthcoming from the University of Chicago Press.