A Treasury of African American Christmas Stories by Bettye Collier-Thomas

Author:Bettye Collier-Thomas
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Beacon Press
Published: 2018-10-22T16:00:00+00:00

THREE MEN AND A WOMAN

Augustus M. Hodges

Augustus Hodges used social criticism to explore key themes in the African American experience during the 1890s and engaged controversial subjects of the time, such as interracial relations, lynching, miscegenation, racial stereotyping, white liberalism, the “New South,” and racism. “Three Men and a Woman” has a didactic tone, as Hodges assumes the role of commentator addressing these topics.

The story hinges around three Christmas Eves, the first in 1890, when the plot is hatched for Ella Watson, a young white woman, to get rid of her husband, Clarence Watson, and to trick her elderly white paramour, Captain Harry Seabergh, into giving her two thousand dollars so that she can be with Jerry Stratton, her black lover. Ella is the granddaughter of Nathan Bedford Forrester, a slave owner, importer of slaves from Africa, celebrated Confederate army general, and the founder of the Klu Klux Klan, which arose in Tennessee following the end of the Civil War.

The first seven chapters of “Three Men and a Woman” describe how Ella and Stratton accomplish their goal. However, Ella, who later marries Stratton, is not content to just stay in New York with him. She longs to visit her relatives in South Carolina. She convinces Stratton, a naive native-born New Yorker, to go to South Carolina with her, where they discover that the “New South,” so highly touted in the press, is infested with a virulent racism that is intolerant of interracial relationships.

The essential question raised by Hodges is what is the significance of Christmas to white Southerners? Do they have a “profound reverence and respect for the birthday of Christ,” as Stratton believes, or will they “commit murder on a holy day like Christmas or Good Friday?”

In “Three Men and a Woman,” Hodges effectively addresses the most salient issues of the time. He explodes the myth of black men raping white women and demonstrates that race supersedes any notion of American democratic ideals when the issue is the virtue of white womanhood, that the same forces in control during the antebellum period are in power after the Civil War, and that both miscegenation and violence against Southern blacks are widespread. Hodges’s interest in interracial love and the problems inherent in such relationships is in part related to his marriage in the 1890s to a Canadian white woman, who was disowned by her family for marrying a black man.

“Three Men and a Woman” is a fascinating story that falls outside the genre of short stories written and published by black writers of the time. Few black newspaper editors would have published a story such as this. Interestingly, the story’s serialization in the Indianapolis Freeman (1902–1903) ends abruptly after the publication of chapter 10, in which the town leaders have decided to lynch Stratton and Uncle Tom. The newspaper did not explain why the story was being discontinued, and readers were left with a cliffhanger. It is probable that the story, especially chapter 10, caused quite a stir with Booker T.

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