James Kinney

     Joel Chandler Harris and Henry Woodfin Grady, "The Prophet of the New South," were colleagues at the Atlanta Constitution and close friends. Harris's 1887 volume, Free Joe and Other Georgian Sketches, contained five stories that made fictive arguments for the principles of the New South Movement as enunciated by Grady in a number of contemporary speeches. Four stories in the collection strongly support the New South goals of reconciliation with the North, agricultural diversity, and industrialization in the South. Most important of the stories in this volume is "Free Joe and the Rest of the World," which argued for the set of racial views basic to the New South Movement.

     Joel Williamson defines three racial "mentalities" in the Post-Reconstruction South -- "Liberal," "Conservative," and "Radical" -- based on differing essentialist beliefs about the nature of African Americans. The cultural rhetoric of "Free Joe" supports the Conservative, pre-war belief in black racial inferiority, while subverting both the Liberal belief in essential equality and the Radical racism that believed blacks were savages to be driven from America.

     Harris's story "Free Joe" establishes a parallel between the time when it was written and the time a decade before the war when the South was filled with fears of slave revolt. Joe, the black man freed from slavery in 1850, becomes an emblem of all post-emancipation blacks in the 1880s. Just as the people who had feared slave revolt before the war were proved wrong, Harris is arguing that those who in 1887 fear the "new Negro" as dangerous are equally wrong, by showing that the child-like "nature" of blacks is not changed by freedom. His propostion in "Free Joe" is not that blacks freed from slavery become savage, but that they become shiftless. The narrator's obvious sympathy for Free Joe and the sentimental Christian humanism introduced by the ending has led modern liberal critics to see Harris as one of their own, but this text is committed to the New South Movement's Conservative racial mentality that held firmly to an assumption of African-American natural inferiority.