Blue Gums, Black Bodies, White Supremacy: Narratives of Racial Contagion in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract

This article explores the sudden spate of stories concerning the so-called “blue gum negro” (the Blue Gum) that circulated in the national press from the late 1880s to the late 1890s. These reports concerned purportedly blue-gummed, Black assailants, whose bite was alleged to be poisonous, and of whom African Americans were supposedly terrified. This article argues that, although these narratives reinforced white notions of Black criminality and credulity, they marked a particular moment of racialization, in which fears of bodily contagion, generated by the recent revolution in germ theory, were harnessed to notions of embodied racial difference, to express and galvanize white anxieties about racial impurity. Because Blue Gums embodied dysgenic menace, white journalists and writers were often reluctant to disavow their existence, instead capitalizing on the slippage between figurative and literal language that characterized discourse on race. However, in appropriating Black culture and presenting a figure from folklore as a racial type, white writers betrayed not only the essentially superstitious character of racial thought but also the interwoven nature of dominant and subjugated cultures in the United States.

In the summer of 1887, newspapers across the nation reprinted a story concerning W. J. York, a white police officer in Mobile, Alabama. According to this report, York’s hand had become “greatly inflamed and swollen” after being bitten by an (unnamed) African American man who was resisting arrest. The piece compared the incident to the biting, the previous year, of Officer John King by another Black detainee (again, unnamed). “King’s hand swelled,” the article claimed, “and then the inflammation attacked his arms and legs, and for two weeks, his life was in danger.” Although “slowly recovering,” King was “not yet able to put his right foot on the ground.” The article went on to assert that the “negroes and some whites declared that the negro had blue gums and that only those with blue gums have poisonous bites. This belief is generally held, and the colored people have, it seems, an aphorism: ‘Don’t fight with a blue-gummed coon.’” ¹ This piece marked, perhaps, the first appearance in print of the Blue Gum, an imaginary, blue-gummed African American with a deadly poisonous bite. ² For the next decade, similar stories circulated in the national press as the Blue Gum gripped the imaginations of white journalists. As the New York Sun noted in 1897, with only slight hyperbole, “Every few months the southern newspapers publish accounts of persons being bitten by blue gum negroes.” ³ These accounts were an important – and, hitherto, unexamined – component of the nationwide white supremacist order. ⁴

Setting aside the element of poison, narratives of blue-gummed, Black assailants contributed to the racial criminalization of African Americans, which became a “pillar of racism” during the 1890s. ⁵ These narratives also provided an opportunity for the white press to reinforce notions of Black credulity. As the New York Sun claimed in 1897, the belief in venomous Blue Gums was “one of the numerous superstitions of the old plantation days which still linger in the south.” ⁶ Crime and credulity were two sides of the same coin, presented by white supremacists as supposed evidence of the “low grade of intellectuality, combined with a strongly emotional tendency,” that rendered African Americans unfit for citizenship. ⁷

However, although white, middle-class journalists might be expected to scoff at the credulity of African Americans, their attitude to the existence of Blue Gums was, frequently, decidedly ambiguous. The original report of an attack on Officer York began with the suggestion that a “species of what may be termed a human rattlesnake is creating considerable interest here, and an incident of two days ago tends to awaken an investigation of scientific importance.” The piece left readers to make up their own minds regarding the reality of the Blue Gum, noting that “as soon as York was bitten an examination of the negro was made, and it was discovered that his gums are of a bright blue color.” ⁸ Such deliberate ambiguity indicates that Blue Gum narratives did more than reinforce notions of Black criminality and credulity. The component of deadly venom was critical to the meaning of these narratives, allowing them to perform a different, if complementary, kind of cultural work. Journalists latched onto Blue Gums because, as the original report’s allusion to “scientific importance” suggests, stories of venomous, blue-gummed attackers bolstered assumptions of embodied racial difference, stoked fears of Black degeneration, and dramatized the threat of racial contagion.

It was certainly no coincidence that journalistic fascination with Blue Gums coincided with the zenith of racist ideology and the nadir of Black life in America. ⁹ During the 1890s, as white southerners sought to justify their efforts to efface Black citizenship and eradicate the remnants of Reconstruction, African Americans were subjected to an “unprecedented outpouring of racism.” ¹⁰ To some extent, this torrent of racism can be situated within an unbroken continuum of “know-your-place” aggression directed against Black political and economic agency. ¹¹ However, racial thought underwent a marked change as southern white supremacists set about building a social structure on the foundations of Black segregation, disenfranchisement, debt peonage, and convict labor. As Joel Williamson has argued, racism assumed ever more extreme forms as “radical” racists, eschewing the neo-paternalism of postbellum conservatives, insisted that African Americans, “freed from the restraining influences of slavery, were rapidly ‘retrogressing’ toward their natural state of bestiality.” ¹² While the Black Congressman George White celebrated the achievements of “a rising people,” white supremacists rarely missed an opportunity to compare “old-time Negroes” (“well-behaved, kindly, respectful”) with the “new issue” (“intemperate, insolent, dishonest”). ¹³ As Gail Bederman has argued, this new racist radicalism was connected to an obsessive desire, on the part of white, middle-class men, to “remake manhood.” ¹⁴ Black agency stimulated this obsession but was not its only cause. In the Gilded Age, extant structures of class and gender were disrupted by corporate capitalism, acute economic depression, urbanization, and women’s political agency. In race, white men thought they saw an anchor for an entire social order. ¹⁵

Thus, the late nineteenth century witnessed the ill-starred birth of a “new racism for a new order.” ¹⁶ This new racism was distinguished by a rigid biological determinism that drew on and contributed to the Social Darwinist worldview dominating American thought between the 1870s and 1920s. ¹⁷ Applying Darwin’s theory of natural selection to society, Social Darwinists refigured human history as a tale of the “survival of the fittest” individuals and races at the expense of the weakest. ¹⁸ This “Darwinian mood” encouraged the translation of social concerns into biological ones, giving a scientific cast to white supremacist warnings of Black degeneration. ¹⁹ Some argued that various races, having formed via natural selection, stood on different rungs of the evolutionary ladder. In this intellectual context, “civilization” was refigured as an “explicitly racial concept,” and supposed Black “savagery” was presented as a biological inevitability. ²⁰ The Harvard scientist and race writer Nathanial Shaler epitomized this worldview when he wrote that the “inherited qualities” of African Americans “unfit them to carry the burden of our civilization.” Because their “Americanized shape” was due to the “enslavement of their blood,” he asserted, there would be a “strong tendency,” under conditions of freedom, for African Americans to “revert to their ancestral conditions.” ²¹ As the physician and University of Virginia professor Paul Brandon Barringer put it, “Scratch the negro, you will find a savage.” ²²

Social Darwinists gave new life to the conflation of race and species that subtended discourse on Blue Gums. In the antebellum period, polygenists had proffered a theory of separate human origins as an explanation of and justification for racial hierarchy. This theory, which contradicted the Biblical account of creation, failed to find purchase in the deeply religious South. ²³ However, in the late nineteenth century, Social Darwinists and proto-eugenicists could reconcile a common human origin with an essentialized understanding of racial difference. ²⁴ The theory of evolution, coupled with the vast extension of time within which human variation might both occur and become fixed, allowed white supremacists to fuse race and species long after the repudiation of polygenic science. ²⁵ As Christopher Willoughby argues, the scientific legacy of antebellum polygenists “did not relate to the origins of racial difference,” but to the depiction of “racial differences as enduring and embodied.” ²⁶ Even though scientists like David Starr Jordan dismissed polygenesis as an idea with “no standing in science,” their deterministic, hereditarian, and hierarchical view of race was virtually identical to that of antebellum polygenists. ²⁷ In this respect, as George Stocking has contended, polygenesis “did not die with Darwin’s Origin of Species.” ²⁸ Indeed, Blue Gum narratives suggest that inchoate notions of polygenism swirled alongside hard hereditarian assumptions at the level of popular belief. This “folk concept” of race preceded and survived racial science’s rise and fall. ²⁹

As had their polygenist precursors, Social Darwinist and proto-eugenicist scientists placed a premium on racial purity, issuing dire warnings regarding the results of miscegenation. ³⁰ According to Joseph LeConte, another physician and professor, because the “primary races” were human varieties “so strong that they may be regarded as incipient species,” their crossing produced “hybrids” inferior to “either of the pure races.” ³¹ With culture and nature conflated, white racial purity became a precondition for progress. ³² As Virginia’s Supreme Court concluded in 1878, the “purity of public morals, the moral and physical development of both races, and the highest advancement of our southern civilization,” required that the “two distinct races” in the South “be kept distinct and separate.” ³³

Anxieties regarding racial impurity were sharpened by the revolution in bacteriology coincident with the Social Darwinist heyday. Segregation gathered strength from the new germ theory, which replaced notions of miasmatical disease with ideas of microbial transmission. Consequently, as Melissa Stein argues, Jim Crow was “very much a scientific project,” predicated on images of the Black body as a vector for disease. ³⁴ The “Negro Problem” became a public health problem, and discourse on disease became a “key part” of the “American racial formation project.” ³⁵ Moreover, according to eugenicists like David Starr Jordan, diseases transmitted from African Americans to whites were a form of “race poison,” corrupting the Anglo-Saxon stock. ³⁶ Consequently, the diseased Black body threatened the health of not only the white individual but also the white race. In the Blue Gum, white writers conjured a vessel for intertwined fears of miscegenation, microbes, and race poison, giving corporeal form to dysgenic menace.

As with other accounts of Black criminality (most commonly, the alleged crimes of lynching victims), Blue Gum narratives traversed the nation. This interregional circulation was made possible by a nineteenth-century “mass media explosion,” ignited by communication technology developments, which allowed race discourses to cross boundaries of class and region. ³⁷ Telegraphs, railroads, and wire services meant that metropolitan dailies could act as “news aggregators,” swiftly republishing reports from rural weeklies. ³⁸ Because anxieties about racial contagion crossed regional lines, identical, or extremely similar, Blue Gum narratives circulated widely. In the North, the first signs of significant Black migration to northern cities stoked fears of Black cultural and biological contamination during the 1890s. Meanwhile, in the West, images of contagious Black bodies resonated with an established white discourse framing East Asian migrants as “vectors of physical, moral, and sexual contagion.” ³⁹

However, while Blue Gum narratives often appeared in the same form, white journalism was not homogeneous. ⁴⁰ Northern and western newspapers were more likely to brandish superstitious belief in Blue Gums as a lamentable example of interracial cultural crossing. Of course, the conflation of cultural and biological impurity allowed journalists to express concerns about interracial cultural influence while capitalizing on their white readership’s terror of bodily contamination. Whites could construct racial credulity and evoke racial contagion simultaneously. Although more likely to suggest that poisonous Blue Gums were a biological reality, white southern journalists also sought to have their cake and eat it, mocking Black credulity with one hand while giving credence to Blue Gum tales with the other. Thus, this discourse was aporetic, leaving readers to simultaneously believe and disbelieve in Blue Gums. This liminality allowed white writers to capitalize on the space between figurative and literal dehumanization to suggest, without stating, Black animality.

Crucially, whites did not conjure the figure of the Blue Gum ex nihilo but appropriated it from Black folk culture. In presenting a folk myth as a biological reality, discourse on Blue Gums epitomized the superstitious character of race. Stephan Palmié and Barbara Fields have both drawn attention to the magical thinking inherent in racialization, a process that Palmié labeled “racecraft” to accentuate the similarity between its workings and witchcraft. ⁴¹ Mingling folk beliefs with medical science, white supremacists created categories of race that were fundamentally magical in that they depended on the influence of an immaterial, invisible world on the material and visible. ⁴² In so doing, they belied the racialized distinction between rational modernity and premodern credulity. Indeed, in their appropriation of the Blue Gum in the service of racism, whites illustrated the symbiosis of dominant and subjugated forms of knowledge in the Atlantic world. ⁴³ Providing inadvertent testimony to the chimerical character of race, authors of Blue Gum narratives reached across the color line in order to draw it.

Blue Gums in Folk Culture

As Blue Gum narratives demonstrate, the desire to dehumanize African Americans impelled some white writers to present a mythical creature as a racial type. The Blue Gum, however, was not a novel invention of white supremacists but a distorted reflection of Black folklore. Although the documentary evidence of nineteenth-century Blue Gum lore is slight, and although it is important not to reproduce segregation by assuming that this lore was exclusive to Black southerners, there is enough to justify an entry on the subject in the Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Folklore. The author of this entry, Bruce Bickley, does not mention any relationship between blue gums and poison. Rather, he notes that, in folk belief, the term blue gum refers to a “vigorously strong […] bloodline straight back to Africa.” For racist whites, this origin made it an expression of opprobrium; for African Americans, approbation. The term might also denote, according to Bickley, a “dangerous or even supernaturally endowed African or African American.” ⁴⁴

However, Bickley’s evidence for blue gum lore as a genuine Black folk tradition is drawn largely from the work of two white authors, Stephen Vincent Benét and Joel Chandler Harris. The only Black writer cited is Toni Morrison, whose Beloved features an enslaved runaway named Sixo, who has “indigo” skin (not gums). ⁴⁵ Certainly, finding direct evidence of nineteenth-century Blue Gum lore is difficult. It is not mentioned in the autobiographies of fugitive slave abolitionists or the work of Black folklorists at the Hampton Folklore Society. Meanwhile, Black newspapers, keenly aware of the political implications of credulity and wedded to an ethos of respectability, sedulously avoided discussion of Black folk beliefs. Not wishing to fan the flames of white condescension, the editors of these papers preferred to celebrate “liberation from superstition.” ⁴⁶

The earliest scholarly treatments of Blue Gum lore appear in two Journal of American Folk-Lore articles, published in 1901 and 1914 and written by Roland Steiner and Henry David, respectively. ⁴⁷ As white southerners, no doubt aware of the references to Blue Gums that had been circulating within the press since the late 1880s, these authors presented a heavily mediated version of Black culture. Both referred fleetingly to Blue Gums, including them as items in lists of folk beliefs, which appear to have been collected second hand from white informants. Henry David alone related Blue Gums to poison, claiming that African Americans believed the “bite of a blue-gummed negro is absolutely fatal.” However, the fact that David’s informants included Joseph LeConte, the Social Darwinist scientist and physician, might raise questions regarding the reliability of his work. Meanwhile, although sometimes cited as evidence for the existence of Blue Gum lore, Newbell Niles Puckett’s discussion of Blue Gums in 1926’s Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro is not unproblematic, considering that it is based entirely on the articles written by Steiner and David. ⁴⁸

Richer and more interesting is the evidence furnished by the Federal Writers’ Project (FWP). According to “Folklore: The Living Past,” a chapter in the Tennessee State Guide produced by FWP workers, “[t]housands of Tennesseans still judge character by physical traits catalogued by generations of observations,” accounting for the belief that a “blue-gummed Negro is a killer and his bite is as poisonous as a copperhead’s.” ⁴⁹ Of more than 2,000 formerly enslaved people interviewed between 1936 and 1938, four alluded to poisonous Blue Gums. Three of these – Cora Torian, Annie Boyd, and Mary Wright – resided in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, just north of the Tennessee border. Although this account may indicate a local concentration of Blue Gum lore, it more probably suggests that the Kentuckians were asked by their interviewer to respond to items on a prepared list of folk beliefs. Tellingly, both Wright and Boyd commented on horseshoes and the number thirteen before alighting upon Blue Gums. Meanwhile, in Beaumont, Texas, Mary Kindred discussed Blue Gums alongside other items of folk culture. At three sentences, Kindred’s treatment was the longest. The interviewee claimed to have seen “lots” of Blue Gums, “and they say iffen dey bite you dey pizes you.” Their hands, Kindred asserted, were “diff’rent from” those of most African Americans. Whereas her own were “right smart white in the inside,” the Blue Gum’s palms were “browner.” ⁵⁰

Kindred’s mention of “browner” palms echoed another reference to blue gums in the FWP narratives, which appeared in a folk song performed by Lizzie Davis of Marion, South Carolina: “The blackest nigger I ever did see,/He come a runnin down from Tennessee,/His eye was red en his gum was blue,/En God a mighty struck him,/En his shirt tail flew.” ⁵¹ Here, blue gums are a corollary of an abundance of melanin, itself seeming to signify the ungovernable resistance of the Trickster folk hero. ⁵² The FWP interviews reveal Black culture through a glass, darkly. As Catherine Stewart argues, they were sites of “conflict and complexity,” in which competing parties sought to inscribe their own versions of Black identity. ⁵³ The predominantly white interviewers brought their racial preconceptions with them, rendering Black speech in belittling dialect while ignoring irony, metaphor, and political significance. Although it remains impossible to ascertain, with certainty, the significance of Blue Gum lore to informants like Kindred (whose “they say” may suggest a certain ironic distance), it seems to have coursed with an oppositional energy perhaps more unsettling for the interviewer than for the interviewee.

Like the Conjurer, the Blue Gum may well have been a locus of an uncompromising Black agency that was anathema to Jim Crow America. Indeed, the two figures appear to have been related. It is possible that, as Albert Raboteau argued (and as Bruce Bickley suggests in his Greenwood Encyclopedia entry), a bluish tint to the gums was sometimes considered a token of magical ability. ⁵⁴ Accordingly, it is telling that Roland Steiner coupled Blue Gums and Conjure. “If conjured by a blue-gummed negro,” he wrote, “death is certain.” ⁵⁵ Furthermore, although its authenticity is far from certain, a Black folksong published by the New York Sun in 1897 may point in the same direction. This song concerned a blue-gummed protagonist who “kin make yo’ sick wid a blink ob ‘is eye.” ⁵⁶

Certainly, as a “potent form of spiritual protection,” the color blue had long held a special place in diasporic spirituality, a significance rooted in the color symbolism of West and Central African belief systems. ⁵⁷ In the Lowcountry, enslaved people painted blue on their door and window frames as a defense against malevolent spirits, while the blue beads unearthed by archaeologists on the sites of plantations probably performed a similar function. ⁵⁸ In 1935, enumerating the paraphernalia of Conjure, the anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston included blue candles as talismans for “success and protection,” which were “for causing death also.” ⁵⁹ This process of inversion was precisely what white supremacists hoped for, seeking to appropriate and reverse the oppositional energies of Black culture.

Blue Gums, Crime, and Credulity

From their inception, Blue Gum reports fused crime, superstition, and science to transform alleged incidents of violence into narratives of racial contagion. It is telling that references to Blue Gums usually appeared in one of two contexts: in accounts of fights involving biting or as journalistic color in descriptions of Black criminals. Tales of venomous Blue Gums certainly reflected the sensationalist turn the American press took in the late 1880s. With declining prices necessitating greater circulation, editors made frantic efforts to grab the attention of readers. Sensational stories of poisonous bites seemed tailor-made to cut through the noise of an intensely competitive market. ⁶⁰ Sensationalism, however, went hand-in-glove with racial politics. Blue Gums complemented reports of alleged Black crime that appeared “almost daily” in southern newspapers and were frequently reprinted (often uncritically) by northern and western titles. ⁶¹ Epitomizing journalism’s soft power over society and culture, Blue Gum narratives reinforced racial criminalization.

During the 1890s, Frederick Hoffman, a German-born statistician and race writer, pioneered a new, behavioralist approach to race, shifting attention from measuring the Black body to quantifying Black crime. ⁶² As he argued in 1896, Black criminality exceeded “that of any other race.” ⁶³ This new paradigm remained rooted in Social Darwinist notions of racial regression. Because of emancipation, argued white supremacists, African Americans were retrogressing toward an atavistic state of savagery, in which the emotional faculty predominated the intellectual and moral. In this context, it is telling that the original 1887 account of Blue Gum attacks concluded that in “both cases of biting the negroes were very deeply enraged.” ⁶⁴

As Kathy Forde and Sid Bedingfield noted, the argument that newspapers on either side of the Mason-Dixon line were complicit in the late nineteenth-century project of white supremacy is a “surprisingly new” one. ⁶⁵ Although attention has been drawn to the role of the print media in sustaining “Jim Crow North” in response to the Great Migration beginning in the 1910s, reporting on Blue Gums certainly suggests that the racial attitudes of many northern papers were hardening by the 1890s. ⁶⁶ When Officer John King eventually died in 1891, no less a publication than the New York Times reported that he had succumbed to “the effects of poisoning received from the bite of what is generally known as a ‘blue-gum’ negro.” ⁶⁷

Aside from the original 1887 report, four Blue Gum narratives proved particularly salient and were picked up by newspapers across the nation. The first, published in January 1891 and originating in Orangeburg County, South Carolina, concerned a fight between Tom Simmons and Nimple Brown. During this altercation, Simmons (a “negro with a ‘blue gum’”) bit Brown (a “prosperous colored farmer”), who died as a result of gangrenous infection. ⁶⁸ The second narrative, which circulated in 1892, made explicit the connection between Blue Gums and the dangerous “new negro.” The piece concerned an Arkansas “desperado” who had bitten another man’s hand during a scuffle and whose “thieving and fighting tendencies” had seen him “shunned by all right-minded people of his race.” ⁶⁹ The third story in 1895 recounted another altercation between two African Americans, Jim Pope and William Fuller of Georgia. The final report focused on Elijah Morton, also of Georgia, hanged in 1897 for the murder of his wife, son, father-in-law, and mother-in-law. ⁷⁰

As with the more frequently invoked “beast rapist,” the racial criminalization fostered by Blue Gum narratives (especially when they involved white victims like officers York and King) legitimized and fueled the extra legal violence on which white supremacy depended. ⁷¹ Ultimately, the Arkansas “desperado” reported in 1892 was “taken from jail and hanged to a tree.” ⁷² Indeed, it is telling that these narratives began to circulate in the national press at the zenith of racial lynching in the South. ⁷³ Like spectacle lynching, Blue Gum narratives comprised a method of racial formation, creating an image of dehumanized Blackness around which notions of white selfhood and solidarity might cohere. ⁷⁴

Alongside racialized notions of criminality, Blue Gum narratives offered journalists a chance to reinforce white supremacist ideas about Black superstition. Repeating a claim made in the original Blue Gum report of 1887, the author of the 1891 South Carolinian dispatch on Simmons and Brown insisted that Black southerners were convinced of the reality of Blue Gums. The “negroes here are wild over the death of Brown,” asserted the author, “and with the accustomed superstition peculiar to the race, imagine all manner of strange things. A negro with a ‘blue gum’ is a terror to them.” ⁷⁵ The same claim was made in the widely circulated 1897 report of Elijah Morton’s lynching. Morton, the author maintained, was “held in universal awe and dread by the balance of his race.” ⁷⁶

Like crime, superstition was presented as evidence of an innate racial irrationality, threatening the health of the American body politic and making Black citizenship a folly. In “no other race,” insisted the white supremacist historian Philip Bruce, was this “trait more fully developed.” ⁷⁷ As Paul Brandon Barringer declared, “To him there is often more virtue in the left hind foot of a rabbit killed in a grave yard after sunset, than there is in all the ballots you can put in his hand.” ⁷⁸ Although such logic had long informed conservative arguments in the English-speaking and Francophone worlds, it was articulated with a new urgency and frequency in the wake of emancipation and Black citizenship. ⁷⁹ Northern periodicals and publishers stimulated a “sort of craze” for southern, local color literature that both calumniated and drew narrative power from “the weird, uncanny forms which superstition takes in the mind of the negro.” ⁸⁰ Meanwhile, anthropologists and folklorists presented folk belief as the key to understanding the racial character of African Americans who, as the founder of the American Folk-Lore Society put it, “for good or ill, are henceforth an indissoluble part of the body politic of the United States.” ⁸¹ As criminality and credulity were collocated, white portraits of Black “superstition” were painted in increasingly sinister hues. To the Virginian author Thomas Nelson Page, Black regression was “borne out by the increase of crime among them; by the increase of superstition, with its black trail of immorality and vice; by the homicides and murders, and by the outbreak of the brutal crime which has […] spread northward with the spread of the negro ravisher.” ⁸²

Twinned images of criminality and superstition saturated the “coon song,” an especially mephitic brand of minstrelsy that found the greatest favor during the 1890s. The protagonist of these songs was, ordinarily, a Black, hypersexual, razor-toting criminal (a close cousin of the “beast rapist”). Inevitably, blue gums made an appearance in this genre, deployed as a sign of embodied racial difference. Published in 1897, Irving Jones’s “Take Your Clothes and Go” hinged on an argument between a light-skinned woman of mixed heritage and her dark-skinned husband, a “red-eye, blue-gum, flat-foot moke.” ⁸³ The following year, A. B. Sloane published “De Blue Gum Nigger.” ⁸⁴ Born in Baltimore, Sloane was a successful Broadway composer who moved to New York in 1890, following the route of those Blue Gum narratives he probably encountered in Gotham’s press. In his imagining, blue gums do not contain venom but signify an uncontrollable lawlessness. While the indomitable hero of the verse sung by Lizzie Davis during her FWP interview embodied resistance, Sloane’s intractable villain justified domination.

Blue Gums and Racial Contagion

Although they certainly complemented imbricated racist notions of Black criminality and superstition, Blue Gum narratives were distinguished by the way in which they dramatized and amplified fears of racial contagion. To anxious whites, racial contagion could take the form of cultural or bodily contamination. And invariably, in a cultural milieu dominated by Social Darwinism, evidence of the former raised fears of the latter. Transracial crossings like Blue Gum lore undermined the logic, encoded in Plessy v. Ferguson, that segregation was simply the formalization of “custom.” ⁸⁵ However, by the time Blue Gum narratives began to circulate, the existence of cultural forms shared by Black and white southerners had been widely recognized. The author of an 1884 article on “Negro Superstition” echoed the views of many, averring that “negroes were not alone” in superstitious beliefs: “for the ‘poor whites’ of the South eagerly believed in signs, forebodings, and dreams, and do to this day, in common with a large majority of the colored people.” ⁸⁶ A few years earlier, William Wells Brown observed that “in the Southern States, superstition held an exalted place with all classes, but more especially with the blacks and uneducated, or poor, whites.” ⁸⁷ As Henry David argued in 1914, in the South, where “the races have been in intimate sociological contact,” there was “no sharp dividing-line between his [the African American’s] lore and that of the whites.” ⁸⁸ It is fitting that David was one of the first folklorists to mention Blue Gums.

Despite journalistic allusions to Blue Gum lore as a “superstition peculiar to the race,” several newspaper articles suggested that it was far from unique to African Americans. ⁸⁹ In 1897, the New York Sun claimed that, in the South, belief in Blue Gums could be found in “white persons of intelligence.” Appearing to capitalize upon the contemporary vogue for folklore in order to Other the entire South, the Sun speculated that belief in Blue Gums “may have been suggested to the whites by their early experiences with the negroes, may have been developed on the old plantations by the vagaries of the African mind or, what is more probable, imported from the jungles of the Kongo homeland.” ⁹⁰ Some southern papers also recognized the interracial character of Blue Gum lore. As the original, Alabamian, account noted in 1887, the “negroes and some whites” believed in Blue Gums. ⁹¹

Wherever they appeared, suggestions of interracial contact betrayed anxieties about racial purity. Such disquiet explains why Blue Gum narratives gained purchase in northern cities like New York, in which the “growing specter” of northward Black migration began to stoke fears of racial contamination during the 1890s. ⁹² At the turn of the century, the northern press was filled with pseudo-ethnographic accounts of urban Black enclaves. ⁹³ In this brand of domestic travel narrative, fears of cultural and social impurity were entwined. As the author of a report on New York’s Bowery remarked, “Nowhere in this broad land is the color line so loosely drawn.” ⁹⁴ Such racial discourse also resonated with western fears of the “unassimilable and polluting” Chinese “heathen.” ⁹⁵ During the Gilded Age, as Claire Jean Kim has argued, the “Yellow Peril” and the “Negro Problem” met in a “mutually constitutive” process of racialization. ⁹⁶ Thus, the Los Angeles Times could be confident during the 1890s that its readers would be interested in “Voodooism in the North,” despite the relatively small Black population at that time resident in the City of Angels. ⁹⁷

At the turn of the century, seeking to racialize credulity as the Black counterpoint to the rational white Self, middle-class whites complained relentlessly about the persistence of superstition among other whites, especially when, as with Blue Gum lore, it exposed the fiction of cultural apartheid. Such a reference to Blue Gums appeared in a Chicago Daily Tribune report on Joseph Lynch’s Sanctified Church. A white Virginian, Lynch was part of the southern Holiness movement, seeking sanctification in this life in the face of perceived Methodist backsliding. The members of Lynch’s church led a peripatetic existence, hounded and murdered by local whites outraged by its egalitarian gender roles and “free love” doctrines. ⁹⁸ The Tribune shook its head at Lynch’s “lamentably ignorant” followers, “who believe first in the Bible, but who believe equally as firmly in ‘hants’ and the power of the wild-eyed Southern voodoo and the venom of the ‘blue-gummed nigger.’” ⁹⁹ The interracial character of the Holiness movement stoked the intense enmity that many whites felt toward it. In 1906, casting a disapproving eye over the Holiness churches springing up in its city, the Los Angeles Times complained that their congregations “rant and dance and roll in a disgusting amalgamation of voodoo superstition and Caucasian insanity.” ¹⁰⁰ The repeated propinquity of references to “voodoo” and Blue Gums was telling. In both cases, whites grossly misrepresented Black culture to fashion white supremacist imaginaries. ¹⁰¹

However, tales of “voodoo” spoke less directly than Blue Gum narratives about fears of the contagious Black body. Compounded by contemporaneous developments in bacteriology, these anxieties were principally responsible for the wave of interest in Blue Gums. Accounts of poisonous African Americans appeared on the heels of the new germ theory, which supplanted notions of miasma as etiology and generated a growing uneasiness about “promiscuous minglings with other people’s bodies.” ¹⁰² Capitalizing on this disquiet, white supremacists turned to medical metaphors, invoking the “specter of infection” to legitimize Jim Crow. ¹⁰³ Advocates of deportation insisted that “the negro is a foreign body and we cannot assimilate him,” whereas supporters of segregation warned that colonization was chimerical, “for the parasite, however much he may hate, never leaves his host.” ¹⁰⁴ Meanwhile, southern Democrats, like Wade Hampton, complained that in “their senseless advocacy of universal suffrage,” the Republicans had “injected into our body politic millions of ignorant, uneducated blacks.” ¹⁰⁵

As examples of what Gregory Dorr has identified as “eugenic metaphor,” such proclamations existed within an established racial idiom, in which the state was figured as a body and social problems as illness. In the Gilded Age, however, this rhetoric assumed an increasingly literal cast as people of color were figured as bearers of “bad blood”: dysgenic threats to white racial purity. ¹⁰⁶ It would be difficult to find this threat more literally expressed than it was in Blue Gum narratives. Indeed, recently, scholars have noted the ways in which the white medical profession presented microbes as racialized, gothic monsters. In medical rhetoric, as Melanie Armstrong argues, the “microbe monster” grew “teeth and fangs,” threatening human lives. ¹⁰⁷ As a racialized, gothic monster acting as a vector for microbes, the Blue Gum reinforced – while at the same time strangely inverting – such discourse.

The assumption that Black superstition was pathological was another reason the Blue Gum worked as a congeries for racialized and medicalized fears. Alongside Blue Gum narratives, the press teemed with accounts of African Americans eschewing medicine in favor of magical cures. ¹⁰⁸ Such stories evinced a hostility toward autonomous sources of Black authority, complementing efforts by exponents of scientific medicine to tighten the profession’s fairly shaky grip on medical authority. ¹⁰⁹ As germ theory legitimized state intervention in the lives of marginalized groups and public health gained traction during the 1880s, medical professionals turned against competing traditions of healing. ¹¹⁰ Of course, Black distrust of white medicine had less to do with credulity than the fact that it was complicit in racial ideology. For the best part of a century, physicians had objectified and brutalized the Black body. ¹¹¹

Attacks on folk medicine, then, were another attempt to define rational whiteness against credulous Blackness. In 1896, the Atlanta Medical and Surgical Journal published a letter by L. H. Ogbourn, who appeared keen to create such a distinction. Ogbourn’s missive concerned surgery on a Black patient whose hand, having been bitten in a fight, had become gangrenous, necessitating amputation. Concluding his letter, the physician noted that the “patient said his antagonist had blue gums, and that was the reason why it made a poisoned wound.” According to Ogbourn, his patient had insisted that the bite of a Blue Gum was “badder den a mad dog’s; dey will sho pisen you every time.’” ¹¹² However, Ogbourn’s motivation for including this anecdote remains ambiguous, as did press discourse on Blue Gums. Although the patient’s claim may have been repeated as evidence of Black credulity, it gestured toward notions of racial contamination. It embodied racial difference that dominated American medical science at the turn of the century.

Ogbourn’s mention of a “mad dog’s” bite evoked the main source of popular awareness of germ theory: fear of rabies. In 1885, public fascination with rabies was catalysed by Louis Pasteur’s successful inoculation of six New Jersey children bitten by a rabid dog. This scientific triumph became a media sensation. ¹¹³ Relatively rare in humans, rabies held the public imagination in its grip due both to its extraordinary symptoms (“hydrophobia”) and fatal results. ¹¹⁴ As Nature asserted (in a telling echo of discourse on Blue Gums), “So strange are its symptoms and its course, that it has been asserted to be no real malady but a mere result of fright and superstition. But of its reality there is unhappily no room for serious question.” ¹¹⁵ According to Frank Snowden, rabies shocked because it inverted the natural order, resulting in loss of reason and “subhuman” strength. ¹¹⁶ Of course, such symptoms had racial resonances: To white supremacists, animal strength and irrationality were characteristics identified with African Americans. Therefore, an inversion of the natural order was a reversal of the racial. ¹¹⁷ On the heels of popular interest in rabies, Blue Gum narratives seemed to fasten the disease to eugenic notions of “bad blood.” As the New York Sun noted in 1897, these tales brimmed with allusions to “hydrophobia, blood poisoning and numerous other terrible ills.” ¹¹⁸

Horace Smith Fulkerson, a Mississippi newspaper editor and advocate of Black deportation, capitalized on public interest in rabies in The Negro; As He Was; As He Is; As He Will Be. Fulkerson’s philippic appeared in 1887, two years after Pasteur’s celebrated inoculations and the year Blue Gum narratives began circulating in the southern press. The Mississippian was swift to grasp the segregationist potential of such stories. “The divinity stirring within these howlers,” he wrote, in an attack on advocates of racial mixing, “arouses the suspicion that they had been bitten by a ‘blue-gum’ darkey and were in the convulsive stage of a genuine case of negrophobia. If this malady be as incurable and as communicable as its prototype, hydrophobia,” Fulkerson continued, “all we can do for its victims is to strap them down – impale them, upon the gibbet of public opinion – so that they will not be able to communicate the disease to others, and then let them die.” ¹¹⁹ Here, in figurative language pointing unmistakably toward real-world violence, Fulkerson suggested that, like rabies, miscegenation inverted the natural order. Such attempts to pathologize racial egalitarianism were nothing new. While punning on hydrophobia, Fulkerson’s neologism, “Negrophobia,” recalled the title of John Campbell’s Negro-mania. ¹²⁰ Published in 1851, Negro-mania compiled writings by race theorists and polygenists to furnish scientific foundations for racial slavery.

In turn-of-the-century America, scientific notions of embodied racial difference (shorn of the theory of separate origins) continued to bulwark white supremacy. As Ida B. Wells put it, “Having destroyed the citizenship of the man, they are now attempting to destroy the manhood of the citizen.” ¹²¹ Indeed, the desire to place Jim Crow upon a scientific footing explains the most striking element of Fulkerson’s discussion, his straight-faced claim that “the gums of some of the Negro race secrete a poison which makes a bite from one of these almost as dangerous as the bite of a rabid dog.” According to Fulkerson, a Vicksburg physician had verified this phenomenon to him, personally, while another – Dr. Beall of Mississippi – had told him that African Americans were immune to hydrophobia. Again, such claims reproduced proslavery discourse. As Khary Oronde Polk argues, the notion of Black immunity to malaria underwrote Black enslavement, marking “immunity as a physical quality belonging to a lower order of being.” Stories of Blue Gums certainly support Polk’s contention that germ theory sharpened this “discourse of black invulnerability.” ¹²² Thus, Fulkerson used calculated credulity to claim that Blue Gums proved that “all mankind are not of one quality of blood.” ¹²³

The part played by Blue Gum narratives in disseminating scientific racism explains why Fulkerson’s professed belief in the existence of Blue Gums was less singular than might be supposed. In 1889, Alabama’s Clarke County Democrat made a similar claim in a report on an alleged biting incident, declaring that the “bite of the blue gummed negro is said to be poisonous, and the following fact would seem to confirm somewhat the truth of the belief.” ¹²⁴ Two years later, the San Antonio Express carried a report on Gideon Crane, a Black citizen of Lufkin, Texas, who claimed not only that he was “a living descendent of a crowned monarch of Stanley’s dark continent” but also that his bite was “more deadly than the adder of the East or the rattlesnake of the West.” According to the Express, although Crane was generally “quiet and inoffensive,” when “thoroughly aroused” the “venom of his passion is seen in the putrid green of his eye, and woe betide the victim upon whom he concentrates his anger or fastens his fangs.” The report concluded with the observation that “now the humble keeper of a hostelry in our town,” when Crane told his customers, “‘You must take coffee without sugar,’ they simply take coffee without sugar.” ¹²⁵ While striving for a humorous tone and pointing, intriguingly, to the possibility that African Americans might capitalize upon (or reappropriate) Blue Gum tales, the Express report epitomized the way in which such narratives dramatized racist notions of Black bodily difference and racial regression.

Although Blue Gum narratives illustrated the ways in which germ theory was attached to white supremacy, they also gestured toward older ideas of embodied racial difference, rooted in anthropometric objectification of the Black body. ¹²⁶ Consequently, such narratives further complemented the claims of degenerationists like Philip Bruce, to whom African Americans were “fast reverting to the original physical type, and therefore to the original moral.” ¹²⁷ Because they hinged on the act of biting, drawing attention to teeth and jaws, stories of blue-gummed assailants could not but evoke notions of prognathism as a sign of Black apishness. As Claire Jean Kim argues, racialized groups have never been seen as fully human, occupying, instead, a borderland between animals and humanity. By the nineteenth century, most ethnologists placed Blacks on the lowest rung of humanity, just above the great apes. ¹²⁸ Darwin gave new life to these ideas, musing in The Descent of Man that the “break” between “the Caucasian” and the ape was much wider than that between “the negro or Australian and the gorilla.” ¹²⁹

Blue Gum narratives certainly support George Fredrickson’s assertion that, to justify lynching, images of Black apishness assumed “new and spectacular forms” at the turn of the century. ¹³⁰ Some even refused to grant African Americans a place in the animal-human borderland. To Charles Carroll, author of The Negro a Beast, all “scientific investigation” proved “the Negro to be an Ape; and that he simply stands at the head of the ape family.” ¹³¹ Carroll, however, was an outlier. Most scientific racists viewed Blacks as a variety of homo sapiens, albeit the most inferior one, closest to apes. As David Starr Jordan told his Stanford University students in 1894, intellectual faculty increased “with increasing civilization,” being “possessed in slight degree by apes; in not much greater degree by primitive man.” Such notions of human gradation, Jordan continued, led to a fascination with the missing link between humans and apes. Jordan’s lecture notes on the “Search for missing links” said it all: “Earliest human remains; some ape-like, but not more so than Australians and some negroes. Blue-gum negroes, blue-gum apes.” ¹³² Thus, as Blue Gum narratives circulated in the press, the idea that blue gums signified Black bestiality enjoyed the highest scientific respectability.

Of course, seeking to disavow superstition, some journalists were less willing to endorse notions of poisonous Blue Gums. A few, like the author of the 1897 New York Sun piece, dismissed such tales out of hand. There was “no scientific reason why the bite of a negro whose gums happen to be covered with a blue cuticle should be any more poisonous than the bite of a white man whose gums nature has provided with a covering of red.” Infection was simply a “result of such conditions as are sometimes known to produce various degrees of blood poisoning from slight wounds or scratches.” ¹³³ The Sun’s diagnosis of “blood poisoning,” however, did little to dispel assumptions that African Americans were vectors for disease, threatening white purity. Another skeptical report, from the same year, pointed more directly toward the eugenicist language of race poison. Citing unnamed “physicians,” the piece concluded that blue gums might be a symptom of “bad blood and that in such cases the bite would be poisonous and probably fatal.” ¹³⁴ Thus incredulity regarding Blue Gums did not signal a departure from scientific racism. As the Los Angeles Times argued in 1913, although the bite of an African American with blue gums was “no more poisonous than the bite of a red-gum negro, or the bite of a red-gum white man,” the “blue-gum negro is just a little nearer the animal and gets mad quicker.” ¹³⁵

Most journalists, however, were neither as convinced as Fulkerson nor as skeptical as the Sun. Instead, because white writers across the nation presented Blue Gum lore both as proof of credulity and evidence of contagion, much of their discourse was janiform. The New York Herald’s account of the Arkansas “desperado” was a particularly conspicuous example of such aporia. Beginning in a skeptical tone, the Herald noted that “there have been doubts about the existence of a ‘blue gum negro.’ Many people know of other people who have seen the so-called poisonous negro, but few have ever been found who have actually seen such a person.” Directly it made this claim, but then the Herald switched register, declaring that the “fact that such an individual really exists and that his bite is poisonous has been fully established among the people along the Saline river, south of Warren, Ark[ansas].” Here, the Herald performed a delicate dance, leaving it to their readers to decide whether it was giving credence to the beliefs of these Arkansans. ¹³⁶

The South Carolinian account of Nimple Brown’s death, which circulated in 1891, performed a similar trick, deriding the “superstition peculiar” to African Americans, having just claimed that the “doctors who conducted the postmortem examination say that Brown’s death was caused by the bite, and that the bite of a ‘blue gum’ negro in nearly every case proves fatal.” ¹³⁷ Again, it was left to readers to decide whether they (and the journalist) agreed with these doctors. In the same year, the New York Times, reporting on Officer John King’s death, engaged in the same legerdemain, leaving it to readers to discern possible satire in its headline (“The Deadly ‘Blue Gum’”) and conclusion (“King’s assailiant [sic] was at the time of the assault described in the papers as a ‘blue gum’ negro”). This paradoxical rhetoric had much in common with the “artful deception” that, as James Cook argues, was a principal mode of nineteenth-century popular culture. White journalists treated tales of poisonous gums as both “counterfeit and currency,” as had audiences for racialized exhibits provided by P. T. Barnum. These exhibits included “What Is It?” in which a series of Black performers posed as a creature purported to be the “missing link” between human and ape. ¹³⁸ Thus, white writers frequently presented Blue Gums as both real and unreal: a state of affairs encapsulated in one oxymoronic description of the Blue Gum as a “well grounded superstition.” ¹³⁹

Such aporia was facilitated by the fact that, frequently, as with much racial rhetoric, discourse on Blue Gums was interstitial, existing within, and drawing power from, the space between the literal and figurative. Seeking to dramatize the “horror of Negro domination,” white supremacists routinely capitalized on the semantic ambiguity of references to beasts and demons. ¹⁴⁰ Thus, the South swirled with images of the Black vote as an “incubus,” or Fusionist politics as a “vampire.” ¹⁴¹ Discussing the lynching of Henry Smith in 1893, the Methodist bishop Atticus Haygood urged his readers to consider Smith’s alleged victim, “first outraged with demoniacal cruelty and then taken by her heels and torn asunder in the mad wantonness of gorilla ferocity.” ¹⁴² As Orlando Patterson has argued, it should not be assumed that deeply religious southerners received such rhetoric in an entirely metaphorical manner. ¹⁴³ And such images were not confined to the South. In the West, white readers of Blue Gum narratives would have been well aware of images of East Asian immigrants as demonic bearers of contagion, especially those familiar with the pages of San Francisco’s deeply anti-Chinese Wasp. ¹⁴⁴ Several Blue Gum narratives occupied the same liminal space. When the writer of the dispatch on Elijah Morton’s execution described him as “one of the worst of the species yet discovered in Georgia” – or when the original Blue Gum account declared that “a species of what may be termed a human rattlesnake is creating considerable interest” – readers were left to interpret “species” as a biological order, a sociocultural category, or, more likely, a hazy amalgam of both. ¹⁴⁵

The popular purchase of Blue Gum narratives is suggested by the swift incorporation of Blue Gums within white supremacist fiction. In 1897, the Texas writer, Mollie Evelyn Moor Davis, led the way with “A Bamboula,” in which a character named “Blue-gum Marc” declares, “ef I git mad at anybody, an’ bite de pusson, dat bite gwine ter be wusser ‘n rattle snake pisen!” ¹⁴⁶ Other authors used blue gums to animalize African Americans, without mentioning poison. In 1898, Thomas Nelson Page combined jaws, teeth, and gums in his description of Dr. Moses, the villain of Red Rock. “His chin stuck so far forward that the lower teeth were much outside of the upper, or, at least, the lower jaw was,” wrote Page, “for the teeth looked as though they had been ground down, and his gums, as he grinned, showed as blue on the edges as if he had painted them.” ¹⁴⁷ Echoing the previous year’s description of Elijah Morton’s “light-blue gums, thickly studded with short, sharp teeth,” Page’s description may well have inspired Thomas Dixon’s portrayal, in The Clansman, of the Black Republican, Old Aleck. ¹⁴⁸ Evoking the association between blue gums and apishness, which had been given credence by scientists like David Starr Jordan, Dixon’s prose pointed, unmistakably, toward the conflation of race and species. Old Aleck’s jaws, he wrote, “were strong and angular, mouth wide, and lips thick, curling back from rows of solid teeth set obliquely in their blue gums.” Indeed, Aleck was “so striking a negro in his personal appearance” that he appeared “almost a distinct type of man.” ¹⁴⁹

Blue Gums and the Superstition of Race

Discourse on Blue Gums appropriated and refashioned Black diasporic culture as racist calumny. In this, it was not alone. Contemporaneous white discussions of the loup-garou were doing the same thing. The loup-garou was a creature from Haitian myth, bent upon the kidnapping and exsanguination of children, yet nineteenth-century white writers presented it as genuine evidence of endemic cannibalism. In response to the Haitian author Jacques Leger, who dismissed such stories as superstition, the journalist and travel writer, Stephen Bonsal, denied that the loup-garou was “invented by old black mammies on the plantations to scare bad white children.” ¹⁵⁰ As Vincent Brown has argued, whites had long sought to control people of African descent by appropriating the power of their spiritual beliefs, mutilating the bodies of enslaved rebels in order to exploit African conceptions of the afterlife. ¹⁵¹ In white discourse on Blue Gums, however, the power of Black culture was redirected toward the project of racial formation. To create race, white writers drew from the well of Black culture. In this way, discourse on Blue Gums epitomized what Stephan Palmié describes as the “densely woven mesh” of the Atlantic world. In this discursive web, dominant and subjugated forms of knowledge existed in symbiosis, rather than binary opposition. ¹⁵²

Further complicating the racialized opposition of white, rational modernity and Black, superstitious tradition was the fundamentally magical character of racial thought. Glimpsed from afar but dissolving on approach, race was an intellectual mirage. Consequently, to defend chimerical notions of racial difference, white supremacists divorced race from phenotype. Like magic, race depended on “invisible ontologies”: the assumption of a hidden reality affecting the visible. ¹⁵³ As Horace Smith Fulkerson claimed, observable, biological reality was not a reliable guide to racial difference. The “whole thing is only ‘skin deep,’” he wrote, defensively; “it is only a surface mark.” ¹⁵⁴ White supremacists fused the spiritual and secular in a decidedly “amodern” fashion, superimposing on the visible an invisible, essentially mystical, racial order. ¹⁵⁵ In this light, Philip Bruce’s cavil that Blacks dwelled “as much in the visionary world as in the material world” looks like projection. ¹⁵⁶

Without evidence for the existence of race – the racial “holy grail” – Social Darwinists traded in the metaphor of “blood,” both as a synonym for race and as the medium of its transmission. ¹⁵⁷ In the late nineteenth century, hard hereditarian conceptions of germ plasm gave this figurative language new authority, allowing exponents of Jim Crow to invoke the “most impressive doctrines of biological science.” ¹⁵⁸ Such appeals, however, remained little more than gloss for an essentially magical conception of race. Meanwhile, as Black agency was met with mass terror, this magical system legitimized the spilling of very real blood in southern killing fields and northern streets. It was little wonder that, seeking to cement racial hierarchy, whites circulated tales of poisonous Blue Gums. Converting fears of microbial infection into narratives of racial contamination, Blue Gum narratives coursed with blood, both literal and figurative. ¹⁵⁹

Having no basis in fact, as Audrey Smedley notes, race was “a product of human invention much like fairies, leprechauns, banshees, ghosts, and werewolves.” ¹⁶⁰ However, Blue Gums and loup-garous demonstrate that racial types were more than simply comparable to the supernatural creatures of folklore: these supernatural creatures could themselves be converted into racial types. This process of translation from folklore to science was nothing new. From Pliny the Elder to John Mandeville and beyond, Western discourse on people of color traded in monsters. In the tenth edition of his foundational work of categorization, Systema Naturae, Carl Linnaeus included homo ferus and homo monstrous alongside homo sapiens. ¹⁶¹ Evincing the continued influence of both the Plinian races and the European “Wild Man” tradition, these mythical additions to the genus homo betrayed the confusion of fact and fiction that was inherent to racial taxonomy from its inception. ¹⁶² Subsequently, Médéric Moreau de Saint-Méry, author of one of the earliest typologies of “nuances of skin,” borrowed the nomenclature of magic and mythology for his imagined racial categories. ¹⁶³ And, as late as 1915, no less an authority than David Starr Jordan could be found discussing the voguish notion that European fairy lore was a folk memory of “historic swarthy dwarf races.” ¹⁶⁴ This idea, of course, was no more fantastical than Jordan’s comparison of “Blue-gum negroes, blue-gum apes.” Thus, racial taxonomies are one of the most unmistakable examples of a haunted modernity, dissolving the boundary between premodern and modern. Discourse on Blue Gums was only the most recent manifestation of such hybridization, providing further support for Bruno Latour’s contention that there “has never been a modern world.” ¹⁶⁵

At the close of the nineteenth century, Blue Gum narratives joined the cultural apparatus of nationwide white supremacy. While complementing the notion that criminality and credulity were Black racial traits, these narratives were more than simply capsules for the Jim Crow zeitgeist. On the contrary, they constituted a contingent instance of racialization, in which new fears of microbial contagion were harnessed to older notions of embodied racial difference. Blue Gum narratives captured white imaginations because they dramatized Social Darwinist and proto-eugenicist fears of the Black body as a source of racial contamination. It was for this reason that white writers were sometimes reluctant to dismiss Blue Gums as superstition, capitalizing, instead, on the fact that racial discourse so often operated in a borderland between figurative and literal dehumanization. Thus, tales of venomous, Black assailants resonated with discourses of race poison that swirled at the turn of the century. And, in an intellectual setting within which nature and culture were conflated, even allusions to the interracial character of Blue Gum lore could evoke biological impurity. The irony is that, in presenting a figure from Black folklore as a racial type, white writers testified to the chimerical nature of racial purity, while betraying the superstitious foundations of racial science. In using Blue Gums to construct race, they were chasing their own tails.