the outbreak of the revolution in 1910, Bullard continued to work out his theorems on the relationship between race and the capacity for self-government. Successive colonial postings led him to claim increasing authority on how to pacify and govern the empire’s lesser races. His observations on recalcitrant Moros and deceitful and ungrateful Cubans under U.S. occupation frequently led him to comparisons with the South of his boyhood.13
A second redeeming feature of his childhood association with blacks, which Bullard recognized, was the influence of Peter Christian, a freedman whom the young Bullard admired for his woodcraft and storytelling. Years later, Bullard recalled the impact Pete had had on him in a speech in which he reflected on the early influences on his life, particularly those that had inclined him toward a military career. “You know a small boy usually wants at various times in his life to be all sorts of things. I remember a fine young negro man, Pete Christian, that had married my nurse Sally. Pete could make more kinds of traps and snares to catch birds and rabbits and squirrels and he knew how to place them with skill and he knew all the trees of the forest and he knew before they were ever written at least half of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus’ stories and had told them to me,” Bullard said. “There was a period in my life when I thought I would like very much to be a fine negro man like Pete.”14 Bullard’s youthful identification with Pete Christian is clear. So, too, is the way the older man became associated in Bullard’s memory with two significant enthusiasms of his life: scouting and storytelling. These central themes appear again in Bullard’s unpublished autobiography, in which he wrote at length of his admiration for Pete and of his appreciation for the things he had learned from the former slave. Again, Bullard stressed the tutelage Pete offered him in woodcraft, which Bullard would later extol as one of the foundations of scouting. He also valued the appreciation Pete awoke in him for the Uncle Remus stories:
Strong, kind, good humored, a boy in way but a man in fact, he was a fellow indeed for boys. He knew and could do so many things! From watching him I learned to be something of a cobbler, carpenter and basket-maker; from being with him, the names and habits of birds and animals; the names and something of trees; something of woodcraft, trapping, fishing and what-not; and from listening to him, an appreciation of those sweetest and most delightful of all stories, the “Uncle Remus” child’s stories of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Brer B’ar and the others that Joel Chandler Harris has later lovingly put among the classics. For all of these, their pleasures and their helps, I owe something to Pete Christian, Negro.15
Even obscured by the lyricism of nostalgia and boyish admiration, Bullard’s attempts to recall and explain the nature of the relationship between Pete and the white boys of his family opens a window on race relations in the era of Reconstruction. By what it omits as well as by what Bullard attempts to explain, his depiction of postemancipation social relations inadvertently reveals enduring patterns of race and power. By way of explaining Pete’s special role in the family, Bullard writes, “Pete was never really a slave. He had grown up in the house and almost as a member of the family of his master.”16 The probable explanation for Pete’s presence in the house of his master and the ambiguity about his former slave status is that Pete was the son of a white man. Bullard never mentions Pete’s parents, nor calls him “mulatto,” as biographer Allan Millett does.17 However, he notes that Pete was distinguished by “a freedom and non-servility of manner found among no negroes about him.” To explain why a grown man would keep the company of white boys such as Bullard and his brother, he continues, “Cut off by racial and social conditions from association with white men and desiring often other company than that of negroes, he turned to the white boys of our family, my brothers and me.” Then, as if to forestall any further reflection on the matter, he concludes, “Custom allowed it.”18
In later life, Bullard expressed revulsion toward interracial sexual relations, so it is perhaps unsurprising that he left out the detail of Pete’s paternity, while suggesting it by the inclusion of other details, such as his allusion to Pete’s “freedom and non-servility of manner” and his curious status as “almost … a member of the family of his master.”19 Bullard’s assumption that “the company of white boys” would appeal to Pete more than the society of adults of his own community is consistent with an unquestioning sense of white superiority and a disdain for African Americans to which Bullard subscribed until the end of his life.20
Appreciative though it is in tone, his description of Pete deploys a dominant stereotype that cast blacks (as well as Indians and other colonial peoples) as childlike, not fully adult in capacity or behavior. In a seemingly benign—even admiring—way, he depicts Pete as a “boy in way but a man in fact.” Here, Bullard unselfconsciously articulated one of the emasculating and dehumanizing tenets of white racist ideology. Reinforced by violence and lack of opportunity, such constructions stripped men such as Pete of their manhood and adult social stature and instead attempted to consign them to a lifelong status of “boy.”
The Uncle Remus tales, which delighted the youthful Bullard and inspired his later attempts at writing about the folkways of colonial peoples, appealed to whites because they reflected a view of black culture that was childish and un-threatening—less developed than the supposedly more evolved Anglo-Saxon culture—and because they denied manhood to African American men, infantilizing them. According to David Murray, “a great part of the appeal and power of Harris’s writings lay in the indefinite suspension of any recognition of power relations or historical change.” Instead, Murray suggests that “keeping the focus on the close relation between the boy and Remus made it possible to provide a sentimental image of rapport as well as to deny the African American any mature manhood.”21 This was not new. An earlier book, Edward E. Pollard’s Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South, quotes an approving review from the New Orleans Delta claiming that the author knows the Negro nature “not by intellection merely, but also by heart; knows it, not through the cold light of ethnological science only, but most of all through the warm, enkindling recollections of boyhood and youth. The negro, who in his true nature is always a boy, let him be ever so old, is better understood by a boy than a whole academy of philosophers.”22 For white men, childhood was an individual developmental stage through which they progressed. Primitive people, on the other hand, were perpetually childlike. The developmental childhood of entire races of people made them apt playmates and also, oddly, the sources of folk wisdom and elemental skills derived from being close to nature, which might be adapted and fashioned to suit the purposes of more “grown-up” civilizations.
Robert Lee Bullard’s ideas about race were typical of his time and upbringing. What is interesting is the connections he made between common racist tropes of black backwardness and childishness and his celebration of the “pleasures and helps” of scouting, which he associated with African American folk knowledge and later with Indian fighting techniques.
Bullard thought that white civilization was antithetical to the values of scouting, which he extolled in many of his writings. He remained equally insistent on the redemptive power of such a connection with the primitive precisely for “super-civilized” (presumptively Anglo-Saxon) men. One example of the relationship he saw between the two is apparent in a short story he wrote about the Philippines which was never published. “No amount of learning or philosophy or civilization ever quite takes a man beyond a secret willingness, even longing to be trapper, ranger, hunter, woodcraftsman or fighter of savages or outlaws, all in one word, scout,” he wrote. Scouting, for Bullard, was transformative, not because it allowed white men to become Indians, but because it put them in touch with an essential part of their own nature, from which civilization had alienated them. “In this the high and the low, civilized and savage, the general and the private soldier, differ not,” he wrote. “Emperors and kings, princes, leaders, teachers, the greatest that the world has held, have aspired to the qualities, the name and reputation of scout. Is it, as some supercivilized these days would have us believe, the call-back of the wild, the echo of savagery? Ah, no, but something better than they with all their reason can offer us—touch with nature.”23According to this view, reason contrasted with nature; savage people were closer
