SOURCE: "Southern Literature and Southern Society," in Southern Literary Study: Problems and Possibilities, edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and C. Hugh Holman, University of North Carolina Press, 1975, pp. 3-20.

Rubin, a leading scholar of Southern literature, argues that Page's "No Haid Pawn, " like many Southern works, implicitly acknowledged the possibility of black insurrection.

Now ordinarily the fiction of Thomas Nelson Page might be the last place anyone would think to look for critical insights into what the antebellum South really thought about slavery, since Page's whole literary career would appear to have been based on the uncritical, eulogistic defense of the Old South. But Page was a writer, and what writers know, they know best in their fiction, not in what they say about what it means. "Never trust the artist," as D. H. Lawrence puts it. "Trust the tale." In the 1880s Page tried his hand...