More Unfortunate Phrasing, Only Now Concerning Homeopathy (Or Something)

In the comments to yesterday's post, I mentioned that while the phrase obviously had great currency, its meaning is elusive.  I should've spoken more forcefully, as further research convinces me I have absolutely no idea what that phrase means.  Consider this passage from W.H. Burgess's Chronic Disease (1907):

A doctor in Maine writes: "I read your book with profound interest, not thinking of 'a nigger in the woodpile' until I came to your drug list. But he looks like a good nigger, so here goes my check for the first order. And if what you sell accords with what you say other orders will follow." Another doctor writes: " I have used your tablets for two years and do not see how I ever practiced without them," and incloses a $15 order. A great many have written: "I cannot practice without your drugs."

Old men retired from practice, who had taken drugs for their infirmities until drugging lost its effect, finding relief and a new lease on life and health from the use of the congenials, have written long letters that bring the tears to our eyes. One suffering with spinal disease, caused by nerve tension, wrote that he must die, but his work was not done. Bichromate of potash and veratrum relaxed the tension, and Epsom water application to the spine every night neutralized the toxins that made the tension, kept down every vestige of inflammation and gave ease and sleep and cured the spinal trouble and set him on his feet again with the power to finish his work. It was our tablets Nos. 3 and 5 which did the work.

The doctor said it was a good nigger in our woodpile. He is right; there is no other nigger like ours. Our nigger tries to be as white as he can, and if he was somewhere else you could not tell that he is one. He is not obliged to hide in the woodpile, like the niggers of the great manufacturing concerns, neither is he afraid of the officers like the coons in the medical trust; he never stole a chicken in his life and fears no one. It was necessary for him to take charge of the woodpile, we have use for him there, and what pleases us so much is that he feels his importance and will not associate with other niggers or the "common white folks," but will run to meet a doctor any time and calls him " Boss."

[...]

If it were not for our little nigger, our work must be left to the mercy of the character that has no mercy. If we allow our calcium to be deprived of the sharp alkaline sting on the tongue, and everything soluble to be leached from our chalk, and to have our sudorifics and stimulants totally destroyed by incorporated anodynes, then our work is a failure, and we might have been the servant of theory as well as truth, and the obligations we feel toward our brother man will never be satisfied; he will reap no advantage for all the benefits conferred upon us. "Our work is not done."

But the little nigger laughs, and understands why he must stick close to that woodpile; he knows who to call "Boss," and the Boss knows why he is there, and that it is not for the purpose of hiding, the way the big niggers hide. In introducing our drug list we wish to say that our "special process" consists in putting together what we want in perfectly dry powders the same that the doctor would prepare in chart, and in keeping these powders dry all the time. So that when the tablet dissolves in the mouth or stomach it will have the same effect as a chart or capsule, each drug exerting its own peculiar effect, free from all previous chemical change. No one can have a special process of greater importance than this, and we challenge the scientific world and the unscientific to show up by the side of it.

Normally I can make hash of racist-inflected lunacy, but I don't have a clue how the phrase functions in this book.

Comments

[JPool]

I'm not sure, but I believe that this falls under the heading of "Overextending the (Racist) Metaphor."

[SEK]

But what is a metaphor of? Something about tablets and their manufacture, I gather, but I don't gather much more than that.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Obviously he was writing in code to those of us who know that he was really making those tablets out of the blood of Christian babies.

[SEK]

Are you calling him a Jew?

[JPool]

I think that the woodpile bit was responding to the implied suggestion that this patent medicine might contian some potentially harmful ingredients.
It seems a rather strange bit of misdirection: "You don't know or understand what's in our tablets, and you don't need to know. You might be concerned that what you don't know might hurt you, but this doctor took a look at our list of ingredients and found nothing alarming. Further more, this thing you don't know about is a very good thing and hidden for very good reasons. It is not hidden to deceive you, steal from you, or lie in wait to kill you, as if it were some nigger. Nigger, nigger, nigger." Or something like that.

[sharon]

Seems to be a case of yanking together two different metaphors, ie: 'nigger in the woodpile' (something hidden and secret), and 'good nigger' (one who lives to serve white guys, knows his place, etc etc). The argument, therefore (as jpool says): no need to be afraid of our secret magical ingredients, because they're only there to do good for you. To anyone with any kind of grasp of the English language, however, it's jarring because the two metaphors are fundamentally in conflict: the n in the woodpile is, by definition, a bad n (since he's either running away from or cuckolding the white man). Conclusion: the writer was not just a racist scumbag, he was also one of those halfwitted cranks who can string words together with good grammatical competence but who have no normal functioning logic. It's a combination that frequently confuses people who are not actually insane, so I wouldn't worry too much about not being able to understand him.

[Rich Puchalsky]

Not really, it's just that an added blood libel would make the passage even more perfect.

[Whitney]

Just stumbled across your blog. Can't help you untangle this one. As W. C. Fields said, "There's an Ethiopian in the fuel supply."

[John B.]

Weird. Somewhat like Sharon, I think the attempt here, via trying to be too cute/clever by half, is to render innocuous the hidden. Maybe a homeopathizing of the phrase?

Re our earlier conversation, I'm pretty sure the sheriff in Show Boat does not have anything like this in mind when he says it.

[Adam Stephanides]

This passage makes sense if you assume that Burgess took (or pretended to take) the phrase to mean "nigger in charge of the woodpile." In which case, said African-American would be an imaginary guarantor of the pills' quality and efficacy, as opposed to the pills of "the great manufacturing concerns" and "the medical trust."

And I think the doctor whom Burgess quotes probably used the phrase to refer to the presence of advertising for Burgess's pills in what he had assumed was simply a book about medicine.