Political correctness

This is a line from my story (set in 1904). It is not an important line and could be cut but it did make me think a bit.

"An American Negress was leading a cakewalk chorus to the mechanical rhythms of a honky-tonk piano. The lyric told of a shooting by a woman of her lover. No one seemed too sad about it though, thought Gwendolyn." 

It isn't relevant to this post but I was thinking of Ma Rainey, pictured here.

I looked up the word Negress (to check if it should have a capital N) and the Wictionary definition said:

(dated, literary, now considered offensive or ethnic slur) A black female.

Now to me, age 65, Negro is a dictionary definition. I didn't know that it was offensive.

To digress here, it makes me remember that I was born a little more than four decades after the period that I'm writing about. Compare that to the six and a half decades that have elapsed since my birth. In terms of my formative years. I'm as close to then as I am to now.

Now, I would certainly not wish to cause gratuitous offence. George MacDonald Fraser's (one of my favourite authors) character: Harry Flashman, freely used the word "nigger". To write anything else would have been completely out of character and dishonest. Compare this to Allan Quatermain, as the first person narrator of "King Solomon's Mines", who in the first few pages muses over the word "nigger" and decides that it is an offensive term that he will not use. Rider Haggard published that in 1885 so that is what liberal people were thinking at the time. I have no doubt that some of the characters that I write would use the word but I haven't yet put them in a situation where they would and would avoid doing so or at least modify what they said. I think this is justifiable, Unlike Flashman they are by and large fairly decent people and I am wtiring an adventure not a social history.

To look at it from a slightly different angle; my story is written in the third person but not in the third person omniscient.

To digress again; this has made me think about the third person omniscient a bit. To be truly omniscient the voice needs to be outside time. We tend to assume we can do this by offering the voice of our time - the early 21st century.    The reader will accept this, of course but we need to have some care, I believe. 

For my purposes anyway my third person voice is not omniscient and is rooted in the early twentieth century. So I'm sticking with "Negress" (unless, for whatever reason, I cut the line altogether). I'll just hope I'm not causing offence to anyone.