Book review: Clotel, or The President’s Daughter
Introduction by Dr. Joan E. Cashin
M. E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk, New York, 1996
191 pages
This is a workmanlike treatment of a subject that is a hardly
imaginable foundation of early America: slavery.
It’s more a documentary than any modern understanding of a novel.
Brown does a good job of character development for a limited cast of
characters, including Clotel, the “mulatto” daughter of a black slave mother
and a white father. The story of many aspects of slavery—disruption of
families, cruelty of masters, the abolition movement, the economic importance
of slave-based agriculture and production, the moral, philosophical and
political debates about the “peculiar institution”—is written in a style that
is manifestly journalistic and prosaic, not literary.
Clotel is a high impact read. Brown was born a slave in
Kentucky circa 1818. He escaped, became an abolitionist and a writer in
England, and was purchased by friends and freed in the middle of the 19th century.
He published Clotel in 1853 as the first “novel” written by a
black American.
It isn’t good reading. It’s harsh reading. It’s a terribly candid
condemnation of a despicable fact of American history. It’s a catalog of shame
and endurance and human spirit.
By the way, the subtitle acknowledges Brown’s unabashed reference
to the story, well known in the mid-19th century, that Thomas
Jefferson dallied with his slave, Sally Hemings, and had children with her.
Here are a couple items:
Prof. Cashin notes: “Historians estimate that perhaps 10 percent
of the four million slaves living in the South in 1860 had some white
ancestry.”1 Too many white owners forced themselves on their
female slaves. In some parts of the South, a person with white lineage except
for a black great-great-great-great grandmother could legally be sold as a
slave.
Brown underscores the hypocrisy of slave owners who professed
political, philosophical or religious convictions that were nominally opposed
to slavery. For example, Brown states that in the middle of the 19th century,
more than 660,000 slaves were owned “by members of the Christian church
in this pious democratic republic.”2
Slavery died hard. Writers like Brown helped to make it happen.
1 - p.
xiii
2 - p.
187
Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2014
No comments:
Post a Comment