Black Students Examine Uncle Tom

Uncle Tom's Cabin

I taught Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the first time this past semester and received three fascinating essays on the work, two of them from my two African American male students. One of them I have posted below but let me mention the other first.

Jordan McCrae, a wonderfully sensitive man who is majoring in both English and Music, is interested in how people should respond to racism. He therefore explored whether Uncle Tom is an Uncle Tom.

After looking at how different characters respond to their enslavement in Stowe’s novel, he concludes that we can’t insist upon a single course of action. Rather, we must remember that the slaves have different personalities and face different life situations. Some choose to escape (like Eliza, George, and Cassy), some become brutalized and do their master’s evil bidding (Sambo and Quimbo), and some, like Tom, engage in Christ-like resistance. Tom doesn’t attempt to escape (although he helps other escape), but he ministers to the other slaves and he refuses to give up his religion in the face of Simon Legree’s threats. In the end it costs him his life.

In his concluding defense of Tom, Jordan concludes,

Not every African American is ready to take action like Malcolm X and not every African American is willing to peacefully protest like Martin Luther King Jr., which shows that there is a range of personalities amongst those that are oppressed.

The other student, David Waters, is an ex-Navy serviceman and a practicing Catholic who is interested in how progressive Christianity can aid the cause of social justice. (He is very excited by the current pope.) Thus he, like Jordan, is interested in how Stowe finds a vision of liberation in Tom’s Christ-like martyrdom. At the same time, he is mindful of James Baldwin’s famous attack on Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which regards it as a bad book tainted by white liberal paternalism. David himself is uncomfortable with certain of Stowe’s racial assumptions but, in the end, he sees Stowe’s Christian vision trumping racial prejudice.

I’m particularly interested in one of the literary issues raised by David’s essay. I believe that a great work of literature can liberate us, even if the author is prejudiced. It can’t just be Stowe’s Christianity that helps her transcend her age as the art of her novel must do some of the heavy lifting. A novel that is nothing more than a well-intentioned abolitionist tract doesn’t serve the cause of human justice as well as a work of art. Indeed, a didactic novel can even perpetuate certain stereotypes, which is David’s concern with Stowe. Just as religion must honor the divine spirit, becoming distorted if it serves political agendas, so art must honor human truth.

To cite an example from David’s essay, he is justifiably critical of Augustine St. Clair’s somewhat self-congratulatory account of how he uses Christian principles to redeem a brutish slave. As David notes, a slave seen as a childlike innocence is no less human than a slave seen as a savage. But even if St. Clair were a mouthpiece for Stowe (although I don’t think he is), the novel itself questions and even undermines St. Clair. In other words, Uncle Tom’s Cabin doesn’t limit itself to stereotypes but captures nuances in many of the characters, white and black alike. Indeed, my third student to write on the novel–Kate is a psychology and English double major–shows that Stowe captures how slavery twists into painful coping contortions practically everyone who comes into contact with it.

I admire the way that all three of these students wrestle with the continued relevance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Here’s David’s fine essay.

By David Waters, English major, St. Mary’s College of MD

Over the course of the semester, it’s been an interesting challenge to read and write in a slightly different way than I’ve been used to. The typical charge from teachers and professors has been to suppress the “I” in favor of an impartial, omniscient voice that makes pronouncements about symbolism and metaphor and literary technique. “I” doesn’t enter into it! In this course, however, we’ve been encouraged to respond to the texts we’ve read from our own perspectives, and that charge has raised interesting questions of its own. How do our perspectives influence our readings of the text? Do those perspectives enable us to see what might otherwise be hidden? Or do they cause us to see what might not be there? I came to Uncle Tom’s Cabin with my own perspectives: black descendant of slaves, Christian, American, progressive. . . When we pause to examine our perspectives, the list can seem endless.

But I also came to Stowe’s novel with a particular idea about how one should approach literature. It seems to me, no matter what our perspectives, we should approach any given work with a spirit of generosity. That is, we should approach the work “free of cant,” looking for the best in it rather than the worst. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is an interesting case study precisely because so many people approach it with minds already ready to see it in one light or another. I wanted to approach Stowe on her own terms and see where she took me.

Stowe paints a clear picture of how slavery compromises the lives of her characters and, given her status as an abolitionist, I’m intrigued by how she managed to not be compromised by slavery. But then, I suppose we could ask, did she manage not to be compromised? Here are the novel’s opening lines:

The scenes of this story, as its title indicates, lie among a race hitherto ignored by the associations of polite and refined society; an exotic race, whose ancestors, born beneath a tropic sun, brought with them, and perpetuated to their descendants, a character so essentially unlike the hard and dominant Anglo-Saxon race, as for many years to have won from it only misunderstanding and contempt. (emphasis mine)

As I read these lines, I thought, Oh boy, here we go. What’s going on here? Our work in my Literary Methods course tells us that Stowe is working from a set of racialist assumptions about race. That is, as distinct from racism, racialism is the belief that people can really be divided into races that are made up of real, inherited characteristics that are passed from one generation to the next.

The distinction from racism lies in the lack of a pejorative judgment made about the race in question. Thus, Stowe at once believes that blacks are essentially different from whites without necessarily believing that they are inferior to whites. Her project then is to bring us “more and more in unison with the great master chord of Christianity, ‘good will to man.’”

This raises several questions: Can Stowe really be racialist without being racist—that is, can she really avoid being compromised by the pernicious evil of slavery? And how does Christianity factor into her project? Does Christianity save her from being compromised, or does it merely inflect her racialist/racist assumptions? One of the most fascinating aspects of Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is the interplay of these questions.

The problem with Stowe’s dependence on a racialist worldview is that the same worldview that enables slavery also taints her Christian view of the problem. Later she will reference the

hand of benevolence . . . everywhere stretched out, searching into abuses, righting wrongs, alleviating distresses, and bringing to the knowledge and sympathies of the world the lowly, the oppressed, and the forgotten.

On the surface there is nothing to argue with here—who doesn’t want justice for the oppressed? But it’s not the hand of justice that’s stretched out; it’s the hand of benevolence. This is an important distinction. “Benevolence” connotes generosity and magnanimity, “justice” recognizes what is due. To act with justice is not to give magnanimously—it is to do what is right. When Stowe asserts “how far nobler it is in nations to protect the feeble than to oppress them,” that “feeble” is damning. Were the Africans feeble before they were brought to our shores in chains? Would they be feeble if freed? Whence their feebleness?

One of the charges against Stowe is that, by and large, she fails to create fully human characters. And indeed, at times her treatment of the black characters in the novel seems to complicate her abolitionist objectives. In one such example, [benevolent slave owner] St. Clare describes his “taming” of a slave, “a regular African lion . . . called . . . Scipio.” In the course of the chase, Scipio “ran and bounded like a buck,” fights off the dogs with his bare hands, is finally brought down only by a gunshot wound. Later, St. Clare tells Ophelia of the “simple process” by which he “tamed him down as submissive and tractable as heart could desire”:

“I took him to my own room, had a good bed made for him, dressed his wounds, and tended him myself, until he got fairly on his feet again. And, in process of time, I had free papers made out for him, and told him he might go where he liked.”

   “And did he go?” said Miss Ophelia.

   “No. The foolish fellow tore the paper in two, and absolutely refused to leave me. I never had a braver, better fellow,—trusty and true as steel. He embraced Christianity afterwards, and became as gentle as a child. . . . In fact he laid down his life for me.”

Here is the best and worst of Stowe. One the one hand, we are given a parable of Christ’s simplest and most difficult command, “Do unto others.” St. Clare plays the Good Samaritan to the savage slave and thus converts him to a gentle Christianity. The difficulty here is that Scipio can only be two things: savage beast or childlike innocent. To characterize Scipio as a “lion” and a “buck” robs him of his humanity as surely as characterizing him as a “child” robs him of his manhood. Much as we might endorse the injunction to do unto others and practice Christian charity, we cannot overlook the denial of Scipio’s humanity and manhood.

The complexity of Stowe’s vision manifests itself in the fact that if she strips Scipio of his humanity, it is only so that she can elevate him to martyrdom. For, much like Uncle Tom, Scipio is made to stand in for a Christ-like ideal whose ultimate expression is to lay down his life for another. This begs the question, Is this the only fate for a “good” slave? Must one either be savage or saint?

These questions, which a close reading of the text demands, do not slight Stowe. Rather, they draw our attention to the pernicious nature of the racialism of her time. This is the racialism that insists on our essential and fundamental difference. This is the racialism that paves the way for slavery and excuses its evils. Even the best Americans of the time could not seem to escape its influence.

For another example, in the midst of the novel, we are introduced to Little Eva and Topsy:

There stood the two children, representatives of the two extremes of society. The fair, high-bred child, with her golden head, her deep eyes, her spiritual, noble brow, and prince-like movements; and her black, keen, subtle, cringing, yet acute neighbor. They stood the representatives of their races. The Saxon, born of ages of cultivation, command, education, physical and moral eminence; the Afric, born of ages of oppression, submission, ignorance, toil, and vice!

The comparison here is devastating: Eva’s “nobility” is written into her very features, beginning with her “fairness.” This is a common tactic, which we may remember from Jane Eyre. There too we encountered characters whose characters could be read in their brows, hair, eyes, and chins. Eva’s description, in its conflation of physically descriptive terms with morally descriptive ones, makes whiteness synonymous with moral excellence.

And yet, as the story progresses, Stowe subverts our expectations by making Eva and Topsy close friends. Indeed, what converts the stern piety of Miss Ophelia to love is the sight of Topsy’s anguish at the loss of Eva:

“Topsy, you poor child,” she said . . . “don’t give up! I can love you, though I am not like that dear little child. I hope I’ve learned something of the love of Christ from her.”

Thus does the Afric, herself converted by the Christian love of a little Saxon, convert the stalwart New England Saxon in her turn. Stowe’s genius here is to upend convention even as she’s hemmed in by it on all sides. Yes, she is a product of a racialist society, but it seems that even racialism can’t finally triumph over Christian love.

The power of Stowe’s Christianity is what rescues her from the prevailing ethos of her society. Throughout the novel, the true heroes are the Quakers, who act according to their faith with a radical zeal that answers the call of Christ to minister to the least among us. And Stowe partakes of that radicalism to give us the biggest subversion yet: the martyrdom—the passion—of Tom.

As his end nears, Tom is tempted by Legree just as Jesus was tempted in the desert:

[I]instead of getting cut up and thrashed, every day or two, ye might have had liberty to lord it round and cut up the other niggers; and ye might have had, now and then, a good warming of whisky punch. . . . heave that ar old pack of trash in the fire, and join my church!

Power, drink, idolatry—the litany is familiar and Tom’s last Temptation precedes his Passion just as Christ’s did. Tom will be strung up as Christ was crucified, and Stowe will give us a latter-day martyr in service to her mission: to soften the hard hearts of her countrymen and end the practice of slavery.

This is the final triumph of Stowe’s Christianity over the evils of racialism and slavery: That she can see Christ even in the Afric who toils under the lash. That she can see in Christ’s exhortation to love your neighbor as yourself, that “neighbor” transcends skin color. These are no mean feats in an age so mired in ignorance and prejudice. If we are to approach Stowe and her novel with a spirit of generosity, free of the cant and accepted wisdom of our own age, we must acknowledge that there is a transcendent aspect to her work. She is somehow able to rise above notions of racial inferiority and see in slaves the divine capacity for sacrifice and love that Christ models for his followers. This is Stowe’s radicalism.

Finally, however, a generous reading must not obscure the complications of Stowe’s portrayals of slaves. While she can see Christ in the Afric, can she see a fellow human being just like herself?

This is the question which renders Uncle Tom’s Cabin fascinating. Stowe is on the right side of history. She brings every rhetorical and emotional device available to bear in the service of abolition. And yet, she is still trapped in a racialist worldview.

In the end, there are no simple answers. But even if her Christianity doesn’t free Stowe from the grip of racialism, there is something in it that inspires her to struggle against the injustice of her time. There is an animating spirit in her novel that springs from the original martyrdom for which Scipio and Tom serve as Stowe’s exemplars. And there is a powerful way in which Stowe challenges the adherents of Christianity in her audience to follow its highest ideals and the radicalism of its founder’s love. In these ways, Stowe soars above criticism and echoes those ideals in her work.

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