Boy, Uncle Tom's Cabin has really gotten a bad rap.
Many Black folks cringe when the subject is brought up.
Not to say that Black folks are so literary, whether they hail from the Ivy league or the ghetto, that their taste for fiction has lead to a unanimity in distaste for the 19th century work.
Far from that. The main ingredient in their taste is the name of the book and it's connotation to kow-towing Blacks.
I can speak personally about that same feeling for it resided within me.
I've always been hesitant about the book.
As an analogy, it's as if I had never tasted honey and for the first time, I stood by a beehive in a net mask, as angry bees buzzed and attempted to sting and kill me, as a tender pulled honeycomb from deep within the bowls of the insects lair and then implored me to taste the golden sap of the bees vomitus.
Well, taste I have, and I love it.
Harriet Beecher Stowe's book is much the same.
What on the surface may appear, sound like and feel racist, is but the most sweet delicacy of thought and exposition.
I never really understood the role of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the history of the United States.
It was always included in discussions of abolitionist movements, and as a seminal piece, but the impression formed within my mind was that this novel was blaxploitation, and that it's success was, rooted in the same vein as minstrel shows, stepin fetchit, hattie mcdaniel, bill bojangles robinson and a host of other negative depictions of Blacks.
Seeing drawings from the book, or posters, they were all in a manner of Black supplication to Whites.
Uncle Tom is often pictured with a young white girl, much the same as "Uncle Remus"
And there you have it. The old, aged, supplicating, Black slave, and the golden, beautiful flower of humanity, White girl.
There is much more to the relationship, but just as a picture tells a thousand words, the words of love and love of Christ were not words told in that picture.
The folks who have damned Uncle Tom, could have chosen another character to hold forth as a champion of the novel. They could have chosen Eliza's husband George.
Light skinned from several generations of plantation rape and sexual exploitation of Black women,
George was proud, held himself in a princely manner, was intelligent, industrious, proud and willing to fight to the death in order to achieve his freedom. A man who once he got his freedom, he relocated to France with his family and earned a College education. Then returned to America with his family before heading off to Liberia to take part in the great experiment of creating a free, new and world recognized nation and home to a new generation of Black power and self-sufficiency. This man was a production of Harriet Beecher Stowe's immense faculties, and he was a model for the future coming of Frederick Douglas, W.E.B. DuBois, A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Paul Robeson, Robert F. Williams, E.D. Nixon, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Huey Newton.
And yet in this, many Blacks could find fault. For his light skin would be seen as a commentary on his intelligence and worth, despite the fact that George himself states his own wish that he were "two shades darker, rather than another shade lighter". A man who was Black, suffered as a Black and was proud and loving of his Blackness. Yet in this character, Stowe did not use him to comment on in-race hierarchies. He was a man, complete and whole and an undeniable product of years of the parallel track of sexual bondage and sex trade of Black women that sat squarely and equally protected within the evils of Slavery itself. how many Blacks in the south, after 200 years of rape and sexual exploitation, did not have White blood? Was there not much debate about the "percentage" of blood that made one Black? 1/32nd Black was "Black" that's if you had a single Black great-great-great-great-grandfather... And bottom line, if your mother was "Black" it made no difference, you were a slave. Surely there were probably many children that were so white in appearance, that it would have been "unconscionable" to place them in the field among those that look obviously Black. but such occasions were rare. There are more than a handful of U.S. Presidents that have had offspring with Black mothers and it is alleged that 5 U.S. Presidents (not counting Barack Obama) were African Americans.
And so race, is the history of the United States.
I assumed that the books popularity and oblique role in abolitionism was in perhaps the anger and rage it caused within abolitionist.
I didn't understand it fully.
My curiosity has been in this way pricked and sedated over the years.
I was ok with the book, and it's legacy being so closely identified with the black struggles and sufferings during slavery.
None of us had any choice in it's history.
But reading Frederick Douglas' "My Bondage, My Freedom" he spoke in a neutral tone about Uncle Tom's Cabin." He may have praised it a bit. He did not shrink from it, nor feel offended by it. The subject matter was distasteful, but it seemed more from the subject matter itself, rather than the perspective or wounds inflicted by the piece.
And so, If Frederick Douglas, as intelligent, acute of mind, a former slave, and leader of the Black abolitionist movement, was fine with Uncle Tom's cabin, then what right have any present day Blacks to object? In fact, it would seem that the proper course would be to read the book.
And read it I did.
could a more beautiful book be written?
In the world there are in truth, two kinds of books.
Truth and Fiction.
In my experience the most powerful Truth has come from those who have survived incredible situations, such as memoirs from Treblinka, Sudan, slave narratives, shipwrecks, natural disasters, people against the odds who miraculously survived. In these stories, the only thing to be done, is to tell the tale. circumstance provides all the drama. The experience is the setting. The task, is to survive. These stories are the most powerful. Not the dramatized.
"Uncle Tom's Cabin" captures the power of such truth and tells a story built upon innumerable stores of Truth, reinterpreted and woven together, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Her intent, her history, her family, the time, the circumstance, the reception and it's importance all play but minor roles to the overwhelming beauty and skillfulness of the prose.
All of which adds up to the inescapable conclusion that to call someone an "Uncle Tom" is so completely backwards and misbegotten to the Truth of Uncle Tom.
Even the Title, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is a reference to a line by George Shelby, a soon to be ex-slave owner, who frees his slaves, and allows them to work for wages, free from the capriciousness of death and re-sale. He tells them to look upon the cabin of Uncle Tom and let it forever be a memorial to the man, his beauty, his immense love and faith, as well as the preciousness of freedom.
All of this must be contrasted with the reality that today, to be called an Uncle Tom is to be called less than a man..
in reality, Uncle Tom was Christ-like.
He endured his fate like Christ.
refusing to do wrong. refusing to hate, refusing to betray trust and loyalty. shielding others, being selfless, and always in the bountiful grace of his lord and savior.
Uncle Tom is surely one of the most beautiful, moral and meek martyrs there ever was or could be.
He in fact gave his life and was beaten to death for not divulging the whereabouts of two female runaway slaves.
He even told his "Masser Legree" that he knew where they were, but the regardless of what happened, he could not, would not ever betray them. and for this he was beaten to death. and with his dying breath, he forgave his attackers and prayed to God for their salvation.
And now we call "Uncle Tom's" the guys who have the exact opposite of the qualities of the original.
And Harriet Beecher Stowe, hastened the end of slavery and struck one of the mightiest, if not the mightiest blow against the entire system of slavery. A staunch abolitionist, daughter of a preacher, sister of a preacher, from a family of abolitionist. she did everything she could to lay the thing bare.
This book was the second best selling book in the United State in the 19th Century, right behind the bible. You'd be hard pressed to find any book, by any author, written at any time that was more respectful, more praising of Blacks, more condemning of slavery than Uncle Tom's Cabin.
it is truly an irony, that as we've matured in the battle against discrimination, we have trampled this holy book underfoot, and declared it a racist artifact, despite it's power, it's beauty, it's intention and the vast work that it achieved in the struggle for freedom.
And if there could be any doubt in the minds of any as to the motivation, intent, truth, morality and ethics of the author, then they should forsake the reading of the book, and read chapter forty-five (45) the last chapter. There, plain and simple, is where the truth lay for all those who have any desire to know of it, and once having read it, there should be no need for speculation, interpretation, analysis, debate or deconstruction.
