Cabin Fever By HENRY LOUIS GATES Jr. NY Times Published: October 22, 2006
I first read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an eighth-grade class in 1964, when it was probably just going out of fashion as required reading for American school children — and the phrase “Uncle Tom” was about to come into widespread use as the ultimate instrument of black-on-black derogation.
I first read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” in an eighth-grade class in 1964, when it was probably just going out of fashion as required reading for American school children — and the phrase “Uncle Tom” was about to come into widespread use as the ultimate instrument of black-on-black derogation.
The scholar Stephen Railton traces the first printed uses of the term to the black nationalist Marcus Garvey and his followers, in about 1919, a year of bloody race riots as black World War I veterans demanded their civil rights. “The Uncle Tom nigger has got to go,” the Rev. George Alexander McGuire declared at Garvey’s first convention in 1920, “and his place must be taken by the new leader of the Negro race ... not a black man with a white heart, but a black man with a black heart.” Intense cultural clashes emerged within the race, as Southern, rural migrants — the proverbial children of Uncle Tom — flooded north, and as black people, spurred on by a variety of warring political organizations, became ever more vocal about ending Jim Crow segregation.
Black nationalists in subsequent decades turned Uncle Tom into a swear word, but it was with the rise of popular black militancy in the 60’s that poor old Uncle Tom became the quintessential symbol that separated the good black guys from the servile sellouts. He was the embodiment of “race betrayal,” an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael called the N.A.A.C.P.’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, an “Uncle Tom,” while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked, in its position paper on black power: “Who is the real villain — Uncle Tom or Simon Legree?” Muhammad Ali pinned the epithet on Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell and Joe Frazier as he pummeled them.
I doubt that many of those who tossed around the insult had actually read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. But James Baldwin had. In a scathing 1949 critique, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin boldly linked the sentimentality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the melodrama of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” a work far more appealing to black power types. “Uncle Tom” had become such a potent brand of political impotence that nobody really cared how far its public usages had traveled from the reality of its literary prototype.
When I returned to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not long ago, it struck me as far more culturally capacious — and sexually charged — than either Baldwin or the 60’s militants had acknowledged. Half a century after Baldwin denounced it as “a very bad novel” in its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” and promotion of feminine tears and anguish as a form of political protest, both the novel and Baldwin’s now canonical critique are ripe for reassessment.
Baldwin wrote that Tom “has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” Tom’s political impotence, for Baldwin, is symbolized by his sexual impotence. In fact, Tom and his wife, Aunt Chloe, do have children, but Baldwin has a point: the question of Uncle Tom’s relation to his family and his marital status has long intrigued Stowe scholars. Stowe shows us a devoted — even doting — father, but not a lover. Where Stowe conveys a sense of physical intimacy among the other married couples in the novel, Tom and Chloe share a pointedly “snowy spread” in their cabin.
And so when, early in the novel, a kindly owner sells Tom to pay his plantation’s debts, the slave leaves his cabin free from domestic bonds. For the fact of the matter — which has not escaped the attention of generations of the novel’s illustrators and parodists — is that once Tom leaves his home he almost immediately becomes involved with a young blonde. She is, of course, Eva, the lovely daughter of his next master.
Indeed, Stowe all but dares the reader to see something untoward in the obsessive closeness of Uncle Tom and Little Eva. While their relationship is not sexual, it is remarkably physical: Eva spends hours in Tom’s room, drapes him with flowers and perches on his knee, causing some concern: “How can you let her?” says her cousin, Miss Ophelia; “Why not?” answers Eva’s father. “You would think no harm in a child’s caressing a large dog, even if he was black.” Eva puts “her little golden head close to his,” kisses him and throws her arms around him. From the traditional children’s edition book cover images of a beaming Tom and Eva to such popularizations as the 1933 Disney short “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” (in which Mickey plays Tom and Minnie plays Eva) or the 1947 Tex Avery short “Uncle Tom’s Cabaña” (starring a sultry animated Eva), the public has always seen Tom and Eva as a couple.
Baldwin, for his part, saw nothing subversive in Tom and Eva’s pastoral frolickings. His view was that of the book’s illustrators, who had always been careful to depict Tom as sweet, gray haired and bespectacled when Eva is in his lap. Yet Baldwin did sense something dark and secret beneath the surface. Sentimentality was not to be trusted: “The ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” he wrote. “It is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” Real men, for Baldwin, don’t sigh, don’t cry, and certainly are not satisfied with a kiss on the cheek.
Baldwin’s writings make clear that his distaste for sentimentality had everything to do with the perception that sentiment undermined what it meant to be a desiring being. Sentiment focuses on a person’s exterior, whereas art, he thought, privileges the interior, the soul, the seat of desire. Yet sentimentality doesn’t deny the existence of wayward appetites; it merely provides a protective distance from them. In antebellum America, sentimentalism was the only mode Stowe could employ to write about sex — especially interracial sex. It made possible the story’s barely submerged sexual content, most apparent in the sensuality of nearly every desperate young slave woman (“The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration. Her dress ... set off to advantage her finely molded shape”).
Nor could Baldwin ever acknowledge his own indebtedness to Stowe. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin insisted that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” scarcely qualified as literature and that Stowe was “not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.” Baldwin denounced the fundamental assumptions about the relationship between literature and politics underlying Stowe’s self-righteous tone. Her novel’s characters “spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light.”
But this sort of Manichean simplicity is a central feature of some of Baldwin’s own work, like the plays “The Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mr. Charlie” and the novels “Another Country” and “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.” The suppleness of his prose gives way to stereotypical depictions of two-dimensional characters, both black and white — individuals who seem to exist as set pieces for ideological diatribes rather than nuanced explorations of their full humanity. The paradox of Baldwin’s career is that he wrote essays with all of the lyricism and subtlety of a great novelist; yet he approached the craft of the novel with an essayistic didacticism.
The hallmark of most 19th- and many 20th-century American novels about race is the tendency toward the sort of melodrama we see in Stowe. Much of the emotional energy is a matter of shackled love. Baldwin was right to see the penchant for melodrama at the heart of even a novel as “black” as “Native Son.” As the critic Albert Murray first pointed out, though, what Baldwin decried in Stowe and Wright he could not relinquish in his own work. Even his early novel “Giovanni’s Room” — a pioneering depiction of a gay love affair — is characterized by impossible love and even more impossible plot coincidences. By the time Baldwin wrote his most carelessly crafted novels, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” and “Just Above My Head,” melodrama had become the narrative register he could not escape.
Why would Baldwin, in his attack on Stowe, speak so harshly against the power of the fiction to persuade? Surely it was because he was, however unconsciously, speaking to his own deepest fears: that as a novelist, he was guilty of the very thing he disdained in Stowe. When Baldwin looked in the mirror of his literary antecedents, what he saw, to his horror, was Harriet Beecher Stowe in blackface. Stowe’s most vigorous detractor was destined to become her true 20th-century literary heir.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the W. E. B. Du Bois professor of the humanities at Harvard. He is the editor, with Hollis Robbins, of the forthcoming “Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” from which this essay is adapted, and the author of “Finding Oprah’s Roots,” to be published in February.
Black nationalists in subsequent decades turned Uncle Tom into a swear word, but it was with the rise of popular black militancy in the 60’s that poor old Uncle Tom became the quintessential symbol that separated the good black guys from the servile sellouts. He was the embodiment of “race betrayal,” an object of scorn, a scapegoat for all of our political self-doubts. In 1966, Stokely Carmichael called the N.A.A.C.P.’s executive director, Roy Wilkins, an “Uncle Tom,” while the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee asked, in its position paper on black power: “Who is the real villain — Uncle Tom or Simon Legree?” Muhammad Ali pinned the epithet on Floyd Patterson, Ernie Terrell and Joe Frazier as he pummeled them.
I doubt that many of those who tossed around the insult had actually read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel. But James Baldwin had. In a scathing 1949 critique, “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin boldly linked the sentimentality of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to the melodrama of Richard Wright’s 1940 novel “Native Son,” a work far more appealing to black power types. “Uncle Tom” had become such a potent brand of political impotence that nobody really cared how far its public usages had traveled from the reality of its literary prototype.
When I returned to “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” not long ago, it struck me as far more culturally capacious — and sexually charged — than either Baldwin or the 60’s militants had acknowledged. Half a century after Baldwin denounced it as “a very bad novel” in its “self-righteous, virtuous sentimentality” and promotion of feminine tears and anguish as a form of political protest, both the novel and Baldwin’s now canonical critique are ripe for reassessment.
Baldwin wrote that Tom “has been robbed of his humanity and divested of his sex.” Tom’s political impotence, for Baldwin, is symbolized by his sexual impotence. In fact, Tom and his wife, Aunt Chloe, do have children, but Baldwin has a point: the question of Uncle Tom’s relation to his family and his marital status has long intrigued Stowe scholars. Stowe shows us a devoted — even doting — father, but not a lover. Where Stowe conveys a sense of physical intimacy among the other married couples in the novel, Tom and Chloe share a pointedly “snowy spread” in their cabin.
And so when, early in the novel, a kindly owner sells Tom to pay his plantation’s debts, the slave leaves his cabin free from domestic bonds. For the fact of the matter — which has not escaped the attention of generations of the novel’s illustrators and parodists — is that once Tom leaves his home he almost immediately becomes involved with a young blonde. She is, of course, Eva, the lovely daughter of his next master.
Indeed, Stowe all but dares the reader to see something untoward in the obsessive closeness of Uncle Tom and Little Eva. While their relationship is not sexual, it is remarkably physical: Eva spends hours in Tom’s room, drapes him with flowers and perches on his knee, causing some concern: “How can you let her?” says her cousin, Miss Ophelia; “Why not?” answers Eva’s father. “You would think no harm in a child’s caressing a large dog, even if he was black.” Eva puts “her little golden head close to his,” kisses him and throws her arms around him. From the traditional children’s edition book cover images of a beaming Tom and Eva to such popularizations as the 1933 Disney short “Mickey’s Mellerdrammer” (in which Mickey plays Tom and Minnie plays Eva) or the 1947 Tex Avery short “Uncle Tom’s Cabaña” (starring a sultry animated Eva), the public has always seen Tom and Eva as a couple.
Baldwin, for his part, saw nothing subversive in Tom and Eva’s pastoral frolickings. His view was that of the book’s illustrators, who had always been careful to depict Tom as sweet, gray haired and bespectacled when Eva is in his lap. Yet Baldwin did sense something dark and secret beneath the surface. Sentimentality was not to be trusted: “The ostentatious parading of excessive and spurious emotion, is the mark of dishonesty, the inability to feel,” he wrote. “It is always, therefore, the signal of secret and violent inhumanity, the mask of cruelty.” Real men, for Baldwin, don’t sigh, don’t cry, and certainly are not satisfied with a kiss on the cheek.
Baldwin’s writings make clear that his distaste for sentimentality had everything to do with the perception that sentiment undermined what it meant to be a desiring being. Sentiment focuses on a person’s exterior, whereas art, he thought, privileges the interior, the soul, the seat of desire. Yet sentimentality doesn’t deny the existence of wayward appetites; it merely provides a protective distance from them. In antebellum America, sentimentalism was the only mode Stowe could employ to write about sex — especially interracial sex. It made possible the story’s barely submerged sexual content, most apparent in the sensuality of nearly every desperate young slave woman (“The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration. Her dress ... set off to advantage her finely molded shape”).
Nor could Baldwin ever acknowledge his own indebtedness to Stowe. In “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” Baldwin insisted that “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” scarcely qualified as literature and that Stowe was “not so much a novelist as an impassioned pamphleteer.” Baldwin denounced the fundamental assumptions about the relationship between literature and politics underlying Stowe’s self-righteous tone. Her novel’s characters “spurned and were terrified of the darkness, striving mightily for the light.”
But this sort of Manichean simplicity is a central feature of some of Baldwin’s own work, like the plays “The Amen Corner” and “Blues for Mr. Charlie” and the novels “Another Country” and “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone.” The suppleness of his prose gives way to stereotypical depictions of two-dimensional characters, both black and white — individuals who seem to exist as set pieces for ideological diatribes rather than nuanced explorations of their full humanity. The paradox of Baldwin’s career is that he wrote essays with all of the lyricism and subtlety of a great novelist; yet he approached the craft of the novel with an essayistic didacticism.
The hallmark of most 19th- and many 20th-century American novels about race is the tendency toward the sort of melodrama we see in Stowe. Much of the emotional energy is a matter of shackled love. Baldwin was right to see the penchant for melodrama at the heart of even a novel as “black” as “Native Son.” As the critic Albert Murray first pointed out, though, what Baldwin decried in Stowe and Wright he could not relinquish in his own work. Even his early novel “Giovanni’s Room” — a pioneering depiction of a gay love affair — is characterized by impossible love and even more impossible plot coincidences. By the time Baldwin wrote his most carelessly crafted novels, “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone” and “Just Above My Head,” melodrama had become the narrative register he could not escape.
Why would Baldwin, in his attack on Stowe, speak so harshly against the power of the fiction to persuade? Surely it was because he was, however unconsciously, speaking to his own deepest fears: that as a novelist, he was guilty of the very thing he disdained in Stowe. When Baldwin looked in the mirror of his literary antecedents, what he saw, to his horror, was Harriet Beecher Stowe in blackface. Stowe’s most vigorous detractor was destined to become her true 20th-century literary heir.
Henry Louis Gates Jr. is the W. E. B. Du Bois professor of the humanities at Harvard. He is the editor, with Hollis Robbins, of the forthcoming “Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” from which this essay is adapted, and the author of “Finding Oprah’s Roots,” to be published in February.
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