My liberty is as of as much consequence to me as Mr. Wilson's is to him. I am as sensitive to feeling as he. If I mistake not, the day will come when the negro will learn that he can get his freedom by fighting for it; and should that time arrive, the whites will be sorry that they have hated us so shamefully. I am free to say that, could I live my life over again, I would use all the energies which God has given me to get up an insurrection.
William Wells Brown, prominent black abolitionist, novelist, playwright and historian, a self-taught genius who fled slavery, wrote the first published novel by an African-American writer. Clotelle, published in the 1850s while he was living in England, was published in 4 different versions. The version I read features a family of mulatto women named Agnes, Isabella, Marion, and Isabella's daughter, Clotelle, who endure the destruction of their family because of slavery and the massive internal slave trade that brought enslaved blacks to the Deep South from states like Virginia. Brown's novel dramatically reveals how slavery undermines and contradicts American democracy and Christianity with constant examples of slavery's dehumanizing blacks, breaking up families, and emphasizing the threat of sexual violence and exploitation of female slaves, in addition to revealing how blacks, such as the slave Sam, internalize racial oppression through color prejudice against darker-skinned blacks versus lighter-skinned blacks. Brown sounds like Frederick Douglass at many times throughout the book because of his appeals to the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence and Christianity as reasons why slavery is immoral. Moreover, the tragic mulatto women in Brown's novel here are so light-skinned they could pass for white, but even they are not safe from racial slavery. Brown likely uses these light-skinned women who are still bought and sold at auctions like other slaves to reveal to whites how racial slavery even impacts people who could be perceived as Anglo-Saxon or white by most whites, which would appeal to sympathetic whites and abolitionists in Britain and the United States since those with predominantly European ancestry were treated as poorly and enslaved like dark-skinned, full-blooded "Negroes." Jerome, a dark-skinned slave, and Clotelle, fall in love and are reunited after both escape slavery for Canada and France, respectively. Their marriage, of a dark-skinned black, and a quadroon, and Clotelle and Jerome's meeting with her white, slaveholder father in France, symbolizes racial reconciliation brought by love.
Since Brown's short novel is such an abolitionist piece, it tends to have stereotypical characters who don't seem to reflect real human beings. Nonetheless, its an interesting novel that connects the fictional characters with real events of the antebellum South, such as Nat Turner's revolt in Virginia in the 1830s, the movement of slaves from the Upper South to the Deep South, the widespread rape and sexual molestation of women at the hands of white men, white women's envy and anger toward black men for 'stealing' their husbands, steamboats to traverse across the river, Canada as a safe haven for runaway blacks, etc. So Brown's novel definitely succeeds in capturing, for what were too many slaves, the harsh realities of life in this period. However, Brown's treatment of racial prejudice in 19th century is very flawed, for he argued that racial prejudice is wrought by slavery, and since Europe had so few slaves, racial prejudice was rare. This is why Jerome, a runaway slave from Mississippi was able to travel in Britain and continental Europe, find respectable employment as a clerk and even win over Clotelle's racist, American father. Obviously =racial prejudice in Europe against blacks existed, and Brown lets Europeans get away too easily, likely due to his sojourn in Britain after fleeing the United States because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Regardless, Brown rightly calls out Christianity and American democracy for moral hypocrisy, which he does so well with Mr. Wilson, a Christian minister from Connecticut who moves to the South and establishes a plantation. Wilson's daughter, Gertrude, opposes slavery and alleviates some of the oppressive conditions of slavery on her father's 'property,' but Clotelle and Jerome are still forced to flee the dehumanizing conditions that would not allow their love.
Despite the novel's rather predictable and cliched ending, it's still a tragedy because Clotelle's mother, Isabel, her aunt Marion's children, and her grandmother all die enslaved. Her father, a Virginia slaveholder, who in different versions of the novel is Thomas Jefferson (who had sexual relations with Sally, a black slave), is convinced to free his slaves by his daughter and her dark-skinned husband, Jerome. Liberation for the rest of the African-American population has not been achieved, and Clotelle's own cousins were sold into slavery in New Orleans because their white father forgot to sign documents freeing his wife, Marion. Thus, even those light-skinned, house slave blacks who escape brutal, field hand slavery though marriage or sexual relationships with white men, are still subject to the law of white supremacy. Clotelle's mother, Isabella, a beautiful light-skinned woman, was freed by Linwood and bears his child, but due to his status as a wealthy planter in Virginia, never marries her or acknowledges his daughter publicly. This culminates in the discovery of Isabella and Clotelle by Linwood's mother-in-law, who has the child sold into slavery and separated from the mother, who is sold to someone else. Isabella escapes Southern slavery by disguising herself as a man in the company of a dark-skinned slave mechanic, which allows her to reach the North. Her love for Clotelle brings her back to Virginia, where she is eventually discovered to be a black woman and chooses death in the Potomac over slavery. Her life is truly tragic because she never realizes that Henry Linwood, the white man she loves so much, never stands up for her or protects their child. That is why I find it very hard to believe Clotelle and her father's reunion in Europe decades later is so positive, because surely Clotelle should have preferred to distance herself from this 'father' who allowed the separation of Isabella and her daughter, making him culpable in the death of Isabella as well.
Overall, this is an interesting example of 19th century African-American literature. The first 'novel,' and setting up standards and common themes such as the tragic mulatto, Brown influenced abolitionist and American literature generally. His own background as a biracial slave in Kentucky who was a house slave makes his narrative more believable, especially regarding tension between field hands and domestic slaves, who used skin color and occupation to create slave hierarchies. Furthermore, Brown also foresaw the violent end of slavery in the United States, with articulate characters such as Jerome predicting retribution on Anglo-Saxon America if slavery does not die. Unfortunately, however, Brown's uncritical praise of European race relations and his rather dehumanizing characterization of Africa and African-born slaves does undermine the text. Like most 19th century American writers, there is an assumption of African cultural inferiority. As a result, one of the African-born runaways who leads the Southampton revolt with Nat Turner is disparaged. Interesting fact: Isabella's escape from slavery by dressing as a white man was likely inspired by a historical slave couple, who did the same thing.
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