"Civil" War wounds: William Wells Brown, violence, and the domestic narrative

African American Review, Spring-Summer, 2005 by Jennifer James

In fact, in Clotel, it appears that physical proximity to the darker-skinned African ancestors to a large measure determines revolutionary potential; thus, as a light-skinned rebellious hero, George is an odd man out, standing apart from the other black men in the texts who also engage in overt acts of resistance against the system of slavery, particularly the figures of Nat Turner and Picquilo (whose messianic blackness is coded in opposition to the minstrel blackness of the comic folk in Brown's work). Showing no hint of "African blood," George possesses hair "straight, soft, fine and light," but William, the slave who ushers Clotel to freedom and flees to Canada, is "tall, full bodied" (224, 171). George had a "prominent" nose and "thin" lips; Turner is "full-blooded" (224, 213). Brown reserves his most detailed description of a black man's body for the cat-like, stealthy Picquilo, "large, tall, full-blooded Negro with a stern and savage countenance ... his step oblique, his look sanguinary" (213, 214). For Brown, the tribal marks on this African's skin were signs of inner power made visible, as if they were carved from the "bold spirit" of his interior (214).

It is no wonder, then, that after George takes part in a slave insurrection at the end of the original Clotel, he arrives in the next version physically inscribed by revolution: "This slave, whose name was Jerome, was of pure African origin, perfectly black" (Takaki 289). Brown enacts another change; the racialized defiance that lands George in jail is downgraded from insurgency to insolence--from participation in a slave revolt to a refusal to be whipped by his master.(3) While these modifications might seem minor when compared to his wholesale purging of the extratextual documents woven into the first narrative, they nonetheless represent a profound change in the way that Brown represents his primary figure of heroic black masculinity. An act of will replaces insurgency, but elicits the same consequences; revolution, Brown appears to say, can take place on a small scale.

The writer is nevertheless playing it safe. In replacing insurgency with insolence, Brown reconfigures Jerome as a character who does not commit a revolutionary act so implicitly violent that it would risk situating him permanently outside of civil law and evolutionary discourse, and therefore outside the permissible boundaries of domestic sentimentality. A fugitive slave who has run from his master's cruelty can be freely reintegrated into civil society; a fugitive slave who has murdered whites would remain a fugitive for life, even if no longer a slave. Moreover, while Brown and other abolitionists celebrated the San Domingo uprising, whites terrified by the prospect of rebellion in North America pointed to the bloodshed as a sign of black savagery. Ever cognizant of the ways the dominant culture perceived African Americans, Brown might have been reluctant to corroborate theories of the beast lurking within the black. These two significant alterations to the narrative, merging divergent manifestations of African masculinity--the sentimental hero and the black revolutionary-and reducing the gravity of Jerome's rebellion allow the black heroic figure to fulfill two narrative functions. Jerome can participate in the creation of the idealized social imaginary that republican domesticity signifies in the sentimental text and simultaneously represent a fierce blackness, with the implicit threat that messianic blackness carries.