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

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

If the "killing" of Jerome is one marker of the writer's shifting perspective, so, then, are the alterations he makes to his heroine. After the hero's death, the black protagonist who remains in the narrative is the widowed Clotelle, dubbed "the Angel of Mercy" for her ministrations to the suffering. But Brown will not have her take center stage in the narrative. Grief-stricken, Clotelle "withdrew from the gaze of mankind" (106). More than a self-imposed act of mourning within the story, her withdrawal signals Brown's desire to cloak the mulatta body. He takes the "impassioned and voluptuous" form he had described in detail on the first page of the novel, the woman who stood upon an auction block with a crowd "gazing and feasting" upon her, the creature locked in a cell as onlookers "gazed at her" and hides this figure from the audience/ spectator (5, 43, 74). Moreover, he has her "pass" for white, as a "rebel lady" in Georgia, then again in Alabama (107, 112). Clotelle hidden, the gaze is reversed as she becomes a spectator to the kind of "repulsive" scene the reader has witnessed in the episode of Jerome's decapitation. In the Georgia hospitals, she sees "emaciated Union prisoners, worn down to skin and bone with disease and starvation, with their sunken eyes and wild looks... hideous in the extreme" (107); in Alabama, she is taken in by a black woman whose husband lopped his hand off rather than serve in the Confederate Army. As is true of Brown's other disjointed, episodic, and strange incarnations of this narrative, it is difficult to determine just what Brown is up to. One possible interpretation is that placing the highly-charged (feminized) figure of the mixed race body out of the reader's view, a body already overly determined by the multiple sexual and racial ideologies ascribed to it, allows him to redirect that gaze to the spectacle of disfigured bodies (and nation) produced by war.

While that very well might stand as one interpretive possibility, Brown himself complicates it in The Negro in the American Rebellion. It would seem that his historical account of the Civil War--a patchwork of newspaper articles, first hand narratives, rumor, and information from other historians-would be no place to insert the tale of (yet another) beautiful "mulatta" who is part of (yet another) idealized "domestic" union. That, however, is exactly what "The Colored Historian" does. In Chapter 31, Brown addresses the massacre at Fort Pillow, which, because of its vast scope and calculated execution, came to symbolize Confederate atrocities in the war. On April 13, 1864, a group of soldiers led by Nathan Bedford Forrest (who would later found the Ku Klux Klan) entered the Tennessee fort with the intention of slaughter. Although it had been captured already, blacks did not have the option to surrender and were summarily shot; some were "burned alive" (Franklin 216). Although whites were also killed, at least 100 African Americans were murdered, some of whom were women and children. A black New Yorker wrote the Secretary of War, suggesting that black soldiers be allowed to kill an equal number of Confederate prisoners of war (Berlin 465-66). The Union government made the requisite noise about punishing the Confederates, but did nothing. Brown, after including the lengthy and detailed report of the Committee on the Conduct of War on the Fort Pillow Massacre, tags on the story that I abbreviate here: