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

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

   When the murderers returned, the day
   after the capture, to renew their
   fiendish work upon the wounded and
   dying, they found a young and beautiful
   mulatto woman searching among
   the dead for the body of her husband.
   She was the daughter of a wealthy and
   influential rebel residing at Columbus.
   With her husband, this woman was
   living near the fort when our forces
   occupied it, and joined the Union men
   to assist in holding the place. Going
   from body to body with all the earnestness
   with which love could inspire an
   affectionate heart, she at last found the
   object of her search. He was not dead;
   but both legs were broken. The wife
   had succeeded in getting him out from
   among the piles of dead, and was
   bathing his face.... At the moment she
   was seen by this murderous band; and
   the cry was at once raised, "Kill the
   wench[!]" The next moment the sharp
   crack of a musket was heard, and the
   angel of mercy fell a corpse on the
   body of her wounded husband, who
   was soon after knocked in the head by
   the butt-end of the same weapon. (247)

Whether or not this woman's story is true becomes secondary to a greater consideration: why the novelist would insert this overdetermined body into what many historians agree forms the most tragic single episode of the war, particularly since he announces in the preface that faced with abundant information about the Civil War, he "did not feel bound to introduce an account of every little skirmish in which colored men were engaged" (vi). The mulatta figure, however, survives Brown's rigorous selection process to finish off a factual chronicle of carnage. Brown's decision transforms a field of blood into a page straight from a sentimental novel: his own. Like the heroines in the Clotel novels, this young woman character is also the daughter of a "wealthy and influential" white father of high society (though not a President nor a senator). And as he does her counterparts, Brown also labels the unnamed heroine of his 1867 text "the angel of mercy." Given these similarities, it seems appropriate to read this war story in relationship to the Clotel narratives.

In the era when Brown was writing about the Civil War, the white female body of Columbia functioned as the corporeal symbol of the Republic. (5) Not so for Brown, who embodies the nation in the figure of the mulatta, "the representation of two races" standing for a republic ancestrally linking two racial identities--a symbolism that will become even more important as Harper makes use of this figure in Iola Leroy (Brown, The Black Man 81). The dual ancestry of the mulatta does not render her a unified ideal; as a figure both black and white in a country divided by race, the biracial female will not live an un-embattled condition until both of her racial identities can co-exist within the boundaries of her nation/body. Thus, despite the manner in which the endings of the novels taken together produce an evolutionary narrative--each revision another cautious step toward freedom--each of the Clotel novels also repeatedly defers closure, ending tentatively with the heroine's ultimate fate undetermined.