Remaking black motherhood in Frank J. Webb's The Gaffes and their Friends

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Anna Mae Duane

Yet despite such persistent reminders of tragedy, the extended family survives and flourishes. Living under the rule of white law, Webb's black characters suffer violent loss and betrayal, but endure through resilience and commitment to one another. In short, one could read Webb's response to Stowe's prefatory question about the governing abilities of the "race at present held as slaves" through his portrait of the Walters household, a portrait that illustrates the heroism with which the slave community had been governing themselves for generations. And in Webb's novel, as in many of the historical accounts we have of slavery, strong women are vital to maintaining such commitment within the black community.

Although many of Webb's contemporaries sought to advance both abolition and women's rights, few wrote works that suggested how concomitant black and female empowerment might actually work. Harriet Jacobs's Linda Brent chafes against the constraints imposed by standards of white womanhood, but cannot find a satisfactory way out. Frederick Douglass, although an ardent supporter of women's rights, delineates a singularly male course to elevation both when he tells his own story in The Narrative and when he creates a fictional account of the real-life revolt aboard the Creole in The Heroic Slave. Harriet Beecher Stowe may advocate a matriarchy, but it is a matriarchy where leaders remain irreproachably ladylike, and therefore ultimately submissive to men. When read against the frustration and ambivalence of his contemporaries, Webb's insistence on empowering the black female body marks him as one of the earliest and strongest voices advocating an alternative, distinctly black standard of womanhood.

By requiring black sons to acknowledge and respect the strength of their mothers, The Garies tacitly recognizes the intersectionality of racial and gender prejudice--a dynamic not formally articulated until the dawn of black feminist criticism over a hundred years later. Not only, then, does this text deserve our attention as an early novel written by an African American, but we must also consider The Garies and their Friends as one of the first texts to deserve inclusion in the black feminist literary tradition.

Notes

(1.) This designation as the second published novel by an African American novel still stands, although Henry Louis Gates's discovery of The Bondswomen's Slave by Hannah Craft reminds us of the many unpublished manuscripts that may predate Webb's text.

(2.) Some examples which foreground the violated female black body are: Lydia Maria Child's 1836 The Antislavery Catechism, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin, and William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel. As Deborah Garfield and others have pointed out, antislavery speaking tours often cantered on the sexual degradation of black women. Harriet Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girt also engages the stereotype of the degraded black mother, although she complicates that stereotype considerably.