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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Anna Mae Duane

The novel disrupts the familiar opposition between oppressed blacks and oppressive whites by exploring the reciprocal relationship between white standards of domestic and financial success and the racial self-hatred that can destroy black families and, by extension, black communities. Writing in a nation captivated by Uncle Tom's Cabin's insistence on the shared emotional experiences of black and white families, Webb manipulates the conventions of white domestic fiction to articulate the profoundly different realities encountered by black and white mothers in antebellum America. He foregrounds a series of challenges that only a black woman would face--the fear of losing children to the slavetrader, the sexual threat posed by a race riot, and the betrayal of a son who passes for white--to reveal the inadequacy of white definitions of femininity and to create an alternative model of womanhood applicable to the experiences of black women.

Mrs. Emily Garie, the first mother we encounter in Webb's novel, reflects the popular literary conception of vulnerable and victimized black women, comparing easily with Stowe's Eliza or Brown's Clotel. (6) Although there seems to be some affection between Emily and her husband, the fact that Mr. Garie had actually purchased his "wife" on the slave block skews domestic ideals of loving reciprocity. As the companion to a white man who is also her legal owner, Mrs. Garie tries to live by the dictates of white femininity while facing dangers that no white woman need fear. Rather than wielding the moral authority that should accompany the role of motherhood, Mrs. Garie realizes that maternity merely compounds her own powerlessness. "It is a fearful thing," she laments, "to give birth to an inheritor of chains" (55). Limited by the standards of white female gentility she has adopted, Mrs. Garie can only express the anguish she feels for her children through a malfunctioning body. Timid, melancholic, and often sickly, she physically enacts the dual constraints of marriage and slavery. Mr. Garie realizes that his wife seems "lost and gloomy." A family friend agrees, and wonders if" 'perhaps she is not well,'" even suggesting that she" 'looks a lit fie pale'" (7). Eventually Mrs. Garie's subtle bodily protests have the effect expected in sentimental writing: She steers her husband toward right action. Clarence Garie agrees to move his family to Philadelphia to placate his wife. In the end, however, Mrs. Garie's womanly influence carries little weight under white law. Mr. Garie formally emancipates neither his wife nor his children; technically all are still chattel. The bonds of familial affection threaten to mutate into the bonds of slavery at a moment's notice.

Webb's narrative soon complicates the standard antislavery tableau of a tortured woman and endangered child by suggesting that there are forces even more pernicious than the greed of the slavetrader which are capable of pulling black children from their mothers. In The Gaffes, it is not just the foul and heartless white man at the auction block that separates mother from child, but also the seductive--and often internalized--white father figure who promises status and privilege. The story of Mrs. Garie's cousin, George Winston, skillfully articulates this choice between the world represented by white fathers and the world of slavery inherited through black mothers. The child of a white man, Winston is torn from his mother on the slave block when he is very young. While still agonizing over this traumatic separation, he is approached by a white man who offers him a picayune. Initially, Winston does not consider this a fair trade: Reclaiming a connection with his mother supersedes any monetary considerations. "'Will that buy mother back?'" he demands. "'If it won't buy mammy, I don't want it. I want my mammy, and nothing else.'" Before long however, Winston's wish for the white man's coin overcomes his longing for his mother, and he allows himself to be lulled by "the prospect of many fabulous events to occur" (9). The young slave flourishes under the tutelage of his new master, who teaches him to read and write and eventually frees him. Although his owner eventually emancipates him, Winston attends his master's business so diligently that he does not initiate a search for his lost mother until six years after he has gained his freedom. After his long delay, Winston finds that she had died a slave "not more than three miles from where he had been living" in security and comfort (13). His loyalty to his surrogate white father--and the bourgeois values he represents--overrules the emotional and moral pull Winston should have felt toward his mother. Here sentimentalism's emphasis on familial love and loyalty frames Winston's betrayal in sharp relief. In an emotional economy that considers the mother-child relationship the most sacred of connections, the willful neglect of the maternal bond provides powerful testimony to the devastating effects of racial self-hatred. As a free man, Winston allows his desire for whiteness to reenact the traumatic separation that, at first, could only have happened at the hands of a white man.