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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Anna Mae Duane

Clarence's move away from the world of his mother does not mark him as a figure of masculine independence; rather, it prevents him from being a man at all. He admits to his white confidante Aunt Ada that his ongoing attempt at racial suppression has "'crowded out every honourable and manly feeling.'" As he participates in the racist jokes and sneers of his colleagues, he experiences his deceit as an explicit betrayal of his mother. Wracked with guilt, he wonders why she does not "rise from her grave and curse me as I speak!" (325). Instead of investing him with an unconquerable spirit, Clarence's foray into the supposedly superior world of whiteness renders him both physically weak and morally dishonorable. Eventually the promise of white privilege slips away from the son just as surely as it slipped away from the mother he betrayed to get it. While at the house of his fiancee Clarence runs into George Stevens, his childhood playmate. It was in the house of George's parents that Clarence first heard his mother called a "nigger," and now their son appears to cast the same epithet on him. Unable to withstand the blow, Clarence succumbs to the sickness that has been eating away at him and returns to his sister's home to die. Together, the stories of Clarence and Winston represent a remarkably early depiction of a complicitous dynamic where black men participate in a gendered and racialized hierarchy that elevates the financial and physical power of white masculinity by rendering black womanhood its polar opposite. It is a deeply uncomfortable narrative to be sure, one that seems to reify racist binaries even as it illustrates the disastrous effects they produce.

Webb does not restrict his portrait of longing for the normality assigned to whiteness to characters of mixed race. The Ellises, a hard-working family of free blacks in Philadelphia, also flounder in their attempts to live within the boundaries of an idealized white middle-class life, only to realize the futility of such an effort. We are introduced to the Ellises by Mr. Winston, who stops by to tell the family to make arrangements for the arrival of the Garies. Like the Garies, the Ellises seem to fulfill many of the conventions of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Mr. Ellis is a hardworking and benevolent father who presides over his little home with great pride. The three Ellis women each seem to embody a trait typically ascribed to the sentimental matriarch. Mrs. Ellis is the traditional mother hen, always fussing over her little brood. Esther, the oldest daughter, epitomizes nurturing kindness. Caddy, the middle child, is the supreme housekeeper.

But Webb quickly fractures this idyllic domestic facade to dislodge the restrictive conceptions of womanhood it contains. Mr. Winston's introduction to this happy household doesn't take the form of a cozy cup of tea or a home-cooked meal. Instead, he receives a wallop on the head when Caddy mistakes him for a beggar boy mussing up her entranceway. In the home of this free black family, Caddy's obsessive rage caricatures the sentimental ideal of a benevolent domestic empire. Whereas Ellen Montgomery, Susan Warner's white heroine in the hugely popular 1850 novel The Wide Wide World, works to repress all vestiges of anger in order to become a better Christian, Caddy has quite a different evolution. Her assault on Winston may be amusing, but her volatility later becomes dangerous. After furiously cleaning the Gaffes' new home, she flies into a rage because her brother Charlie has lost the lunch he was supposed to bring her. Unable to bear such an affront to her anticipated scene of domestic bliss--eating good food in a spotless house--Caddy loses control. She attacks Charlie, causing him to fall down the stairs and break his arm so severely that he comes close to death (91).