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

African American Review, Summer, 2004 by Anna Mae Duane

Webb skillfully manipulates the anxiety Caddy would undoubtedly create in an 1857 audience to heighten the dissonance between white sentiment and black reality. The wrath that accompanies her housekeeping testifies to the excruciating paradox that structures black domesticity. Caddy's household tyranny is produced by the maddening knowledge that blackness nullifies the very claim to the sentimental womanhood she nonetheless feels compelled to emulate. No matter how clean she keeps her home, and no matter how many children she raises, Caddy's future role as mother and wife will be undercut by a national philosophy that disdains all forms of blackness, particularly female blackness. As we have already seen, Mrs. Garie's pale complexion and impeccable manners did her family little good once the neighbors had identified her as a "nigger woman." Caddy's fury also renders her ineligible for another role imposed upon black women by white fiction--that of the complacent and capable mammy whose happiness is made complete by tending to the white folks' household. Unwilling to be a happy servant, and unable to become the empowered mistress of her own domestic haven, Caddy resorts to violence, which renders her a monstrous inversion of the loving domestic matriarch who can rule with a glance and reprimand with a gentle frown.

The carefully constructed "race riot" (actually a mob organized to appropriate black property) that ends the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Garie and threatens the lives of the Ellis family soon justifies Caddy's resistance to the restrictive roles imposed upon black women. The riot scene metaphorically recreates the dynamic portrayed so often in abolitionist literature--white men seem destined to violate the sanctity of home and family through physical violence. Yet in Webb's novel, many of the women who find their homes and bodies under siege do not run away like Stowe's Eliza: They stand, fight, and win, thus disrupting the social balance contingent upon a violated and submissive black female body. The bulk of the fighting occurs in Mr. Waiters' house, a domestic space that disrupts traditional gender expectations. A strong masculine figure and one of Philadelphia's self-made black millionaires, Mr. Waiters throws off the comfortable connection between blackness and submission. "... above six feet in height, well proportioned," and of "jet-black complexion," his physical presence matches a forceful personality that diverges sharply from Stowe's docile Uncle Tom (122). Indeed, Walters explicitly identifies himself with one of the era's most famous figures of black resistance by proudly displaying a portrait of the Haitian rebel Toussaint l'Ouverture in his sitting room. Although many critics have figured Mr. Waiters as the epitome of individualist capitalism they charge Webb with extolling, the narrative makes it clear that a black millionaire's money does him little good when violence strikes. (10) Turned away by the political and financial power brokers of Philadelphia, Walters only retains his hard-won home because of his connection with the black community and, in particular, with the women within it.