paradox of slave mutiny in Herman Melville, Charles Johnson, and Frederick Douglass, The

College Literature, Fall 2003 by Lock, Helen

Central to Grant's explanation of the loss of the ship is what he regards as the imposture of Washington: "no one could suspect him of a murderous purpose. The only feeling with which we regarded him was, that he was a powerful, good-disposed negro" (Douglass 2000, 48). Washington spoke rarely and then only with "the utmost propriety" and "pronunciation equal to that of any schoolmaster," which Grant finds a "mystery" (48). In fact, he says, "none of us knew the extent of his intelligence and ability until it was too late" (48). But as this last remark, and later Washington's and the mate's own words, reveals, this mask that allays the crew's suspicions is actually the real Washington, which the crew interpret as a mask in the light of subsequent events.Yet it is the reality that fools them. Mysterious as their preconceptions suggest it to be, Washington actually is a man of few, well-spoken words, of great intelligence (the mate's word for it is "shrewd" [48], which still suggests a certain deviousness), and without murderous intent. (It should be noted that in The Heroic Slave's account, two men are killed during the uprising, the captain and the owner of the slaves. In the actual Creole mutiny of 1841 only the slaves' owner was killed.) Indeed, immediately after referring to him as a "rascal," the mate quotes Washington's own words,'"You call me a black murderer. I am not a murderer. God is my witness that LIBERTY not malice, is the motive for this night's work. . . . We have done that which you applaud your fathers for doing, and if we are murderers, so were they]'" (49).

The mate's conflicted response to Washington's identification of himself with the patriotic rebellion of the Founding Fathers is to pronounce Washington's speech "impudent" and himself simultaneously "disarmed" by it: "I forgot his blackness in the dignity of his manner, and the eloquence of his speech. It seemed as if the souls of both the great dead (whose names he bore) had entered him" (Douglass 2000, 49). It is as if the mate's perception of Washington is inverted; when he sees him infused with the souls of the great (white) dead, Washington's blackness, which for Grant is incommensurate with such greatness, disappears. Formerly seen as black and bloodthirsty, Washington now appears possessed by the greatness that belongs, by implication, to whiteness. Thus the reversal in Grant's thinking merely leaves us once again with a mirror image of the preconceptions and assumptions that preceded it.

Moreover, Grant continues to refer to the mutineers in general as "murderers," and exhorts the crew to resist them, even while he is contrasting the bravery of Washington in the ensuing storm (an event that precludes the kind of extended interaction between factions that revealed mutual influence in "Benito Cereno" and Middle Passage) to the behavior of the white members of the crew, whom, in an interesting reversal of contemporaneously conventional racial imagery, he describes as "so many frightened monkeys" (Douglass 2000, 50). In fact, he says ofWashington,