Legacy of 'Uncle Tom's Cabin': Unintended lessons in racism
Appreciations, however, are still being made so many, many years later as the legacy of slavery is debated — the issue of reparations for African Americans, for example — and race relations tangle and fray.
Even those who had never been inclined to read the seminal book, who had an aversion to its portrayal of the lead character as childlike and docile, have found it to be a critical read.
"It transcends literature," says Charles Johnson, the acclaimed author and University of Washington professor. "It has become cultural artifact. It's a fascinating text if you approach it from the angle of being a transcript of the progressive white mind — the thoughts and feelings of white Americans who feel guilty of slavery."
Johnson wrote the foreword of an anniversary edition of the book published this month by Oxford University Press and widely available at bookstores. Until asked to write the preface last year, he had never read the book.
That very fact is testament to the book's lingering power.
"It's a book I've avoided, quite frankly," he says. "Then I was glad I read it. As a matter of fact, I was so engaged by it, I told my friend August about it. And he read it at the same time."
"August," is August Wilson, a Pulitzer-Prize-winning playwright who lives in Seattle. Both men are African American, and each has ingeniously used the English language to sculpt facets of black America.
As such, Johnson held an aversion to reading about Tom — whom he describes as an "emasculated black 'behemoth' of a man."
Gentle, good Tom is a slave who chooses to die rather than reveal the names of two runaway slaves. While the narrative was the first to portray the humanity of black Americans — indeed, some early readers wept at Tom's suffering — the enormously popular story triggered numerous stage productions that included "happy darky" song-and-dances with white actors in blackface.
These "Tom Shows" or "Tommers," which took great liberties with the original plot and which author Stowe had no control over, flourished through the Civil War years and continued through the 1940s until complaints by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People shut them down.
"What I knew about the book were these incarnations in popular culture," Johnson says. "I've kind of had a revulsion of the portraits of Uncle Tom and Little Eva."
Two forces behind book
Stowe was a devout Christian and the daughter of a prominent preacher born and raised in Connecticut and Cincinnati. According to the Harriet Beech Stowe Center in Hartford, Conn., two things galvanized her to write "Uncle Tom's Cabin": the death of her son Charley from cholera when he was 18 months old and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, which made it illegal for citizens of free states to help runaway slaves.
Stowe envisioned her story as a moral tale to provoke a white Christian audience to condemn slavery. She writes her mission in the book's first pages:
"The object of these sketches is to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race; as they exist among us; to show their wrongs and sorrows, under a system so necessarily cruel and unjust as to defeat and do away the good effects of all that can be attempted for them, by their best friends, under it."
Initially printed in serial form in The National Era, an abolitionist newspaper, the complete story was published as a book in two volumes in 1852. Some 10,000 copies were sold in its first week, half-a-million copies by 1857. It became the country's first best-seller, outselling the Bible at times, and it successfully accomplished Stowe's mission of rousing an abolitionist movement that culminated in the Civil War.
"So you're the little woman," Abraham Lincoln told Stowe when they met, "who wrote the book that started this Great War."
Southerners, though, cringed at Stowe's portrayals of them and assailed the book as libelous. Some abolitionists condemned the book for seemingly advocating African colonization. And in one of the most well-known contemporary criticisms, James Baldwin, the civil-rights activist and novelist, rebuked Stowe for her portrayals of mixed-race, lighter-skinned blacks as more intelligent than darker-skinned slaves, such as Tom. Moreover, he criticized Stowe for making Tom more spiritual than human, more simple-minded than complex.
Successes and failures
Johnson's books, short stories, essays and screenplays — even his first published works, which were cartoons — depict historical and contemporary black America. Raised in Evanston, Ill., he won the National Book Award in 1990 for "Middle Passage," a parable about a newly freed slave who stages a revolt aboard a slave clipper headed to Africa.
Johnson was the second African-American man to win the award, after Ralph Ellison in 1953. He is a MacArthur Foundation "genius" who teaches fiction at the UW. Over a cup of coffee recently, he engaged in a conversation that hopscotched from writer and social commentator Stanley Crouch to the current film "Barbershop" to race as an illusion in which he partakes.
As a narrative, Johnson says, Stowe constructs a rousing, suspenseful story in "Uncle Tom's Cabin." But as an accurate portrayal of slavery and blacks, she failed, he says. She soft-pedals the horror of slavery in order to appeal to her white audience. Her portraits of blacks are paternalistic and condescending.
Yet it is those images, Johnson and others say, that gives the book its value for even today's readers. It illustrates a critical point in history. And it illuminates how racial stereotypes have emerged — giving context to the film "Birth of a Nation" and the minstrel shows.
There is also the book's contribution to the American lexicon, which youth are more likely to know about rather than the story's role in antebellum America.
The phrase "Uncle Tom" initially emerged as an insult directed by whites toward other whites who were sympathetic to the plight of slaves, according to The Color of Words, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Ethnic Bias in the United States, by Philip Herbst.
In the 1940s, blacks lobbed it at other blacks who appeared to be overly deferential to whites. An "Uncle Tom" meant a sell-out or traitor. And through the decades, it continued to be hurled at public figures — novelist Ellison; boxer Joe Frazier (by Muhammad Ali); U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas.
Book's contributions
Without reading the book, says Patricia Turner, a professor of African-American studies at the University of California at Davis, you can't understand how the characterization surfaced in popular culture or how some black artists have appropriated the story to give it some sense of "black ownership."
The book was the springboard for playwright Robert Alexander and his 1990 production "I Ain't Yo' Uncle: The New Jack Revisionist Uncle Tom's Cabin"; for Spike Lee's 2000 film "Bamboozled" and for visual artist Kara Walker and her black-paper cutout silhouettes.
Even the book's prevalent use of the N-word, Turner adds, shows the extent of how blacks were dehumanized. "It's important to know that's the language that was used," she says.
History or works of art don't always have to be positive or uplifting to be important or to deserve recognition today, says Stephanie Ellis-Smith, executive director of the local Central District Forum for Arts and Ideas.
"We too often want to shove aside uncomfortable chapters," she says. Rather, the book, she continues, ought to be taught in schools today as a lesson in how races viewed each other at a moment in history and as a vehicle to discuss how they continue to regard one another today.
Johnson agrees, writing in his introduction that the book is a Rorschach test for feelings about slavery in general and black people in particular. To that end, he says, "Uncle Tom's Cabin" can still serve today's reader even if it's different than how the author originally intended.
Florangela Davila: 206-464-2916 or fdavila@seattletimes.com