Chrysovalantis Kampragkos

Alit 9-585: American National Identity and Political Ideology: 1775-1865

The Roots of African American Subjectivity: W.W. Brown’s The Escape

African Americans of the 19th century, when the time for freedom from slavery was

reaching, did not face only problems of economic nature, of racial discrimination, or

of the way they would be integrated in the American society as freed people and equal

to the white population. Another major issue was the nature of the culture they had

nurtured and developed while being slaves, and whether this culture, which definitely

had an impact on their behavioral codes, was a genuine black tradition. Was it a

tradition separated from white norms or was it deeply affected by white behaviors and

ideologies to the point blacks could not escape attitudes―injected by the

whites―which did not hit the problem of racism to the core, and therefore not

allowing them escape fully from their past? While slave narratives, written by

escaping slaves, were a genuine expression of the southern black experience, and

were acting as major critiques of the slavery and plantation system, they were not art

or fiction in their strict sense, and therefore, the problem of creating a cultural system

that would overcome white attitudes that kept blacks in bondage remained. William

Wells Brown was one of the first blacks who tried to solve this problem, by being one

of the first African American novelists and playwrights, his novel Clotel; or, the

President’s Daughter (1853), being considered the first novel written by a black. His

1858 play The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom is, in my opinion, an attempt to forge

a literary tradition and a cultural system that would overcome whites’ perceptions of

blacks. Furthermore, in the play Brown tries to create a black voice of resistance and

social suggestions for the first time, without relying to the usually paternalist attitudes

of white abolitionists. His method of achieving his goals is by using a combination of

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dramatic genres and by undermining traditional perceptions of both black and white

people in the construction of his characters.

First of all, the play uses a lot of autobiographical elements, since Brown was

a slave himself. By using his own experience in the South, Brown will construct his

own critique of slavery and his own view on how it should be solved. In his preface,

Brown writes that “[t]he main features in the drama are true. […] Many of the

incidents are drawn from my own experience of eighteen years at the South” (37). As

Ronald T. Takaki notes, “[i]n The Escape, Brown used fiction not only to attack

slavery and arouse Northern public opinion against the South but also to dramatize his

old personal concerns―the lustfulness of white men, the viciousness of white women,

and the powerlessness of black men” (221). The mulatto boy Sampey in the play is

creates after Brown himself, since as Takaki informs us, since the writer “learned

from his mother, a slave of ‘mixed blood’ herself, that his father was a white man and

his master’s [Dr. Young] half brother. […] [H]is mistress, Mrs. Young, hated him.

His light skin was a constant and annoying reminder of his relationship to her

husband[.] […] On one occasion, for example, a Major Moore paid a visit during Dr.

Young’s absence and introduced himself to Mrs. Young. William was about ten years

old at the time and was ‘as white as most white boys.’ […] Thinking William was Dr.

Young’s son, Major Moore said[…] [:] ‘Madam, I would have known your son if I

had met him in Mexico; for he looks so much like his papa” (216). In the play, there is

a scene taken exactly from Brown’s life, where Major Moore mistakes Sampey for

Dr. Gaines’s (the play’s slaveholder) son, and Mrs. Gaines becomes very angry with

the boy (50).

There are other instances of autobiography in the play, like the two black

slaves Glen and Melinda, who, according to Brown, are real people (37). The two

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slaves have secretly married, but Dr. Gaines wants Melinda for himself and keeps her

in an isolated house, pushing her to become his mistress (51). Glen strikes Gaines,

and, despite being in jail, does not regret for his action: “I did right to strike him back

again. I would had killed him. Oh! there is a volcano pent up in the hearts of the

slaves of these Southern States that will burst forth ere long. I would be willing to die,

if I could smite down with these chains every man who attempts to enslave his

fellowman” (52). However, the couple escapes along with another slave, Cato, and

while trying to escape to Canada, they are chased by whites due to Fugitive Slave

Law. The blacks fight with the whites and finally escape (60). According to Takaki,

Melinda’s character is based on a fellow slave Cynthia, who was also blackmailed by

a slaveholder (218). All the autobiographical elements serve as a vehicle for Brown to

express his opinion on how slavery should be solved, and his solution is using any

means necessary, including violence practiced by blacks against whites. His attitude is

absolutely different from gradual abolitionists and works like Harriet Beecher Stowe’s

Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in which Stowe advocates that the solution to slavery is piety and

faith to God, essentially paternalistic views expressed by whites, which did not pose a

real threat to the slavery system. As Takaki says, “[t]he degradation of Cynthia

illustrated one of the dilemmas Brown faced up as a slave. He felt he could do nothing

to appease his pent-up rage and defend slave women like Cynthia against lascivious

and brutal white men” (218). Therefore, the play serves “Brown’s need to remember

and resolve in his fantasy the travail of his slavery,” and “in his [Brown’s]

imagination he was able to act out his rage and frustration as well as the violence he

wished to bring down on his oppressors” (Takaki 216). Brown’s slave experience

shows the way of achieving liberation. As an ex-slave, he stands in opposition to

pacifist, reformist methods that could not solve the problem of slavery.

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Another key element in the play is satire and irony against religion and

southern women, which stand as warnings for the hypocrisy of southern people and

for their moral depravity, as opposed to the image they project to the public. Mrs.

Gaines pretends to be a member of the aristocracy, “born with a spoon in [her]

mouth” (38), arrogant towards lower caste whites. However, a slave called Susan says

that Mrs. Gaines is lying, and that “[s]he come from Carlina, from ’mong de poor

white trash. She don’t know any better. You can’t speck nothin’ more dan a jump

from a frog” (49). In this way, Brown both shows the vanity and arrogance of

southern slaveholders, and creates a feeling of black pride and superiority to these

people. It is for this reason that he writes in his preface that “[a]s I never aspired to be

a dramatist, I ask no favor for it, and have little or no solicitude for its fate. If it is not

readable, no word of mine can make it so; if it is, to ask favor for it would be

needless. […] The play, no doubt, abounds in defects, but as I was born in slavery,

and never had a day’s schooling in my life, I owe the public no apology for errors”

(37). Brown does not feel inferior to his white audience, not by simply blaming the

system of slavery for his lack of education, but because he does not feel inferior to

white people, because he has encountered white people lower in spirit and character

than any black slave. Therefore, the problem of slavery, according to him, is not

solved by feeling pity for blacks (like Stowe showed in Uncle Tom’s Cabin), but

through the realization that both races are equal. Timothy B. Powell claims, that

“[w]hile deeply respectful of Stowe’s ability to engender support for the cause of

abolition, Brown’s […] stance differed sharply from Stowe’s view that African

Americans were ‘an exotic race’” (142). Furthermore, Mrs. Gaines is ironically

presented as hypocritically religious. On the one hand, she always talks about God,

and rejoices in talking with the preacher Mr. Pinchen, but she always threatens her

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slaves that she will whip them, and that if she does not go to Heaven, it will be

because of them (43). As such, she is shown as a totally hypocritical and immoral

person, who gradually becomes a monster because of her husband lust for Melinda,

forcing Melinda to drink poison (52). In this way, Brown shows that slavery turns

both blacks and whites into beasts, and that it deprives both races of their humanity.

He also pictures religion as a tool for making black men, black women, and white

women submissive, when Dr. Gaines, in order to tone down his wife’s jealousy, says

that “I’ll get brother Pinchen to talk to her, and het her mind turned upon religious

matters, and then she’ll forget it” (45).

Brown’s major strategy in subverting white hegemony and construction a

black subject is the use of blackface minstrelsy with the black slave Cato. AsEric Lott

says, “[w]hile it was organized around the quite explicit ‘borrowing’ of black cultural

materials for white dissemination, a borrowing that ultimately depended onn the

material relations of slavery, the minstrel show obscured these relations by pretending

that slavery was amusing, right, and natural” (3). Cato is shown as a typical blackface

character, subservient, loyal, silly, and amusing. However, Brown disrupts the

stereotypical closure of the minstrel show when Cato deceives a barkeeper and

escapes slavery, inflicting violence on whites (55, 56, 60). In his songs, a typical

element of minstrel shows, he criticizes the harsh labor conditions of slavery (56), the

Fugitive Slave Law (57), the Bible as justification of slavery (48), and even the

Republican ideals of George Washington and the Northern states, which do not apply

for black slaves (48, 57). The new name he chooses, Rev. Alexander Washington

Napoleon Pompey Caesar, is ironic towards the imperial/ imperialistic attitude of

America to Africa. Writing on another of Brown’s works, William H. Andrews notes

that “the unmaking, or rather, the unmasking of the pretensions of white mastery on

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the antebellum plantation goes hand in hand with black attempts to become masters of

their own fate, often at the expense of their owners” […] Authority rarely emanates

from a fixed and acknowledged source; authority is transactional, a product of

discourse, especially of wit contests in dialogue. […] That Cato only plays the fool

becomes clear in his successful hoodwinking of slavecatchers” (11, 12, italics mine).

Furthermore, Andrews rightfully claims that “[t]he narrator does picture southern

whites as rather less masterful than the traditional image of patriarchal slavery

maintained” (14). The subversion of the contend “darky” in Cato is finally shown

when he seeks desperately to vent his rage: “An’ de ole boss hit me wid his cane after

dat nigger tore my coat. By golly, I wants to fight somebody. Ef ole massa should

come in now, I’d fight him” (40). In this sense, the adoption of blackface minstrelsy

by blacks becomes a form of resistance. Grace Elizabeth Hale has very interestingly

noted that “[t]o act ‘blackface,’ African American performers had to look at ‘darkies’

through white people’s eyes―they had in effect to play whites. […] Given the

popular context of minstrelsy, African American performers and musicians’ creation

of ‘miscegenated’ styles paradoxically subverted white methods and declared black

freedom to match white methods” (38). As whites borrowed elements from slaves’

lives in order to entertain, blacks borrowed whites’ psychological reactions to create a

liberating form of art.

What is more, Brown’s treatment of the issue of slavery and the way he seeks

to subvert it is very interesting and insightful. In opposition to simplistic Stowe-esque

sentimentalization of slavery as an institution that most of all harms family and is un-

Christian, Brown treats his black characters as expendable commodities in a market

capitalist economy through the depiction of slave trade, and his white characters as

defining themselves in relation to blacks’ economic position, showing that whiteness

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is actually defined by its other, blackness. A white character called Scragg Dr. Gaines

tells that “I felt bad to see a nigger dressed up in such fine clothes, and I wanted to

whip him right off. I tell you doctor, I had rather whip that nigger than go to heaven”

(52). Here, Brown’s use of blackface performance serves as a critique of the minstrel

show itself as a way through which blacks are being treated as merely marketable

commodities, if we take into consideration that the main audience of minstrel shows

was the working class. In a time of increasing migration from Europe to America and

the emergence of socialist theories of transforming society, the potential solidarity

between white workers, immigrant workers and black slaves would be a disaster for

the solidification of American industrial capitalism, which was rapidly expanding. In

this sense, the ridicule of blacks in minstrel shows served in two ways. First, white

workers could see that there were social groups lower than them, economically and

mentally. As Lott says, “[i]t was cross-racial desire that coupled a nearly

insupportable fascination and a self-protective derision with respect to black people

and their cultural practices, and that made blackface minstrelsy less a sign of absolute

white power and control than of panic, anxiety, terror, and pleasure” (6). The

character of blacks in minstrel shows was not so different from the pseudo-scientific

proof of biological essentialist theories, which showed the supposedly natural

inferiority of blacks. Secondly, the harsh labor conditions workers (and especially

immigrants) experienced in the mid-1800s showed them a radically different reality

from their expectations of equal choices and mobility in America. The industrial

capitalist mode of production developed a consumer culture, and in the minstrelsy

tradition, blacks were ultimately pictured as commodities. As Hale notes, “[b]lacked

up white men had long before [the 20th century] pioneered the commodification of

black images and continued to impersonate African Americans on booming minstrel

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stages across the nation. White children played with ‘darky’ figured toys and squealed

in delight at Uncle Remus’s tales of Brer Rabbit’s adventures” (51). Therefore,

blackface minstrelsy made blacks appear as property not only of their slaveholders,

but also of the poor working class, who would forget their problems by consuming

entertainment and spectacle. According to Hale, “wage laborers found humor in

blackfaced minstrels’ stereotyped slave life. For most northerners, however, working

for wages seemed significantly better than its apparent alternative, slavery. Workers at

least retained some semblance of control over their domestic arrangements” (91).

Hale concludes that “[m]instrelsy, then, mediated between slavery and late

nineteenth-century mass culture. It placed stylized black racial imagery at the center

of commercial popular culture” (154). Brown, then, in his presentation of plantation

life and minstrelsy negotiates slaves as marketable commodities and predicts the

solidification of consumer culture.

In conclusion, Brown’s play promotes a method that would lead blacks out of

slavery. This was the use of violence as both self-defense and attack, without the

paternalistic attitudes of white sympathizers. What is more, his work is a pre-

Emancipation attempt to develop a cultural system of codes and manners that would

help the liberated African Americans overcome hegemonic imaginaries of themselves

created by their oppressors. He advocated to his race to leave behind all belittling and

hypocritical ideologies, like religion and dreams of excessive social mobility,

ideologies that would continue to enslave them, despite being free. In short, he asked

from his fellow people to create their own culture and feel proud of themselves.

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Works Cited

Andrews, William H. “Mark Twain, William Wells Brown, and the Problem of

Authority in New South Writing.” In Southern Literature and Literary Theory.

Ed. Jefferson Humphries. Athens, Georgia: U of Georgia P, 1990.

Brown, William Wells. The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. 1858.

Hale, Grace Elizabeth. Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South,

1890-1940. New York: Pantheon, 1998.

Powell, Timothy B. Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the

American Renaisssance. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000.

Takaki, Ronald T. Violence in the Black Imagination. 1972. New York: Oxford

University Press, 1993.

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