Reading Post: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Betsy & Tacy Go Downtown

I've finished my third book for the Classics Challenge and this was my favorite so far -- Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, published in book form in 1852, which I chose as my "19th Century Classic." The book starts out hard, with a lot of awful things happening -- slaves being sold to cruel masters, families broken apart -- and I wanted to put the book down and choose something else to read. But it got easier. Some good things happened along with the awful things, and the characters became interesting enough that I wanted to know what would happen to them. I ended up reading the 442 pages in about a week, enjoying it thoroughly until the last rather dull chapter, where the author argues openly against slavery. Of course, the entire book is propaganda against slavery, but it's such entertaining propaganda. In the introduction to the edition I read, Amanda Claybaugh talks about the book's immense popularity (in the north), citing "Richard Henry Dana, Jr., noting that four men were reading Uncle Tom in a single railway car," among others. Wikipedia notes that it was the second best-selling book of the 19th century (behind only the Bible). It was the first best-seller in American history.

So why haven't I read this before? Why hasn't anyone I know ever read it? It really is worth reading. Anyone who reads Gone with the Wind (do young girls still read that?) should also read Uncle Tom's Cabin. Well, at last I have.

I read that contemporary readers wept at the death of various characters, but I didn't. The deaths seemed less awful than the scenes where children were torn from their mothers to be sold, that kind of thing. One scene that did bring me to tears, however, was near the end, when George Selby, son of the man who kicks off all the trouble at the start of the book, finally frees his family's enslaved people.

     About a month after this, one morning, all the servants of the Shelby estate were convened together in the great hall that ran through the house, to hear a few words from their young master.
     To the surprise of all, he appeared among them with a bundle of papers in his hand, containing a certificate of freedom to every one on the place, which he read successively, and presented, amid the sobs and tears and shouts of all present.
     Many, however, pressed around him, earnestly begging him not to send them away; and, with anxious faces, tendering back their free papers.
     "We don't want to be no freer than we are. We's allers had all we wanted. We don't want to leave de old place, and Mas'r and Missis, and de rest!"
     "My good friends," said George, as soon as he could get a silence, "there'll be no need for you to leave me. The place wants as many hands to work it as it did before. We need the same about the house that we did before. But, you are now free men and free women. I shall pay you wages for your work, such as we shall agree on. The advantage is, that in case of my getting in debt, or dying,--things that might happen,--you cannot now be taken up and sold..."

It's pure fantasy, I know. Did any slave owner ever actually do this? Did any slaves ever say no to being freed? But it comes at the end of a book in which a lot of terrible things happen, and the scenario of a "good" slave owner who dies, throwing his enslaved people into dire situations, is repeated throughout that book. The idea of George Shelby freeing his slaves and then hiring them back as workers for pay just erases a lot of the anxiety raised in the book, and that's probably what caused my tears.

Some of the ideas in the book would not be acceptable now. For example, Stowe's "solution" to the problem of slavery seems to be to free all slaves -- and then send them to Liberia. The Liberian experiment was drawing to a close by then, but her characters still seem to think it's the best choice for them.

Another thing I noticed was that, as in Dumas's Georges, in the world of Uncle Tom's Cabin, the slaves who are part white are presented as more intelligent and worthy than those who are not. Over and over, major characters are described as being able to "pass" as white, and it is primarily those characters who succeed -- not just because it's easier for them to escape, but because they are somehow "better" than darker, more fully African characters. Eliza is a "quadroon" (one-fourth Black), her husband George Harris is a "mulatto," Emmeline is another "quadroon," as is Cassy. Only Tom is described as being

a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a fully glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence.

The character of Uncle Tom is interesting to me, because I was aware of the term "Uncle Tom" being used as a pejorative, describing African-Americans who debase themselves before whites. But Tom in the novel isn't like that. He is the hero of the tale, a Christ-like figure. He has almost the worst set of experiences of any character, and the experiences get worse as the book progresses, but he stays strong. The root of his strength is his Christian faith -- trying to do what Jesus would have done helps him to be the good person he is. He is polite and helpful to white people, but he is especially kind to Black people who are suffering at the hands of white people. He won't steal from any of his "Mas'rs" and neither will he kill them when given the opportunity. But he will lie to/withhold evidence from a "Mas'r" to save other Black people, even if it means his own death. If there were ever a fictional character in need of rehabilitation among the general public, it is Tom.

So where did the servile version of Uncle Tom come from? According to my book and to Wikipedia, it came from "Tom shows," various plays based (roughly) on the novel, that began almost immediately and "that would remain popular for more than seventy-five years." In other words, until at least 1927? And it's estimated that more than three million people saw a Tom show. The Tom shows, though related to the book, were very different from it -- often very racist, with white actors in blackface playing the white characters, and much of Stowe's message diluted or removed altogether. This is where the negative "Uncle Tom" stereotype came from -- the Uncle Tom of the Tom shows.

Wait a minute, I thought. I know about Tom shows. Betsy, Tacy, and Tib went to one, when Winona got comps from her father, the editor of the Deep Valley Sun. I picked up my old copy of Betsy and Tacy Go Downtown by Maud Hart Lovelace and refreshed my memory. The book is set in 1904 when Betsy and her friends were 12 years old.

...Betsy's gaze wandered to the billboard and clung there fascinated.
     "I've read the book," said Betsy slowly.
     " 'Foremost American drama and the nation's pride,' " Winona read aloud. "Dear to Americans as the Declaration of Independence. Struck the death knell of slavery.' "

After much ado, Winona takes the other three girls to the play. It is the first time they have been in the Deep Valley Opera House and the first time they have seen a play other than the ones they put on themselves for their parents.

     The orchestra started to play. It played sad tunes. Old Kentucky Home. Swanee River, Massa's in de Cold Cold Ground. All over the house the lights went low.

Reading the description of the play, I remembered that I never really understood what the book was talking about. Who was Eliza? Who were St. Clare and Marie and Little Eva? I didn't know that Eliza belonged to Tom's original master and that both Eliza's son and Tom are sold off by that master, but Eliza runs away with her son and escapes to Canada. St. Clare is Tom's second master.

     Presently they were in the elegant St. Clare parlor. The languid Marie lay on the couch. Little Eva ran in, her yellow curls flowing about her.
     "Mamma!" she cried in a sweet piping voice.
     "Take care! Don't make my head ache."
     St. Clare came in, and good old Uncle Tom, and funny Aunt Ophelia with her corkscrew curls, and the comical Topsy.
     The audience laughed uproariously at Topsy.

Good old Uncle Tom -- that gives you a sense of how he must have been portrayed in the Tom show. And in the play, Ophelia is apparently a comic character, as is Topsy. In the book, Miss Ophelia is quite serious, and Topsy is essentially tragic, though she ends well.

I don't think of Maud Hart Lovelace's books as racist. Two of the Betsy-Tacy series deal with local prejudice against immigrants from Lebanon. But Downtown was published in 1943, long before the Civil Rights era. And I realized, after reading about Tom shows and then rereading Downtown, that the actors in the play that Betsy saw were white people in blackface. For whatever reason, Lovelace doesn't make this fully explicit in the book except in her description of the intermission act:

The waits between the acts of the play did not break the spell. A black-faced quartette sang plantation melodies, told jokes, and cakewalked. The girls did not talk very much. They waited for that moment of unfailing rapture when the curtain would go up.

But after the play, they wait outside the stage door to see the actress who plays Little Eva, and they see her leave with a woman "who looked ever so faintly like Eliza" -- presumably hard to recognize because she no longer has dark makeup on her face?

One of the most amazing things about reading out of your comfort zone is the connections you start to find. Books aren't written in a vacuum. Writers read other writers, and "talk" to them by writing their own books on similar subjects and themes. And of course writers write about what's going on at the time they are living. Maud Hart Lovelace was writing historical fiction about her own childhood. It didn't occur to me that anything she wrote would be relevant to what I'm reading this year, but it turns out that it is, because the Tom shows went on for more than 75 years after Uncle Tom's Cabin was written. I don't see Downtown listed as a reference in the Wikipedia article on Tom shows, but the three songs Lovelace mentions the orchestra playing are the three songs Wikipedia lists as examples of songs often played in Tom shows. The reference for this claim is a PBS show on Stephen Foster. Maybe the creators of that show used Downtown as a reference? The links, the connections are never-ending.