"Civil" War wounds: William Wells Brown, violence, and the domestic narrative.

In 1867, William Wells Brown, the first published black American novelist, wrote a fictionalized account of the Civil War, becoming also, it appears, the first black American war novelist in the process. However, Clotelle, The Colored Heroine, A Tale of the Southern States was not a war novel in its origins. Brown, who manifested an unparalleled talent for repetition throughout his career, took one of his several revisions of the 1853 Clotel, or The President's Daughter and added four chapters dealing with the Civil War. Brown admits in his preface that all but these chapters were completed "before the breaking out of the recent rebellion" (4). Approximately six months before the publication of Clotelle, Brown had also become the first black American to publish a book-length historical account of the Civil War, The Negro In the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity (1867).

The 1867 version of Brown's revisions of Clotel brings the fugitive slaves Clotelle (the re-named daughter of the Clotel of the first novel) and her black husband Jerome home from their refuge in France to participate in the Civil War. Joining the Louisiana "Native Guards," one of the first black regiments raised to fight in the war, Jerome is killed off four paragraphs into the Civil War section of the narrative when a white general asks that his black subordinates charge into an onslaught of bullets and shells to retrieve the body of another (presumably white) officer. Four by four, they are fed into the fire until, on the fourth try, the body has been rescued. Very nearly out of danger, Jerome is decapitated by a shell. What Brown labels "human sacrifice" (106), was, of course, "black sacrifice"; black men willingly--and here, forcibly--laying down their bodies at the altars of freedom and citizenship. Jerome does not die in sacrificial glory, as Frances Harper's slave-martyr Tom will in the Civil War novel Iola Leroy (1892), saving black and white men alike; Jerome's death is senseless and the scene absurd. Moreover, Jerome's commanding officer is not the concerned abolitionist/commander both Harper and memoirist Susie King Taylor will both put to use in their war texts, but "a sorry tribute to [white] humanity" (106). (1)

This episode is a fictionalized representation of an event in the war that apparently had made a deep impression on Brown. In The Negro in the American Rebellion, the writer allots the incident an entire chapter, rendering it in explicit, excruciating detail. In historical actuality, a non-commissioned black officer, Captain Andre Callioux, whom Brown describes in the most elevated terms of black masculinity--"the blackest man in the Crescent City.... Finely educated, polished in his manners ... bold, athletic and daring"--was killed in a poorly planned attack on the rebel works at Port Hudson, Louisiana (169). Although it was evident that the works could not be taken without extraordinary loss of life, a General Dwight ordered that the mission continue. His subordinate, Colonel Nelson, made seven charges of the Confederate batteries, each unsuccessful, and each bringing more deaths and casualties. "Humanity," Brown writes, "will never forgive Gen. Dwight ... for he certainly saw he was throwing away the lives of his men. But what were his men? 'Only Niggers'" (170). Brown's narrator asks the relevant question: "But had they accomplished anything more than the loss of many of their brave men?" Unwilling to let the query hang too long, he answers it quickly and affirmatively. "Yes: they had," the author writes, explaining that the bravery of the black troops "created a new chapter in American history for the colored man" (172). His assurance seems more than a little disingenuous. Brown indeed is trying to have it both ways: these black lives were both carelessly disposed of in battle and honorably preserved by historical record--not just his, but also that of the dominant culture, which, Brown writes, "paid ... tribute" to these men (172). In his own preface to the Negro in the American Rebellion, Brown acknowledges "Feeling anxious to preserve for future reference an account of the part which the Negro took" in the Slaveholder's Rebellion. Thus, Brown's insistence that the blood of black lives lost, even those lost in this most obscene manner, had already written this "chapter in American history" appears more hopeful than truthful.

Brown's attempt to "have it both ways" underscores the difficulty he faced in creating a usable African American history of the Civil War: writing a realistic portrayal of black military life that exposes the psychological and physical assaults that blacks endured at the hands of both the Union and Confederacy (aspects that Harper will later forgo) while at the same time idealizing the dignity and bravery of the troops. The Civil War was nothing if not a conflict rife with conflicts: a war that was and was not about slavery, that freed some slaves but not others, in which blacks were used as both Union and Confederate soldiers, and in which those blacks who did don Union uniforms were paid no more than fugitive slave laborers. It was a war the end of which seemed to promise total liberation, but brought about a freedom so limited that many blacks were left to wonder whether emancipation had come at all. Looking at Brown as a Civil War writer, I am intrigued by his troubled endeavors to produce and manage a black body that can negotiate this contradictory historical terrain. As I will explain, Brown used his early texts to create male and female heroic bodies that could take their proper places within an evolutionary, linear narrative of black historical progress, a narrative designed to combat the devolutionary temporal narratives that would preclude blacks from inhabiting national space. In a work published during the Civil War, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius and His Achievements (1863), Brown argues that blacks, who belong "to the great family of man," are not debilitated by a "natural inferiority" that would prevent them from achieving equality "on this continent with the white man" (31). The argument that belonging to the same evolutionary time should secure blacks the right to live with whites in the nation, rather than to be expatriated or expelled to a more "backward" elsewhere, is a variation of the claim he had used to demand the abolition of slavery. Throughout his lectures and speeches Brown maintains that blacks, if indeed degraded, were made that way from the intellectual and physical deprivations of bondage, and given time, they will (re)emerge as enlightened, capable beings.

For Brown, that linear narrative of black progress almost always crosses the threshold of the domestic, the allegorical space where he enacts his fantasies of national inclusion. The manner in which Brown constantly moves his hero and heroine across geography and circumstance--from the United States, to Europe, back to the United States; from slavery to freedom--demonstrates that Brown's particular notion of a politically useful domesticity relies less on the creation of a perfected material space than on an idealized heterosexual union whose hallmark is its very mobility: black men and women forming a political alliance that is impervious to time, space, and history. For African Americans, whose historical experience has been defined by geographical movement, displacement, and loss, the notion of a moveable "homespace" defends against the "lack" implied by an inability to construct a stable physical domesticity. This holds particularly true for Brown, who was a fugitive slave. His sketch of Madison Washington, the instigator of the revolt on the slave ship Creole, included in The Black Man, articulates Brown's notion of a black progress within the trope of a mobilized matrimony. While Frederick Douglass's fictionalized version, The Heroic Slave, has Washington's wife dying before the insurgency takes place, Brown places Washington's beautiful "mulatta" companion ("marbled" skin, "mild blue eyes," a "finely chiseled mouth") within the group of slaves freed by her husband (81). As Richard Yarborough observes, Brown's realization of liberation results in "a restoration of the integrity of the domestic circle," revising Douglass's idealization of a solitary male heroic figure (173). As I argue below, Brown was intent on creating a decidedly black and a decidedly heroic male protagonist who could access public male power and perform domesticity at once. (2)

However, as the 1867 Clotelle demonstrates, a marked shift takes place in the narrative Brown produced after the war. In abandoning the heterosexual domestic imaginary, and with it, the powerful set of meanings it had accrued within his work, Brown questions whether the cultural vocabulary most dominant in 19th-century America can function within postbellum black protest fiction. He raises a similar question in abandoning the black corporeal fantasy embodied by the hero and heroine he sculpted so meticulously for the Clotel novels: Can highly stylized, aestheticized representations of blackness still perform the political work necessary for African Americans in post-Civil War United States? In Clotelle Jerome's magnificent body is very certainly "transformed," but the equally magnificent "mulatta" Clotelle is also altered, nullified, as it were, through Brown's linguistic neglect. In these chapters, he refuses to enshroud her in the idealizing terms standard for the literary figure whose very comeliness had come to represent the political and social promise of the black nation. Focusing on the alterations made to these bodies and the alterations to the Clotel narratives, I will argue that Brown's unwillingness to provide Jerome and Clotelle with either a protective domestic narrative or a protective corporeal language in the Civil War section of the 1867 revision reflects the writer's disillusionment in the years following the conflict, a disillusionment that led him to create a depiction of the "Rebellion" that rejects the laws that govern sentimentality for the laws that govern the frankly unsentimental project of war.

It almost seems unnecessary to explain the degree of optimism the war inspired in black Americans, and therefore, the corresponding degree of disappointment that African Americans experienced when their hopes for prosperous lives as freed people were dashed repeatedly. Long before the abolition of slavery was declared an official war aim, and well before the Emancipation Proclamation, most blacks understood that any war between the northern and southern states would turn on the issue of slavery. Brown, a tireless anti-slavery activist, had ample reason to believe that everything he had worked for throughout his entire adult life would come to fruition. At the end of 1865, the Congress both ratified the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery and enacted legislation establishing the Freedman's Bureau. However, the opportunities the Bureau provided were all too often negated by the "Black Laws" that many states, north and south, had first rushed to enact in the wake of the Emancipation Proclamation, hoping to keep contra-band from securing employment. Most of these laws appeared after the war, when free(d) blacks were seen as even more of a threat to white labor. Called "Black Codes" in the South, they imposed restrictions in nearly all aspects of African American life, giving whites the opportunity to reign over blacks with impunity. Blacks in South Carolina, for instance, one of the states most devastated by the war, could not marry if "paupers"; orphaned black children were forced into indentured apprenticeships (Mullane 301, 302).

Brown transcribes some of these laws in his Civil War history, commenting acerbically on what he views as their absolute hypocrisy: "And yet Connecticut, with her proscription of the negro, and receiving their aid in fighting her battles, retains her negro 'black laws' upon her statutebook by a vote of more than six thousand" (Brown, Negro 143). The war within the war that Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and other black activists had waged to force the Union to accept black soldiers had already given blacks an inkling of the obstacles they would face as freedpeople. Indeed, Brown, who had been vocal in this movement, and who later recruited blacks to join Union forces after Lincoln agreed to raise African American troops in 1862, resigned his post in 1864 in anger at the Union's refusal to grant adequate wages to black soldiers.

I return, then, to the dilemma that The Negro in the American Rebellion presented to Brown in 1867 as he sought to write a "non-fiction" history that balanced the real and the ideal, and as he strove to present a black male body capable of transforming physical and psychic humiliation into a transcendent state of heroism. He tries to solve this problem by re-imagining the conflict as a race war taking place almost exclusively between black men and their oppressors, attempting to construct a black male body in which two modes of violence are reconciled: a body that is both injured and injuring.

Calling the war the "Slaveholders' Rebellion" in his introduction, Brown begins his chronology with Crispus Attucks, the fugitive slave who was the first to fall in the Boston Massacre. Writing of Attucks's escape from bondage in one sentence and the massacre at Boston in the next, Brown represents Attucks's slave-break and his involvement in the war in one fluid movement, from fugitive to revolutionary, collapsing the distinction between slave and patriot. He devotes the next three chapters to Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, and Madison Washington, each of whom planned a slave revolt. He follows these installations with "The Growth of Slave Power," a chapter characterizing the expanding proportions of slavery as an overfed "monster" (40). The next chapter describes John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, emphasizing the roles played by John Copeland and Shields Green, the only two blacks captured alive. Quoting an article in the Baltimore Sun that marvels at Copeland's "unwavering fortitude" before his execution, Brown adds that Shields "behaved with equal heroism" (49). He concludes: "Shields Green ... died as he had lived, a brave man, and expressing to the last his eternal hatred to human bondage, prophesying that slavery would soon come to a bloody end" (49).

In Brown's book, the Civil War begins thereafter, with black men heeding (albeit unsuccessfully) Lincoln's call for 75,000 Union volunteers. By positioning black soldiers along a continuum of American slave revolutionaries, Brown transforms the Civil War into the greatest in a series of slave revolts, placing the black male in direct, armed confrontation with his master/monster: "an opportunity of settling with the 'ole boss' for a long score of cruelty" (157). Far from being something as removed from African American life as a conflict over "state's rights," the war instead becomes slavery's bloody finale, the inevitable conclusion to an inhumane institution prophesied decades before by a black man with his dying breath. Indeed, in his 1854 meditation on the slave revolution in Santo Domingo and its leader Toussaint L'Ouverture, Brown predicted that if slaves rose up, then "the God of Justice would be on their side" (qtd. in Levine 502). Thus, he defines revolt as a morally righteous materialization of R/republican ideology and divine retribution, and envisions such uprising as the completion of the "revolution that was commenced in 1776" (502). In the 1853 Clotel, Brown had already fused the philosophies of black slave "revolt" and white American "revolution." There, George Green, on trial for insurgency, provocatively asks, "Did not American revolutionists violate the laws when they struck for liberty? They were revolters, but their success made them patriots--we were revolters, and our failure makes us rebels" (226). Thus, while the history of slave revolts left many "failed" bodies--wounded, wrecked, and even obliterated by violence--it was nevertheless a heroic violence of slaves' own making, in which they forcefully asserted selves that centuries of enslavement had attempted to de-create. These bodies, then, represented willing and necessary forfeitures in the making of a manly race and, as Brown sees it, in the making of a black American.

But the powerful association Brown makes between the war and slave revolution obscures a simple fact: the Civil War was not a slave revolt, and at Port Hudson, these men did not volunteer for the charges--a crucial fact that Brown alters within his novel when he writes that the black soldiers were asked, not commanded, to put themselves in harm's way. The fictionalized account in Clotelle therefore becomes puzzling. Within the space of the imaginary, Brown could have chosen to portray many less bloody and less tragic events of the war. He could have chosen events that showed an emerging fraternity among white officers and their black subordinates. In other words, he could have used his "non-fiction" to construct an uncompromised heroic black manhood, the decision Douglass made in depicting in The Heroic Slave a black man who wages a successful revolt, rather than a fictionalized version of, say, Nat Turner, whose body ended up dangling from a noose. Instead, Brown apparently felt so distressed by white wounding of black male subjectivity (on many terrains) that he himself reviolates the black male body: "His head entirely torn off by a shell," Jerome is simply and unceremoniously snuffed out (106). Images of slaying, Kenneth Burke observes in an analysis of Milton's heroes, are acts of transformation; "the killing of something is the changing of it" (179). Brown willfully presents a grotesque where once stood a "whole" black man.

Certainly, then, this seems an odd fate for a character the writer had carefully chiseled across the span of four versions of his novel. Indeed, Brown did not initially construct his hero as a man physically dark enough to be Andre Callioux's double. Named George in the first Clotel, he more phenotypically resembles the white aristocrats in the first text, Henry Morton and Antoine Devenant--who marry mixed race women--than he resembles most of the other prominent black males in the narrative. In part, George's phenotypic whiteness serves one of the same fundamental purposes as the mulatta's: it renders him a reasonable facsimile of the chivalric heroes of white sentimental literature generally, and within Clotel specifically, it allows him to supplant the white male figures who form ultimately unsuccessful relationships with Brown's mixed race heroines. Influenced perhaps by the appearance of what Delany called the "New negro" black male in his serialized novel Blake, or the Huts of America (1859-62)--a hero defined by the combination of his undeniably black skin, powerful intellect, great strength, and, most supremely, his commitment to instigating global black revolution-Brown apparently concluded that George was too white to signify black manhood, physically and ideologically. More than a bulked up, colorized version of George, Jerome consolidates the two distinct manifestations of black heroic masculinity in the novel: the ultra-light-skinned black romantic hero who marries the mulatta heroine and is allowed access to the domestic sentimentalized narrative, and the ultra-black slave-revolutionary, whose acts place him within a different narrative, one that distinctly disallows for domestic stability.

In fact, in Clotel, it appears that physical proximity to the darker-skinned African ancestors to a large measure determines revolutionary potential; thus, as a light-skinned rebellious hero, George is an odd man out, standing apart from the other black men in the texts who also engage in overt acts of resistance against the system of slavery, particularly the figures of Nat Turner and Picquilo (whose messianic blackness is coded in opposition to the minstrel blackness of the comic folk in Brown's work). Showing no hint of "African blood," George possesses hair "straight, soft, fine and light," but William, the slave who ushers Clotel to freedom and flees to Canada, is "tall, full bodied" (224, 171). George had a "prominent" nose and "thin" lips; Turner is "full-blooded" (224, 213). Brown reserves his most detailed description of a black man's body for the cat-like, stealthy Picquilo, "large, tall, full-blooded Negro with a stern and savage countenance ... his step oblique, his look sanguinary" (213, 214). For Brown, the tribal marks on this African's skin were signs of inner power made visible, as if they were carved from the "bold spirit" of his interior (214).

It is no wonder, then, that after George takes part in a slave insurrection at the end of the original Clotel, he arrives in the next version physically inscribed by revolution: "This slave, whose name was Jerome, was of pure African origin, perfectly black" (Takaki 289). Brown enacts another change; the racialized defiance that lands George in jail is downgraded from insurgency to insolence--from participation in a slave revolt to a refusal to be whipped by his master.(3) While these modifications might seem minor when compared to his wholesale purging of the extratextual documents woven into the first narrative, they nonetheless represent a profound change in the way that Brown represents his primary figure of heroic black masculinity. An act of will replaces insurgency, but elicits the same consequences; revolution, Brown appears to say, can take place on a small scale.

The writer is nevertheless playing it safe. In replacing insurgency with insolence, Brown reconfigures Jerome as a character who does not commit a revolutionary act so implicitly violent that it would risk situating him permanently outside of civil law and evolutionary discourse, and therefore outside the permissible boundaries of domestic sentimentality. A fugitive slave who has run from his master's cruelty can be freely reintegrated into civil society; a fugitive slave who has murdered whites would remain a fugitive for life, even if no longer a slave. Moreover, while Brown and other abolitionists celebrated the San Domingo uprising, whites terrified by the prospect of rebellion in North America pointed to the bloodshed as a sign of black savagery. Ever cognizant of the ways the dominant culture perceived African Americans, Brown might have been reluctant to corroborate theories of the beast lurking within the black. These two significant alterations to the narrative, merging divergent manifestations of African masculinity--the sentimental hero and the black revolutionary-and reducing the gravity of Jerome's rebellion allow the black heroic figure to fulfill two narrative functions. Jerome can participate in the creation of the idealized social imaginary that republican domesticity signifies in the sentimental text and simultaneously represent a fierce blackness, with the implicit threat that messianic blackness carries.

The transformation of Jerome is just one of many changes the writer made in revising Clotel. Ironically, Brown, a man of so many "firsts," appeared to delight in seconds and thirds, repeating characters, plots, and passages verbatim from one text to another. And not only did the writer borrow from his own historical publications for the 1867 Clotelle; as a basis for a subplot for the 1853 version, he used a panel from the guide to the 1850 panorama he had staged while a fugitive in Britain, A Description of William Wells Brown's Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of An American Slave, From His Birth in Slavery to His Death or His Escape to His Home of Freedom on British Soil (Levine 306).

That Brown mined his own historical material for his novels is interesting but not especially surprising: historical fiction is inherently a return to prior representation. More compelling is the nature of Brown's returns. We must ask what that echoing might signify within the body of the writer's work, a body filled with echoes. And although it remains true that Brown often repeats without revision, Brown's instances of repetition can be thought of as similar but never as the same. For example, in Clotel, Brown includes the part of Andrew Jackson's 1814 address that recommends commendations for blacks who participated in the War of 1812. He embeds the document within a discussion between Mrs. Carlton and her husband, who are debating plans to manumit their slaves. During this discussion, Mrs. Carlton remarks upon the ineffectiveness of Jackson's declaration: "And what did these noble men receive in return for their courage, their heroism? Chains and slavery" (164). Recontextualized and reprinted by Brown in 1867 as part of The Negro in the American Rebellion, Jackson's address becomes something else altogether: evidence that Brown offers to argue that white Americans have always understood and valued blacks' contributions to the US military. (4) What is revealed here is, of course, the inherently unstable condition of any text; replaced, the text itself accrues altered meanings. In light of the now familiar poststructuralist argument that "history" is only text, a discursive recreation of "the thing itself," Brown's act--taking a document produced from a historically messy moment and attempting to impose a tidy evolutionary reading on it, beating back previous interpretations with his newer one--shows us how Brown might have approached the writing of America's slave past, not only in The Negro, but in his imaginative works as well (especially since Brown insisted on blurring any distinctions between the two).

Brown recognized the instability of both text and interpretation: Jackson's letter, and thus the fruits of black military labor, could read/be read differently in 1853 than in 1867. It follows, then, that in the case of the Clotel novels, the writer's compulsion to repeat and revise is, in part, an attempt to retroactively ascribe meaning to previous incarnations of the work. Throughout the versions written before 1867, he faithfully adheres to the most significant aspects of the plot of the first Clotel, adding more elements, such as the reunion of Clotelle with her slaveholding father, that show Brown anticipating positive historical developments, and in my speculation, anticipating the possibility that he at last might be able to ground Jerome and Clotelle in a stable, integrated home on domestic soil. Each subsequent novel appears as an evolution made along a linear narrative of progress that was moving, if slowly, toward liberation. As an anti-slavery polemicist, Brown's mission had been indisputably clear: to use the medium of the novel as an abolitionist tool. In the tumultuous, contradictory state of the nation in the years immediately following the war, his mission became less certain, and his outlook grew increasingly bleak. The final Clotelle registers these psychological and ideological changes, and powerfully so: as the severing of Jerome's head from his torso suggests, the four chapters completing the 1867 publication represent a break from the other narratives that is so drastic that it can only be described as complete.

If the "killing" of Jerome is one marker of the writer's shifting perspective, so, then, are the alterations he makes to his heroine. After the hero's death, the black protagonist who remains in the narrative is the widowed Clotelle, dubbed "the Angel of Mercy" for her ministrations to the suffering. But Brown will not have her take center stage in the narrative. Grief-stricken, Clotelle "withdrew from the gaze of mankind" (106). More than a self-imposed act of mourning within the story, her withdrawal signals Brown's desire to cloak the mulatta body. He takes the "impassioned and voluptuous" form he had described in detail on the first page of the novel, the woman who stood upon an auction block with a crowd "gazing and feasting" upon her, the creature locked in a cell as onlookers "gazed at her" and hides this figure from the audience/ spectator (5, 43, 74). Moreover, he has her "pass" for white, as a "rebel lady" in Georgia, then again in Alabama (107, 112). Clotelle hidden, the gaze is reversed as she becomes a spectator to the kind of "repulsive" scene the reader has witnessed in the episode of Jerome's decapitation. In the Georgia hospitals, she sees "emaciated Union prisoners, worn down to skin and bone with disease and starvation, with their sunken eyes and wild looks... hideous in the extreme" (107); in Alabama, she is taken in by a black woman whose husband lopped his hand off rather than serve in the Confederate Army. As is true of Brown's other disjointed, episodic, and strange incarnations of this narrative, it is difficult to determine just what Brown is up to. One possible interpretation is that placing the highly-charged (feminized) figure of the mixed race body out of the reader's view, a body already overly determined by the multiple sexual and racial ideologies ascribed to it, allows him to redirect that gaze to the spectacle of disfigured bodies (and nation) produced by war.

While that very well might stand as one interpretive possibility, Brown himself complicates it in The Negro in the American Rebellion. It would seem that his historical account of the Civil War--a patchwork of newspaper articles, first hand narratives, rumor, and information from other historians-would be no place to insert the tale of (yet another) beautiful "mulatta" who is part of (yet another) idealized "domestic" union. That, however, is exactly what "The Colored Historian" does. In Chapter 31, Brown addresses the massacre at Fort Pillow, which, because of its vast scope and calculated execution, came to symbolize Confederate atrocities in the war. On April 13, 1864, a group of soldiers led by Nathan Bedford Forrest (who would later found the Ku Klux Klan) entered the Tennessee fort with the intention of slaughter. Although it had been captured already, blacks did not have the option to surrender and were summarily shot; some were "burned alive" (Franklin 216). Although whites were also killed, at least 100 African Americans were murdered, some of whom were women and children. A black New Yorker wrote the Secretary of War, suggesting that black soldiers be allowed to kill an equal number of Confederate prisoners of war (Berlin 465-66). The Union government made the requisite noise about punishing the Confederates, but did nothing. Brown, after including the lengthy and detailed report of the Committee on the Conduct of War on the Fort Pillow Massacre, tags on the story that I abbreviate here:

   When the murderers returned, the day
   after the capture, to renew their
   fiendish work upon the wounded and
   dying, they found a young and beautiful
   mulatto woman searching among
   the dead for the body of her husband.
   She was the daughter of a wealthy and
   influential rebel residing at Columbus.
   With her husband, this woman was
   living near the fort when our forces
   occupied it, and joined the Union men
   to assist in holding the place. Going
   from body to body with all the earnestness
   with which love could inspire an
   affectionate heart, she at last found the
   object of her search. He was not dead;
   but both legs were broken. The wife
   had succeeded in getting him out from
   among the piles of dead, and was
   bathing his face.... At the moment she
   was seen by this murderous band; and
   the cry was at once raised, "Kill the
   wench[!]" The next moment the sharp
   crack of a musket was heard, and the
   angel of mercy fell a corpse on the
   body of her wounded husband, who
   was soon after knocked in the head by
   the butt-end of the same weapon. (247)

Whether or not this woman's story is true becomes secondary to a greater consideration: why the novelist would insert this overdetermined body into what many historians agree forms the most tragic single episode of the war, particularly since he announces in the preface that faced with abundant information about the Civil War, he "did not feel bound to introduce an account of every little skirmish in which colored men were engaged" (vi). The mulatta figure, however, survives Brown's rigorous selection process to finish off a factual chronicle of carnage. Brown's decision transforms a field of blood into a page straight from a sentimental novel: his own. Like the heroines in the Clotel novels, this young woman character is also the daughter of a "wealthy and influential" white father of high society (though not a President nor a senator). And as he does her counterparts, Brown also labels the unnamed heroine of his 1867 text "the angel of mercy." Given these similarities, it seems appropriate to read this war story in relationship to the Clotel narratives.

In the era when Brown was writing about the Civil War, the white female body of Columbia functioned as the corporeal symbol of the Republic. (5) Not so for Brown, who embodies the nation in the figure of the mulatta, "the representation of two races" standing for a republic ancestrally linking two racial identities--a symbolism that will become even more important as Harper makes use of this figure in Iola Leroy (Brown, The Black Man 81). The dual ancestry of the mulatta does not render her a unified ideal; as a figure both black and white in a country divided by race, the biracial female will not live an un-embattled condition until both of her racial identities can co-exist within the boundaries of her nation/body. Thus, despite the manner in which the endings of the novels taken together produce an evolutionary narrative--each revision another cautious step toward freedom--each of the Clotel novels also repeatedly defers closure, ending tentatively with the heroine's ultimate fate undetermined.

At the end of the first Clotel, written three years after the Fugitive Slave Law was passed, Mary is trapped in Europe with George, unable to come home lest she fall prey to slave catchers. By 1861, when a version of Clotel was serialized in The Weekly Anglo African under the name Miralda; or the Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery, Founded on Fact, the nation had divided over the issue of slavery. Brown closes his novel with a statement voicing his optimism that "in the world to come," equality would reign (Fabi 648). The nation was still warring when Clotelle, A Tale of the Southern States was published in 1864; consequently, Brown leaves his heroine safely in Europe, reconciled with her father, who is making plans to free his slaves and to "end his days in the society of his beloved daughter" (Takaki 340). Still recovering from the war in 1867, the "new" nation is under construction, and we find Clotelle correspondingly performing the work of Reconstruction as a schoolteacher in New Orleans.

As idyllic as this scenario might appear, the route that Clotelle has taken home belies any genuine sense of narrative stability or closure. After Clotelle is accused of helping a female Union sympathizer in Alabama, she defiantly announces her allegiance to the North. Clotelle learns from a slave woman that she will be jailed for her offense; the heroine, still passing as white, is whisked away in the dead of night by a black servant, and taken to the cabin home of Jim and Dinah, an embattled black couple with whom Clotelle hides for a week. (6) Brown draws a rather unflattering picture of the U/union that has replaced Clotelle and Jerome's in the narrative. Describing the hero and heroine's state of matrimonial bliss, he writes that "Few unions had been more productive of harmonious feelings" (106); however, this uneducated, unrefined couple bickers incessantly, their fights ending when Jim, who has purchased his wife, threatens to sell her back into enslavement. It is in this "place of concealment," a physically violent space where the folk are unmercifully taunted by slavery, that Clotel reemerges as black, not, as in the other narratives, on a boat sailing safely away from her former position as chattel (114). Reinhabiting her black subjectivity thusly, in the slave cabin, she later purchases the land where she herself once lived in bondage, "where at this writing-now June, 1867--resides the 'Angel of Mercy' " (114). Far from being the end of anything, or even the originary moment leading to a definitive conclusion, Clotelle is still suspended, still in present tense, and still on the geographic terrain of slavery.

The differences between the "close" of this final Clotelle and the closure of the story that Brown attaches to the Fort Pillow massacre report further reveal his struggle with interpreting the war in terms of its ability to secure a future for black Americans. In the Fort Pillow narrative, he turns his reader's attention to the mulatta figure's physicality by calling her expressly "a young beautiful mulatto," the very corporeality he subsequently attempts to conceal in the Civil War chapters of Clotelle. In addition, while Clotelle, the other "angel of mercy," who, in her capacity as nurse, is positioned as a spectator to the "hideous" bodies of Union men, the Fort Pillow "angel" plows through piles of mangled dead and dying bodies and dies herself intermingled with them. The very gruesomeness of the situation that this character (and Brown) encounters necessitates her specific embodiment as a "young beautiful mulatto," a corporeal code that signifies a spiritual and physical fecundity that stands in frank opposition to death.

Five years before Clotelle, the Colored Heroine and The Negro in the American Rebellion were published, Brown remained sanguine about changes that the Civil War might bring to African American civil life. In 1862, Brown assured members of the New York Branch of the Anti-Slavery Society that freedpeople would prosper--on their own--if permitted "the opportunity to exercise their own physical and mental abilities" (Aptheker 470). Using himself as an example, Brown boasted that he "did not ask society to take me up.... All I asked of the white people was, to get out of the way ... " (470). As Ronald Takaki notes, on the first anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, a still forward-looking Brown characterized the war as an opportunity for racial union: "This rebellion will extinguish slavery in our land, and the Negro is henceforth and forever to be a part of the nation. His blood is to mingle with that of his former oppressor, and the two races blended into one will make a more peaceful, hardy race ... than America has ever seen before" (227). Brown's psyche, shaped by his own mulatto body and its traumatic origins, insists upon a corporeal understanding of nation, so much so that even the unsettling image of black blood spilling into a common stream with his oppressors' proved comforting to the writer. The excess of the mulatta figure's "impassioned and voluptuous" form stands as a less painful version of this liberational paradigm. As a material manifestation of Brown's unwavering faith that "God hath made one blood of all nations for men to dwell on the face of the earth," the bountiful, ripe figure who in Brown's imagination has always been able to bring forth a "hardy.... blended" race without the violence of war symbolizes a nation ready to deliver peacefully the promise of both God and the Republic. Therefore, giving the "angel of mercy" the (re)productive corporeality he later disposes of in the 1867 Clotelle enables Brown to present that body as a reminder of that promise. Figuring the "mulatta" dead atop a heap of wounded, or destroyed, black masculinity enables Brown to depict the purposeful and violent slaughter of the promise her body represents. In the same way, a black wife dead atop her prostrate husband figures as Brown's matrimonial ideal.

Indeed, at the point that Brown returns to the mulatta body in Clotelle, the tears in his veil of optimism had become visible. It is not the body he had circulated within the first and second versions of Clotel, or even in the chapters leading up to the Civil War in the third. Throughout Brown's fiction, this figure's beauty is both asset and detriment; if it causes her to be objectified and coveted by white men, it also rescues her from the auction block and wins her the lifelong devotion of the narrative's black hero. Her beauty is also transcendent. Even when Mrs. Miller, her jealous mistress, chops off her hair to diminish her allure, she still radiates; disguised as a male to escape slavery, her fine "Spanish" looks attract a group of female admirers. Most certainly, her ability to mesmerize was Brown's manner of making her inferior to no white woman, but, as a representative of the miscegenated nation, her comely face parallels the promises of her corporeal excess.

However, in the 1867 Clotelle, her beauty is not merely hidden behind masquerades, but permanently extinguished. Brown, who hardly lets a passage about Clotelle pass without remarking on some aspect of her attractiveness, makes not a single mention of it in the Civil War section of the 1867 narrative. The only comment made about Clotelle's physical appearance is Dinah's remark as Clotelle emerges from a storm looking like a "drownd [sic] rat" (112). Brown does not expressly say that this old woman is the same grinning Dinah who conspires with Mrs. Miller in the violent haircutting scene--" "Gins look like a nigger, now' " (40)--but he underscores her name in the novel's concluding chapter: "Dinah," he writes, "for such was her name" (113). In forging this link, Brown highlights the difference in his heroine's "before" and "after" appearance: before and after the Civil War had altered Brown's authorial disposition. In the span of four short chapters, Jerome, the "very fine looking" defiant hero of the antebellum portion of the novel is transformed into a decapitated torso; Clotelle, the " 'beautiful quadroon'," into a rodent.

In eradicating mentions of her beauty and cloaking her form, Brown dislocates the mulatta figure from her body; in killing Clotelle's second husband and leaving both her son and her long-lost father abandoned in Europe, he wipes out her family. The noncommittal yet definitely sentimentalized endings of the other Clotel works give way to an ending that undercuts domestic sentimentality by refusing the heroine the safety of heteronormative union and family. Attached to no man conjugally and bereft of (patrilineal) blood kin, her primary ties to the domestic narrative have been severed. Brown provides his heroine with an alternative to her previous life of domesticity: a life dedicated to work. The romanticized antidote Brown provides in the part of the novel written before the war stands in stark contrast to the more sober, practical remedy offered in the section written thereafter. This change is explained by the fact that Brown actually has written two very different novels posing as one. The first belongs to the school of sentimentalized abolitionism, invested with moral, social, and civil pedagogical instructives of domesticity; the second is a war narrative, questioning a pedagogy that posits overly simplified answers to problems that grew increasingly complex in postbellum America. Brown apparently realized that neither fictive depictions of black heroism on the battlefield nor idealized representations of black matrimony would effect black equality in real, rather than imagined, worlds.

Brown's four short chapters on the Civil War stand as an important contribution to African American war literature-and an aberration within that tradition--precisely because of what the writer has refused to do. (7) Within war writing in general, the wound serves an essential metaphor, linking physical trauma to the body to the psychological trauma suffered by all whom war has affected, directly and indirectly. The nature of the wound (its site, its severity, its effects on the body's many functions) can be interpreted as an index of the nature of psychic trauma inflicted to other bodies elsewhere, inside and outside of the text: those bodies represented by the particular fleshly incarnation that the writer chooses to depict as assaulted. In this understanding, Jerome's wound, and therefore, the wound to the black body politic, becomes even more severe, for the damage done to his body is not simply severe, but irreversible.

Moreover, before the destructive capabilities of the modern weapons used in the Civil War had made such an injury far too common, a head blown from a body was a relatively unfamiliar form of wounding. This unfamiliarity adds to its symbolic potency: Jerome's decapitation renders anti-black violence appropriately shocking and strange precisely because it is offered to the reader in less recognizable form than, say, the lynching of the unnamed black man that Brown details in the 1853 novel. Adding to the strangeness of the decapitation is its very legal appropriateness, which distinguishes it from the lynching: it is a "civil" war wound, inflicted within the bounds of "civil" law, sanctioned and authorized by a representative of the State. Though Brown sees the General's order as an undeniably deadly racist calculus in which 16 black bodies are "sacrificed" for a single dead white one--described by Brown as inhumane choice--the act hides within the bounds of civil law, becoming, in the rules of war, something other altogether.

Although Brown invests his characters with little interior motivation, we can assume that Jerome's decision to fight for the Union parallels the thousands of black men who did the same. Throughout the history of warfare on the American continent, before even the Revolutionary War "made" a nebulous geography into a nation, African Americans had offered their lives to be recognized as human beings, who in turn deserved to be recognized as citizens. This method of "recognition" is, of course, ironic: not simply because of its seeming futility, but because of what a body becomes in violent death--unrecognizable in relation to what it was before. Elaine Scarry argues that a civilization embeds itself in the body; a handshake, a gait, a wave are signs of that civilization carried within an individual human form. The inherent contradiction in the concept of "dying for one's country" lies within the radical deconstruction of the body slain on a battlefield. When "the chest is shattered," the nation is emptied from the body; "the civilization as it resides" in the body is unmade (122). Any notion of the Republic inside of Jerome's form exited through his headless neck.

Even if we reject Scarry's theory, the idea that postbellum African American war literature might repeat Brown's narrative--resulting in works full of black bodies "dying" for their country--is nevertheless disconcerting. The desire to be recognized as a citizen expresses one's desire to be considered a "speaking subject" rather than an object spoken "for." Drawing energy from Benedict Anderson's reading of the rise of French nationalism, Sharon Holland makes a simple but significant observation: "The ability of the emerging nation to speak hinges on its correct use of the 'dead' in the service of its creation" (28). A dead body very quickly surrenders its agency (hence, for example, the note attached to a suicidal body in an effort to ensure the "meaning" of its death). Anderson's analysis itself examines how one of the more influential French historians of the eighteenth century, Jules Michelet, reads the bodies of those who died in the violence of the French Revolution. Speaking for them, as Anderson notes, on their behalf, Michelet pronounces them sacrifices in making the French nation although "these sacrifices were not understood as such by the victim" (198). In a similar manner, Brown speaks for his construct (Jerome's dead form), but not as a mouthpiece for the State. When Brown labels Jerome both a "hero" and a "sacrifice" to the General's inhumanity, he disrupts the post-war official language that tended to speak of dead black Union bodies as uniformly "heroic" (in the same leveling way that nations honor all of their soldiers as "heroic"), a language that failed to acknowledge the specificity of what it meant for a black body to fight and die in the war: a language that did not, in effect, endeavor to ascertain what a black body might say from the grave.

While Brown's decision to represent Jerome as injured and killed raises many intriguing questions--possibly more interesting than if this character had lived--after Brown, graphic, specific depictions of the wounded black male body and representations of the grotesque will virtually disappear until the middle of the twentieth century. (8) Given the powerful link between corporeal and psychic wounding, the presentation of a physically damaged black male body, the body Brown willingly describes, poses a political and social risk to African American writers. Within the black masculinist war novel in particular, African American male writers accept the (live) body Brown derives from Douglass and Delany, to construct a brown-skinned, full-bodied, vigorous soldier-citizen--a "manly" black self--who refutes the dominant culture's feminized construction of the black male body as degraded, passive, and weak. (9) This newer model of black masculinity is fueled by the necessity of imagining a body poised to represent the black body politic, a masculine preserve, in its quest for citizenship rights. (10)

The reluctance to depict violence to the black male body in the black American war novel, a public text, responds in part to a historical legacy of routinized torture and mutilation of the black body. The black body objectified and diminishing before their very eyes constituted a transformational power of violence that whites could witness. As many historians have documented, photographs of lynchings were routinely mailed and traded as postcards, and severed black body parts displayed as trophies. Earlier, anti-slavery activists had depended on displays and photographs of the scarred and deformed black body to provide material evidence of the barbarity of slavery; anti-slavery literature offered its literary equivalent. Even if the use of the wounded body in antislavery efforts asked on-lookers and readers to gaze not too long upon the body itself, but instead to turn that gaze upon the spectral image refracted by the body--in other words, the slaveholder--the wounded black form was intended to linger in audiences' minds, that ocular lingering necessary for arousing a desire for change. The risk of specularity is apparent: the body is at risk of being imagined in a permanent state of damage or injury. The absence of the wound in novels after Brown's can be read therefore as an attempt to shield the violated black male body from the gaze of the spectator-audience.

In comparing the issue of injury in African American war literature to anti-slavery literature (and also anti-lynching literature), the very source of the infliction further complicates the meaning of the wound for these writers, as Brown's work aptly demonstrates. If violence to the enslaved or lynched body can be read as "unjust" and "non-consensual," the injury stemming from battle resists similar cultural interpretation, particularly as many of the wounded men who are depicted in African American war literature volunteer to place themselves in a position where their bodies might be readily deformed or destroyed. The involuntary wound, in other words, was efficiently mobilized in a "useful" capacity. The symbolic potential of the voluntarily, "consensually" disfigured or disabled black body produced by war has less accusative power in a tradition of war literature that is very much accusatory, operating in the same vein as anti-slavery literature: as evidence of the dominant culture's unwillingness to extend to African Americans civil and human rights. Thus the brilliance of Brown's decapitation of Jerome-his "civil" war wound(ing)--lies in the writer's successful elision of the differences between non-consensual and consensual injury, between slavery and war, allowing the wound to exist somewhere between the voluntary sacrifice of battle and the involuntary injury inflicted by the oppressor.

Protective domesticity, the second element that Brown rejects in his war narrative, returns when Harper, who borrows as freely from Brown as he does from himself, reconstructs the ending of Brown's 1867 Clotelle in her 1892 novel Iola Leroy. While Harper's Iola, like Clotelle, chooses a public life of work, Harper will rebuild for her the domestic structure Brown has dismantled, constructing correct black marriages as political unions stronger than the reconstituted nation itself. The idea of black matrimony as the basis of civilization and a politically committed union as "the consummation" of the couple's "desire" to be racially rather than sexually engaged will dominate the African American literature of that period (Tate 125). Harper will follow those literary edicts, even as she strives to write about war.

Works Cited

Aichinger, Peter. The American Soldier in Fiction 1880-1963. Ames: Iowa State UP, 1975.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflection on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1991.

Aptheker, Herbert. A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, Vols. 1-5. New York: Carol P, 1990.

Bentley, Nancy. "White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction." Subjects and Citizens: Nation, Race, and Gender from Oroonko to Anita Hill. Eds. Michael Moon and Cathy Davidson. Durham: Duke UP, 1995. 195-218.

Berlin, Ira. Free At Last: A Documentary History of Slavery, Freedom and the Civil War. New York: New P, 1992.

Brown, William Wells. The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, His Achievements. New York: Thomas Hamilton, 1863. 11 Sept. 2000 <http://metalab.unc.edu./docsouth/brown.html>.

--. Clotel, or the President's Daughter: A Narrative Life in the United States. New York: Carol, 1995.

--. Clotelle; or The Colored Heroine. A Tale of the Southern States. Miami: Mnemosyne P, 1969.

--. The Negro in the American Rebellion: His Heroism and His Fidelity. Miami: Mnemosyne P, 1969. Burke, Kenneth. On Symbols and Society. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1989.

Ernest, John. Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794-1861. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2004.

Fabi, M. Guilia. "The 'Unguarded Expressions of the Feelings of the Negros': Gender, Slave Resistance, and William Wells Revisions of Clotel," African American Review 27 (1993): 639-54.

Franklin, John Hope, and Alfred A. Moss, Jr. From Slavery to Freedom: A History of African Americans. New York: McGraw Hill, 1994.

Harper, Frances E. W. Iola Leroy, Or Shadows Uplifted. New York: Oxford UP, 1990.

Holland, Sharon. Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.

Levine, Robert, ed. Clotel, or the President's Daughter. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2000.

Mullane, Deidre. Crossing the Danger Watec Three Hundred Years of African-American Writing. New York: Doubleday, 1993.

Reid-Pharr, Robert. Conjugal Union: The Body, the House and The Black American. New York: Oxford UP, 1999.

Scarry, Elaine. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford UP, 1985.

Takaki, Ronald. Violence and the African American Literary Imagination, New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Tate, Claudia. Domestic Allegories of Political Desire. New York: Oxford UP, 1992.

Taylor, Susie King. Reminiscences of My Life in Camp with the 33d United States Colored Troops Late 1st S. C. Volunteers. 1902. Collected Black Women's Narratives. Ed Anthony Barthelmy. New York: Oxford UP, 1988.

Warner, Marina. Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. Berkeley: U of California P, 1985.

Yarborough, Richard. "Race, Violence and Manhood: The Masculine Ideal in Frederick Douglass's 'The Heroic Slave.'" Haunted Bodies: Gender and Southern Texts. Eds. Anne Goodwyn Jones and Susan V. Donaldson. Charlottesville: UP of Virginia, 1997. 159-84.

Notes

(1.) In my larger project, I argue that the "concerned abolitionist/commander" is a characterization that allows Harper and Taylor to invest Union officers with anti-slavery sentiments when such sentiments were certainly not always the case historically. See Taylor.

(2.) I am indebted in this article to M. Guilia Fabi's work on the Clotel novels.

(3.) See Bentley.

(4.) Brown introduces this document just 10 pages into his work as part of a chapter on blacks who served in the Revolutionary War. He precedes it with Jackson's first 1814 letter imploring free blacks to participate in the 1812 conflict. "That colored men were equally serviceable in the last war with Great Britain is true," Brown writes, "as the following historical document will show" (9). The first letter, addressed to the "Free Coloured Inhabitants of Louisiana," promises black men who volunteer "the same in bounty, in money and lands, now received by the white soldiers of the United States..." and freedom from "unjust sarcasm" (9). The second address, given three months later, lauds their service: "The President of the United States shall be informed of your conduct on the present occasion; and the voice of the Representatives of the American nation shall applaud your valor..." (11). The exact wording of both speeches varies according to source; William Cooper Nell's citation in Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (1851) differs from Brown's.

(5.) For one of many works that read this figure, see Warner.

(6.) Reid-Pharr offers a similar reading of Clotelle's racial reinterpellation and the significance of Jim and Dinah to the 1867 Clotelle in Conjugal Union: The Body, the House and the Black American.

(7.) To argue that there is a discernable "tradition" of black war writing, I trace many recurring elements found within African American war writing to William Nell's expansion of the aforementioned 1851 Services of Colored Americans, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), the first full length history of black participation in warfare. I demonstrate how the greater part of African American autobiography, fiction, and poetry written before the desegregation of the military in 1948 echoes Nell's concerns: establishing a corrective public military history inclusive of blacks; narrating acts of black patriotism and valor to show that blacks are fit for full and equal enfranchisement; and finally, using the nationalist discourses of liberation that accompany American warfare to argue for citizenship rights. Moreover, a shift occurs in black American literature written after the Vietnam War, as African Americans question the usefulness of warfare as a political tool and the military as a means of social advancement and civic inclusion. While American war literature has long been analyzed, even those wide-sweeping generic considerations of literature such as Wayne Charles Miller's Armed in America: Its Face in Fiction, John Limon's Writing After War(1994), and Helen Cooper, Adrienne Auslander Munich, and Susan Merill Squire's collection of essays, Arms and the Woman(1989) generally have ignored war writing by black Americans. Some critics have analyzed a few pre-Vietnam texts--Susan Schweick's and Ann Folwell Stanford's insightful analyses of Gwendolyn Brooks's war poetry (A Gulf So Deeply Cut: American Women Poets and the Second World War, 1991; "Dialectics of Desire: War and Resistive Voice in Gwendolyn Brooks's 'Negro Hero' and 'Gay Chaps at the Bar,' " 1992), J. L. Greene's brief analysis of African American WWI fiction in Blacks in Eden: The African American Novel's First Century (1996). There have been, of course, numerous analyses of Chester Himes's brilliant homefront novel If He Hollers Let Him Go (1945). However, black literary war content has been sidelined in favor of other critical perspectives. For instance, before Elizabeth Young's extensive treatment of Iola Leroy in her book on American women war writers, Disarming America, Women's Writing and the American Civil War (2000), Harper's work had been studied primarily as an early effort in the African American novel, usually within the framework of black women's sentimental fiction. In The American Soldier in Fiction 1880-1963, Peter Aichinger offers a useful definition of the war novel that extends the genre beyond depictions of the battlefield proper, arguing that the war novel is "any long work of fiction in which the lives and actions of the characters are principally affected by warfare or the military establishment" (6). By this definition, a work such as Harper's Iola Leroy, which features very few battle scenes, can be considered a work of war. For a recent analysis of the collection by Helen Cooper, et al., see Ernest.

(8.) For instance, in Iola Leroy Harper references two black male soldiers' respective wounds, and even calls one "severe," but she does not attempt to describe them. Each wound remains dislocated, unanchored, abstract, and therefore materially separate from the black body that it should "realistically" mark. Gwendolyn Brooks's sonnet sequence "Gay Chaps at the Bar" in A Street in Bronzeville (1945) marks a turning point in the black war tradition, purposefully, presenting psychologically and physically disabled bodies in a set of poems that arguably assert an anti-war ideology.

(9.) The black masculinist war novel's main concern is to present the black soldier-citizen as the epitome of manliness: honorable, ethical, powerful, and sexual. Although the first masculinist war novel I have been able to identify, F. Grant Gilmore's The Problem: A Military Novel (1915), wavers between conventions of sentimentalism and conventions of realism, the works in this tradition mark the African American war novel's break from sentimental discourse. Most of these novels include depictions of the "front." The front generally operates in two ways: first, it adds a dimension of realism; secondly, it serves as a backdrop against which the black soldier-citizen can demonstrate his patriotism, and more significantly, his manhood. The novels invariably include a white antagonist, generally a superior officer who, through intense racial provocation, tests the soldier's commitment to military principles, and by extension, his commitment to the nation that he has sworn to protect. The heterosexual love plot becomes less about imagining domestic-sentimental notions of "civility" (as in the black sentimental war novel) than about reaffirming denied masculinities. The pre-Vietnam war versions of these novels include Gilmore's work on The Spanish-Cuban-American Wars and the Wars against the Philippines, Victor Daly's 1932 novel Not Only War'. A Story of Two Great Conflicts (WWI), William Gardner Smith's 1948 book Last of the Conquerors (WWII), and John Oliver Killens's 1962 epic And Then We Heard the Thunder (WWII).

(10.) Thus Harper must "kill off" the slave-martyr Tom, who, while "Herculean" in his strength, cannot enlist as a soldier because of his unnamed "physical defects" (40). His defective body arguably unfits him to represent the evolved black masculinity that Harper fashions for a post-slavery political milieu. A physically "disabled" body is a politically "disabled" one as well.

Jennifer James is Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies at George Washington University in Washington, DC. She is currently working on a book that analyzes war literature by African Americans from the Civil War to WWII.