Remaking black motherhood in Frank J. Webb's The Gaffes and their Friends.

The book which now appears before the public may be of interest in relation to a question which the late agitation of the subject of slavery has raised in many thoughtful minds; viz.--Are the race at present held as slaves capable of freedom, self-government and progress? (Harriet Beecher Stowe, Preface to The Garies and their Friends [1857])

According to many critics, the novel Stowe prefaces, Frank J. Webb's The Garies and their Friends, seems to share her doubts concerning the capability of "the race at present held as slaves" to govern themselves. At least that's one way to read an African American author's frustrating decision to write a novel in 1857 that spends little time detailing the horrors of slavery--a subject that contemporary black writers took pains to elaborate. The year the novel was published, a London Sunday Times reviewer chided Webb for leaving "untouched" the problem of how emancipation "is to be effected, without as much injury to slave as to slaveowner" (116). For the most part, time did not change critical attitudes toward the text. In 1987, Bernard Bell would find fault with the novel because "we do not find a direct attack on slavery anywhere." Webb's references to abolition are, for Bell, "timid and ambivalent" (42). The Garies' espousal of capitalist values also invited derision from a number of critics, including Blyden Jackson, who blasts the novel for ignoring racial injustice in favor of the notion that "Negroes need, above all, in America to get rich" (348). More recently, critics like Eric Gardner, Rosemary F. Crockett, and Robert S. Levine have argued persuasively that the text deserves analysis, not only as the second novel written by an African American, but also as one of the first to deal with volatile questions of identity and loyalty within the black community. (1) Yet Webb's text still continues to languish from a general lack of scholarly attention.

This essay suggests that The Garies' cold reception can be traced, at least in part, to the discomfiting answers the novel provides to Stowe's questions about black self-government, answers that defy a venerated plotline where racial oppression is imposed from outside the black community and courageous protest emanates from within. Instead, a good deal of the suffering black characters endure in The Garies emerges from their own desire to participate in the standing power structure by adopting white delimitations of both race and gender. As Claudia Tate has argued, literature relating "other stories about the desire of black subjects that do not fit the Western hierarchical paradigm of race as exclusion, vulnerability, and deficiency" have repelled both white and black critics who are unsure how to place such stories in the African American canon (7). Yet as Tare suggests, the insistence that a black novelist should only tell stories about impoverished and downtrodden people merely "perpetuates fantasies of white power and black victimization that take on lives independent of the material circumstances of real black and white experiences and further reifies a cultural code where things 'white' signify entitlement, liberty, and power, things 'black' signify penalty, lack, and defect" (18).

Antislavery rhetoric depended on precisely such an opposition between oppressor and victim to garner reader sympathy, and authors found that black women--whose combination of race and gender supposedly rendered them doubly powerless--were particularly effective figures. Activists like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Lydia Maria Child, and the Grimke sisters all emphasized scenes of female degradation in their writings as they sought to forge sentimental bonds between victim and reader. (2) Certainly, these narratives of physical violation did much to expose the horrors of slavery to a wide readership. But as Karen Sanchez-Eppler has argued, in spite of writers' ostensibly good intentions, their repeated allusions to the figure of the endangered black woman effectively cast the black female body as a devalued, victimized object (29). Barred from exhibiting physical resistance by the dictates of genteel femininity that structured the sentimental genre, and then excluded from the cult of true womanhood because she could not successfully resist sexual assault, the black woman featured in much antislavery literature is largely disqualified from the moral prowess necessary to maintain strong homes and upstanding children. (3) For according to a sentimental ethos that posits that only pure and virtuous mothers can raise good Christian citizens, a sexually degraded black woman would be inherently unable to produce offspring capable of assuming valuable roles in free society.

As an exploration of the pernicious effects the desire for whiteness wreaks within black families, Webb's novel focuses almost exclusively on domestic spaces--a tactic that engages, and eventually refutes, many of the tenets of white sentimentalism. As Robert Reid-Pharr suggests, much of early black literature works through questions of race via a depiction of a particular type of black domesticity, which in turn "negotiate[s] the production of the black body" (5-6). Reid-Pharr sees The Garies' emphasis on housekeeping as a sort of "domestic eugenics," wherein the well-run house produces individuals who maintain the proper "racial and domestic distinctions" and, through that process, construct a viable form of black subjectivity (69). I would add, however, that this subjectivity is inextricably bound to the black women that populate the novel. It is not merely the characters that cross racial boundaries who get swept off Webb's domestic stage, but rather those who reject the vision of black motherhood that the novel works so carefully to create. By the end of the novel, characters who buy into the disabling fiction that black women represent lack while white men represent power are largely destroyed, to be succeeded by characters who participate in a new domestic model that establishes black motherhood as the generative force of families capable of meeting the challenges of citizenship in a racist country. It's not just an abstract, purified black body that Webb wants his homes to produce, but rather a distinct form of black identity that derives its ontology from the vital labor of the maternal body. (4) Rather than naively extolling the virtues of white capitalism or callously avoiding the ills of slavery, The Gaffes and their Friends cannily deploys sentimentalism's emphasis on the family to privilege the strength and resilience of black women over the fiscal advantages represented by white fathers. (5)

The novel disrupts the familiar opposition between oppressed blacks and oppressive whites by exploring the reciprocal relationship between white standards of domestic and financial success and the racial self-hatred that can destroy black families and, by extension, black communities. Writing in a nation captivated by Uncle Tom's Cabin's insistence on the shared emotional experiences of black and white families, Webb manipulates the conventions of white domestic fiction to articulate the profoundly different realities encountered by black and white mothers in antebellum America. He foregrounds a series of challenges that only a black woman would face--the fear of losing children to the slavetrader, the sexual threat posed by a race riot, and the betrayal of a son who passes for white--to reveal the inadequacy of white definitions of femininity and to create an alternative model of womanhood applicable to the experiences of black women.

Mrs. Emily Garie, the first mother we encounter in Webb's novel, reflects the popular literary conception of vulnerable and victimized black women, comparing easily with Stowe's Eliza or Brown's Clotel. (6) Although there seems to be some affection between Emily and her husband, the fact that Mr. Garie had actually purchased his "wife" on the slave block skews domestic ideals of loving reciprocity. As the companion to a white man who is also her legal owner, Mrs. Garie tries to live by the dictates of white femininity while facing dangers that no white woman need fear. Rather than wielding the moral authority that should accompany the role of motherhood, Mrs. Garie realizes that maternity merely compounds her own powerlessness. "It is a fearful thing," she laments, "to give birth to an inheritor of chains" (55). Limited by the standards of white female gentility she has adopted, Mrs. Garie can only express the anguish she feels for her children through a malfunctioning body. Timid, melancholic, and often sickly, she physically enacts the dual constraints of marriage and slavery. Mr. Garie realizes that his wife seems "lost and gloomy." A family friend agrees, and wonders if" 'perhaps she is not well,'" even suggesting that she" 'looks a lit fie pale'" (7). Eventually Mrs. Garie's subtle bodily protests have the effect expected in sentimental writing: She steers her husband toward right action. Clarence Garie agrees to move his family to Philadelphia to placate his wife. In the end, however, Mrs. Garie's womanly influence carries little weight under white law. Mr. Garie formally emancipates neither his wife nor his children; technically all are still chattel. The bonds of familial affection threaten to mutate into the bonds of slavery at a moment's notice.

Webb's narrative soon complicates the standard antislavery tableau of a tortured woman and endangered child by suggesting that there are forces even more pernicious than the greed of the slavetrader which are capable of pulling black children from their mothers. In The Gaffes, it is not just the foul and heartless white man at the auction block that separates mother from child, but also the seductive--and often internalized--white father figure who promises status and privilege. The story of Mrs. Garie's cousin, George Winston, skillfully articulates this choice between the world represented by white fathers and the world of slavery inherited through black mothers. The child of a white man, Winston is torn from his mother on the slave block when he is very young. While still agonizing over this traumatic separation, he is approached by a white man who offers him a picayune. Initially, Winston does not consider this a fair trade: Reclaiming a connection with his mother supersedes any monetary considerations. "'Will that buy mother back?'" he demands. "'If it won't buy mammy, I don't want it. I want my mammy, and nothing else.'" Before long however, Winston's wish for the white man's coin overcomes his longing for his mother, and he allows himself to be lulled by "the prospect of many fabulous events to occur" (9). The young slave flourishes under the tutelage of his new master, who teaches him to read and write and eventually frees him. Although his owner eventually emancipates him, Winston attends his master's business so diligently that he does not initiate a search for his lost mother until six years after he has gained his freedom. After his long delay, Winston finds that she had died a slave "not more than three miles from where he had been living" in security and comfort (13). His loyalty to his surrogate white father--and the bourgeois values he represents--overrules the emotional and moral pull Winston should have felt toward his mother. Here sentimentalism's emphasis on familial love and loyalty frames Winston's betrayal in sharp relief. In an emotional economy that considers the mother-child relationship the most sacred of connections, the willful neglect of the maternal bond provides powerful testimony to the devastating effects of racial self-hatred. As a free man, Winston allows his desire for whiteness to reenact the traumatic separation that, at first, could only have happened at the hands of a white man.

Once Winston is physically cut off from his mother by her death, he suppresses the racial and cultural heritage she has handed down to him, and trades on his light complexion to gain entrance to exclusive salons on Fifth Avenue. He accrues privilege through his tacit complicity in the systemic racism that doomed his mother to slavery and death. At one point, he laughingly relates a story about his New York host, a man well known for his antipathy for "anything with a drop of negro blood in its veins" (4). Because the man acted "like a father" to him (3), Winston doesn't speak up or in any way "run a tilt" against the man's racist opinions (5). Enthralled by the promises of a succession of white fathers, but haunted by the blackness inherited from his mother, Winston ultimately finds it impossible to reconcile the two legacies. He largely disappears from the text shortly after announcing that he plans to leave the country, and we are left to wonder whether his nominally white body will allow him to contain and deny his troublesome maternal heritage.

For Mrs. Garie's son Clarence, the imaginary rejection of his mother manifests materially as a body divided against itself. Clarence, who had little knowledge of his status in the South, learns the price of having a dark-skinned mother once he comes in contact with whites in the North. Playing in a white neighbor's home, the little boy is astonished when the lady of the house bustles in to impart the shocking information that their neighbor Mrs. Garie is a "'nigger woman.'" Her husband, an attorney, needs some clarification before deciding on a course of action. "'... you don't mean a real black nigger!' " he exclaims. "'Oh no,'" his wife allows, "'not jet black--but she's dark enough'" (131). While husband and wife try to quantify the precise level of Mrs. Garie's blackness, her son suffers the implications of his mother's color. He and his sister are summarily banished from the Stevens' home, where they had been welcome for several weeks. The narrator takes pains to connect the son's suffering with the ignominy incurred by his mother's racial status, relating that, after his initial brush with prejudice, Clarence "was beginning to learn the anomalous station he was to fill in society." He "had learned to some extent what was meant by the term nigger woman." Clarence's school teaches him another lesson in racism by dismissing him and his sister. Although the teacher protests--and Mrs. Stevens admits--that the Garie children "'are as white as any children in the room,'" their biological connection with their mother nullifies the privilege that should accompany their pale complexions (157). Faced with threats from the community's white mothers, the teacher "turn[s] away from her school these two little children ... because they were the children of a 'nigger woman'" (160). In the mouths of the novel's white characters, this designation of combined blackness and femaleness represents the absolute low point on the social and biological scales. Philadelphia's intolerance finally culminates in a night of racial violence that kills Mr. Garie and leads to Mrs. Garie's death from exposure. Little Emily remains in Philadelphia and grows up in a black household while the light-skinned Clarence agrees to a plan to pass for white, eventually losing both his sense of black identity and his own physical vitality.

As with his use of the trope of the victimized black mother, Webb's evocation of the "tragic mulatto" figure summons a host of cultural expectations about both blackness and femaleness. As scholars have noted, representations of mixed-race characters often conflate racial and gender stereotypes. Since white womanhood was largely equated with both beauty and physical frailty, authors often suggested that whiteness merely compounded a female slave's vulnerability. As Nancy Bentley points out, literature often dooms the daughter of a white father to be crushed by the same system of sexual exploitation that brought about her own birth (505). In numerous texts written both before and after Webb's novel, the "tragic mulatta" meets her end in the face of sexual and social indignities.

For a male mulatto, however, the infusion of white blood typically elevates both the strength and spirit of the recipient. Often this young man will exhibit a rebellious character, and courageously rise up against tyranny. (7) Stowe's George Harris and Richard Hildreth's Archy Moore are just two examples of the empowered male mulatto to emerge in popular fiction in the years before Webb published his novel. (8) The notion of whiteness as an invigorating and elevating force had considerable credence in 1857, as the following review of Webb's novel in the London Athenaeum indicates:

   There is no doubt that the mixture of
   race gives to the original slave stock
   capacities for civilization and moral
   qualities of self-control which render
   them capable of achieving freedom
   and undertaking all its responsibilities,
   which in their original state they were
   not--and, when the majority are capable
   of being free, they will no more
   remain slaves than the Britons ... but
   till then all the amiable intentions in the
   world will not make them free or give
   them the souls of freemen. (qtd. in
   Crockett 116)

The power of whiteness here carries with it the specifically male virtues of rationality and moral "self-control" that render one fit for membership in a democratic citizenry. In order to attain the "souls of freemen," apparently black males must first inhabit the bodies of white men.

The Garies and their Friends offers a stunning rebuttal of the conventions surrounding the tragic mulatta-empowered mulatto dichotomy, conventions that construe blackness and femininity as inherently less fit for survival than white masculinity. (9) Little Emily Garie, whose role as the beautiful mulatto daughter of a white planter would usually doom her to a tragic end, lives on in health and relative happiness and eventually marries Charlie Ellis. For Emily's brother Clarence, however, the decision to disavow his mother's racial legacy in order to reap the rewards that accompany his father's whiteness degenerates him into a helpless invalid. Frantz Fanon has said that, for blacks, "consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity" (110). Living in a culture that equates femaleness, and particularly black femaleness, with things of the body, Clarence cannot deny his mother's racial lineage without hollowing out his own corporeality. The white blood that seemed such an advantage--the white blood that should supposedly strengthen and invigorate him--acts as a disease. Instead of allowing him to achieve the manly freedom associated with whiteness, Clarence's embrace of his father's world leaves him "thin," "pale" and "feverish" (321). In his attempt to rid himself of color, he has rid himself of vitality. His "face is without a particle of red to relieve its uniform paleness," and he admits that he is "sick in heart, mind, and everything" (322).

Clarence's move away from the world of his mother does not mark him as a figure of masculine independence; rather, it prevents him from being a man at all. He admits to his white confidante Aunt Ada that his ongoing attempt at racial suppression has "'crowded out every honourable and manly feeling.'" As he participates in the racist jokes and sneers of his colleagues, he experiences his deceit as an explicit betrayal of his mother. Wracked with guilt, he wonders why she does not "rise from her grave and curse me as I speak!" (325). Instead of investing him with an unconquerable spirit, Clarence's foray into the supposedly superior world of whiteness renders him both physically weak and morally dishonorable. Eventually the promise of white privilege slips away from the son just as surely as it slipped away from the mother he betrayed to get it. While at the house of his fiancee Clarence runs into George Stevens, his childhood playmate. It was in the house of George's parents that Clarence first heard his mother called a "nigger," and now their son appears to cast the same epithet on him. Unable to withstand the blow, Clarence succumbs to the sickness that has been eating away at him and returns to his sister's home to die. Together, the stories of Clarence and Winston represent a remarkably early depiction of a complicitous dynamic where black men participate in a gendered and racialized hierarchy that elevates the financial and physical power of white masculinity by rendering black womanhood its polar opposite. It is a deeply uncomfortable narrative to be sure, one that seems to reify racist binaries even as it illustrates the disastrous effects they produce.

Webb does not restrict his portrait of longing for the normality assigned to whiteness to characters of mixed race. The Ellises, a hard-working family of free blacks in Philadelphia, also flounder in their attempts to live within the boundaries of an idealized white middle-class life, only to realize the futility of such an effort. We are introduced to the Ellises by Mr. Winston, who stops by to tell the family to make arrangements for the arrival of the Garies. Like the Garies, the Ellises seem to fulfill many of the conventions of nineteenth-century domestic fiction. Mr. Ellis is a hardworking and benevolent father who presides over his little home with great pride. The three Ellis women each seem to embody a trait typically ascribed to the sentimental matriarch. Mrs. Ellis is the traditional mother hen, always fussing over her little brood. Esther, the oldest daughter, epitomizes nurturing kindness. Caddy, the middle child, is the supreme housekeeper.

But Webb quickly fractures this idyllic domestic facade to dislodge the restrictive conceptions of womanhood it contains. Mr. Winston's introduction to this happy household doesn't take the form of a cozy cup of tea or a home-cooked meal. Instead, he receives a wallop on the head when Caddy mistakes him for a beggar boy mussing up her entranceway. In the home of this free black family, Caddy's obsessive rage caricatures the sentimental ideal of a benevolent domestic empire. Whereas Ellen Montgomery, Susan Warner's white heroine in the hugely popular 1850 novel The Wide Wide World, works to repress all vestiges of anger in order to become a better Christian, Caddy has quite a different evolution. Her assault on Winston may be amusing, but her volatility later becomes dangerous. After furiously cleaning the Gaffes' new home, she flies into a rage because her brother Charlie has lost the lunch he was supposed to bring her. Unable to bear such an affront to her anticipated scene of domestic bliss--eating good food in a spotless house--Caddy loses control. She attacks Charlie, causing him to fall down the stairs and break his arm so severely that he comes close to death (91).

Webb skillfully manipulates the anxiety Caddy would undoubtedly create in an 1857 audience to heighten the dissonance between white sentiment and black reality. The wrath that accompanies her housekeeping testifies to the excruciating paradox that structures black domesticity. Caddy's household tyranny is produced by the maddening knowledge that blackness nullifies the very claim to the sentimental womanhood she nonetheless feels compelled to emulate. No matter how clean she keeps her home, and no matter how many children she raises, Caddy's future role as mother and wife will be undercut by a national philosophy that disdains all forms of blackness, particularly female blackness. As we have already seen, Mrs. Garie's pale complexion and impeccable manners did her family little good once the neighbors had identified her as a "nigger woman." Caddy's fury also renders her ineligible for another role imposed upon black women by white fiction--that of the complacent and capable mammy whose happiness is made complete by tending to the white folks' household. Unwilling to be a happy servant, and unable to become the empowered mistress of her own domestic haven, Caddy resorts to violence, which renders her a monstrous inversion of the loving domestic matriarch who can rule with a glance and reprimand with a gentle frown.

The carefully constructed "race riot" (actually a mob organized to appropriate black property) that ends the lives of Mr. and Mrs. Garie and threatens the lives of the Ellis family soon justifies Caddy's resistance to the restrictive roles imposed upon black women. The riot scene metaphorically recreates the dynamic portrayed so often in abolitionist literature--white men seem destined to violate the sanctity of home and family through physical violence. Yet in Webb's novel, many of the women who find their homes and bodies under siege do not run away like Stowe's Eliza: They stand, fight, and win, thus disrupting the social balance contingent upon a violated and submissive black female body. The bulk of the fighting occurs in Mr. Waiters' house, a domestic space that disrupts traditional gender expectations. A strong masculine figure and one of Philadelphia's self-made black millionaires, Mr. Waiters throws off the comfortable connection between blackness and submission. "... above six feet in height, well proportioned," and of "jet-black complexion," his physical presence matches a forceful personality that diverges sharply from Stowe's docile Uncle Tom (122). Indeed, Walters explicitly identifies himself with one of the era's most famous figures of black resistance by proudly displaying a portrait of the Haitian rebel Toussaint l'Ouverture in his sitting room. Although many critics have figured Mr. Waiters as the epitome of individualist capitalism they charge Webb with extolling, the narrative makes it clear that a black millionaire's money does him little good when violence strikes. (10) Turned away by the political and financial power brokers of Philadelphia, Walters only retains his hard-won home because of his connection with the black community and, in particular, with the women within it.

When the Ellises first arrive at Mr. Waiters' home on the night of the riot, the women are still operating well within the gender boundaries marked by white sentimentalism. Mrs. Ellis, dutifully fulfilling her role as a timorous female, can barely stand the sight of the guns assembled for defense. "'Dear me!'" she exclaims, "'it almost frightens me out of my wits to see so many dangerous weapons scattered about'" (204). Much like her counterparts in white domestic novels, Mrs. Ellis is disturbed by any demonstration of physical anger or resistance. Caddy, for her part, has recruited a friend, and together they drop mysterious hints about some childish secret weapon they have concocted.

But Esther, the oldest daughter, blatantly defies the standard conceptions of womanhood that Mrs. Garie and Mrs. Ellis struggle to fulfill. Her reaction to the scattered weapons of defense differs sharply from her mother's. When asked how the guns affect her, she expresses a level of anger normally reserved for men. Indeed, witnessing racial injustice" 'takes all the woman out of [her] bosom.'" When she sees white men taunting a young black mother, Esther feels as if she "'could have strangled them: had I been a man, I would have attacked them on the spot, if I had been sure they would have killed me the next moment.' " Esther's heated speech would be disquieting coming from any black person in antebellum America, but out of the mouth of a black woman it is revolutionary, as Mrs. Ellis's response indicates. She is shocked, and tells her daughter that such talk is "'unwomanly'" and " unchristian'" (205). And so it is, according to an ethos that limits female action to prayers and pleas.

Although Esther's mother is horrified by her daughter's words of rebellion, Mr. Waiters admires Esther's courage, recognizing her as "'a brave one, after my own heart'" (205). And Esther's actions lend credence to her speech. She alone has the presence of mind to remove a burning cinder from a table full of explosives. In the heat of the battle, "she resolutely refused to retire, and continued fearlessly to load the guns and hand them to the men." Instead of choosing either the Christian submission or the terrified flight usually allotted to the black heroine, Esther responds to danger with rage and resistance to triumph over supposedly superior white men in physical combat. Caddy soon follows suit, transforming the hallowed female art of cleaning into an act of battle. At a point in the riot when guns alone become insufficient to repel the white men threatening to batter down Mr. Walters' doors, she and her friend Kinch pour quantities of boiling water laced with pepper to scald the rioters (214). Like her black counterparts in sentimental novels, Caddy works with the tools of the kitchen, but to a very different end. She uses spoons, kettles, hot water, and pepper not to selflessly serve white families, but to defend black lives and property--in short, to perform violence upon the bodies of the vulnerable white men below while she remains secured in a decidedly domestic space.

In response to critics who have chastised The Garies for its supposed distance from slavery, I suggest that the novel's depiction of the Ellis sisters' resistance represents a far more accurate connection to the experiences of black female slaves than the pale, half-fainting victims popular in contemporary antislavery texts. As scholars like Deborah Gray White and Angela Y. Davis have shown, the lives of enslaved women were not marked by abject victimhood, but by self-reliance, resistance, and relative equality in marriage. Esther's desire to strangle abusive men may have shocked white arbiters of femininity, but would have struck a responsive chord with Fannie Berry, a former slave who, in 1937, recounted the story of a fellow slave woman named Sukie to an interviewer. Sukie, like Caddy, defends herself from a white man's advances by making use of domestic tools, in her case, boiling vats of lye:

   ... ole Marsa was always tryin' to
   make Sukie his gal.... He lay into her,
   but she ain't answer him a word. Den
   he tell Sukie to take off her dress. She
   tole him no. Den he grabbed her an
   pull it down off'n her shoulders. When
   he done dat, he fo'got about whuppin
   her I guess, 'cause he grab hold of her
   an' try to pull her down own de flo'.
   Den dat black gal got mad. She took
   an' punch ole Marsa an" made him
   break loose an den she gave him a
   shove an push his hindparts down in
   de hot pot o' soap. Soap was near to
   bilin', an it burnt him near to death. He
   got up holdin' his hindparts an' ran
   from de kitchen, not darin' to yell,
   'cause he didn't want Miss Sarah Ann
   to know bout it.... Marsa never did
   bother slave gals no mo'. (57)

AS Deborah Gray White explains, in response to their "exposure to the ugly, the crude, the base nature of southern society," slave women invented a new definition of womanhood "neither grounded in female frailty and meekness, nor founded upon women's inferiority to men" (101). I suggest, then, that Webb's depiction of the "unchristian" and "unwomanly" behavior of the Ellis sisters recovers black womanhood from the persistent literary trope of victimization and instead celebrates the strength that allowed generations of black women to survive the trials of slavery.

An alternative conception of family emerges from the destruction of the riot, one where both black men and women exert physical and moral authority. With Mr. and Mrs. Garie dead, and Mr. Ellis permanently maimed at the hands of white rioters, the two families are now reformed under a partnership between Esther Ellis and Mr. Waiters. From the beginning, the relationship is marked by a candid acknowledgment of Esther's strength. Overwhelmed by the riot's many tragedies, Mr. Waiters turns to her to help bear the burden. After telling Esther of the brutal beating her father sustained, he asks her to break the bad news to her mother and sister. "'Esther,'" he confesses, "'I'm not equal to it'" (237). In this new conception of family, old gender roles no longer apply with the same rigidity: Strong men can admit weakness and women can take charge. Paternalistic husbands are replaced by a man who admires female power, and the timidity of Mrs. Garie and Mrs. Ellis is surpassed by a woman whose capable body allows her to defend her family both physically and morally.

After the battle, the novel's focus on the families' two sons reasserts the central role mothers play in Webb's vision of the black family, and divests white manhood of its supposedly exclusive claim to potency and vigor. Both boys are faced with a choice between the worlds represented by white fathers and black mothers. As we have seen, Clarence's choice to align himself with whiteness proves devastating. Although dark-skinned Charlie cannot physically pass for white as Clarence can, he must still decide where to cast his lot ideologically. When the riot breaks out, Charlie--in a scenario strikingly similar to George Winston's--is being pampered and educated under the auspices of a white benefactor. However, he chooses a very different course of action than Winston's disavowal of his black mother. Fully recovered from the broken arm occasioned by his earlier disregard for female values, Charlie immediately leaves his privileged position in a white home to return to Philadelphia. Once home, Charlie's connection to family prevents him from collapsing in racial self-hatred when he is unable to find work. When an employer turns him down solely because of his color, Charlie retains his equilibrium because of his love for his sister. He tells Esther, "'I shouldn't care to be white if I knew I would not have a dear old Ess like you for a sister'" (293). For Charlie, the strength he derives from his family far outweighs the allure of the marketplace. And contrary to social expectations, Charlie's eventual success and happiness as a man are largely attributable to his connection to women. By the end of the novel, he is gainfully employed and happily engaged to Clarence's sister Emily.

The novel draws to a close with Clarence, a son consumed by his desire for whiteness, dying in a home that privileges the power of black motherhood. The Waiters household contains many of the traditional trappings of sentimental bliss: Women nestle snugly at home and babies merrily roll about. Yet in contrast to the first domestic tableau presented by the Garie family's denial of blackness, the Waiters family enacts a new paradigm that resists physical aggression from without and racial self-hatred from within. The image of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the quintessential model of black rebellion, is now flanked by another image imbued with considerable force. A portrait of Esther Waiters, mother and wife, occupies the wall opposite the painting of the male revolutionary (333).

This final juxtaposition of Clarence's enfeebled "white" body wasting away in the midst of a thriving black family crystallizes Webb's unsettling portrait of black domesticity. To be sure, the Waiters household represents a celebratory vision of protest and familial strength, but the pangs of thwarted desire and the ghosts of loss haunt the vision throughout. Critics have sometimes considered The Garies a separatist text, but Webb never provides the illusion that his characters can live outside the influence of whiteness. After all the happy extended family we find at novel's end was forged in response to acts of white violence that left the Ellises homeless and Emily Garie an orphan. Mr. Waiters, the novel's exemplar of black male strength and independence, reveals his own desire for whiteness when he allows his belief that "'it is everything to be white'" to influence his advice to the unhappy young Clarence (275). Perhaps even more than Clarence, Mr. Ellis emerges as the novel's most heartbreaking specter. He survives the riot's disfigurement to haunt the narrative's jubilant domestic scenes with reminders of a traumatic past. An outburst of laughter at a pleasant family dinner causes Mr. Ellis to mentally relive his ordeal cowering and crying out, "'There they come! ... there they come!'" (342). The narrator reports that even at his own son's wedding "the poor old gentleman scarcely seemed able to comprehend the affair, and apparently laboured under the impression that it was another mob, and looked a little terrified at times" (372). As a traumatized presence within a strong black family, Mr. Ellis suggests that some wounds can never be fully healed, even in a home buttressed by wealth in the midst of a "free" city.

Yet despite such persistent reminders of tragedy, the extended family survives and flourishes. Living under the rule of white law, Webb's black characters suffer violent loss and betrayal, but endure through resilience and commitment to one another. In short, one could read Webb's response to Stowe's prefatory question about the governing abilities of the "race at present held as slaves" through his portrait of the Walters household, a portrait that illustrates the heroism with which the slave community had been governing themselves for generations. And in Webb's novel, as in many of the historical accounts we have of slavery, strong women are vital to maintaining such commitment within the black community.

Although many of Webb's contemporaries sought to advance both abolition and women's rights, few wrote works that suggested how concomitant black and female empowerment might actually work. Harriet Jacobs's Linda Brent chafes against the constraints imposed by standards of white womanhood, but cannot find a satisfactory way out. Frederick Douglass, although an ardent supporter of women's rights, delineates a singularly male course to elevation both when he tells his own story in The Narrative and when he creates a fictional account of the real-life revolt aboard the Creole in The Heroic Slave. Harriet Beecher Stowe may advocate a matriarchy, but it is a matriarchy where leaders remain irreproachably ladylike, and therefore ultimately submissive to men. When read against the frustration and ambivalence of his contemporaries, Webb's insistence on empowering the black female body marks him as one of the earliest and strongest voices advocating an alternative, distinctly black standard of womanhood.

By requiring black sons to acknowledge and respect the strength of their mothers, The Garies tacitly recognizes the intersectionality of racial and gender prejudice--a dynamic not formally articulated until the dawn of black feminist criticism over a hundred years later. Not only, then, does this text deserve our attention as an early novel written by an African American, but we must also consider The Garies and their Friends as one of the first texts to deserve inclusion in the black feminist literary tradition.

Notes

(1.) This designation as the second published novel by an African American novel still stands, although Henry Louis Gates's discovery of The Bondswomen's Slave by Hannah Craft reminds us of the many unpublished manuscripts that may predate Webb's text.

(2.) Some examples which foreground the violated female black body are: Lydia Maria Child's 1836 The Antislavery Catechism, Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1852 Uncle Tom's Cabin, and William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel. As Deborah Garfield and others have pointed out, antislavery speaking tours often cantered on the sexual degradation of black women. Harriet Jacobs's 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girt also engages the stereotype of the degraded black mother, although she complicates that stereotype considerably.

(3.) Hazel Carby's Reconstructing Womanhood provides an extensive exploration of the dissonances between the standards of white femininity and black female experience.

(4.) Although my analysis focuses on the maternal body as a path to racial self-sufficiency, Webb's novel simultaneously engages the question of black identity on a number of registers. For an excellent analysis of The Garies in conjunction with contemporary self-elevation movements, see Levine; Cooper.

(5.) Robert Reid-Pharr's introduction to the 1997 edition of The Garies skillfully discusses Webb's engagement with sentimentalism, arguing that "Webb was clearly in conversation with a score of authors" whose "sentimentalism and emphasis on the domestic helped shape the ideological structures of the antebellum American writing world" (xviii). My reading of Webb's deployment of sentimental rhetoric draws upon past scholarship illustrating the political uses of the domestic novel, such as the work of Jane Tompkins and Nancy Armstrong. More recently, P. Gabrielle Foreman looks specifically at the subversive elements of black domestic fiction to "suggest that [sentimental] conventions combined With narrative workings that simultaneously criticize them ... constitute black sentimentality as a genre" (331).

(6.) William Wells Brown's 1853 Clotel follows the trials of a family of mulatto female slaves who suffer physical and sexual degradation. Much of the action in Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin stems from the flight of the mulatto slave woman Eliza, who seeks to save her child from slavetraders.

(7.) For excellent discussions of the effects of gender stereotypes on narratives of passing, see Hathaway; Smith.

(8.) As Hathaway points out, this tradition extends well beyond the antebellum era. Charles Chesnutt's "The Sheriffs Children" and Langston Hughes's "Father and Son" both focus on a rebellious mulatto son who rises up against his white father (134).

(9.) Here I disagree with M. Giulia Fabi, who argues that "the subordinated and restricted role women play in Webb's fiction is confirmed by his treatment of the theme of passing" and, in particular, through his decision to bestow "this kind of racial mobility only on male characters" (30). Although men are the only characters who actually pass for white, Mrs. Garie also crosses implicit racial boundaries, both through her light complexion and her marriage to a white man. In any case, "racial mobility" seems a dubious asset in Webb's novel, since no character attempting to pass for white achieves any lasting success.

(10.) For more on The Garies as a capitalist manifesto with Waiters as its centerpiece, see Bell 43; Bone 31.

Works Cited

Armstrong, Nancy. Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel New York, Oxford UP, 1987.

Bell, Bernard, The Afro-American Novel and its Tradition. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987.

Bentley, Nancy. "White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction." American Literature 65.3 (1993): 501-21.

Berry, Fannie. 1937 interview. "Remembering Slavery': African Americans Talk about Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation. Ed. Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven Miller. New York: New P, 1998. 176-80.

Bone, Robert. The Negro Novel in America. New Haven: Yale UP, 1965.

Carby, Hazel Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Cooper, Frederick. "Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-50." American Quarterly 24 (1972): 604-25.

Crockett, Rosemary F. "Frank J. Webb: The Shift to Color Discrimination." The Black Columbiad: Defining Moments in African American Literature and Culture. Ed. Werner Sollors and Maria Diedrich. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994. 112-22.

Davis, Angela Y. "The Legacy of Slavery: New Standards for Womanhood." Women, Race and Class. New York: Vintage, 1983.3-29.

Fabi, M. Giulia. Passing and the Rise of the African American Novel Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2001.

Fanon, Frenz. Black Skin, White Masks. Trans. Charles Lain Markmann. New York: Grove P, 1967.

Foreman, P. Gabrielle. "'Reading Aright': White Slavery, Black Referents, and The Strategy of Histotextuality in Iola Leroy." Yale Journal of Criticism 10.2 (1997): 327-54.

Gardner, Eric. "'A Gentleman of Superior Cultivation and Refinement': Recovering the Biography of Frank J. Webb." African American Review 35 (2001): 297-308.

Garfield, Deborah. "Speech, Listening and Female Sexuality in The Life of a Slave Girl." Arizona Quarterly 50.2 (1994): 19-49.

Hathaway, Heather." 'Maybe Freedom Lies in Hating': Miscegenation and the Oedipal Conflict." Refiguring the Father: New Feminist Readings of Patriarchy. Ed. Patricia Yeager and Beth Kowaleski-Wallace. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1989. 153-67.

Jackson, Blyden. A History of Afro-American Literature. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 1989.

Levine, Robert S. "Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and their Friends." Prospects 19 (1994): 349-73.

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

--. "introduction." Webb vii-xviii.

Rev. of The Garies and their Friends, by Frank J. Webb. 1857. Athenaeum (London). Crockett 117.

Rev. of The Garies and their Friends, by Frank J. Webb. 1857. Sunday Times (London). Crockett 116.

Sanchez-Eppier, Karen. "Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition." Representations 24 (1988): 26-59.

Smith, Valerie. "Reading the Intersection of Race and Gender in Narratives of Passing." Diacritics 24.2-3 (1994): 43-57.

Tate, Claudia. Psychoanalysis and Black Novels: Desire and the Protocols of Race. New York: Oxford UP, 1998.

Tompkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860. New York: Oxford UP, 1987.

Webb, Frank J. The Garies and their Friends. 1857. Intro. by Robert Reid-Pharr. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.

White, Deborah Gray. "Arn't I a Woman?": Female Slaves in the Plantation South. New York: Norton, 1985.

Anna Mae Duane is an. Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut. She has recently completed a dissertation that explores the ways in which transatlantic authors of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries deployed images of suffering childhood to negotiate questions of race, religion, and nation. She wishes to thank Lenny Cassuto, Matthew Larson, Elson Bond, and the editors of AAR for their careful readings and insightful comments on earlier drafts of this article.