Читать книгу Uncle - Cheryl Thompson - Страница 5

I love old movies and I love watching Turner Classic Movies in particular. One Saturday evening a few years ago, I stumbled upon The Great White Hope. Released in 1970, it stars James Earl Jones as boxer ‘Jack Jefferson.’ The film is a biopic based on the life of boxer Jack Johnson (1878–1946), who, at the height of the Jim Crow era, became the first African American world heavyweight champion; he held the title from 1908 to 1915. I have been a huge boxing fan since I was a little kid. I first discovered Johnson when I was a teenager, but learned more about his life only when I was teaching a Black Studies course at the University of Toronto. I devoted an entire lecture to the history of Black people in sports. Johnson was truly the first African American sports hero. Yet he was also a controversial figure because he crossed racial and class lines in both his professional and personal life, even marrying a white woman, Etta Terry Duryea (played in the film by Jane Alexander), at a time when interracial relations were not only frowned upon but could result in death by lynching.

At one point in the film, Jefferson is in Budapest shortly before the start of World War I, but not to box. Instead, he is there to take the stage in a cabaret performance of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It was an unexpected reference in a film about a boxer, and one I knew something about. Because I have been obsessed with Uncle Tom’s Cabin ever since I started studying the phenomenon of the nineteenth-century novel and its subsequent spinoffs. When several characters from Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared as part of the film’s storyline, I had an ‘aha’ moment.

Title-page illustration by Hammatt Billings for Uncle Tom's Cabin [First Edition: Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1852].

My fascination with the novel, first published in 1852 by Harriet Beecher Stowe, began in my twenties, when I read the book for the first time. I was working then as an insurance claims adjuster, living in a suburb northwest of Toronto. I had heard about the book since I was a little kid. But after someone I knew was called an ‘Uncle Tom,’ I decided I needed to know where this term came from. Out of sheer curiosity, I began reading the 391-page novel on the commuter train into the city. It took me almost a year to get through it, because nineteenth-century novels are pretty dense. But after I finished, I felt like I had just hit the tip of the iceberg in terms of understanding why, of all the character names in fiction, Uncle Tom’s has lingered on in popular culture and politics.

Uncle Tom’s Cabin interweaves three narratives. The first is the story of Eliza, an enslaved woman who becomes a fugitive when she flees with her young son over ice floes on the Ohio River to Cincinnati. With the help of Northerners, and in defiance of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act – a federal law that mandated the capture and return of African Americans into slavery, whether they were enslaved or free – Eliza heads to Canada to reunite with her husband, George, who had run away earlier, refusing to endure his master’s cruelty any longer.

The other two storylines involve Uncle Tom and Little Eva. Tom, whom Stowe depicted as a dignified Christian man in his thirties or forties, is born a slave on a Kentucky plantation owned by Mr. Shelby. After falling into financial trouble, Shelby is forced to sell two of his slaves, one of whom is Tom. Even though Tom has a wife and children, he is sold to a slave dealer named Mr. Haley, who takes him to New Orleans. While being transported by boat to the plantation, Tom rescues another passenger, Little Eva St. Clare, a six-year-old who has fallen into the river. Her grateful father, Augustine St. Clare, agrees to purchase Tom at auction.

Once on St. Clare’s plantation, Tom and Eva become friends. Tom takes on the role of Eva’s surrogate father, but also her plaything. He comforts and consoles Little Eva but does not scold or discipline her. In the early illustrated editions of the novel, Tom and Eva are depicted sitting together in an arbour on the plantation, reading the Bible. In other images, Eva sits on Tom’s lap and helps him get dressed.

Eva is a sickly child. She falls ill and, on her deathbed, asks her father to free all his slaves, especially Tom – who is depicted in illustrations as a dutiful friend at Eva’s deathbed.

Topsy, the young, enslaved girl in the novel, is a dehumanized depiction of Black girlhood. She is the extreme opposite of Little Eva, the novel’s child-angel. Topsy has unkempt hair, she lies, and is frequently in need of discipline. The juxtaposition between Topsy and Little Eva sets the stage for two racial stereotypes that still linger today around white childhood innocence and the far less innocent depictions of Black childhood.

While St. Clare is preparing to free his slaves, he is unexpectedly killed in a fight. Simon Legree, who owns a plantation in a remote area of Louisiana, purchases Tom and St. Clare’s other slaves from the estate. Legree is a brutal figure. He beats Tom for refusing to abuse the other enslaved men and women. Finally, Legree whips Tom to death after he refuses to reveal the whereabouts of others who have run away. Uncle Tom is the novel’s heroic figure because he chooses not to escape. Instead, he accepts his suffering and becomes Stowe’s martyr – a simple, God-fearing Christian whose strong faith does not allow him the apparently selfish luxury of escape. Tom ultimately becomes a symbol for a pious Black masculinity that is non-violent, loyal, and even accepting of the status quo for enslaved people.

Stowe’s story profoundly influenced public attitudes about slave-holding and the Fugitive Slave Act, as well as the events leading up to the Civil War. President Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said that Stowe and her book helped precipitate the Civil War. Early readers could not have known that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was not merely a piece of abolitionist fiction penned by a writer fervently convinced that slavery was patently immoral. Rather, its publication marked the beginning of a cultural, commercial, ideological, and theatrical phenomenon that would endure for generations.

During my first reading of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was released. I had not (and still have not) read her novels or seen any of the films. But I started to see parallels between the early-twenty-first-century frenzy around Rowling’s Harry and our long-standing obsession with Stowe’s Uncle Tom.

Harriet Beecher Stowe. From the original painting by Alonzo Chappel (c. 1872).

In some ways, Uncle Tom, as a publishing phenomenon, is the nineteenth-century version of Harry Potter. After Uncle Tom’s Cabin was released as a novel, Stowe’s original publisher, John Jewett, sold mechandise, such as mementos, card games and puzzles, porcelain figures, needlework, and items of clothing. These items became cross-marketing tie-ins with the novel (though they would not have been called that at the time). Similarly, there have been countless product tie-ins with Harry Potter that extend the story well beyond the printed page. There has never been a time when Uncle Tom’s Cabin has existed only as a novel. Like Harry Potter, its multiple and associated images have always coexisted with the book. Rowling, however, managed to achieve what Stowe, given her era, never had the opportunity to do: she became a media mogul, not just a literary icon. Stowe herself is less remembered than her novel, even though she went on to become an editor and a suffragist, in addition to her abolitionist work. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was a phenomenon bigger than its author. In some ways, it is more synonymous with abolitionism today than actual abolitionists are!

I am most interested in the period after the novel’s initial success, when Uncle Tom, as a literary character, morphs into a theatrical Uncle Tom, and then an advertising Tom, followed by a Hollywood Tom. Eventually, he mutates into a racial insult. While some people know that Uncle Tom derives from Stowe’s novel, few understand why calling a Black man ‘an Uncle Tom’ is to accuse him of selling out. In colloquial terms, he is a brotha who just does not act ‘Black.’ This sense of not ‘acting Black’ usually means the man who is the target of the insult speaks standard English, identifies as a conservative, dates only white women, and seems to have a hyper-affinity with white culture. In a contemporary sense, an ‘Uncle Tom’ might listen to country or rock music, wear khakis, and be politically conservative. After reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I needed to connect the dots between the martyr in the novel and the epithet hurled at Black conservatives today.

As I watched The Great White Hope, the boxer biopic, the echoes of Stowe’s novel were immediately evident. In the film, the character Jefferson appears onstage playing Uncle Tom alongside Eleanor, a white woman who is Jefferson’s love interest, and cast in the role of Little Eva. Eventually, they are joined by an African American actor performing the role of Topsy. In front of a Hungarian audience, Jefferson portrays an aged Uncle Tom with grey hair, while Eleanor’s Eva mirrors the novel’s depiction of a white child with blond hair in ringlets. Topsy is depicted as a motherless ‘pickaninny’ – a stereotype of an illiterate, derelict, and deprived Black child. The film shows Uncle Tom and Little Eva sitting together under a tree. Eva gazes at the beautiful sky, while Tom professes his wonder at Eva’s beauty. Tom seems upset, so Eva asks him what’s wrong. ‘You and the massa so good to old Tom,’ he replies. ‘He just got to cry about it now and then.’ This scene is strikingly nuanced for a biopic about a boxer. Here is a loosely fictionalized athlete in a Hollywood film playing an actual fictionalized character from a nineteenth-century novel appearing onstage in early-twentieth-century Hungary. I was struck by the serendipity of stumbling upon this reworking of Uncle Tom’s Cabin depicting both the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while in the midst of writing a book about Uncle Tom’s legacy in the twenty-first century.

In this book, I refer to three Toms: Stowe’s Uncle Tom, the theatrical version of Uncle Tom, and Uncle Tom as a servile trope and racial epithet denoting Black men who sell out. My aim is to explore Uncle Tom as a literary character, a ‘real person,’ a theatrical character, and, eventually, as an insult. What are the associations between Uncle Tom’s literary, visual, theatrical, and cultural incarnations? How can we understand the life, death, and rebirth of Uncle Tom as produced and reproduced through the novel, minstrel shows, memorabilia, and public performances? Uncle Tom lives on, but he is not the same Uncle Tom created by Stowe, and his name is used pejoratively. At what point did Uncle Tom, the character, change into Uncle Tom, the caricature? The origins of this shift can be traced to the theatre.

Blackface minstrelsy, which first arose as a national theatrical sensation in the 1830s and 1840s, was performed by white, mostly male Northern performers who crossed racial and gender boundaries by mimicking African Americans (e.g., they would wear bright red lipstick, darken their faces with coal-black makeup, exaggerate their facial expressions, and cross-dress) to entertain audiences with the ‘authentic’ music, humour, and dance ostensibly common on Southern plantations. The wearing of blackface shielded white performers from direct identification with the materials they were performing, and yet, as the minstrel show travelled North America and eventually the Western world, audiences began to interpret the performances as ‘authentic’ glimpses into Black life in America. It has been argued that without blackface minstrelsy, the phenomenon of Uncle Tom’s Cabin would not have existed, and without Uncle Tom’s Cabin, minstrelsy would not have continued to flourish.

I came of age over a century later, in the 1990s, a frenetic time that featured Y2K fears, the global access of the internet, and a deluge of historical dramas: JFK (1991), Schindler’s List (1993), Malcolm X (1992), and Titanic (1997), to name a few. The last decade of the twentieth century was all about nostalgia for individuals and events that had left an indelible mark – visual, cultural, or cinematic – on the century. Similarly, the 1890s were dominated by sojourns into the past via novels, images, and live theatre. These forms not only produced nostalgia; they transformed it into consumable products that mass audiences could take with them into the new century. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was one of few nineteenth-century works that not only survived but thrived in twentieth-century popular culture.

Uncle Tom travelled into the twentieth century through books, live productions, and even advertising, which boomed in the 1920s and 1930s. Advertising represented a modern form of storytelling that became commonplace in newspapers, magazines, and, later, television. At the end of the nineteenth century, advertisers had turned to nostalgia to soothe distress about moral and ethical upheaval by speaking to, and about, memories of the past. This kind of advertising substituted the solace of simpler and quieter times for the social and cultural crises and disintegration of the present. It is within this context that we can begin to understand how Uncle Tom migrated from the pages of Stowe’s novel and minstrel stages onto the commodity packaging and advertising of the twentieth century.

By probing the mutation of Uncle Tom as a literary character in Stowe’s novel into his depiction on stage, in advertising, and in film, the chapters that follow explore how a fictional figure became ‘real’ and has continued to leave an indelible mark on Black masculinity for over 170 years. Every Black man in the public spotlight since 1852 has been either referred to and/or referenced against Uncle Tom. Even in our own era, prominent Black leaders are accused of Uncle Tomism, such as when Jesse Jackson hurled the epithet at President Barack Obama.

Much of this book is based on experiences I have personally had, encountering the various incarnations of Uncle Tom, as well as caricatures of Black people in general. I vividly remember the impact Mammy Two Shoes, a character in Tom and Jerry cartoons, had on me as a child. Two Shoes is a heavy-set, middle-aged, apron-wearing maid who takes care of the house where Tom and Jerry carry out their antics. What struck me most about this character is that she is always partially hidden. We never see her face because her head is off-screen. She is a loud, aggressive Black woman without an identity. As a child, I thought Two Shoes was funny. The processes of signification – i.e., the fat Black woman’s body as a sign of servitude and inferiority – did not register then. But as I got older, I started to think back to cartoons like Tom and Jerry, which also latently reproduce racist tropes about Blackness. That is when it dawned on me how powerful these childhood messages were. My adult disdain for mice and cats undoubtedly stems from watching a figuratively decapitated Black woman become foil to Tom and Jerry’s antics.

Similarly, every holiday season, television stations air It’s a Wonderful Life, the 1946 classic starring Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed. The main story is centred on George Bailey (Stewart) and his quest to make sure his family business stays out of the hands of the evil Mr. Potter (Lionel Barrymore). When I watch this film, I am always struck by the appearance of the sleeping car train porter – porters were Black men who had to perform the servile role of an Uncle Tom in their jobs. When George Bailey’s younger brother Harry (Todd Karns) returns to Bedford Falls via train, a porter is there just to smile and show an interest in the lives of George, his brother, and his wife, while gingerly carrying their bulky baggage from the train.

What’s more, during Hollywood’s classic period (1930–45), movies with Black characters almost always had some sort of sentimentalized musical interlude performed by slaves on a plantation, or by servants during the postbellum years. Black women were pigeonholed as maids and Mammies, and Black men were stuck playing buffoons or Uncle Toms. When the 1960s arrived, the civil rights era created a new public image of Black masculinity that was, on the one hand, passive, Christian, and docile, and on the other hand, increasingly militant and outwardly deviant. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., for example, was sometimes dismissed by a younger generation as an Uncle Tom, versus the heavyweight boxer Muhammad Ali.

My own forgetting underpins why I wrote this book. It is shocking to me to reflect on all the racist images I consumed as a child, images that went unnoticed, unexplained, and unexamined until I was well into adulthood. As a Black person, I have the social and cultural tools and experiences to look back on my own life and reflect, unpack, and then reframe these tropes. But how do non-Black people do this work, if at all? Do other people similarly recognize the scenes and themes from their past that reproduced racist tropes? In the 1970s and 1980s, I remember that Russian characters in films like Rambo, Air Force One, and Rocky IV were always cast as evil villains determined to destroy America and American ‘heroes.’ Similarly, Hollywood images of South Asian men in film and on television in the 1990s depicted them as asexual, passive, unattractive, and/or socially awkward. These depictions, of course, are not real, but they do shape how we see the Other and vice versa.

As a Black woman, I must admit that it is difficult to know what it truly feels like to have someone hurl the Uncle Tom insult in my direction; I have never experienced it the way Black men have. The killing of George Floyd, coupled with the deaths of other unarmed Black men and women in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic, brought issues of race and anti-Black racism into clear focus. The global protests that followed shed light on the fact that, while Black people have come a long way since the days of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and even the civil rights movement, racial issues still feel as salient as they did two centuries ago. This moment confirmed to me that being Black is not just about one’s racial identification. There is an unspoken agreement among most Black people that we stick together, no matter what the circumstances. I have seen first-hand how Black people who side with institutions, corporations, and white authority, or who actively hinder Black progress, are either deemed race traitors or have their loyalty called into question. To call someone an Uncle Tom today is to accuse that individual of racial disloyalty. Black men who participate in white institutions are often left with an untenable choice: do they ‘keep it real’ (i.e., outwardly show their loyalty to Black people and Black culture), or do they perform the jobs they are there to do, irrespective of the community’s expectations of how they should or should not act?

Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a starting point. In the chapters that follow, I will trace Uncle Tom’s tumultuous journey from literary character to minstrel caricature, advertising icon, film, and television stereotype, and, eventually, to his final incarnation as a colloquial insult firmly embedded within Western culture. This book is not a literary critique of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, nor does it aim to be a comprehensive study of all things Uncle Tom. There are many examples not included in this volume, and these omissions are not oversights. My aim, rather, is to examine the historical trajectory of this indelible literary character and the multiple spinoffs that followed over time. Each has a role to play in articulating how and why Uncle Tom has never left the public’s imagination.

After reading Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I sought out other contemporary Uncle Toms and found one in Spike Lee’s Bamboozled (2000). The film is centred on Pierre Delacroix (his real name is Peerless Dothan), who is depicted as an Uncle Tom for his apparent lack of Black cultural cachet, such as knowledge of hip-hop, sports (boxing and basketball), and Black art.

Bamboozled got me thinking: Why is Uncle Tom still here? And how has the persistence of Uncle Tom affected the way we think about Black masculinity? Uncle, ultimately, is an exploration of cultural production, but one that opens a window on the ways in which American consumer society has produced race for over 150 years.