A Character I Read Differently Now

This week's Long & Short Reviews prompt was to write about a fictional character whom we read differently now than we did the first time we read the book.

It's a cringe-inducing book of course, but among all the works of Women's Literature I've read with an attempt to understand the cringe factors, one that baffled me in my early teens and kept me coming back to the book was Cassy, whom another writer called "the unsung hero" of Uncle Tom's Cabin.

What I appreciated even in middle school was the way Harriet Beecher Stowe reversed the gender roles of "hero" and "heroine," in a way twentieth century men tended to hate. Uncle Tom is neither a race traitor nor a fool; he's a radical, even fanatical Christian. He really is the zealot Josiah Henson admitted pretending to be in order to build trust. He does choose to remain in slavery, when his friends try to escape, in order to get a few more souls "saved" (as nineteenth century Methodists understood it). But he understands what his friends are escaping from, and he does not tell them to be good slaves. He tells them to try to escape without "blood-guiltiness," without committing outright murder. So he becomes the passive heroine who offers spiritual inspiration to the active hero.

That hero is a mostly French, but legally Black, enslaved woman who has been kept as the horrible slavemaster's "mistress," whom the slaves call Misse Cassy. Her role on the Legree plantation is to knock Simon Legree out cold with sex and alcohol at night, after which she "glides" out to bring water to slaves who have been beaten until the blood flowed. She's endured that job with increasing bitterness until cholera goes around and, after they've been sick, Legree goes into town, buys a younger slave woman, Emmeline, and threatens to send Cassy out to pick cotton. Cassy "scornfully declared" that she would pick cotton. Though still jaundiced, she "picks like the devil and all his angels," filling her own quota of cotton and that of a weaker slave woman as well. "She's got'em all in her, I believe," says Legree  He likes that thought. Cassy's position as slave "mistress" and Emmeline's as good Catholic girl are secure for the moment. But Cassy knows it won't last, and, inspired by Tom, she manages to hide herself and Emmeline long enough that they're presumed dead, dig out the nice clothes she's been allowed to wear, and buy tickets to Canada as the free French lady nobody doubts that she is.

The best reward Harriet Beecher Stowe could think of for this character was one of the not-so-amazing coincidental meetings that Beecher Stowe later explained were common among slaves who made it to Canada. Though their families and friendships were often deliberately broken up by separation, when they left the same place they often found themselves following the same "underground railroad" route to the same destination. In Canada Cassy is reunited with the daughter she lost and gets to be a virtuous and happy grandmother.

I understood why Beecher Stowe didn't describe Cassy's adventure. She'd never been in the Louisiana swamp. Nor, I learned later, had the woman who became her primary model for Cassy; many of the ex-slaves who escaped successfully and became antislavery activists came from "Border States," and the model for Cassy was a Washingtonienne. Beecher Stowe had fixated on New Orleans as the place where Uncle Tom could experience slavery at its best (as the coachman in a rich, generous family where the little girl learned to read along with him) and worst (as a cotton picker, chosen for his size and strength as a third "giant" Legree meant to use to beat the other slaves). Beecher Stowe read about New Orleans extensively but, fearing its reputation as an "unhealthy" city and hearing from her supporters that she shouldn't support Slave State economies by travelling that far south anyway, she didn't actually go there. 

Everyone knows that the character of Tom seems to have been a mix, in Beecher Stowe's mind, of Josiah Henson as his memoir presented him (a young man), an abused slave Henry Ward Beecher had described to her (a very old man), and, in his zeal for preaching, probably Henry Ward Beecher himself. The seams in this remarkable amalgamation show, in the book. Beecher Stowe's phrasings vacillate between making him sound about forty years old and about ninety.

What about the slave women in the book? They don't sound like Harriet Tubman, Ann Jacobs, or Linda Brent. Tom has a placid, dark-complexioned, proto-Positive-Thinker wife who sells her work outside the home (as was legal and not uncommon) to help raise money to buy Tom back. Then there's Topsy, the little girl the kind slavemaster buys to rescue her from a place of entertainment where, so far, she's only been taught to clown and say "I's so wicked." There's a lazy, dirty slave "Mammy" whose bad habits Beecher Stowe seemed implicitly blaming for the untimely death of the little White girl she reared. There's Lucy, whose daughter is hardly twenty years old, so Lucy can't be much over sixty; in her first scene Lucy shows some spirit when taunted about being old, in her other scene she seems to have had the spirit beaten out of her and become "old" and useless. 

But the ones who seemed to fascinate Beecher Stowe all seem to look somewhat alike. Eliza, the heroine who reenacted a feat that has actually been accomplished, further north, but has probably never been accomplished on the Ohio River, is a "beautiful quadroon," at least three-quarters White but still legally Black. She is cleverer, more energetic, and much stronger than the average girl. And prettier. Rosa and Jane, who are explained as being the silly little slackers they are because they don't have to work or study, have not developed much toughness or cleverness but their prettiness is described as if they were Eliza's little sisters. So is Emmeline's. So, despite her age and jaundice, is Cassy's. Was Beecher Stowe obsessed with a particular type of Black woman?

I didn't have to find the answer to this question for a term paper in college. The Washington Post Magazine, however, supplied the answer, about twenty years ago. Beecher Stowe interviewed one family--in Washington--that provided the models for all of those mixed-race women. The article gave their names and address. Their story "could not be told" in polite Victorian society, so their adventures were taken from other ex-slaves' stories 

And I didn't keep the magazine. And, today, when I want to write this article by contrasting the fictional stories of Cassy, Eliza, Emmeline, Rosa, and Jane, I can't tell you the real names or much of the real stories of the women Beecher Stowe cast as those characters. 

What I can tell you is that I found Cassy hard enough to understand--in grade seven?--that I reread the book again in grade ten, again in college, and at least twice after learning that Beecher Stowe's enslaved heroines look alike because Beecher Stowe was talking to a mother and her daughters. My understanding of Cassy's character changed every time. 

I learned that, while theatrical companies loved to do "Scenes from Uncle Tom's Cabin," so much that some groups specialized enough to be tagged "Tommers," they shied away from trying to bring Cassy to life on stage. 

I learned that, while Beecher Stowe was greatly impressed by the family she met in Washington, and thought enough of the mother to describe her female hero as acting and talking like her, she was also somewhat afraid of her. Probably not without reason. 

In my twenties I understood that part of Cassy's mystique is that nice Victorian audiences did not recognize a woman's sexuality in any favorable way, and Cassy, having been sexually abused all her life, can hardly be blamed for smoldering with sexual energy.  

Later, I read that the model for Cassy was prostituted as a young slave and ordered to manage a house of prostitution as an older slave. She was remembered as very, very good at what she did. She didn't mind participating in the degradation of other people's daughters but she minded bitterly when the girls in question were her own daughters. She used every kind of appeal she had to get her daughters out of slavery and out of Washington. She did her job willingly, and apparently with more than average talent, so that her daughters wouldn't have to do the same job.  

In my thirties I understood that another part of what makes Cassy so difficult a character to act is a habit Black Americans call "signifying." Cassy is seldom free to say what she really thinks in a straightforward way, but often finds it possible to communicate what she is thinking by saying the opposite of what she means in a particular way. Unauthorized to tell a White man not to shoot, she cries, "Fire your pistols! Do!"--superficially supporting his decision while using nonverbal communication to make him reconsider it. The nonverbal communication that makes "signifying" possible has been extensively studied; still, it's not an easy speechmode for most people to learn.

But only around age forty did I understand why Beecher Stowe had made her strongest characters so much alike, and why she'd made Cassy such a difficult, peculiar, individual character when it would have been so much easier to have made her the sort of grandmother most children prefer to believe they have. Harriet Beecher Stowe had met a real woman who both attracted and repelled her, and the proof of her talent, despite the many well known flaws of her book, is that she was able to invent a fictional woman who both attracts and repels readers in the same ways. 

I only wish, now, I could find that article about the real slave woman.