followers that he should tell them nothing of his plans! He was always a secret man, and he knew where he went. With no insurrection of slaves behind him and the knowledge that even some of the abolitionists would forswear him, he stormed to “an almost certain immortality, dragging with him certain unwilling gentlemen who will be embarrassed to find themselves there as his murderers.” The manner of his failure was to be the very measure of his success. A strong man and his sons were gone to their death achieving a great goal—in fact, and in agreement with the poet’s syntax, Brown was the “form ideal.” But what of Uncle Tom? What was he?
Uncle Tom, then, was a “ghost” because he was a character from fiction and because Harriet Beecher Stowe had killed him off in such impressive literary fashion that no one could doubt that he was really in heaven with Little Eva. Yet was he only a character from the book? The poet would seem to imply, and the Sibyl must surely have known, that both he and John Brown were real.
Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life among the Lowly poured out from the presses like an avalanche and swept away the greater part of its readers in a torrent of tears, though here and there it was answered by a countertorrent of abuse. In a few years people were to say that it was “the book that had started the war.” Everyone read it; almost everyone saw it acted as well. Uncle Tom, Little Eva, Topsy, Simon Legree, Eliza, all became giant-size as they played out their drama in theaters and in tents behind the kerosene flares and the pine-pitch torches. Even Mrs. Stowe, for the one time in an otherwise virtuous life, was known to have stolen into a theater—heavily veiled, of course—to see her creatures on the stage.
It was Harriet Beecher Stowe who without a doubt was the best-hated woman south of Mason and Dixon’s line, and the ranks of the Northern army were filled with young men who had, when the war broke out, scarcely left her book behind them in the nursery. Yet it was not the shade of a poke bonnet and bustle that Mr. Holmes saw in the smoke of battle. No, it was that “old darky” with his aureole of cotton-wool hair and beard that the poet thought he saw there: Uncle Tom, bobbing and bowing, loving as he suffered. Yes, Massa; no, Massa. It was this picture of a subservient Negro, his master’s friend, the conciliator and turn-the-other-cheek brother, which Mrs. Stowe presented for the admiration of the nineteenth century.
“Uncle Tom” meant one thing to the nineteenth century, but today the term means something quite different. For while John Brown has passed into history and legend, it is Uncle Tom who goes marching on. He is the ghost of a certain relationship between the races in America, and as he marches toward the second half of the twentieth century his is a ghost which must be laid.
It is in the hope of laying his ghost that this book is written. To the problem with which we are presented in this country and elsewhere by the color bar—segregation, the job ceiling, and every other evidence of prejudice—there is no solution which does not involve struggle. The use of force is not an abstract or academic question, for force is used every day in one form or another by those who wish to ensure that the lines continue to be drawn according to race or religion.
The enforcement of discrimination by legal means, or by extralegal means which are condoned by public opinion, is an application of force against a minority group which is bewildering to anyone who has read the American Constitution. If such acts are acceptable to the majority of Americans, it can be only because of a lack of understanding of the age-old technique of divide and conquer. New evidences of the common interest of the majority of the people are continually coming to light, yet the old methods of subjugation will continue to work if they are not understood.
In order to divide people it is necessary to do so in a manner that seems logical, or at least obvious, and which plays upon their own sense of insecurity. This division may be accomplished according to the skin pigmentation, though the line of demarcation might just as well, in the absence of a pigmented group, be pushed to its absurd conclusion and, after a suitable period of inculcation of prejudice, the mass might well be split according to the color of the eye. Then we might have a war of the Blue Eyes against the Brown Eyes. Hitler almost succeeded.
Yet, while one group is elevated at the expense of the other, the mass pressure generated in the subject group must be occasionally relieved. In order best to accomplish this—to provide a safety valve, as it were—an influential individual in the minority can be allowed special privilege on the understanding that he will, in exchange, work to soften the ugly moods and to pacify the anger of his fellows. Such a man can be had in many ways, and he need not be a villain—as indeed Josiah Henson was not. The Uncle Tom of any group can be persuaded to accept a position of minor importance, where his every gesture will, in fact, be padded with compromise, if he can be made to feel that his elevation is not only an individual triumph but is an achievement which, by reflection, will be of benefit to the minority from which he comes. Unless the person concerned be of high moral character and integrity of purpose, it is easy to succumb to comfort and advantage, to become a mere tool.
It may seem almost cynical to say that to a large extent this is happily not possible for members of the Negro minority. The maneuver cannot be managed well enough because of the rigidity of the system of prejudice which surrounds all men and women of color. An affluent Negro, or one who has achieved distinction, will find it as arduous and even impossible as will his poorest and most illiterate brother to achieve and enjoy the equality which is his legal right. True enough, he can turn his back and attempt to segregate himself in a Black Society or Black Economy as certain groups have done in the past, or, driven by despair and the mirage of material success, attempt to gain it or a semblance of such success by whatever means are closest to hand. If in the attempt he must be servile or a clown, he is most likely to be called an Uncle Tom by those who know their folk history, for Uncle Tomism has a long tradition to which, unwittingly, Mrs. Stowe gave a permanent name.
In the days of the Big House, when the plantation flourished, the house servants were in a position far superior to that of the field servants; they, and above all perhaps the women, made cultural and economic advances which are still reflected in the lives and life patterns of the Negro population of today. The house servants were usually those who were brought up from childhood in close contact with the lives of the masters, and it is little wonder if they came to identify their own interests with those of the owners. This identification produced a conflict not only between the two groups of slaves but also in the personal lives of those slaves who benefited from the advantages of increased freedom of movement and intimate contact with their masters. The house servants came to patronize the field hands, regarding themselves as superior, since they had learned that which never could be learned in the cotton fields—the manners and customs of the country to which they were to belong—and in consequence they exercised their native ingenuity in improving the domestic accomplishments of American life. Field work and the system, on the other hand, drove from the minds of the field slaves all that they had ever been in the past—whatever it had been.
The house servants were the first among their fellows to learn the art of reading and writing, at a time when it was punishable by law to teach a slave to read. They thus became the spokesmen of the field hands, their brothers in oppression, who had grievances which they found it difficult to express, for they were neither as articulate as the house servant nor could they get the ear of the master as easily. At the same time the field workers admired, envied, and hated the house servant who had become their arbitrator—the go-between on whose interest and ingenuity they often depended for comfort and safety.
The house servant, while he might sometimes be inclined to forget it in the warmth of the Big House or in the just pride that he had in his accomplishments, was nevertheless a slave himself, in constant fear of being sent back to the cotton fields and the rice swamp. Though he might consider the welfare of his fellows enough to intercede for them, or to aid them secretly in his function as butler by giving them handouts from the back porch, yet, even with the best of intentions, he soon came to know the rather narrow limits beyond which he could not go. The system made him a compromiser, and thus it was not he but the system which was at fault. In all truth, his intentions were often good, and even when
