of Josiah Henson. It is reflected by the manner in which they speak of him: “Oh, he just said he was Uncle Tom.” “Beecher, now, he’s a deep one. Knows more than he talks ’bout.” “Beecher Henson is as white as I am. He can’t be Uncle Tom’s grandson.” “There never was an Uncle Tom, really.”
It is curiously irrational, of course, because there can be no doubt of the truth of the story. But there is something more than mere cynicism in the attitude of the Dresdenites. After all, they are the children and the grandchildren of those people who experienced the paternalism of the Dawn Institute. A residue of resentment against the old man is evident in everything they say. Some of the people have read Mrs. Stowe’s book, but not many of them are aware of the meaning which the phrase “Uncle Tom” has taken on today in the United States.
Uncle Tom in fiction was the perfect type of the Negro whom the white folks were willing to free as long as he retained all the characteristics of his former servitude. He was compliant and submissive, satisfied with whatever a master chose to give him. He was pious and ready to accept the doctrine that even in heaven “black cherubs rise at seven to do celestial chores.”
In real life the same people like “their colored folk” when they are menial. They like to be flattered by the Negro’s deference and amused by his antics; fawning is considered a mark of respect. They are not quite sure whether or not they like the Negro to cower, for that sometimes arouses a twinge of conscience, but they amuse each other with tales of his physical cowardice and suppose it to be a racial characteristic. The joke disappears, however, when they need to frighten themselves with stories of the Negro who is a monster of strength and wanton cruelty. Into such a paranoiac picture of his people must the modern Uncle Tom fit himself. No easy task.
Uncle Tom scolds his nephew, whose escapades may range from wild pranks, maliciously exaggerated, to deeply justified outbursts of violent resentment against being treated as something less than human. He preaches to his people to wash their faces, straighten their hair, and “honor the white folks.” At one time he assures everybody that this is a white man’s world and the only way to live is to get everything one can by being subservient and taking a little good along with much bad. Another day he is out preaching that anyone with the least trace of pigmentation in his skin should go back to Africa or, at the very least, found a Black Economy, with black trains to run alongside the white ones, and a black government seated in a black Washington.
Behind the Uncle Tom disguise is a dangerous man who leads his people nowhere. Forced into patterns of their own which make it increasingly difficult for contact to exist between the races, Uncle Tom walks a tightrope over this chasm.
The stock figures left over from plantation days, the minstrel show, and Mrs. Stowe’s book, are a little worn-out today. It is obvious that they will no longer do. While the Negro has a job in a factory, not everyone is going to expect to see him shining shoes or picking up pennies for doing a cakewalk on the street corner. Yet this economic security is new, incomplete and precarious. As long as it remains, so there will always be Uncle Toms. Alas, Uncle Tom is not just a stock character, nor is he Josiah Henson. He is alive today under many disguises. He is the so-called leader subventioned by a section of society eager to use him as their tool. No action led by him, no cultural relations, no concession gained, no school built, no hospital staffed, nothing attained through his intercession will ever be a step toward the solution. There is no Negro problem in America; there is a common problem.
It will be a great day when we can shout together, “Uncle Tom is dead.”
“Potiphar’s Wife” (1950) is one of several stories about life in Morocco that Gysin wrote not long after arriving there. He had been invited to Tangier by Paul Bowles, whom he had known in New York in the 1940s. These pieces were never submitted for publication and only appeared much later in Gysin’s Stories (1984).
The second time he ran away because he had too many elder brothers, Yussef ben Allal El Hamri got a job working with a man who sold pastries from a little cart which rolled through the market of Alcazar Kebir. Yussef had wanted to go to war in the Spanish zone, for he had heard that the Americans were in Morocco, but, as he could never find anyone who could tell him for sure whether they were for or against the Sultan, he allowed himself to be distracted. He had admired the cakes one day when he had not eaten for a long time, and now he was working for Hamid, who made them in his own house.
Hamid payed him four pesetas a day and he rarely went out of the house for fear one of his brothers might see him, take him back home, and beat him. His only trouble was with Hamid’s wife, Zuleika: she hated him. “I’m going to lose this good job; all because of this aunt,” he would say to himself when she complained of anything he did in a loud screaming voice. The trouble had started as soon as Hamid had brought him home on the first night. She had looked at him very closely and said, “You’re not going to have this dirty boy around the house all the time, I hope. Hamid, why do you always want to bring stray dogs home with you?”
“Really,” said Hamid without looking at Yussef, “I hadn’t noticed. Where’s my dinner, Zuleika; what have you made tonight?”
He was a man who shouted at times in order to be sure of his own importance: Zuleika, although she was quite young, knew how to handle him perfectly.
When he was eating she threw a ragged, old grass mat out into the little courtyard of the house where Yussef was sitting patiently waiting.
“You’re too dirty to come in the house,” she said. “You’re too dirty to eat with decent people. Here, take this to sleep on. And here’s your food,” she said, thrusting a plate of scraps at him.
She went on treating him like that, finding fault with everything he did while he was learning and even after he learned to make the cakes as well as Hamid himself. He had learned simply by watching, for Hamid rarely spoke to him either to instruct or to blame him. Zuleika never again spoke to him directly, finding that it humiliated him more to talk about him as if he were a bad dog or a slave in the house.
“I know I’m going to lose this job: I know I am. And all because of you,” Yussef went on thinking to himself all the time.
One day Hamid came back with half the cakes still unsold, saying that he was ill. His wife scoffed at him at first, but it was easy to see that he had a fever for he shook all over. She put him to bed on the floor of the main room and ordered Yussef to take the remainder of the cakes out and sell them. The next day Hamid was much worse and no cakes were made that day. The day after that he looked no better and it began to seem a serious matter, for they lived on a narrow margin like most Moors.
“Give me the money to buy the flour and the sugar and the cinnamon and the raisins and the nuts and the butter and I will go out and buy the things to make the cakes,” said young Yussef breathlessly.
“You?” said Hamid, just managing to raise his head from the pillow.
“You?” echoed his wife. “You?”
Hamid reached under the pillow where he always kept his money and pulled out a bill which he gave to the boy. His wife would have objected, but he closed his eyes and she thought for a minute that he might be going to die.
The cakes were quite as good as usual, and Yussef paid a little boy half a peseta a day to come to the house and get them in order to carry them to a Jewish woman who agreed to sell them for him. That night Hamid called him to his bed to say that he was going to double his wages to eight pesetas. It was easy to see that he was much sicker; perhaps delirious
