his transfer from the American paratroopers to the Canadian army during the war, he met Tex Henson, great-grandson of Josiah Henson, the real-life model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom, who had settled in Ontario, Canada, and founded agricultural communities among the former slaves. Subtitled The Story of Uncle Tom, a Historical Narrative, the book draws on Henson’s own account of his life (written before the decline of his Canadian ventures, while he was still a touring phenomenon), as well as extensive additional research, in an effort to understand the measure of Henson’s complicity in what came to be seen as the negative representation of Uncle Tom. Covering Henson’s entire life till his death at a ripe old age, the narrative goes on to show how that image from the popular novel ultimately affected Henson’s own reception in the world, how the real life and the fiction intertwined as a lesson and warning for later generations.
The book also stands as an early marker of Gysin’s lifelong interest in history, and his ability to make connections between different cultural and historical currents. His insight and sensitivity to the subject of race relations were rare for a white man at the time, perhaps a benefit of his non-American origins. As a result, the work gained him entry into black intellectual circles for years after. An appendix not excerpted here, “A History of Slavery in Canada,” made up the final third of the book.
| Don’t Chase after Me | I’m on my way to CanadaWhere everyone is free.So Goodnight, Old Master,Don’t chase after me.—Slave Song |
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When this story was told by its hero, he called it Truth Stranger Than Fiction, for Harriet Beecher Stowe had modeled the principal character in her novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin upon an earlier account of his life. Under her hand a metamorphosis took place, in which the fictional character of Uncle Tom grew to such strength in the popular imagination of the troubled time that it shouldered aside, and seemed to condemn to obscurity, the human counterpart from which it had sprung. The man was robbed of his personality and almost of his name by a character in a novel, which came to be such a symbol of the inevitable struggle about to take place that those who lived too close to the event to be able to see it in perspective might well mistake the symbol for the cause.
This book is about Uncle Tom, the man and the symbol, and inevitably, therefore, it is an attempt to analyze the society which created him. It is not a book against any individual; nor is it a book against the original Uncle Tom, Josiah Henson; but it is a book against the attitude to which the term, Uncle Tomism, has come to be applied. It was written in the army, in barracks before “lights out,” in hotels, in trains, and in those libraries which could be reached on weekend passes. For that reason there are undoubtedly faults of scholarship and lacunae in research, but there is no apology for the intention of the book, except inasmuch as it might be misconstrued by living members of the Henson family, some of whom were the author’s comrades in arms in the Canadian army. The writer wishes to assure them that no personal disrespect is intended and feels sure that a certain objectivity—a great deal of good along with some bad—will be found throughout the story.
The life of Josiah Henson is illuminating because it shows how a man was formed in slavery and in freedom. Lewis Clark, himself an escaped slave and the author of a narrative from which Mrs. Stowe borrowed some of her material, said, “Slavery was a curious blend of force and concession; of arbitrary disposal by the master and self-direction by the slave; of tyranny and benevolence; of antipathy and affections.” The escape from slavery often involved a moral decision on the part of the slave, curious though that may seem, which has a relevance today. So, in our own time, a moral decision, complicated by social and economic factors, faces every individual of the Negro group who comes in contact, as indeed he must, with the dominant white majority. Whether or not a Negro will be called an Uncle Tom by his own people depends on the manner in which he conducts himself in his dealings with whites.
The term, Uncle Tom, has become a cant phrase among American Negroes, along with half a hundred other synonyms in current slang, but the type of person to whom it refers is known in other minority groups as well. The Japanese-Americans or the Jews might well adopt the term for those of their leaders who counsel compromise rather than struggle. There are, of course, both Negroes and whites who will defend the manner in which an Uncle Tom conducts his relations with the rest of the world. They assure themselves that there is no other way in which the things that are vitally necessary at the moment can be obtained, and are inclined to find justification for their point of view by claiming that they are “practical” and by pointing to the achievements of a man like Booker T. Washington. What may have been true at one time—and perhaps even then to a much more limited extent than they are willing to admit—is no longer true today. To continue to conform consciously to a pattern of segregation is to assure the fact that segregation with all its attendant evils will continue to exist. If, therefore, an attempt is made in this book to represent Henson as a three-dimensional character, it does not imply in any way that today it is possible to condone actions similar to his.
One can no longer believe that either Uncle Tom’s Cabin or the John Brown raid at Harper’s Ferry caused the Civil War in the United States. Rather, both Uncle Tom and John Brown were created and shaped by the same deep forces in society which brought about the irrepressible conflict. At the time, of course, both John Brown and Uncle Tom were identified with the war in the popular imagination, which always seeks an easy, obvious, and often humanized symbol in order to create a hero through whose actions a world event can be interpreted according to the customs which rule each private life.
The popular attitude was conveniently shaped into capsule form by Oliver Wendell Holmes:
All through the conflict up and down
Marched Uncle Tom and Old John Brown;
One ghost, one form ideal:
And which was false and which was true
And which was mightier of the two
The wisest Sibyl never knew
For both alike were real.
In the image of the poet, Brown was the form ideal, though his body lay a-mouldering in the grave, while from that grave had sprung a song to claim that his soul went marching on. The old hymn tune to which they had set the words rolled and thundered through the ranks of the Union, or began, muffled and indistinct as the boots of tired men, to rise, gather, and swell into a mighty monotonous chorus of voices which carried the soldiers another mile and another mile.
The face of the nation was about to change.
The South hanged Brown at Charlestown in Virginia; Lee, not yet a general, had led the last charge against the engine house at Harper’s Ferry on October 16, 1859; Stonewall Jackson was among those who saw Brown die one bright morning in December of the same year.
Death had delivered him: “This is a beautiful country; I never had the pleasure of seeing it before,” he said to those who led him out to the gallows, and it was true that he had seen no country before except the country of his vision. Now he was done with camp and countermarch. The Kansas War, the secret journeys, the convention in Canada, the shepherding of slaves to safety, and the expedition undertaken had led him here inevitably. In the letters which he was allowed to write from prison—they proved stronger weapons against the “peculiar institution” than the pikes with which he had proposed to arm the slaves—we hear the voice of a happy man sure of his destiny. Old John Brown, Osawatomie Brown, the angry prophet and antique hero, knew that the principal condition of his new-found happiness was the limit of time in which he could enjoy it; he was already free. “I am worth now infinitely more to die than to live.”
To those who have written of the last days before the attack on Harper’s Ferry it has seemed probable that he planned it to be a glorious failure. If that
