There is something audacious and revelatory about Brown's novel. The first time I came to the sentence where Brown defines his protagonist, Clotel, to be the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, I felt the boldness of that declaration, and the truth of it, and was amazed to realize that it was known in 1853 that Jefferson had children who were slaves, whom he never acknowledged, much less freed. The novel is not a novel in the strictest sense since much of it seems culled from the news of the mid-1850's, and then re-enacted with fictional characters, something like a History Channel documentary will use scenes with actors in their documentaries to portray true events. Each short chapter reads as an episode culled from the news that was contemporary to the novel's publication. The use of fiction to portray real events is done very skillfully here, for example in a scene where the hypocrisy of a white slaveowner reading only those portions of the bible to his slaves that support their bondage is fully revealed, as well as the slaves' full understanding of that hypocrisy. Or when a white mistress comprehends for the first time that a slave's child looks like her husband. The discomfort of both white slaveowners and their darker-skinned slaves at the very existence of light- or white-skinned slaves is difficult to read about, but feels true as well. There are scenes written with great compassion, and sometimes with great brutality, of how slaves tried to escape, and how they were captured and punished for their attempt to escape. Heartbreaking, wrenching, revealing...amazing, especially if as a reader you can let go of the expectations you might have of what a "Novel" is meant to be, and read this instead as a part-indictment, part-historical re-enactment of human lives in the most desperate circumstances.
No comments:
Post a Comment