My Southern Home: The South and Its People

By William Wells Brown

The culmination of William Wells Brown's long writing career, My Southern Home is the story of Brown's search for a home in a land of slavery and racism. Brown (1814-84), a prolific and celebrated abolitionist and writer often recognized as the first African American novelist for his Clotel (1853), was born enslaved in Kentucky and escaped to Ohio in 1834.

In this comprehensive edition, John Ernest acts as a surefooted guide to this seminal work, beginning with a substantial introduction placing Brown's life and work in cultural and historical context. Brown addresses from a post-emancipation vantage point his early experiences and understanding of the world of slavery and describes his travels through many southern states. The text itself is presented in its original form, while Ernest's annotations highlight its layered complexity and document the many instances in which Brown borrows from his own earlier writings and the writings of others to form an underlying dialogue. This edition sheds new light on Brown's literary craft and provides readers with the maps they need to follow Brown on his quest for home in the chaotic social landscape of American southern culture in the final decades of the nineteenth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Nov 7, 2011
• ISBN: 9780807869352

William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown (1814–1884) was a career abolitionist who escaped slavery before the age of 20. As a young man, Brown worked on a steamboat, while learning how to read and write. He joined several anti-slavery groups and began helping other African Americans seeking asylum. Brown went on to lecture and write several books detailing the horrors of slavery. In 1847, he published Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, a memoir detailing his own harrowing account. This was followed by 1853’s Clotel, which is often considered the first African American novel.

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My Southern Home

or,

THE SOUTH AND ITS PEOPLE

My Southern Home

or, THE SOUTH AND ITS PEOPLE

by William Wells Brown.

Edited and with an Introduction by JOHN ERNEST

The University of North Carolina Press

Chapel Hill

© 2011 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

The illustrations in this book are from My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People, by William Wells Brown (A 1880 .B76), courtesy of the Tracy W. McGregor Library of American History, Special Collections, University of Virginia Library.

Designed and set in Merlo by Rebecca Evans.

The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and

durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity

of the Council on Library Resources. The University of North Carolina

Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Brown, William Wells, 1814?–1884.

My southern home; or, the South and its people / by William Wells

Brown; edited and with an introduction by John Ernest.

p. cm.

Previously published: Boston : A. G. Brown & Co., 1882. 3rd ed.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8078-3511-1 (cloth : alk. paper)

ISBN 978-0-8078-7208-6 (pbk : alk. paper)

1. African Americans—Southern States.

2. Slavery—United States. 3. Southern States—Social life and customs.

4. Brown, William Wells, 1814?–1884. I. Ernest, John. II. Title.

E185.B88 2011 305.896’073075—dc22 2011012362

cloth 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

paper 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1

For Denise

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Overview of This Edition of My Southern Home

My Southern Home: or, The South and Its People

Printer’s Errors and Editorial Changes

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Illustrations

Wm. Wells Brown 2

Great House at Poplar Farm 10

Tropical Luxuriance 21

Negro Dentistry 34

Rev. Henry Pinchen 39

Mrs. Sarah Pepper Gaines 47

Gambling for a Slave 54

Running Down Slaves with Dogs 66

Tabor’s Catch-dog, Growler 66

Rev. Mr. Wilson and His Captured Slave 67

Leap of the Fugitive Slave 79

Walker, the Slave Trader 89

Ku-Klux Emblems 123

White and black hands embraced 186

Acknowledgments

I’ve been working on this edition for many years, and I’m grateful to everyone who offered assistance and encouragement along the way. Robert Levine and John Bryant encouraged me to pursue this edition years ago, and I’ve been variously grateful to them and annoyed at myself for listening to them—but mostly grateful. The folks at the University of North Carolina Press have been characteristically professional and supportive. I’m grateful to Sian Hunter and Mark Simpson-Vos for their faith in this project, and to Mark, Ron Maner, Joycelyn Moody, and an anonymous reader for advice that raised the edition to a new level of usefulness and elegance. I am indebted as well to the editorial board and to the editorial, production, and marketing staffs—particularly project editor Mary Caviness—for taking in my manuscript and sending out a worthy edition of William Wells Brown’s final book. My research assistants—Rebecca Skidmore Biggio, Sohinee Roy, and Luminita M. Dragulescu—provided substantial help at different stages of this project, as did Rebecca Mays Ernest at the early stages of this project and Denise Eno Stewart at the end. I’m indebted as well to the librarians at the University of New Hampshire, the University of Virginia, and West Virginia University, and particularly to the interlibrary loan services at UNH and WVU.

In many ways, My Southern Home is the story of Brown’s lifelong search for a home—some combination of the compromised and conflicted but still dear home that he knew during his youth in enslavement and the broader home that welcomed the accomplished writer and lecturer of his later years. It is perhaps appropriate, then, that as I completed this project, I neared the end of a lifetime’s journey that finally promised a return to a home lost in my youth. I am grateful to Denise Eno for providing me with such a sure map, many years ago, and for guiding me home at the journey’s end, our new beginning.

Introduction

Where in the world is William Wells Brown?¹ This is not the sort of question one expects to ask about the author of a memoir, especially when that author seems to answer the question in the memoir’s title: My Southern Home. In fact, though, the South had not been Brown’s home since 1834, when he escaped from enslavement, and he did not make it his home after publishing My Southern Home in 1880. To some extent, of course, Brown reclaims the home of his youth in this memoir, addressing his early experiences and observations, and the world of slavery more generally, in the first fifteen chapters, and the post-emancipation, post–Civil War years in the remaining chapters. Brown had toured the South in the winter of 1879–80, and it was that tour that led to this book. There seems to be no reason to ask, then, where Brown might be in this memoir of his youth and his late-life travels, since he is perfectly clear about it.

All readers of My Southern Home, though, soon discover that it is sometimes difficult to locate Brown in this memoir, and readers of this edition will find even more reason to ask where and how to locate Brown, though they will also have a better paper trail to lead them in the search. Those familiar with Brown’s writing career will recognize many passages in My Southern Home, for in fact Brown reprints here, in the last book of his career, snippets and often extended episodes from virtually all of his published books. But readers will discover as well that much of this material is placed in different contexts, sometimes leading to significantly different conclusions. They will discover as well that some of Brown’s own experiences are now ascribed to other people, and that episodes from his fiction and his one published play are integrated into accounts of his experience and observations. Moreover, readers of this edition will discover that some of Brown’s observations from his post–Civil War travels in the South are drawn from newspapers, and that a great deal of the political commentary is drawn from highly publicized accounts distributed through newspapers, books, and pamphlets. They will discover as well that some of the experiences Brown reports just do not add up—for example, his account of entering a slave cabin in South Carolina to hear a soldier reading the Emancipation Proclamation. The proclamation was issued in 1863, long before Brown visited the Deep South. Where in the world is William Wells Brown? Everywhere, it seems, though his journeys often seem to have been intellectual as well as physical, a journey through newspapers, pamphlets, and books, as well as a journey through various southern states.

Indeed, the remarkable and winding narrative turns and embedded texts that characterize My Southern Home make this one of Brown’s most confounding and challenging publications, and a particularly revealing glimpse into American history after the Civil War. Some readers view Brown’s final memoir as something of a performance piece—a book that takes its readers on a winding narrative journey of surprising turns and twisting political viewpoints, a savvy commentary on a troubled and confused era. Other readers have found it to be a problematic pastiche of a narrative, with shifting genres and perspectives, and sometimes shifty opinions and commentary. Brown presents this multigenre book as an autobiographical memoir that begins with an account of his life as a slave and concludes with reflections from his tour of the South during the post-Reconstruction era—including, as Brown notes in his preface, incidents [that] were jotted down at the time of their occurrence, or as they fell from the lips of the narrators, and in their own unadorned dialect.² Parts of the text are presented in dramatic form (for, indeed, they were drawn from Brown’s plays); parts are presented as transcriptions of African American folk songs and customs that Brown encountered in his travels; and parts are commentaries on the uncertain situation of African Americans recently emancipated from slavery and deep into what many historians take to be one of the most conflicted and threatening periods in African American history. Readers encounter various episodes that seem to lead to no clear moral and various texts that work both with and against one another in creative tension. Even if we take this memoir, then, as the reflections that resulted from a significant intellectual journey, based on personal observations and extensive reading, it can still be difficult to locate Brown.

It is difficult even to locate Brown in the early chapters of My Southern Home, though we encounter various other people living in the home of his youth and even engaged in some of the incidents of his youth. But Brown generally avoids placing himself in any scene, relying instead on his role as an observer or peripheral participant—indeed, an observer of racially ambiguous status. Brown does not even apply the words I, me, or my to himself in most of the early chapters—and when he does, he sounds less like an autobiographical narrator than a sophisticated observer, very much like the many white Americans who journeyed through the South and then published their travel accounts and offered their opinions on the race problem (usually more narrowly conceived as the Negro problem). When a mistress looks for her slave, Brown enters the narrative only to say, I hastened out to look for the boy. And when the mistress worries that she will not have a clean cap to wear when greeting the guests who would soon arrive, Brown’s comment seems designed to distinguish himself from the mistress’s slaves: I tried to comfort her by suggesting that the servants might get one ready in time. During the mistress’s visit with company, Brown states simply, I listened with great interest to the following conversation between Mrs. Gaines and her ministerial friend. And when he observes that both Dr. and Mrs. Gaines were easily deceived by their servants, Brown does not seem to group himself with those servants when he reports, I often thought that Mrs. Gaines took peculiar pleasure in being misled by them. And so it is through much of the early part of the narrative. Brown never tells of his own escape from slavery, for example, and only lightly references his youthful presence in the early scenes on the plantation in My Southern Home that stands in for and is based on the troubled home of his youth. As William Andrews has observed, "When compared to Brown’s Narrative, written more than thirty years earlier, My Southern Home seems carefully designed to deindividualize the narrator, to distance his voice and his experience from that of Brown."³

And this deindividualized narrator continues through the chapters covering Brown’s more recent travels through the South. Throughout My Southern Home, Brown’s own position is never entirely clear—not only his former position in the world of slavery but also his position in relation to the settings, events, and opinions he presents throughout the book. In the chapters covering Brown’s postwar travels, his representation of African Americans in the South often seems to play to existing stereotypes—the very characterizations, indeed, being used at the time in attempts to justify white supremacist control. In many ways, Brown provides readers with the narrative form and content of a great number of publications after the Civil War and Reconstruction that approached life on the antebellum plantation with a kind of idealized fascination—publications rife with dialect, song, and descriptions of an earthy but crafty people largely at home in the difficult but, for numerous white American readers of the time, romanticized world of slavery and Reconstruction. Even when Brown approaches the issue of social equality for African Americans—the one question that appeared to overshadow all others, as he puts it—his position seems in many ways conflicted. Overall, his approach to this issue echoes that of Booker T. Washington: Paddle your own canoe is Brown’s advice to African Americans striving against the social and legislative obstacles they encountered at the time. Moreover, Brown can seem not simply to argue for but to identify with the white supremacist position on the issue, noting at one point about the question of social equality that it was as if the liberating of a race, and securing to them personal, political, social and religious rights, made it incumbent upon us to take these people into our houses, and give them seats in our social circle, beyond what we would accord to other total strangers. Where is William Wells Brown? In this statement, somewhere between an implicitly white us and a degraded these people. But if Brown begins with mild advice, offered from an immense social distance from southern blacks, he ends that same chapter with more pointed commentary on the response of southern whites to the specter of social equality: Through fear, intimidation, assassination, and all the horrors that barbarism can invent, every right of the negro in the Southern states is to-day at an end. Complete submission to the whites is the only way for the colored man to live in peace. Whose opinions are represented in My Southern Home? Everyone’s, it seems—and the various opinions seem to add up only to an incoherent world characterized by deep racial and class tensions. Where does Brown himself stand? Well, that’s a more difficult question, and perhaps the main question readers of this memoir will find themselves asking.

A Literary Activist

To answer that question, and to locate Brown in his own memoir, some biographical background might be helpful. Until recently, mainstream recognition of William Wells Brown’s enormous body of writing was limited largely to a list of firsts: the first African American novel (Clotel, published in 1853), the first African American travel narrative (Three Years in Europe, published in 1852), the first published African American play (The Escape, published in 1858). Certainly, in a nation that systematically denied African Americans the economic, educational, and social opportunities so important to the development of a literary career, it is significant that Brown rose from slavery to publish in virtually every literary genre—fiction, autobiography, poetry, drama, history, and travel—in addition to writing for numerous newspapers in the United States and Great Britain and publishing orations from his long career as a professional lecturer on various subjects. These days, many readers are getting past the sometimes condescending celebration of the obvious and are beginning to discover the William Wells Brown who many had never thought to look for: a talented writer with a sophisticated understanding of the racial politics of literary representation, and one with an uncanny ability to transform literary conventions into cultural mirrors that present readers with discomforting images of the world they thought they knew. These many years later, Brown is gaining increasing recognition for his remarkable literary career—a series of firsts that have proven their ability to last.

Brown was enslaved at his birth near Lexington, Kentucky, one of seven children of an enslaved woman named Elizabeth. His father was a white man, and was probably related to his owner, Dr. John Young. In his later writings, Brown often wrote of the experience of slavery as a kind of education that taught the enslaved a great deal about the United States, lessons often lost to white Americans who were raised on stories of the American Revolution and a nation devoted to liberty and individual rights. Brown’s lessons were various and difficult. He experienced the daily degradations of slavery, and he witnessed the whipping and even murder of those who tried to resist. He suffered physical violence himself, and he witnessed violence against his own family members, whom he was unable to defend. When Dr. Young adopted a nephew named William, the young slave William was told that his name would thereafter be Sandford. When Dr. Young’s finances were in a slump, Brown saw his mother, sister, and brothers sold away from him. But those same financial difficulties provided Brown with a different sort of education as well, one that would help him to prepare for his future and would influence his writing significantly. Brown was hired out to various businessmen who were willing to pay slaveholders for the services of their slaves. In addition to working as Dr. Young’s assistant, Brown worked in a tavern; he worked on steamboats; he worked for a slave trader; and he worked for the Reverend Elijah P. Lovejoy, the editor of the Saint Louis Times who was later murdered for his antislavery activism.

When Brown’s sister was sold again in 1833, this time to be taken to the Deep South, Brown decided the time had come to try to escape, and he talked his mother into joining him in the attempt. They were captured, however, and suffered the frequent fate of recaptured fugitive slaves. Brown’s mother was sold and taken to New Orleans; Brown himself was sold, and in that same year was sold again to become, at first, a coachman for Enoch Price, a St. Louis merchant and steamboat owner. In 1834, though, Brown escaped again, this time successfully, and he worked his way from Cincinnati to Cleveland, Ohio, where he settled and worked on the Lake Erie steamer the Detroit. Along the way, Brown received help from a white Quaker couple, and he expressed his gratitude by accepting the husband’s offer of his name, Wells Brown, while also reclaiming his original name of William. By the fall of that year, Brown married his first wife, Elizabeth Schooner, and used his position on Lake Erie to help other fugitive slaves escape to Canada.

In 1836, Brown moved with his wife and new daughter to Buffalo, continuing his journey toward his future as an antislavery leader and writer. In Buffalo, Brown continued to work as a steamboatman, and he continued his social activism as well, working with the region’s underground railroad and organizing a temperance society, of which he later became president. But Brown’s future was influenced particularly by his attendance at the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo in 1843, at which meeting he met the great antislavery leader Frederick Douglass. By the end of that year, Brown was an agent for the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, and in 1844 Brown presented his first significant antislavery speech at the tenth anniversary meeting of the American Anti-Slavery Society. In 1847 Brown, now estranged from his wife, moved to Boston and became a lecturing agent for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society. There he published his Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself, a book that helped to establish him as an increasingly important leader in the antislavery movement.

Brown’s 1847 Narrative is considered one of the most interesting examples of that genre of writing commonly called slave narratives, for Brown works as a kind of trickster narrator, emphasizing the extent to which a crafty (and, in literary terms, crafted) deception is necessary to those born in slavery. Like most authors of slave narratives, Brown faced the challenge of drawing from his personal life for a curious audience in an effort to encourage his readers to oppose slavery. How much does one reveal to those who might be inspired by the narration of horrors, and how much does one withhold from the invading eyes of the merely curious? That Brown was successful in striking the balance is suggested by the fact that his Narrative’s four American editions sold roughly 10,000 copies in two years and was followed by five British editions (including the 1851 Illustrated Edition of the Life and Escape of Wm. Wells Brown from American Slavery). Indeed, Brown told his story, or had it told for him, many times—in the various editions of the original Narrative; in the Memoir of William Wells Brown, written by white British abolitionist William Farmer, which Brown used as a introductory sketch for his travel narrative Three Years in Europe; in the autobiographical accounts that precede his fictional narrative Clotel and the American edition of his travel narrative; in the Memoir of the Author, written by Alonzo Moore, which opens the history The Rising Son; and in his daughter Josephine Brown’s Biography of an American Bondman. Brown’s status as a trickster narrator is suggested by the fact that, while there is considerable overlap among these various biographical and autobiographical accounts, there are also contradictions and persistently missing or questionable information. One who reads all of these accounts of Brown’s life can leave the experience wondering how much one can know about Brown.

But if Brown was careful to keep his personal life under a veil of secrecy while also consistently before the public eye, he was not at all shy about publishing his views on his main subject, the system of slavery and its many effects on American national character. Brown’s power as an antislavery speaker is amply documented in his 1847 pamphlet A Lecture Delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, in which he begins by asserting, Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.⁴ The intimacy of the various violations committed in the system of slavery, Brown asserted, could not be published; and the enormity of the system itself, touching every area of American life and character, could barely be comprehended, let alone represented. Brown’s entire literary career was devoted to this challenge to represent that which resists representation, the system of slavery, and to represent as well the communities, black and white, that had been so deeply influenced by that system.

The depth of this challenge is suggested by Brown’s long residence in Great Britain necessitated by the Fugitive Slave Law, part of the Compromise of 1850, which threatened to carry Brown and other fugitives back into slavery. Brown first went abroad as an elected delegate to the International Peace Congress in Paris, and there he remained until his freedom was purchased for him by a British ally in 1854. Determined not to rely on charity, Brown presented hundreds of lectures during his time abroad, and he expanded his literary publications significantly. Some of his publications were related directly to his work on the lecture circuit, particularly A Description of William Wells Brown’s Original Panoramic Views (1850), a description of various scenes of slavery designed to accompany visual illustrations that Brown exhibited. From his travels, too, came one of his most significant works, Three Years in Europe; or, Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852), which was followed by a revised American edition titled The American Fugitive in Europe: Sketches of Places and People Abroad (1855). In writing travel narratives, with commentary on historical sites, art, and the political and social elite that he met with along the way, Brown participated in a genre associated with cultural sophistication and high social standing, and in this way he countered the racist arguments of the time while also engaging his readers in extended antislavery commentary.

It is in this period, too, that Brown published what many believe to be his most significant literary achievement, the fictional narrative Clotel; or, The Presidents Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853). In the lists of Brown’s firsts, this is the work that gets the most attention, hailed as the first novel published by an African American. Brown himself, however, never identifies it as a novel, and there is reason to believe that Brown was up to something more complex. Certainly, as he worked on this manuscript, Brown was aware of the success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but he was also aware of writers like the British social reformer Harriet Martineau, who used fictional narratives, including a book about slavery, to illustrate principles of political economy. Moreover, Brown was familiar with the antislavery press generally, which mixed a number of genres in any given issue of a newspaper in separate but related articles on slavery. In Clotel, Brown borrowed from various writings by others, as well as various pieces he himself had published previously, to present a multi-genre commentary on slave life in the United States. The book was greeted with respect in his own time, if only quietly noticed and quickly forgotten. Twentieth-century critics, though more attentive, were by and large less kind, criticizing the book for including too much material held together only loosely by a few thin lines of plot. More recently, though, scholars have seen an underlying coherence in the book’s apparent incoherence and have found a major achievement where previous readers found only a first attempt.

After Brown’s freedom was purchased in 1854, he returned to Boston with renewed zeal, and was met with a celebratory public meeting in his honor in Boston. Brown quickly got to work, lecturing for the American Anti-Slavery Society and the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society while also working to secure his status as a professional man of letters. Perhaps looking to establish for himself an identity and an authority different from that which white readers generally associated with those of African descent, Brown presented lectures on subjects beyond his impassioned antislavery themes. Doing so, though, went against the grain of the cultural expectations of the time. Although Brown had published Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, Written by Himself in 1847 and Clotel in 1853, an 1855 review of Three Years in Europe published in The Liberator, a paper particularly supportive of Brown, carried the significant title A Fugitive Slave Turned Author, and began by asserting (implicitly drawing a distinction between slave narratives and forms of literature), It is a new thing in this country for a slave to become an author.⁵ No doubt, Brown understood the assumptions behind this gesture. In the same month, another article in the Liberator celebrated the first attempt of a colored man to give a course of Lectures, embracing other topics than the anti-slavery subject, referring to a series of lectures that Brown presented in Philadelphia. In those lectures, Brown covered such subjects as the great men and women of the Old World, the humble origin of great men, Mahomet and Confucius, and his published lecture, which indicated his growing interest in historical writing, St. Domingo: Its Revolution and Its Patriots (1854).⁶ Through these and other lectures, and through the publication of self-consciously literary performances in fiction, drama, and travel narratives (as opposed to the expected autobiographical narratives and antislavery orations), Brown indeed tried to negotiate a shift from fugitive slave to author. The response to these efforts emphasizes the extent to which, for most white readers, Brown’s attempts to define himself on his own terms were constantly trumped by a reading public that associated him with a narrow understanding of a black man’s public role and cultural affiliations, including assumptions about what constitutes a literary performance.

Brown challenged those expectations even on the antislavery lecture circuit. By 1856 he had written a play titled Experience; or, How to Give a Northern Man a Backbone, which he sometimes read in place of a standard lecture. That first play was never published, but another of his plays was: The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom. A Drama in Five Acts. In both of these plays, Brown explores white American antislavery sympathy, and he argues for the need for something better than sympathy, focusing in The Escape on a rather ineffectual white northerner who is named, appropriately enough, Mr. White. As Brown’s first biographer William Edward Farrison has noted, Brown’s turn to drama was one of his many attempts to vary the form of his antislavery message in an effort to win and hold the attention of possible converts.⁷ As Brown himself noted, he could make more money for the cause at these events if he were to read a play than if he delivered a lecture. In fact, the plays were so well received that in 1856 the Liberator announced that Brown had given up his agency with the American Anti-Slavery Society to devote his time to giving his lyceum lectures and the reading of his drama. The plays were not staged or performed; Brown himself simply read all the parts himself, with a most happy dramatic effect, as one reviewer noted.⁸

The Escape should be of special interest to readers of My Southern Home, for Brown reprints much of his play in his memoir, sometimes retaining its dramatic form and only occasionally adjusting the play to fit the narrative style of a memoir. Entirely familiar with the expectations of white audiences, even those who gathered to hear an antislavery message, Brown was, in fact, very much interested in the literary conventions and racial assumptions that shaped American history and culture. While it was certainly new in the mid-1850s for a black antislavery lecturer to read an original drama, the five-act play that Brown wrote and read offered very little material that was new in itself. The Escape is, in part, a recontextualization, a significant rearrangement, of established literary conventions and familiar antislavery commentary. The play’s six principal characters are all, as Farrison has observed, stock characters⁹: Dr. and Mrs. Gaines, the white slaveholders and owners of the farm at Muddy Creek, Missouri; Glen and Melinda, both enslaved, who are in love but forbidden to marry; Mr. White, the white northerner who visits the South and confronts the realities of slavery; and Cato, a house servant to the Gaineses and Dr. Gaines’s recently trained medical assistant. Dr. and Mrs. Gaines are the duplicitous and morally bankrupt slaveholders, and much of the plot has to do with Dr. Gaines’s attempts to make Melinda his mistress (as he has succeeded in doing with others, the play suggests). Through the farce of the Gaineses’ marriage and in the violent disregard for humanity that underlies their professions of religion, we see the effects of slavery on the character of the enslavers.

We see also a broad range of responses to the system of slavery. Glen and Melinda, a sentimental couple estranged by injustice, each give melodramatic voice to ethereal ideals of love and to holy destinies obstructed by a corrupt social system. Mr. White, a white northerner who considers himself devoted to the antislavery cause, expresses that devotion more in sentiment than in action. Cato is a figure straight out of blackface minstrelsy: he dresses in what is clearly intended as a comical imitation of white fashion; he pulls the wrong tooth of a slave with a toothache; and at the end of the play when he assigns himself a new name—the Reverend Alexander Washington Napoleon Pompey Caesar—to suit his anticipated dignity as a freeman, he praises it not as respectable but as suspectable. The various principal characters and the various plot lines are brought together when Melinda and Glen, having secretly married, escape to the North, precipitating the concluding, dramatic confrontation at Niagara Falls, the kind of incident which had become a part of the stock of antislavery literature.¹⁰ As the various parts of the play come together, so does Brown’s commentary on slavery not as a simple moral issue to be debated but as a cultural system touching the lives of all involved. And all Americans, as Brown argued throughout his career, were involved. In My Southern Home, Brown draws from a fairly wide range of these characters and plot lines, though now presenting this material as stories drawn either from his youth or from his travels.

For those who have followed Brown’s literary career, this is a familiar move, for throughout his career Brown frequently reworked material he had published before to place old stories in new contexts. His most extended efforts along these lines were his various reworkings of his first book-length fictional narrative, Clotel. Over the years approaching and following the Civil War, Brown returned to this story, publishing a stripped-down version of the narrative, with the names of the principal characters changed, in the black-published newspaper, the Weekly Anglo-African. The new version—now called Miralda; or, The Beautiful Quadroon—was published serially from December 1860 to March 1861 and more fully resembled a novel than did Clotel in its presentation of a coherent and sentimental tale of slavery. Those still not satisfied with the story had only to wait until 1864, when Brown returned to the same material, again making only slight revisions, to publish the novel Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States, which was included in white abolitionist James Redpath’s Books for the Camp Fire series for Union soldiers. Finally, those who might have missed the previous versions could catch up on the story in 1867, when Brown published Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine, largely a reprinting of the previous version, but with a new conclusion that took the title character