Stowe's Rainbow Sign: Violence and Community in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856)

JOHN CARLOS ROWE Stowe's Rainbow Sign: Violence and Community in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! African American song, as quoted in James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963) Then Denver, running too. Away from her to the pile ofpeople out there. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987) IBEGiN with James Baldwin's famous epigraph and title to his civil rights' jeremiad, The Fire Next Time, to challenge our scholarly and critical understanding of Harriet Beecher Stowe, passionate abolitionist who is still remembered for sentimentalizing race relations. Indeed, James Baldwin identified the central problem in Oncle Tom's Cabin as its reliance on characters who are little more than "whites in blackface ," thus criticizing the novel as a sort of literary minstrel show (Baldwin , PjR 578-85). We continue to teach Uncle Tom's Cabin as crucial to our understanding of nineteenth-century abolition, women's rights, and literary value, but we do so with a nearly morbid fascination concerning Stowe's authorial stance toward her subject, one that seems described aptly by Toni Morrison's general claim that many white U.S. writers tend to imagine their "writerly self, in the wholly racialized society that is the United States, as unraced and all others as raced" (Morrison, Phying xii). Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number i, Spring 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 610 38]ohn Carlos Rowe Stowe was herself profoundly critical of both her popular reputation as a white northern meliorist author and her literary work as a sentimental exploitation of African American suffering. The success of Uncle Tom's Cabin—it sold 300,000 copies in its first year of publication and rapidly became the most popular U.S. novel—prompted critics to attack the novel for its distortions and exaggerations, especially ofAfrican American living conditions under slavery. Stowe was determined to demonstrate the truth of the deplorable conditions she fictionalized and the southern slavocracy as the primary source of the fantastic delusions , including sentimentalism itself, for which she had been criticized. To that end, she carefully compiled in A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin (1853) the documentary evidence to support most of the fictional episodes in the novel (Gossett 285). As Lisa Whitney points out, the legal materials Stowe had been collecting since 1852 would also contribute directly to the organization of Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, in which "Stowe sets out to answer the question, 'What is slavery?' by examining the law of slavery" (554). Stowe draws upon popular knowledge, gossip, and celebrated legal cases to create in Uncle Tom's Cabin a sentimental romance that dramatizes the hypocrisy of the southern church, the cruelty of slave-owners and slave-hunters, and the violence done to African American individuals and families under slavery. Her fictional solutions to these problems , however, are both impractical and unwittingly racist. Arguing for the power of sympathy as an extension of religious righteousness in the fight against slavety, Stowe successfully links abolition with a burgeoning women's rights movement that also drew upon feminine moral and religious authority.1 Yet in so doing, Stowe reaffirms the ideology of the "angel in the house" and extends the patriarchal notion of feminine sacrifice and abjection to African Americans, among whom the most famous instance is Uncle Tom himself.2 By fulfilling her African American characters' desires for freedom with the nineteenth-century promise of the free-state of Liberia, Stowe not only endorses the "back-toAfrica " movement supported variously by pro-slavery and anti-slavery interests, but she also puts her feminism and abolitionism to the work of U.S. colonialism. The "republic" where George plans to emigrate with his family is Liberia, following significantly his "thorough education " after "four years at a French university," so it is not surprising that Stowe's Utopian nation is predicated on the values ofwhite "civilization Stowe's Rainbow Sign39 and Christianity" (Stowe, UT 608-9). As Gretchen Short has pointed out, Uncle Tom's Cabin concludes by endorsing a "Christian and...