Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights

3 Everyone Is Impressed: Slavery as a Tender Embrace from Uncle Tom’s to Uncle Remus’s Cabin

92 3 Everyone Is Impressed Slavery as a Tender Embrace from Uncle Tom’s to Uncle Remus’s Cabin To the modern nose, much nineteenth-century literature might seem to stink of pedophilia. Uncle Tom spies Little Eva on the steamboat and “cut[s] cunning little baskets out of cherry-stones” to “attract ” the child. Little Eva is initially “shy,” and Tom finds it “not easy to tame her.” But the girl “bashful[ly]” accepts Tom’s gifts, and soon the two get “on quite confidential terms.” In this reading, the seduction culminates when Eva “whisper[s] softly . . . ‘I want him.’”1 In a later best-selling tale of interracial, cross-generational love, Joel Chandler Harris’s Uncle Remus “initiates” a white, unnamed Little Boy by taking him into Remus’s cabin, “stroking the child’s hair thoughtfully and caressingly” while holding the Boy on his lap, and murmuring tales of Brer Rabbit’s mayhem into his ear.2 For scholars who read in this mode, Little Eva’s and the Little Boy’s status as children provides a vessel for adult sexual desires. Hortense J. Spillers argues that Harriet Beecher Stowe constructed Little Eva as a “temptress ” who directed “lush sensuality” toward Uncle Tom; this sensuality “stands in” for unruly female sexuality, including white women’s desire for black men. Had Stowe written Eva as an adult, this argument suggests, the tender caresses between Eva and Tom would have seemed overtly sexual or romantic; Eva’s childhood is therefore an alibi that allows Stowe to disavow cross-racial sexual desire even as she covertly (and perhaps inadvertently) represents it.3 In contrast, James Kincaid argues after Michel Foucault that the figure of the child does not represent adult sexuality so much as produce it. In Kincaid’s view, signs of nineteenth-century children’s innocence—repetitious descriptions of cherubic visages and clear, trusting eyes and artless declarations of love—obsessively detail the Everyone Is Impressed 93 sexually unthinkable; thus the disavowal of desire actually constructs it.4 Performing the homoerotic gesture that birthed nothing less than American literature itself, Uncle Remus invites the Little Boy to come back to the cabin again, honey—an essay Leslie Fiedler never wrote.5 Such arguments that Little Eva and the Little Boy either reflect or produce eroticism inevitably fall short because they seek sexual content in Stowe’s and Harris’s prose—and that content is, in truth, sparse. Physical contact, as one important measure of intimacy, provides an illuminative index. In Stowe’s text, Little Eva and Uncle Tom touch exactly four times, and then only fleetingly. The first touch occurs in chapter 14, when Tom saves Eva from drowning (“he caught her in his arms”).6 In chapter 16, Eva “sat down on his knee” while “hanging a wreath of roses round his neck.”7 In chapter 18, Eva “catch[es] his hand.”8 And finally, in chapter 26, Tom delights in carrying the dying Eva’s “little frail form in his arms.”9 Spillers reads sensuality and “intimate contact” between Tom and Eva especially in the so-called arbor scene of chapter 22; but in fact, Stowe neither describes nor implies any touching between Tom and Eva anywhere in that chapter.10 The occasional and limited touches between Eva and Tom contrast with Eva’s unrestrained embraces with a nursemaid called Mammy: when Eva returns from her steamboat voyage, she cries out, “O, there’s Mammy!” and then “fl[ies] across the room; and, throwing herself into her arms, she kisse[s] her repeatedly.” Later, Eva “thr[ows] her arms around” Mammy and “thrust[s]” a diamond-encrusted box “into [Mammy’s] bosom , and, kissing her, r[uns] down stairs.”11 On her deathbed, as Eva hands out locks of her hair, she embraces Mammy while keeping Tom physically distanced. “Here, Uncle Tom,” said Eva, “is a beautiful [lock of hair] for you. O, I am so happy, Uncle Tom, to think I shall see you in heaven,—for I’m sure I shall; and Mammy,—dear, good, kind Mammy!” she said, fondly throwing her arms round her old nurse,—“I know you’ll be there, too.”12 As this representative passage shows, Eva’s physical engagement with Tom is chaste in comparison to the unbridled sensuality between Eva and Mammy. Never does Eva throw her arms around Tom or kiss him, much less thrust jewels into his bosom. Yet no scholar has read forbidden eroticism into the Eva...