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Chapter  Slavery In the  novel Adela, the Octoroon, H. L. Hosmer, an antislavery minister and supporter of colonization, painted a picture of the depravity of plantation life based in the incestuous actions of slaveholders. When George Tidbald , a southern patriarch and congressman, returned to his plantation from Washington, D.C., he found one of his slaves on her deathbed. Crissy, the slave, was also Tidbald’s daughter, his lover, and the mother of his child. Disavowing this vexed web of relations, Tidbald assumed that it was the recent birth of a child and the physical difficulties of nursing that were at the root of Crissy’s illness. He was correct in assuming that the child bore the etiology of the illness, even if it had little to do with the physical demands of childbirth and nursing. ‘‘What makes you feel so bad,’’ Tidbald inquired, ‘‘when I speak to you about him?’’1 Tidbald, Crissy said, knew very well what upset her so and then she burst into tears. As Tidbald walked back to the plantation house, he reflected on Crissy’s situation and what she may have meant before she began to cry. ‘‘Can it be that Criss knows her origin? Has anyone informed her, and if so, does that knowledge cause this grief? Why should it? She is a slave, and there is nothing uncommon or at war with the privileges of the institution in this matter. If she does even, what of it? Why need I care, where my will is law?’’ (). The affectionate ‘‘Criss,’’ rather than Crissy, implied that Tidbald did not necessarily believe his own attempt at distancing their relationship. After Tidbald had left the slave quarters, Crissy was consoled and criticized by another slave, the motherly Aunt Christmas. What Christmas recognized in Crissy’s grief was that it was not the incestuous abuse that paralyzed Crissy with melancholia, but rather that ties of family and love could not be recognized across the color line because of her status as a slave. Chastising Crissy for her reluctance to confront Tidbald, Christmas exclaimed, ‘‘I’s Slavery  sure I’d tell ‘em. I’s sure I’d let ‘um know dat I knew I was his own chile. He know’d it all de while, de ole rascal’’ (). While Crissy was dejected over the absence of expressed familial love, Christmas understood Tidbald’s actions for what they were, incestuous abuse. And she demanded that Crissy, whom Tidbald imagined as nothing more than a mute commodity, speak her knowledge of kinship back to her owner father, thus disrupting the natal alienation that sustained the structure of slavery. While Christmas found the relationship abhorrent, Crissy was more ambivalent, desiring paternal recognition while struggling to deal with the fact that her child was the product of incest. ‘‘‘Yes, de ole villain!’ said Aunt Christmas; ‘and if dat was all, dere would be no use ob cryin’, but he is de fader ob your chile, and dat’s de berry reason dat I’d let ‘um know it’’’ (). For Christmas there was no utility in crying about incestuous rape, which was endemic to the life of enslaved women. Forcing acknowledgment of paternity, however, could have utility and might have brought advantage to mother or child or both. Crissy agreed, yet her solution was death, which in many ways could be associated with public knowledge of incest. To acknowledge openly her incestuous relation with Tidbald was to dramatize her own social death through literal biological demise. Crissy did ultimately die, which further substantiated the intimate ties between incest and death. Yet before she died, she, along with Aunt Christmas , confronted Tidbald. Receiving Crissy’s call just before her death, Tidbald ‘‘came, and as he gazed upon the shrunken features of the poor girl, a look of real concern seemed for a moment, to take possession of his naturally somber visage’’ (). As Tidbald looked on the body of his dying daughter, he begged her not to die, or even speak of death. Crissy, for her part, just wanted to look upon her father one last time, but it was Aunt Christmas who could not bear the perversion of this scene, in which the daughter, victim of both slavery and incestuous violation, seemed only to want to reap the approval of her father/master one last time, while the father desired to see his slave/child live through her illness, brought on by the denial of fatherhood twice over. As she forced Crissy...

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