From Gift to Commodity: Capitalism and Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century American Fiction

5. From Grateful Slave to Greedy Banker: William Wells Brown’s Clotel and the Circulation of Shinplaster Fiction

114 five From Grateful Slave to Greedy Banker William Wells Brown’s Clotel and the Circulation of Shinplaster Fiction Many harrowing scenes are graphically portrayed; and yet with that simplicity and ingeniousness which carries with it a conviction of the truthfulness of the picture. —Preface, William Wells Brown, The Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave (2006a) Cease circulating as facts what we know can be shown to be merest fictions. —Edward Farrison (1969, 264) Shall we be slaves to pampered knaves, And Banks still be our masters, Since all they pay from day to day, Is nothing but Shinplasters?” —“Song from a Jackson Barbecue September 25, 1839” (quoted in Sharp 1970, preface) While during and after the 1837 panic Susan Warner’s possibilities were reduced in drastic ways, William Wells Brown’s would increase in an even more radical fashion. He not only gained his freedom in those years but also, as he suggests in his 1853 autobiographical preface preceding his novel Clotel (W. Brown 2000), was able to profit from the very same American economy that brought the Warners to the brink of destitution.1 While the autobiographical preface appears on first sight to be a rehash of his 1847 slave narrative, authenticating himself as a slave, he adds a striking new scene to his life story in which he casts himself not as a grateful slave—as he had done in his slave narrative—but as a savvy barber and then banker, circulating shinplasters to a Midwestern town.Changing his persona from sincere slave to William Wells Brown’s Clotel 115 shady banker was a move ill suited to gain the trust and sympathy of a reading audience upon which the slave narrative relied—doubly so since this episode does not occur in his initial slave narrative. Was this autobiographical episode fact or fiction? And why would Brown want to be seen as a ruthless banker rather than a trustworthy, escaped slave? When, in 1855, Frederick Douglass admonished Brown to “cease circulating as facts what we know can be shown to be merest fictions,”he could have been speaking about this very turn in Brown’s writings rather than,more specifically, about Brown’s mention of an “uncomplimentary letter” Douglass had alleged sent to an English lady about Brown. The specific conflict between Douglass and Brown flared up and subsided quickly (Farrison 1969, 262), but the more fundamental differences between the two men remained. While Douglass mostly preserved the border line between fact and fiction, Brown deliberately played with it and undermined it. Even though the slave narrative relies for its meaning and impact on the seeming sincerity, truthfulness, and gratitude of the narrator, Brown took an almost Barnumesque pleasure in the revisions and expansions of his life story with little concern about their and his credibility .2 As Brown published and republished accounts of his life and escape as a slave, expanding and embellishing his narrative and even adding entirely new episodes such as the one about the shinplasters, readers would have to begin to doubt the truthfulness of his remarks.These revisions attest not only to Brown’s increasing interest in the amusing, the absurd, and the exaggerated but also to his move from fugitive slave to professional writer—not to leave the slave narrative and abolitionist writing behind for “mere” fiction but rather to reconsider the tension between fact and fiction itself and to circulate his own semifictional currency in the literary market for profit. Brown’s idiosyncratic relation to truth has been noted by critics.3 For example, Ann DuCille coins the wonderful term “unreal real estate”to describe Brown’s “fictive realm of the fantastic and the coincidental . . . an ideologically charged space,created by drawing together a variety of discursive fields—including the ‘real’and the ‘romantic,’the simple and the sensational, the allegorical and the historical—usually for decidedly political purposes”(1993,18).4 But despite her metaphor, DuCille does not deal with economic issues. Indeed, even though Brown’s work had always been particularly aware of and intent on exposing the economic underpinnings of American slavery and its relation to capitalism (Heermance 1969, 49), critics have not connected Brown’s narrative practices to his interest in America’s economy. Yet, he gives us ample reason to do so. While in his slave narrative Brown still invokes both sincerity and the gift—a 116 Panic Fictions truthfulness to...