"Uncle Tom's Cabin" and the Reading Revolution: Race, Literacy, Childhood, and Fiction, 1851-1911

Epilogue. Devouring Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Black Readers between Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of Education

L 231 Epilogue devouring Uncle Tom’s Cabin Black Readers between Plessy vs. Ferguson and Brown vs. Board of education “there was something about that book. i couldn’t understand it. he just read it over and over and over again.” —Emma Berdis Jones Baldwin (mother of James Baldwin) throughout this study we have seen the complex interplay of personal and cultural history in shaping reader response, the pitfalls of taking readers’ testimony at face value, the highly charged politics of literacy, and the frequent gaps between the public consensus and individual experiences of reading. i want to end this book by pursuing the unique meaning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin for african americans as the ongoing repercussions of the Civil War and the failure of Reconstruction were intensified by legalized segregation. over the last twenty years, with the burgeoning of reception studies, reading studies, and the history of the book, scholars have devoted serious attention to the way “underrepresented” and “understudied” groups have used books, newspapers, and periodicals to gain cultural competence and to understand their own position in society.1 as this multifaceted project proceeds, historians of reading have become increasingly sensitive to the difficulties of finding evidence for “so elusive a practice as reading,”2 and to the challenge of contextualizing and interpreting that evidence, especially when it is skimpy, eclectic, or outside the framework of published reviews and other institutional practices (e.g., schools, libraries, or book clubs). elizabeth Mchenry suggests that “new ways of looking at the multiple uses of literature” in african american communities will help us gain “a more accurate and historically informed understanding of a complex and differentiated population.”3 in this chapter i draw on the work of Mchenry, Karla F. C. holloway, and other historians of reading to disclose and clarify neglected aspects of the african 232 K Epilogue american reading experience—and changes in the meaning of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an extremely important book for african american readers in the years between the court decision Plessy vs. Ferguson (1896), which made segregation legal, and Brown vs. Board of Education (1954), which reversed that decision. in the intervening years, when many young african americans were the children or grandchildren of ex-slaves, information about slavery was paradoxically scarce. in the public sphere, slave narratives “virtually disappeared from american cultural memory for over a century,” as W. J. t. Mitchell notes.4 ex-slaves themselves, eager to move on, were reluctant to hand down stories of their experience to their children. in this context Uncle Tom’s Cabin was an eye-opener for young black readers who were hungry for information about their family’s past and about slavery in general. in 1944 when the Federal Writers’ Project gave scholars access to ten thousand pages of interviews with former slaves, slave narratives started to be published again.5 Soon the Civil Rights movement began. at this point the meaning and function of Uncle Tom’s Cabin changed radically once more, at least for professionalreaders .JamesBaldwin’sfamouscritiqueofStowe,“everybody’sProtest novel,” published in Partisan Review in 1949, ushered in an era during which Uncle Tom’s Cabin was either attacked or neglected. When (white) feminist scholars gave the book a new lease on life a generation later, Baldwin’s attack remained a touchstone for black anger at Stowe, as if his critical understanding of her novel summed up the african american response. Yet other black readers, from the 1890s well into the 1940s, read Uncle Tom’s Cabin differently . in fact, Baldwin’s essay does not fully represent his own experience of reading Stowe’s novel. as a child Baldwin read it “obsessively” and “compulsively ” by his own account.6 as an adult he revisited the book several times. Using Fiction: Uncle Tom’s Cabin on the Black Reading List From Frederick douglass through henry louis gates, african american writers have overwhelmingly affirmed the ideology of literacy; their autobiographies often become a space to foreground “faith in reading” among their credentials as full-fledged participants in the racialized literary culture of the L 233 Devouring Uncle Tom’s Cabin united States.7 as holloway has shown, black writers have regularly avoided “lengthy lists of black books” in autobiographical accounts of what they read.8 Conversely, “white” classics play an important role in narratives that are often designed to demonstrate a black reader’s discernment and...