Up from Slavery

GOODBYE TO UNCLE TOM (435 pp.)--J. C. Furnas--Sloane ($6).

Here is a book on the Negro in America with a startling thesis. Author J. C. Furnas (--And Sudden Death, Anatomy of Paradise) argues that all U.S. thinking about the Negro for the past century has been shaped directly or indirectly by one book, Uncle Tom's Cabin, and the play fashioned from it--to the Negroes' detriment.

According to Furnas, Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the pious New England zealot was "small personally as well as physically, glib, lazy-minded, a common denominator of millions of the brains and consciences of her time." The key "crimes" of which he accuses her are 1) knowing little or nothing of the South and of how slavery operated, 2) promoting racial stereotypes, e.g., Topsy, the comical waif, faithful, cheek-turning Tom, 3) talking genetic nonsense about the "African race," 4) implying that a Negro's taste for freedom and education grow proportionately to his infusions of "white blood." With the aid of some 387 books, pamphlets and articles listed in his bibliography, Author Furnas raps the ghostly knuckles of Mrs. Stowe. Though Goodbye to Uncle Tom sometimes lapses into a footnotational frenzy of Ph.Dimensions, that rarely seems to dim a highlights' history of U.S. slavery that is chockablock with information most Americans have either forgotten or never knew.

Jefferson & Jackson. The first slave to be sold on what was to become U.S. soil, Furnas says, landed at Jamestown in 1619, a full year before the Pilgrim Fathers landed at Plymouth. The early settlers saw nothing immoral in slavery, since many a white was himself an indentured servant and little better off. Economically, slave labor was on the way out when Eli Whitney invented the cotton gin and made it profitable to keep huge tracts of land in cultivation. Even so, a rich planter might clear no more than a 1% profit annually. A representative weekly food ration for a slave was "a peck of meal, three pounds of bacon, and a pint of molasses." The housing rule of thumb on the plantations was six Negroes to one room, usually 16 ft. by 18 ft. in size, but the log cabin Lincoln grew up in was meaner than some slave quarters.

Slaves could marry, but the union was not legally recognized in the South. One Kentucky minister with auction-block separations in mind amended the words in slave weddings to "till death or distance do you part." Women slaves were often prey to the master's amatory whims. Some historians hold that even the great Jefferson fathered mulatto offspring and he was twitted for it in caustic verse:

The weary statesman for repose hath

fled From halls of council to his Negro's

shed, Where blest he woos some black Aspasia's grace And dreams of freedom in his slave's

embrace . . .

While the slave trader (Andrew Jackson was one for a while) and the overseer with his bull whip were the logical villains of slavery, the master sometimes outdid them in inventive cruelty. One South Carolina owner used to put his Negroes in hogsheads with nails driven, in all around and roll them downhill. One fugitive slave, possibly a survivor of some such punishment, had himself nailed up in a box 3 ft. by 2 1/2 ft. by 2 ft. and survived a 25-hour shipment on the railroad to the North. There was a real-life model for Eliza who fled across Ohio River ice, but with no bloodhounds in pursuit. In fact, the bloodhounds are a bit of stage business thought up by the play adapter of Uncle Tom's Cabin and do not exist in Mrs. Stowe's novel.

All Blood Is Red. Once Author Furnas deserts history far genetics, he goes off on some fairly esoteric, and often vague, tangents ("Families showing six-toedness as a recessive trait are a good rule-proving exception"). In a tone of things-I-never-knew-till-now, he announces several latter-day commonplaces, such as 1) under equal environmental advantages, Negroes stack up well with whites in IQ tests, 2) Negroes have no unique odor of their own, 3) Africa is a racial crazy quilt, and the modern American Negro is no more closely related to his African ancestors than a modern Greek is to an ancient Greek, 4) all blood is red, and it is uniform except for blood groups. Well-meant though all of this undoubtedly is, it smacks of an overly reasoned-out love-thy-neighbor-BECAUSE philosophy rather than a simple love-thy-neighbor. It even makes Harriet Beecher Stowe's righteous indignation on the closing page of Uncle Tom's Cabin sound refreshingly wholesome and not a bit out of date:

"This is an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed . . . and is America safe? Every nation that carries in its bosom great and unredressed injustice has in it the elements of this last convulsion . . . Oh, Church of Christ, read the signs of the times!"

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