James Baldwin
EVERYBODY'S P,ROTEST NOVEL
In
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
that cornerstone of American social
protest fiction, St. Clare, the kindly master, remarks to his coldly dis–
approving Yankee cousin, Miss Ophelia, that, so far as he is able to
tell, the blacks have been turned over to the devil for the benefit of
the whites in this world-however, he adds thoughtfully, it may turn
out in the next. Miss Ophelia's reaction is, at least, vehemently right–
minded: "This is perfectly horrible!" she exclaims. "You ought to
be ashamed of yourselves!"
Miss Ophelia, as we may suppose, was speaking for the author;
her exclamation is the moral, lIeatly framed, and incontestable like
those improving mottoes sometimes found hanging on the walls of
furnished rooms. And, like these mottoes, before which one invariably
flinches, recognizing ,an insupportable, almost an indecent glibness,
she and St. Clare are terribly in earnest. Neither of them questions
the medieval morality from which their dialogue springs: black,
white, the devil, the next world-posing its alternatives between
heaven and the flames - were realities for them as, of course, they
were for their creator. They spurned and were terrified of the darkness,
striving mightily for the light; and considered from this aspect, Miss
Ophelia's exclamation, like Mrs. Stowe's novel, achieves a bright, al–
most a lurid significance, like the light from a fire which consumes a
witch. This is the more striking as one considers the novels of Negro
oppression written in our own, more enlightened day, all of which
say only: "This is perfectly horrible! You ought to be ashamed of
yourselves!" (Let us ignore, for the moment, those novels of oppression
written by Negroes, which add only a raging, near-paranoiac post–
script to this statement and actually reinforce, as I hope to make
clear later, the principles which activate the oppression they decry.)
Uncle Tom's Cabin
is a very bad novel, having, in its self-
