EVERYBODY'S PROTEST NOVEL
581
tention whatever beyond admiration. They are a race apart from
Topsy. It transpires by the end of the novel, through one of those
energetic, last-minute convolutions of the plot, that Eliza has some
connection with French gentility. The figure from whom the novel
takes its name, Uncle Tom, who is
.a
figure of controversy yet, is
jet-black, wooly-haired, illiterate; and he is phenomenally forbearing.
He has to be; he is black; only through this forbearance can he survive
or triumph. (Cf. Faulkner's preface to
The Sound and the Fury:
These others were not Compsons. They were black: - They endured.)
His triumph is metaphysical, unearthly; since he is black, born with–
out the light, it is only through humility, the incessant mortification
of the flesh, that he can enter into communion with God or man.
The virtuous rage of Mrs. Stowe is motivated by nothing so temporal
as a concern for the relationship of men to one another--or, even,
as she would have claimed, by a concern for their relationship to
God-but merely by a panic of being hurled into the flames, of being
caught in traffic with the devil. She embraced this merciless doctrine
with
all
her heart, bargaining shamelessly before the throne of grace:
God and salvation becoming her personal property, purchased with
the coin of her virtue. Here, black equates with evil and white with
grace; if, being mindful of the necessity of good works, she could
not cast out the blacks-a wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claim–
ing, like an obsession, her inner eye-she could not embrace them
either without purifying them of sin. She must cover their intimidating
nakedness, robe them in white, the garments of salvation; only thus
could she herself be delivered from ever-present sin, only thus could
she bury, as St. Paul demanded, "the carnal man, the man of the
flesh." Tom, therefore, her only black man, has been robbed of his
humanity and divested of his sex. It is the price for that darkness with
which he has been branded.
Uncle Tom's Cabin,
then,
is
activated by what might be called
a theological terror, the terror of damnation; and the spirit that
breathes in this book, hot, self-righteous, fearful, is not different from
that spirit of medieval times which sought to exorcize evil by burning
witches; and is not different from that terror which activates a lynch
mob. One need not, indeed, search for examples so historic or so
gaudy; this is a warfare waged daily in the heart, a warfare so vast,
so relentless and so powerful that the interracial handshake or the
