For those few who have not read . . .

Click on the image for a legible view.

Once upon a time, everyone under the sun — and a few in the shadows — knew a certain great novel so well, its characters’ names served as figures of speech. One still does, the very figure of servitude. Here’s a dictionary definition for another; it attests quite well to the novel’s ubiquity a century after publication. The definition was written by Eric Partridge and comes from his Name into Word: Proper Names That Have Become Common Property (London: Secker and Warburg, 1949):

Simon Legree tends, in American writing, to mean, literally and figuratively, ‘a cruel, sinister, relentless slave-driver’. …

For those few who have not read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which appeared in the early 1850s and did much to precipitate the emancipation of the Negroes in North America, it is necessary to mention that Simon Legree hounded Uncle Tom and his fellow-slaves and came to a somewhat gruesomely sticky end.

And for those few who have not read the novel, Legree’s comeuppance is precipitated by a certain Gothic tomfoolery, performed by two of the slaves, who prey on Legree’s mind by playing ghost. Here’s the sticky end as Stowe gives it:

… finally, there came over his sleep a shadow, a horror, an apprehension of something dreadful hanging over him. It was his mother’s shroud, he thought; but Cassy had it, holding it up, and showing it to him. He heard a confused noise of screams and groanings; and, with it all, he knew he was asleep, and has struggled to wake himself. He was half awake. He was sure something was coming into his room. He knew the door was opening, but he could not stir hand or foot. At last he turned, with a start; the door was open and, he saw a hand putting out his light.

It was a cloudy, misty moonlight, and there he saw it! — something white, gliding in! He heard the still rustle of its ghostly garments. It stood still by his bed; — a cold hand touched his; a voice said, three times, in a low, fearful whisper, “Come! come! come!” And, while he lay sweating with terror, he knew not when or how, the thing was gone. He sprang out of bed, and pulled at the door. It was shut and locked, and the man fell down in a swoon.

After this, Legree became a harder drinker than ever before. He no longer drank cautiously, prudently, but imprudently and recklessly.

There were reports around the country, soon after, that he was sick and dying. Excess had brought on that frightful disease that seems to throw the lurid shadows of a coming retribution back into the present life. None could bear the horrors of that sick-room, when he raved and screamed, and spoke of sights which almost stopped the blood of those who heard him; and, at his dying bed, stood a stern, white, inexorable figure, saying, “Come! come! come!”

I say “as Stowe gives it” because the dramatizations that flourished in the nineteenth century and after often altered the details. Legree is shot, for instance, in the most popular of the stage versions, that of George L. Aiken.

Oddly, Partridge has no entry at all for Tom or Uncle Tom, though this epithet has had much a longer shelf life than Legree. Go figure.

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Variation on a Historical Theme

I’ve been trying to get a fix on antebellum popular song, something that’s hard to do when you can’t read music. Something that’s probably hard to do anyway, since there aren’t any recordings. But even without reading music, it’s fun to nose around through the sheet music of the time. Something that’s easy to do thanks to American Memory, the Library of Congress website, which has an endless supply of it (drawn from the archives of Brown, Duke, and the Library of Congress itself).

What sort of stuff can you find there? Stuff like “Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe” (1853), an anti-abolitionist minstrel song with words by Charles Soran, music by Charles M. Stephani. I posted a page of the sheet music the other day, with a transcription of the lyrics. What follows are some contextual comments, of the sort I might make in the classroom … a first attempt to assimilate song to my account of the period’s poetic cultures.

I singled out this song in part because there’s a recording (link here) at one of my favorite websites, Uncle Tom’s Cabin & American Culture; in part because the song illustrates so nicely the way art takes shape in response to historical events. And by “events” I don’t mean the overarching events like slavery and class stratification that gave shape to minstrelsy as a whole (a subject treated extensively by scholars, my favorite of these being William T. Lhamon in Raising Cain). I mean the more easily forgotten episodes that produce topical songs. “Topical” as in a medicine: something applied to the surface of the social body. Of course, when hucksters sell medicine, the result is often poison, and that’s the case here.

I won’t be speaking of the song as song, only of the sheet music as literary artifact. Not that I lack interest in the music. Rather, I feel inadequate to the task, not knowing, for instance, how accurate the recording might be in its instrumentation, performance style, or adherence to the score. I will say, though, that the available rendition — by Japher’s “Original” Sandy River Minstrels — reminds me of a record I had as a boy, from which I learned a number of classic children’s songs, among them two minstrel numbers that outlived blackface: “Jimmy Crack Corn” and “Oh! Susanna.” But to the sheet music…

Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe

Words: Charles Soran
Music: Charles M. Stephani

A blackface minstrel song, and a good indication of the controversy stirred up by Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For a modern recording, go here. Lyrics below, as transcribed from the sheet music, racist language and all. Brief commentary to follow.

Image courtesy the Library of Congress (click for link to collection)

I went to New York city, a month or two ago,
Hunting for dat lady, Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe;
I see’d de Abolitions, dey said she’d gone away,
Dey told me in de city it was no use to stay.
She take away de dollars, and put ’em in her pocket,
She laid her hand upon it, and dar she safely lock it.
Dey said if Massa come for me, den dey would quickly meet;
Dey’d make a Lion of me, and gib me ’nuff to eat.

Chorus.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe
How could you leave de country, and sarve poor niggers so.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe
How could you leave de country, and sarve poor niggers so.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe
How could you leave de country, and sarve poor niggers so.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe
How could you leave de country, and sarve poor niggers so.

2.

Dey treated dis ere child, as doe I was a Turk,
Den told me for to leve dem and go away to work;
I couldn’t get no work, I couldn’t get no dinner,
And den I wish de Fugitive was back in Ole Virginny.
Oh! when I was a picanin, Ole Uncle Tom would say,
Be true unto your Massa, and neber run away.
He told me dis at home, he told me dis at partin,
Don’t trust you de Ab’litions, for dey seem quite unsartin.

Chorus.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe, &c.

3.

Ole Massa’s very kind, ole Missu’s kind at home too,
And much I love my Dinah, in ole Virginny true,
Now I’ll go back and stay dar, and neber more will roam,
Lor bress de Southern Ladies, and my ole Virginny home,
But don’t come back, Aunt Harriet, in England make a fuss,
Go talk against your Country, put money in your puss,
And when us happy niggers, you pity in your prayer,
Oh! don’t forget de White slave, dat’s starvin ober dare.

Chorus.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe, &c.

4.

Now de rules of dis here house, don’t admit of no encore,
So afore we go just listen, I’ll sing you one verse more,
Aunt Harriet Beecha Stowe, she tried to see de Queen,
But Victoria was too smart for her, and could not be seen;
She den went o’er to France, and tried to come it dere,
But de Empress and Emperor, know’d ‘xactly what dey were,
So de best way to fix it, and hab it understood,
Is dat she left de Country, for her own Country’s good.

Chorus.
O! O! Aunt Harriet Becha Stowe, &c.