THE FUGITIVE SLAVE AS HUMORIST

James W. Clark, Jr.

The most humorous historians of slavery in America, paradoxically, have been some fugitives whose slave narratives were published during the Abolition Crusade as propaganda. Of course, Milton and Lewis Clarke, Henry Bibb, Henry Box Brown, and Sojourner Truth, to cite a group of the best narrative subjects, were not literary comedians.¹ Josiah Henson, Frederick Douglass, and William Wells Brown, men whose fame extends beyond their narratives, certainly were not funny men either.² Yet all but one of these people were far from humorless. They possessed a wit like that of the unnamed former slaves who are substantially represented in Lay My Burden Down, a folk history of slavery edited by B. A. Botkin and published in l945.³

But the wit of the fugitives whose narratives were made public before the Civil War deserves special consideration. Given the slave narratives’ purpose of arousing and sustaining sentiment against slavery, it might have seemed to Garrison and others that recitals of that institution’s unrelenting horror would achieve that end most effectively.⁴ But the content of many authentic narratives suggests that through occasional humor this propaganda became more apt and believable. The auditors and readers of this material sensed that real people were being revealed. The fugitives’ mixture of their wit with their woes made their utterances poignant. In the idiom of that day, their manner of narration "hit a straight lick with a crooked stick."⁵

Since the public that was committing itself to the abolition of slavery viewed the slave owners as adversaries, perhaps no passages in the narratives pleased crusaders more than those in which the slaves outwitted their masters. The Clarke brothers of Kentucky recount such an incident on their master’s place where the order of the mid-July day had been to harvest a sixty-acre wheat field before any slave could have any food or drink.

When master and overseer and all hands were locked up in sleep, ten or twelve of us went down to the spring house; a house built over a spring to keep milk and other things cool. We pressed altogether against the door, and open it came. We found half of a good baked pig, plenty of cream, milk, and other delicacies; and, as we felt in some measure delegated to represent all that had been cheated of their meals the day before, we ate plentifully. But after a successful plundering expedition within the gates of the enemy’s camp, it is not easy always to cover the retreat. We had a reserve in the pasture for this purpose. We went up to the herd of swine, and, with a

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milkpail in hand, it was easy to persuade them there was more where that came from, and the whole tribe followed readily into the spring house, and we left them there to wash the dishes and wipe up the floor, while we retired to rest.⁶

The same two brothers relate other instances in which their owner was duped. In one, the pervasive game of the slaves’ wearing verbal masks is detailed.

Do not slaves often say that they love their masters very much?—Say so? yes, certainly. And this loving master and mistress is the hardest work that slaves have to do. When any stranger is present, we have to love them very much. When master is sick, we are in great trouble. Every night the slaves gather around the house, and send up one or two to see how master does. They creep up to .the bed, and with a very soft voice, inquire, "how is dear massa? O massa, how we want to hear your voice out in the field again!" Well, this is what they say up in the sick room. They come down to their anxious companions. "how is the old man?" "Will he die?" "Yes, yes, he sure to go, this time; he never whip the slaves no more." "Are you sure? Will he die" "O yes! surely gone for it, now." Then they all look glad, and go to the cabin with a merry heart.⁷

When this master actually died, two slaves went out to dig his- grave. Lewis Clarke recounts the incident: "They dug it very deep. As I passed by, I asked Jess and Bob what in the world they dug it so deep for. It was down six or seven feet. I told them there would be a fuss about it. And they had better fill it up some. Jess said it suited him exactly. Bob said he would not fill it up; he wanted to get the old man as near home as possible. When we got a stone to put on his grave, we hauled the largest we could find, so as to fasten him down as strong as possible."⁸

Not all anecdotes of the duped master involved such finality, however. Frederick Douglass was once sent by the man who claimed him in Maryland to spend a year in the employment of a Mr. Covey, who was supposed to tame the slave. Douglass tells how he exercised an impious control over his interim master. "The exercises of his family devotions were always commenced with singing; as he was a very poor singer himself, the duty of raising the hymn generally came upon me. He would read his hymn, and nod at me to commence. I would at times do so; at others, I would not. My non-compliance would almost always produce much confusion. To show himself independent of me, he would start and stagger through with his hymn in the most discordant manner. In this state of mind he prayed with more than ordinary spirit."⁹

While Douglass and the Clarke brothers were still slaves, their witty evasions and duplicities had been natural compromises between submission to the system and revolt within it. After they ran away from it and became propagandists for abolition, their humorous narratives emphasized their human worth and provided additional arguments against slavery.

The widening circle of those to be duped is illustrated by the Narrative of Henry Bibb.¹⁰ After this light-skinned slave made his escape, he halted his journey to Canada and got a job as a porter and bootblack at the American Hotel In Portsmouth, Ohio. I-us salary was set at twelve dollars a week. But when his boss turned out to be poor pay, Bibb concocted, as he relates, a method of getting his money. "I made it a point never to blacken all the boots and shoes over night, neither would I put any of them in the bar-room but lock them up in a room where no one could get them without calling for me. I got a piece of broken vessel, placed it in the room just before the boots, and put [in] several pieces of small change, as if it had been given me for boot blacking; and almost every one that came in after their boots, would throw some small trifle into my contribution box, while I was blacking away."¹¹ Earlier in his life Bibb bad been a house slave for a mistress whom he describes as a tyrant. When she tired of him, she hired him out; but, as Bibb later recalled, "I had become . . . skilled in running away, and would make calculations to avoid detection, by taking with me a bridle. If any body should see me in the woods, as they have, and asked, ‘What are you doing here sir? You are a run-away?’—l said—’No, sir, I am looking for our old mare.’"¹²

Occasionally the bested person in these narratives is a black fellow. William Wells Brown tells of having fooled a man into taking a whipping that was intended for him.

He was a free man, and had been in the city only a short time. I told him I had a note to go to the jail, and get a trunk to carry to one of the steamboats; but was so busily engaged that I could not do it although I had a dollar to pay for it. lie asked me if I would not give him the job. I handed him the note and the dollar and off he started for the jail. . . . I walked around the corner and took my station, intending to see how my friend looked when he came out. I had not been there but a short time, when a colored man came around the corner, and said to another colored man with whom he was acquainted— "They are giving a nigger scissors in the jail."

"What for?" said the other. The man continued:

"A nigger came into the jail, and asked for the jailer. The jailer came out, and he handed him a note and said he wanted to get a trunk. The jailer told him to go with him, and he would give him the trunk. So he took him into the room, and told the nigger to give up the dollar. He said a man had given

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him the dollar to pay for getting the trunk. But that lie would not answer. So they made him strip himself, and then they tied him down, and are now whipping him."¹³

When Brown soon met his victim in the street outside the jail, he denied any knowledge of the note’s content and asked what the jailer had done. The free Negro declared: "They whipped me and took my dollar and give me this note." On cue Brown offered to buy the note from him for fifty cents, which was all the money Brown had. The free Negro agreed. Directly Brown presented this note to his master: "Dear Sir:—By your direction, I have given your boy twenty lashes. He is a very saucy boy, and tried to make me believe that he did not belong to you, and I put it on him well for lying to me."¹⁴ Brown’s crime had been spilling wine on one of his master’s guests the previous night in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

On the religious side of the slave’s existence, the plantation system itself could be the duper. The amusing misconceptions which Henry Box Brown relates are representative.

I really believed my old master was Almighty God, and that his son, my young master, was Jesus Christ. One reason I had for this belief was, that when it was about to thunder, my old master would approach us, if we were in the yard, and say "All you children run into the house now, for it is going to rain," and when the shower was over, we would go out again and he would approach us smilingly and say, "What a fine shower we have had," and bidding us look at the flowers in the garden, would say, "How pretty the flowers look now." We thought that he thundered, and caused the rain to fall; and not until I was eight years of age, did I get rid of this childish superstition.¹⁵

No mature fugitive of slavery who has left a narrative has given a richer and more humorous account of abiding religious beliefs than Sojourner Truth. The reasonableness of her exhortations adds to their value as entertainment, as in the following example:

Why, if God works by the day, and one day’s work tires him, and he is obliged to rest, either from weariness or on account of darkness, or if he waited for the "cool of the day to walk in the garden," because he was inconvenienced by the heat of the sun, why then it seems that God cannot do as much as I can; for I can bear the sun at noon, and work several days and nights in succession without being much tired. Or, if he rested nights because of the darkness, it is very queer that he should make night so dark that he could not see himself. If I had been God, I would have made the night light enough for my own convenience, surely.¹⁶

Prayer, too, was her forte; in her Narrative she almost scolds God when

she learns that her son is being sold to the master of a distant plantation: "Oh God, you know how I am distressed for I have told you again and again. Now God, help me get my son. If you were in trouble, as I am, and I could help you, as you can me, think I wouldn’t do it? Yes, God, you know I have no money, but you can make the people do for me, and you must make the people do for me. I will never give you peace till you do, God."¹⁷

Another fugitive whose religious beliefs informed a large part of his narrative was Josiah Henson. His recital, which affected Mrs. Stowe considerably in portraying Uncle Tom, was essentially humorless, however. Henson explains his refusal to use humor: "I could give here a great many particulars, which would amuse and interest the reader, if they did not instruct him. But is better not to indulge the inclination. . . ."¹⁸

Henson’s sensibilities concerning humor were mistaken. That which amuses is not necessarily antithetical to the instructive. It would have been better for literature and for history, time and taste have suggested, if Mrs. Stowe’s Uncle Toni had not been so good and so tolerant as to give his dignity to the dogs. Likewise, The Life of Josiah Henson¹⁹ might have been a rival in its own right to the autobiographies of Frederick Douglass and the other fugitives that have been praised if its treatment had been less serious and pious. With Uncle Tom and with Josiah the tendency of critics has been to satirize what each man is rather than to praise or believe either man’s perception of his world.

The occasional humor with which the most successful slave narratives are related argues for the thesis that humor encouraged the nineteenth-century public to believe in and support figures like the Clarke brothers who robbed old master cold and laid the crime to the pigs. Their wit made their sobering stories more urgent calls for the reform of the economic order. Whether at the expense of their white masters, their black fellows, or their God, the nonsatirical humor of the slaves probably never made more converts to social change than among those Americans who read or heard these believable slave narratives by fugitives before the Civil War.

NORTH CAROLINA STATE UNIVERSITY

NOTES

    ¹These subjects either dictated their narratives or enjoyed the assistance of an editor. Joseph C. Lovejoy, Narratives of the Sufferings of Lewis and Milton Clarke (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1846); Lucius C. Matlack, ed., Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb (New York: Published by the Author, 1849); Charles Stearns, Narrative of Henry Box Brown (Boston: Brown and Stearns, I 849); and [Olive Gilbert], Narrative of Sojourner Truth (Boston: Printed by the Author,

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1850). Information about the fugitives’ assistants is supplied in Marion W. Starling, "The Slave Narrative, Its Place in American Literary History," Diss. NYU 1946, pp. 429–33.
   ²An anonymous amanuensis [Samuel Eliot], identified by Starling, assisted in the preparation or The Life of Josiah Henson (Boston: Arthur P. Phelps, 1849). Douglass was aided in completing Narrative of tile Life of Frederick Douglass (Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1845) by William L. Garrison and Wendell Phillips. Edmund Qwincy helped the subject in writing Narrative of William Wells Brown, (Boston: The Anti-Slavery Office, 1847).
   ³I have relied upon the fifth impression, Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961.
   ⁴ See Douglass, pp. v–viii and Lovejoy, pp. 3–5.
   ⁵Botkin, p. 2.
   ⁶Lovejoy, p. 29.
   ⁷lbid., p. 113.
   ⁸Ibid.
   ⁹Douglass, p. 62.
   ¹⁰A 1969 reprint of this work by the Negro Universities Press of New York is available. It is typical of other recent editions; Lovejoy, for example, has been reprinted by Arno Press (New York, 1969).
   ¹¹Matlack, p. 170.
   ¹²Ibid., pp. 16–17.
   ¹³Brown. pp. 53–55.
   ¹⁴Ibid., p. 56.
   ¹⁵Stearns, p. 25.
   ¹⁶Gilbert, p. 107.
   ¹⁷Ibid., p. 70.
   ¹⁸Eliot, p. 76.
   ¹⁹This work is not to be confused with Uncle Tom’s Story of his Life (London: "Christian Age" Office, 1877), which Henson prepared with assistance from Mrs. Stowe and others after his fame had spread worldwide.

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