Complete Misery Sink In

Ah, the mower.  Pushing it over some hilly ground this morning I caught a root and the motor shut down.  No luck when I try to pull it to start.  It sounds like there is something off alignment down there. I’d only just got the pull-chord fixed last week.  I guess I’ll be taking it back to the repair shop.  

Pushed through to the completion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin this morning.  Difficult but only so, to imagine the assertive religiosity of the Second Awakening, in places like here in upstate New York, where Joseph Smith got his start.  The American righteousness that was framed in emphatic, prescriptive Christian terms wouldn’t suffice today.  Tom was a believer.  He had faith and acted nobly, if submissively, as Jesus, presumably would have.  Never having read the book but having been long familiar with the aspersion, “Uncle Tom” it’s interesting to consider that, to my reading, Tom was less a boot licker, but someone who was brave in his faith.  That it sprung from the imagination of a white woman, notwithstanding, I’m curious now to see if the opprobrium associated with the term was used in equal measure by Southern Christian Leadership Conference as was by, say, the Panthers. 

Now we would watch a video clip of some injustice and get riled in under ninety seconds and then share it with everyone we know.  This novel was short of theatre and music, the only way collective such a story could be shared.  It would be interesting to read review at the time from not only southerners in general, but from the likes of Fredrick Douglass as well.  One assumes it was taken as gospel in the communities of Massachusetts or New York.   (Though presumably not Connecticut, which had only abolished slavery four years before the book was published in 1852!)

I must say, I enjoyed the unfiltered realism of Solomon Northrup’s “Twelve Years a Slave” and Fredrick Douglas autobiography much more.  But the routines are remarkably similar.  There is a good master who is almost tolerable.  Then that master comes on hard times and has to sell the slave who goes somewhere else, (for Northrup and Uncle Tom, deep down south) to a much worse plantation with a miserably cruel master or overseer.  Not unlike reading about the Holocaust, things necessarily go from from bad to worse, which all voicing of this genre must pass through.  It doesn’t seem like one can confront “enough” of this progression to let the complete misery sink in.

Wednesday, 5/13/20