Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em><\/a> had on mid-19th Century America, indeed the world. Lincoln was dead on.<\/p>\nUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> is a barn-burner, even today. What a story it tells! By following the lives of a small cast of black and white characters over a five-year period, it rubs salt in every societal wound: those that were open to public debate, those no one dared speak of, those that live on today.<\/p>\nUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> is about slavery, forced miscegenation, eugenics, the destruction of families. It\u2019s about the underground railroad. It\u2019s about the still-shocking collusion between the federal government and slave states in passing laws not only making it illegal for citizens of free states to help fugitive slaves, but mandating their cooperation in returning slaves to their masters. It\u2019s about the pervasive white fear of slave uprisings. It even brings up the idea of reparations, a subject that to this very day causes white brains to explode.<\/p>\nWhen Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> was published, in 1852, it was immediately banned in the South as abolitionist propaganda. Throughout the 20th century and up to the present day, conservatives and liberals continue to challenge the book\u2019s inclusion on school reading lists, citing objectionable language: niggers (house & field varieties), darkies, \u201cthe despised race,\u201d mulattoes, quadroons, octoroons, pickaninnies, mammies, Sambos … language that frankly makes me squirm … but what leaps out even more forcefully is Stowe\u2019s condemnation of Christianity as practiced by white preachers and congregations. There\u2019s no doubt in my mind this is the unvoiced reason behind most contemporary objections and challenges.<\/p>\nReading Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, I\u2019m uncomfortably reminded that I grew up with people who used the same words and held the same benighted beliefs. I attended churches where racism and an implicit approval of slavery was still espoused from the pulpit. Sadly, there\u2019s plenty of evidence the kids I grew up with passed the poison on to their children and grandchildren.<\/p>\nUncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> hasn\u2019t lost its mojo: it still has the power to stir. But great parts of it are offensively unbelievable to modern readers, probably the result of Harriet Beecher Stowe pulling her punches, not wanting to completely alienate her intended white audience, too timid to say all the things that were in her heart. An example: in 1852, it was conceivable to white readers that a little white girl could swoon and die from nothing more than an excess of sensitivity, waving her lace kerchief to sobbing, devoted slaves as she drifts away. A little black girl, on the other hand, could be torn from her mother, forcibly impregnated by a white master, see her own child in turn sold downriver for another white man to fuck, be worked almost to death in the cotton fields once she lost her looks, whipped and kicked like a recalcitrant mule … and express no emotion more forceful than annoyance, coarse creature that she is.<\/p>\nAnd Uncle Tom … I thought I knew what it meant to call someone an \u201cUncle Tom.\u201d I didn\u2019t know the half of it. Tom loves his white masters. He\u2019ll do anything for them. When he\u2019s taken from his wife and children and sold downriver, he goes willingly, hoping for the best. He embraces the white man\u2019s Jesus, the cruelest character in the book: absent, uncaring, the emptiest of empty promises. Even as Tom exhales his final breath, the life literally beaten out of him, he cannot imagine raising a hand against a white man. Brother, you call someone an Uncle Tom, you\u2019re really calling him something!<\/p>\n
Condemned and praised, Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em> is everything it\u2019s accused of: horrifying, upsetting, offensive, thought-provoking, moving. It started a war. It ended slavery in this country … at least for now.<\/p>\nNote:<\/em> I read an illustrated and annotated version<\/a>. The 150 black and white illustrations and 32 pages of color artwork are of historical interest and may be worth the extra expense. The notes and commentary by Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Hollis Robbins, on the other hand, are trivial and distracting … they read as if written by fussy 12-year-olds. If you\u2019re considering buying a copy of Uncle Tom\u2019s Cabin<\/em>, skip this annotated version and just buy the real thing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"YCRT! is a periodic post featuring banned book reviews and news roundups. Banned & Challenged Books I’m not a big fan of lists, but here’s one I can get behind: five subversive children’s books everyone should read. Parents in Texas go after a high school AP English reading list and school administrators cave, removing Chuck Palaniuk’s Fight […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[47,412,30],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11864","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-banned-books","category-books-reviews","category-reviews"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11864","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11864"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11864\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":31903,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11864\/revisions\/31903"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11864"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11864"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pwoodford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11864"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
![\"can't](\"http:\/\/farm8.staticflickr.com\/7183\/6883320413_277cc81f45.jpg\")
<\/p>\n![\"uncle](\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8329\/8372636041_361f10ea6f_m.jpg\")
<\/a>Uncle Tom’s Cabin<\/a>![\"4_0\"](\"http:\/\/farm9.staticflickr.com\/8170\/7979979821_c1d2ba3232_o.jpg\")
<\/p>\n