From Uncle Tom to Uncle Robin: “Dabbling with Master’s Will”

Corina Crisu

Rewriting

Polytropic Identities

in the Postmodern African American Novel

Chapter V

“Fiction-Made Characters”

Parodying Stereotypes in Ishmael Reed’s

Flight to Canada

From Uncle Tom to Uncle Robin: “Dabbling with Master’s Will”

When exposing the lurking presence of the conventional South, Reed pays special attention to the stereotype of the black pacifist. It is the aim of this section to see how Stowe’s Uncle Tom is imaginatively transformed into Reed’s Uncle Robin, by laying stress on disguise and literacy. As suggested above, Stowe’s white sentimentalism is remade by Reed’s “critique of seriousness” that discloses his anti-essentialist view upon black identity (Jessee 1996, 128). Reed’s embittered laughter castigates Stowe’s position as the nation’s scribe delegated to present the African Americans’ story. To quote Hortense Spillers, we as readers are “coerced to change our mind about who and what ‘character’ is” (1989, 55). For that reason, Reed undermines the hackneyed image of the black pacifist who passively submits to the white man’s oppression. Retaining Tom’s obedient meekness only apparently, Uncle Robin’s subversive behavior controls his master’s will both literally and figuratively.

To contextualize his story, Reed parodies Stowe’s attempts to romanticize the Southern aristocracy. The Virginia plantation in Flight to Canada reverberates with the medieval feuds and the Arthurian legends: the master’s name is Arthur, his castle is a fine replica of Arthur’s castle in Camelot, swarming with knights, ladies, and… slaves. Through ingenious comparisons, Reed draws attention to the continuation of Eurocentric views: if medieval Arthur fought with the Saxons and with the Druid gods, “his descendants came to his America and made war against the gods of ‘Indians’ and Africans” (16). Swille’s aristocratic ambitions perpetuate the “Anglican Grand Design,” with “the whole dang-blasted genteel crew” (49).

Not surprisingly, the quintessence of this “dang-blasted genteel crew” should be found in Stowe’s book, which emphasizes the aristocratic atmosphere of the Southern domain. Thus, we encounter the Byronic St. Clare, the angelic Eva (alias Annabel Lee), and, mostly, the elegant mansion of a Southern plantation:

The carriage stopped in front of an ancient mansion, built in that odd mixture of Spanish and French style, of which there are specimens in some parts of New Orleans. It was built in the Moorish fashion,—a square building enclosing a court-yard, into which the carriage drove through an arched gateway. The court, in the inside, had evidently been arranged to gratify a picturesque and voluptuous ideality. Wide galleries ran all around the four sides, whose Moorish arches, slender pillars, and arabesque ornaments, carried the mind back, as in a dream, to the reign of oriental romance in Spain (167-68).

If Stowe’s above description reunites the East and the West, Reed’s Southern domain juxtaposes several temporal levels. Thus, Arthur Swille’s castle and his collections of medieval fettering equipment are part of a postmodern collage, together with the telephone, the color TV, the milk pail fulla toddy, the free dental care, and the spot remover.

Reed populates this Southern setting with a handful of characters taken from Stowe’s book. Significantly, Stowe’s couple Uncle Tom-Aunt Chloe is transformed here into Uncle Robin and Aunt Judy, who live in the Frederick Douglass Houses, who watch TV and drink champagne, and whose children are free and work in the North. The emblematic Southern aristocrat is represented by Master Swille—the rich, educated, necrophilic baron, who daily drinks slave mothers’ milk, and cherishes incestuous memories of his sister. His wife, Ms. Swille, is the ironic portrayal of a Southern emancipated belle, who spends her time watching the Beecher Hour Show on television. Their son, the anthropologist who was eaten by African cannibals, is a burlesque version of Stowe’s young Master George, the liberator who emancipates his slaves.

Stowe’s soft-hearted mammy is also present in Reed’s text, where she turns into the hard-hearted Barracuda. When depicting the relationship between mammy and her mistress, Reed inverts Stowe’s significance. If Stowe depicts mammy as a poor, fatigued creature who does not sleep at night in order to take care of the hypochondriac Marie, Reed depicts mammy as a maternal presence who nurtures her master, but also as a terrifying one who patronizes her mistress, in a subversive act of taking her place.³⁵ At Barracuda’s side, Topsy makes her momentary appearance as a disobedient character, reminding us of the tricky, theatrical presence of Stowe’s Topsy.³⁶

Among these characters, both Tom and Robin occupy significant places as literate slaves. Tom’s most distinct trait of character is his religious faith that inspires his self-sacrificing attitude toward the others. Stowe’s “antebellum discourse of benevolence” solicits readers to identify with Tom’s patience, suffering, and humanity (Ryan 2000, 752). Tom is defined accordingly as a minister for his black people, “a sort of patriarch in religious matters,” whose whole appearance bears the imprint of “the touching simplicity, the child-like earnestness, of his prayer” (35).

Stowe takes special care in making Tom the prototype of the African pacifist: “He was a large, broad-chested, powerfully-made man, of a full glossy black, and a face whose truly African features were characterized by an expression of grave and steady good sense, united with much kindliness and benevolence” (27). When Tom is sold down South, he endures the harshest treatment not because of his lack of courage, but because of his Christian principles. His strong sense of responsibility toward both the blacks and the whites manifests on various occasions: his love for his family and community; his refusal to run away from the Shelby plantation; his rescuing of little Eva from drowning; his role in St. Clare’s conversion and later in the conversion of the black people on Legree’s plantation; finally, his martyrdom as a consequence of his refusal to tell on Cassy and Emmeline.³⁷

With subtle irony, Reed’s Uncle Robin flings away Tom’s heroic coat and becomes a man of many schemes who humbly subverts his master’s intentions. To be sure, the innocent-looking Robin—an example of servility—knows how to turn the tables on his side after his master’s death, how to take his place and inherit his Southern estate. His final confession—“I dabbled with [Master’s] will” (170)—has a double meaning. On the one hand, his remark suggests his ability to lie and cajole in order to modify his master’s testament; on the other hand, his remark reveals his ability to control his master’s decisions. Seen as “a simple creature” by his master, Robin is in fact a strategist who gingerly calculates each of his movements. The white black man Moe perfectly defines Robin: “[master] thinks you are docile, but sometimes it seems to me that you’re the cleverest of them all” (40).

Robin’s name in itself is significant: being a bird, the robin connotes flight, freedom, movement, and crossing borders. More than that, Robin also sends us semantically to Robin Hood, another trespasser, the legendary English outlaw of the 12^th century; or to Robin Goodfellow alias Puck, the mischievous sprite in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. A fiction-made hero with a thousand faces, Robin is both a slave and a master—a travestied gentleman, wearing either Moorish attire or Swille’s clothes. (He reminds us here of Tom’s neat appearance, when Tom is derisively seen as one of those “niggers who tried to be gentlemen” (Stowe 346)).

Intertextually, Robin himself makes open reference to Tom: “Sometimes it seems to me that we are all Uncle Toms” (41). Robin’s remark highlights the impossibility to escape an all-encompassing system, where the master-slave places are interchangeable. As in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, Reed seems to advocate throughout his novel the reversibility of situations and roles. Thus, when Swille dies consumed by fire, it is Robin who inherits his great estate. It is the slave who turns into a master, as suggested by Robin’s humorous cynicism: “I’m going to run it just like my Massa run it” (167). The plantation that belonged de facto to Robin, because he was the one who administered it (just as Tom took care of Shelby’s and later St. Clare’s plantations) becomes de jure his own, since he is legally Swille’s inheritor. In this way, both Tom and Robin look at property as if it is their own, only that they do this for different reasons: while Tom devotedly serves his master, Robin deceitfully minds his own interests.³⁸

Uncle Robin is certainly a polytropic character who knows how to snake his way through master’s papers, thus manipulating his master’s will. Considered to be like a computer by Swille, Robin makes use of literacy in order to impose his own volition, to appropriate what belonged to his master. In fact, it is the slave-animal stereotype that Reed undermines here. If Stowe and her contemporary abolitionists strove to dissolve the comparison between a black person and an animal, Reed’s postmodern approach undermines the slave/computer parallelism: “This computer left itself a whole estate. Property joining forces with property. I left me his whole estate. I’m it, too. Me and it got more it” (171). Robin’s pun suggests his condition as property in the eyes of his master, his inanimate status, and his objectified self.³⁹ Hence, Robin’s rewriting his master’s testament is an act of appropriating what already was part of himself, what already belonged to himself.

If Henson’s story was taken by Stowe, Robin’s story is to be entrusted to another black man, Raven Quickskill. The rewriting of Robin’s story by Raven draws attention to Reed’s rewriting of Stowe’s text. Like other postmodern metafictions by Barth, Carter, or Coover, Flight to Canada offers a parodic reworking of familiar conventions. In a double game of rupture and connection, Reed plays with the nineteenth century tradition, which he undermines. His historiographic metafiction thus keeps the balance between the familiar and the unfamiliar, seeking to defamiliarize conventions. While questioning Stowe’s novel, Reed presents to us an extremely self-conscious text, in which we as readers are confronted with the “uncertainty about the validity of its representations” (Waugh 1995, 40).⁴⁰

NOTES

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