New York_ The Novel - Edward Rutherfurd [207]
A curse to the slave owners of the South, that was for sure.
The wretched thing had started quietly enough, as a serial in a little magazine that was only read by the abolitionist crowd anyway. But then, last year, some fool of a publisher had put it out as a book, and it had broken all records. Three hundred thousand copies sold in America already, and still going strong. He’d heard they’d sold another two hundred thousand in England as well. Though a friend just back from London had told him: “The English are delighting in it, not so much for the slavery issue, but because they say it shows what a bunch of savages we uppity Americans really are.” There was no end to its run in America in sight, either. The publisher was putting out a deluxe edition now, with nearly a hundred and twenty illustrations, and the lady herself was publishing another work about how she came to write the book in the first place, called A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin. No doubt that’d be a best-seller too.
And what was the thing about anyway? The story of a slave family and their trials and tribulations. Nothing new there. But it was written in the sentimental style, with a black mammy, and sweet pickaninny children, and a slave family broken up, and dear old Uncle Tom, the faithful, fatherly, suffering slave, dying at the end. No wonder all the women liked it.
“Our family had a slave like Uncle Tom,” he remarked. “By name of Hudson. My grandfather knew him. He was happy enough, I believe. I certainly never heard he complained.”
“He wasn’t a slave, he was free,” Hetty corrected him. “And he lost his only son, who was captured and probably sold into slavery in the South. Your family tried to find the boy for years, but never could. Your father told me all about it.”
“That may be,” he allowed. “But the book’s just a sentimental tale about an old slave who loves everybody. There are no Uncle Toms in real life.”
“That just shows you haven’t read it, dear,” she said. “Uncle Tom’s as real as you or me, and not at all sentimental. When it’s necessary, he encourages slaves to run away. As for the rest, slaves are separated from their children, flogged and sold down the river. Are you saying these things don’t happen?”
“I guess I’m not,” said Frank.
“Everyone agrees it’s a wonderful book.”
“Not in the South, they don’t. I heard that a man in Arkansas was run out of town for selling it. The South says the book’s a criminal slander. They’re furious.”
“Well, they should be repentant.”
“It’s not surprising really,” he continued mildly. “After all, the villain of the book is a typical Southern slave holder.”
“Actually,” said Hetty, “if you’d read the book you’d know he’s a Yankee who moved south. The Southern gentleman in the book is a kindly man.”
“Well, people in the South don’t like it, anyhow.”
“The point is not about any individual, Frank. It’s about a system.”
They had walked as far as Thirty-sixth Street. Seeing a cab, Master hailed it, hoping the business of getting in would break his wife’s concentration. It didn’t.
“The system, Frank,” she continued, as soon as they were seated, “whereby one human being can own another as a chattel. This book”—she took it out, and clearly meant to give it to him—“is a Christian book, Frank. A challenge to all Christians. How can we countenance such an evil in our land?”
“And what,” he asked wearily, “do you expect me to do about it?”
She paused. Evidently she had been thinking about it.
“I think, Frank,” she said quietly, “that we ought to consider whether we do business with slave owners.”
He almost cried, “Are you out of your mind?” But fortunately, he caught himself, and waited a few moments before he replied.
“Hard to be a New York merchant and have nothing to do with the cotton trade.”
That was quite an understatement. Generations of New