Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 165impose on black people to justify their enslavement of them. “Slavery makes its
victims lying and mean,” Brown points out, “for which vices it afterwards reproaches
them, and uses them as arguments to prove that they deserve no better fate.”
Brown traveled to Europe, remaining there until 1854. In 1852 he published Three
Years in Europe, the first African-American travel book, consisting mainly of letters
the author had written to friends and newspapers in America. And in 1853 he
published Clotel. He was later to revise the novel and republish it several times: once
in serial form as “Miralda; or, the Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of Slavery,
Founded on Fact” (1860–1861) and twice in novel form, as Clotelle: A Tale of the
Southern States (1864) and Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine – A Tale of the Southern
States (1867). In 1848 Brown had written a piece for a compilation, The Antislavery
Harp, entitled “Jefferson’s Daughter,” based on the well-established rumor that
Thomas Jefferson had had a mulatto daughter by his housekeeper, an African-
American, who was then sold at a New Orleans slave auction. This was evidently the
inspiration for Clotel, although in none of the different versions is Jefferson ever
mentioned by name. What is notable about the novel is how openly, for its day, it
explores the related themes of black concubinage, miscegenation, and the link
between sexual and racial oppression. “With the growing population in the Southern
states, the increase of mulattoes has been very great,” the story begins. “Society does
not frown upon the man who sits with his half-white child upon his knee whilst the
mother stands, a slave, behind his chair.” Claiming that “the real, or clear black, does
not amount to more than one in four of the slave population,” the narrator then
goes on to consider the tragic consequences of this racially and sexually charged
situation. Through several generations, black women are shown at the mercy of the
arbitrary power and the sexual whims of white men and the jealousy of white
women. “Every married woman at the South,” the reader is told, “looks upon her
husband as unfaithful, and regards every negro woman as a rival.” Daughters are
sold at slave auction; a black concubine is sent off to a slave trader at the insistence
of a jealous white wife; one black woman kills herself rather than suffer further
enslavement; another woman is put up for auction with her daughter, on the death
of her husband, when it is discovered that, legally, she is black and still a slave.
To an extent, Clotel is a symptom of the racial blindness it diagnoses. The narrator
observes that there is considerable prejudice “even among the negroes themselves”
about racial coloration. “The nearer the negro or the mulatto approaches to the white,”
he says, “the more he seems to feel his superiority over those of darker hue.” He then
illustrates that prejudice himself: the heroines in this story all tend to be fair-skinned,
while the comic characters, the fools, tricksters, and villainous collaborators with
white oppression, all tend to be black. But this is something that Brown may have
sensed himself. In its original version, the beloved of the heroine, Clotel, is of lighter
complexion just like her. In the revised versions, however, he is described as “perfectly
black.” Clotel is reunited with her white father at the end of the novel; and, “having all
the prejudices against color which characterises his white fellow-countrymen,” the
father at first expresses his “dislike” of his son-in-law’s complexion. Clotel’s reply is
forthright and sums up the main intended message of the book. “I married himGGray_c02.indd 165ray_c 02 .indd 165 8 8/1/2011 7:54:41 AM/ 1 / 2011 7 : 54 : 41 AM