Jamaica Kincaid is an essayist and
novelist whose most recent work of fiction is
See Now Then.
Apparently, under any circumstances, money cannot buy you love, but in
antebellum Georgia it could buy the
one you love, according to the
extraordinary 1857 novel
The Garies and Their Friends by the novelist,
poet, and essayist Frank J. Webb. One of the first novels published by an
African American, it debuted with a glowing endorsement from Harriet Beecher
Stowe.
Mr. Garie, the master of a prosperous plantation,
had seen the woman who would become his wife—a woman who was not
entirely black, not entirely white—for sale in Savannah; he bought her,
brought her home, and proceeded to treat her and their two children as any
nice and decent man would treat his family. Mr. Garie is a very happy fellow
when we first meet him: His wife is beautiful; his children look white; there
is plenty of delicious food on his table. But Mrs. Garie worries, aware that
if Mr. Garie should die, his survivors would be regarded as property, not
heirs, and sold, most likely separately. To avoid such unbearable sorrow,
Mrs. Garie persuades her husband to move them all away, to Philadelphia.
There they are free from the horror of slavery, but not from everlasting
prejudice.
In the South, Mr. Garie's privilege was enough
to protect them as long as he lived; in the North, they all are in danger
because Mrs. Garie is not white. Webb brilliantly shows how white society in
the North had its own obsessions with the presence of black people, rarely
leaving them alone to simply cope with the difficulties of ordinary human
existence. That this American classic does not occupy a prominent place in
the literary canon is not really a mystery, though it is a shame. Its subject
is not the almost invisible flaw in a golden bowl carved from pristine
crystal, but the visible fracture in our American ideal; its scarlet letter
is the color of our skin.
