There had been a revolt on board the San Dominick; the Negro sailors and the slaves had killed many of the whites, and had kept the others alive only for their skill as navigators in order to reach a Negro country. The mutineers and revolters are overcome in a bloody battle, carried to Lima, and executed. The contrast between the reputed gentleness of Negroes “that makes them the best body-servants in the world,” and the fierceness with which they fight for freedom is forcibly driven home. Certain Negroes stand out: Babo who, resembling a “begging friar,” engineered the revolt with great skill and is almost fiendish in his manner of breaking down Cereno’s morale; Francesco, the mulatto barber; Don José, personal servant of a Spanish Don; and Atulfa, an untamed African chieftain, all filled with hatred for whites. Melville graphically pictures the slave mothers, “equally ready to die for their infants or fight for them”; the four old men monotonously polishing their hatchets; and the murderous Ashantees. All bear witness to what Melville recognized as a spirit that it would take years of slavery to break.
Although opposed to slavery, Melville does not make Benito Cereno into an abolitionist tract; he is more concerned with a thrilling narrative and character portrayal. But although the mutineers are blood-thirsty and cruel, Melville does not make them into villains; they revolt as mankind has always revolted. Because Melville was unwilling to look upon men as “Isolatoes,” wishing instead of discover the “common continent of man,” he comes nearer the truth in his scattered pictures of a few unusual Negroes than do the other authors of this period.
Frontier Humor. The southern humorists, thriving from the thirties to the sixties, introduce the Negro only incidentally in their picture of horse-swapping, gander-pulling, camp meetings, fights, and political brawls. Because they were realistic, the “plantations” they show are most often backwood farms. The hard-fisted frontier squires, with a love of horse-play, and a callousness necessary for survival, treat their slaves as one would expect: they are neither Legrees nor American versions of Sir Roger de Coverly. In Georgia Scenes (1835), Longstreet non-committally shows a Southern backwoods “lady” knocking her servant around from mere habit. In Adventures of Simon Suggs (1846) Johnson Hooper gives good pictures of southern camp-meetings, at which Negroes and whites vie in religious hysteria, mingling indiscriminately in the hollow square, plunging and pitching about in the “jerks” and screaming “glory” in unsegregated chorus.
George Harris in Sut Lovingood Yarns (1867) tells of a rowdy whose antics include poking a hornet’s nest into a Negro camp meeting. At another time, Sut removes a corpse and lays a snoring, drunken Negro in the coffin. When the slave preacher Simon comes to the coffin he yells:
“Oh Goramighty massy on dis soul; de debil hesef on top of brudder Seize!...” Jis then I moaned out in a orful doleful vise, “Hiperkrit, cum tu hell, I has a claim ontu you fu holdin the bag while Seize stole co’n.” He jes rar’d backwards, an’ fell outen the door wif his hans locked, an’ sed he in a weak ... sort of vise, “Please marster” an’ jis fainted, he soon cum to a-runnin’, fer I hearn the co’n crashin thru the big field like a in-gine were runnin’ express thru hit. I hain’t seen Simon ter this day.
Other humorists tell of frontier surgery upon slaves; if they were not ill before, they were near death’s door after the barbarous operations.
The tone of the humorists is burlesque, which often sinks to the level of present-day “darky” jokes. Nevertheless, southern humor is significant. The assumption that Negroes are especially designed as butts for rough practical jokes is probably closer to the reality of the antebellum South than the sentimentality of more ambitious works.
True to the manner of cracker-box philosophers, Artemus Ward attacks the sentimentalized and the unconventional, and delivers many of the “common-man’s” jibes at abolitionists and Negroes. “The Octoroon” is, at least, a refreshing departure from the shopworn tragic mode.
“Hush—shese a Octoroon!”
“No! sez I ... yu don’t say so! How long she bin that way?”