73 pages • 2 hours read
William Wells BrownClotel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1853A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 26-29Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 26 Summary: “The Escape”
After the arrest of slaves who had not been killed during Nat Turner’s revolt, only one—Horatio’s slave George—had not been put to death. George, whose father was also a statesman, was light-skinned enough to “often [be] taken for a free white person” (189). His execution is delayed by the fact that, when the courthouse had been on fire a few weeks earlier, he had bravely entered the building to retrieve important papers; however, despite a passionate speech in which he compares Nat Turner’s revolt with the American Revolution, ultimately he is sentenced to be hanged in ten days’ time.
George is frequently visited in his prison cell by Mary, with whom he has had a romantic relationship. Mary pleads with him to switch clothes with her so he can escape. At first he refuses, but at her promise that she will not be hurt, he relents. They switch clothes, and George escapes to head for Canada, leaving Mary inside the cell.
George steals a fisherman’s boat to cross the Ohio River. Once in Ohio, still in Mary’s dress, he is pursued by two slave catchers and takes refuge in the barn of a Quaker farmer who manages to delay the pursuers by demanding a permit from an officer before they search his barn. By the time the slave catchers open the barn, George has left through the back door to hide in the home of one of the farmer’s friends. There, he changes once again into a man’s clothing.
Once in Canada, after over two weeks of traveling, George takes a job working on a farm and begins to educate himself.
Chapter 27 Summary: “The Mystery”
George had promised Mary he would try to help her escape from slavery. He works for six months in order to save enough money to do so, at which point he sends a messenger to find out if Mary can be purchased. The messenger returns with the news that Mary, as punishment for her having helped George escape, has been brought to New Orleans and sold at the market.
George decides to leave America, and he sails to Liverpool, England, where he finds a job and takes lessons at night. He earns a promotion and then becomes a partner, and is “now on the road to wealth” (197). Able to pass as white, he never tells anyone he was a slave.
In 1842, George, who goes by Mr. Green, has been in England for ten years. He decides to visit France. In Dunkirk, he enters a cemetery and sits on a tomb to read a book. He spots a woman in a veil and mourning clothes walking with a young child. As he watches her, the woman faints, and he races over to help her. They are joined by an old man who appears to know her. When she wakes up, she looks at George and faints again, and the old man asks George to leave them.
Back at the hotel, George wonders at what had happened. Realizing he had left his book in the cemetery, he returns to retrieve it but finds it gone. The next morning, a servant gives him a note from someone named J. Devenant who apologizes for “the inconvenience” (199) to which George had been subjected the day before and invites him to dinner that day. George accepts the invitation, eager to solve the mystery.
Chapter 28 Summary: “The Happy Meeting”
A carriage picks George up at his hotel and brings him to a beautiful villa, where he is met by Mr. Devenant, the old man from the cemetery. Soon the young woman enters. After looking at her closely, George faints. When he awakens, Mr. Devenant asks if he is American and if he was “acquainted with a girl named Mary” (201). When George affirms that he loved Mary, Mr. Devenant tells him that the woman is in fact Mary. George and Mary have a tearful reunion.
Mary, now Mrs. Devenant, alludes to the fact that her husband has died. She explains that after George escaped, Horatio visited her in prison and confessed that he hoped George managed to become free but that she would likely “suffer in his stead” (202). After three days in prison, Mary was informed that she was going to be sent out of state. A trader purchased her, and the two went to New Orleans. A young man with black hair observed her. Mary, sensing he was a foreigner, was happy when he did not purchase her.
Two days later, Mary was purchased by a man who wanted a maid for his wife. The wife was traveling to Mobile, and Mary went with her. On the boat, Mary spied the young man. He approached her that night, telling her he was her friend and that she looked just like his sister, who passed away years ago in France. When he told her he wanted to purchase her to set her free, she was wary.
The next day, the man convinced Mary to escape with him into the crowd. He promised to marry her as soon as possible. A couple of hours later, they boarded a ship heading for Europe. They spent five weeks at sea, during which time Mr. Devenant was kind with her. When they arrived in France, they were married. Mary says she loved him but only with “that affection which we have for one who has done us a lasting favour” (206).
Two weeks later, George and Mary are married. Brown notes that Mary thought she would never see George again and that George stayed faithful to her over so many years. He also laments that fugitive slaves “can receive protection from any of the governments of Europe” (207) but “cannot return to their native land without becoming slaves” (207).
Chapter 29 Summary: “Conclusion”
Brown, writing of himself in the first person, reiterates that he has “personally participated” (208) in many of the incidents of which he has written and that the rest he has heard from “the lips of those who, like myself, have run away from the land of bondage” (208) or from “American Abolitionist journals” (208). He writes that working on Lake Erie for nine years offered him many opportunities to help slaves escape and that many of them told him their stories, of which he has “made free use” (208).
Brown reminds readers that various Christian churches own tens or even hundreds of thousands of slaves. He implores the British to let their “feeling be publicly manifested” (209). He asks them to “[l]et it be understood, unequivocally understood, that no fellowship can be held with slaveholders professing the same common Christianity as yourselves” (209).
Chapters 26-29 Analysis
In Chapter 19, Brown described the ingenuity of fugitive slaves who trick white passersby as they escape. In the final chapters, he shows the ingenuity not only of the slaves but also of the white abolitionists who help them escape. Shortly before he is to be executed, Mary, visiting him in prison, convinces George to switch clothes with her in order for him to escape. When George is nearly overtaken by slave catchers in Ohio, a Quaker farmer delays his being discovered by demanding the catchers obtain a warrant; when they come back with a warrant, he tells them they must bring their own tools to open his shed, only for them to ultimately find George had escaped out the back door long before. These incidents demonstrate not only ingenuity but also sacrifice and compassion. Just as Clotel “had risked her own liberty for another” (179), Mary risks her own safety for George, telling her later she knew she could be killed but “willing to die if you could live” (203). These passages draw attention to our shared humanity by reminding readers that our love for each other triumphs no matter our skin color or circumstance.
Despite the tragedies depicted in Clotel, Brown ends his novel with hope. Though Clotel herself, as well as her mother, sister, and sister’s family, dies before the novel’s end, Clotel’s legacy is carried on through her daughter Mary, who escapes slavery and finds happiness seemingly delivered to her by God. Mary, writes Brown, “had every reason to believe that she would never see George again” (207); her meeting him serendipitously in the French cemetery seems, in George’s words, to be “the Lord’s doings” (202). Those before her have died, but in Mary, new life begins, and in doing so it shows the power of love to span years and to survive tragedies. Similarly, Brown’s final plea suggests we have the power to right the injustices of slavery. Reminding his British Christian readers of the hundreds of thousands of slaves owned by American churchgoers, he writes that “[t]he religious bodies of American Christians will send their delegates” (208) to religious meetings and that the British should let their opinions of slavery “be publicly manifested” (209). In asking that the British “[l]et it be understood […] that no fellowship can be held with slaveholders professing the same common Christianity as yourselves” (209), Brown suggests there is yet hope that slavery can be abolished. He concludes by quoting Psalm 67, stating that when slavery is ended, the “earth indeed yield her increase, and God, even our own God, shall bless us” (209). By ending with a religious invocation, Brown reclaims Christianity from slaveholding Christians, reminding his readers of Christianity’s true tenets. In “Preface,” Brown had written that “[s]lavery would long since have been abolished” (3) had it not been “for persons in high places owning slaves” (4). In the final chapter, his pleas to the British suggest the power to end slavery rests with us and that we can, in fact, make real change if we demand it.
