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.
Preface-Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Preface Summary
Brown notes that in the 200 years “since the first cargo of slaves was landed on the banks of the James River” (3), four million slaves have come to live in 15 out of 31 states. As black people are “considered common property” (3), white people may act toward them “with perfect impunity” (3). Since the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law, even if a slave escapes to the North, white people are required to return slaves to their masters in the South. All sorts of people own slaves, even “statesmen and doctors of divinity” (3). Slavery has been perpetuated by the fact that “persons in high places” (3) continue to own slaves. Those who are “friends of the slave” (3) must cast “the gaze of the world” (4) on slavery, for condemning “the traders, the kidnappers, the hireling overseers, and brutal drivers” (4) does nothing if “those who move in a higher circle” (4) are not affected. Writing from London, Brown concludes that slavery’s having been “introduced into the American colonies, while they were under control of the British Crown” (4) means the abolition of slavery should be important to the British. Brown hopes his book will help inspire the British to speak out against American slavery.
Memoir of the Author: “Narrative of the Life and Escape of William Wells Brown”
William Wells Brown is the son of a slave and her master’s relation. One of his most distressing memories is of hearing his mother begging for mercy as she was being flogged by the overseer. Brown’s master hires him out to an innkeeper named Mr. Freeland, whose cruelty inspires Brown to run away. He is found by “Negro dogs” (6) and brought home, where he is whipped.
Brown is hired by slave trader James Walker to prepare other slaves for the New Orleans market. The separation of families is especially devastating to Brown, as is the hypocrisy of the Christian who “can so debase himself as to treat a fellow-creature as here represented” (11).
Brown’s master sells Brown’s sister and brothers; his mother is a slave in St. Louis. Brown and his mother attempt to escape but are caught, and Brown’s mother is sold to a speculator. Brown’s desire to be free is now stronger than ever.
Brown is sold to Captain Enoch Price, who owns a steamboat. When the boat docks on a trip to Louisville, he manages to escape, traveling only during the day and enduring intense cold and loneliness. He flags down a passerby who appears trustworthy. The man, a Quaker, takes him home and feeds him. Brown takes on the man’s name, Wells Brown. He then makes his way toward Canada, but stops in Ohio, where he takes a job. He offers treats to his employer’s sons in exchange for their teaching him to read.
Brown works on a steamboat and helps nearly seventy slaves escape to freedom. He then goes to Michigan, where he opens a barbershop. He also participates in the temperance movement, which leads to his becoming an active abolitionist. He soon begins speaking for various anti-slavery societies. In 1847, after he publishes his narrative, Enoch Price writes to Brown’s friend saying Brown is his slave and that he will give him his free papers for $325 dollars. Brown refuses the offer.
In 1849, Brown is invited to lecture in England, where he speaks about the discrimination he faces even in the Free States. He lives in England for almost four years and gives more than a hundred lectures, for which he receives high praise. He is unable to return to the United States due to the Fugitive Slave Act.
Brown’s wife dies in 1851, and his two daughters study in England. Brown’s friend writes to Enoch Price to ask if he will give him free papers for 50 pounds, but Price rejects this offer, saying he has “everything arranged for his arrest if he lands at any port in the United States” (40).
Chapter 1 Summary: “The Negro Sale”
In the Southern states, “[s]ociety does not look down upon” (43) slave owners who father children with their slaves. Brown calls this “the best evidence of the degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America” (43). He also condemns Christians who do not honor slave marriages. He calls marriage “the foundation of all civilisation” (45) and asks “what must be the moral degradation of that people to whom marriage is denied” (46).
The fiction narrative begins with an explanation of how some “mulatto women, or quadroons” (46)—women with one black parent or one black grandparent—pay their owners to buy their own time. These women “are distinguished for their fascinating beauty” (46). One such woman is Currer, who for years had worked as a housekeeper in the home of Thomas Jefferson, using the money to pay her master Mr. Graves and to support her beautiful daughters, Clotel and Althesa. After Jefferson was called to Washington, Currer made money as a laundress. When Mr. Graves dies, Currer, Clotel, and Althesa, along Mr. Graves’s other slaves, are put up for auction. Clotel and Althesa are especially noted in the advertisement as “very superior” (47).
Currer had tried “to bring her daughters up as ladies” (47); with the money she earned, she enabled her daughters to live “in comparative luxury” (47), often attending balls at which slaves and whites mingled “upon terms of perfect equality” (48). At one such ball, Clotel had met a wealthy young man named Horatio Green, who is taken by her beauty and vows to purchase her and to “make her mistress of her own dwelling” (48). Currer, dreaming of freedom for her daughter, is delighted.
The day of the sale, families are torn from each other’s arms. Clotel, whose “complexion [is] as white as most of those who were waiting with a wish to become her purchasers” (49), is sold last, being “the most valuable” (49). The auctioneer convinces purchasers to bid higher prices by telling them of her intelligence, trustworthiness, and virtue. Horatio purchases Clotel. Brown decries the hypocrisy of Christians who partake in this “inhumanity” and “atrocity” (50) and notes the irony of the fact that “two daughters of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of American Independence” (51), are “disposed of to the highest bidder” (51).
Chapter 2 Summary: “Going to the South”
Dick Walker is the slave speculator who purchases Currer and Althesa. The slaves he has purchased are kept in prison until he is ready to leave for New Orleans. In order to avoid “any of those scenes so common where slaves are separated from their relatives and friends” (52), he begins the journey with his slaves very early in the morning, preventing Clotel from seeing them before they leave. Walker and the slaves walk for eight days to the Ohio River, where they board a steamship for New Orleans.
Walker orders his slave Pompey to prepare the newly purchased slaves for the market. Pompey has “seen so much of the buying and selling of slaves, that he appeared perfectly indifferent to the heart-rending scenes which daily occurred in his presence” (53). He orders older slaves to lie about their ages, telling them they will be whipped if they tell the truth.
Nineteen people are killed and injured in an accident aboard their steamship, the Patriot. That night, as the boat is towed by another steamboat, men gamble away their money and even their slaves, leaving slaves devastated to leave those they know and suddenly serve strangers. On the fourth day, while docked in Natchez, Mississippi, a clergyman, in need of “a good, trusty woman for house service” (57), purchases Currer from Walker; Currer asks that the clergyman also buy Althesa, but he says he “would not need another” (57). Althesa is distraught. When the boat arrives in New Orleans, the slaves are sent to market.
Chapter 3 Summary: “The Negro Chase”
Currer remains in Natchez, known for the particular “inhumanity and barbarity of its inhabitants” (58), with the Methodist parson who purchased her from Walker. Brown offers several examples of newspaper advertisements in which men with “Negro dogs” offer their services catching runaway slaves.
Shortly after Currer arrives in Natchez, a slave hunt takes place. Two slaves had escaped, and “[t]he dogs were put upon their trail” (60). The dogs follow them through swamps for several miles. Finally the dogs locate the slaves, and the roaring “as the relentless pack rolls on after its human prey” (61) reminds one “of Actaeon and his dogs” (61). One slave escapes up a tree, but the other is brought down when a dog bites his leg. The first slave comes down from the tree at gunpoint. When he resists being tied, a “Lynch court” (62) is held, and he is sentenced to be burned at the stake.
Tied to a tree, the slave says he is “ready to go in peace” (62). However, when he begins to be consumed by the fire, he screams for someone to shoot him. He manages to escape and is shot to death as he flees. His body is “thrown into the fire, and consumed, not a vestige remaining to show that such a being ever existed” (62). Thousands of slaves witness this event, during which “magistrates and ministers of religion” (62) warn the slaves “that the same fate awaited them, if they should prove rebellious to their owners” (62).
Brown recalls that a Natchez newspaper described “[a] runaway’s den” (63), which was built “in a little patch of woods, where it had been for several months so artfully concealed underground, that it was detected only by accident” (63). The den had a trapdoor, steps, a fireplace, and a supply of food. It was occupied by two runaway slaves, one man and one woman. They tried to escape, but dogs managed to capture the man.
Preface-Chapter 3 Analysis
Brown’s interspersing of fiction with fact—newspaper clippings, committee writings, and even his own biography—lends credibility to his story, ensuring readers’ understanding that the novel is grounded in truth. For instance, Currer’s witnessing the execution of a slave whose death is detailed in the Vicksburgh Sentinel leads readers to expect that many of the horrors they will read about in Clotel have actually occurred. This intermingling of fact and fiction also enhances Brown’s credibility as a storyteller. Not only do his newspaper clippings provide evidence of his truthfulness, but his autobiography in the beginning of the novel establishes that he is, as a former slave and well-respected speaker, knowledgeable on his subject. By writing his autobiography in the third person—he refers to himself as “William” or “Brown,” depending on his status at that point in the narrative—he removes emotion, suggesting to his readers that the narrator of this tale is even-handed.
The story’s being grounded in truth also makes the scenes of family separation that much more powerful. In the autobiographical narrative, Brown describes how the slave trader Walker, annoyed by the crying of one of his slave’s children, tears the child from his devastated mother and gives him away. Brown writes of himself, “Nothing was more grievous to the sensitive feelings of William, than seeing the separation of families by the slavetrader […] without the least appearance of feeling on the part of those who separated them” (11). He himself suffers the torment of separation when he and his mother are captured trying to escape; when his mother is sent to the New Orleans market, Williams’s “heart struggled to free itself from the human form” (16). Therefore, in reading about Althesa’s sorrow when Currer is sold to a Natchez minister, readers understand that, while this particular event is fictional, the devastation it depicts is only too real. Brown’s giving the slave speculator the same name as the real trader in his autobiography further intertwines truth and fiction.
In describing many scenes of the slaves’ torment and heartbreak, Brown illuminates the humanity of the slaves, and he contrasts their humanity with the cruelty and hypocrisy of the slave owners. When describing his and his mother’s escape and capture, Brown writes that “the very man who, but a few hours before, had arrested poor panting, fugitive slaves, now read a chapter from the Bible and offered a prayer to God” (14-15). Brown frequently condemns the slave owners for their professed godliness, writing, “The thought that man can so debase himself as to treat a fellow-creature as here represented, is enough to cause one to blush at the idea that such men are members of a civilised and Christian nation” (11). He similarly notes the incongruence of slaves being sold “in a city thronged with churches” (50). It is not only Christians who demonstrate hypocrisy: Brown suggests hypocrisy is built into the foundations of the nation itself. Having concluded his description of the auction in which Clotel and her family are sold, he writes, “Thus closed a Negro sale, at which two daughters of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the presidents of the great republic, were disposed of to the highest bidder!” (51). Readers are asked to consider the irony in the fact that the daughters of the writer of this sacred document of independence are sold as property. Moreover, we are asked to question the very nature of our nation, whose founding fathers are indifferent to the sale of their own kin—a practice that is “the best evidence of the degraded and immoral condition of the relation of master and slave in the United States of America” (44).
Brown also reminds readers of the slaves’ humanity by writing on the virtues of marriage and how slaves have more respect for marriage than do their masters. While Christian slave owners separate husbands and wives, the slaves themselves see marriage “as a sacred obligation, and show a willingness to obey the commands of God on this subject” (45). The slaves demonstrate virtuousness that Christian slave owners preach of but do not practice. Brown’s descriptions of Clotel’s grace, poise, and virtuousness further illuminate the horror of treating slaves as unfeeling “chattel.”
