UNCLE TOM A Traitor! Seriously?!

UNCLE TOM
A Traitor! Seriously?! 

by W.E. Littlejohn ©2015

Uncle Tom was no "Uncle Tom."  He was no sell out!”  95-year-old, Akua (a name indigenous to her Akan Ancestors whom Whites  kidnapped from Ghana), declared to the young college student whom she overheard hurl the “uncle tom” insult to a foe.  Surprised, but remaining respectful, the young man asked:  “What’cu talkin’ ‘bout, ma’m?” reminding Akua of a young, cute, puffy-cheeked Gary Coleman in the 1970s Different Strokes  sitcom.

Steve Cook, supervisor of the Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site, in Ontario, Canada, confirmed on You Tube that Josiah Henson was no sell out, and because of Henson and others many Africans and African Americans escaping slavery “... found a home, became self- sustaining, raised children and [were] educated....”  As a descendant of the Dawn Settlement, founded by Josiah Henson, Cook should know.  

If the truth about European and European descendants’ (Americans) enslavement of Native Americans, then Africans, was taught in schools, the young man never would have used the derogatory uncle tom term.  He also would have learned that Josiah Henson was the person on whom Harriet Beecher Stowe based her book, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which means Josiah Henson and Uncle Tom are one and the same!  This naked truth was highlighted on the 1970s/80s sitcom, The Jefferson's, where the proud and committed race-man, "George," is admonished for calling his wife's ("Louise/Weezy") uncle, "uncle tom."  Stowe had read Henson’s 1849 autobiography, TheLife of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself, which was published in England in 1877, and acknowledged, in 1853, that Henson's writings inspired her to write Uncle Tom's Cabin.   (View the expanse of the book's multiple covers for this title here.)

Like the author of The Help, whose publication is based on narratives she elicited from pre-Civil Rights Movement Mississippi domestic female workers, Stowe, while living in Cincinnati, Ohio in the 1830s and ’40s, compiled personal and emotional experiences of physical and mental assaults committed by White enslavers and endured by Africans and African Americans she met who had fled Kentucky plantations, to publish a series of stories.  As David S. Reynolds, author of Mightier than the Sword: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Battle for America, wrote “she [Stowe] loved spending time in the kitchen with servants like the African-­American, Zillah.”  In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for example, the beautiful Eliza escapes from White kidnappers by leaping “from ice floe to ice floe across the Ohio River with her baby in her arms; the brooding Cassy who is owned [held hostage*] by the sadistically vicious and brutal enslaver, Simon Legree.”  Tom,“is sold deeper into the south, eventually to Legree, who torments and tortures him before ordering his overseers to beat him to death.”

The silent movies’ (1896-1930) all-white filmmakers twisted Tom, Stowe’s protagonist, into the stereotypical, degrading image seen and term used today; the term being:  One who betrays and harms their own people to gain favor from an enemy.  Traitor.  The perfect media image is Samuel L. Jackson’s traitor character in the movie Django Unchained.  The movie’s character’s - and some would argue that Black people like Supreme Court Judge, Clarence Thomas’ - “depraved loyalty” to the White enslaver is akin to the Stockholm Syndrome, also called “capture-bonding.”  Mass media’s uncle tom is among the multiple manipulative images that have and continue to contribute to the “mis-education [and self-hate] of Black people,” to quote history scholar, Carter G.Woodson. 

Stowe's novel is named after Henson's cabin.  A cabin on the former Riley plantation in Rockville, MD erroneously thought to be Henson’s cabin, was purchased by the Montgomery County, MD, government in 2006, and is now a part of the National Park Service National Underground Railroad Network to Freedom program, which has identified 380 Underground Railroad sites nationwide; 19 are in Delaware.  Numerous were in Cincinnati,Ohio.  

In the following excerpt from his book The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada,as Narrated by Himself, Henson described the unspeakable brutality his father endured after rescuing his wife (Henson’s mother) from being raped by a plantation white “overseer.”  

{{{I was born June 15th, 1789, in Charles County, Maryland, on a farm belonging to Mr. Francis Newman, about a mile from Port Tobacco.  My mother was owned by [held hostage by*]* Dr. Josiah McPherson, but hired to the Mr. Newman to whom my father belonged [was held hostage by]*.  The only incident I can remember which occurred while my mother continued on Mr. Newman's farm, was the appearance one day of my father with his head bloody and his back lacerated.  He was beside himself with mingled rage and suffering.  The explanation I picked up from the conversation of others only partially explained the matter to my mind; but as I grew older I understood it all.  It seemed the overseer had sent my mother away from the other field hands to a retired place, and after trying persuasion in vain, had resorted to force to accomplish a brutal purpose.  Her screams aroused my father at his distant work, and running up, he found his wife struggling with the man.  Furious at the sight, he sprung upon him like a tiger.  In a moment the overseer was down, and, mastered by rage, my father would have killed him but for the entreaties of my mother, and the overseer's own promise that nothing should ever be said of the matter. 

Typically, the promise wasn’t kept.   

The authorities were soon in pursuit of my father.  The fact of the sacrilegious act of lifting a hand against the sacred temple of a white man's body...this was all it was necessary to establish.  And the penalty followed: One hundred lashes on the bare back, and to have the right ear nailed to the whipping- post, and then severed from the body.  For a time my father kept out of the way, hiding in the woods, and at night venturing into some cabin in search of food.  But at length the strict watch set baffled all his efforts.  His supplies cut off, he was fairly starved out, and compelled by hunger to come back and give himself up.

 The day for the execution of the penalty was appointed.  The Negroes from the neighboring plantations were summoned, for their moral improvement [fear conditioning]***, to witness the scene.  A powerful blacksmith named Hewes laid on the stripes.  Fifty were given, during which the cries of my father might be heard a mile, and then a pause ensued.  True, he had struck a white man, but as valuable property he must not be damaged.  Judicious men felt his pulse.  Oh! he could stand the whole.  Again and again the thong fell on his lacerated back.  His cries grew fainter and fainter, till a feeble groan was the only response to his final blows.  His head was then thrust against the post, and his right ear fastened to it with a tack; a swift pass of a knife, and the bleeding member was left sticking to the place. 

Previous to this affair my father, from all I can learn, had been a good- humored and light- hearted man, the ringleader in all fun at corn husking and Christmas buffoonery.  His banjo was the life of the farm, and all night long at a merry-making would he play on it while the other Negroes danced.  But from this hour he became utterly changed.  Sullen, morose, and dogged, nothing could be done with him.  The milk of human kindness in his heart was turned to gall.  He brooded over his wrongs.  No fear or threats of being sold to the far south - the greatest of all terrors to the Maryland slave- - would render him tractable.  So off he was sent to Alabama.  What was his fate neither my mother nor I have ever learned....

Further into his narrative, Henson says that the memory of white enslavers breaking up and selling each of his family members

“is photographed in its minutest features in my mind. The crowd collected around the stand, the huddling group of Negroes, the examination of muscle, teeth, the exhibition of agility, the look of the auctioneer, the agony of my mother- - I can shut my eyes and see them all.

My brothers and sisters were bid off first, and one by one, while my mother, paralyzed by grief, held me by the hand, her turn came, and she was bought by Isaac Riley of Montgomery County. Then I was offered to the assembled purchasers.  My mother, half distracted by the thought of parting forever from all her children, pushed through the crowd, while the bidding for me was going on, to the spot where Riley was standing.   She fell at his feet and clung to his knees, entreating him in tones that a mother only could command, to buy her baby as well as herself, and spare to her one, at least of her little ones.  Will it, can it be believed that this man, thus appealed to, was capable not merely of turning a deaf ear to her supplication, but of disengaging himself from her with such violent blows and kicks, as to reduce her to the necessity of creeping out of his reach, and mingling the groan of bodily suffering with the sob of a breaking heart?  As she crawled away from the brutal man I heard her sob out, "Oh, Lord Jesus, how long, how long shall I suffer this way.}}}

Henson’s eloquent delivery discredits the historical propaganda in mass media, academic and popular literature and school text books that Africans, enslaved or not, had low or no critical thinking capabilities and that none could read and write, as I was taught in Catholic elementary school and at Andrew Jackson High in St. Albans (Queens), NY, where none of the all-white teaching staff informed the student body about Andrew Jackson’s hate for and leader of  the horrific relocation of Native Americans, known as the Indian Removal Act and Trail of Tears.

In his book, Henson tells how he saved $350 to purchase his freedom.  This was a colossal feat, since enslavers took/stole the money African hostages earned from being “rented” out.  Upon paying the fee for his freedom, the enslaver increased the price to $1,000.  Cheated, Henson escaped enslavement, in 1830 with his wife, Nancy, and four children, through the now infamous, Underground Rail Road (URR). 

While neither physically underground, nor a railroad with train tracks (although human trains made plenty of feet tracks), hundreds of Africans, with the humanity and assistance of Quakers and Black and White Abolitionists, ran, walked, stumbled, swam and crawled along its path into Northern cities like Philadelphia, Boston, Vermont  and New York.  They were dismayed to learn, that after the long days, weeks, even months of tortuous struggle, they could be re-kidnapped, returned to the south, and re- enslaved as determined by the Fugitive Slave Law: 1740-1860.  So, a large percentage of Africans, including Henson and his family, sought freedom beyond U.S borders - in Canada.   

In 1841, again, with the help of Quakers and Black and White Abolitionists, Josiah Henson and other escaped hostages purchased 300 acres of Southern Ontario land, on the Sydenham River, near the present day town of Dresden, to establish the Dawn Settlement.  After the Emancipation Proclamation and passed, in 1863, many of the settlers returned to the U.S.; others stayed.  Their descendants, like Steve Cook, still live in the area. 

Henson was a Methodist preacher, writer and an outspoken abolitionist who, like Harriet Tubman and FrederickDouglass, lectured and advocated for literacy and education for Blacks.  (Incidentally, did you know that a Liberty Ship was named for Harriet Tubman in 1944, and the city of South Portland, Maine recognized the SS Harriet Tubman with a proclamation in 2014)  Henson also led a Black militia unit during the Canadian Rebellion of1837, and helped recruit Blacks in Canada to join the Union Army during the American Civil War.  Henson lived to be nearly 100 years old, transitioning in 1883.

Josiah Henson’s determined and enterprising Spirit lived on in his great-grand nephew, Matthew Henson, the first man to reach the North Pole, in 1909.  Matthew set foot on the North Pole before his fellow White explorer, Robert E. Peary (who was celebrated and awarded the Hubbard Medal).  Whites grudgingly ignored Henson’s historic and colossal achievement until 2000, when, posthumously, the National Geographic awarded him the Hubbard Medal.  Matthew Henson’s great-niece, Audrey Mebane (a direct descendent of Josiah Henson) accepted the award.

Through the African-CanadianHeritage Tour, visitors, by way of Detroit, MI, can cross into Windsor/Ontario, Canada and explore this valuable African history in villages, churches, museums; at monuments, a school, a sawmill, a brickyard, a rope factory, black walnut orchards, a gristmill and Henson’s original cabin and gravesite. 
A Canadian stamp commemorated Josiah Henson. Uncle Tom’s Cabin Historic Site, near Dresden, Canada, has been a museum, since the 1940s.    

Read more about U.S.-born Africans, such as Mary Ann Shadd, publisher of The Provincial Freeman, Canada’s first anti-slavery newspaper, and the first woman in the U.S. or Canada to edit and publish a newspaper.

Akua advised both young men to read Henson’s personal narrative, The Life of JosiahHenson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself, on the University of North Carolina’s website and Uncle Tom's Story of His Life: An Autobiography of the Rev.Josiah Henson (London, 1877), for the truth.  She also suggested they read Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, by James W. Loewen.  She also appealed to them to never call anyone “uncle tom” again and quoted lyrics from Fertil Grounds' song, Broken Branches.  “You gotta know your roots for the truth.”    

P.S.  Months later, Akua's heart sunk when she heard a young a young woman raging with anger, in the aftermath of the June 17, 2015 murders of 9 African Americans in Charleston, NC, yell into a news crew's camera telling Black people to "stop praying" and calling President Obama "uncle tom."  Akua understood the young woman's pain, but sighed:  "Another who doesn't know her history."