On Joaquin Murieta, Race, and Cult Movies

The Sonoran outlaw, Joaquin Murieta is one of those historical figures who was a real person but whose factual existence has been so clouded by myth that now he’s more literary than historical. Of course, this isn’t much of a problem for us in the world of literature. After all, even historical figures have a literary equivalent, a version of themselves that signify some greater, larger abstract ideas. Sure, there might be a historical Lincoln, but that doesn’t mean we can’t also have our own badass, vampire-killin’ version of Honest Abe as well. Interesting enough, it was the Native American author, John Rollin Ridge, who wrote the ur-text of the Murieta mythos, The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Murieta: The Celebrated California Bandit, which also happens to be the first novel written by a Native American.

Ridge (whose Cherokee name was Yellow Bird) lived an interesting life, almost interesting enough to compete with his most famous literary work. Ridge was the son of John Ridge and grandson of Major Ridge, leaders of a group of Cherokee who, prior to the forced removal from Cherokee lands, struck a deal with the U.S. government, known as the Treaty of New Echota, that would cede Cherokee lands in exchange for compensation. Understandably, this was an unpopular position among the Cherokee, but you can see the logic behind the Treaty Party’s position. They felt that removal was inevitable, so they wanted to strike the best deal possible.

Many other Cherokee saw these actions as a betrayal, and after enduring the Trail of Tears and removal to Indian Territory in the West, many of the leaders of the Treaty Party were assassinated, including Ridge’s father and grandfather, John Ridge and Major Ridge.

Ridge eventually made his way to California during the gold rush, but unsatisfied with mining turned towards writing as his trade, eventually writing a highly fictionalized version of the exploits of Joaquin Murieta. Joaquin Murieta: The Novel is a fascinating, contradictory, and often shockingly violent story. Throughout, however, it’s infused with real feelings of love, anger, and betrayal. Arguably, the object of love and hate is the United States herself.

Early on, Ridge establishes that the story of Murieta is not singular; it’s the story of circumstances: 

The character of this truly wonderful man was nothing more than a natural production of the social and moral condition in which he lived, acting upon certain peculiar circumstances favorable to such a result, and, consequently, his individual history is part of the most valuable history of the State. (7)

Here and elsewhere you can feel Ridge working out his complex feelings about the nation on the page. Murieta is a dashing outlaw, a good man turned to do bad things, a victim of circumstances. 

In their heyday, the Ridge family were wealthy Cherokee elites who held positions of power and esteem. The Cherokee themselves were a part of the five civilized tribes, which meant they adopted a number of white customs, in part strategically assimilating as a means to protect their rights from white settlers. In fact, the Ridges even owned slaves. If things had gone differently, if his family hadn’t signed the Treaty of New Echota, then he too may have become an important leader among the Cherokee people. In part, the Ridges achieved their positions of prominence because they were able to deftly navigate both white and native worlds, acculturating when it was advantageous. 

It’s not hard to see a bit of Ridge in Murieta as he immigrated to California “fired with enthusiastic admiration of the American character” (8). But this enthusiasm is soon dashed. After much initial success in mining, Americans jealous of his success violently beat him, tie him up, and then rape his wife in front of him. Murieta continues to mine for gold, chasing his initial success, only to be attacked by Americans once again. (Usually, these sorts of tales only require one violent inciting incident, but Ridge has Murieta victimized a second time). This time whites accuse him of being a horse thief, tie him up and whip him, and then go to his half-brother’s house and hang him. 

Naturally, after enduring this sort of violence, Murieta forms a band of robbers. California during the gold rush was a multicultural place, and whites established laws that prevented non-whites from competing in the gold mining craze, including the 1850 Foreign Miners’ Tax Law, which had the intent of making it nearly impossible for people of color to compete with whites in the gold rush by establishing a cumbersome bureaucracy and taxes that applied only to “foreigners.” 

Despite the violence he endured, Murieta is the consummate gentleman thief. He occasionally prefers to let people go rather than murder them, and when his enemies get the best of him, he often laughs it off. When Murieta and his men are betrayed by seemingly friendly Tejon Indians, he eventually “burst out into a loud laugh at his ridiculous position, and ever afterwards endured his captivity with a quiet smile” (38). 

Interesting enough, during Murieta’s time as the captive of the Tejon Indians, Ridge paints a largely unflattering portrait the Tejon people. Although, they are some of the few people who can win one over on Murieta, they’re also described as “poor,” “miserable,” and “cowardly.” Presumably, as a partially acculturated member of one of the “civilized” tribes, Ridge sees himself and the Cherokee in general as superior to the Tejon. His somewhat unkind portrayal of California Indians may also be a way for him to distance himself from “those Indians.”

Ridge seems unable to fully identify with California Native Americans, but this isn’t the only strange, tangled relationship the novel has with race. While Murieta can take a joke and lose a few battles without losing his sense of humor, his chief lieutenant, Three Finger Jack can’t. In fact, he’s shockingly bloodthirsty, especially when it comes to killing Chinese: “ ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘I can’t help it; but, somehow or other, I love to smell the blood of a Chinaman. Besides, it’s such easy work to kill them. It’s a kind of luxury to cut their throats’” (64). And here is the crux of Joaquin Murieta’s weird relationship with race: Murieta is both a victim of racialized violence while his gang is simultaneously a perpetrator of racialized violence.

If we were to map Ridge’s psyche onto his text, then surely Three Finger Jack would be the id to Murieta’s ego. The astute gentleman thief of Murieta surely represents how Ridge, an educated man descended from a once powerful family, sees himself. But within Three Finger Jack, Ridge can arguably release his unfettered rage, lashing out at white racists and Chinese settlers alike. 

Even though Ridge is the first Native American to write a novel, like many nineteenth-century authors, he doesn’t fit nicely into our modern conception of how a minority author is supposed to tackle issues of race and colonialism. We don’t expect denunciations of white colonial racism to sit side by side with leering depictions of violence against immigrants, which is one of the reasons why the text is so valuable as an object of study and analysis. Not all minority authors could be as incredibly ahead of their time as Frederick Douglass.  

Of course, as a son of slave owners, we of course shouldn’t expect racial solidarity from Ridge. But Joaquin Murieta’s anger at injustice and simultaneous rage against innocents reminds me a lot of the cult films of the 70s and 80s, like Repo Man, They Live, A Boy and His Dog, Death Race 2000, and Escape from New York. These are explicitly political films that pummel their targets of with anger and a good bit of irony. Arguably, the politics in these films are mostly liberal, but there’s a not-so-hidden mean streak that runs through all of them. The raw anger of these cult classics is also what drew me to them in my youth, and if I’m being honest, one of the reasons why I return to many of them now that I’m older. 

But like Joaquin Murieta, the target of these movie’s anger often slips, often landing not on Reaganomics or inequality but on women. LIke Ridge’s casual violence towards the Chinese and semi-dismissive portrayal of California Native Americans, misogyny is an unfortunate byproduct of so many cult classics of the late twentieth century. If I would draw a hasty framework connecting a novel from the 1840s and movies from the 1970s and 80s, then I might claim that anger at injustice done to us by society can so easily curdle into anger at other, easier targets. It’s not so difficult to both punch up and down at the same time. Looking at the world around us, where anger is hardly in short supply, this seems like a useful reminder.

On The Siren Song of Socialism and Herman Melville’s Typee

Is there anything cornier than a political cartoon? Unlikely. Political cartoons are the sort of things that uncle you never speak to “fwds” you over e-mail or plasters on his facebook page. At most, they repackage already cliched talking points with some unnecessary visual aids, usually of the explicitly racist variety. They’re the even less ambitious younger brother of the op-ed.

But they can also be helpful. No, they don’t further political debate or shine a light on woefully underdiscussed issues, but they do provide keen insight into the political mind’s id. A political cartoon can give us a better glimpse of the conservative mind than an ocean’s worth of David Brooks and Ross Douthat’s hot takes. There’s something about the visual nature of the form that brings out the deepest recesses of the conservative subconscious.

And that’s what we got with Ben Garrison’s cartoon, “The Siren Song of Socialism,” which was passed around the internet by both conservatives as a stern warning against the evils of socialism and by liberals as an example of how far off the deep end the right has fallen. If you haven’t seen it, the cartoon consists of a man dressed in a flannel and blue jeans tied, like Odysseus, to the mast under which Garrison has helpfully included the label “millennials.” The man is excitedly leering at three women on an island representing Kamala Harris, Tulsi Gabbard, and Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, each scantily-clad in “island” garb. At the head of the ship, a stern Trump informs the man, “We’re not going there!”

Naturally, plenty of people focused on the underlying sexism and racism of the cartoon. It’s a little weird that Garrison is lumping Harris in with Ocasio-Cortez. The former’s been criticized as an overzealous prosecutor while the latter is an actual member of the Democratic Socialists of America. The fact that these women are people of color seems to be at the forefront of Garrison’s mind than whether or not both have any devotion to socialism.

But while most were trying to parse which was worse, the cartoon’s racism of sexism, I was kind of amazed how much the illustration reminded me of the work of Herman Melville.

The comparison might sound strange for a number of reasons. Today, when you hear the name “Melville,” most are reminded of his masterpiece, Moby Dick, but that wasn’t the case during Melville’s lifetime. Before scholars rediscovered Melville’s genius, he was mostly known for his first novel, a little adventure tale called Typee after the name of a native tribe living on the Polynesian island of Nuku Hiva.

Typee became a hit in Melville’s day because it was reportedly based on his real experiences living among a cannibal tribe in Polynesia. While based on his own experiences, Typee is also fictionalized to an extent. While it’s true that Melville, like his protagonist in the novel, jumped ship while at Nuku Hiva and lived for a time among the Typee people, he didn’t stick around three months like he claimed in the novel. It was closer to three weeks. Still, the sensational story of Melville living among a Polynesian tribe helped garner him become known as the “man who lived among the cannibals” and catapulted the novel to a level of success that Melville could never repeat in this lifetime.

In the novel, Melville eventually cuts his way through the jungle and stumbles upon the Typee village, which turns out to be something of a socialist paradise on Earth, not dissimilar to Garrison’s fevered dream of socialism. But before we get to Melville’s depiction of Typee culture, it might be useful to take a look at whaling in the first half of the nineteenth century. At the beginning of Typee, Melville states that the crew had been at sea for six months “cruising after the sperm-whale beneath the scorching sun of the Line, and tossed on the billows of the wide-rolling Pacific” (11). During that time Melville would have alternated his time among the enclosed bowels of the ship and the infinite horizon of the Pacific.

And even on the open ocean, Melville would have been crammed into a small whaleboat with several others chasing sperm whale by using a harpoon fastened by rope onto the small boat to latch onto the gargantuan creature. Once securely latched to the whale, the boat would be pulled along for an hour or more while the whalers tried to kill the giant creature, hoping he doesn’t crush them or dive too far below the surface and take them with the leviathan. When the whale begins spraying blood from his blowhole instead of air, the sailors know that death is near. Melville writes in Moby Dick: “At last, gush after gush of clotted red gore, as if it had been the purple lees of red wine, shot into the frightened air; and falling back again, ran dripping down his motionless flanks into the sea” (329).

Once they had finally killed the whale, the whalers must drag the massive carcass to the ship where they must peel away and process the blubber. The dead whale was fastened to the starboard side of the ship where planks were erected for the whalers to cut off strips of blubber, like they were peeling an apple. The blubber was then boiled and eventually stored in barrels. The crew and ship would become stained by oil and blood, and the massive carcass could become a beacon for nearby sharks, which was just another danger whalers faced if they happened to slide off the now slippery deck. The stench of the processing whale blubber into oil would have been overwhelming, Melville describing it as smelling “like the left wing of the day of judgment” (475).

It was dangerous work, but it was the only way that whalers could get paid on their journey. These men weren’t given salaries. Instead, they received a “lay,” or a percentage of the profits, which could be meager for those with no seniority. If they encountered few whales, then they earned nothing, or even ended up in debt to the ship because sailors had to purchase supplies like clothes, boots, or tobacco from the shipowners.

A whaling ship was rigidly hierarchical. Captain Ahab, obsessive, brutal, and demanding, has become an archetypical tyrant. In Omoo, Melville’s sequel to Typee (yes, Typee was so popular that it even received the obligatory sequel treatment), the crew becomes so upset with their treatment at the hands of the captain that they mutiny. This was the life of a sailor in the first half of the nineteenth century. You work your body to a nub hoping to make enough money so that you aren’t in debt at the end of the voyage all the while under the absolute sway of a tyrant.

Comparatively, life among the Typee must have seemed like paradise to Melville, and he often presents the Typee people as living in an Edenic paradise. Their principle food, the breadfruit, is plentiful and can be transformed into a wide variety of dishes. Before visiting the Typee, Melville assumed that their lives were nothing “but a world of care and anxiety,” but found that they lived “infinitely happier” lives than “the self-complacent European.” (149). Melville continues to compare Western society unfavorably to the natives of Polynesia. The Typee aren’t ignorant of violence and occasionally go to war against their neighbors, but the violence of their society pales next to trail of unfettered war, torture, and executions throughout European history. In a passage that is sadly as true today as it was over a hundred and fifty years ago, Melville condemns the seemingly more “humane” prisons we’ve built: “yet how feeble is all language to describe the horrors we inflict upon these wretches, whom we mason up in the cells of our prisons, and condemned to perpetual solitude in the very heart of our population” (150).

And Melville isn’t shy about laying down blame for how Western society has gone wrong:

[In the Typee village] [t]here were none of those thousand sources of irritation that the ingenuity of civilized man has created to mar his own felicity. There were no foreclosures of mortgages, no protested notes, no bill payable, no debts of honor in Typee; no unreasonable tailors and shoemakers, perversely bent on being paid; no duns of any description;…no destitute widows with their children starving on the cold charities of the world; no beggars; no debtors’ prisons; no proud and hard-hearted nabobs in Typee; or to sum up all in one word–no Money!

Life in a whaling ship is living in capitalism’s burning furnace. By living among the Typee, Melville sees that there are other worlds, other ways of arranging society. The world of the Typee looks a lot like a Marxist utopia. But what’s so striking about Melville’s representation of Typee society is that it’s so much freer than Western capitalist societies when freedom is supposed to be at the very heart of capitalist’s appeals. We are free to choose our employers, what we buy, where we live, and what we do with our lives. Of course, that’s not the lived experience of most people living in capitalist economies, certainly not during Melville’s time but not even in our era of late capitalism where massive inequality and precariousness are increasingly normalized.

What I find fascinating about the parallels between Garrison’s hacky political cartoon and Melville’s first novel is that, although they take complete opposite views on “socialism,” they actually break down the dichotomy of freedom and servitude along the same lines. The hapless millennial in Garrison’s cartoon is tied up and a self-serious Trump is the one steering the ship away from the island of socialism. For many conservatives, that lack of freedom has actually become a part of capitalism’s appeal. A society where the rich and powerful can exert their power over others is not just an unfortunate byproduct of capitalism’s excesses, it’s one of the main points.

Of course, as a man of the nineteenth century, Melville also brought plenty of baggage with him. His account of the Typee isn’t without some of the racist assumptions of the day, even if it was more progressive than many peers. And both Garrison and Melville view everything through the male gaze. Freedom for Melville also means free access to women’s bodies, and parts of Typee were censored because they featured between the sailors and the Polynesian women.

We might be inching towards a time where we finally acknowledge the central lie about capitalism: that it’s about freedom. For most, there is nothing freeing about being at the mercy of an employer and the shifting economic winds. There are some entrepreneurs, like Peter Thiel, who are at least honest about the fact that their view of capitalism is incompatible with democratic values. Melville knew this over a hundred and fifty years ago, and we might be learning all over again that democracy and capitalism don’t mix.

On Tom Sawyer Abroad and the Accidental Imperialists

Everyone knows about that time Tom Sawyer tricked the neighborhood kids into painting his aunt’s fence for him. Everyone knows about his time hiding out on Jackson Island with his friend Huck Finn and when he made his way out of McDougal’s Cave with his sweetheart Becky. Heck, those who have read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn could even tell you that Tom Sawyer was there when Huck Finn freed the slave Jim after he is recaptured. Tom Sawyer’s story has been a part of not only the literary canon, but a part of the American tale we tell ourselves. But few know about that one time Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, and Jim hopped on a flying machine with a deranged inventor and made their way over to Northern Africa.

It turns out that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is not the end of the Tom and Huck saga. Mark Twain completed two other novels focused on his two most famous characters, Tom Sawyer Abroad and Tom Sawyer Detective. Twain even attempted to write other adventure tales featuring Tom and Huck, including Huck and Tom Among the Indians, Schoolhouse Hill, and Tom Sawyer’s Conspiracy, but none of these were published or even completed in Twain’s lifetime.

There’s a reason why Tom Sawyer Abroad failed to lodge in America’s consciousness: it’s not great. I suppose you could see it as the Solo: A Star Wars Story of the Tom Sawyer series, or Twain’s Caravan of Courage: An Ewok Adventure, if you’re being unkind. While the previous Tom and Huck stories weren’t exactly concerned with narrative realism, it does seem odd to see Twain inject some Jules Verne steampunk into the bucolic world of St. Petersburg, Missouri.

Like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Abroad is narrated by Huck, and though published about a decade after Huck Finn, it begins almost immediately after the events of the previous novel. The first chapter, “Tom Seeks New Adventures,” which begins with Tom Sawyer deciding that the events of Huck Finn wouldn’t be enough to satiate his curiosity and wanderlust, seems to perfectly describe what was likely Twain’s brainstorming process. As M. Thomas Inge notes in my edition’s afterward, Twain, who got himself into financial trouble towards the end of the nineteenth century, wrote Abroad for “crass commercial purposes.” In other words Twain writing a third novel featuring these characters is kind of like when a movie studio decides that they have some IP that they can squeeze a few bucks from. So I guess this makes Tom Sawyer Abroad the Live Free or Die Hard or the Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps or Godfather III of Twain’s oeuvre.

And just like many movie studios of late, Twain had been bitten by the franchise bug. He apparently had plans to ship Huck, Tom, and Jim to other parts of the world in a series of sequels, which never came to be. Judging by the quality of Abroad, this is probably for the better. The main problem is that although Abroad promises lots of hijinks by Tom, Huck, and Jim in Northern Africa, the trio doesn’t really spend much time actually on the ground. Instead, they spend much of the early chapters terrorized by the manic mad inventor of the airship who both seems to have absolute faith in his invention and a streak of misanthropy, and when he plunges to his grizzly death, the three of them are left to figure out what to do now that they’ve somehow wandered across the Atlantic Ocean. But once they reach Africa, they mostly just hang out in the stupid air balloon. There’s no awkward mix up with local customs or getting caught up in the tension between the Berbers and colonizing European powers. No, it’s mostly just Tom, Huck, and Jim observing things from a far and shooting the shit.

On the bright side, the conversation and arguments that the three get into are without a doubt the highlights of the novel. As the most learned of the three, Tom repeatedly tries to represent himself and worldly and authoritative, but he’s almost always rhetorically outmaneuvered by Jim. At one point they consider the implication that fleas are proportionally much stronger than humans, leading them to the horrifying conclusion that if a flea were human-size, then that “flea would be President of the United States, and you couldn’t any more prevent it than you can prevent lightning.”  In these moments, you can feel Twain’s warmth towards his creations, and the book starts to take the shape of an anti-adventure novel, where the characters go halfway around the world just to get into philosophical arguments with one another. Maybe Richard Linklater can do the film adaptation.

It’s worth highlighting the boisterous illustrations, which are admittedly a lot of fun, and interestingly enough they were created by Dan Beard, an early founder of the Boy Scouts of America. 

Tom Sawyer Abroad is uneven at best, but that doesn’t mean that there’s not some interesting work going on here. The novel showcases Twain’s burgeoning anti-imperialist attitudes. Early on, Tom tries to convince his companions to embark on a crusade, but Jim is unsure about the ethics behind this new idea, arguing that if he had a farm and someone wanted it, it wouldn’t be right for them to just take it like the so called crusaders. Apoplectic, Tom rejects Jim’s metaphor outright:

“It ain’t a farm, it’s entirely different. You see, it’s like this. They own the land, just the mere land, and that’s all they do own; but it was our folks, our Jews and Christians, that made it holy, and so they haven’t any business to be there defiling it.”

Tom’s response surely strikes the reader as an inefficient defense of crusades, but it also inaugurates themes of epistemological uncertainty and imperialism. He rejects Jim’s metaphor as a means of knowing how Middle Easterners must have felt about invading Europeans. Throughout the novel the notion of metaphors as a means of knowing comes into play, which in turn affects how the trio see themselves as an invasive force.

Later, after the three have been riding the balloon across America, Huck uses his knowledge of of maps to try and pinpoint exactly where they are. Although they have been riding the balloon for quite some time, Huck’s surprised that they haven’t passed into Indiana yet. When asked why he thinks they haven’t passed Indiana yet, Huck logically observes that while the state of Illinois is green, Indiana is clearly pink. After all, that’s how it’s portrayed on maps he’s seen. Like the metaphor of the farm, Huck is relying on the map as a form of metaphor. It synecdochically stands in for the nation as a whole, but where Jim’s farm metaphor attempts the bridge the distance between Christians and Muslims, the map demonstrates ways in which metaphor can distance us from the reality of the object itself. Color coded states are a helpful shorthand, but they are clearly a fiction.

There’s a running theme of how distance, both figurative and literal, between us and the other becomes difficult to bridge through traditional modes of knowledge production. While reading Tom Sawyer Abroad, I eventually became frustrated by the fact that Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the damn balloon. One of the joys of these globetrotting nineteenth century adventure stories is how our western heroes get to visit new places and cultures. Of course, these cultures are always interpreted through the understanding of the white authors, often in wildly inaccurate and racist ways. But if we’re to look at Abroad as an anti-adventure novel, perhaps this is the point. There’s no uncovering of ancient artifacts from lost civilizations or opportunities to use superior wit to escape capture by the natives. Instead, the three of them much prefer to sit around and jaw with one another just as if the front porches of St. Petersburg, Missouri were transported to the Sahara Desert.

Because Tom, Huck, and Jim rarely leave the balloon, they have a skewed perspective understanding of Africa and its people. It’s telling that Twain borrows the word “aeronaut” from Jules Verne, who he is clearly satirizing, but here he spells it “errornaut” (italics mine).

 To me, this seems to suggest ways in which this new technology allows individuals to more quickly and easily cast about the world while also maintaining a distance from the actual people who live in these “far flung” regions, keeping us just as ignorant as before we left our provincial town. I can’t help but compare the balloon in Abroad with drones sent by the military to places like Northern Africa and the Middle East.

We see both of these issues, the use of metaphor as knowledge-creation and the errornautical view of the world, collide in the chapter, “The Sand-Storm,” where the trio witnesses the destruction of a caravan of nomads violently tossed by a sandstorm. Tom and company were devastated by these deaths and felt like they had lost friends although they never actually met any members of the caravan.

For some time, the trio had followed the caravan with their air balloon, and as Tom says, “The longer we traveled with them, and the more we got used to their ways, the better and better we liked them.” Of course, they didn’t actually know any of the Africans below, so they granted them names, like “Mr. Elexander Robinson and Miss Adaline Robinson” or “Miss Harryet McDougal.” Over time, the group became so familiar with these nomads that they decided it was okay to drop the misters and misses and other titles. Once again, Abroad is trapped between the remote and the nearby. Tom and the rest are capable of extending empathy towards outsiders from a culture and place foreign to them, but in order to do so, they must Anglicize these people. The Africans become Robinsons and McDougals.

Over the course of the novel, Tom, Huck, and Jim become accidental imperialists. At one point, Tom looks at all the sand that’s been gathering in their balloon and decides that it must be worth tens of thousands of dollars. Quickly, he sets upon a money-making scheme:

“[W]e can keep on coming back and fetching sand, and coming back and fetching more sand, and just keep it a-going till we’ve carted this whole desert over there and sold it out; and there ain’t ever going to be any opposition, either because we’ll take out a patent.”

The only thing that preventing Tom from embarking on literally stealing the desert sands of North Africa are tariffs, which he reasons would completely eat away at their profits.

But just as it’s easy to not only forgive Tom’s fence-painting scheme, but actually laud him for his ingenuity, Tom, Huck, and Jim are so genial, it’s easy to forgive or miss altogether the fact that they seem to be inadvertently colonizing countries they likely didn’t even know existed at the beginning of the novel. Needless to say, Tom Sawyer Abroad is a strange novel. I don’t think anyone expected Mark Twain to pump out a steampunk sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, and after reading the novel, I’m not surprised that it’s fallen into obscurity. Despite the fact that the novel spans oceans and deserts, it seems strangely stagnant and claustrophobic. The novel is filled with contradictions like this, but in many ways Tom Sawyer Abroad is the kind of novel you enjoy the more you think and write about it. 

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I do think that there’s a lot of potential to adapt Tom Sawyer Abroad as a film. Hear me out. There’s no definitive film version of either Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn, perhaps the closest being the 1938 technicolor adaptation. For whatever reason, both novels seem to resist adaptation, perhaps because of their episodic structure. But what’s the use in letting these instantly recognizable IPs lying around? People have heard of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, and they’re in the public domain. Do I have to draw you a map?

But in all seriousness, I would be down for a steampunk, globe-trotting Tom Sawyer movie. And since the novel isn’t as precious as the first two, a screenwriter doesn’t really have any obligation to follow the book to the letter. It’s an invitation to let your imagination go wild. If Hollywood wanted to play it safe, they could just let Guy Ritchie do to Tom Sawyer what he already did to Sherlock Holmes. But I also think both Kings of Summer and Kong make Jordan Vogt-Roberts uniquely qualified for steampunk Tom Sawyer. This one’s for free, Hollywood.

On Pap Finn and White Trash

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn might be the most laid-back of any “Great American Novel.” It goes down as easy as iced tea on a summer day or a dry stout after a long day of work. Let’s just take a moment to appreciate the cover of Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition (the copy I own) by Lilli Carre. Just look at how delightful that image is. Doesn’t it just invite you to take an adventure on the mighty Mississippi? And doesn’t it promise that the adventure will be fun, even exciting, but that in the end, no one will get hurt?

That’s not exactly true of the story itself. A few people die, including Huck’s drunken and abusive dad (who we’ll get to in a bit), but the story is so wrapped up in irony that when Huck once again teams up with Tom Sawyer in the final act in order to rescue the escaped slave Jim, Tom purposefully creates obstacles for the rescue so that it better resembles the adventure novels he’s read.

I mean, take a look at the inscription that opens the novel:

NOTICE.

Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

BY ORDER OF THE AUTHOR

Per G. G. Chief of Ordinance

 

It almost makes it possible to not read anything into the novel, to refuse to peak under the veil, to plumb the subtext, and to just come along for the adventure.

But we can’t. No, it’s just not in our constitution. So when rereading Huck Finn after about a decade, I couldn’t help but draw connections between the world Twain crafted and our own. (By the by, G. G. in the above inscription likely refers to General Grant who Twain befriended. Twain even published Grant’s memoir.) Huck Finn draws a picture of a fragmented, inchoate nation. Its very geography speaks to differing, contested, and overlapping peoples, governments, customs, borders, and languages. The narrative spans the length of the Mississippi, a commercial byway that seems to be the only link to disparate, isolated communities. In other words, the world of Huck Finn is startling familiar to the United States of today.

Before we even get started on Huck’s trip down the Mississippi, Twain highlights the divided nature of America as embodied in speech:

In this book a number of dialects are used, to wit: the Missouri negro dialect; the extremest form of the backwoods South-Western dialect; the ordinary “Pike-County” Dialect; and the modified varieties of this last…I make this explanation for the reason that without it many readers would suppose that all these characters were trying to talk alike and not succeeding.

Through multiple dialects, Twain illustrates ways in which we barely speak the same language, and in fact language serves as much a means of division as a means of communication. Language attaches itself to geography, race, and class.

It’s the last of these that I want to focus on, specifically on Huck’s drunken, abusive father. It’s easy to see Twain as a champion of the lower class. He not only uses dialect, but he allows Huck to the be narrator of his own story, elevating him and his unique speaking style to that of the novel’s typically bourgeois subject who for so long nearly monopolized literary attention. It’s this populism that has lead to his canonization as a particularly American author.

But when we look at Huck’s father, Pap Finn, it’s clear that he’s burdened with many of the same stereotypes associated with the poor in America. He’s lazy, he’s a drunk, and he’s an unrepentant racist. In White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America, Nancy Isenberg traces common stereotypes of poor whites from early colonization to the 21st century. She finds not only that America has always had some form of class system, but also it was commonly believed that that a permanent underclass was natural and right. Pap seems to reflect America’s belief that poverty is the result of individual failings.

There’s one striking passage where Pap expresses class and racial resentment against a well-educated black man who had the audacity to live in Missouri as a free man. What’s worse, the useless government didn’t even bother to enslave him:

“There was a free nigger there, from Ohio; a mulatter, most as white as a white man. He had the whitest shirt on you ever see, too, and the shiniest hat; and there ain’t a man in that town that’s got as fine clothes as what he had; and he had a gold watch and chain, and a silver-headed cane–the awfulest old gray-headed nabob in the State. And what do you think they said he was a p’fessor in a college, and could talk all kinds of languages, and knowed everything. And that ain’t the wust. They said he could vote, when he was at home…I says to the people, why ain’t this nigger put up at auction and sold?…Why they said he couldn’t be sold till he’d been in the State six months…They call that a govment that can’t sell a free nigger till he’s been in the State six months.” (36-7)

So many of the negative perceptions of poor whites that we associate with Trump voters are found in Pap. He’s resentful and embittered, and these feelings are directed towards blacks who he sees as his natural inferiors. This passage reminded me of a remark made by J.D. Vance in Hillbilly Elegy claiming that many poor whites look at Barack Obama, see a successful black man with an established family, and feel angry and ashamed.

As mentioned in White Trash, there’s a long history of elevating African-Americans by comparing them favorably to poor whites. Isenberg point to the famous photograph of Elizabeth Eckford, one of nine girls who were selected to attend the newly desegregated Little Rock Central High School in 1957. In the photograph, we can see Eckford calmly walking to school while a white classmate, Hazel Bryan, shouts at her from behind. The image is powerful. As Isenberg puts it, attempting to maintain her tenuous social and economic position above blacks Bryan became the face of white trash for most of America. There’s certainly truth in this reading, and it’s long underpinned our understanding of why poor whites would fight so aggressively for slavery during the Civil War when they could never hope to own slaves themselves. (Of course, there were exceptions, even back then).

Of course, focusing too intently on animosity between poor whites and blacks serves to distance middle and upper class whites from their own more genteel bigotry. We see racism as something that only the ill bred engage in.

At the same time, poor white racial animosity has long been used by the left as an explanation for why we lack the kind of class consciousness that’s found in Great Britain. Look at What’s the Matter with Kansas or the debate over whether Trump’s ability to flip the Midwest was a result of economics or racism. (Recent research has suggested that white voters were concerned about losing their status as whites, but I don’t think you can discount ways in which economic anxiety can reinforce racism).

In some ways, Pap demonstrates the tricky relationship progressives have with poor whites in the Trump era. We believe we should be sticking up for the economically marginalized while also acknowledging that racism drove many of these people (although certainly not all) to vote for an obvious huckster who represents the exact opposite of what we believe to be the best qualities of the nation.

So what do we do with Pap? It helps that he’s not the sole or even the most prominent representation of poor whites in the novel. That position, of course, belongs to Huck himself who purposefully flees bourgeois respectability. Perhaps it’s easier to handle the stereotypes embodied by Pap because he does not fully stand for poor whites, and Twain valorizes the dusty street urchin that headlines the novel.

There’s also an opening to read Pap as more than a simple stereotype. In one exchange with Huck, he tries to steer his son away from education. First, he asks his son to read in order to see if his son even knows how, and when he sees that Huck can read, he accuses him of putting on airs:

“It’s so. You can do it. I had my doubts when you told me. Now looky here’ you stop that putting on frills. I won’t have it. I’ll lay for you, my smarty; and if I catch you about that school I’ll tan you good. First you know you’ll get religion, too. I never see such a son.” (29)

There are different ways to interpret his fear of education. Certainly, he’s afraid of his social standing in relation to his son. For his son to be educated would mean an inversion of father/son norms as he understands them. There’s also a suggestion that Pap sees education as unmanly and unsuitable for a son of his. (At one point he calls Huck a “dandy.”). But I wonder if we can’t also read some genuine attachment.

Pap could be afraid of how education might transform Huck’s speech, driving a wedge between him and his son. Twain foregrounds language’s ability to divide, so it makes sense that this form of logophobia is on the mind of Finn the elder. As Huck’s language changes, he becomes a part of the bourgeois, and it’s interesting to note that Pap links education with religion here. In English departments we so often find common allies with characters who reject bourgeois norms, but Pap seems to test these limits. Still, we might see his tirade not simply born out of personal grievances or fear of losing what little socio-economic privileges he has, but rather developed out of a fear of losing his only son. We might consider whether such a monstrous character might also have room for affection within.

In 2007, Jon Clinch published a book, Finn, that follows Pap Finn prior to the events of Huckleberry Finn. Instead of humanizing and rounding out the character, though, he makes him even more gruesome and beyond our sympathy. I haven’t read Clinch’s book, but it is interesting to note that when so many retellings try to humanize the villain (see: Wicked and Maleficent), Pap is denied a similarly new perspective.

Pap Finn reminds us that liberals and the left have always struggled when it comes to poor whites. Often they are seen as enemies while also being the kind of marginalized group we should be working to help. But people can be complicated. A racist can also be economically disenfranchised; a poor white can also benefit from white privilege. As Huckleberry Finn still teaches us, race and class wrestle with each other in troubling ways.

On Tom Sawyer, Cats, and Water Nymphs

When I was ten, Tom Sawyer tricked me. Not only did he convince me to paint his aunt’s fence, a chore he was supposed to complete on his own, but he somehow got me to give him a big glass stopper and a tin soldier for the honor. I never forgave him.

Or at least that’s the only explanation I can think of for why I never actually sat down to read The Adventures of Tom Sawyer until now. In fifth grade I was in a school production of the novel where I got to be one of the dummies who paint the fence, and I suppose I never got the love for a character who’s kind of a jerk. But just like Bart Simpson, America’s other irascible schoolboy, Sawyer has a heart of gold, never as bad as his parents or teachers might think in their moments of anger.

By now most people are nominally familiar with the basic outline of Tom Sawyer’s plot: his innocent courtship of new girl Becky Thatcher, his friendship with Huck Finn (and Joe Harper), his running away to an island in the Mississippi River with Huck (and Joe), his witnessing of Injun Joe committing murder, and his time lost in McDougal’s cave with Becky. But reading the actual book, it’s clear that Mark Twain isn’t interested in a tight plot so much as in creating a series of vignettes you might find in one of his public speeches.

In his “Preface” to the novel, Twain makes his goals plain. He plans is “to try pleasantly try to remind adults of what they once were themselves, and of how they felt and thought and talked, and what queer enterprises they sometimes engaged in” (vii). Tom Sawyer’s ability to capture boyhood even for men living over a hundred and fifty years after the events are supposed to take place, makes it the ur-text of male nostalgia. Without Tom Sawyer would we have the works of Stephen King, Our Gang, The Goonies, The Sandlot, Peanuts, and any other text where (mostly) boys construct an entire society outside the purview of adults.

But what I found most striking about first about Tom Sawyer in my first read through are the “queer enterprises.” Plenty are familiar with Leslie Fiedler’s essay, “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” where he posits an interracial sexual relation between Huck and Jim (arguably a bit of a stretch) as well as Ishmael and Queequeg (much less of a stretch). Fiedler’s essay was first published in 1948(!) and then later repackaged in the early sixties in his book Love and Death in the American Novel. But I had never previously read a queer take on Tom Sawyer, even though it’s ripe for such a reading.

It’s when Tom, Joe, and Huck flee to a small island in the Mississippi that most clearly presents a sexualized relationship between boys. Twain writes:

After breakfast they went whooping and prancing out on the bar, and chased each other round and round, shedding clothes as they went, until they were naked, and then continued the frolic far away up the shoal water of the bar, against the stiff current, which latter tripped their legs from under them from time to time, and greatly increased the fun. And now and then they stood in a group and splashed water in each other’s faces with their palms, gradually approaching each other with averted faces, to avoid the straggling sprays, and finally gripping and struggling till the best man ducked his neighbour, and then they all went under in a tangle of white legs and arms, and came up blowing, sputtering, laughing and grasping for breath at one and the same time. (150-1)

I can imagine that queer theorists took a look at that passage and said to themselves, “Naw, this is too easy.” The scene seems strangely reminiscent of the water nymphs John William Waterhouse would paint a couple of decades later.

The ages of Sawyer and his friends are never revealed, but it’s clear that they are at the age to notice girls. Sawyer, of course, pursues Becky Thatcher, even persuading her to get “engaged” by kissing him. Thatcher’s a bit incensed when she learns that Sawyer was previously engaged to another girl. This budding romance puts Sawyer and his friends at a crossroads where they must choose between each other and compulsory heterosexuality.

Perhaps the most common metaphor for the boys of St. Petersburg is that of a cat. A quick search shows that the word “cat(s)” appears in the slim volume of Tom Sawyer eighteen times. It’s a wonderfully layered metaphor. On the one hand, Sawyer, Finn, and Harper are like strays, resourceful and versed in the ways of getting what they want. But cats are also androgynous. Feline are often associated with women where dogs are associated with men. In this sense, Sawyer and his friends’ close association with cats speak to the fact that they are not yet, by the dictates of the 19th century, “men” in multiple senses of the word.

Much of Tom Sawyer’s plot revolves around McDougal’s Cave, which serves as a convenient psychoanalytical metaphor for the subconscious. The characters enter and exit the cave at several point, and within the context of Tom and his buddy’s island adventure, these journeys into the dark stand for exploration of unearthed desires. Tellingly, the climax of the novel occurs when Tom and Becky get lost within the cave and must navigate their way to the surface. This joint male/female journey becomes Tom’s means of establishing a heteronormative relationship, leaving behind his time on the island in the Mississippi and the queer relationships he developed there.

But Tom Sawyer refuses to fall into place as a tidy heteronormative journey. By the end of the narrative, after Becky and Tom are rescued, Injun Joe is dead, and Huck Finn is adopted by The Widow Douglas, Tom and Huck have one last encounter. Stifled by his structured life in his new home, Huck flees. Tom chases him down and promises Huck that all of this civilizing (read: interpellating into the heteronormative adult world) won’t be so bad, and that they will never give up their time together. In fact, when the time is right, they will form their gang in secret once again.

What’s so fascinating about Tom Sawyer when reading it for the first time as an adult is how obvious these queer themes are. In order to complete a queer reading, you barely have to break a sweat. How much of this, though, is a result of a modern reader who had to read queer theory in graduate school and how much of it would have been recognized by the Twain’s 19th century audience? Returning to Twain’s preface now, Twain’s words take on a new meaning: “part of my plan has been to try pleasantly to remind adults of what they once were” (vii). How many adults were reminded of queer lives lived outside the gaze of the heteronormative world? Perhaps this sort of scholarly work is nearly impossible. Even looking at the reception of Tom Sawyer at the time would yield little since book reviews would have been subject to the rules of discourse that at the time would have made such discussion verboten. So we’re left with a mystery. But even without a definitive answer, we can assume that the queer themes would have likely moved certain audience members with a sense of recognition and an understanding that their experiences are not singular, that they are not alone.

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This is the first of several reviews of Mark Twain’s series of books that feature Tom Sawyer and his friends. In total, he wrote four books that include Tom Sawyer and his best friend Huck Finn. I’ll tackle each one, examining whatever themes happen to catch my eye at the time.

On Ulysses S. Grant’s Memoirs and “Annihilating Space”

Is there a president who has had a more tumultuous rise and fall in his reputation than Ulysses S. Grant? Grant became the man who saved the Union and then was elected to the presidency twice. And yet his reputation took a hit when “Lost Cause” historians started to paint him as a buffoon who managed to overwhelm General Robert E. Lee not with better tactics but with more men. In the popular imagination, Grant became a butcher and Lee became the symbol of American rebellion whose name adorned countless schools, buildings, and the Duke boys’ Dodge Charger.

One part of Grant’s legacy that has largely fallen by the wayside happens to be his memoirs. Following his death after well-publicized health troubles, the publication of Grant’s memoirs might be the highwater mark in Grant’s public esteem. In his later years, Grant struck up a friendship with Mark Twain (who had very briefly fought for the Confederacy at the start of the Civil War), and Twain agreed to publish Grant’s work.

Financial as well as personal reasons likely motivated Grant’s decision to write his memoirs. He had started an investment company with his son, Ulysses S. Grant Jr., and his business partner, Ferdinand Ward. Unfortunately, Ward began stealing investors money, which sent Grant and his son into financial ruin. Shortly after this disaster, Grant was diagnosed with throat cancer. Hoping to burnish his finances as well as legacy, Grant decided to write his memoirs. He would finish the work only days before he died.

Twain devised a devious marketing scheme for the memoirs. He sent out representatives to booksellers who were Civil War veterans dressed in full regalia. Buying the memoirs became an act of patriotism.

Twain expressed his admiration for Grant’s memoirs on an aesthetic level, writing, “this is the simple soldier, who, all untaught of the silken phrase-makers, linked words together with an art surpassing the art of the schools and put into them a something which will still bring to American ears, as long as America shall last, the roll of his vanished drums and the tread of his marching hosts.” He even compared Grant’s memoirs favorably with Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, a common reference point for nineteenth-century war narratives. (The nineteenth-century American mercenary and filibuster, William Walker explicitly modeled his narrative of his brief conquest of Nicaragua after Caesar’s Commentaries, even writing in the third person as Caesar did).

Reading Grant’s memoirs, it’s easy to see why Twain admired the general’s prose. Grant writes in a straightforward, matter-of-fact manner that would have stood in stark contrast with the looping sentences of the Victorian era. For Twain this likely made Grant’s writing particularly “American.” As someone who, like Grant himself, hails from Ohio, I find his writing to be particularly midwestern. Despite becoming president and winning the Civil War, Grant is nothing if not humble. The second sentence of his memoir reads: “There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.” This presages a running theme in the narrative that Grant and people in general have little control over their own destiny, a proposition that sublimates his own accomplishments. In some ways, this is an inversion of the classic American personal narrative in which the individual pulls himself up by his bootstraps through hard work and determination.

We see Grant’s view that history and life are a series of adventitious events in his recalling of how he entered West Point:

“In the winter of 1838-9 I was attending school at Ripley only ten miles distant from Georgetown [Ohio], but spent the Christmas holidays at home. During this vacation my father received a letter from the Honorable Thomas Morris, then United States Senator from Ohio. When he read it he said to me, ‘Ulysses, I believe you are going to receive the appointment.’ ‘What appointment?’ I inquired. ‘To West Point; I have applied for it.’ ‘But I won’t go,’ I said. He said he thought I would, and I thought so too, if he did. I really had no objection to going to West Point, except that I had a very exalted idea of the acquirements necessary to get through. I did not believe I possessed them, and could not bear the idea of failing.” (28)

What a delightful image of one of America’s most famous generals reluctantly accepting a post at West Point because his father, a true helicopter parent, applied for him and Grant, the dutiful son, acquiescing to the family wishes. When Grant can boast, he almost always chooses to demur.

The early chapters of Grant’s memoirs, which are the most enjoyable, feel as if they are influenced by Twain’s writing, especially his use of folksy humor. As a child, Grant loved nothing more than riding horses, and he had his eye on a colt owned by a Mr. Ralston. So his father sends him to negotiate a sale:

“My father had offered twenty dollars for it, but Ralston wanted twenty-five. I was so anxious to have the colt, that after the owner left, I begged to be allowed to take him at the price demanded. My father yielded, but said twenty dollars was all the horse was worth, and told me to offer that price; if it was not accepted I was to offer twenty-two and a half, and if that would not get him, to give twenty-five. I at once mounted a horse and went for the colt. When I got to Mr. Ralston’s house, I said to him: ‘Papa says I may offer you twenty dollars for the colt, but if you won’t take that, I am to offer twenty-two and a half, and if you won’t take that, I am to give you twenty-five.’” (26)

There’s a good deal of small town charm in this anecdote, and you could imagine it occurring in one of Twain’s stories of life along the Mississippi.

As Grant’s life progresses, he begins to disappear as a flesh and blood character. By the time we reach the Civil War, his narrative voice is overtaken by simple, unexciting descriptors. We hear about orders sent, troop movements, and bivouacs. (I’ve never read a book with more instances of the word “bivouac.”) At times, I was amazed at Grant’s ability to make war seem so dull. Grant provides little context to the battles he fought, and I wonder whether this was because he expected audiences of the 1880s to have more detailed knowledge of Civil War battles or whether he simply did not write for an audience who lacked detailed knowledge of Civil War battles. (Keeping Wikipedia open might aid a modern reader).

Occasionally, Grant’s personality peeps out from under these largely lifeless descriptions. Grant appears to have an ongoing bromance with Generals William Tecumseh Sherman and Philip Sheridan who come to be his most trusted peers. Grant’s rivalry with Lee also serves as an ongoing theme, and he complains on a few occasions that northern newspapers believed Lee could do no wrong while the Union Army could do no right. Grant first brings up this sentiment at the end of his service in the Mexican-American War: “The natural disposition of most people is to clothe a commander of a large army whom they do not know, with almost superhuman abilities. A large part of the National army…and most of the press of the country, clothed General Lee with just such qualities, but I had known him personally, and knew that he was mortal; and it was just as well that I felt this” (129). This is a pretty solid burn. And these occasionally appear even in the later chapters as the language of tactics and strategy overwhelm the reader.

If there’s one theme that seems to run through Grant’s entire memoir, it’s that of space. In the early chapters we see an expansion of America’s sovereign space into Mexico and the West Coast, where Grant spent some time following his service in the Mexican-American War. Writing of his trip to the East Coast by rail, which he estimates to have average twelve miles an hour, Grant claims the conveyances “seemed like annihilating space.” Prior to the Civil War space is annexed and annihilated. (It’s no coincidence that Grant uses the language of violence for the speed and reach of the railroad).

By the time of the Civil War, the text’s relationship to space changes. In part, this is represented by the number of detailed and beautifully rendered maps that become more common as the memoir progresses. These maps show troops dwarfed by the landscape, which is strung together by lines representing mountains, rivers, lakes, and railroad tracks.

From this bird’s eye perspective, Grant is concerned just as much, if not more, with stringing together avenues for reinforcements and supplies as he does with besieging forts and defeating whole armies. Additionally, he’s also concerned with cutting off the Confederate troops from food and supplies. It is as if he is weaving together a nation while simultaneously unraveling another. This brought to mind Laura Benton’s book A Search for Sovereignty in which she notes that sovereignty exists only from conditions on the ground. It is not something that can be unilaterally extended by a nation-state. While Grant was surprised at rail’s ability to annihilate space in antebellum America, he becomes responsible for annihilating and then remaking space in wartime America. 

Grant’s memoirs are at times fascinating, but likely more fascinating for Civil War buffs and presidential historians than for literary scholars. At nearly eight hundred pages, I can’t imagine it ever having the cultural cache that something like Mark Twain’s memoirs did when they were rereleased a few years ago. But Grant himself is another story. After a century, the lost cause narrative of the Civil War is finally losing its grip on our understanding of the nineteenth-century. Played by Jared Harris, Grant was even given a badass introduction by Steven Spielberg in Lincoln. Grant strolls onto the scene confidently taking up the middle of the frame, flanked by Native American general Ely Parker and someone who appears to be General Sheridan. No longer the butcher of the men, Grant may yet become the hero he once was.

On Free State of Jones

In 1948, Davis Knight was put on trial under Missippi’s miscegenation laws after marrying a white woman, June Lee Spradley. By today’s standards, Knight appeared white, and he passed to the extent that the official marrying Knight and Spradley didn’t even think to ask about Knight’s race. But Knights ancestry hid African blood, and the state of Mississippi eventually brought him to court and were able to return a conviction. In the mid-nineteenth century, his ancestor, Newt Knight, had taken up with a former slave by the name of Rachel, meaning that Davis Knight may have had at least one-eighth African blood, making him black according to Mississippi law. Fortunately, this conviction was overturned by the Mississippi Supreme Court. Unfortunately, the overturned conviction rested not on the unconstitutional nature of miscegenation laws, but rather as a means to avoid a challenge to miscegenation laws in the federal courts.

Davis Knight’s incredible story is a shocking example of how race in America was policed by state forces. And yet, the story of his ancestor, Newt Knight is somehow even more improbable. Newt Knight lived in Jones County Mississippi, a poor subsistence farmer in a land ruled by the whims of large plantation owners. He would briefly serve for the Confederacy before going AWOL and leading a band of Anti-Confederate fighters in their resistance against the newly formed government. Director Gary Ross’s film, Free State of Jones tells the story of New Knight as well as Davis Knight, and it’s an important film that stretches our understanding of both the Civil War and its aftermath, Reconstruction. Ross seems intent on bending the traditional Civil War narrative in order to get the viewer to see how the problem of race in America was not settled with the close of the war in 1865.

Newt Knight worked as a medic during the war, and when we first see him, he’s exchanging a wounded soldier’s garb for an officer’s jacket so that the man will be treated more quickly. Already disillusioned with the war, Knight becomes incensed when he discovers the implementation of the Twenty Negro Law, which exempted those who owned twenty slaves or more from military service, making his service part of, as Knight puts it, “a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.”

Knight abandons the army and returns home to his wife and child where he finds that the Confederacy has been seizing a disproportionate number of food and goods for the war effort. After turning guns on some Confederate soldiers to prevent them from taking any more, he flees to the swamps and lives alongside a number of slave maroons.

Knight strikes up a friendship with an escaped slave Moses as well as Rachel, a woman still tied to her plantation, but who manages to smuggle supplies to the escaped slaves. The film treats this as an experience of cross-racial empathy. Not only does Knight live with these escaped slaves, but he also depends on them. Unlike Knight, these men and women are knowledgeable about the swamp, able to navigate its inscrutable waters and wrest food from its harsh corners.

After the battle of Vicksburg, which essentially cleaved the Confederacy in half, more deserters trickle into Jones County, and Knight begins to rally a resistance, a resistance that includes both black and whites. Using guerrilla tactics, Knight and his men eventually wrest Jones County and the surrounding area away from the Confederacy. During this time, he also strikes up a romance with Rachel. (At this point in time, Knight’s wife has fled the county, afraid that her husband’s lawlessness will mean repercussions for her and her child.)

Ross’s film is attempting to reinsert the notion of class into the Civil War narrative. Knight’s journey takes him from a realization that as a poor farmer, he’s being used as fodder to prop up an unjust economic system to the understanding that he has much in common with enslaved blacks of the South. This is not to mean that the plight of the poor white man is just as bad as that of enslaved persons. It certainly wasn’t. And slave narratives at the time from people like Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs took pains to make it clear that slavery was a far worse situation than poverty. Still, both Knight and the escaped slaves he’s taken up with are being chewed up by an unjust economic system.

In a pivotal scene, Moses is chastised for taking food that one of Knight’s men believes belongs only to the other whites, not to “n***ers.” Moses responds, “How you ain’t a n***er?” This of course can be read a number of ways. This poor white has also been used by Confederacy, conscripted into a war that does not benefit him. It could also be read as a comment on the illusion of race as a biological category, an absurdity that becomes clear in the film through the intermittent intrusion of Davis Knight’s story.

In a film of this nature, it would make narrative sense to end at the close of the Civil War, perhaps also covering the fact that Knight and Rachel had to flee their home for fear of repercussions, just so that the ending isn’t too “Hollywood.” But nearly the last half hour of the film covers the Civil War’s aftermath and Reconstruction. Moses’s son is taken by a plantation owner as an “apprentice,” a form of slavery that persisted after the Civil War. We also witness the political disenfranchisement and violence blacks faced at the hands of terrorist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan.

By extending the narrative, Ross points out the long-term destructive force unleashed by slavery, which was not stopped at Appomattox, at the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, or at the passage of the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments. Like Knight’s descendants, we too are living in the shadow of slavery and the Civil War.

As a filmmaker, Ross is often faulted for being too much of a crowd pleaser, and you can see his desire to make buoyant entertainment in his screenplays for Big and Dave or in his directorial efforts like Seabiscuit. There’s really nothing inherently wrong with this instinct for making an audience happy, but I think critics also forget that Ross also directed the smart and nuanced take on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave,” Pleasantville. And there’s a real desire on his part in push the Civil War drama forward in the hopes of counteracting the Lost Cause narrative that has infected the public imagination. And in doing so, he plays with the structure of Free State of Jones in unique and interesting ways.

That’s not to say that Free State of Jones is a perfect film. I can’t quite decide if it’s too short or too long. Davis Knight’s story seems essential to what Ross is attempting to accomplish with this film, but his intrusion into the nineteenth-century narrative is sometimes clunky. And while Ross worked with historians to make sure the details of his film were right, by necessity some of history’s weirdness gets sanded down. For instance, by the end of the film, Knight’s first wife comes back to live with him and Rachel, but we don’t really get a sense of what she would have thought about her husband taking up with another woman, especially a former slave. (Although, it is suggested in the film that Knight may have been carrying on a sexual relationship with both women, which the historical record appears to back up).

But Free State of Jones is a timely and necessary film. We live in an age where racism has forced many poor and working class whites to vote against their own interests. And it’s worth remembering that this has historical precedent that goes back generations. In time, I expect the reputation of Free State of Jones to increase. It’s another important film in a string of them that asks us to reexamine nineteenth-century America in order for us to understand how we’ve gotten into the mess we’re currently in.

On Robert W. Chambers’s King in Yellow Panic

Robert W. Chambers has become an apparition in American literature. He’s barely read anymore, but we can feel his ghostly presence across dimensions, mostly through his influence on writers like H.P. Lovecraft whose popularity has only increased in recent years thanks to the memeification of Cthulhu. Lovecraft was most certainly influenced by Chambers and his vision of forbidden knowledge and its ability to drive men mad. Chambers developed the idea of a book called The King in Yellow, a play that at first seems normal to the reader but eventually becomes twisted and macabre. Although the contents of the play are deliberately obscured by Chambers’s writing, those who do in fact read the play become mentally shaken.

The King in Yellow clearly serves as an antecedent to Lovecraft’s own Necronomicon written by the “Mad Arab.” Chambers himself was influenced heavily by Ambrose Bierce who in addition to writing his popular stories of the Civil War also dabbled heavily on ghost stories. In his 1886 story, “An Inhabitant of Carcosa,” Bierce first develops the idea of the ancient and unknown city, which may or may not be of our world, which Chambers inserted into his own weird tales. There’s an appeal to how these narratives are borrowed and passed down like a particularly spine-tingling ghost story. Likewise, many other authors, such as Robert E. Howard and Robert Bloch, who freely took from Lovecraft. And it’s likely because of this chain of influence that Chambers is likely still around today, even influencing such works of popular fiction as the first season of True Detective.

This is a pretty cozy narrative of creation as collaboration, but Lovecraft and Chambers also shared some good old fashioned white, American racism. In particular, Chambers appears concerned with the influx of Chinese immigrants towards the end of the nineteenth century, and his stories are replete with suggestions of the “Yellow Peril.” Chambers’s short story, “The Maker of Moons” in particular provides us with a glimpse into the fin de siecle anxieties about the East invading the West.

Like much of Chambers’s speculative fiction, “The Maker of Moons” belongs to the genre of “weird fiction,” a dreamlike blend of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. Early in the story, the narrator visits his friend’s gold shop where his friend, Godfrey, shows him an eyeless hybrid creature that looks similar to a sea urchin and a spider. The narrator is so disgusted by the creature, which he claims is worse than a “Japanese grotesque,” that he tells Godfrey to kill it immediately (95). Godfrey discovered the creature in the Canadian wilderness in a place called The Cardinal Woods where he also found an orb of gold that appears to have been synthesized. Hearing this, the narrator, Godfrey and their friend Barris head to the woods on a hunting expedition, hoping to also discover whoever’s making the bootleg gold.

While hunting by himself at night, the narrator stumbles on a fountain and a mysterious woman who goes by the name of Ysonde and tells him she comes from a mysterious place called Yian. She disappears as quickly as she appeared, and the following day the narrator returns to where he found the fountain but nothing is there. Ysonde clearly fulfills the stereotype of the Asian female who is delicate, loving, enticing, and perplexing.

The narrator discovers that his companions have also seen “Chinamen” in these woods. Barris had previously discovered a gold globe with the “Chinese hieroglyphics” of Kuen-Yuin, a sort of Chinese cult (113). As Barris, who makes his living as some sort of secret agent, says,

[T]he Kuen-Yuin have absolute control of a hundred millions of people, mind and body, body and soul. Do you know what goes on in the interior of China? Does Europe know,–could any human being conceive of the condition of that gigantic hell-pit? You read the papers, you hear diplomatic twaddle about Li Hung Chang and the Emperor, you see accounts of battles on sea and land, and you know that Japan has raised a toy tempest along the jagged edge of the great unknown. But you never heard before of the Kuen-Yuin; no, nor has any European except a stray missionary or two, and yet I tell you that when the fires from the pit of hell have eaten through the continent to the coast, the explosion will inundate half a world,–and God help the other half (113).

It’s easy to spot the hallmarks of Orientalism in this passage. China is the province of the mystical and unknown and poses an existential danger to the West. The paradox of yellow peril is present in how easily Barris dismisses knowledge of China the general public might gather from your daily newspaper in order to highlight the hidden threat buried within the nation, inaccessible to those without the proper esoteric knowledge. In order to represent China of the late nineteenth century as a true threat to the West, you had to contend with the contradictory image of China as the “sick man of Asia.”

Throughout the nineteenth century, China faced foreign invasion, colonization, and civil war, but there was still something threatening about the nation to Westerners. This was partly because of America’s nativist and anti-Chinese racism. But, as others have pointed out, China’s longstanding history as an international power that rivaled and often eclipsed Europe surely engendered a feeling of anxiety about Western imperialism and the fear that America and Europe’s foreign adventures would someday lead to a precipitous fall. Western authors, then, simultaneously claimed that China was weak and backwards as well as an incredible threat to our very way of life.

In the story, the West’s fear of China is also embodied in a monster known as a Xin, which is a larger version of those eyeless creatures shown to the narrator at the beginning of the narrative and look like a combination of a spider and a sea urchin. These smaller versions of the Xin follow his every command: “‘This monster is horrible, for it not only lives in its own body, but it has thousands of loathsome satellites,–living creatures without mouths, blind, that move when the Xin moves, like a mandarin and his escort’” (133). The image of this creature and his mindless followers plays into the idea that China was composed of a monolithic mass of people who readily gave up their own individuality for the good of the emperor. Of course, nothing could be further from the truth. China is ethnically and religiously diverse, which made establishing a governing authority over China’s intimidating landmass extremely difficult. The Qing Dynasty still ruled in the late nineteenth century, and for many Chinese they were seen as illegitimate because the royal family was ethnically Manchurian.

When it comes to fear of the Other, reality is often less important to people than perception. Like much of Chambers’s fiction, the ending of “The Maker of Moons” is inconclusive. The narrator suggests that more people learn of Kuen-Yuin and his cultish followers but that many may not believe these fantastic stories. Only the chosen truly understand the threat America faces from the other side of the globe. The imprecise nature of the threat only makes it that much more frightening. There are some easy parallels between Chambers’s story and the language used about Syria, a country that’s experiencing a devastating civil war and yet whose refugees are likened to a fifth column ready to undermine our very nation. The clear repetitive nature of these overblown concerns should clue us into how detached they are from reality.

On Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century

It’s not often that a densely researched academic text enters the national conversation. Often there’s a thick barrier between academic and public discourse. The only means to break through this divide is to funnel research that’s important to the public into a more easily digestible op-ed. But the idea that an economist could get the general public to run out and purchase a 600-plus page tome that pores through centuries of data on income inequality seems especially improbable in our day and age of bit-sized digital text and information. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, whose English translation came out in 2014, is that 600-plus page tome. And while Piketty’s centuries spanning analysis of income inequality isn’t exactly a beach read, it’s also clear that Piketty believes his work is important enough for a non-academic audience and clearly wrote his study so that it could be read by anyone willing to put in a little elbow grease.

In the text’s introduction, Piketty attempts to provide a glimpse into his own thinking and where he sees himself in the world of economics. He notes that because he’s a part of the generation that largely came of age following the fall of the Soviet Union, he has no real allegiance to dogmatic Communism and “lazy rhetoric of anticapitalism.” He sees himself as somewhat freed from the dogmas of the Cold War. This might come as news to many of his detractors. From professional pundits to random internet commentators, Piketty’s critics have attempted to smear him with the dreaded commie label. This is less a reflection of Piketty’s politics than it is an indication of how far to the right we’ve shifted in the last few decades. That’s not to say that Piketty is non-ideological, at least in the Althusserian sense. He clearly thinks that vast inequality that’s not justified by social utility and potentially harmful to large portions of the population is a problem. He just doesn’t believe the government needs to seize all means of production in order to rectify economic injustice.

Piketty also harbors a deep distrust of the economic discipline. He claims that too often economists make use of equations that arise not out of a careful analysis of data but rather to illustrate largely abstract points. These equations give the discipline the image of rigor without actually backing it up with the requisite amount of data gathering and analysis. For instance, the Laffer Curve, which suggests that tax revenues will disappear at 0% or 100% of taxation, has often been used to argue against any increase in taxes. The basic argument that if you tax one hundred percent of income, then you will obliterate economic activity makes sense, but no one really knows at what point prior to this point that economic activity will drop off. The U.S. had a marginal tax rate of 90% during Eisenhower’s administration and it hardly killed the economy.

To rectify what he sees as the sins of his discipline, Piketty has collected a boatload of data. Stretching all the way back to the eighteenth century, Piketty examines inequality in income, inequality in capital, sources of capital, public and private capital, and much more. Throughout the text are found helpful graphs and clear definition of Piketty’s terms. The division between income–money brought home from a day’s work–and capital–assets that are owned and bought and sold–are essential to his analysis. He notes that for much of the past two hundred and fifty years, the elite derived their wealth from capital, through speculation and the stock market as well as rents on property. The landed gentry made money by merely owning things, on average pulling in four or five percent per year of the value of what they owned, a rate of return that has largely stayed the same over the centuries.

Piketty’s data analysis leads him to several main points, including two important “laws of capitalism” (which I will get to in a bit) that help explain vast movements of wealth over the last few centuries. Perhaps the simplest and most striking observation is r>g where r equals the rate of return on capital and g equals national growth. In other words, those who own capital are receiving returns at a greater rate than the economy as a whole grows. There appears to be a disconnect between returns on capital and general economic growth, meaning that those with enough money invested in capital will prosper far more than the working stiff bringing home a paycheck. This also means that claims that we can grow our way out of inequality are largely overly optimistic at best and completely bunk at worst.

From here, Piketty’s explanations become a little trickier, but are by no means opaque, even to economic novices like myself. The first fundamental law of capitalism is α = r x β where α equals share of income from capital in national income, r is the rate of return on capital, β and equals the capital/income ratio (the amount of total wealth between wealth from income and wealth in capital). Even if you are, like me, not used to conceptualizing in mathematical notations, Piketty makes certain that the reader understands each variable in his laws, clearly defining his terms for academics and non-academics alike. To (overly)simplify Piketty’s first law of capitalism, as the capital/income ratio and or the rate of return on capital increases, so does the percentage of income from capital in our national income. This matters, in part, because capital is normally owned by those with greater wealth and because the capital/income ratio has been steadily increasing for the past thirty years.

The second fundamental law of capitalism posits β = s/g where , once again, β equals capital/income ratio, s equals the savings rate and g equals the growth rate. To put this into words, as savings increase and growth decreases, the capital/income ratio increases, that is more wealth is derived from capital (those who have the means to invest) than from income (those who take home a paycheck). Once again, not everyone is able to save or save in large measure. As the ultra wealthy are able to set aside money, the capital/income ratio becomes more severe, and this is only exacerbated when economic growth slows as it recently has in much of the globe.

By looking at wealth over the course of centuries, Piketty is able to establish that left to its own devices, wealth will outpace growth, but anyone who is casually familiar with movements like Occupy Wall Street are aware that the inequality we now experience was not always the case. In fact, when graphed income inequality across the twentieth and into the twenty-first century follows a U-shaped curve with massive inequality to be found at the beginning of the twentieth century and at the end the millennium. So what happened during the middle of the century? Both World Wars as well as the Great Depression demolished global wealth. These global shocks combined with policies to tax and redistribute wealth limited gaps within the socioeconomic strata. The Reagan and Thatcher revolutions combined with fears that nations like Japan were going to eclipse the West lead to a gradual dissolution of the redistributive policies of the mid-twentieth century.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century is an impressive achievement for plenty of reasons, but as someone who loves literature, I was particularly drawn to Piketty’s attempts to engage with literature to illustrate and explain attitudes surrounding wealth. He argues that because inflation was relatively low in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, authors during these times could note the exact wealth of a character and expect their audience to know exactly how that translated into an annual yield. Capital results in a relatively safe four or five percent return each year, so if a wealthy aristocrat in a Jane Austen novel is believed to own £200,000, then the audience knows they make £8,000 per year. The audience of the time was well aware that those at the very top of the economic pyramid are the idle rich living off the dividends from inherited wealth.

Of all the literary analysis in Capital, I found “Vautrin’s Lesson” to arguably be the most fascinating and useful for scholars of literature. In Honore de Balzac’s Pere Goriot (1835), the character of Eugene de Rastignac has studied law but is introduced to the cruelty of the culture and capitalism of nineteenth-century France. Rastignac comes across the cynical and morally bankrupt Vautrin who attempts to embroil Rastignac in a scheme to commit murder in order to access a large estate. Vautrin outlines the sheer impossibility of ever amassing a wealth of consequence through hard work in even a potentially lucrative profession like law. Even if he is capable of networking in the city and landing a plumb legal position–which are hard to come by–after a lifetime of unending labor, Rastignac will never reach the peaks of those who have simply inherited their wealth (238-39). Thus, inheritance will always beat out hard work.

Shortly after reading Capital, I happened to reread George Orwell’s fantastic little memoir, “Such, Such Were the Joys” about his time at an English boarding school. I was shocked to find the following passage:

Very early, at the age of only ten or eleven, I reached the conclusion­ no one told me this, but on the other hand I did not simply make it up out of my own head: somehow it was in the air I breathed–that you were no good unless you had £100,000. I had perhaps fixed on this particular sum as a result of reading Thackeray. The interest on £100,000 a year (I was in favour of a safe 4 per cent), would be £4,000, and this seemed to me the minimum income that you must possess if you were to belong to the real top crust, the people in the country houses. But it was clear that I could never find my way into that paradise, to which you did not really belong unless you were born into it. You could only make money, if at all, by a mysterious operation called “going into the City,” and when you came out of the City, having won your £10,000, you were fat and old. (291)

It’s remarkable how similar Orwell’s passage mirror’s Balzac’s, despite the fact that it the events are separated by eighty years and the English Channel. The events Orwell recounts would have occurred around 1913, and at the early age of ten he had already soaked in the idea that hard work could never compete with inheritance, an idea present in both literature and, as Piketty illustrates, fact.

Are we doomed to enter a new age of aristocracy or is there a way to divert this catastrophe? Piketty suggests that we institute a global tax on capital of two percent. This has been largely been criticized as unrealistic. However, with the release of the Panama Papers, it’s becoming clearer that the ultra-wealthy are hiding their wealth from tax collectors, a modern benefit not available to the poor and middle class. Besides, it seems like the international community is fully capable of coming together to develop transnational trade deals. What prevents nations from coming together to fight global inequality, except for a lack of political will? If something is not done about the issue of inequality, the political unrest could also start to resemble what we saw in the first half of the twentieth century.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century serves as a wake up call. If we continue down the road we are heading, inequality will eventually rise to the level last seen in the early twentieth century. It is already the case that the wealth of one’s parents has become a determining factor in most people’s lives. Piketty further warns that unless we do something about inequality, we are likely to see a rise in nationalism. Consider the fact that Capital was released before the Brexit and Donald Trump’s meteoric rise. Those two events alone should scare even the one percent into action.

On Underground and Visualizing Slavery

The first episode of the TV show Underground opens with the now unmistakable riff and drumbeat of Kanye West’s “Black Skinhead,” a musical cue designed to signal that the show intends to differentiate itself from how film and television traditionally tell stories of slavery. Film and television narratives about slavery in America often wrap themselves in solemnity and tell the audience that they are watching something educational. This is perfectly natural and even laudable. Something like the original Roots miniseries played a role in educating the American public about slavery, something much needed in the late 70s.

That’s not to say that directors haven’t experimented with how to portray slavery on film. Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave relied on extended shots in order to face the sheer brutality of slavery. And after decades of movies like Glory and Dances with Wolves, films about race and America’s history have attempted to reinsert people of color at the center of the narrative. I do think that Underground is trying something relatively new with the slave narrative that we haven’t quite seen before, although I’m less certain the show succeeds at what it’s trying to accomplish.

As an ongoing series, Underground has different goals and aspirations than other visual slave narratives, even when compared to Roots which also made use of serialized storytelling. Presumably, Underground aspires to be an ongoing television show, and as of this writing has even been renewed for a second season, but at only ten episodes a season, Underground tells a relatively self-contained story in its first season, and had the writers tied up some loose ends purposefully left undone, the show could have become a mini-series. What truly separates Underground from something like Roots is that the former wishes to entertain above all else.

I have to admit that the show’s desire to keep the audience entertained at nearly any expense, left me more than a little uncomfortable at times. Despite the subject matter, the show feels more like something produced by the CW than HBO or even AMC. Or, if you would prefer, Underground is more Uncle Tom’s Cabin than Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. The show never aspires to be “prestige” television. In fact, there are more than a few similarities between Underground and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the blockbuster of its day. While Uncle Tom’s Cabin is classified as a sentimental novel, sometimes this designation obscures the fact that it also has plenty of action-adventure elements, especially early on as we follow Eliza as she and her son escape from slavery and head to Canada all the while pursued by slave hunter Tom Loker. When I first read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, I was surprised by how effectively Stowe wrote the chase scenes. She makes excellent use of cliffhangers and effectively draws her audience into an adventure narrative before transitioning into the clearly sentimentalized portion of the novel.

Likewise, Underground spends most of its first season as an extended chase scene. (There will be spoilers). The first three episodes mostly follows seven enslaved persons on Macon, a plantation now under ownership by a carpetbagging northerner. During these early episodes, these character come together and meticulously plan their escape from Macon, like some nineteenth-century Ocean’s Eleven. However, when Rosalee, one member of show’s romantic pairing, ends up killing the overseer when he attempts to rape her, she and her potential paramour, Noah, prematurely flee the plantation. The rest of the group, who become known as the Macon Seven, soon follow. For the next seven episodes, we follow the Macon Seven as they escape one close call after another. They are pursued chiefly by the bounty hunter August Pullman (played by Christopher Meloni, which is to be expected not because Meloni strikes me as a nineteenth-century slave catcher, but because that guy appears in everything these days). Pullman also brings his son along for the chase. Basically, he pops up at just about any inopportune moments only for the Macon Seven to barely escape.

The show barely attempts to portray the events in a realistic manner, and I think that’s intentional. Underground isn’t concerned with interrogating slavery in the nineteenth century. Instead, it wants to keep its audience entertained and develop a show that’s largely based around black action heroes who fight against America’s white supremacy. But there’s still something a little untoward about the show. It’s difficult to sit through a show about the violent institution of slavery knowing the show is depicting these events chiefly for entertainment purposes.

The goal of entertaining above all else seeps into the aesthetics of the show. The directors barely hold a shot for more than a few seconds and we quickly flit back and forth between characters (in addition the Macon Seven, the show also follows two burgeoning abolitionists who are joining the underground railroad, but their story is largely uninteresting). The creators seem worried that awash in peak TV, viewers might become bored and change the channel. (There is one incredible tracking shot in the first episode, so it’s not as if the show is entirely without artistry).

There’s one scene in particular that struck me as bothersome, even as the writers, directors, and actors are clearly attempting to sidestep some tricky issues. It’s revealed early on that Tom Macon, the owner of the plantation, is having an affair with one of the house slaves, Ernestine. When their tryst is first revealed to the viewer, we see Tom discover Ernestine completely nude. Before the two have sex, Ernestine makes Tom promise that he won’t send her youngest son out into the field and instead allow him to apprentice as a blacksmith with her older son. This is clearly supposed to upend the power dynamic between the two, at least momentarily, and Ernestine even slaps Tom a couple of times to drive the point home. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel uncomfortable seeing the enslaved body of Ernestine used to tantalize the audience. (A couple of shots linger on the abs of Noah, played by Aldis Hodge, so they’re at least equal opportunists when it comes to sexualizing the enslaved body). Knowing the centrality of rape to American slavery makes the scene difficult to endure. And while I understand that the makers of the episode wish to show how a woman might achieve agency within this system, at what point does giving your characters agency tip over into whitewashing the sins of slavery?

The same good intentions that make the show interesting in the first place are what also hold it back. Underground has been produced at a time of racial division in America, and there’s something laudable in attempting to tell the story of the nation’s racist past to a larger audience. The anachronistic songs only serve to connect the events of the nineteenth century to our present day unrest. But because America has yet to overcome the racism that has been woven into our country because of slavery, it’s difficult to watch a film that treats slavery as entertainment first and historical event second. This bothered me far less when watching Tarantino’s Django Unchained, and perhaps the reason is that Tarantino’s film is so clearly filtered through blacksploitation and westerns that there is no illusion of veracity. As a director, Tarantino is telling us at every turn, “You are watching a movie right now.”
Still, some of the questions of Underground were also brought up when Django Unchained was first released, chief among them, What is the appropriate way to visualize slavery? At the very least, Underground attempts to reimagine ways we can tell stories about our nation’s original sin.