Blurring the Color Line: Black Freedom, Passing, Abolitionism, and Irish Ethnicity in Frank J. Webb's The Garies and Their Friends

Abstract

BLURRING THE COLOR LINE: BLACK FREEDOM, PASSING, ABOLITIONISM, AND IRISH ETHNICITY IN FRANK J. WEBB'S THE GARIESAND THEIR FRIENDS Robert Nowatzki Ball State University One of the most intriguing scenes in Frank J. Webb's 1857 The Garies and Their Friends, a novel that focuses on African-Americans and a biracial family in antebellum Philadelphia, depicts the racechanges forced upon the wicked white racist George Stevens.1 Shortly before the race riot that he is orchestrating, a fire company gang beats him up and tars him; a group of drunken white men then ridicules him and smears him white with lime. This scene encapsulates Webb's attempt to problematize notions of racial identity and racial difference in the novel. By positing race as a fluid category that is intertwined with class and that white racists worked to stabilize, Webb's novel anticipates recent theoretical discussions about the constructed nature of race. The novel's critique of racial categories and racism, along with the fact that it is the second novel by an African-American, makes it one of the most interesting works ofnineteenth-century American fiction.2 It is also one of the first novels to represent the ambiguous social status of Irish immigrants as well as racial prejudice and urban violence in the antebellum North during the turbulent Jacksonian period.3 Of the limited scholarship dealing with Webb's novel, most focuses on biographical information; black domesticity, communalism, and reform activism; Christian hypocrisy; sentimentalism; and realism. There is surprisingly little analysis of how The Garies deconstructs definitions of racial categories .4 In this essay I argue that Webb's depiction of prosperous Northern blacks, mulattoes, white abolitionists, and Irish immigrants in The Gariesdisrupts the racial ideologies ofnative-born white Americans . The novel further questions how whites racially define themselves and others by pointing out the often conflicting paradigms of racial categorization—skin tone, dress, class status, reputation, and ancestry—and by suggesting that a white person's whiteness can be undermined when that person marries a black person, is labeled as an abolitionist, or is physically blackened with tar. Despite this racial fluidity, however, the novel also emphasizes the power of white racists in resisting this instability by categorizing racially ambiguous characters as inescapably "black" and inferior. 30Robert Nowatzki The notion of blackness as a fixed category of identity inferior to whiteness drives much of the violence and social ostracism depicted in The Garies: it causes the deaths of a white man, his biracial wife, their stillborn baby, and their son as well as the mutilation and derangement of their black neighbor. More positively, The Garies offers a sympathetic, detailed depiction of free African-Americans working together to battle prejudice and violence in the North, subjects that were familiar to Webb as a native of Philadelphia. Webb's focus on free blacks and racism in the North held little appeal for Northern white readers; in this sense it resembles Harriet E. Wilson's 1859 novel Our Nig, another novel that exposed Northern racism and sank into obscurity. Webb's depiction of Northern white racism, along with the fact that the novel was published in England, suggests that Northern whites were not his intended audience.5 Lacking an audience in the United States, The Gariesfailed to pose an effective challenge to popular notions of race in general as well as to derogatory perceptions and representations of African Americans that proscribed their social positions and opportunities. The Garies chronicles the lives of the white Clarence Garie, his mulatto wife (and former slave) Emily, and their children (also named Clarence and Emily) after their migration from Georgia to Philadelphia . Webb also includes a "passing" plot early in the novel that features Emily's mulatto cousin George Winston. The Garies befriend their industrious African-American neighbors the Ellises and the wealthy black landlord Mr. Walters, but they run afoul oftheir neighbor George Stevens, an unscrupulous lawyer who organizes a race riot and pressures an Irishman named McCloskey participate in the attack . Shortly before the attack, Stevens suffers the painful racechange experience mentioned above. During the riot, the Ellis family takes refuge in the home of Walters and aid his armed resistance to...