Hearts of Blackness: Reconsidering the Abolitionists--Again

Abstract

In an episode from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, retold by John Stauffer in The Black Hearts of Men, Ishmael regards disapprovingly the racism he detects among fellow white travelers on schooner from New Bedford to Nantucket. The onlookers are puzzled by the comradeship between Ishmael, white Christian, and Queequeg, black cannibal. Who would think that a white man were anything more dignified than whitewashed negro, Ishmael wonders (p. 219). In the same year that Moby-Dick was published, 1851, the white abolitionist Gerrit Smith penned A Story: The Ruinous Visit to Monkeyville, which also tells of white man who imagined himself as black. It was an odd tale, never published, about nine-year-old white boy named John Brown, who could hear but not speak. After much prayer by his family, John miraculously begins to talk. No sooner has he acquired the skill than his speech-and soul-are corrupted by a set of rude, ignorant, low-bred from Monkeyville who speak with a dialect or language peculiar to themselves. Under their influence, Brown becomes liar, thief, and murderer. The story ends with his execution, followed by Smith's words of caution: Remember, Reader, is it not better never to have voice, than to misuse it, as John Brown did (pp. 268-9)? Stauffer convincingly argues that Smith envisioned the Monkeyville boys as black and that he modeled his protagonist on the John Brown who later gained fame at Pottawatomie and Harpers Ferry. When Smith wrote the story, Brown was living in the biracial community of North Elba, New York, which Smith helped to create, and he had begun to confess to Smith some of his violent schemes. Although Smith lived for another twenty-three years after writing the story, Stauffer waits until the end of Smith's life and the end of the book to mention the tale. It comes as