William Wells Brown's Economy of Entertainment

Abstract

William Wells wrote his final book, My Southern Home: or, South and Its People, following his 1879 tour of American South. Published in 1880, book makes an odd coda to a prolific literary career during which authored numerous versions of his autobiography, four books of black history, one published drama, and three editions of his groundbreaking novel, Clotel. Though much of this work has been subjected to intense scholarly scrutiny, My Southern Home has been all but ignored. (1) One reason for this is that since it was written several years after Emancipation, My Southern Home was motivated by different political and aesthetic goals than those that spurred Brown's antebellum writings, and therefore doesn't fit into typical critical paradigms. My Southern Home also perplexes readers with its form, for though it announces itself as an autobiography in which earlier incidents were written out from author's recollections, text does not deliver on that promise (113). In fact, when readers visit Brown's old home, they find a racially indeterminate narrator, a parade of stereotypical illustrations, and promised recollections of slavery copied verbatim (or slightly altered) from Brown's antebellum writings such as Narrative of William Wells (1847), Clotel (1853), or The Escape (1855). This recycling and retooling of old material in antebellum chapters of book precedes a postwar section featuring loosely connected sketches set in various Southern locales. None of characters in first section of My Southern Home appear in second section, and narrator himself appears and disappears without accounting for his own movements or actions. Scholars who have reckoned with Southern highlight many confusions and dead-ends endemic to text. William L. Andrews admires work, but rightly notes that it is nearly impossible to read into My Southern Home a consistent and verifiable sociopolitical message and that the narrator's identity and purposes are ... hard to pin down (Introduction 11). John Ernest accepts Andrews's arguments and posits that Brown's book is less memoir than sociology (Maps 91). According to Ernest, Brown's method led him to present all flaws, contradictions, and pleasures that defined author's Southern home. Ultimately, Ernest argues, Southern make[s] object of observations observing subject himself, William Wells Brown (Maps 103). Ernest is correct to note that positions himself at center of Southern, though I argue that he does so by revealing many of methods that made him a successful author. Throughout his final work, reveals his ability and dynamism as he both revises old material and creates new scenes, many of which feature songs, antics, and performances that illuminate workings of an economy of entertainment. (2) Within Brown's economy of entertainment, black characters use performance to rebalance economic scales, and to highlight uncertainty of racial signifiers. The characters in Brown's My Southern Home show that performing rather than working is what defines white power under slave system and is, concomitantly, one way to reverse economic inequalities of slavery and Jim Crow. Because it was obvious to that work did not correspond to wealth for white slaveholders who lived off fruits of chattel labor, he crafted representations of slavery in which blacks mastered art of not working. Moreover, as only autobiography authored after Emancipation, Southern illuminates economic benefits of entertainment for former slaves within postwar America. (3) Though features free men and women who use performance to realize economic gain in postwar economy, he also inserts himself into a book that is itself an important postwar performance in order to prove that new economic arrangements necessitate revision--but not abandonment--of economy of entertainment. …