Were a playwright to choose an African-American character to push Abraham Lincoln toward signing the Emancipation Proclamation, the names of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Nat Turner or Sojourner Truth might come to mind. It's fiction, so it doesn't matter whether the meeting really took place. We're just looking for a plausible subject.
But would you think of Uncle Tom, whose name has become a synonym for servility?
Seems a stretch, but that's exactly the man Carlyle Brown chose to carry the mantle of freedom in his new play. "Abe Lincoln and Uncle Tom in the White House" has its world premiere Saturday in the Guthrie Studio, with actors James A. Williams and Steve Hendrickson. Brown is attempting to turn convention on its head and to reclaim Uncle Tom's identity in a dialogue that explores the economic dimension of slavery, the notion of self-sacrifice and the intense pressures of leadership.
"I hadn't read the book, and I had fallen victim to the mentality that says when you hear the name Uncle Tom you get the picture of the worst individual you could imagine," said Williams, who plays the man. "In reading the book, I found a character of honor and dignity and I thought, maybe this character deserves to be looked at again."
The book, of course, is Harriet Beecher Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin," serialized in a magazine and then published in 1852. The story divided the nation on the question of slavery and set the path for the Civil War. Legend has it that when Beecher Stowe visited the White House herself, Lincoln remarked, "So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war."
Beecher Stowe was inspired to write her abolitionist tract in response to the Fugitive Slave Act, which in 1850 imposed penalties on law officers in non-slave states to return escapees to the South. Uncle Tom is a slave who refuses to give up information about runaways, and ultimately is martyred. He is kind, perhaps to a fault, because Beecher Stowe wanted to create — in her eyes — a completely sympathetic and human image.
"Mrs. Beecher Stowe was creating what she thought was the perfect spokesman for abolitionists," Williams said. "It's almost a superhuman portrayal of kindness and goodness."
Christlike is the term that many have ascribed to Tom — including both Williams and Brown. It is an identity that has provoked incendiary reactions through the years, fed by polemics that Tom was self-abasing and eager to please the slaveholder. Brown said he has retained the honor and goodness of Uncle Tom, but that he hopes to "reclaim Tom's identity from Harriet Beecher Stowe."