1) the captive body becomes the source of an irresistible, destructive sensuality; 2) at the same time—; in stunning contradiction —the captive body reduces to a thing, becoming being for the captor; 3) in this absence from a subject position, the captured sexualities provide a physical and biological expression of "otherness" ; 4) as a category of "otherness," the captive body translates into a potential for pornotroping and embodies sheer physical powerlessness that slides into a more general "powerlessness," resonating through various centers of human and social meaning. (67)
American slave
narratives, largely published after Séjour's story, appealed
to readers by emphasizing enslaved humanity. This illustration,
from Narrative
of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave,
Written
by Himself (1847), constructs a portrait of slave emotion expressed
within and constrained by a system of power and family separation
similar
to the system depicted by Séjour earlier in "The Mulatto"
(described above). |
 |
This lack of human acknowledgement is also seen in Georges, Laïsa's son, a mulatto who does not know who his father is and who consequently feels a sense of emptiness. While Georges likes his master "as much as one can like a man," and his master "esteem[s] him, but with that esteem that the horseman bears for the most handsome and vigorous of his chargers" (357), their dynamic is a consequence of the black-white binary dictated by the systemic structure of slavery. As a result, Georges experiences intense remorse, the result of being denied the identity of his own father, an identity his dying mother Laïsa refuses to disclose to him. After Laïsa's death, Georges, like his mother and her brother Jacques, is, in a figurative sense, an orphan.
Although Georges is seriously wounded saving his master's life from would-be murderers, Alfred tries to seduce Georges's wife, Zelia, during his convalescence. She resists Alfred's overtures, refusing to compromise her virtue for her master. As Antoine explains, Alfred, "instead of being moved by this display of a virtue that is so rare among women, above all among those who, like Zelia, are slaves, and who, every day, see their shameless companions prostitute themselves to the colonists, thereby only feeding more licentiousness" (359), allows his lustful desires to govern his actions. Zelia repeatedly resists him—a testament of the strength of Zelia's humanity and of her love for her husband— and causes Alfred, in his last desperate effort to seduce her,to lose his balance, striking his head as he falls. Tragically for Zelia, colonial laws dictated that the slave must be blamed and executed for her master's injury.4
Zelia's action, deemed rebellious within the dictates of the system of slavery, proves for the slave doubly devastating, resulting in her death as well as the destruction of her family. Georges pleads persistently and passionately to Alfred to spare his wife. When that fails, Georges angrily condemns his master as a "scoundrel," even threatening his life if Zelia is executed. Alfred, however, remains adamant. He shows no mercy. Alfred's recalcitrance precipitates his own murder and the murder of his wife at the hand of the vengeful Georges three years later. Only in the interval, after securing his two-year-old son and running away from his master, to a free space, "those thick forests that seem to hold the new world in their arms" and living among the Maroons, slaves, who, like Georges, "have fled the tyranny of their masters" (361), does Georges savor a semblance of what freedom means.
In Séjour's bleak story, there are no winners, for Georges also kills himself, since he apparently cannot live with the guilt and remorse. In avenging Zelia's death, Georges has also killed his own father, completing the destruction of his family. The story's concluding scene is strikingly symbolic. Georges severs his father's head with an ax just as Alfred tries to tell him that he is his father (364). The word "father" is severed, broken in two, a reminder that in a slave society normal paternal connections could not exist with slave children. Georges's action results in two children, one mulatto (his son) and the other white (Alfred and his wife's son), being orphaned. For both the slave boy and the free white boy of "The Mulatto," family is destroyed. Yet Alfred's child, by token of his race and class, will likely reap the benefits from his dissolved family. As Hortense Spillers comments, "the vertical transfer of bloodline, of a patronymic, of titles and entitlements, of real estate and the prerogatives of 'cold cash,' from fathers to sons and in the supposedly free exchange of affectional ties between a male and female of his choice—becomes the mythically revered privilege of a free and freed community" (74), of which the white child is beneficiary. Yet for the slave this takes on a different, constricted meaning: Georges and Zelia's orphan son will, as long as he remains in bondage, enjoy no privileges. Séjour conflates magistricide and patricide, so that in killing his master and father, Georges has killed part of himself. In terms of the rebellion-submission binary, Georges's act of ultimate rebellion is equated to his ultimate self-submission as an enslaved man. In other words, Georges's submission is the result of the oppressive and destructive effect of his enslavement on his mind and his spirit. For Georges, submission and rebellion as possibilities for manhood are inextricably linked, if irreconcilable.
While this situation, perpetuated by the systemic structure of slavery, is dismal for Georges, there exists a third alternative in Antoine, the narrator. Having lived for seventy-plus years, Antoine has succumbed to neither magistricide nor suicide as a response to slavery; instead, he tells stories about slavery. These stories provide an outlet for voicing commentary as a counterpoint to the tragic outcome of Georges's master-slave story. The narrator's stories also alert his white listener, and Séjour's readers, to the destructive consequences of slavery.
