[HPforGrownups] Re: Freedom for House-Elves (Was: Kreacher the Plot Device Elf)

[Magpie]

No: HPFGUIDX 161869

 a_svirn:
> But that's exactly what I am saying, Betsy. If Beecher Stowe wrote
> about defiant and rebellious slaves, eager to free themselves from
> the white man's yoke, we could dismiss Scarlett's "mammy" as a sort
> of anomaly, or even wishful thinking on Mitchell's part. But thing is
> the picture they both paint is remarkably similar. The only
> difference is that one is looking at it misty-eyed, while other is
> genuinely appalled. So I'd say it's a good bet that "mammy" was very
> much the norm.

Magpie:
Or Mammy was a familiar narcissistic projection of the white owners who saw 
what they want to see--and since white people were usually the ones doing 
the writing that's what we saw. If a black slave is ordered to take care of 
the children, they would naturally see her as a warm, mother figure and not 
think beyond that. If a person has been raised to care for another person 
they certainly might feel affection for them. And people are complicated. 
Placed in a situation where one of you is in the owning family and the other 
is a slave, you still might find things to like in each other within that 
framework.

But so could the person being cared for come to see the situation as being 
about affection in ways it isn't, especially if they don't want to justify 
it. Unless an owner made an effort to find out about a slave outside the 
services they performed for them, they would have little idea what they were 
like as a person. A stereotype can be common and still be wrong. Stowe's 
characters react to things based on the Christian principles she wanted to 
show. She herself had never been to a plantation, iirc.

I mean, a rebellious slave was punished, so there were reasons that you 
might more see more subservient behavior. For instance, in Roots Kunta Kinte 
doesn't accept his slavery at all. But when his family is threatened and he 
sees no other way to save them he falls to his knees and plays the part of 
the fawning slave. I can't imagine it wasn't common knowledge amongst slaves 
how to play that part to flatter whites if they had to do that. Alex Haley 
didn't personally experience slavery any more than Stowe or Mitchell did, of 
course, but he was writing based on his family's oral history, just as I 
think Mitchell partly was. His slaves come out very differently than 
Mitchell's do. They would never have turned out an offer of freedom. Freedom 
was the goal. Frederick Douglass, iirc, describes his dawning childhood 
realization that he is a slave as a sad one, and says the "Old Master" was 
never spoken of with affection.

> a_svirn:
> Well, if it comes to that, was there a great slave rebellion in pre-
> Civil War America? (And the Civil War wasn't exactly a *rebellion*,
> since it wasn't initiated by slaves.) Or in the British colonies? Or
> anywhere else, for that matter?

Magpie:
There were slave rebellions.  There were also runaways and the Underground 
Railroad etc.--I believe slaves commonly sheltered runaways in their own 
quarters to help them get away and helped in other ways. And there were 
individual examples of slaves acting out against masters--sometimes 
violently.

-m