Babo Speaks Back: White Violence and Black Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Black Fiction

Abstract

Although numerous critics have noted the manner in which slave narratives appropriated the gothic genre for their texts, black writers of the nineteenth century were equally prone to using the genre, particularly after emancipation. These later texts, however, are concerned with the failures of emancipation and the rise of new forms of racial injustice and slavery. Each text is haunted by slavery and presents that haunting particularly through the violation of women’s bodies and psyches. Notably, the texts’ choice to mediate the real temporal collapses—the haunting of the past and failures of the present—in the form of suffering women recalls traditional gothic anxieties about the role of women. More importantly, the texts respond to a very real gothic use of women’s bodies during the nineteenth century: as the rationale for violence against blacks in the form of lynching. Furthermore, the writers attend to the peculiarities of witnessing the real violence done to black women against the imagined violence done to white women. Such violence, and its inherent mantra to “Keep the Negro Down” (Hopkins 178), connects the antebellum period to the postbellum era. Consequently, black writers using the gothic genre in the nineteenth century respond by meditating upon the horrors of the violence, and its significations for black survival and American progress.

With freedom, a new system of intimidation came into vogue; the Negro was not only whipped and scourged; he was killed.

Ida B. Wells, “A Red Record”