Clotel: or The President’s Daughter

Although of historic interest simply by virtue of the fact that William Wells Brown appears to have been the first African American to write a novel, Clotel is much more than a literary curiosity: it is an eminently readable and emotionally powerful, portrait of the dehumanizing horrors of slave life in the Ante-bellum South. Brown, himself an escaped slave, tells the story of the slave Currer and her daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and of their attempts to escape from slavery. The unacknowledged father of the girls, President Thomas Jefferson, is the reason for the title and a theme that runs through the book. There is an immediacy to the stories here–of slave auctions, of families being torn apart, of card games where humans are wagered and lost, of sickly slaves being purchased for the express purpose of resale for medical experimentation upon their imminent deaths, of suicides and of many more indignities and brutalities–which no textbook can adequately convey. Though the characters tend too much to the archetypal, Brown does put a human face on this most repellent of American tragedies. He also makes extensive use of actual sermons, lectures, political pamphlets, newspaper advertisements, and the like, to give the book something of a docudrama effect.