The Garies and their Friends (Race in the Americas) Review

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The Garies and their Friends (Race in the Americas) Review"The Garies and Their Friends" is a delightful discovery, especially taking into account its inauspicious title and the cloyingly sentimentalist prose of its opening chapters (think Louisa May Alcott's novels "for girls"). I'm not sure what I expected from this, the second novel published by an African American (in 1857), but its thriller-paced plot and distinctive characters took me by surprise--as did the author's brave and brazen willingness to confront a variety of then-controversial social and racial issues.
The Garies are a slave-owning Southerner, his beloved slave-turned-wife, and their two mixed-race children. To escape the racism of the South and the strict laws of Georgia prohibiting freedom for the children, the family moves to Philadelphia. Living in a white neighborhood, they both meet their remarkable collection of "friends," including the respectably middle-class and black Ellis family, and discover that the racism in the North is of a different, and equally dangerous, nature. Of particular concern is the couple next door, a wife appalled by their new mixed-race neighbors and a husband who hatches a plot to rob the Garies of their wealth.
The twists of the plot subject the Garies and their friends to everyday travails and once-in-a-lifetime opportunities, to riots, murders, and fraud, to well-meaning benefactors and corrupt politicians. Two siblings are separated--one to a black family, the other raised by a white academy--and their different journeys are a novel unto themselves (and this subplot results in one of the most heart-rending and fascinating portions of the book).
Although the obvious moral of Webb's work is posed as a tirade against the evil taint of the twin institutions of slavery and of racism, its underlying theme is even more basic: Why can't we all just get along? At times, Webb seems to imply that the simple acquisition of money will help erase many of the distinctions between black and white, but, fortunately, Webb's novel is a long way from being an assimilationist tract.
Rather than suggesting that equality results when blacks behave more like whites, he advocates precisely the opposite: Emily, the young woman raised in the black community, writes to her brother, who is "passing" and hopes to marry a white woman: "[Y]ou ask me to sever, once and for ever, my connection with a people who, you say, can only degrade me. Yet how much happier am I, sharing their degradation, than you appear to be! . . . You walk on the side of the oppressor--I, thank God, am with the oppressed." Webb's opinion of blacks who "become white" is clear from the tale's tragic outcome.
The style is typical of much of the sentimental novels of the nineteenth century, and it's initially difficult to get past the effusive exclamations and the too-cute decorum that fills the dialogue and even the narrative itself ("Oh, isn't that a pretty calico, mother, that with the green ground?" "He had just that hop-and-go kind of gait, and he was the funniest man that ever lived."). But give it time--after the first 50 pages, I read the book in one sweep, astonished that Webb was able to incorporate so many inflammatory issues of the contemporary scene into a relentlessly gripping, often comic, devastatingly tragic, always heartwarming, and ultimately triumphant story. The book's decorous tone and its presentation of horrific injustice result in a jarring dissonance that conspires to make the novel even more powerful. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.The Garies and their Friends (Race in the Americas) OverviewIn this novel set in antebellum America, the Garies-a white southerner, his mulatto slave-turned-wife, and their two children-have moved to Philadelphia from Georgia.Originally published in London in 1857,The Garies and Their Friends was the second novel published by an African American and the first to chronicle the experience of free blacks in the pre-Civil War northeast. The novel anticipates themes that were to become important in later African American fiction, including miscegenation and "passing," and tells the story of the Garies and their friends, the Ellises, a "highly respectable and industrious coloured family." "It is remarkable that, even as the study of African American literature and culture has become central to any number of projects within American intellectual life, so little attention has been given a work as significant as Frank J. Webb'sThe Garies and Their Friends."-from the 1997 introduction by Robert Reid-Pharr

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