ESQ: A Journal of Nineteenth-Century American Literature and Culture

Just prior to the vicious race riot that lies at the heart of Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends (1857), an incident occurs that provides a window into one of the novel’s primary aims: exposing racism as the ideological mystification of class struggle.¹ Ensconced within the “temporary fortress” into which the “jet-black” hero of the novel’s first half, Philadelphia real estate mogul Mr. Walters, has converted his Easton Street mansion are many of the Garies’ eponymous friends: the Ellises, “a highly respectable and industrious coloured family” comprised of Charles and Ellen Ellis, a mechanic and a seamstress, respectively, and their children Esther, Caddy, and Charlie; Kinch De Younge, Charlie’s scraggly yet “redoubtable” mate; and a “few of Mr. Walters’s male friends” who have “volunteered their aid in defence of his house.”² Having moments ago narrowly escaped a pre-riot catastrophe in the form of a stray piece of live firewood that lands atop a stockpile of gunpowder cartridges, these black resistance fighters are soon startled by yet another premature alarum, this time in the form of a “loud commotion heard below stairs” (G, 210).

The cacophony, as it turns out, signals not the onslaught of the predominantly Irish working-class mob, but rather [End Page 564] an accident involving the young, redoubtable Kinch. Determined to appear a warrior, Kinch “ha[s] added to his accoutrements an old sword.” Unaccustomed to “weapons of this nature,” however, “he ha[s] been constantly getting it between his legs, and ha[s] already been precipitated down a flight of steps.” Though Kinch remains “undaunted … by this mishap,” continuing to cling to the sword “with wonderful tenacity,” it eventually upsets him again, this time sending him “violently” against a table, causing him to overturn a pan of batter onto his head and back. When he implores the first responders for water, exclaiming that “the yeast is blinding” him, they answer his appeal with a “shout of laughter, without the slightest effort for his relief ”—a response that Walters, contrasting the incident with the near-catastrophic gunpowder debacle, caps off with the following quip: “This is the farce after what was almost a tragedy” (G, 210, 211).

Peripheral though it may seem, this farcical episode nonetheless performs a few crucial functions. First and foremost, it provides one last bit of comic relief (for resistance fighters and readers alike) before the onset of the riot’s “horrors” (G, 220), which include the maiming of Charles Ellis, whom white rioters force off a rooftop, and the deaths of Clarence and Emily Garie, the former of whom is murdered in cold blood by the novel’s primary villain, “Slippery George” Stevens, while the latter dies of exposure while hiding from the white mob.³ The episode also serves as another instance of the novel’s seemingly inexorable focus on the domestic, as Kinch’s battering foreshadows the defense of the house that he and his future wife Caddy Ellis stage, as together they turn away the “motley crowd” below by dousing its members with boiling cayenne pepper water (G, 211).

Yet, if criticism on the novel to date is any indication, the episode’s most important function would appear to be its symbolic one, for the whitefacing that Kinch undergoes in this scene seems to confirm both older and more recent readings of The Garies as, in the former case, a testament to [End Page 565] the black bourgeoisie’s desire to be(come) white, and, in the latter case, a precursor to our contemporary understanding of race as a social construction. Indeed, no other scene would appear to better crystalize both readings, as it seems to illustrate not only older claims that Webb’s protagonists are “not proud of being black” and “would prefer to be white,” but also more recent assertions that Webb’s novel anticipates “argu[ments] against racial essentialism,” in particular “current constructionist discussions,” by “positing race as a fluid category,” a “constructed mask.”⁴

“Seems,” however, is the operative word here...