Frank Webb's Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics through The Garies and Their Friends

Literary critics such as Claudia Tate and Ann duCille have taught us to think differently about form and class in late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century African-American literature. They have qualified the charges of acquiescence leveled against the literature of respectability or “uplift”: the charges that such literature adopted white middle-class values of industry, frugality, circumspection, and moral purity in a bid for social acceptance, and that such literature was distinguished by condescension towards the African-American masses and surrender to the dominant culture.

Tate argues that African-American women novelists in the 1890s presented to their readers “allegories of political desire.” Rather than domestic mimesis, Frances E. W. Harper and Pauline E. Hopkins offered shrewd portrayals of the gap between an imagined world of ideal courtship and marriage and the actual world of racial injury. In Tate's words, such novels offered “cultural description as symbolic representation, not transparent presentation” (101). Analyzing the gap, revealing the deeper story beneath the surface, Tate finds not false consciousness but narratives that indicate a tempered hope for social equality and female agency.

For duCille, African-American women novelists in the early twentieth century such as Jessie Fauset and Nella Larsen transmuted marriage conventions and subversively explored issues of freedom in a racist society, articulating black feminine self-consciousness and desire. These novels were “not transparent documents” giving access to racial authenticity or communal practice, but strategic contributions to debates about gender, race, and citizenship (45). Responding to Hazel Carby's argument about repression and sublimation in Harper's 1894 novel of “uplift,” Iola Leroy, Tate argues that “sexual desire is not displaced by social purpose but encoded in it—regulated, submerged, and insinuated into the much safer realm of political zeal and the valorized venue of holy wedlock” (16). Both Tate and duCille insist that knowledge about historical context enables new perspectives, allowing modern readers to perceive significance in details of plot, character, gesture, and setting—to look at, rather than merely through, these novels. In resisting “transparency” and in reconstructing a historical aesthetics, they argue against the distillations of African-American literature to sociology or racial essence.

The rethinking of “uplift” among literary critics and historians may help to further the aesthetic reconsiderations currently underway in literary studies.¹ American novelists of racial manners, black and white, reflect on the intimacies of context, gesture, and consequence. The scrutiny of these works, prompted by Tate, duCille, and others, alters our understanding of the relationship between literature and politics and tests our critical assumptions. Redirecting literary focus from the post-Reconstruction to the antebellum period and from novels by women to a male-authored text, I will use the dislocating example of Frank J. Webb's 1857 novel about Philadelphia, The Garies and Their Friends, to suggest that we may not have gone far enough in appreciating literary surface. We may not yet have grasped the intricacy and recalcitrance of these novels of racial manners, overestimating the need for allegories or subversions to decode meanings that are seen to lie above or below the words on the page. Nineteenth-century works such as The Garies and Their Friends may turn out to be even less transparent and more revealing than critics such as Tate and duCille propose. These literary texts insist that we read their details closely, attend to their volatile manners, and understand how these gestures are part of a struggle over position and a meditation on history and conduct.²

The Garies and Their Friends was published in London in 1857 by G. Routledge and Co., the chief promoters of American authors to the British public. The novel originally appeared in two editions, an expensive blue-cloth volume, blind-stamped and lettered in gilt, and a cheaper edition, bound in thin yellow boards. The two editions suggest that Routledge imagined the book would appeal to elite and popular audiences. Both editions contained two brief prefaces, one by Lord Brougham, who had been instrumental in passing the British Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and the other by Harriet Beecher Stowe, who had published Uncle Tom's Cabin five years earlier in 1852. Thus The Garies and Their Friends, which has been criticized by several modern critics for evading the subject of slavery, came to the public in 1857 with impeccable abolitionist credentials.³

In her preface, Stowe recognizes the aptness of Webb's Philadelphia setting. After reporting that “the author is a coloured young man, born and reared in the city of Philadelphia” (xix), she makes clear to British readers what “Philadelphia” means: “This city, standing as it does on the frontier between free and slave territory, has accumulated naturally a large population of the mixed and African race” (xx).⁴ She describes the border status of the city, above the Mason-Dixon line that defined the edge between slavery and freedom, and alludes to the city's prominent role in debates about the character of the nation. She emphasizes the cynosure that Philadelphia's African-American community had become, the social experiment in freedom that its members represented for many observers: “In this city they form a large class—have increased in numbers, wealth, and standing—they constitute a peculiar society of their own, presenting many social peculiarities worthy of interest and attention” (xvix).⁵ The word “peculiar” often appears in the decades before the Civil War in discourse about race, slavery, property, and privilege, especially in reference to Philadelphia and its African-American middle and higher classes. Stowe does not specify what she thinks is “peculiar” about this Philadelphia society, although she repeats the word and its cognates several times in her short preface.

According to Stowe, the key question posed, and answered in the affirmative, by Webb's novel is: “Are the race at present held as slaves capable of freedom, self-government, and progress?” (xix). Two contemporary reviewers disagreed about the success of Webb's literary performance. Presuming that Webb's goal was to show that “the negroes possess intellect not inferior to that of the whites, and that similar cultivation would result in equal intelligence, which is evidenced by the condition of the coloured population of Philadelphia,” the reviewer for the London Sunday Times concluded, in September 1857, that “Of the capabilities of the race, the manner in which Mr. Webb wields his pen sufficiently testifies” (2). On the other hand, the reviewer for the London Athenaeum, reporting in October 1857 that The Garies was “interesting, and well written,” explained that these qualities, and the success of African Americans in Philadelphia, resulted from an “admixture of European blood … so that the question intended to be at once raised and answered by this work—whether slaves are capable of self-government—is not fairly stated” (1320). For these reviewers, Stowe's preface has set the terms for evaluating Webb's novel as the answer to a question: Does it or does it not show the race “capable of freedom”?

The questions that Webb asks are different. They are questions about the social and political contexts in which such a formulation could have meaning and about the qualities of freedom for all under such conditions. Stowe's framing inquiry about “the race at present held as slaves” mistakes the scope of the novel, which focuses on “free” people and does not equate black with slave, and also renders hypothetical the African-American “capability” that Webb takes for granted. Yet it would be unfair to castigate Stowe, since Webb himself understands that his literary efforts inevitably will play a role in wider debates about race, freedom, and citizenship. The London publication of The Garies and Their Friends, with its endorsement by British abolitionists and cultural arbiters, likely was part of a strategy to influence the US from abroad. Webb shares Stowe's consciousness of historical necessity, but he also recognizes the absurdity and redundancy of confirming natural rights and verifying human equality. He addresses a question whose premise he rejects, and his answer is riddled with ironies. In The Garies, Webb is both earnest and incredulous.

Alternating between South and North and then concentrating on Philadelphia, Webb evaluates the post-independence promise that free African-American discipline and virtue would secure legal rights and economic success. He alludes to two key violations of this promise: the Pennsylvania state constitutional revision of 1838 that stripped African-American men of the right to vote, and the riots of 1842 and 1849, during which the property, institutions, and persons of the African-American rising classes were targeted. Webb details the social texture of “freedom”: a fragile, labored surface ruptured by violence. The Garies and Their Friends is a historical novel of urgent manners.

Webb tells the stories of three families. Clarence Garie, a wealthy white planter and slave-owner, moves north from Georgia at the urging of Emily, the mixed-race woman with whom he has fathered two children, who wants them and the baby she is carrying to grow up in a “free” state. They are befriended by the Ellises, an industrious African-American couple and their three children. The father, Charles, is a carpenter. The mother, Ellen, takes in laundry and sewing, and the daughter, Esther, also sews. The bedraggled son, Charlie, resists being put out to service and ultimately matures into the reputable “Charles.” The other daughter, Caroline or Caddy, obsessively cleans and orders the Ellis home. The names “Esther” and “Caddy” evoke the striving outsiders in the recently published Bleak House, and Webb reworks Dickens's concerns with deportment and respectability.⁶ The Garies end up as targets for the machinations of George Stevens, an unscrupulous white lawyer who engineers a riot designed to drive blacks from their homes so that he and his cronies can reap a real estate windfall. Having discovered that he is Garie's cousin and only surviving heir, Stevens plots his murder, seeking to inherit his vast estate.

During the riot, the Ellises take refuge with the wealthy black entrepreneur Walters, who has transformed his house into a temporary fortress. A mob invades the Garies' home. Mr. Garie is shot, Emily dies of exposure, her child is stillborn, and only their two children, also named Clarence and Emily, survive. The elder Ellis, on his way to warn the Garies, is attacked. Targeted by a gang, he is chased down a blind alley and then climbs to the roof of a building. Holding off his attackers with a club, he struggles but finally is overcome. The men force him to the edge of the roof, intending to throw him over. He clings to the edge, but when one of his attackers strikes his fingers—the fingers that enable his livelihood as a carpenter—with first the handle and then the blade of a hatchet, severing two fingers on one hand and deeply cutting the other, Ellis falls. The graphic riot scenes at the center of the novel do not tear it open, rending its mannered surfaces and revealing hidden violence. Instead, Webb provides a spectacular public rendition of the violence in everyday life that has been on display, in the South and in the North, from the beginning of the narrative. Webb's story is a mixture of strenuous labor, aggressive civility, edgy sentiment, social comedy, and curious irony. His insinuating narrator slows, undercuts, and distends the action, reflecting upon and skewing his history.⁷

The novel begins in Georgia, on a plantation near Savannah in the late afternoon, when “a Family of peculiar Construction,” as the first chapter title describes them, gathers for tea. This scene frames the action of the novel, and will be hinged to the final supper in Philadelphia, celebrating the wedding of the younger Emily Garie and Charles Ellis. At the start of the The Garies and Their Friends, Webb sets a very strange table:

It was at the close of an afternoon in May, that a party might have been seen gathered around a table covered with all those delicacies that, in the household of a rich Southern planter, are regarded as almost necessaries of life. In the centre stood a dish of ripe strawberries, their plump red sides peeping through the covering of white sugar that had been plentifully sprinkled over them. Geeche limes, almost drowned in their own rich syrup, temptingly displayed their bronze-coloured forms just above the rim of the glass that contained them. Opposite, and as if to divert the gaze from lingering too long over their luscious beauty, was a dish of peaches preserved in brandy, a never-failing article in a Southern matron's catalogue of sweets. A silver basket filled with a variety of cakes was in close proximity to a plate of corn-flappers, which were piled upon it like a mountain, and from the brown tops of which trickled tiny rivulets of butter. All these dainties, mingling their various odours with the aroma of the tea and fine old java that came steaming forth from the richly chased silver pots, could not fail to produce a very appetising effect. (1)

Despite the narrator's guarantee about the appealing qualities of this scene, its excesses (and especially the facts revealed when readers are introduced to the human beings at the table) induce at least a slight queasiness. In Webb's southern plantation still life, the inanimate objects—spilling over their boundaries, revealing their interiors, tempting viewers—seem to be alive. The tender skins of the strawberries are “peeping through” the enveloping sugar, offering florid glimpses; as the verb “peep” implies, the strawberries themselves might be regarding the diners, furtively or playfully. The limes, not just any limes but “Geeche” limes from the Low Country region of South Carolina and Georgia associated with the Gullah people and their durable African customs under slavery, are nearly overwhelmed by the luxurious syrup they produce. Their “bronze-coloured forms” tantalize. Rivaling their “luscious beauty” are the peaches in brandy, placed “as if to divert the gaze” from the limes, but the aesthetic intent here is left obscure. What is the status of the “as if”? Who or what is the agent? Did the “Southern matron” seek the diversion, or someone else, or the narrator, or even the fruit itself?

Ripe and peeping strawberries, enticing and drowning limes, diverting peaches, seeping corncakes—nothing is still in this picture. The silver baskets and the rims of glass barely contain these exorbitant products. The delicacies here are figured as inviting, vulnerable bodies. Some strange visceral comedy or drama of manners, race, sex, pleasure, and economics is being played out across the table even before we meet the “rich Southern planter” and the “Southern matron.” As the chapters unfold, the narrator shows how food becomes a medium of expression and struggle, culminating in the extraordinary final supper, a northern vanitas, which extends the opening tableau and breaks its frame.

The “rich Southern planter” is Clarence Garie, whom the narrator informs us did not “attract more than ordinary attention” (1). The same cannot be said about the “lady of marked beauty” who sits “opposite to him … presiding at the tea-tray” (2). The narrator encourages and manipulates regard for this lady:

The first thing that would have attracted attention on seeing her were her gloriously dark eyes. They were not entirely black, but of that seemingly changeful hue so often met with in persons of African extraction, which deepens and lightens with every varying emotion. Hers wore a subdued expression that sank into the heart and at once riveted those who saw her. Her hair, of jetty black, was arranged in braids; and through her light-brown complexion the faintest tinge of carmine was visible. As she turned to take her little girl from the arms of the servant, she displayed a fine profile and perfectly moulded form. No wonder that ten years before when she was placed upon the auction-block at Savanah, she had brought so high a price. Mr. Garie had paid two thousand dollars for her, and was the envy of all the young bucks in the neighbourhood who had competed with him at the sale. (2)

Flesh and fruit are linked here, since the woman, too, is composed of appealing surfaces (“gloriously dark eyes,” “jetty black” hair, “light-brown complexion,” “fine profile and perfectly moulded form”). Such outlines again suggest glimpses of an interior: “through her light-brown complexion the faintest tinge of carmine was visible.” Like the commodities on the tea table, she has been purchased and forms part of the planter's array, as we learn in the decorous, jarring mid-sentence volta of “the auction-block at Savanah” and the remembered spectacle of the “young bucks” who eagerly sought to acquire her. Again the narrator complicates his appetising effects, suggesting how desire and pleasure are bound to, but not limited by, a system of exploitation.⁸

The “marked beauty” of the woman at the table distinguishes her and also indicates that she has a price, which is enumerated as “two thousand dollars.” She is introduced first in terms of race, then class, then caste. She has a name, “Emily,” which is withheld until a line of dialogue several paragraphs later, when Mr. Garie describes to his guest Mr. Winston, a “dark-complexioned gentleman” (a freed slave who turns out to be Emily's cousin), the disapproval of a northern acquaintance at his “speaking of Emily as my wife” (3, 4).

Garie speaks of Emily as his wife, but she is not legally his wife, nor is she the conventional “Southern matron” governing table and home that readers were led to expect in the opening scene. The narrator does not make Emily's status explicit for another 100 pages, at which time Garie's “kind-hearted” old Uncle John warns him that he will be exposed to public disgrace if he lives in Philadelphia with his “mulatto mistress” (99, 101). Uncle John advises him to remain in Georgia where he can cohabit with her or dismiss her as he pleases. Garie defends his relationship, arguing that he considers Emily to be his wife, even if the law in Georgia prohibits a legal recognition. Before then, the narrator repeatedly has used the term “wife” to refer to Emily, reflecting Garie's acknowledgement of their bond and also the slave-owner's myopia, with the possible effect of misleading the reader. Finally, at the start of the chapter in which Clarence and Emily are married by a minister in Philadelphia, after another clergyman has refused to perform the service, the narrator intervenes to clarify: “To Emily Winston, we have always accorded the title of Mrs. Garie; whilst, in reality, she had no legal claim to it whatever” (133). This kind of discrepancy typifies the narrator's performance throughout the book. A sly guide to the plantations of Georgia and the streets and parlors of Philadelphia, he continually and decorously shifts the ground under his characters and readers.

In the first scene at the Ellis tea table in Philadelphia, there are no silver baskets, finely engraved decanters, or overflowing containers. Instead, the narrator pictures a china tea-pot, “which received its customary quantity of tea,” no more and no less. This table, too, is precarious, but the Ellises attempt to guard against its vulnerability. The brewing pot has been “carefully placed behind the stove pipe that no accidental touch of the elbow might bring it to destruction” (17). Rather than piling up a mountainous array of fruit and cakes, the Ellises consume quantities of nutritious and hearty food, here warm cornbread and cool butter. Both pleasure and sustenance are their aims. The Ellises appreciate their edibles. While reluctantly serving as a waiter at a dinner party given by his employer Mrs. Thomas, the young Charlie Ellis corrects a bigoted dinner guest who denies the “antiquity of the use of salad” by removing a volume of Chaucer from the bookshelf and quoting a relevant passage (6).

Webb's early Philadelphia scenes evince a social comedy different from the satires of the gap between reach and grasp that supposedly characterized the city's black aspirants. Rather than the ludicrous pretense found in Edward W. Clay's widely circulated series of “Life in Philadelphia” images (colored etchings originally published between 1828 and 1830), or in novels by Robert Montgomery Bird (Sheppard Lee in 1836) or Sarah Josepha Hale (Liberia; or, Mr. Peyton's Experiments in 1853), Webb flaunts the ways in which his characters undermine their menial roles or enact the rituals of respectability with a telling vehemence. Critics of the book hardly ever discuss its social and physical comedy, which pivots on the intimacy between manners and violence. Emphasis is given to themes of racial passing, the red herring of assimilation, the spectacular ferocity of the riot, or the assault on the reprobate Stevens by a group of volunteer firemen who mistake him for a member of a rival company and blacken him with tar. Yet so much of the action of Webb's book takes place on the level of gesture and tone, so much of its meaning lies in the negotiations and consequences of small details that critics have tended to overlook. In the finest points, Webb discovers inordinate significance.

Take, for example, the Ellises' daughter Caddy. Caddy loves to clean. Of plain appearance and “of a rather shrewish disposition,” she is “indefatigable … never so happy as when in possession of a dust or scrubbing brush; she would have regarded a place where she could have lived in a perpetual state of house cleaning, as an earthly paradise” (16). Anticipating a visit from Mr. Winston, Caddy springs into action. She makes sure that the Ellises' little parlor is the epitome of order, bringing it to “an astonishing state of cleanliness” (45). She arranges ornaments at exact distances from the corners of the mantelpiece, burnishes the looking-glass until it is immaculate, and places the doors “in a state of forwardness to receive their expected guest” (45). In charge of preparing the house that the Garies will occupy when they arrive from Georgia, Caddy harries two old cleaning women when she detects streaks on the windows and “infinite small spots of paint and whitewash” on the floors (85). Toward the end of the book, she supervises the domestic arrangements for Charles and Emily's wedding and supper, tyrannizing Walters's staff and driving the entrepreneur from his own home.

Webb represents Caddy's exertions as a complex response to life in Philadelphia. Caddy furiously tries to maintain order in her domestic space. Her labor is so strenuous because of her passion for symmetry and her anxieties about scrutiny (visitors are imminent: like her poised doors, Caddy is always in a “state of forwardness to receive”) and because of the pervasive threats to African-American homes. Her insecurities are marked by both class and race, and she vividly displays in her movements the energy required to maintain her position. Webb represents Caddy's incessant activity as negotiating the demands of social performance in Philadelphia, an attempt to define a space in which, given the constraints, she and her family can be “free.” Her efforts to preserve order—arranging, dusting, scouring—appear to be without end, as Webb indicates when his narrator tells us that before Caddy's eyes were “infinite small spots of paint and whitewash.” Not “infinitely,” which would emphasize her perspicuity, but “infinite,” hinting that she may never be able to safeguard her home. The “infinite small spots of paint and whitewash” suggest that racial difficulties in Philadelphia may be indelible and septic. The protective character of Caddy's labors is dramatized during the riot, when she uses her domestic prowess to help defend the Walters home. With the assistance of her young friend Kinch, she boils kettles full of hot water and cayenne pepper and delivers the scalding contents onto the heads of those who are about to breach the front door with their axes. When Walters runs upstairs to discover the source, Caddy proudly displays her weapon: “‘This,’ said she, holding up a dipper, ‘is my gun’” (214).⁹

Caddy's dignity often is undercut by the slapstick comedy that accompanies her efforts. Preparing tea for her father and Mr. Winston, who are expected shortly, Caddy shields her silk dress with an old petticoat. When she notices a “beggar boy” drawing with charcoal on her pristine steps, she demands that he cease and he laughs and puts his thumb to his nose (46). Grabbing a broom, she steals around the side of the house and brings her weapon down upon the head, not of the boy, but of a startled Mr. Winston. With the details of petticoat over silk dress and crushed hat, Webb emphasizes the precarious security that clothes provide and the thin line between decorum and pratfall.

Webb presents an African-American twist on George Lippard's Philadelphia, riven by class struggle and corruption, symbolized by “Monk Hall,” the Gothic structure beneath whose flooring lies a series of “trap-doors.” In an emblematic scene of Lippard's notorious 1845 novel The Quaker City; or, The Monks of Monk Hall, a “quiet supper-room” collapses and one of the male protagonists falls into the abyss. Lippard's narrator reflects upon vulnerable surfaces: “In such cases no man could stride across the floor without peril of his life” (60–61, 120–22). In The Garies and Their Friends, the Garies, the Ellises, Walters, and Stevens walk across their parlors or on the streets of the city, and with one false step—false in ways not revealed until after the social or racial mistake is made—they trip a hidden spring and a chasm opens. Webb's characters attempt to preserve their balance on the verge. The wrong dinner kettle prompts a beating for Charlie Ellis, or a particular coat turns into a bulls-eye for Stevens, or Garie, at home with Emily, hears the evening calm broken by the cries of “Down with the Abolitionist—down with the Amalgamationist!,” directed at him by the approaching mob (221).

With such details, Webb evokes the volatile racial history of antebellum Philadelphia. In 1838, when the light-skinned Robert Purvis helped his darker-skinned wife down from a carriage while attending the opening ceremonies at Pennsylvania Hall, the largest public meeting place in Philadelphia, newly dedicated to varieties of social reform and especially to the abolition of slavery, the gesture was perceived by spectators as an outrage of racial amalgamation. The moment, repeatedly invoked, helped to justify the burning of the Hall three days later. In 1842, the banner held by a group of African-American temperance marchers in Philadelphia, depicting a slave whose chains had been severed and the backdrop of a rising sun, was interpreted as an affront by onlookers (some discerned a slave ship or town in flames), who then set upon the paraders, inciting two days of violence directed at African-American targets.

In the final elaborate set-piece of the novel, Webb describes the wedding of Charles Ellis and Emily Garie in a time approaching the present, “many years” after the riot (309). The festivities are held in the home of the entrepreneur Walters, who has married Charles's sister Esther. The remnants of the Garie and Ellis families and their many friends have gathered to celebrate. The guests include a few whites who have supported the families during the course of the narrative, playfully figured by the narrator as the “blancmange” alongside the “chocolate cream” in his inventory of desserts (376). After the wedding, a meal is served, and, representing the constraints of freedom, Webb pulls out all the stops:

Then came the supper. Oh! such a supper!—such quantities of nice things as money and skill alone can bring together. There were turkeys innocent of a bone, into which you might plunge your knife to the very hilt without coming into contact with a splinter—turkeys from which cunning cooks had extracted every bone leaving the meat alone behind, with the skin not perceptibly broken. How brown and tempting they looked, their capacious bosoms giving rich promise of high-seasoned dressing within, and looking larger by comparison with the tiny reed-birds beside them, which lay cosily on the golden toast, looking as much as to say, “If you want something to remember for ever, come and give me a bite!”

Then there were dishes of stewed terrapin, into which the initiated dipped at once, and to which they for some time gave their undivided attention, oblivious, apparently, of the fact that there was a dish of chicken-salad close beside them.

Then there were oysters in every variety—silver dishes containing them stewed, their fragrant macey odour wafting itself upward, and causing watery sensations about the mouth. Waiters were constantly rushing into the room, bringing dishes of them fried so richly brown, so smoking hot, that no man with a heart in his bosom could possibly refuse them. Then there were glass dishes of them pickled, with little black spots of allspice floating on the pearly liquid that contained them. And lastly, oysters broiled, whose delicious flavor exceeds my powers of description—these, with ham and tongue, were the solid comforts … on the whole, it was an American supper, got up regardless of expense—and whoever has been to such an entertainment knows very well what an American supper is. (376–77)

It is hard to know where to begin talking about this passage or how to stop. (And I have omitted the narrator's catalogue of desserts and alcoholic beverages.) As with the southern table at the opening of the novel, this northern table overflows with provisions far beyond the needs of its diners. The items at the wedding banquet are more substantial than the decadent fare on the Georgia table and, of course, this is a larger meal held on a ceremonial occasion, but in both scenes the array of food is strangely personified, sexualized, and historicized.

At the wedding table, there are no slow disclosures of race and caste. The supper at Walters's house is a conspicuous accomplishment of African-American Philadelphia. The wedding party and guests have survived. Family and friends have assembled. Walters and the Ellises have prospered in business and marriage to the extent that they can afford and savor this banquet. Webb evokes the distinctive food culture of mid-nineteenth-century Philadelphia. The city's passion for oysters “in every variety” was legendary, and dishes made from sea turtles or from terrapin, the marsh turtles that were a cheaper local alternative, were a Philadelphia specialty. The city was known, too, for its prominent black hospitality and catering industries, presided over by such figures as Robert Bogle, esteemed for his terrapin dinners, and Henry Minton, whose establishment was recognized by Martin Delany in his Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) for its “tables … continually laden with the most choice offerings to epicures … the shrine of bountifulness” (100–01). Webb does not name Bogle (who died in 1837) or Minton (whose career was flourishing in the 1850s), choosing to inflect his novel with the Philadelphia figures and events, rather than specify them. Yet the lavish spread in general and the terrapin in particular evoke the influential black caterers and restauranteurs. In The Garies, Webb showcases an African-American clientele for their expensive services, which more typically would have been solicited by affluent European-American customers.¹⁰

Webb's diners enjoy their food and drink in the supper scene, as they do in the previous scenes of eating at the Ellis and Walters homes in Philadelphia. The southern tables in the novel remain largely untouched. While the excess on display at the wedding supper complicates the guests' pleasures, it does not invalidate them. The characters are presented as having earned their sumptuousness and their release. The event is no temperance affair, like the parties approved by Joseph Willson in his Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia (1841) (100–01). At the wedding supper, distinguished by black achievement, the North seems different from the South and the end of the story appears to represent clear progress from its beginning. Yet the opening and final meals are linked by their excessive details and figures, and the boundary between slavery and freedom becomes porous. In both scenes, tables and diners are figured as vulnerable. Pleasure is tangible but also unsettling. Despite the narrator's reassurance, the “comforts” of the wedding supper are far from “solid.”¹¹

This is a strangely overdone “American supper.” Waiters rush in and out of the room, but no mention in this orgy of consumption is made of where or how all of these goods were produced, no allusion comparable to the “Geeche limes” in the opening scene. Cunning cooks—and “cunning” seems an ambiguous trait in cooks, or even in authors—have removed the bones from the meat, leaving no visible trace of their labor. Although the skin on the turkeys is not “perceptibly broken,” the birds have been sliced open and reconstructed. The brown and tempting breasts, the capacious bosoms, and the delicate skin seem as though they might rupture at the touch of a diner's knife.

The narrator draws attention to the absence of bones, but never makes clear what this absence signifies. What has been taken out? What is not being represented, or is being represented by its removal? Those who have produced this meal? African Americans in Philadelphia, the great majority of whom would not have the means for such a display? African Americans laboring under slavery in the South? Or is the turkey itself—a product of concealed, extracted, vulnerable labor—a reminder of slavery? Have the bones been removed in an attempt to banish the skeleton from this feast, to evade memories of riot and intimations of mortality? Is the turkey without bones a figure for novelistic abstraction and artifice, the kinds of imaginative labor performed upon the world that enable and unsettle its consumption? Can we read it also as a figure for the critical sleight-of-hand that pulls structure from verbal substance? If so, is the skeleton “form” or “history”? The turkeys are “innocent of a bone,” and “innocent” is a peculiar adjective here. If the diners strenuously reconstruct their innocence and stage their freedom, is this effort myopic, misguided, purgative, fortifying? In what senses are the characters—and also the narrator, Webb's different readers, and the author himself—“innocent,” or not? The “American supper” passage is filled with insinuations about knowledge, ignorance, and cunning.

When the narrator imagines the tiny reed-birds at the supper importuning the guests (“‘If you want something to remember for ever, come and give me a bite!’”), the diction hints, ominously or at least ambiguously, that they will have an indelible experience. But what about the “bite” will the diners be unable to forget? It is not clear that the unspecified “something” will be entirely pleasant. The line beckons but also dares. With his animated reed-birds, Webb likely rewrites the scene in chapter 13 of Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), set in the Quaker Rachel Halliday's northern kitchen, where the escaped slaves George, Eliza, and Harry find refuge: “even the knives and forks had a social clatter as they went on to the table; and the chicken and ham had a cheerful and joyous fizzle in the pan, as if they rather enjoyed being cooked than otherwise” (122). The domestic fantasies of freedom and consumption in Stowe and Webb come with overtones of coercion, but Webb accentuates the instabilities and gives his meal a queasy agency. Those dainty reed-birds may—or may not—cheerfully submit to their fate.¹²

Webb did not invent his “turkeys innocent of a bone,” but he amplifies the metaphors. We can find, for example, instructions for preparing a “Boned Turkey” in Eliza Leslie's New Receipts for Cooking, published in 1854. Although we have no evidence that Webb knew this particular volume, Leslie's renown as a Philadelphia author and culinary expert and the popularity of her cookbooks allow us to speculate that New Receipts for Cooking might represent the kind of approach to food preparation and display that Webb incorporated in The Garies. Here is part of what Eliza Leslie has to say about the manufacture of a “Boned Turkey”:

Next loosen the flesh from the breast, and back, and body; and then from the thighs. It requires care and patience to do it nicely, and to avoid tearing or breaking the skin. The knife should always penetrate quite to the bone; scraping loose the flesh rather than cutting it. When all the flesh has been completely loosened, take the turkey by the neck, give it a pull, and the whole skeleton will come out entire from the flesh, as easily as you draw your hand out of a glove. The flesh will then fall down, a flat and shapeless mass. With a small needle and thread, carefully sew up any holes that have accidentally been torn in the skin. … Stuff it very hard, and as you proceed, form the turkey into its natural shape, by filling out, properly, the wings, breast, body, &c. When all the stuffing is in, sew up the body, and skewer the turkey into the usual shape in which they are trussed; so that, if skillfully done, it will look almost as if it had not been boned. (104–05)¹³

Often when literary critics turn to supposedly nonliterary sources, they describe how creative writers transform the inert materials of their culture. In Eliza Leslie's recipe, though, we already find the cunning of the cooks in preparing their meals: the exquisite perforation, the diligent scraping, the artful extraction conveyed with an odd simile that joins autopsy and undressing, dissection and fashion (“and the whole skeleton will come out entire from the flesh, as easily as you draw your hand out of a glove”), the meticulous, aggressive renovation, and the fantasy of flesh without bones. Webb has recognized the curiosity of such rituals and the extravagance of such investments, and he has extended the frame of reference from the domestic to the civic and the national. The “turkeys innocent of a bone” become the centerpieces in his “American supper.” In Webb's Philadelphia, gesture is charged with the weight of race and nation, prescission and violence define the social structure, and strenuously maintained surfaces may collapse or erupt at any moment.

Sexuality, not explicitly represented in the plot of The Garies and Their Friends, is embodied, as it was on the Georgia tea table at the start of the novel, in the inviting delicacies arrayed at the wedding supper: the tiny reed-birds “which lay cosily on the golden toast,” their aspect soliciting a bite, and the “brown and tempting” turkeys “into which you might plunge your knife,” with “their capacious bosoms giving rich promise of high-seasoned dressing within.” Like the items on the Georgia tea table, the reed-birds and turkeys at the wedding supper entice viewers with their sensuous exteriors and offer glimpses of interior delights.

Webb here draws on a tradition of still life painting in which fruit, meat, and human flesh are visually linked—a Dutch tradition, or at least Dutch as transmitted through early nineteenth-century Philadelphia artists, a context to which I will turn shortly. At this wedding feast, he implies a sexuality that decorum and propriety (and likely strategy as well, given the emphasis in popular culture on black avidity) restrict him from presenting directly. He conveys the intense satisfaction experienced by his diners and also their involvement, as victims and possibly actors, in larger contexts of oppression. There is a disconcerting edge to his portrayal: the items at the supper seem to encourage their violation. Webb may be summoning a discordant echo of the historical warrants for the Philadelphia riots (the victims' own behavior prompted assault) or the twisted justifications for rape. In addition, he seems to be having intemperate fun, embedding metaphors of sexuality and injury at his respectable banquet. In the opening and final table scenes, he reverses the usual depictions of South and North, stressing the vulnerability and violence in Philadelphia and under freedom. The aspects of the supper—endorsement of pleasure, exposure of violence, social critique, sexual humor—do not fit together seamlessly, and Webb appears to relish the excess.

The meat at the supper table is figured as human, not only because its appealing surfaces resemble flesh and not only because it appears to speak, but also because it is subject to the kind of violence bodies experience in war or riot: a blade plunged “to the very hilt” and splintered bones. Eliza Leslie advises her cooks to make sure that their knives “should always penetrate quite to the bone,” and Webb emphasizes the carving knife as weapon, furnishing it with a “hilt” like a dagger or sword. The narrator's phrase “to the hilt” repeats his description two chapters earlier, when the younger Clarence Garie, passing for white, imagines murdering George Stevens's son, who knows and will expose his secret: “As he sat there … he became a murderer in his heart; and if an invisible dagger could have been placed in his hands, he would have driven it to the hilt in his breast” (346). The blade and the bones at the “American supper” evoke the ritual of public violence at the graphic center of the book: the hatchet that cuts into father Ellis's hands as he tries to hold on to the edge of a roof, the bones that break with his fall. Ellis himself, addled and infirm, makes the connection at the wedding: “The poor old gentleman scarcely seemed able to comprehend the affair, and apparently laboured under the impression that it was another mob, and looked a little terrified at times when the laughter or conversation grew louder than usual” (372). The specter of riot is never far from Ellis's mind, and at the wedding and supper he serves as a living reminder of its carnage.

Visually, the form that most resembles Webb's bracketing table scenes is the still life, especially as pictured by Dutch painters in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and by Philadelphians in the first half of the nineteenth century. In the Dutch images, usually oil paintings, tables were set and skewed, with their extravagant contents indicating the aspirations but also ambivalences of a rising middle-class. The signs of cultivated affluence were marked by reminders of transience. The images combined optical pleasure and moral intimation. Such palpable allegories were further developed in the type of Dutch still life known as “vanitas.” In these paintings, the objects arranged in seeming disorder on the tables—fruit, meat, flowers, candles, books, coins, crystal goblets, drinking glasses, hour glasses, and skulls—were rendered in sensuous colors and textures and incorporated a visual and literary language of mortality. Mundane and erudite, these objects bristled with significance. They were manifestly not “still,” but in the process of consumption or decay, vivified by loss, often balanced at precarious angles or tipped over. On banquet tables, the game was skillfully displayed, ornamented to appear as though it were still alive. The contents of mince pies spilled toward the viewer, as though they were viscera.

Still life painting in the early US first appeared in Philadelphia, most influentially in works by the family of Charles Willson Peale, and especially his son Raphaelle. Raphaelle Peale's still lifes often concentrated on a few objects—fruits, vegetables, a cut of meat—in a shallow, isolated space. Alexander Nemerov describes the uncanny embodiment and fragile intimacy of Peale's objects, which are represented with an attention so intense that they seem oddly alive. Blackberries appear to have absorbed not only the artist's mind but also his physical presence. A glistening cut of steak with split bone, its flesh rendered in exquisite detail, heightens the vulnerable meatiness of artist and observer. On such canvases, Peale intensifies the still life and vanitas traditions, and raises the possibility that close attention to surfaces might risk the secure distance and depths of the observer.¹⁴

The Dutch and Philadelphia still lifes offer a perspective on Webb's aesthetics and politics of “freedom” in The Garies and Their Friends. He may have seen such paintings on display at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts or on the walls of parlors and dining rooms in African-American or European-American “higher class” homes. The reminders of mortality are on display throughout the novel, from the skull and crossbones the young Kinch chalks on the back of Charlie Ellis's uniform, to the bullet hole that Walters leaves in his ceiling after the riot, to the invalid father Ellis who dreads a mob at the wedding celebration. The book opens and closes with two hinged counterparts, the Georgia tea table, a still life whose delicacies are implicated in the system of southern slavery, and the Philadelphia wedding array, a northern vanitas whose pleasures come with an edge and whose emblems are the “turkeys innocent of a bone” into which knives may be plunged “to the very hilt.” Between these images, Webb presents scenes that are characterized by what we might call a still-life aesthetics: meticulously arranged domestic interiors—visions of freedom, consumption, and constraint—whose surfaces, imbued with narrative and historical meanings, invite the viewer to partake of their complex pleasures. The surfeit conveys achievement as well as precariousness and insinuates details in broader contexts and temporalities.

Webb's verbal still lifes are influenced by the distinctive experience of African Americans in Philadelphia, on the border between freedom and slavery. The achievements of his characters are fragile, not only because of the inevitability of death (the typical vanitas motif) but also because of the tenacity of prejudice and the omnipresence of violence, spectacular and intimate. The death that shadows his African-American characters, and also his European-American characters in different ways, takes as one of its forms the historical materiality of racial slavery in the US, a social death whose effects pervade the North. The successes of Walters, the Ellises, and the Garies are viewed as excessive by Stevens and the rioters, who target them for attack; by the public and private authorities in the novel who enforce racial boundaries on the streetcars and in schools, trades, churches, and cemeteries; and to some extent by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lord Brougham, the renowned figures who introduce the book as a parable of capability and regard its characters and events as “peculiar.”

At the end of the novel, the surviving African-American protagonists remain in Philadelphia, in spite of disfranchisement and riot. Webb does not encourage emigration, as Martin Delany had in his Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States and other African-American leaders would in the 1850s. (Webb himself moved to Jamaica from 1858 until 1869, when he returned to the US.) With a transatlantic audience in mind, Webb enlists his novel in the politics of information, with the hope that his narrative of African Americans in Philadelphia will reinforce the judgments of those who denounce prejudice and support abolition, and alter the views of those who do not see or who distort the progress under freedom. Yet The Garies and Their Friends should not be reduced to a political stance. Such position-taking does not begin to convey the range of attitudes in Webb's novel or the dynamics of his historical imagination.

Webb endorses and mourns the diners at his “American supper.” He sympathizes with them and satirizes them. Walters and the Ellises carefully negotiate status and authority in a game whose rules change as they advance, and the author draws his readers into the story he tells. As the narrator suggests, “whoever has been to such an entertainment knows very well what an American supper is” (377). Webb allows a distance between his readers and such entertainments (restricting address to “whoever has been”), perhaps indulging his British audience, but he also collapses that distance, implying that all of his readers, British and American, black and white, women and men, participate in the volatile spectacles of race and freedom. They may take part in different ways and with different degrees of knowledge, but they all attend.

Like the contemporary African-American anti-ethnologists, Frederick Douglass in his lecture “Claims of the Negro Ethnologically Considered” (1854) and James McCune Smith in his essay “On the Fourteenth Query of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia” (1859), both of whom, with learning and irony, painstakingly demonstrate the equal humanity of their race and seek to refute the ludicrous but devastating charges of natural inferiority, Webb bristles at substantiating the obvious and verifying the truth, and he responds with earnestness and outrage. However, like his contemporaries and like his characters, he labors on. The Garies and Their Friends is, as I have tried to show, much more than an effort to prove character and capability. It is a meditation on that demand and on its backgrounds, contexts, and legacies. Webb suggests that a measure of freedom still may be possible in a society in which he represents his characters as having a history of investments. This certainly is a freedom qualified by racism and inequity, as Harriet Jacobs implies at the end of her Incidents in the Life of A Slave Girl (1861), published on the verge of the Civil War: “We [she and her family in New York] are as free from the power of slaveholders as are the white people of the north; and though that, according to my ideas is not saying a great deal, it is a vast improvement in my condition” (201). With a similar deftness and a nod to those “who know very well,” Webb's narrator insists on degrees of freedom, even as he involves his readers in a difficult history and suggests that there is no unconstrained position.

Webb is skeptical about progress, and, despite the four paragraph coda to the novel, in which the narrator assures readers that the families lived for many years in domestic contentment, the sequence of scenes in the book leaves open the question whether the future will repeat or diverge from the Philadelphia pattern of regressive advance. The African-American service during the yellow fever epidemic of 1793 followed by charges of extortion and theft; the national conventions “for the improvement of the free people of colour” in the 1830s followed by the destruction of the abolitionist Pennsylvania Hall and disfranchisement in 1838; the African-American temperance parade of 1842 met with assault and then days of riot; petition after petition to restore the vote, with no legal effect—such a pattern seems as distinctive of the city in the decades before the Civil War as the famously symmetrical grid plan of Philadelphia first outlined by William Penn and Thomas Holme in 1683.

In his still lifes, we might say that Webb presses the adjective “still,” examining persistence (the decision to remain in the US rather than emigrate), action (the vehemence of restraint), temporality (the meanings of repetition), and contradiction (the regressive advance). Still—in the future as in the past, nevertheless—perhaps foolishly, perhaps not, Webb's characters strive in the hope that their actions will produce different outcomes, and the narrator keeps his distance.

Webb's narrator—arch, ironic, setting and skewing his tables—does not capitulate to the values of a dominant culture or recommend an elevation that is really a submission, in moves that many critics and historians have seen as characteristic of Philadelphia's African-American leaders or a wider devotion to “respectability” in the nineteenth century. These are the kinds of judgments disputed by literary critics such as Claudia Tate, Ann duCille, and Carla L. Peterson, and historians such as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., and Patrick Rael. Yet when Werner Sollors, the editor of the only volume of Webb's collected writings, in his otherwise discerning introduction skims over those table scenes in The Garies—“This thoroughly bourgeois novel takes delight in the culture of the Garies' and Ellises' domestic meals: a Southern dinner and a Philadelphia wedding feast are described in lavish detail”—we are alerted to the possibility that we may wish to read even more slowly and less transparently, acknowledging that issues of class, race, history, and ceremony are played out in the technicalities of American novels of racial manners (Frank J. Webb, 4). We should move more deliberately through such texts to our claims about politics, realizing that our terms may not be as self-evident as they seem. “Thoroughly” does not acknowledge the postures and distances assumed by Webb's narrator, and “bourgeois” insufficiently marks the shifting alignments of class and race described in the novel, or the characters' tactical materialism, or their strenuous pleasures, all conveyed and appraised through Webb's verbal excess. The “lavish detail” in those meals incorporates histories of art, politics, food, place, and literature.

The Garies and Their Friends refuses the opposition between “form and manner” and “substance,” made then (in debates about conduct in Philadelphia) and now (in theoretical disparagements of “form”). Webb shows that form, his characters' and his own, is vital rather than ephemeral, symptomatic, or evasive. In his novel, details of gesture, tone, and ornament are not only expressions of personal and group identity, but also part of a struggle for status, authority, and even survival. In The Garies, to obey the rules is to violate norms. Webb situates his forms and formalities in a depth of field that includes Southern slavery and Northern prejudice, the black political conventions of the 1830s and 1840s, debates about “condition” and “complexion,” the economic, civic, and social achievements of the African-American middle and higher classes, the 1838 disfranchisement, the riots of the 1840s, and the pessimism articulated by many in the 1850s.¹⁵

Webb's forms are the substance of the debates in and about Philadelphia. When he aestheticizes the Georgia tea table or the Philadelphia wedding supper, when he pauses to specify objects on the tables or the behavior of diners, when he focuses on Charlie's wayward domestic service for his employer or Caddy's exacting labors in her own home, such representations do not evade or displace social realities, but consider them in literary terms. Webb uses verbal texture to examine position, acknowledge the contexts and temporalities for action, gauge the pressures on conduct, and suggest an excess that is neither detachable from these circumstances nor reducible to them. Webb's novel can help us see the literary register of the debates about “freedom” in Philadelphia. These were debates about history and form, the constitution of space, the articulation of character, the struggle for authority at the level of the word, and the burdens and pleasures of excess. Texts such as The Garies and Their Friends call for a close reading that is also a deep and wide reading. They suggest that we only think we know what we are seeing when we look at surfaces.

Notes

Works Cited

Author notes