Volume 53, Number 18 · November 16, 2006
Blacks: Damned by the Bible
By David Brion Davis
The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam
by David M. Goldenberg
Princeton University Press, 448 pp., $24.95 (paper)
In Mark Twain's still underappreciated novel Pudd'nhead Wilson, Roxy, a recently freed Missouri slave who acts and speaks like a black even though 'only one-sixteenth of her was black,' shocks her arrogant grown son Tom Driscoll by informing him for the first time that she is his true mother: 'Yassir, en dat ain't all! You is a nigger!—bawn a nigger en a slave!—en you's a nigger en a slave dis minute.' Tom had been raised as a privileged white and had even spent two years at Yale. Later, in bed, Tom groans and mutters, 'A nigger!—I am a nigger!—oh, I wish I was dead!' As he struggles to confront this new identity, Tom 'said to himself that the curse of Ham was upon him.'
Review, 4566 words
To read the full text of this piece, please choose one of the following options:
|
If you are already a subscriber to the Review's electronic edition, please sign in: |
To subscribe to the electronic edition, please press the button below. |
To purchase access to this article for $3, please press the button below. |