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Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Margo Jefferson are two of the finest intellectuals in our country today. Gates, a MacArthur Fellow, and Jefferson, a Pulitzer-Prize winner, share a deep interest in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin. In 2006, Gates and Jefferson sat down at the Library for a special event on the novel co-presented with The Studio Museum in Harlem. While initially praised by the likes of Frederick Douglass, its eponymous character has also at times been linked with an insulting vision of black masculinity and, more recently, has been recuperated by some feminist scholars. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Margo Jefferson discussing the myriad ways of understanding Uncle Tom's Cabin.

Gates discussed the way in which Uncle Tom's Cabin has lived not only as a novel in the American imagination but also in other forms, including as a musical: 

"This book never met a genre that it didn’t like, or that didn’t like it. It’s just extraordinary. In fact there’s a fascinating set of exchanges between Stowe and her publisher about the royalty rate. I mean, as you know, this became the greatest-selling novel in the history of the novel, overnight, within a month, and Stowe had been talked into taking a 10 percent royalty rather than a 20 percent royalty. And Jewett was the publisher, and he said, 'Yes, but I’m going to take the other 10 percent and put it into advertising for musicals and for other forms,' and even commissioned John Greenleaf Whittier to write a poem, which was set to music, about the death of Little Eva. And, actually, it’s not clear, I mean it was a publisher’s hustle, Bob Weil tried the same thing on me but my agent wouldn’t go for that. But they were exceedingly successful in transforming this book into other genres right away. By the time she sailed for England, within a year of its publication, it had sold a million and a half copies, and there were already musical forms emerging. Five hundred thousand women had signed—in the U.K.—had signed a petition, five hundred thousand, protesting slavery, awaiting, and this petition awaited Harriet Beecher Stowe’s arrival in England. I mean, it’s just amazing. We can’t imagine how hot this book was and how many forms it took."

 
Jefferson observed that some characters in the book have been particularly influential, appearing in iterations in other works or other iconic cultural figures:

"Topsy and Eva are very fascinating to me because Eva, really, as this little, blond, exquisite Victorian child—I suppose you could say she’s connected to Dickens’s Little Nell and all of that— but she really becomes a kind of pedophiliac pinup girl, you know, she absolutely becomes as the shows take her over and, you know, movies and all of that, she becomes this little, you know, adorable, sexualized figure who is simultaneously so innocent. Topsy, of course, becomes, you know, the little pickaninny, and the dancing, singing, this natural talent, and the reproach of every, you know, young black woman ever to be raised. But Topsy is the unbounded spirit of black talent, but also the black with no parentage, the wild, dangerous creature. Topsy and Eva show up in all sorts of strange places. They show up in Marlene Dietrich’s dressing room in Morocco. They’re her little fetish objects. They show up on the keychain of a child molester in a Chester Himes novel. Shirley Temple, to my mind, embodies the, you know, fusion of Topsy, because she can dance and sing and she’s very bodacious, and she’s got Eva’s little curls, and you’re not supposed to feel sexual towards her, but she quickly becomes the best-selling actress, above the Ginger Rogerses, the Dietrichs, the Garbos, in Hollywood, and Graham Greene writes a piece pointing out, you know, dear God, how sexy she is. Then she gets mated with Bill Robinson, Bojangles, who’s a kind of Uncle Tom, and it turns out that the man who suggested that they be paired is none other than D. W. Griffith."

While the novel has enjoyed much success, Gates recalled that Stowe was faced with some incredulity when it was first published. This resulted in a number of textual responses:

"Stowe’s book was so popular, and upset so many people who were pro-slavery that all these people accused her of making it up, and particularly of exaggerating the horrors of slavery. So she immediately produced a book that was called The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which was full of all these documents, a very difficult book to read. And she said that she had based Uncle Tom, the characterization of Uncle Tom, on a black man who had written a slave narrative, Josiah Henson. And Josiah Henson was a real person, and he escaped from slavery in 1849, I believe, and he escaped with his family. But there’s no evidence. I mean, if you read Josiah Henson’s book and you read Uncle Tom’s Cabin there’s no evidence to me that she is modeling Uncle Tom after Josiah Henson. So she’s being very opportunistic, she had to cover herself in some sort of way, so there’s Josiah Henson, so what does Josiah Henson do? He publishes a new edition of the book, The Real Uncle Tom, and rewrites his life to conform to the portrait of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Now I think only in America, as Don King would say, could this possibly happen. "

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