I wasn't aware of this book until I had it recommended as part of a course on historical fiction. The simplicity and ease with which the author narrates such sordid and terrible crimes committed against slaves stirs up a storm of emotions that the most passionate rendering could not. The knowledge that the author is himself an escaped slave, a "first-hand witness" to such heinous acts perpetrated against the human race serves to add weight to his story. The line between fact and fiction is often blurred, but the gist of the emotions conveyed rings true. While I've read a few books that describe the plight of slaves, such as Roots, The Underground Railroad, Uncle Tom's Cabin and ended up shedding tears, Clotel left me aghast at the pain the author has painted through every story, every anecdote that he recounts.
Do read, but be warned that it requires an iron heart to stomach the atrocities visited on African Americans in those days. ( )

There is something audacious and true about this book, however fictional. The first time I came to the sentence calling Clotel the daughter of Thomas Jefferson I felt the boldness of that sentence, and the truth of it, that it was known even in 1853 that Jefferson had children who were slaves. The novel is not a novel in the strictest sense since much of it seems culled from the news and then re-enacted with fictional characters, something like a History Channel documentary will use scenes with actors in their documentaries to portray true events. Each short chapter reads as an episode culled from the news that was contemporary to the novel's publication. The use of fiction to portray real events is done very skillfully here, for example in a scene where the hypocrisy of a white slaveowner reading only those portions of the bible to his slaves that support their bondage is fully revealed, as well as the slaves' full understanding of that hypocrisy. Or when a white mistress comprehends for the first time that a slave's child looks like her husband. The discomfort of both white slaveowners and their darker-skinned slaves at the very existence of light- or white-skinned slaves is difficult to read about, but feels true as well. There are scenes written with great compassion, and sometimes with great brutality, of how slaves tried to escape, and how they were captured and punished for their attempt to escape. Heartbreaking, wrenching, revealing...amazing, especially if as a reader you can let go of the expectations you might have of what a "Novel" is meant to be, and read this instead as a part-indictment, part-historical re-enactment of human lives in the most desperate circumstances.
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A powerful antislavery polemic with an interesting "hook": the title character is the unacknowledged daughter of Thomas Jefferson. It is not so much a novel as an assemblage of assorted excerpts from newspaper articles, speeches, poetry, and other people's fiction (Lydia Child's "The Quadroon," etc.) mixed with original material, all strung into a rather loose narrative structure. This formal choice is very interesting to think about, though it makes for a disjointed and sometimes frustrating reading experience. The cast of characters is large and the plot ambitious in scope, along the lines of [b:Uncle Tom's Cabin|46787|Uncle Tom's Cabin|Harriet Beecher Stowe|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1348092796s/46787.jpg|2478635] which predates it by a year, but Brown doesn't demonstrate Stowe's confident command of these materials. Stowe's a better novelist, with richer (and more consistent) characterization and surer sense of narrative pace. But Brown's critique of race and slavery in the US is more radical and uncompromising than Stowe's, which invariably retreats from thunderous denunciations into the comforts of bourgeois domesticity, recolonization schemes, and evangelical platitudes.

I read the Penguin edition, which I do not recommend. Aside from some typos, the endnotes patronizingly micromanage the reader's experience, and where they are helpful the information seems to have been cannibalized from the Bedford edition, ed. by Robert Levine. ( )

This is a workmanlike treatment of a subject that is a hardly imaginable foundation of early America: slavery.
It’s more a documentary than any modern understanding of a novel. Brown does a good job of character development for a limited cast of characters, including Clotel, the “mulatto” daughter of a black slave mother and a white father. The story of many aspects of slavery—disruption of families, cruelty of masters, the abolition movement, the economic importance of slave-based agriculture and production, the moral, philosophical and political debates about the “peculiar institution”—is written in a style that is manifestly journalistic and prosaic, not literary.
Clotel is a high impact read. Brown was born a slave in Kentucky circa 1818. He escaped, became an abolitionist and a writer in England, and was purchased by friends and freed in the middle of the 19th century. He published Clotel in 1853 as the first “novel” written by a black American.
It isn’t good reading. It’s harsh reading. It’s a terribly candid condemnation of a despicable fact of American history. It’s a catalog of shame and endurance and human spirit.
By the way, the subtitle acknowledges Brown’s unabashed reference to the story, well known in mid-19th century, that Thomas Jefferson dallied with his slave, Sally Hemings, and had children with her.
Here are a couple items:
Prof. Cashin notes: “Historians estimate that perhaps 10 percent of the four million slaves living in the South in 1860 had some white ancestry” (p. xiii). Too many white owners forced themselves on their female slaves. In some parts of the South, a person with white lineage except for a black great-great-great-great grandmother could legally be sold as a slave.
Brown underscores the hypocrisy of slave owners who professed political, philosophical or religious convictions that were nominally opposed to slavery. For example, Brown states that in the middle of the 19th century, more than 660,000 slaves were owned “by members of the Christian church in this pious democratic republic” (p. 187).
Slavery died hard. Writers like Brown helped to make it happen.
More on my blogs:
http://barleyliterate.blogspot.com/
http://historybottomlines.blogspot.com/ ( )

I did not enjoy Clotel in the slightest. In fact, it was close to torture trying to finish it. There is no coherent storyline and Wiliam Wells Brown appears little more than a hack. The whole structure of the novel appears to be based off "Uncle Tom's Cabin." There are so many characters introduced then dismissed, only to be brought back 60 pages later that I found it difficult to invest myself into the story of the novel.

Not a fun read. Not very interesting. Personally, I wouldn't really consider it a classic. ( )