73 pages • 2 hours read
William Wells BrownClotel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1853A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 13-15Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 13 Summary: “A Slave Hunting Parson”
Jones wants to impress Carlton, who is “from the North, and a non-slaveholder” (110), and he invites Carlton to preach to them. Jones’s driver Dogget tells the slaves that, if Carlton should ask, they should say the Lord made them, they want to go to heaven, and they love their master. If they do well, he will reward them with whiskey.
Carlton reads a chapter from the Bible and then engages the slaves in conversation. The slaves have little recollection of what they were taught and misunderstand Carlton’s questions—for instance, when Carlton asks a slave if he serves the Lord, the slave answers, “No, sir, I don’t serve anybody but Mr. Jones; I neber belong to anybody else” (112).
Carlton can’t help but laugh. Jones, concerned that Carlton will give a bad report to Mr. Peck, tells him, “You did not get hold of the bright ones” (113). When Carlton relates to Mr. Peck what he observed, Mr. Peck is “amused” (113). He uses this report as evidence “why professed Christians like himself should be slave-holders” (113). Georgiana, on the other hand, is somber. She recites a poem that suggests Christians are hypocritical for claiming to “feed” slaves’ “famished spirits” (113) while flogging them for learning to read.
Carlton describes how he saw bloodhounds kept in an iron cage. When Georgiana asks her father if they are like the dogs he used “to hunt Harry” (114), Mr. Peck, clearly uncomfortable, denies it. After he leaves, Georgiana explains to Carlton that her father had a slave named Harry who was whipped for visiting his wife in town; though she had asked her father to allow Harry to stay with his wife, her father had said “they could not spare him from the farm” (114). One day Harry ran away, and the dogs were set on him. When Harry fought the dogs, Mr. Peck shot him dead. As Georgiana tells this story, she begins to cry.
One day Mr. Peck goes to his farm with a group of Northern friends. In an attempt to convince them his “slaves were happy, satisfied, and contented” (115), he gives them whiskey and asks them all to toast him. One slave named Jack recites a poem stating that “white folks gets the money” (115) even though “[t]he black folks make the cotton” (115).
Chapter 14 Summary: “A Free Woman Reduced to Slavery”
Henry is “a kind and affectionate husband” (116) to Althesa, who appreciates his efforts to purchase Currer. Because Henry refuses to own slaves, the couple hires slaves who are let out by their masters. After five years, the Mortons have two daughters together.
They hire a woman named Salome, whose skin is so white that Althesa is concerned she wasn’t actually born a slave. This fear is confirmed when, encouraged by Althesa, who frequently notices her crying, Salome informs her that she was actually born in Germany. Her father had brought her and her mother to America. After he died, Salome’s employer, for whom she was a nurse, brought her to New Orleans for a visit. Salome was apprehended by two men claiming to have bought her. She was brought to a farm, where she “was forced to take up with a Negro, and by him had three children” (117). She now is owned by her former master’s daughter.
Althesa asks Henry to help Salome despite strict laws that discourage freemen enslaved unjustly from regaining their freedom. Though he confirms Salome’s story, her master insists she’s a slave and prevents her from working at the Mortons’ house again.
By coincidence, three months later Salome is approached by a woman who remembers her from the ship they sailed on from Germany. With the woman’s help, Salome regains her freedom. One thousand dollars is required of anyone helping a freeman regain freedom, and Althesa helps pay this fee. Salome’s children likely remain slaves.
Brown indicates that Salome’s story “is no fiction” (119) and that its truth can be verified by reading the newspapers.
Chapter 15 Summary: “To-Day a Mistress, To-Morrow a Slave”
Horatio, “[d]efeated in politics” (120) and “forsaken in love by his wife” (120), begins abusing alcohol and loses “all principle of honour” (120). His wife and her father insist that Clotel and Mary be sold and sent out of state. Though Horatio at first resists, when Mrs. Green threatens to move back in with her father, he relents. In an effort to further punish her husband, Mrs. Green takes Mary, only 10 years old, as a servant in their household, and treats her with harshness and cruelty. Clotel is sold to a man named James French, who lives in Vicksburg, Mississippi, known for “the severity with which slaves are treated” (121).
Though Mrs. French clothes her slaves well, she underfeeds and overworks them. Because the wives of slaveholding men suspect their husbands are carrying on intimate relationships with their female slaves, they look at “every quadroon servant as a rival” (121). Mrs. French makes Clotel cut hair hair until it was “short as any of the full-blooded Negroes in the dwelling” (121). Envious, the other female slaves mock Clotel, who remains just as beautiful, and suggest Clotel puts on airs.
Clotel, distraught at the loss of her daughter, does not eat, and the Frenches decide to sell her. She is sold to a young man who desires a housekeeper.
Chapters 13-15 Analysis
Chapter 13 exhibits the contrast between true Christianity, embodied in Georgiana, and the Christianity of the slaveholders, who use Christianity not only to oppress the slaves but also to impress each other. Jones, seeking to show the Northerner Carlton that his slaves are godly, does “everything in his power to make a favorable impression” (110), and he has his driver, Doggett, give the slaves a crash course in Scripture the night before Carlton is to preach to them. When Carlton reports back to Mr. Peck that the slaves could not properly answer his questions, Mr. Peck is “amused,” believing the ignorance of Jones’s slaves to be evidence of “why professed Christians like himself should be slave-holders” (113). Jones and Mr. Peck are less concerned about the salvation of their slaves than about imparting to others that they themselves are good Christians.
Georgiana sees through the slaveholders’ exploitation of Christianity. Upon hearing about the ignorance of Jones’s slaves, she recites a poem criticizing slaveholders for their hypocrisy in sending missionaries abroad to bring Christianity “to the heathen” (113) while “flog[ging] the trembling Negro” (113) at home. Later, Georgiana tells Carlton a story in which her father’s slave Harry had visited too long with his wife in town; her father set the dogs on him, shooting him to death when he tried to escape. Throughout Clotel, Brown has offered many examples of slave marriages not being honored by slave owners. Georgiana continues to recognize that, between the slaveholders and the slaves, it is the slaves who demonstrate true Christian values.
The slaveholders continue to both dehumanize and infantilize their slaves. Doggett calls the slaves “boys and gals” (111), suggesting the slaves are children who need taking care of. However, as observed in previous chapters, the slaves see through their masters’ deceptions. In Chapter 8, the slave Jack recites a poem in which he acknowledges that “[t]he black folks make the cotton, / And the white folks gets the money” (115). Just as the slaves understood the weaponization of Christianity, they recognize their own exploitation, proving sharper in this way than the masters themselves.
Readers are offered perhaps the most heart-wrenching example of the cruelty of slavery in Chapter 15, when Clotel is ripped from her daughter and sold to the Frenches in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Making the situation worse is that Mrs. French, like many slaveholding wives, “regards every quadroon servant as a rival” (121) and forces Clotel to cut off her hair—delighting the other slaves, who look “with envy” at “[t]he fairness of Clotel’s complexion” (121) and accuse her of acting as if she’s white. Clotel’s experiences in Mrs. French’s house show how biracial slaves are often left without place or identity, rejected by slaves and slave owners alike. Her experiences also illustrate how “social virtues” falter “in a society of which injustice is the primary characteristic” (121).
As in Chapter 9, Horatio Green is contrasted with Henry Morton: whereas the former, depressed over his failures, turns to alcohol and declines to protect his daughter Mary from the cruelty of his wife, the latter helps the servant Salome find her freedom. Even the fact that Althesa is called “Mrs. Morton” is a reminder that Henry, unlike Horatio, kept his marital commitment to his wife.
The case of Salome, related in Chapter 15, lends credibility to Brown’s story by once again intertwining fact and fiction. Anticipating his readers may question the fantastic tale of the white German woman who was kidnapped and sold into slavery, Brown concludes the chapter by stating that if one thinks it is fiction, one need only “look over the files of the New Orleans newspapers of the years 1845-6, and you will see there reports of the trial” (119). In Chapter 11, Carlton told Mr. Peck and Georgiana that, though he had heard “hard stories in abolition meetings in New York about slavery” (103), it is only now that he considers “that many of them are true” (103). By including in his novel so many real-life examples and by citing his sources, Brown prevents naysayers from denying the harsh realities of slavery.
