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 22-25Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 22 Summary: “A Ride in a Stage-Coach”
In Cincinnati, dressed in her disguise as Mr. Johnson, Clotel boards a stage-coach to Richmond, Virginia to try to find Mary. While she attempts to avoid notice, the other passengers engage in passionate conversations about politics and the temperance movement—the movement to abolish alcohol. One man, who used to live in New Orleans and now lives in Tennessee, describes how he went to Vermont, a “teetotaler” or temperance state, to visit family, and despite alcohol being forbidden, he was clandestinely offered alcohol by several family members. A minister from Connecticut says that “no man living who uses intoxicating drinks, is free from the danger of at least occasional, and if of occasional, ultimately of habitual excess” (166). The man from Tennessee retorts that the minister’s religion worships politics and “banks and tariffs” (167); the minister, in attempting to show how the “people of New Orleans are the most ungodly set in the United States” (167), reads an article from a New Orleans newspaper that describes how people gathered to watch a bloody battle between a bull and a bear. Clotel, who in her disguise appears to look like a handsome young Italian man, attracts the affections of two young women; their father invites her to spend a week with them, but Clotel declines.
Chapter 23 Summary: “Truth Stranger Than Fiction”
New Orleans suffers a deadly Yellow Fever epidemic, and Henry and Althesa both die of the illness. Henry had been unaware that, according to law, “children follow the condition of the mother” (173). As his wife had been born a slave, his children now become slaves. He would have been horrified, writes Brown, to know that, in the eyes of the law, Althesa was his slave and not his wife, and that his teenage daughters, Ellen and Jane, were his slaves, as well.
Henry’s brother James goes to New Orleans to help settle the estate. Deeply fond of his nieces, he prepares to bring them to his home in Vermont, having no idea Althesa had been a slave. As the three are about to board a train, they are arrested. Henry, distraught, offers “to mortgage his little farm in Vermont for the amount which young slave women of their ages would fetch” (174), but the girls are brought to auction, where they are sold for more than other slaves given the fact that they are Thomas Jefferson’s granddaughters. Ellen is sold to an older man; she soon discovers that he has bought her for sexual purposes, and she poisons herself on her first day with him. Jane is sold to a young “unprincipled” (175) man who takes her to live in “a forest prison” (175) where she sees no one but him and an old slave who serves her. She writes a letter to her suitor, Volney Lapuc, “a student in her father’s office” (175). Meanwhile, frustrated by Jane’s refusal to sleep with him, Jane’s master locks her in “an upper chamber, and [is] told that would be her home, until she should yield to her master’s wishes” (175). After two weeks, she sees Volney outside her window, and she throws him a note. The next night, he returns with a rope ladder, and she descends, only to be discovered by her master as she and Volney embrace. Her master shoots Volney dead, and Jane soon dies of a broken heart. She is buried with the slaves, and no one mourns for this girl “who had been so carefully cherished, and so tenderly beloved” (177).
Chapter 24 Summary: “The Arrest”
Clotel arrives in Richmond and goes to a hotel, where she immediately recognizes someone she knows. Hiding behind her disguise, she takes to her room. The next day, she eats alone in her room and then goes to the suburbs, where she finds the house in which she had lived with Horatio. She is frustrated that she is so near her daughter without being able to determine how to obtain news of her.
Clotel happens to be in Richmond during the time of the slave Nat Turner’s rebellion, in which hundreds of slaves escaped into the swamps and then revolted. As a result, people are more watchful of strangers. The police, who have read of her escape in advertisements and seek the reward, investigate her room and find women’s clothing in her trunk. She is arrested and brought to prison. Meanwhile, in the slave rebellion, white blood and slave blood alike are shed, and revolters who are not killed are arrested. Brown indicates that one of the slaves who is arrested will become important later in the story.
Chapter 25 Summary: “Death is Freedom”
Clotel is brought to a “negro pen” in Washington, DC, where she waits to be put on a boat headed back to New Orleans. She “expect[s] no mercy from her master” (183). The night before she is supposed to leave, she manages to escape, with guards in fast pursuit. She almost makes it across the Long Bridge over the Potomac River and intends to head into the forests, but she is overtaken and cornered. Looking around and seeing that freedom is impossible, Clotel, “the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of Independence” (185), lifts her hands and eyes “toward heaven” (185) and leaps over the side of the bridge into the river.
Brown writes that Clotel is not seen as a heroine because, while people “have tears to shed over Greece and Poland” (185) and “can furnish a ship of war to convey the Hungarian refugees from a Turkish prison to the ‘land of the free and the home of the brave’” (185), they do not sympathize with slaves in their own country. Clotel dies a tragic death despite having “virtues and goodness of heart [that] would have done honour to one in a higher station of life” (186). On her death, a poem about her appears in the newspaper.
Chapters 22-25 Analysis
These chapters, which describe the tragic ends of Clotel, her nieces Ellen and Jane, and Althesa and Henry, portray cost of slavery. By painting vivid images of Ellen and Jane standing at the slave market “trembling, blushing, and weeping” (174) as they suffer the prodding of “rude hands that examined the graceful proportions of their beautiful frames” (174), Brown appeals to 19th-century sensibilities. These young girls, he suggests, are no different from the daughters of any of his readers; in fact, they should be venerated as heirs to the Jefferson name. Their virtue and delicate demeanors make their being handled “like cattle in Smithfield market” (174) all the more unsettling. That these pure, timid girls are purchased as sexual objects further elicits the sympathy of 19th-century readers.
Brown appeals to his readers’ family values not only by describing the sale and separation of Ellen and Jane but also by drawing attention to the fact that this loving family was not, in the eyes of the law, a family at all. Henry, he writes, would be shocked to learn that “she whom he thought to be his wife was, in fact, nothing more than his slave” (173). It is worth noting that Henry’s brother James is unaware that Althesa had been a slave even after meeting her daughters. Brown seems to point to the absurdity of the law, for the girls, indistinguishable from white people, are slaves for no tangible, discernible reason.
Clotel herself is cast once again as an ideal woman: in “attempt[ing] the rescue of a beloved child” (179), she “demonstrate[s] that over-willingness of woman to carry out the promptings of the finer feelings of her heart” (178). Here, Brown appeals to his 19th-century readers by establishing how Clotel embodies “woman’s nature” (178) with her devotion and self-sacrifice. In showing the bond between Clotel and her daughter, he reminds readers that, as Carlton had said, slaves “are like other people, flesh and blood” (137).
By bringing the action to Washington, DC, the capital and heart of the nation, in what is arguably the climax of the novel, Brown reiterates the irony of slavery: that a nation professing to be built on freedom has actually been built by slaves. Even free black people, he writes, if caught without papers in the nation’s capital can be imprisoned in “Negro pens” (183) until they are brought to New Orleans to be sold. Clotel’s death on the Long Bridge takes place “within plain sight of the President’s house and the capitol of the Union” (184); upon her death, Brown reminds us that Clotel was “the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence” (185). Clotel’s dying within vision of the White House is, according to Brown, symbolic of “the unconquerable love of liberty the heart may inherit” (185). It is also a condemnation of the hypocrisy of our nation and of its founders, as well as a call to action to make the nation live up to its ideals.
By writing that his novel “speaks of a thousand wrongs and woes aside, which never see the light” (177), Brown establishes that he offers but one of the many examples of tragedy brought about by slavery. Throughout Clotel, Brown has gone to great lengths to establish that his book, though largely fiction, is based on real events, some of which he experienced by personally. In this passage, Brown asks his readers to consider the many people who will never be mourned. Readers may consider how the fates of Clotel and her beloved family members are unknown to each other: though readers follow the various storylines, the characters themselves are separated from each other, never to hear of each other again.
