Cassy


From Shakespeare’s Venice, Mary takes us to the context closest to her time and place, and to the concerns of her abolitionist audiences in America and England, with an extract from The Christian Slave. Despite its original success and the progressive attitudes of its author, Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a problematic text. The history of its dramatic adaptations and interpretations, which popularised and maintained profoundly objectionable stereotypes of African American identity for white audiences, is at the heart of these issues, as the folklorist Patricia A. Turner has long shown in her vital research. Our engagement with The Christian Slave has been informed by such conversations about the obvious limitations and deplorable legacies of Stowe’s work.

In Let Her Witness It, the focus is on the character of Cassy. We develop the theme of thwarted relationships between women and men which Othello established for us, and we focus on female experience. Mary delivers Cassy’s speech from Act III, Scene 4 of Stowe’s Christian Slave. The beginning of Cassy’s story is not unlike Mary’s own: her mother is enslaved, her father is a wealthy landowner, and she receives both education and adulation in a childhood of comparative good fortune. But when she is 14 Cassy’s father dies suddenly; “my father had always meant to set me free,” she tells us, “but he had not done it, and so I was set down in the list.” Cassy’s father is not the last man to let her down. She recounts, in unsparing detail, her exploitation at the hands of the two white slaveowners who subsequently take possession of her, her agonies as a mother, and a desperate decision she takes which, in her circumstances, seems to her the only way to protect her youngest child from the unrelenting trauma of slavery.