Black joy is a form of resistance that gives agency to Black people in times where oppression and racism have tried to take away everything else. Stowe portrays an instance of black joy when she describes Uncle Tom’s cottage at the beginning of chapter 4. The cottage is first described as a “small log building” which is essentially a one-room building housing a five-person family. In this description, there isn’t an emphasis on the abysmal conditions the family endured to try to make the space livable. Instead, attention is brought to the way Aunt Chloe made the small space into a home by using visual imagery and contrasting diction.
“On this piece of carpeting Aunt Chloe took her stand[…] and it and the bed by which it lay, and the whole corner, in fact, were treated with distinguished consideration, and made, so far as possible, sacred from the marauding inroads and desecrations of little folks. In fact, that corner was the drawing-room of the establishment”(Stowe 99).
Stowe takes the time to set the scene and I believe it was her intention to subtly contrast the care and pride that Aunt Chloe takes in her home with the reality that the cabin they live in was never meant to house a family of five. Despite the family not having much, Aunt Chloe expresses her black joy by taking pride in the things she does have. The narrator also notes that “on a rough bench in the corner, a couple of woolly-headed boys, with glistening black eyes and fat shining cheeks” were watching their baby sister attempt to walk(Stowe 99). The contrast between the diction of the “rough” bench and the joy of Aunt Chloe’s children demonstrates the many ways black joy can manifest in spite of hardship. Stowe doesn’t necessarily dismiss the poor conditions the family lives in, but rather she displays that the pain and injustice that come with the conditions of slavery can also coexist with joy.
Questions:
- Can black joy be confused with denial in terms of defining what “good” mental health looks like for Black people?
- Aunt Chloe’s character is depicted as a jovial Black woman, in what other ways has she displayed her resistance against slavery?