Sapphira and the Slave Girl by Willa Cather

The tall black man turned to Nancy and put a hand on her shoulder. "Dey ain't strangers where you're goin', honey. Dey call theyselves Friends, an' dey is friends to all God's people. You'll be treated like dey had raised you up from a chile, an' you'll be passed along on yo' way from one kind fambly to de next. Dey got a letter all 'bout you from the Reverend Fairhead, an' dey all feels 'quainted. We must be goin' now, chile. We want to git over the line into Pennsylvany as early tomorrer as we kin." There was something solemn yet comforting in his voice, like the voice of prophecy. When he gave Nancy his hand, she climbed into the chaise.

Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather's last published novel, might be a seen as a return to Virginia, the state where Cather was born. The story takes place shortly before the Civil War (Cather was born not long after it), in the household of Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, who has grown old alongside her husband, a miller in the Blue Ridge mountains. As a young woman, Sapphira married slightly below her station, and the rural town where she and the miller live is not quite the plantation of her youth, and yet she maintains a full household of Negro "servants," whom she treats for the most part with kindness. The exception is Nancy, a young half-white woman, rumored to be the daughter of either an itinerant artist or one of the miller's own brothers, and who Sapphira suspects--wrongly--to be the object of her husband's sexual or romantic affections. Sapphira punishes Nancy in a lot of passive-aggressive ways, but Nancy's ultimate punishment comes when Sapphira opens her doors to a rakish young nephew whom she knows will not take Nancy's "no" for an answer.

I was surprised by just how heavy the threat of sexual violation hangs over Sapphira and the Slave Girl. Cather's prose is characteristically elegant, bordering on the plain, but in this case it conceals a deep and distressing sexual anxiety. Nancy is already marked from birth by the anxieties of interracial sex and rape, and Sapphira's belief that her husband's kindness toward Nancy is evidence of a sexual relationship shows just how intense those anxieties can be. Sapphira's solution is to introduce, even if by inaction, a greater and more predatory threat, as if to say, "Oh, you want to have sex with your white master, do you?" But of course, Nancy doesn't, and even if she did, there would be no meaningful consent within the boundaries of the master-slave relationship; Sapphira's antipathy toward Nancy reveals the mental gymnastics needed by the slaver to assign a sexual power to the enslaved in order to clear one's own conscience. Sapphira essentially targets Nancy for rape, and a suspicion that the book still believes in her genteel virtues may explain why Sapphira and the Slave Girl is so little read today. Sapphira's daughter, Rachel Blake, ultimately helps Nancy escape on the Underground Railroad.

Toni Morrison famously used Sapphira and the Slave Girl as a case study in her analysis of the white imagination; I haven't read that essay, but it's not hard to see where such an analysis might begin. At times the novel is surprisingly didactic, as when one character realizes quite pointedly that whether one treats one's slaves "well" is immaterial, that the system is fundamentally immoral. But it's hard not to feel that the novel wants to have it both ways, that it really wants us to admire and sympathize with the anti-slavery whites like Rachel, and not to be too harsh on Sapphira. It also wants us, I'd argue, to admire the hardiness and gentility of antebellum society, as when one of Rachel's daughters is killed by a diphtheria epidemic. The biggest flaw, perhaps, is that Nancy herself is a character that holds little interest, a passive recipient of sexual torment whose most developed moment comes when she must agonize over whether to leave the life she has known or light out for Canada. Whatever the promise of the title, it's hard to argue that both Nancy and the woman who keeps her enslaved have equal billing.