SOURCE: Rowe, John Carlos. “Stowe's Rainbow Sign: Violence and Community in Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856).” Arizona Quarterly 58, no. 1 (spring 2002): 37-52.

In the following essay, Rowe examines Stowe's criticism of sentimental white sympathy for the plight of the slave in the absence of a specific program of social and political reform.

God gave Noah the rainbow sign, No more water, the fire next time! 

African American song, as quoted in James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time (1963)

Then Denver, running too. Away from her to the pile of people out there. They make a hill. A hill of black people, falling. 

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

I begin with James Baldwin's famous epigraph and title to his civil rights' jeremiad, The Fire Next Time, to challenge our scholarly and critical understanding of Harriet Beecher Stowe, passionate abolitionist who is still remembered for sentimentalizing race relations. Indeed, James Baldwin...