Summary

In Chapter IV, Jefferson acknowledges the difficulties of navigating “your way through American culture” (68). She then describes her first encounter with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1969. She bought the book “expecting to sneer” her way through “its racial sophistries and female pieties” (68). She encountered something else instead: a sort of “moral and narrative freedom” (68).

Jefferson reflects on Harriet Beecher Stowe. She considers her obsession with Stowe’s characters Tom and Topsy. She quotes sections of the book, and rewrites crucial scenes. She wants to understand how “generations of blacks” would feel about Tom and Topsy (69).

In 1853, Stowe fled enslavement and began “working in Boston as a nursemaid” (72). Throughout this time, she worked on her novel. She wrote to a friend confiding that she sometimes wished she were never born (73).

Artist Kara Walker “reanimated” Topsy’s character “on canvas and paper” (73). She depicted Topsy...