Tyranny of Theives

For my post on the Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown I decided to focus on how Henry, even from a very young age, learned about and witnessed the performance and thievery of his master. He recounts that as a toddler his mother would sit him on her lap “and, pointing to the forest trees which were then being stripped of their foliage by the winds of autumn, would say to me, my son, as yonder leaves are stripped from off the trees of the forest, so are the children of the slaves swept away from them by the hands of cruel tyrants.” (Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, p 52)

The comparison to leaves being stripped from the trees suggests that the will of the masters is unbendable and unchangeable, like the seasons, like the wind. Trees grow leaves every year, and every year they lose them, like slave mothers lose their children. I also think this passage, in which his mother calls the masters “tyrants” is interesting when followed by an account of the slave children thinking that their master was God – and the master never correcting them. The master does decide their fates, whether actively or passively, but his choices are ultimately for the benefit of himself and his interests. We would at least hope that behavior like this is more typical of a tyrant than of God, although they both possess ultimate power. This ludicrous denial of truth on the part of the master sets up the religious hypocrisy of masters and overseers, a theme throughout the novel.

The violent language the above passage (e.g. “stripped,” swept”) is rooted the both the unrelenting cruelty of the tyrant, and the rhetorical performance appealing to the familial bond. Henry writes that when he was born the masters “robbed me of myself” until he “forcibly wrenched” himself from their hands. (Box Brown, p 51) He states that separating families is much more devastating than the whip, producing “pangs which lacerate the soul” as a result of “forcible disruption” of families that “only grow deeper and more piercing.” (Box Brown, p 61)