‘I’m making a white man of him’: Making and Breaking Whiteness in The Garies and their Friends

Abstract

Returning to the origin of critical whiteness studies, antebellum African American literature, this chapter examines how tenets of Whiteness are performative and arbitrary in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and their Friends. Assembling a cast of respectable free African American families and cunning and dishonest White men, Webb depicts Whiteness as a set of values not intrinsic to White bodies, and that the privileges Whiteness affords are not extended to Black Americans who embody those tenets. Influenced by the cross-racial oratory of his wife Mary E. Webb, Webb conveys the permeability of the colour line through episodes of White racial transformation and African American passing, and he shows White male anxieties that they could lose the privileges of Whiteness themselves. In the final section the chapter considers prescriptive Whiteness itself as deadly through deathbed speeches in The Garies and across early African American fiction.