Willa Cather's State of the Union: Sapphira and the Slave Girl

A portrait of the mixed-race woman (or “mulatta”) as a key to modernist culture’s fixation on race may be obtained through examination of Sapphira and the Slave Girl, Willa Cather’s last novel. I explore the author’s presentation of slavery and the mixed-race woman, a crucial figure in a melodramatic plot of abuse. In addition, I trouble the mixed-race woman’s relationship to and confrontation with the construction of white womanhood in Cather’s novel. This tension is usually absent from fiction, as it is typically not central to the plot. However, it is in this tension that I examine discussions of American national identity, power, and oppression, particularly of a nation built on enslaved labor during ante- and postbellum America.

Although published in 1940, Sapphira and the Slave Girl takes place in the nineteenth century, mainly in 1856, with the epilogue set in 1881. A complex text with slavery at its center, the novel focuses on Sapphira Dodderidge Colbert, a wealthy heiress, and her relationship to those around her. Despite deteriorating health and confinement to a wheelchair, Sapphira powerfully controls the operations of the family’s Back Creek farm. But there are greater implications presented by Cather’s novel. The marked, incapacitated white woman symbolizes the United States, swollen with the unresolved disease of racism and slavery. These issues erupt in Back Creek—and continue to stagnate throughout the United States. It is no wonder then that Sapphira is busily arranging the rape of Nancy, the “slave girl” of the title, finding sexual violence to be the one significant way to continue controlling Black bodies. To this end, I argue that Back Creek is a metaphor for the United States, a cultural and political “backwater” obsessed with (but unable to come to terms with) the ramifications of race and slavery.

Cather’s Sapphira is the possessor of power and privilege in the novel, due to her family lineage and financial holdings in Back Creek. Although she has resided there for more than thirty years, she is not native to the area, having come from east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. As a wealthy heiress and landowner with slaves, Sapphira sees the white people native to Back Creek as simple, “very poor” people. More plainly, her favorite slave, Till, describes the people of Back Creek as “poor farmers and backwoods people,” among whom Till’s finer domestic service skills “had little chance” (70–71). Because of the Colberts’ status within the community, Back Creek residents seem to be wary of their wealth and influence. At the same time, these people view their own whiteness as the only leveling agent in their poverty.[1] David Fairhead, the preacher at Rachel Blake’s and Henry Colbert’s church, observes that some of the poorer “mountain boys” resort to stealing and petty crime rather than work alongside Black laborers because they believe that their white skin grants them a certain degree of privilege: “It’s the one thing they’ve got to feel important about—that they’re white” (83). The residents of Back Creek cling to their whiteness as a marker of their privilege, much as Sapphira exercises her white and class privilege to be a propertied slaveholder and arranges her household as she sees fit. In Back Creek, tensions are on display in the relationships between the slaveholders and other white-presenting people. Back Creek folks are also painfully aware of the gradations of whiteness. It is noted that Henry Colbert, Sapphira’s husband, “had grown up in a neighbourhood of English settlers [and had adopted their speech patterns]. [...] This was not, on Back Creek, a friendly way of talking” (9). However, his wife is allowed to speak as she likes because “a woman and an heiress had a right to” (9). The Back Creek residents seem to tolerate Sapphira Colbert. They don’t have to like her, however. Cather’s portrait of the United States (as represented by Back Creek) illustrates that wealth and privilege may be held by a limited few, in this case, one wealthy white woman who uses a wheelchair.

It is important for me to further deconstruct the subtleties within whiteness presented in the novel. The residents of Back Creek may think Sapphira and Henry an odd pairing, but Sapphira also sees herself very differently from the other members of her immediate family and is a beneficiary of the gradations of whiteness. As cultural historian Maurice Berger says in his book White Lies, “Whiteness is not a univalent category. The strengths and limitations of one’s own whiteness depend on many factors; its power and privileges are not awarded evenly or evenhandedly” (166). Sapphira is of English heritage.[2] Her ancestors had come from the British Isles, whereas Henry Colbert and his family are considered “immigrants” because their grandfather came from Flanders (part of modern-day Belgium). The people of Back Creek “never forgot that he was not one of themselves” (9), implying that, like Sapphira, they too were of English ancestry.[3] In addition, Henry is Lutheran, not of the Church of England like his wife. This fact seems to be of note since the reader is informed that there were “disadvantage[s] of having been raised a Lutheran” (110). The difference in religion suggests a kind of character defect, as we understand that Henry’s ambivalence about slaveholding (though he supports it, in essence, by not exercising his own ability as a man to free the slaves until after his wife dies) is related to his upbringing and religious background. In fact, the newlyweds’ relocation to Back Creek allows Sapphira to avoid questions about Henry’s “vague ancestry, even his Lutheran connections, [which] would have made her social position rather awkward” (25). I see a critical point here about gradations of whiteness and privilege, one that can be demonstrated through John Hartigan Jr.’s “Locating White Detroit.” Hartigan astutely explains that, in the United States, people are attempting a discussion of “an irregular terrain in which some whites always sit insecurely in the larger body of whiteness. ... [T]he gap between whiteness and whites opens distinct horizons of social and political contexts” (204). This statement underscores the need for incisive analyses of class, which certainly plays a significant role in discussions of whiteness. In Cather’s novel, Sapphira is living in a white community and yet is among strangers, foreigners even. The reader, then, can problematize the socioeconomic privilege of Cather’s title character and how that white privilege still goes unchallenged.

On its surface, it may appear that Sapphira’s privilege is a consequence of her marriage, adhering as it does to the typical strictures of nineteenth-century marriage contracts. Historian Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s work on gender in the plantation South is useful in demonstrating that Sapphira’s world is an anomaly. “[T]he lady,like other women,” Fox-Genovese writes, “remained bound by a broad vision of appropriate gender relations. ... In a world dominated by male strength, women could not aspire to be the head of a household” (203). In contrast, the novel takes pains to describe how the heiress feels about her property. As a child, she inherits a rather sizable Back Creek property from her uncle.[4] This place is part of an area described as “nameless except for [its] unpronounceable Indian [name]” (29). That Sapphira inherited the Back Creek property as a child aligns with historian Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers’s research into the activities of slaveholding women in her study They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. Through numerous examples, Jones-Rogers illustrates how southern women actively managed their plantations because “[t]hey had an immense economic stake in the continued enslavement of African Americans” (150). Similarly, the fictional Sapphira is a formidable presence in the novel, controlling the day-to-day operations, including the lives of her enslaved property. She finds in Henry, four years her junior, a serendipitous match. Henry had been serving as a business advisor to Captain Dodderidge after the older gentleman became incapacitated by a riding injury. Perhaps even more conveniently, Henry, as well as his father before him, is a miller. (The land, which included a water mill, had been rented for fifty years by various tenants.) Henry provides something invaluable to his wife: he offers her the ability as a female to dictate much of the day-to-day course of her life, including their move to Back Creek. Henry’s “vague ancestry” and convenient ambivalence about slavery further contribute to his perceived powerlessness. As Judith Fetterley notes in her essay “Willa Cather and the Question of Sympathy: An Unofficial Story,” “[Sapphira] married a man willing to let her be the master” (19).

As a master, Sapphira has the power or right to make decisions about her property, including her slaves. Many theorists have written about the underlying motivations for Sapphira’s problematic plan for Nancy, ranging from an inability to act on her own lesbian desires to an attempt to enact her power, literally using Martin Colbert, her nephew by marriage, as a phallic substitute.[5] Part of the horror of Sapphira’s aging and physically declining body rests in her inability to be sexually intimate with another human being or to be procreative. Sapphira’s husband, Henry, rebuffs her expressions of longing for physical company or contact a number of times. For example, after Jezebel’s funeral, Sapphira says, “‘Surely you don’t mean to go back to the mill tonight, Henry, with your good clothes on,’” but her husband explains he has business to tend to and leaves her in the house. Therefore, it is possible that the violence of the sexual act that Sapphira arranges for Nancy is a manifestation of Sapphira’s frustrations with her own sexual life. It is also possible that she remained unmarried as long as she did because she is unable to act upon same-sex desire. In addition, though Sapphira was then a vital young woman, she could also have been asexual. There is also the possibility that Sapphira is tiring of the proscriptions of “white ladyhood” and, in the case of Nancy, having to obtain her husband’s permission to take action. However laced with sexual tension or the need to demonstrate power her decision may be, the novel provides evidence that Sapphira’s motivation lies in the Back Creek world she has constructed for herself.

Very early in the text, Sapphira offers, “I ought to be allowed to arrange Nancy’s future” (12). And why shouldn’t she control Nancy’s body? In the groundbreaking book of literary criticism Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, Toni Morrison contemplates this question in her analysis of Sapphira and the Slave Girl: “It is after all hers, this slave woman’s body, in a way that her own invalid flesh is not” (23). In a violent text, articulating white female autonomy in tension with slavery’s continuance in a U.S. backwater, Sapphira is trying to make unsettling “arrangements” for Nancy. With this knowledge, Till’s loyalty to Sapphira can come across as a romanticized notion of Black female loyalty to their slaveholders—even to the detriment of her relationship with her own daughter. But Till’s behavior can be better explained as a consequence of how slavery distorts interpersonal and particularly family relations. Due to the nature of female enslavement and the difficult circumstances under which enslaved women were required to accommodate the sexual advances of white males, it is not clear that Till’s liaison with Nancy’s father was consensual. However, it is interesting to contemplate that Nancy’s father could be the Cuban painter who had visited Back Creek some years earlier to paint the portraits of the Colberts that hang in the parlor.[6] The novel reports conspiratorially, “He was a long while doing them” (74). One wonders if this line is about the Cuban painter’s portraits or his sexual liaisons with enslaved females. Whatever significance can be derived from the line, a possible union between Till and the portrait painter can be imagined as the only agency or defiance Till might have exercised after her arranged marriage to Jefferson. And, regardless, Nancy’s paternity is not known, this “in spite of her resemblance to the portrait painter from Cuba” (68). The identity of her father continues to be the subject of wide speculation on Back Creek, again due to certain presumptions about the nature of slavery. To imagine a consensual union between two people of color destabilizes the social and legal prescriptions of slavery in the United States. The preferred narrative (because it is the more commonly “accepted” one under slavery) is that one of Henry’s brothers is Nancy’s father: “The Colbert men had a bad reputation where women were concerned. [...] Nancy was often counted as one of the Colbert bastards” (68). Nancy’s paternity is more likely connected to the Cuban painter, yet time and again the characters assert that the young slave girl is a Colbert. Certainly Till, as Sapphira’s property, is subject to her mistress’s will, a familiar American narrative that Cather’s novel reinforces. I assert, however, that for all the gossip about the male Colberts’ inability to control themselves sexually, an “inter-American” paternity narrative that displaces the Colberts, including Sapphira, is quite compelling. Their potential lack of masculine potency in relation to Till and control over the American narrative is unsettling. With Jacob Colbert as Nancy’s alleged father, Cather writes a paternity story that cleaves more to the United States’ narrative of miscegenous activity between Black enslaved females and white men.[7]

The other issue that these speculations raise concerns the ways that white enslavers are able to control the narrative and the circumstances of Black family construction. For example, Sapphira “married [Till] off to Jefferson,” who was many years her senior. In fact, he is chosen for Till by Sapphira because he is a “capon man,” or sterile. He is also described as having certain “incapacities [that] were well known among the darkies” (74). At a time when enslaved persons were not permitted to marry each other (or, for that matter, anyone of their choosing), it is interesting that Sapphira chooses a sterile man for her prized parlor maid once Till presumably is sexually viable. The underlying tension in fact is that a sexually active Till might be distracted from her focused attention toward her mistress. On the other hand, Nancy has fallen out of favor with Sapphira, having been “treated [...] like an untrustworthy stranger” for some time (47). Sapphira could be trying to find some utility for Nancy by simultaneously manipulating the “slave girl’s” possible fertility, with the added benefit of increasing her own wealth. Jones-Rogers’s research about white women’s involvement in slavery supports this reading. She observes that white women “personally orchestrated acts of sexual violence against enslaved women and men in hopes that the women would produce children who would increase their wealth” (149). In this way, one can imagine a possible, though incredibly troubling, rationale for Sapphira’s plan for Nancy. Because she is unable to sell Nancy without her husband’s permission, Sapphira decides to tie the slave girl to the Back Creek farm through procreative and profit-based means, which amounts to something very different from the fate she envisioned for her devoted housemaid Till. Cather shows not only how slavery distorts human relationships but also that female enslaved persons are part of an economy that permits open access to their sexuality.

It is also necessary to note that Cather neglects to imagine Till’s feelings of having to live with Jefferson (or even the previous sadness of having to leave the intimacy of her relationship with the Devonshire housekeeper Mrs. Matchem, who served as Till’s mentor in the art of domestic service). The reader is informed that “Till accepted this arrangement with perfect dignity” (74). Closer analysis reveals that Till, through her sexual relations, might have been retaliating in the only way she could. The Cuban painter is commissioned “[s]ome years after [Till] had moved her belongings from her attic chamber in the big house over to Jeff’s cabin” (74), and she is pregnant soon after. Till’s decision to have a liaison with the Cuban painter, if she did indeed do so, would be her only known act of rebellion against Sapphira’s efforts to control the people and action around her. Sapphira suffers from what I would call an “entitled impotence,” asserting herself in the only arena she can control. The potential circumstances of Sapphira’s plan to “couple” Nancy with Martin provide additional evidence of Sapphira’s desperation to assert power and authority.

Sapphira has betrayed Till twice, having separated the young woman from Matchem and then set out to arrange her sexual future. And yet, Till remains exceedingly loyal to her mistress. Till has a congenial relationship with Sapphira, very different from Nancy’s. Till counsels Nancy on how best to placate Sapphira’s recent bad humor with her. Yet, their conversation reinforces the master-slave relation because their relationship is predicated on Sapphira’s needs and Till tending to them. For example, Till suggests to Sapphira that she will “wear the kid shoes around the house a few days more an’ break ’em in for you,” so that the new shoes will not pinch her mistress’s swollen feet (34). Sapphira is even described in one of her direct addresses to Till as having “joked” with her slave. Throughout the novel, their interactions do come across as “pleasant,” in the sense that they do not evoke the “contemptuous indulgence” she exercises with some of the other enslaved persons (138). Still, for all the apparent good humor, there is a self-preservation bordering on an utter selflessness within Till with respect to her relationship to Sapphira.[8] “Anything that made trouble between her and the Mistress would wreck the order of the household” (217). Such was the training that Till took to heart under the tutelage of the Devonshire housekeeper, Matchem, that “there was all the difference in the world between doing things exactly right and doing them somehow-or-other” (72–73). Ultimately, though, Till’s service props up her mistress’s white ladyhood, making it possible for Sapphira to effect her plan for Nancy’s sexual life. As Morrison suggests in Playing in the Dark, “That condition could only prevail in a slave society where the mistress can count on (and an author can believe the reader does not object to) the complicity of a mother in the seduction and rape of her own daughter” (21). How does Cather come up with such an inexplicably violent text?

In the midst of this disturbing plot line, the novel explores how slavery might be troubling the balance of Sapphira’s marriage. One of the key events in the novel is the illness and death of Jezebel, an older slave on the Back Creek farm. After Jezebel’s funeral, Henry has a moral wrestling with himself about slavery. He reminds himself that he has the “legal right” to free all of Sapphira’s slaves, but it is not a serious thought. Practical questions like “Where would they go? How would they live?” (110) allow Henry to trade the slaves’ individual liberty for his wife’s good humor. He eventually comes to the conclusion that “[n]owhere in his Bible had he ever been able to find a clear condemnation of slavery [...] nowhere did his Bible say that there should be no one in bonds, no one at all” (112). That Cather has Henry Colbert ruminating on slavery for several pages, examining the moral and religious underpinnings of the institution, is curious. It results in problematic analyses like literary theorist Mary Ryder’s observation that Henry may be “the most enslaved character of the book” though he is a propertied white male, albeit through marriage.[9] Henry evokes sympathetic feelings because he is recognizable, simultaneously wrestling with white supremacy and benefiting from its trappings. However, Henry’s perceived oppression in a text where enslaved people have no freedom of movement, much less the ability to exercise their own personhood, is suggestive of the continued potency of white supremacy, even at the end of the twentieth century (when Ryder’s analysis appears).

Sapphira’s husband, Henry, is described many times in the novel as being different, almost foreign, in comparison to his wife. He is even in opposition to his blood relatives with respect to their views of how to treat Black people: “She had married the only Colbert who had a conscience, and she sometimes wished he hadn’t quite so much” (110). Henry’s ruminations, though, do little to affect race relations in Back Creek. Henry settles upon an observation he has made, seemingly over many years, that the Bible seems to justify the slave system. As Ryder notes, “What he seeks is mercy, God’s forgiveness for his involvement in a system that he instinctually feels is wrong but with which he will not interfere because of his commitment to his wife” (134). He is hopeful that slavery will soon end, thus putting an end to his interminable conflict.[10] He further comforts himself by recalling a recent interaction with Sampson, a “mulatto” slave. When Henry offers his head mill hand an opportunity to work as a free man in the Pennsylvania Quaker mills, Sampson begs beseechingly to stay a slave, citing his wife and children as the reasons he wishes to remain enslaved. In this way, the reader might misinterpret Sampson’s comfort with slavery, particularly by his wanting to keep his family together (though there was certainly no guarantee that the Colberts would honor a commitment to them). However, Sampson further reveals “he’d a’most sooner leave the chillun than leave the mill” (111), suggesting that his loyalty is actually more to the mill and Henry Colbert than to his love for and commitment to his family. There are real material and interpersonal concerns revealed through the characters of Henry Colbert and his slave Sampson. Yet, Sampson’s statement makes plain Cather’s connection to other nostalgic treatments of slavery and enslaved persons, like those in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), and contradicts accounts contained within nineteenth-century narratives of enslavement. Authors of such narratives, Mary Prince among them, articulate how freedom—even that which is granted in foreign places with the clear knowledge that there will be no reunion with family in this lifetime—is the only reasonable end to the barbaric institution of slavery. Prince states more than once, “To be free is very sweet” (94). Sampson, however, cannot imagine freedom within the world of the novel. In the end, Sampson’s unwillingness to be freed assures Henry of the rightness of slavery—and its continuance in Back Creek. In an intimate exchange with his wife, Henry decides, “There are different ways of being good to folks. [...] Sometimes keeping people in their place is being good to them” (264). We learn in the epilogue that Henry frees all the slaves upon Sapphira’s death, going to “a wonderful lot a’ trouble gittin’ good places for his people” (281). Still, the cumulative effect of Henry’s early comments and actions reveals a willful blindness to his social responsibility, not unlike other white people who avoid examining their indirect role in the oppression and violence against Black people.

In fact, Henry’s intermittent conversations with his wife about slavery, specifically regarding what to do with Nancy, begin in the first scene of the novel and lay the groundwork for Sapphira’s eventual drastic action. Further, because Sapphira is unable to imagine any kindnesses being bestowed upon her slaves, except within the narrowly prescribed guidelines of her own mind, she begins to have suspicions about Henry’s late-night musings and goings-on at the mill. After Jezebel’s funeral, Sapphira observes a “deep conversation” between Henry and Nancy in which Henry is described as “speaking very earnestly, with affectionate solicitude” in his interaction with the grieving young woman (105). Cather writes that Henry had “forgotten himself” because “he was not speaking as master to servant. [...] It was personal” (105–6). Has he exceeded the prescribed nature of master-slave relations? The thing is, there are no legitimate rules in a practice as despicable as slavery. The preoccupation with adultery allows these characters to refocus attention away from issues that are more uncomfortable. Were Sapphira to truly believe that her slave was having an affair with her husband, she could sell Nancy away from the familiarity of her surroundings and make a profit. But Henry has made it quite clear that he will not give his permission for the sale. Before she hatches the rape plot, Sapphira devises an elaborate scheme to take Nancy on her annual spring visit to Sapphira’s sister through the Easter holidays because “[i]t would smarten [Nancy] up, to see how people do things” (53). One can assume that Nancy would see how other enslaved females behave with their mistresses and follow suit. The trip does not provide the desired lessons, evidently, so more drastic means are necessary. More tellingly, Nancy is a threat to Sapphira because of her youth, beauty, and mixed-race status, symbolic of a new America. The novel informs the reader that “Nancy came into the world by accident,” indicating that the circumstances of her birth were unusual (suggesting her likely Cuban paternity). Although unable to pass for white, Nancy has greater proximity to whiteness than the other slaves on Back Creek, hence her potentially increased mobility (something Sapphira is literally lacking).[11] Slavery, we are told, “was their natural place in the world” (217), and yet Nancy’s existence communicates otherwise. Bluebell, another slave, suggests that the very mixture of Black and white (if you believe the popular narrative of Nancy’s origins as a Colbert) makes Nancy dangerous: “she’s stuck up, havin’ white blood [...] dat set all de culled folks agin her” (184). Individuals standing at the crossroads of Black and white can be read as symbolic of a new America. Furthermore, Sapphira’s nephew, Martin, observes, “The niggers here don’t know their place, not one of ’em” (181), after his interactions with Sampson and Nancy, both mixed-race persons who do not behave according to their prescribed roles. These racially mixed persons are part of the new or evolving United States, but that country is unrecognizable to most white people. Valerie Babb has noted that “filling cultural institutions with representations only of whites ... all generate a spontaneous, if subconscious, recognition of the supremacy of whiteness and sanction the perception that whites intrinsically have more right to what is American than do other groups in the United States” (42). Cather’s use of the “mulatta” character ultimately offers a window into the American collective cultural and political psyche and the fraught relationship that exists between the races. Much in the way the miller takes in brown wheat and produces white flour, I argue that Cather is refining away the confusion of changing political dynamics, restoring a world in which a mistress with limited mobility can still oppress those around her, denying citizenship and agency to those perceived as Other.

While there is no excuse for Sapphira’s despicable plans to “arrange Nancy’s future,” I would locate her declining health as one motivating factor for her actions. The first descriptions of Sapphira’s appearance place her in direct contrast to Nancy. Sapphira’s hands are plump compared to Nancy’s “slender, nimble hands” (21). Further descriptions of Sapphira’s body indicate that she is not well: “The Mistress had dropsy and was unable to walk [...] all the more cruel in that she had been a very active woman” (13–14). In these lines, the reader can understand how devastated Sapphira might feel about her failing health and deformed lower limbs. Dropsy, more commonly known today as edema, is a pooling of fluid in certain areas of the body (frequently in the limbs) and suggests the presence of other medical issues. Her condition literally has her housebound and dependent on others, which in some ways may intensify her frustration. Sapphira was previously able to be mobile or to manipulate modes of mobility; her current level of despair might also be amplified by the realization that she has become— like many nineteenth-century women—tied to the home. The evidence of her physical deterioration, which is masked to the public with “dresses [that] touched the floor,” also signals Sapphira’s mortality. Is Cather giving a portrait of the 1850s (or her own time of the 1930s)? I argue that Sapphira’s incapacitation and swollen legs are indicative of the state of the Union. At a time when nations are immersed in discussions of personhood and citizenship, she is what is left over, an incapacitated white female body unable to reproduce. Almost a century after the novel’s publication, the United States is arguably still a backwater, unable to fully live up to the promises of its founding principles.

It may be useful to read some vulnerability into the characterization of Sapphira. Early in the novel, she reflects on illness, divulging her feelings about her father’s debilitating illness in relation to her current physical condition. “In those days she had not known the meaning of illness. To be crippled and incapacitated, not to come and go at will, to be left out of things as if one were in one’s dotage” (107). I would posit that perhaps the father and daughter’s shared illness, one passed down in families, is racism and white privilege. Sapphira never characterizes herself as “crippled and incapacitated” until after she witnesses Nancy and Henry in conversation after Jezebel’s funeral. Once Henry rebuffs Sapphira’s request that he stay in the house that evening, she is taken to her room by Washington, another slave, and Till prepares her for bed. If nothing else, these pages depict Sapphira’s lack of mobility. What have been historically perceived as masculine tendencies (mobility, willingness to explore, trying to create one’s own destiny, etc.) become thwarted by incapacitation in Sapphira, similar to the state of Captain Dodderidge in his final days.

However, Sapphira’s deteriorating physical condition provides additional information for the reader. Cather’s Back Creek is a white southern utopia that reveals what is safely hidden in the American imagination about race—and the desire for the continued oppression of Black people. These meditations are arguably central to the text, causing the kind of violence and hysteria evident in Sapphira’s plan for Nancy. There is an extended, bucolic description of Back Creek making reference to white flowers and trees, particularly the dogwoods with “their singular whiteness” (117). These are lasting memories shared by “[e]very Virginian” and subtly evoking the shared experiences of whiteness as it relates to slavery and the subjugation of Black people.[12] Literary scholar Patricia Yaeger observes that this whiteness “becomes a haunting signifier of what cannot be thought or organized either in the nineteenth-century historyscape of the novel or in the landscape of the 1930s from which Cather herself is writing” (147). Further illustrating the lasting impression of whiteness and slavery is the appearance of Cather herself as the five-year-old narrator in book IX who refers to “our Nancy” (274). Although the narrative in that section takes place some twenty-five years after the main events of the novel, the child is intimately acquainted with Rachel, Till, and Nancy. She has been hearing about “our Nancy” her entire life, the possessive indicating a certain investment or participation in Black subjugation. The use of the first person in this section also suggests the immediacy of the child’s connection to slavery and the Civil War.

Before Nancy’s return, Cather cannot imagine any intimacy between mother and daughter. There is a void of feeling or emotion through much of the text. In Till and Nancy’s first scene together, Cather has them cleaning in a flurry of activity in the service of Sapphira. There is no conversation of a personal nature between them, since Cather does not consistently imagine relationships among her slaves that are not adversarial. One might argue that most (if not all) of the novel’s relationships involve various complex expressions of oppression and power. For example, Rachel’s marriage depicts affection, but she too operates in service to her husband, and the reader learns of their relationship in oblique summary: “self-abnegation which [...] took the form of untiring service to a man’s pleasure and of almost idolatrous love for her [male] first-born” (142). Rachel has two older sisters that Sapphira has “married very well” (133). Yet, Sapphira takes to her room to deal with the shock that Michael wants to marry sixteen-year-old Rachel. She cannot imagine that she was not the architect of Rachel’s life prospects, which she had decided would be rather limited. The novel informs the reader that “even from an invalid’s chair she was still able to keep her servants well in hand” (56). Given that Till thwarted Sapphira’s plan (when she was impregnated by the Cuban painter or Jacob Colbert) and Rachel frustrated her marriage plot (by wedding Michael Blake), Sapphira must turn her attention to Nancy. One wonders if Sapphira’s motives do not also relate to complicated feelings of jealousy surrounding Nancy’s looks and beauty. Regardless, this tension speaks very clearly to the lack of sisterhood among the women in Sapphira’s household and Nancy’s incredible vulnerability. Toni Morrison notes that “[t]he absence of camaraderie between Nancy and the other slave women turns on the device of color fetish. ... The character [Cather] creates is ... a fugitive within the household” (23). To further the point, we can turn to Cather’s published correspondence; in a 14 October 1940 letter to Dorothy Canfield Fisher, she revealed that the real-life “meeting between Nancy and Aunt Till ... was one of the most moving things that ever happened to me when I was little” (Selected Letters 592). Although we have access to the child’s recollection of their meeting, the reader has not had access to the interiority of these Black women’s lives. Cather is perhaps unable to imagine or commit to exploration of that interiority because this is her book, certainly not that of the nameless slave girl in the novel’s title—or her enslaved mother. Any camaraderie exists between Cather and her titular character.

Because Sapphira has made so much of the Colbert men’s curse of being womanizers, one wonders if Henry Colbert is suppressing his desire for Nancy. The novel explains that he had inherited the Colbert curse (191) but that he has gotten a handle on it since being married. The knowledge of his nephew’s sexual plans for Nancy threatens to undo Henry; he is described as not being able to look at Nancy for a while because she suddenly becomes a woman to him. Then, he seems to be proving his virility and reclaiming his Colbert masculinity and viability as a man, while mowing the wheat fields (207–8); right after this action he begins obsessing about Martin’s designs and how his own relationship with Nancy is not the same. In fact, I argue that the novel portrays him as seeing Nancy for the first time through Colbert eyes because Martin has awakened something dormant within Henry. Perhaps the change in how Henry sees Nancy is why he contributes to her escape. Henry is involved but cannot face the reality of his action: “Hush, Rachel, not another word! You and me can’t talk about such things. It ain’t right. [...] I can’t be a party to make away with your mother’s property” (223–24). But he does make “a way” for Nancy to escape by financing the journey. Yet, simultaneously, Henry admonishes his daughter with the following statement: “[N]othing must pass between you and me on this matter; neither words nor aught else” (224). In order to maintain the fragile reality on Back Creek, there can be no record of their transaction.[13] In other words, it is best for all involved that Rachel and Henry forget the betrayal of their contract with whiteness.

Although Nancy escapes with Henry and Rachel’s support, she remains ensnared in the memories of Back Creek’s residents. The first-person child-narrator of the epilogue shares that her lullaby evoked memories of Nancy: “Down by de cane-brake, close by de mill / Dar lived a yaller gal, her name was Nancy Till” (274). Just over one hundred pages earlier, Martin Colbert sings these lines in one of his first attempts to overpower Nancy. As he says, “There never was a finer morning for picking cherries or anything else” (177). That the child-narrator finds soothing words that originate in the violence of owning Black bodies is not surprising due to the disconnect in the American psyche that cannot reconcile its past. It is also evidence of the extent to which slavery and white privilege are part of the fabric of the United States.[14] For her own part, the child already has prejudices about Black people. Although the child has no lived memory of slavery, she cannot embrace a fully realized Black person. She admits that she expected the actual Nancy to be “the picture I had carried in my mind,” that of the pejoratively rendered “yaller gal” (277). Nancy’s words, then, are described as “too precise,” causing the child to be “repelled” (284). For example, Nancy enunciates the syllables of the word history, which the child says she “didn’t like. [...] Even my father said ‘hist’ry’” (284). Nancy’s speech pattern is described as not being “friendly” in the novel. In Back Creek, as in the recesses of the American mind, there are behaviors particular to Black people, behaviors that aren’t legible in a stereotypically racialized American narrative. There is a connective thread to earlier points in the novel about Black women’s position, such as the big fuss made over Jezebel’s illness and death. Yet, the entire section of the novel devoted to the old slave’s passing is bursting with descriptions of Black men and women as various creatures. The beloved slave is depicted as looking like a “lean old grey monkey” with a “cold grey claw” (88, 91). Most tellingly, Jezebel is descended from “a fierce cannibal people” (93). It’s as if Cather thinks her readers may have missed that the only thing “Auntie” Jezebel craves in her last days is a “li’l pickaninny’s hand” (90). Jezebel’s deathbed revelation of cannibalism further underscores the common perception that slavery is needed to control Black people’s behavior. There are erotic connotations to the old Black woman desiring the child’s hand, which are disturbing.[15] And yet, Jezebel has been intimately tied to Sapphira for so long that she could be channeling her troubled mistress’s thoughts, which are too horrible to place on the white female. Jezebel’s desire takes the place of Sapphira’s suppressed longing to consume and control the flesh of her slave girl. As Morrison concludes, “[T]he author employs [Black characters] in behalf of her own desire for a safe participation in loss, in love, in chaos, in justice” (28). With all of this in mind, how do we place this work?

Sapphira and the Slave Girl deserves to be part of the conversation about Cather’s oeuvre, because she is writing about what people need to read.[16] Given the recent work of scholars like Jones-Rogers, Cather’s work about a white female slaveowner becomes that much more relevant. As Jones-Rogers notes about women enslavers, the “products of these women’s economic investment ... were fundamental to the nation’s economic growth and to American capitalism” (xiii). White women’s slaveholding and ensuing wealth were an integral piece in the positioning of the United States as a superpower. She also notes there was an additional gain for these women: “slavery was [white women’s] freedom. They created freedom for themselves by actively engaging and investing in the economy of slavery, and keeping African Americans in captivity” (xvii). The white slaveholding female, like the fictional Sapphira, traded on the horrors of slavery for their own gain, disrupting our understanding of female-to-female interactions, as well as notions about frailty and helplessness. In the end, as Morrison notes, authors have a particular responsibility to the characters they create: “[a]n author is not personally accountable for the acts of his fictive creatures, although he is responsible for them” (86). Cather’s novel demands a nuanced textual exploration that allows readers to reconcile its contents with her position as an iconic American author.

Critics are often disquieted by Cather’s arguably racist articulation of Black characters in Sapphira and the Slave Girl, which played a role in the lack of attention to the novel until recent years. Part of the discomfort derives from the American belief that the absence of formal, legal discrimination necessarily means the absence of any further complicated or troubling issues surrounding race. There is also the belief that no one should make pointed assertions on race in polite company and certainly not a celebrated novelist like Cather. As Toni Morrison notes in Playing in the Dark, “The contemplation of this black presence is central to any understanding of our national literature and should not be permitted to hover at the margins of the literary imagination” (5). Any illusions about Cather’s intentions throughout the text should be quelled by the author literally entering the text. Cather offers a signed postscript following the epilogue, indicating that her parents relayed stories of “acquaintances whom they had met” on their visits to Virginia, though they were “unknown” to her (288). She simply had a “lively fascination” for their names. Cather dispels the fiction of the story in her 14 October 1940 letter about the novel to close friend Dorothy Canfield Fisher, which reveals that this story and “darkey speech ... was deep down in my mind exactly like phonograph records” (Selected Letters 592). Further, Cather’s 9 November 1940 letter to American editor and author Viola Roseboro indicates the immediacy of the material: “not very much of it is actually fiction. ... I scarcely know where my own contribution to it begins” (Complete Letters #1502). Cather also shares both the challenge of the material and rendering it accurately. She sent Roseboro one of two advance copies of the novel, admitting, “The stage trappings of such a narrative are so easily come by, but there is something else which eludes and eludes—I mean the Terrible” (Complete Letters #1502). These views signal Sapphira and the Slave Girl as a major work, precisely because it is difficult and uncomfortable. No such discussions will call into question Cather’s skill as an author. In the end, Sapphira and the Slave Girl shows the American white woman knowing and writing the disease of racism, leaving bare the gaps and omissions in a collective history yet to be fully addressed.