Interesting essay
I found this recently, copied here without permission:
Nearly 50 years ago, an Illinois dog breeder wrote a 600-plus-page novel about
an antebellum plantation that laid bare the dehumanizing practices of slavery and the toll levied on both slave and owner. It would sell more than 5 million copies, be made into a film, and spawn a score of lesser works that were variations on its theme.
Kyle Onstott’s “Mandingo” is an epic tale of brutal treachery on the Falconhurst
plantation, a depleted Alabama property owned by the ailing and aging Warren Maxwell (James Mason in the film of the same name) and run by his hobbled son, Hammond (played by Perry King). Warren, beset by rheumatism and moral indifference, depends on his son to manage their stock -- dozens of slaves used for harvesting cotton and, increasingly, bred for sale, particularly Warren’s highly prized, copper-colored Mandingos.
Daddy Maxwell is an arrogant, amoral, quick-tempered man who at one point is
goaded by a pedophiliac slave trader to use young boys as human “leeches” to draw out the pain from his swollen, aching joints. Son Ham is kinder and more patient and as enamored of the black women he owns as he is contemptuous of the white woman he marries, a distant cousin named Blanche (played in the film with turns of lustiness and insouciance by Susan George). The Mandingo Mead, played by boxer Ken Norton in the film, becomes the Maxwells’ prize-fighting buck who, under the cover of darkness, is forced to service Hammond’s neglected wife. And there are dozens of other characters, variations on classic archetypes, including sycophantic house servants and sadistic overseers. In the course of events, scenes of unbelievable violence and carnality are presented that outstrip Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 Pulitzer Prize winner “Gone with the Wind” but is dwarfed in authenticity by Alex Haley’s own Pulitzer Prize winner “Roots,” published in 1976.
Though “Mandingo” would be ignored by literary critics, it would eventually be
devoured by the reading public all over the world, having been translated into Korean and French, among other languages. In 1975, almost 20 years after its publication, the book was dramatized in the jarringly explicit Dino de Laurentis film. The film, much like the source novel, has been shelved along with other curious but unimportant Americana that lack the cultural significance of the best literature or art. Even though the book is a truly unpleasant read and the film graphically depicts infanticide and death by boiling, among other horrors, they are to me signposts marking our nation’s journey through its racial past. Much about the book, its author and its legacy, are undeniably -- and regrettably -- American.
“Mandingo” mixes floridly formal narrative passages with dialogue that is nearly
indecipherable in its faux-phonetic representation of Southern dialects. Consider this passage, which captures the central theme in the Falconhurst drama:
Blanche was bored and even nauseated by her father-in-law’s eternal praise of
his son, present or absent. If only Hammond would do something amiss, if only he would err, if his father would upbraid him or express in the son’s absence some disapproval of his actions. The only fault the older man could find was that his son worked too hard, and in his voicing of it that fault became a virtue.
“An’ you don’ quit this a-strivin’ and a-drivin’ and’ a-frettin’, you goin’ to
bust down with rheumatiz afore that boy is big enough to take a hold,” he warned.
“Whut boy?” demanded Ham.
“Why, your boy -- the one Blanche is goin’ to have you.”
Blanche blushed.
It was a reminder to Hammond. He had neglected his marital duties, which were
not entirely pleasant, what with the pallor of the soft white flesh, which he was not forced to see but of which he imagined the color under the heavy nightgown. Its very smell, though less heavy, was more offensive than Negro musk. The tang of fresh musk, if attenuated, was zestful, but this blond effluvium connoted corruption.
Ham would fulfill his "marital duty" while continuing to confer his true love on the slave woman Ellen, whom he impregnates. Blanche would whip Ellen into miscarrying ("slippin’ her sucker," as Onstott writes), bear Ham an unwanted daughter and then take up with the slave Mead in an act of vengeance that, need it be said, would end badly for all. It is as despicable an array of human suffering as can be imagined. But, oddly, it is intoxicating and not without moments of illumination.
How Onstott came to write this book is unclear. Born in DuQuoin, Illinois, an
All-American, midwestern town quite a distance from Falconhurst’s muddy roads, Onstott used his scurrilous imagination to craft a slave-breeding tome that was originally published in 1957 by Denlinger’s of Richmond, Virginia, the house that had published his earlier hobbyist’s manuals on dog breeding and beekeeping. (Onstott’s background as an American Kennel Club judge explains the novels preoccupation with the mechanics of breeding.) According to Denlinger, “Mandingo” went on to be, to no one’s surprise, the company’s biggest seller. Even in Eisenhower’s scrubbed America, sex and violence were hot commodities.
Onstott, who would eventually move to San Francisco, reportedly spent 10 years
researching the South’s “peculiar institution” from a distance of 100 years and 700 miles before putting pen to paper. As a result, “Mandingo” and its shorter sequels also penned by Onstott -- “Drum” and “Master of Falconhurst” -- deliver disturbingly detached scenes of physical and spiritual decay. These works were the beginning of a publishing phenomenon that spanned 30 years. The 20-book Falconhurst series -- which, interestingly, included both “Flight to Falconhurst” and “Falconhurst Fugitive” -- was continued after Onstott’s death in 1966 by his writing partners, Lance Horner
and Ashley Carter. These later books are generally considered of inferior quality, repetitious and even more gratuitously violent and carnal than the first.
Acknowledging “Mandingo’s” incendiary nature, the publisher wrote in the first
edition of the book -- released three years after the landmark Brown v. Board of Education ruling against slavery’s institutional offshoot, Jim Crow -- “From today’s vantage point, almost a hundred years after the cataclysm [the Civil War], the developing situation [in the novel] may be viewed objectively. Actually, the finger of blame should be pointed at no one geographical group of people. Although the factions that promoted the abolition of slavery were ethically in the right, Southern planters in general are shown to have been victims of circumstances rather than diabolical tyrants as they have sometimes been painted” [notes added].
The publisher went on to write, “While the social outlook of today is on a
vastly different plane, it must be remembered that the average person of our time is no different from his counterpart a century ago. Lacking the means of rapid transportation and communication, people of that time were confined both geographically and intellectually to smaller spheres. Nevertheless, their scope of thought, their methods of coping with individual situations, and their approach to the problems of the day were different only because circumstances were different.”
While this note might appear to be an attempt to remove the opprobrium of misconduct from the slave owners, it actually makes a fairly lucid point: We are all -- to some degree -- shaped by circumstances. As overwrought as it is, “Mandingo” does succeed in exploring the complexity of the Southern enigma. Specifically, the novel is set in a ravaged and depleted land that is as much enslaved by its brutality as is its human chattel. The enfeebled demimonde of Southern plantation owners looked to their sons to defend hoary traditions only to find that many of the younger generation lacked the will or conviction to do so. Caught between loyalty and lust, the sons would ruthlessly enforce conventions applied to others while flouting those applied to themselves. White women, no more than chattel of a lighter hue, were both idolized and ignored, and their unique enslavement -- sexual obligation without personal liberty -- bred vain insularity and universal resentment. Black men, infantilized or emasculated, deferred to their owners, whom they both loved and hated, dreaming of their masters’ destruction and coveting their power. And black women, empowered by their concubinage with white men, held on tenuously to their “status” and set their worth based on the color preferences of their white lovers.
We in the South are pulling ourselves out of this cesspool, but we must remain vigilant, for vestiges of the sad and destructive world of “Mandingo” are all about.
E.L. Wiggins December 2005