Remaking black motherhood in Frank J. Webb's The Gaffes and their Friends

After the battle, the novel's focus on the families' two sons reasserts the central role mothers play in Webb's vision of the black family, and divests white manhood of its supposedly exclusive claim to potency and vigor. Both boys are faced with a choice between the worlds represented by white fathers and black mothers. As we have seen, Clarence's choice to align himself with whiteness proves devastating. Although dark-skinned Charlie cannot physically pass for white as Clarence can, he must still decide where to cast his lot ideologically. When the riot breaks out, Charlie--in a scenario strikingly similar to George Winston's--is being pampered and educated under the auspices of a white benefactor. However, he chooses a very different course of action than Winston's disavowal of his black mother. Fully recovered from the broken arm occasioned by his earlier disregard for female values, Charlie immediately leaves his privileged position in a white home to return to Philadelphia. Once home, Charlie's connection to family prevents him from collapsing in racial self-hatred when he is unable to find work. When an employer turns him down solely because of his color, Charlie retains his equilibrium because of his love for his sister. He tells Esther, "'I shouldn't care to be white if I knew I would not have a dear old Ess like you for a sister'" (293). For Charlie, the strength he derives from his family far outweighs the allure of the marketplace. And contrary to social expectations, Charlie's eventual success and happiness as a man are largely attributable to his connection to women. By the end of the novel, he is gainfully employed and happily engaged to Clarence's sister Emily.

The novel draws to a close with Clarence, a son consumed by his desire for whiteness, dying in a home that privileges the power of black motherhood. The Waiters household contains many of the traditional trappings of sentimental bliss: Women nestle snugly at home and babies merrily roll about. Yet in contrast to the first domestic tableau presented by the Garie family's denial of blackness, the Waiters family enacts a new paradigm that resists physical aggression from without and racial self-hatred from within. The image of Toussaint l'Ouverture, the quintessential model of black rebellion, is now flanked by another image imbued with considerable force. A portrait of Esther Waiters, mother and wife, occupies the wall opposite the painting of the male revolutionary (333).

This final juxtaposition of Clarence's enfeebled "white" body wasting away in the midst of a thriving black family crystallizes Webb's unsettling portrait of black domesticity. To be sure, the Waiters household represents a celebratory vision of protest and familial strength, but the pangs of thwarted desire and the ghosts of loss haunt the vision throughout. Critics have sometimes considered The Garies a separatist text, but Webb never provides the illusion that his characters can live outside the influence of whiteness. After all the happy extended family we find at novel's end was forged in response to acts of white violence that left the Ellises homeless and Emily Garie an orphan. Mr. Waiters, the novel's exemplar of black male strength and independence, reveals his own desire for whiteness when he allows his belief that "'it is everything to be white'" to influence his advice to the unhappy young Clarence (275). Perhaps even more than Clarence, Mr. Ellis emerges as the novel's most heartbreaking specter. He survives the riot's disfigurement to haunt the narrative's jubilant domestic scenes with reminders of a traumatic past. An outburst of laughter at a pleasant family dinner causes Mr. Ellis to mentally relive his ordeal cowering and crying out, "'There they come! ... there they come!'" (342). The narrator reports that even at his own son's wedding "the poor old gentleman scarcely seemed able to comprehend the affair, and apparently laboured under the impression that it was another mob, and looked a little terrified at times" (372). As a traumatized presence within a strong black family, Mr. Ellis suggests that some wounds can never be fully healed, even in a home buttressed by wealth in the midst of a "free" city.