4 - “Follow Your Leader”

Summary

Though experience has shown that revolutions and political movements – unless when they have been conducted with the most guarded caution and moderation – have generally terminated in results just the opposite of what was expected from them, the angry ape will still play his fantastic tricks, and put in motion machinery, the action of which he no more comprehends or foresees than he comprehends the mysteries of infinity.

William Harper, Memoir on Slavery

Who aint a slave? Tell me that.

Melville, Moby-Dick

Benito Cereno Herman Melville's unsettling novella of black revolutionary conspiracy, was serialized in the October–December 1855 issues of Putnam's, a widely circulating periodical whose editors took care, so they assured, “that nothing in the remotest degree offensive to propriety or good taste defaces these pages.” Though accorded but scant notice in reviews of Piazza Tales (1856), wherein the novella was reprinted, Benito Cereno now seems an obviously central literary meditation on the problem of slavery in antebellum culture. Less obvious, at least for a while, was Melville's attitude toward slavery and rebellious blacks. F. O. Matthiessen initiated debate on the subject in 1941, judging the novella to be “superficial” because its presentation of “the embodiment of good in the pale Spanish captain and of evil in the mutinied African crew” obscures the fact that Babo and his compatriots “were slaves and that evil had thus originally been done to them.”