Fields of the Forgotten: Why Rereading Uncle Tom’s Cabin Still Matters
Artist’s Statement
Fields of the Forgotten | Why We Must Never Forget is a visual remembrance of the men, women, and children whose labor built this nation yet whose names were erased from its history. The cotton fields in this piece are more than a backdrop; they are silent witnesses to centuries of stolen promise, broken bodies, and unyielding spirit.
The figures represent both the visible and the unseen — those who survived and those who never made it into the history books. The overseer’s presence reminds us that oppression was not accidental; it was enforced, calculated, and sustained.
“You can kill a revolutionary, but you can’t kill the revolution.” – Fred Hampton, Deputy Chairman, Illinois Chapter, Black Panther Party
The older I get, the more I realize that whenever there is something America wants us to bury, it is usually because the truth inside it would empower and awaken the Black man.
So they, meaning white supremacists with the faces of boogeymen, do everything in their power to deter us from discovering the truth. Recently, I reread Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a book I had not thought about in years, and it hit me that literature—especially the kind that speaks to the true history of chattel slavery in America—is something this country would rather we forget.
This post is not just about one novel. It is about how our resistance has been portrayed, distorted, and erased over time. It is about reclaiming the complexity of our stories, refusing to let others define our heroes, and recognizing that the erasure of truth has political consequences today, including the refusal to pay the debt owed to ADOS.
Sambo, Quimbo, and the System’s Design
I reread Uncle Tom’s Cabin after someone called me “Sambo” for saying slavery and illegal immigration are not the same. The insult sent me back to the characters in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel: Uncle Tom, Aunt Chloe, George, Eliza, Sambo, and Quimbo, alongside the slave masters—Mr. Shelby, Augustine St. Clare, and Simon Legree—and their families. It also brought me to James Baldwin’s sharp critique of the book and eventually to modern works like Twelve Years a Slave and The Underground Railroad.
I vaguely remembered Sambo as a negative figure, meant to demean. Being called that name was clearly intended as an insult, yet I could not quite recall why it carried such weight.
As I reread the novel, I realized that, knowing myself, I am not a Sambo. Unfortunately, oftentimes to my own detriment, I defend the truly oppressed. My curiosity shifted from the insult to the novel itself. Each Black character played a central role. They were typecast without being caricatures. Sambo was the enslaved man who had become exactly what the system wanted him to be—a cruel enforcer against his own people. Yet in the end, he and Quimbo repented and tore off the wretched masks that had imprisoned them.
I was drawn to Tom. He was not selfish. He sacrificed for others, even allowing himself to be sold to protect them. He refused to betray those who escaped, refused to beat another enslaved person, and died rather than harm his people. His resistance was not loud or violent, but steady and absolute. His silence was not cowardice. It was defiance.
Sambo and Quimbo, in contrast, believed survival meant becoming what the master wanted—aligning with oppressors and enforcing the system’s cruelty with precision. That is the image white America prefers: the compliant Black who polices his own. But even they awoke in the end.
What struck me most was not just the actions of the enslaved characters but the mindset of the masters. Shelby, St. Clare, and Legree all believed their way of life was natural, justified, even moral. St. Clare’s long speeches about wealth and capitalism mirrored the mindset of many white plantation owners who knew slavery was wrong but justified it to appease their hollow souls. Against that backdrop, Stowe showed the many ways Black people responded to slavery, revealing how deeply oblivious white people often were to the truth.
Tom’s steadfast faith and Aunt Chloe’s quiet strength showed resistance through dignity, endurance, and humanity. Sambo and Quimbo showed what happens when people adopt the spirit of the system. George represented those who escaped altogether. The women—Cassy, Emmeline, Aunt Chloe—endured rape, beatings, and hardship, yet fought for their own freedom.
At its core, the novel is a story of resistance, survival, and the moral cost of oppression on everyone involved.
James Baldwin’s Inaccurate Critique
James Baldwin’s “Everybody’s Protest Novel” dismisses Uncle Tom’s Cabin as sentimental and symbolic rather than substantive. He argued that Stowe reduced her characters to tools—saints and symbols—denying them full humanity. He criticized her virtue model, where the good were those who endured silently, died with grace, and never fought back.
Baldwin wanted portrayals of Black people as fully human: angry, flawed, joyful, complex. He missed, however, that for enslaved people, survival often meant pretending or resisting quietly. Each of Stowe’s characters represents a truth about how people survived under an inhumane system.
He also overlooked the parallels between Tom’s “turn the other cheek” endurance and the Civil Rights Movement’s nonviolent resistance, championed by leaders like Martin Luther King Jr. That same endurance helped dismantle segregation.
While Baldwin was right to point out Stowe’s blind spots, he missed that sometimes fiction says what reality cannot. Stowe was not a radical. She was a white woman in 1852 writing for Northern Christians, planting seeds in the only way her position allowed. Where Baldwin saw sentimentality, I see spiritual clarity. Tom did not fight with fists, but with an unshakable “no.” That is resistance too.
Baldwin’s dismissal was a mistake. Rejecting Uncle Tom’s Cabin erases a valuable record of how varied Black resistance could be—and how white narratives have long shaped our understanding of it.
Modern Narratives and the Erasure of Black Men
The same tension between suffering and agency appears in modern works. In Twelve Years a Slave, Solomon Northup’s real-life story is framed on screen with relentless brutality but little space for the inner lives, strategy, or quiet resistance that kept people alive. It risks flattening the enslaved into victims rather than fully realized human beings.
The Underground Railroad takes a different approach, centering on Cora, a young woman who survives horrors across every state she passes through. But every strong Black man in her orbit is destroyed, corrupted, or erased—Caesar, Royal, Mingo. The survival of the woman becomes the focus, while male counterparts vanish.
The pattern appears again in The Woman King, which elevates a female hero while sanitizing the Dahomey kingdom’s role in the slave trade. The result is an incomplete truth.
Black women did not survive slavery, Jim Crow, or generational hardship alone. We endured alongside men who worked, fought, and protected their families in whatever ways they could. Without those men, there is no us.
Runaway Slave: Then and Now
In old slave narratives, the runaway risked everything for freedom. Today, “runaway” too often means men leaving their families, sometimes pushed out by systems designed to break them. The dignity and purpose of running toward liberation has been replaced, in many cases, by running from responsibility—though the root causes still trace back to systemic oppression.
Today’s Culture and the Echo of the Plantation
We still have Sambos today—just in new uniforms. They may be media personalities, politicians, or influencers, but their role is the same: align with systems that harm us, condemn those who resist, and be rewarded for it.
The plantation tactic of dividing the compliant from the defiant still works. Compliance has never guaranteed safety. Silence has never guaranteed dignity.
Black Youth Rebellion and Topsy’s Legacy
Some of the rebellion we see in Black youth today is survival in disguise. The system floods our communities with weapons of destruction, then punishes us for using them.
This erasure of the Black man leads me back to the Black child—like Topsy in Uncle Tom’s Cabin—shaped by absence. Then, the family was destroyed by whips and auction blocks. Today, it is destroyed by mass incarceration, economic deprivation, underfunded schools, and housing traps. Both eras strip away stability. Both leave children to grow up without the security of mother and father.
Topsy’s “confession” in the novel—admitting guilt because it was expected—mirrors how society predetermines our youth as guilty before they have a chance to prove otherwise. Until the systems that create these cycles are dismantled, much of what we call “crime” will simply be resistance in the only form a broken environment allows.
The Debt That Remains
The erasure and distortion of our stories is not just cultural—it feeds the political denial of what is owed. America owes a debt to ADOS, and it is time to repay it. Forty acres and a mule were promised and then taken away. Generation after generation, the fight for justice was deferred in the name of survival.
Now the call is louder. This country extends help to others while keeping its foot on our necks, all while presenting itself as a global good Samaritan.
We fill stadiums. We drive culture. We work in industries where doors swing wide for white applicants but remain shut for those who look like us. We knock, again and again, accepting crumbs while the feast is kept from us.
Reparations is not about guilt. It is about settling a debt that has been unpaid for far too long.
© 2025 Jacqueline Session Ausby. All rights reserved. This post and all original content published under DahTruth are the intellectual property of Jacqueline Session Ausby. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author.
