Unfortunately, Clotel returns in the midst of Nat Turner's insurrection (1831). She escapes from a slave dealer and returns to Virginia disguised as a white man to free her daughter, Mary, still a house slave. When she and her husband die, their daughters are sold into slavery by their father's creditors.Ĭlotel's owner in Virginia falls in love with her, fathers a child by her, and, despite vague promises of marriage, sells her. Currer and Althesa both die in the course of the narrative, Althesa in particularly tragic circumstances: she has married her owner and raised two daughters as free white women. It first appeared in the United States as Miralda, or The Beautiful Quadroon: A Romance of American Slavery Founded on Fact (serialized in the Weekly Anglo-African during the winter of 1860–1861), then in book form, substantially revised, as Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864) and Clotelle, or The Colored Heroine: A Tale of the Southern States (1867).īased on persistent rumors about Thomas Jefferson's relations with a slave mistress, Clotel begins with the auction of Jefferson's mistress (Currer) and her two daughters by Jefferson (Clotel and Althesa). The first known full-length African American novel, Clotel, by William Wells Brown, was originally published in London as Clotel, or The President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (1853).
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