Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States

The first novel published by a formerly enslaved person in American history. William Wells Brown wrote Clotelle in 1853 amid persistent rumors that Thomas Jefferson had fathered children with Sally Hemings. The story opens with the auction of Currer, a mixed-race woman owned by a Virginian, and her two daughters Clotel and Althesa. When a young planter falls in love with Clotel and seems to promise marriage, she dares to hope for escape from bondage, but he sells her anyway. What follows is a harrowing tale of escape, disguise across racial lines, and a mother's desperate journey to rescue her daughter from the very house where her father lives as a white man. This is abolitionist fiction at its most daring: a page-turner that refuses to look away from the auction block, the broken family, the casual cruelties of a society that proclaimed liberty while owning human beings. It endures as the founding text of African American literature, proof that Black writers could master the novel's form to anatomize a nation's founding sin.