Day of Tears

Pierce Butler is the white man who owns the slaves of the Butler plantation, which has been passed through his family for generations. Pierce is addicted to gambling and loses much of his family’s fortune in card games, which he seems to take up after his divorce from his British abolitionist wife, Fanny Kemble. Pierce oozes privilege and consistently refuses to take responsibility for his actions. Fellow slave owners often hear him bemoaning the difficulties of his life, which, they believe, are of his own doing. The last day of the slave auction, Pierce talks to the overtly racist slave seller about the nature of his position:

I gambled on cards and lost and now I’ve got to pay up. But gambling on the weather, that’s the worst gamble there is […] And if taking your chances on the weather isn’t bad enough, you have to watch your slaves to make sure the work gets done when it’s supposed to. You look away from them for a minute and they’ll stop working. Sometimes I wonder who owns who (26-27).

Ironically, Pierce believes himself to be the unlucky victim of fate’s cruel hand. He constantly whines about how difficult it is to sell his slaves but maintains that he has no other choice, even though he could feasibly go to jail to pay his debts. Instead, he chooses to sell most of the slaves, often breaking apart families to get the most money out of them. The audience finds very few redeeming qualities in Pierce, as even other white slave owners believe him a fool. He has a quick temper and seems to stubbornly believe that what he does is right, despite all evidence to the contrary. Unlike other slave owners, Pierce does not actively beat his slaves. However, when Will points out his inhumanity in selling Emma, Pierce’s anger flares up, and he threatens to sell Will off as well out of spite. A few years later, Pierce dies without the respect of his daughter, Sarah, who never forgives him for selling Emma.

Will, Emma’s father and Mattie’s husband, has been a slave on the Butler plantation since birth. From the beginning of the novel, Will argues that the nature of slavery is inherently unfair and is critical of Pierce for selling his slaves to pay his gambling debts: “Don’t seem right that us is the ones that have to pay the price for another man’s weakness” (6). From the beginning of the novel, the audience understands that the slaves do not accept their social positionality, although many do not seem to know how to change it. Even though Will is closest to Pierce—having grown up with him and saved his life when Pierce was young—Will is still critical of him. Due to this relational proximity to the Butlers, Will is able to understand Pierce for what he is: a weak man. Will thinks of Pierce like a brother; however, Pierce later makes it clear that this relationship is incredibly one-sided, with Pierce holding all the power and Will being subject to Pierce’s torrential emotions.

After Pierce sells Emma, Will finds himself slightly lost. He struggles to accept the expectations placed upon him to behave, and he cannot help rebelling against it, albeit in a way that the Butlers cannot see: “[T]hey expect me to bow and grin […] and I do. I hate myself for doing it, but I can’t seem to help it. It’s the way I been trained […] I’m gon’ make Master sorry for giving me this grief” (104-05). Will demonstrates the self-hate that arises from oppression. He has spent his entire life as a slave, yet he rails against what he has been taught. Will takes passive resistance one step farther and decides to put a curse on Pierce for what he has done, demonstrating that even within the depth of oppression, human connections can force acts of rebellion. In this way, Will acts as a personification of the rebellious will, striving to bring justice for Pierce’s inhumanity. Pierce leads a short and troubled life, in which he gambles away the money he earned off the slave auction and has lost the respect of his daughter. This outcome indicates that Will achieved the justice he sought against Pierce.

Mattie is a slave on the Butler plantation. She is the mother of Emma and the wife of Will. Much like her husband and daughter, Mattie grew up on the Butler plantation and has been a slave for her entire life. At the beginning of the novel, she feels the same kinship to Pierce that her husband, Will, feels. Mattie grew up alongside Pierce, and her own mother, Emma’s grandmother, was even Pierce’s wet-nurse. Mattie demonstrates the entanglements of relationships within the Butler plantation, although she also immediately notes that the social positionality of slaves requires the inhumanity of white slave owners. Throughout the book, Mattie is associated with emotions, especially those that correspond to human attachments. After Pierce sells Emma, Mattie is mostly associated with hatred, which she claims represents a powerful force of destruction: “If my hatred was fire, wouldn’t nothing be left standing in this place” (101). Although many of the slaves seem deeply traumatized by their sale, Mattie, like Will, seeks vengeance upon those who have wronged her, especially Pierce. She spits in his food to demonstrate her revulsion in an act of subtle yet important resistance. The similarities between Emma and her mother indicate that Emma too would lose any children if she were to stay in slavery.

Mattie later disappears from the narrative itself, indicating the common erasure of slave narratives from American history. Because Mattie remains a slave—at least as far as Emma knows—she fades from the narrative, only to emerge as memories of Emma’s past life. Mattie continues in the memory of her daughter, passed on to future generations through oral history.

Sarah is the eldest daughter of Pierce Butler and Fanny Kemble, whose emotions run towards the abolitionist ideas of her mother. She has a remarkably close relationship with Emma and loses all respect for her father when he sells Emma at the auction, an act which she never forgives him for. As a young woman, Sarah remembers how she felt when Pierce exasperatedly declaimed her as her mother’s daughter: “I felt so proud when he said I was Mama’s child and not his […] I was thinking about how to have a good heart” (109). Sarah represents the dissention between family members caused by the immorality of slavery.

Slavery also affected white families, as it became a point of contention that pitted brother against brother, or, in this case, sister and mother against sister and father. This familial discontent is not as drastic nor as important as the rending apart of Black families caused by slavery. However, it is important to note that slavery in and of itself affected all families. There is a universality then to the repercussions of slavery, as though possession of another human being renders a person unable to bond with other people. As opposed to the nature of family, which brings people together, slavery becomes its opposite, in that it tears people apart from one another. Slavery is inherently antithetical to the nature of families, as demonstrated through the character of Sarah.

Joe is one of the Butler plantation slaves sold alongside Emma to Mistress Henfield. Joe does not seem to have a family but has a crush on Emma from the outset of the novel. Unlike Emma, who naively trusts Pierce at the beginning of the novel, Joe is always suspicious of white people, even Mr. Henry when he first asks Joe about escape: “I never had a white person ask me about being free. I wondered if he as trying to get me into trouble” (115). Unlike the other characters, Joe is immediately suspicious of all white people. There is some implication that slave owners had separated Joe from his family previously, as there is no mention of his family. Joe was likely subjected to the trauma of alienation at a fairly young age, and his apprehension toward white people is tied to the strength he finds in familial ties, as he exists as the personification of resolute hope that all Black persons will be free.

Once he and Emma reach Philadelphia, he remarks of his freedom: “Everything is perfect except that we left so many in slavery. Sometimes I feel guilty that we made it out […] I wish there was a Mr. Henry for all the slaves” (156). Joe does not just see himself as an individual, solely concerned with his own escape. Rather, he requires the absolute freedom of all Black people and an abolishment to slavery. Joe ends up dying after going back to America to fight in the Civil War. Joe exists within the novel as a symbol of resistance, not only for his own personal resistance against the oppression of slavery, but also as a symbol of resistance for the entire Black community.