“Likewise Masked”: Blackface and Whitewash in Melville’s “Benito Cereno”

Abstract

In December of 1855, Charles F. Briggs, the editor of Putnamk Monthly, published an editorial, “About Niggers,” in which he defended the presence of stories about Africans and African Americans in the short-lived magazine that provided a home for several of Melville’s influential novellas. Briggs ends his piece with an anecdote from a friend about Anthony Rox, an ex-slave and now a “superb enginedriver, on the Ohio river,” who, when asked how he came to be free, responded: