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What story does William Wells Brown tell in Clotel?

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Phillis Wheatley's first book of poetry — African American literature Frontispiece and title page of *Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral* (1773) by Phillis Wheatley, the first Black woman to become a poet of note in the United States. The portrait on which the frontispiece's engraving is based is often attributed to Scipio Moorhead, an Black artist and writer who, like Wheatley, was enslaved and living in Boston.

In Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, William Wells Brown presents a melodramatic and tragic narrative concerning three generations of Black women navigating the brutal realities of slavery, miscegenation, and concubinage.1

The story centers on the lives of Clotel and Althesa, the daughters of Thomas Jefferson and an enslaved woman named Currer. Despite their ability to pass for white, the sisters are sold into slavery following Jefferson’s death. The novel follows their struggles, culminating in the tragic death of Clotel, who perishes while attempting to rescue her own daughter from the institution of slavery.2

As the first novel written by an African American, the work serves as a significant critique of antebellum slave culture, highlighting the inherent inhumanity of a system that commodified human beings regardless of their ancestry or appearance.12