An Uncomfortable Watch, An Impossible Decision & the Pros and Cons of Looking a Gift Horse in the Mouth.
Contains Spoilers.
Claire (Caitriona Balfe) and Jamie (Sam Heughan) arrive at River Run and finally get to meet Jamie’s Aunt Jocasta (Maria Doyle Kennedy). River Run turns out to be an impressively wealthy estate but it doesn’t take long for us to see what that wealth is built upon – the labour of slaves.
It also doesn’t take long for us to realise Jocasta may be formidable but she’s almost blind. With any luck for Jocasta, it’ll just be a case of the cataracts and no doubt super doc Claire will sort that little problem out for her in a matter of minutes. In fact, as the episode unravels, we realise the episode’s title refers to Claire’s specific skill set as a doctor and more precisely the Hippocratic Oath that doctors such as Claire are supposed to adhere to, but life, and particularly when it comes to Jamie and Claire’s lives, is not always so black and white.
Jocasta aside, we are introduced to some other new characters; Jocasta’s extremely dignified factotum/pair of eyes, Ulysses (Colin McFarlane); the steward of naval contracts, Lieutenant Wolff (Lee Boardman) – who I suspect has his eye on Aunt Jocasta’s sizeable fortune and who Jamie soon puts in his place. (I suspect Jamie has now garnered yet one more enemy to add to the list). Then there is Jocasta’s advisor Farquard Campbell (James Barriscale) and in a rather clumsily written scene, we meet John Quincy Myers (Kyle Rees) who is not only a mountain of a man but looks like he might also be a heap of fun.
Claire, never one to shy away from speaking her mind, bumps up at times against Jocasta; two strong women from two very different times. It’s left to Jamie to soothe things over between them. Poor Jamie! It does seem his lot in life is to always be surrounded by strong-willed women.
That Claire, Jamie’s and Ian’s (John Bell) world view is out of sync with everyone else’s is brought home when Jocasta has a party inviting the cream of Cross Creek society and uses the occasion to announce that Jamie is her heir despite seemingly only being in his company for around 5 minutes. I know he’s family but Jocasta is an adroit businesswoman, and yes, I know she has been keeping an eye on Jamie’s business exploits (impressive considering she was on the other side of the world in the middle of nowhere at the time without the benefit of Facebook), but it still does seem all rather precipitous. Check out Lieutenant Wolff’s face; he’s definitely not happy about it.
I’m apparently not alone in being taken aback by the news. Jamie too falls into that camp. No wonder, as in true manipulative Mackenzie mode, Jocasta has announced his new inheritance without discussing it with Jamie first, thus putting him well and truly on the spot. It’s a great offer but it leaves Jamie and Claire with a moral dilemma and the root cause behind this dilemma is the reason why this particular episode is such an uncomfortable one to watch, as we are brought face to face with the system of slavery which underpinned colonial American society and was the bedrock of its wealth. It says something about the moral rectitude of our two penniless heroes that they are having second thoughts about inheriting a sizeable property and vast wealth because of their uneasiness with slavery. I suspect many others, including Lieutenant Wolff, wouldn’t have been so fastidious, given half the chance.
From the small black child who carries pails of water almost the same size as he is while the white men stand around and chat (including Meyers who could have picked up a couple of buckets with uttermost ease) to the brutal lynching later on, slavery permeates this episode.
As such, it makes Jocasta’s character morally complicated to modern eyes. Like all the MacKenzies, Jocasta is intelligent and wily but also a woman of her times. As she would have it, she’s doing her slaves a favour, looking after them, treating them (to her lights) well, and regarding some as friends, but apparently on not such friendly terms that the overseers don’t need whips or guns. She points out that only a few slaves have run away, presuming it’s because they want to stay rather than them being barred from leaving by the almost unsurmountable barriers in their way, or the heavy price that they or their fellow slaves would have to pay were they to succeed or not. Or the minor matter of where precisely they should escape to.
It’s the kind of paternalistic claptrap you can still read in books such as Gone with the Wind, which even at age 13, when I read the novel, I was appalled by. If I remember rightly (and it was rather a long time ago) Mitchell portrays her black characters as childish and simplistic and slavery as some kind of paternalistic system which enabled these people to be looked after. For descendants of slaveowners it is a rather rosy if utterly disingenuous take on history, if not a particularly original modus operandi; from time immemorial oppression has been justified by the oppressors by denigrating the oppressed.
It also raises the question as to how we should judge historical or even fictional, historical characters: by our own mores or those of the time? No doubt, Jocasta would have been regarded somewhat as a liberal in the 18th century; in our own eyes she’s morally reprehensible.
As for Jamie, a former indentured servant and prisoner as well as an incredibly forward-thinking man for his time and for our 20th century Claire the idea of owning slaves is abhorrent. This episode is made all the more uncomfortable because Claire and Jaimie’s attempts to evade the mores of the time prove so unsuccessful and thus make clear how pervasive slavery was: showing all too clearly the impossibility of doing good when the society around you is so iniquitous, and the law of the land underpins slavery as an institution.
Even if you want to free your slaves, as Jamie wants to, the law makes it impossible to do so, setting almost impossible conditions and making it financially prohibitive. It turns out if Jamie wants to free all Jocasta’s 152 slaves it will cost him upwards of £15,000 and then there is the slight matter of meeting the condition that he has to prove that every single one of them has shown meritorious service, primarily by saving his life.
Moreover, such actions would not be looked upon kindly by his neighbours, fearing a threat to their own livelihood. It’s pointed out to Jamie that previous would-be abolitionists before him have “disappeared”, never to be seen again.
Despite their best efforts, therefore, it proves impossible not to be complicit in such a society. Claire asks Phaedra (Natalie Simpson) to call her Claire not mistress. This doesn’t help matters (though it might help Claire’s conscious); in fact, it only serves to make Phaedra and her fellow slaves uncomfortable. If Phaedra gets caught out being too familiar with a white woman it’s not Claire who’s going to get in trouble, it’ll be her.
But it’s not just the African slaves that are getting the rough end of the white man “civilising” America. The native Americans are also paying a price. Ian, like many a young boy, is fascinated by them and points out the similarities between them and Highlanders. And in a sense he’s not far wrong. One of the bitter ironies of history is that many of the Scots who were forced off their land after Culloden or later on in the Clearances dutifully went off to the New World and did exactly the same thing to the indigenous people that had been done to them.
But worse is to come when Jamie and Claire come upon a lynching. The slave Rufus (Jerome Holder) having shed a white person’s blood, in his case that of the overseer Byrnes (Cameron Jack) must be executed according to the law of the land. Byrnes has taken matters a step further and has decided to lynch Rufus by impaling him with a hook and hanging him via that. At first, I thought I’d got it wrong; my brain unable to compute what I was seeing but this is indeed the sight that confronts Jamie and Claire. I can only presume the incident is sadly based on an actual case. (If you want further sobering accounts of similar events, then check out The National Memorial for Peace and Justice website).
Horrified by what they see, Jamie insists that Rufus is taken down and Claire and Jamie rush him to the main house where Claire is once more in super doc mode and saves his life but what follows is one hell of a moral dilemma that Claire and Jamie have to face. Indignant that they have saved a black man from execution, Jocasta’s neighbours surround River Run and demand they give Rufus up so they can lynch him and see so called “justice done”. If they don’t hand him over, it’s clear they will burn the place down.
Claire is faced with the choice of giving Rufus a painless death or keeping him alive so he can be ripped apart by the mob. In the end, she has no choice but to break her oath to “do no harm” by choosing the lesser of two evils and gives Rufus a doctored tea, after which Jamie hands over his body. The mob, so enraged they don’t even seem to realise that Rufus is already dead, drag his limp body away and lynch him. Claire looks on horrified, Jamie is seemingly furious at what is happening and his inability to do anything about it.
Did I enjoy this week’s episode? In one word, no. Given the subject matter, as I say, it was an uncomfortable watch. If anything, watching this week’s episode, you just can’t get your head around the fact that such blatant inhumanity and injustice was not only par for the course but legally sanctioned in the name of power and money. Plus ça change.
