There is much more to consider about Yombo, who is perhaps the most intriguing of the many personages, black and white, to appear in The Story of an Old Farm. Shortly after the death of Aaron Malick in 1809, Yombo became the property of John Hastier, who resided in Elizabethtown, and who probably, according to Andrew Mellick, “was the owner of Yombo's wife.” As Mellick dramatically puts it, “Nothing more was heard of [Yombo] by the Bedminster people, excepting that several years afterwards word came from Elizabethtown—‘Old Yombo is dead.’” This illuminating statement testifies to the life of a slave who had made a lasting impression on the whites who encountered him. Indeed, not every slave's death elicited a message or telegram to his former owners with whom he had lost all contact. The phrase “Old Yombo is dead” connotes a sense of incredulity that this wretched slave, who had challenged incessantly the authority of whites, actually or finally had died. Correspondingly, the original account of Aaron Malick's slaves that was given to his great grandson describes Yombo “as a sample of the kind of slave that made this institution [slavery] odious.” Again, we are led to envision a hostile, if not brutal, relationship between Yombo and his owners, whereby he used every means possible to mitigate their power over him.

This chapter explores why the local whites remembered Yombo, and contends that his obstinate persona was a creation of his circumstances under bondage and not a manifestation of his innate, intractable nature, as Andrew Mellick implied. In part, it serves as a rebuttal to Mellick's one-dimensional account of his ancestor's slave, which reflects the nineteenth-century literary tradition of racializing or essentializing black and other subaltern peoples. Comments such as Yombo's “disposition was not in any sense agreeable” and “the darkey [Yombo] was treacherous” belong to a certain genus of writing that intentionally disempowered its subjects.

And yet, The Story of an Old Farm forces us to think about slave resistance in alternative and exciting new ways. Most studies of American slavery do not consider the issue of slave meanness, which was as important a resistance strategy as theft, sabotage, flight, and so on.