Benito Cereno

When to this is added the docility arising from the uninspiring contentment of a limited mind, and that susceptibility of blind attachment sometimes inhering in indisputable inferiors, one readily perceives why those hypochondriacs Johnson and Byron -- it may be something like the hypochondriac Benito Cereno --took to their hearts, almost to the exclusion of the entire white race, their serving men, the negroes, Barber and Fletcher.
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno, 1855.

If one finds Moby Dick intimidating I recommend Melville's shorter works (Great Short Works of Herman Melville, Harper and Row, 1969), full of insight into human experience and emotion and, in Benito Cereno, race.  Captain Amaso Delano finds a ship drifting off the coast of Chile, a slave ship that had been attacked by disease and weather, or so its captain claims, with more slaves than crew members surviving.  Delano finds appearances to be strange but takes everything at face value, providing food and water for the survivors.  But then when he takes leave of the ship Benito Cereno, its captain, jumps into Delano's boat and it is revealed that the slaves have, in fact, revolted against the crew and have been holding the remaining crew members captive, completely fooling Delano, whose own prejudices have prevented him from seeing the truth.  We see what we want to see, what we prefer to see, when it comes to race; this tends to be as true now as it was in Melville's day, as much as many things have changed.  In Stepin Fetchit's performances in John Ford's films, Steamboat Round the Bend (1935) and Judge Priest (1934), for example, some people see a shiftless African-American, while the character is really appearing to be shiftless in order to confirm prejudices that actually allow him a kind of freedom, a way of coping, just as the slaves on Benito Cerneno's ship are doing.