Читать книгу Multilingual Subjects - Daniel DeWispelare - Страница 9

MULTILINGUAL LIVES

Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid

On August 9, 1761, four male slaves escaped from Dogue Run farm in the Colony of Virginia. This event is remarkable for several reasons, the most notable of which is that Dogue Run farm made up part of the Mount Vernon plantation complex owned by George and Martha Washington, a couple who had married and combined their holdings two and a half years prior to the escape. In an effort to recapture those whom Washington viewed as his rightful property, he did like many other “victims” of this peculiar species of labor “theft.” He took to the literate public sphere of newspapers and narrated the men into brief but vivid existence for the regional community of readers.¹ Specifically, Washington undertook the common act of purchasing a fugitive slave advertisement that described these four men in detail.² His advertisement, dated two days after the escape, appeared in an edition of the Maryland Gazette that was printed in Annapolis on August 20, 1761.³

Washington’s roughly five-hundred-word advertisement, which has been usefully annotated by the editors of the Papers of George Washington, reads as follows:

Fairfax County (Virginia) August 11, 1761.

RAN away from a Plantation of the Subscriber’s, on Dogue-Run in Fairfax, on Sunday the 9th Instant, the following Negroes, viz.

Peros, 35 or 40 Years of Age, a well-set Fellow, of about 5 Feet 8 Inches high, yellowish Complexion, with a very full round Face, and full black Beard, his Speech is something slow and broken, but not in so great a Degree as to render him remarkable. He had on when he went away, a dark colour’d Cloth Coat, a white Linen Waistcoat, white Breeches, and white Stockings.

Jack, 30 Years (or thereabouts) old, a slim, black, well made Fellow, of near 6 Feet high, a small Face, with Cuts down each Cheek, being his Country Marks, his Feet are large (or long) for he requires a great Shoe: The Cloathing he went off in cannot be well ascertained, but it is thought in his common working Dress, such as Cotton Waistcoat (of which he had a new One) and Breeches, and Osnabrig Shirt.

Neptune, aged 25 or 30, well-set, and of about 5 Feet 8 or 9 Inches high, thin jaw’d, his Teeth stragling and fil’d sharp, his Back, if rightly remember’d, has many small Marks or Dots running from both Shoulders down to his Waistband, and his Head was close shaved: Had on a Cotton Waistcoat, black or dark colour’d Breeches, and an Osnabrig Shirt.

Cupid, 23 or 25 Years old, a black well made Fellow, 5 Feet 8 or 9 Inches high, round and full faced, with broad Teeth before, the Skin of his Face is coarse, and inclined to be pimpley, he had no other distinguishable Mark that can be recollected; he carried with him his common working Cloaths, and an old Osnabrigs Coat made of Frockwise.

The last two of these Negroes were bought from an African Ship in August 1759, and talk very broken and unintelligible English; the second one, Jack, is Countryman to those, and speaks pretty good English, having been several Years in the Country. The other, Peros, speaks much better than either, indeed has little of his Country Dialect left, and is esteemed a sensible and judicious Negro.

As they went off without the least Suspicion, Provocation, or Difference with any Body, or the least angry Word or Abuse from their Overseers, ’tis supposed they will hardly lurk about in the Neighbourhood, but steer some direct Course (which cannot even be guessed at) in Hopes of an Escape: Or, perhaps, as the Negro Peros has lived many Years about Williamsburg, and King William County, and Jack in Middlesex, they may possibly bend their Course to one of those Places.

Whoever apprehends the said Negroes, so that the Subscriber may readily get them, shall have, if taken up in this County, Forty Shillings Reward, beside what the Law allows; and if at any greater Distance, or out of the Colony, a proportionable Recompence paid them, by

GEORGE WASHINGTON.

N.B. If they should be taken separately, the Reward will be proportioned.⁴

Washington’s notice typifies the variety of document a slave owner might be expected to compose upon the event of a slave escape. His prose follows the conventions of anglophone fugitive advertising from the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, conventions that I discuss at greater length in the next chapter. In brief, Washington’s ad describes the age, dress, embodiment, and likely provenance of four people who will be hunted on the strength of those details. It also offers a sizable reward.

Additionally, and crucial for the argument of this book, Washington’s ad follows the generic conventions of a subset of fugitive ads that attend meticulously to the language practices of the people who are described.⁵ As a case in point, Washington includes pointed assessments of each one of his quarries’ linguistic features. In the absence of the shorthand visual judgments that photographic technology makes possible, linguistic features are of obvious significance in the identification of an unknown person during the eighteenth century, especially insofar as linguistic features overlap with and buttress related perceptions about age, dress, embodiment, and provenance. Indeed, this unsystematic rendering of perceived linguistic features is a perfect example of what I mean by the term “metalinguistic writing,” and so I am particularly interested in advertisements that include these details. This ad’s premises are clear: one must listen in on elements of language that disclose other people’s identities; these clues are revealed in speech’s varied contours; and, furthermore, linguistic particularities combined with other signs of difference can be used to gloss a person’s public character. In order to locate escaped slaves who are present in Washington’s own account books only as made-up names and purchase prices, the ad above endows these four men with bodies and accompanying sounds. Even as those bodies and sounds are merely figments of text, they are meant to be recognizable to readers as sortable linguistic types.⁶

That the duly respected general and first president of the United States owned, managed, and pursued slaves in a way that is conventional and tedious (rather than atypical or benevolent) should come as no surprise. After all, the gap between enlightenment humanism’s vaunted rhetoric and slavery’s barbarities is one of eighteenth-century culture’s most basic cultural conditions (rather than contradictions).⁷ In Washington’s case, the logistics of his long history as a slave owner are all at once mundane and shocking.⁸ The people Washington held in bondage powered a lucrative system of farms that grew over the course of the proprietor’s lifetime from two thousand to eight thousand acres. A total of 317 slaves were enumerated in a census undertaken simultaneous to the writing of Washington’s last will and testament in 1799.⁹ The contemporary visitor to Washington’s Mount Vernon plantation museum might hear from a tour guide or read on a placard that Washington manumitted all his slaves upon his death. These historical approximations encourage the misconstruction that Washington himself purposefully manumitted 317 individuals in 1799. In fact, the details are more complex, the dates later, and the numbers less comprehensive.¹⁰

Returning to the escape of Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid in 1761, the editors of the Papers of George Washington report that two of the four men who appear in the advertisement—Peros (a.k.a. Parros) and Jack—had come to Washington’s plantation as dower slaves via his wealthier bride.¹¹ The other two—Neptune and Cupid—appear only in Washington’s account books after 1760, a fact that lends credence to the ad’s claim that these men “were bought from an African Ship in August 1759.”¹² The editors further note that three of the four men—Peros, Jack, and Cupid—are included on a list of slaves at Mount Vernon that was composed in 1762, a year after the initial escape.¹³ Regarding the slave referred to as Neptune, the situation is foggier. He does not appear on the 1762 list referenced above. However, in May 1765, Washington’s account books include a debit to one of his overseers for 3l. 7s. 3p. for “pd Prison Fees in Maryld Neptune.”¹⁴ It is unlikely that the Neptune who was bailed out of a Maryland prison and returned to Washington’s human holdings in 1765 is the same man as the Neptune who escaped in 1761. The details of how the other three escapees—Peros, Jack, and Cupid—were returned to bondage under Washington such that they were enumerated in the next year’s census are also obscured.

There are two main reasons why I have traced the broad outlines of this escape and its aftermath here. First, I want to use a common genre of eighteenth-century writing, fugitive advertising, in order to show that linguistic difference was a salient aspect of interpersonal interaction in the eighteenth-century anglophone world. Linguistic difference was also a salient aspect of the representation of such interactions after the fact. People sorted and identified one another with attention to linguistic particularities. Then, as now, “Everything is summoned by an intonation,” as Derrida writes.¹⁵ Or, in the words of the contemporary poet Elizabeth Alexander, “We encounter each other in words, words / spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed / words to consider, reconsider.”¹⁶ The second point I want to make by way of Washington’s advertisement is that linguistic difference was and remains narratively generative. Fugitive ads show this plainly. Across many forms and genres of writing in the period, narrative strategies were developed in order to represent the complexities of interpersonal interaction in a realm of anglophone heterogeneity. Rhetorical strategies for naming social relationships made visible through linguistic difference flourished, as this book’s chapters show. As writers developed descriptive techniques for encoding in text whether another person spoke well or badly, rapidly or slowly, with what quirks and disabilities, and in what kind of accent, the characterological and narrative landscape of eighteenth-century anglophone writing widened dramatically.

Consider, for example, the way that Washington’s ad can be read against the grain as four miniscule and partial biographies. Their bodies, clothes, origins, and linguistic particularities appear as the fleeting details of subjectivity—paltry details, certainly, but details nonetheless. For my purposes, I want to stress here that the linguistic particularities Washington ascribes to Peros, Jack, Neptune, and Cupid reveal several dimensions of anglophony’s eighteenth-century texture, especially as they relate to embodiment. As a case in point, Washington’s ad claims that Neptune and Cupid, who are new to North America, “talk very broken and unintelligible English.” Put another way, they are multilingual subjects and their English has been acquired recently, informally, and under the duress of trying to adapt to enslavement. They “talk” English, but unintelligibly, which, aside from being a contradiction, is a judgment on these men’s social and even civilizational statuses relative to Washington. By contrast, Jack “speaks pretty good English, having been several Years in the Country.” His body is “well made” and marked with the residues of severed familial and community allegiances by “Cuts down each Cheek, being his Country Marks.” With “pretty good English” and a marked face that attests to other cultural loyalties, Jack appears in the Maryland Gazette as a quintessential multilingual anglophone subject of the eighteenth century.

A tantalizing and subtle detail of the ad links Jack, Neptune, and Cupid together as a conspiratorial group. The three are “countrymen,” a nebulous indication by Washington that perhaps these men communicated in versions of the same African language or in African languages that were mutually intelligible or pidginized to the degree that each could make himself understood to the others.¹⁷ Read in this way, it is possible to surmise that Washington heard the African languages of these and other slaves with some regularity, or at least that his overseers did. This idea is further supported by the fact that, as Donald Sweig notes, Washington was regularly purchasing slaves “from the mid-1750s until about 1770.”¹⁸ It is also likely that Washington is openly suggesting to the reader that a shared set of African linguistic protocol helped facilitate the men’s planning and eventual escape. Be on guard against slaves speaking to each other in languages you do not understand, Washington’s ad warns the reader. Be on guard against the multilingualism of certain others. Through these short descriptions, it is clear that Washington’s ad pitches linguistic difference as both apparent and subversive, especially insofar as it overlaps with and reinforces other vectors of stigmatized identity like race.¹⁹

The slave named Peros stands apart from the other three. For one, he is the oldest and the most experienced with the life of a slave in the mid-Atlantic colonies. This is attested to by Washington’s laudatory but paternalistic evaluation that Peros “speaks much better than either, indeed has little of his Country Dialect left, and is esteemed a sensible judicious Negro.” In the present, some will feel a specter of palpable linguistic loss in Peros’s story, but Washington sees only improvement in the form of civilizing and (perhaps) humanizing achievement. In fact, his description implies that to the degree that Peros’s “Country Dialect” has dissolved, his ability to speak and comport himself properly has improved. Peros’s stable command of an anglophone language likely even encourages Washington and his overseers to view him as “sensible” and “judicious,” though that reading is more assumption than conclusion. Whether or not Peros can also communicate with Jack, Neptune, Cupid, or others in another African language remains unclear but is suggested in this ad. It is not implausible that Peros should have “little of his Country Dialect left.” Linguistic skills atrophy if they are unused. However, Washington does not speak Peros’s ancestral language or languages. His claim that Peros has lost that unnamed language is difficult to verify and perhaps better reflects Washington’s own affective investments than real linguistic facts on the ground.

Indeed, in the picture that Washington draws of Peros, the writer’s linguistic evaluations take on a note of narrative excess. In addition to the paragraph near the end of the advertisement in which he gives a general accounting of the language skills of the group as a whole, Washington’s initial description of Peros insists on including the detail that his “Speech is something slow and broken, but not in so great a Degree as to render him remarkable.” Peros, in other words, speaks with quirks that, paradoxically, a reader of the Maryland Gazette will never notice because these features do not “render him remarkable.” Washington admits that Peros’s linguistic particularities are below detection, somehow only knowable or noticeable to the ad’s author. And yet they are mentioned in this short text as though they signify something more. What could Peros’s “unremarkable” linguistic “slowness” and “brokenness” be doing in a text that is purchased, written, and designed to efficiently highlight those features that are remarkable about him as the object of a manhunt? By the author’s own admission, these details are superfluous to the task of finding and identifying the man in question. So why are they there?

Washington’s inclusion of these details about Peros’s linguistic identity signifies something about the context of eighteenth-century anglophony even if it says little of interest about Peros as a historical person and embodied linguistic subject. Emergent characterological and narrative forms (of which the fugitive ad is only a narrow example) played a role in making the linguistically unremarkable remarkable as an index of identity. These forms of writing bring nonnormative language into being in new ways. The slave hunter who catches Peros and his band of differentially skilled anglophone multilinguals is to know that the oldest, most “sensible,” and most “judicious” among them is not actually “sensible” or “judicious” at all. His language is to be judged “slow” and “broken” even if it is not experienced as such by an interlocutor. These details consolidate the more general eighteenth-century phenomenon whereby the experience of linguistic difference is mediated by metalinguistic descriptions emphasizing normativity. Wherever they are found, these descriptions enumerate qualities like body shape, mental acuity, and behavioral quirks in such a way as to conceptually align them with linguistic difference. The inclusion of these “unremarkable” linguistic details as remarkable, in other words, is a scaled-down version of a more comprehensive process. Eighteenth-century anglophone writing that is about or concerning anglophony forecloses certain ways of experiencing linguistic difference during this period. By giving readers a linguistic scrim through which all experiences of otherness must pass, eighteenth-century texts precede and undermine human interactions that may or may not feature linguistic difference. Metalinguistic commentary comes to predict and predefine character types, in other words, and linguistic difference becomes a prominent clue in the larger labyrinth of public identity as it unfurls in the eighteenth century’s transoceanic spaces. Conversely, in the absence of apparent linguistic difference, other vectors of identity are called on to project any likely linguistic differences that may exist even when on the surface they are undetectable or “unremarkable.”

As part of the passage to a more elaborate discussion of the multilingualism of the other as it appears in eighteenth-century texts, I begin with the ephemeral evocation of these four men’s voices and linguistic identities because the truth of these voices and linguistic identities is something that can be neither confirmed nor denied. Washington’s evaluation of these multilingual subjects is eternally suspended in the swollen archive of the U.S. slave economy just as it is forever inscribed in an anglophone history of representation involving what type of person is commonly believed to speak in what types of ways. We cannot hear Peros, Jack, Neptune, or Cupid speak on their own terms. Even if we could hear them, their speech would already be mediated, just as the works of liminal anglophone subjects like Ignatius Sancho and Phillis Wheatley were, at the moment of their publication, predigested through the assumptions of racist categorization, some of which were built around and buttressed by linguistic reception criteria, a point I address in the following chapter.²⁰ Washington’s ad in the Maryland Gazette has spoken for these four men. In its even more powerful way, the mesh of embodied, ethnolinguistic identities that takes shape against the regime of eighteenth-century Standard English and its writing practices has, in its powerful way, already prefigured them too.