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Оглавление1. Ellen Craft’s Masquerade
The crisis of identification that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century United States was fundamentally driven by the anxieties of “a culture that worried that a full knowledge of a person’s racial origins could become obscured” (Otten 231). In the antebellum period these anxieties emerged in increasingly desperate attempts to codify racial difference as biological and therefore inescapable. The ability of fugitive slaves to subvert, manipulate, and defy these attempts through their successful escapes both challenged and accelerated southern white efforts to define race as physically fixed. Additionally, by midcentury the increased public role taken by women in the abolition and suffrage movements and accompanying challenges to raced and classed notions of masculinity and femininity created new fears over the “natural” roles and attributes of the sexes.1 The many historical and literary studies of these related dynamics, however, have rarely addressed the contemporaneously emerging anxiety regarding the knowability of the disabled body. Yet this too is a fundamental and inextricable element of the identificatory crisis, and figures of feigned or suspected disability began to emerge prominently to represent this deepening fear.
In one such figure, the fugitive slave and author Ellen Craft, we find all three forms of embodied social identity unmoored from physical and representational certainty, and so her story represents a touchstone for the eventual emergence of fantasies of identification surrounding disability, race, and gender. By examining a series of representations of Craft, including critical and creative responses by African American and feminist writers, we see not only the inextricability of these identities but also the crucial role played by disability in enabling flexible understandings of other supposedly biological identities.
A Complication of Complaints
In 1845 Ellen Craft and her husband, William, escaped from slavery in Georgia by traveling disguised as a “white invalid gentlemen” and his valet. After a four-day journey they arrived on free soil in Philadelphia and soon became prominent in the Boston-based abolitionist movement, telling their story to large audiences and swiftly gaining fame that eventually led to pursuit by southern agents seeking to reenslave them. The Crafts escaped once again, this time to England, where they later authored a narrative of their escape, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, published in 1860 by London’s William Tweedie.2 The Crafts’ narrative has received a significant amount of critical attention, much of which has focused on the racial and gender passing perpetrated by Ellen, while a secondary concern has been the prominence of the Crafts on the abolition circuit before the Civil War.3 However, no historian or literary critic has yet grappled with the presence of disability in the narrative; while the fact that Ellen pretended to be disabled is often mentioned in the course of other concerns, disability has not been addressed as a social identity that can be manipulated or interpreted, as can race and gender. Yet disability, and in particular the feigning of disability—what I call the “disability con”—plays an essential function in both the Crafts’ narrative and the social context in which it appeared.4
Indeed the disability con is an important element for many fugitive slave narrators, such as James Pennington, who pretended to have smallpox, and Lewis Clarke, who employed disguises very similar to those of Ellen Craft, including green spectacles and handkerchiefs tied around his forehead and chin (Pennington 565; Clarke and Clarke 139, 147). A number of historians have briefly noted the use of feigned illness and disability among slaves as a means of resistance, as well as the related cultural dynamics of suspicion and surveillance, yet this context is not generally invoked in discussions of Ellen Craft, unlike examples of gender or race-based masquerades.5 My consideration of disability in the Crafts’ narrative is not to negate other critics’ arguments but rather to enhance and complete them, particularly those that argue for the narrative’s portrayal of a mutually constitutive relationship between race, gender, and class. In these many insightful analyses of Ellen Craft’s “tripartite disguise” (Browder 121), the fourth crucial element of that disguise is rendered invisible and haunting.6
Yet a close reading of the narrative evolution of Ellen Craft’s disguise clearly demonstrates the intimate and constitutive relationship of race, gender, class, and disability. In William’s narration, he and Ellen first think of racial masquerade, suggested by Ellen’s white skin. Next they decide upon gender-crossing, due to the perceived impropriety of a white woman traveling with a black man. But the class status of the white male persona adopted then presents the new obstacle of literacy:
When the thought flashed across my wife’s mind, that it was customary for travelers to register their names in the visitors’ book at hotels, as well as in the clearance or Custom-house book at Charleston, South Carolina—it made our spirits droop within us. So, while sitting in our little room upon the verge of despair, all at once my wife raised her head, and with a smile upon her face, which was a moment before bathed in tears, said, “I think I have it!” I asked what it was. She said, “I think I can make a poultice and bind up my right hand in a sling, and with propriety ask the officers to register my name for me.” (Craft and Craft 23–24)
At this point the concept of the invalid—of passing as disabled—enters the disguise and soon becomes its central enabling device. The crucial function of disability for the disguise is emphasized by its remarkable proliferation throughout the narrative, which begins immediately after the conversation just quoted. Ellen fears that “the smoothness of her face might betray her; so she decided to make another poultice, and put it in a white handkerchief to be worn under the chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head” (24). Then, nervous about traveling in the “company of gentlemen,” Ellen sends William to buy “a pair of green spectacles [tinted glasses]” to hide her eyes (24). We immediately discover the efficacy of these stratagems, as William observes that, during the escape, “my wife’s being muffled in the poultices, &c., furnished a plausible excuse for avoiding general conversation” (24). At the time of the disguise’s inception, no specific illness or condition is referenced, although later in their journey, Ellen will claim to have “inflammatory rheumatism” (38).
In fact during the Crafts’ four-day journey, Ellen acquires new impairments whenever discovery is threatened: when spoken to by an acquaintance who might recognize her voice, she “feigns deafness” (Craft and Craft 29); when other passengers are inclined to become too social, she goes to bed, citing her rheumatism (30); and when two young white ladies appear overly interested in the dapper gentleman, Ellen quickly becomes faint and must lie down quietly (39). As “problems of possible recognition, of hotel registration, and of reading are all solved by more and more complete adoption of the role of invalid master” (Byerman 74), we see that the validity of Ellen’s racial, gender, and class passing hinges upon the invalidity of her body.
Yet that invalidity has been naturalized or ignored by critical readings of the Crafts’ narrative, discussed as a purely material and expedient factor rather than a social identity requiring analysis. For instance, it is only after the Crafts’ narrative has explained the elements of the invalid disguise that we reach that favorite moment of critics, the transformation of Ellen into a “most respectable-looking gentleman” through cross-dressing and a haircut (Craft and Craft 24). The transgression of this gender, race, and class masquerade is so interesting that critics and historians alike tend to disregard the fact that Ellen does not actually travel as this “respectable-looking gentleman” but as his invalid double, bandaged and poulticed and spectacled in the extreme. Clearly, passing as white, male, and even wealthy is not enough to effect the Crafts’ escape. In fact none of these acts of passing could have succeeded, apparently, without the necessary component of passing as disabled.
This complex interdependency of identities, signified in the text when William tells an inquiring traveler that his master suffers from “a complication of complaints,” presents a troubling challenge to scholars of African American history. Both abolitionists and freedmen of the Crafts’ time and African Americanist scholars and critics today appear deeply invested in the recuperation of the black body from a pathologizing and dehumanizing racism that often justified enslavement with arguments that people of African descent were inherently unable to take care of themselves—in other words, disabled.7 Thus we find throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives and scholarship an emphasis on wholeness, uprightness, good health, and independence—all representational categories that the Crafts paradoxically needed to subvert in order to attain actual freedom.8 As Jennifer James observes, “In post–Civil War African American literature particularly, it was imperative that the black body and the black ‘mind’ be portrayed as uninjured by the injuring institution of slavery in order to disprove one of the main antiblack arguments that surfaced after emancipation—that slavery had made blacks ‘unfit’ for citizenship, ‘unfit’ carrying a dual physical and psychological meaning” (15). With this awareness of the complicated and important history behind representations of disability in the African American context, it is nevertheless important to elucidate the presence of disability in the Crafts’ narrative to understand how the entwined fantasies of racial, gender, and disability identification functioned both to enable their escape and to shape its subsequent interpretations.
Lindon Barrett, for example, argues that “the central act of the Crafts’ escape is the removal of what is designated as an African American body from [a] position of meaninglessness to the condition of meaning and signification” (323). By claiming that the bodies of African Americans have been “taken as signs of nothing beyond themselves,” Barrett recasts the function of whiteness in the Crafts’ escape as providing not only literal freedom but ontological existence. In contrast, Dawn Keetley suggests that Ellen’s passing as a white man functions as “a concealment of any distinguishing features, rather than as a positive accrual of ‘white’ and ‘male’ features” (14). Thus Ellen’s disguise—or at least the descriptions of her disguise in the narrative—“highlight what she is not” (14). Both of these analyses draw upon deconstructive theory to read race as a matter of a paradoxically absent presence or present absence. This analysis relies on Derrida’s concept of the supplement, as that which is added to an apparently complete text but is actually necessary to its meaning, “the not-seen that opens and limits visibility” (163).
I suggest that not only is the supplement a useful concept for examining the function of disability in the Crafts’ narrative but that many critical analyses of the narrative also unconsciously rely upon disability as supplement. Sterling Lecater Bland, for example, discusses Ellen’s mobility and agency without referencing her invalid disguise, instead emphasizing “Ellen’s remarkable ability to challenge a series of raced, classed, and gendered associations” (Voices 148, my emphasis). Such a dynamic is also particularly noticeable in Barrett’s repeated referrals to Ellen’s bandaged hand in a paragraph ostensibly devoted to analysis of her racialized body:
Like the bandaged hand, the inscription of the white male figure on the black female body of Ellen is an essential element of the Crafts’ escape. . . . Like the bandaging of her hand, Ellen’s regendering refigures advantageously “the absence of a presence, and always already absent present” on which signification depends. . . . What is more, the transfiguring of Ellen’s body, like the bandaging of her hand, divides her body. The new status of this body within the condition of meaning necessitates that it be divisible. The bandaging of her hand and cropping of her hair redirect and redistribute the interpretive gaze aimed at her. (331, my emphasis)
The mantra-like repetition of “the bandaged hand” in this paragraph repeatedly evokes but endlessly defers the presence of disability as fundamental to Ellen’s disguise—and thus to her racial meaning. In this sense disability appears to function for Barrett, much as it functions within the narrative, as the necessary “bridge” that enables racial and gender mobility while itself remaining fixed and apparently immobile. This dynamic can also be understood through Butler’s concept of the constitutive outside, “the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility” (Bodies that Matter xi). The pertinence of Butler’s analysis to this particular example is highlighted in her further clarification of the constitutive outside as “a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (xi). The extent to which the body marked by disability is unthinkable and even frightening for contemporary critics studying the Crafts’ narrative is captured in Barbara McCaskill’s description of Ellen’s bandaged face as a “facial monstrosity” (“Yours” 520).
Figure 1.1. Ellen Craft in her adapted disguise. From Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.
McCaskill is referring to Ellen’s “likeness,” the engraved portrait that was sold to raise money for the abolitionist cause even before the publication of the Crafts’ narrative, and which has accompanied every published edition of the narrative (Fig. 1.1). The engraving shows the head and upper body of what appears to be a smooth-faced young white gentleman with curly dark hair escaping a top hat to cover his ears. He is dressed in a black suit and stiff white collar, with a light-colored tartan plaid sash crisscrossing his front. His face is not bandaged, and the “green spectacles” used during the escape appear to have been replaced by a pair with clear lenses. The only remaining element of the invalid disguise is the white sling, which no longer supports the figure’s arm but simply hangs around his neck, slightly tucked between elbow and body. In this hanging position, parallel to the tartan sash, the sling looks like another sash or scarf, its disability function obscured to the point of invisibility.
The fact that this engraving purports to represent Ellen in her disguise yet actually represents an adapted version of the disguise with all signs of disability removed or obscured, has confounded many critics. Bland, referring to William/the narrator’s observation that “the poultice is left off in the engraving, because the likeness could not have been taken well with it on” (Craft and Craft 24), remarks, “What is unclear is whose likeness would be obscured by the poultice. Is the engraving intended to represent Ellen, William’s wife? Or is the engraving intended to show Ellen in the disguise she used to pass as a white gentleman traveling with his black slave? The engraving fully succeeds at neither, thus forcing the reader to ponder the reason for the apparent deviation” (Bland, Voices 150). While Bland does not offer an answer to this question, Ellen Weinauer concludes that the removal of the poultice suggests that “it would appear that the purpose of the engraving is to represent not ‘Mr. Johnson,’ but Ellen herself” (50). But if the purpose was to represent Ellen, why is she still dressed in her male costume? As Keetley observes, the picture does not show one “discernible race or gender,” instead portraying “a permanent state of racial and gender ambiguity” (14).
I contend that the purpose of the portrait is to represent the “most respectable-looking gentleman” so beloved of critics—that is, to represent the aspects of Ellen’s disguise that subvert nineteenth-century assumptions regarding the immutability of race and gender, while removing those aspects that even by implication show the African American body as unhealthy, dependent, and disabled. Thus McCaskill’s characterization of a couple of bandages as a “monstrosity” is clarified by her claim that “[with] her bandaged maladies a mere and known pretense, Ellen’s frontispiece portrait articulates the death of herself as a captive commodity and her resurrection as a wily, liberated subject” (“Yours” 516). Here McCaskill clearly applauds the removal of signs of disability and reads their removal metonymically as an indicator of freedom and autonomy.
The irony of obscuring or removing signs of disability from representations of Ellen is that disability, like race, has historically been viewed as a fixed bodily condition; it is not so easily removed as a bandage. Yet in the case of Ellen Craft, it appears at first that the performative, constructed nature of both disability and gender contrast with the seeming inherency of race. For Ellen must don bandages and spectacles to pass as disabled and must cut her hair and wear a suit to pass as a man, but apparently she need do nothing at all in order to pass as white. For she is white, if whiteness is defined purely by the color of her skin and texture of her hair.9 An 1849 article in the Wisconsin Free Democrat insisted, “Let it not be understood that she is a Negro. Ellen Crafts [sic], though a slave, is white” (Keetley 18n17). By 1852 the abolitionist Rev. Frances Bishop could emphasize another slave woman’s fairness, not with the common comparison to a British or southern white woman but simply by describing her as “quite as white as Ellen Craft,” a sign of Ellen’s resignification into a pure and reified whiteness (Armistead, LAS 44).10 Josephine Brown, daughter of the prominent abolitionist William Wells Brown, writes that “Ellen was as white as most persons of the clear Anglo-Saxon origin. Her features were prominent, hair straight, eyes of a light hazel color, and no one on first seeing the white slave would suppose that a drop of African blood coursed through her veins” (76).11
When Josephine Brown calls Ellen “the white slave,” she is clearly not suggesting that Ellen is a European kidnapped into slavery but rather is making the common abolitionist point that racial justifications of slavery were becoming increasingly more difficult to support, due to the “visible, progressive ‘whitening’ of the slave body throughout the century” (Wiegman 47). For the idea of race as inherent and fixed was exactly contradictory to the aims of the Crafts’ narrative and the abolitionist movement, both of which sought to display racial ambiguity precisely to “deauthorize racial categories” and thus counter a racially based system of slavery (Keetley 14; Bland, Voices 145). Instead representations of Ellen Craft function according to Marjorie Garber’s claim for the transvestite (285), demonstrating how social anxiety regarding the idea of inherent bodily identity is displaced from race onto gender and class and finally—and most fundamentally—onto disability.
Representations of Ellen’s whiteness in the abolitionist press were almost always accompanied by references to gender and class, as when William Wells Brown described an encounter between Ellen and Lady Byron in which the British noblewoman found that Ellen “was so white, and had so much the appearance of a well-bred and educated lady, that she could scarcely realize that she was in the presence of an American slave” (J. Brown 80–81). The invocation of Ellen as a genteel lady was echoed by Samuel May, general agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, when he wrote that Ellen appeared to be “a Southern-born white woman” and expressed extreme horror at the thought “of such a woman being held as a piece of property, subject to be traded off to the highest bidder” (Sterling 23–24). In this case, idealized (white) womanhood functions as supplement, a placeholder for social distinctions based on physical difference, so that racial difference may be shown to be an arbitrary legal construction. Weinauer makes this point forcefully in her critique of the Crafts’ narrative, arguing that William Craft as narrator “insists, finally, on the natural status of gendered categories, writing Ellen into her proper place within them. Unlike the meanings assigned to race and class memberships, meanings that Craft presents as discursive, interested constructions, ‘woman’ is assigned a meaning that is fixed, immutable, and presumably disinterested” (38).
The role played here by gender in supplementing race is undeniable. Yet I suggest that the meanings ascribed to disability are even more “fixed and immutable” and that disability functions as the invisible, submerged supplement to the bodily realities of both gender and race—even, or perhaps especially, when disability is represented through the disability con. This entanglement of meanings emerges from both nineteenth-century and contemporary efforts to negotiate the paradox of the racial body: the dilemma of arguing that race is a social, constructed identity even while confronted with the reality of racially marked bodies.12 In the case of Ellen Craft, race is at once shown to be arbitrary and constructed, since she is defined as black yet appears white, and physically inherent, since her body itself is all the disguise she needs to appear white. Here disability comes into play, as the social identity most strongly identified with physical difference and the body, to function as the necessary supplement that allows the bodily nature of race to be obscured. This shadow function of disability is to hold the fact of physicality, unmoored from social or representational meanings; its effect is to produce arguments that define race and disability as separate and virtually incompatible entities, when in fact they are deeply connected and mutually constitutive.
Consider the topic of literacy, a central theme of African American literature from its inception, and certainly a key factor in the Crafts’ narrative. Discussions of literacy and illiteracy are by definition discussions of ability and disability—the ability to read and write, or its lack. The disability of illiteracy profoundly impacted the lives of formerly enslaved authors like the Crafts and Frederick Douglass; the acquisition of literacy is a material and symbolic triumph that resounds from Douglass’s Narrative to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and beyond. Yet to discuss illiteracy as disability resonates with centuries of characterizations of African Americans as flawed or defective, incapable of acquiring the ability that has come to equal personhood in post-Enlightenment Western culture.13 Such characterizations came as much from white proponents of slave rights as from slave owners, as in the quotation from The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841 that Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. use as the epigraph to their landmark study The Slave’s Narrative:
“Things for the Abolitionist to Do”
1. Speak for the Slave, . . .
2. Write for the Slave, . . .
“They can’t take care of themselves.” (4)
In his extended discussion of literacy in the Crafts’ narrative, Barrett argues that literacy is a more powerful sign of whiteness than the white body itself, that “light or racially ambiguous skin is ultimately insufficient as an ‘ontological’ marker of whiteness” (324). Thus he complicates the claim that Ellen need “do” nothing to appear white, when whiteness is understood as a social identity predicated upon literacy. Here Barrett teeters on the edge of an analysis of the mutually constitutive nature of race and disability, noting that the bandaging of Ellen’s hand “is the indispensable correlate to Ellen’s racially ambiguous skin. In this context it is the ultimate sign of whiteness” (326–327). But to Barrett, the social meanings mobilized by Ellen’s bandaged hand are stable and fixed: it will be “read not as a sign of illiteracy but as a sign of illness that will earn her credibility and sympathy” (325). The deflection of possible intellectual disability onto physical disability is, for Barrett, inescapably tied to the fact of whiteness. He essentially equates the bandaged hand, a physical sign of the inability to write, with the visible fact of black skin, also at that time assumed to signify the inability to write. Such an equation at once hints at the importance of examining intersections of race and disability and excludes such an examination.
For Ellen Craft, displacing the disability of illiteracy onto a physical impairment enables her escape from slavery by allowing her to travel as a white man: it allows her to function as a mobile subject. The complex relation of literacy and mobility, and its necessary connection to disability, is apparent in the contrasting circumstance of Harriet Jacobs in her well-known 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Even while confined to a tiny crawlspace, Jacobs was able to employ her literacy to manipulate her former owner and obtain her children’s freedom by writing false notes to be mailed from various locations. Both women brilliantly played upon assumptions about their abilities to achieve freedom; Jacobs, however, suffered long-term physical effects from her long confinement, while Ellen Craft was able to learn to read and write and thus shed the disability of illiteracy. So disability in each case was neither fixed nor immutable but existed as a shifting, contingent identity. And in each case, disability surfaced in relation to race through the issues of literacy and mobility.
Multiple Identities, Multiple Representations
We can see this dynamic, as well as the continued entanglement of gender, race, and disability, in the numerous “retellings” and adaptations of the Crafts’ escape. Not only did the Crafts tell their story on the abolitionist stage countless times during the nearly twelve years before publication of their narrative, but a number of authors retold or adapted their tale in the cause of abolition, and, later, racial pride and historical memory. Probably the first of these “retellings” was Williams Wells Brown’s letter to the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator on January 12, 1849, about two weeks after the Crafts arrived in Boston (Craft and Craft 76). Brown describes the disguise in an order reflecting his own probable assumptions about the importance of social identities: first, he tells us that “Ellen is so nearly white, that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman.” Then he informs us that “Ellen dressed in men’s clothing,” and finally, about halfway through his letter, Brown mentions that Ellen “tied her right hand up as though it was lame.” Even this brief allusion to disability appears to require immediate recuperation, as Brown immediately adds, “which proved to be of service to her, as she was called upon several times at hotels to ‘register’ her name,” thus foregrounding the substitution of one ability for another—the ability to pass for the ability to read and write. Brown’s account reflects simultaneously a heightened consciousness of race and gender passing and a submerged anxiety regarding disability passing, especially by an enslaved African American.
When Brown later adapted the Crafts’ story for his 1853 novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, he similarly downplayed the element of disability and, to a certain extent, gender in the disguise. His character, Clotel, has lived a privileged existence as a white man’s mistress before being enslaved, so she is presumably literate and thus need not bind up her arm. Probably to accord with his characterization of Clotel as a highly refined, sentimental, and modest Victorian heroine, Brown also downplays her choice of man’s clothing for the disguise, portraying this element as largely a product of Clotel’s cruel and jealous mistress having forced her to cut her hair short. Interestingly, though, Brown’s Clotel also expresses a sentiment entirely absent in the Crafts’ own account, as the character of William (in this version only an acquaintance) tells her, “You look a good deal like a man with your short hair.” Clotel responds, “I have often been told that I would make a better looking man than a woman. If I had the money I would bid farewell to this place” (141). The first half of this response expresses a rather radical notion of gender crossing for our Victorian heroine, while the second half strangely equates male appearance with the ability to escape, as if Brown had never heard of the countless women who escaped from slavery.14 This is a rare moment when Brown’s sentimental, abolitionist authorial mask slips to offer tantalizing glimpses of a more individual view that both expands and forecloses the possibilities of gender. It is not surprising that, immediately following this comment, Brown tells us that Clotel “feared that she had said too much” (141).
Clotel also uses the same alias as Ellen Craft, “Mr. Johnson,” and Brown actually reproduces a newspaper correspondent’s eyewitness account of Ellen’s disguise as if it referred to his fictional heroine (Clotel 145–146).15 And like Ellen, Clotel travels as an invalid, wearing green glasses, tying a white silk handkerchief around her head, and pretending “to be very ill” (143). Yet without the bandaged hand necessitated by illiteracy, Brown’s heroine does not need to perform disability in the repeated and proliferative manner of Ellen Craft; she does not pretend to faint, feign deafness, limp, or stagger around dramatically as in the Crafts’ narrative. Brown’s downplaying of disability here is probably motivated by his dislike for portraying his slave heroes as weak or damaged, an interpretation that is strengthened by the revisions he made when he republished his novel in 1864. In this version Brown greatly shortened his account of the escape and removed disability completely from the disguise, omitting the bandages and including the green glasses as part of his heroine’s “gentlemanly appearance” rather than as a sign of invalidism (Clotelle 47).16 (Although the heroine keeps to her stateroom “under a plea of illness,” the idea that she is actually playing the role of an invalid is never mentioned in this version.) These changes suggest a retreat from the disability aspects of the Crafts’ story prompted by the postbellum need to present the newly emancipated African American subject as healthy, independent, and worthy of freedom, in opposition to proslavery claims that freedom was unhealthy and even disabling for African Americans, producing, in one southern physician’s words, “a beautiful harvest of mental and physical degradation” (Baynton 39). Without the necessary factor of illiteracy, other devices of disability such as the bandaged hand, limp, and feigned deafness are easily sloughed off from Brown’s conception of the necessary and acceptable components of a slave’s triumphant escape. (I would argue that, then as now, signs of disability are viewed as acceptable only when necessary.)
This dynamic is taken even further in another adaptation of the Crafts’ story in the 1858 play The Stars and Stripes: A Melo-drama by the white abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child. Like Brown, Child chooses to make the Crafts literate, and thus erases the element of disability from their disguise. In fact Child aggressively foregrounds her characters’ literacy, portraying William reading aloud about freedom from the newspaper and Ellen writing a pass for another slave to use for his escape (141, 147). This characterization is of a piece with Child’s choice to make both of the Crafts light-skinned, clearly seeking to portray them to a white audience as “refined” in every aspect. As a northern abolitionist character says to Ellen, “No one would believe that you were not a white woman,” and William is described in the stage directions as a “genteel-looking light mulatto” (165, 123).
There is no mention of disability or illness in Child’s portrayal of the Crafts’ escape, but illness enters her play in another fashion, when her comic white proslavery characters speak of “drapetomania” as the reason that William and Ellen ran away:
Masters: The fact is, sir, the niggers are a very singular race. They have several diseases, peculiar to themselves. The one which prevails most generally, is called by our doctors, drapetomania; and the only way I can account for this strange affair, is by supposing that Bill and Nellie had an attack of that disease.
North: Pray what sort of disease may that be, sir?
Masters: It means a mania for running away. . . . The learned Dr. Cartwright, of Louisiana University, has written a celebrated book about nigger diseases. He advises that the whip should be freely applied for the first symptoms of drapetomania. He calls it “whipping the devil out of ’em.” But the fact is, I never perceived any symptoms of it in Bill. He always seemed healthy. It is a very singular disease, that drapetomania! There’s no telling who may be seized by it. Some of the planters think it is becoming epidemic. (173–174)17
Child reverses the actual circumstances of the Crafts’ escape: rather than portraying healthy slaves pretending to be ill, she portrays healthy slaves being labeled as ill by their white oppressors. Since we are clearly meant to mock and disbelieve the white proslavery characters, their very insistence on William and Ellen as “diseased” (the word disease appears seven times during the full exchange) is meant to convey the fugitives’ supreme healthiness—and by extension, the healthy and natural character of freedom itself. Showing Ellen as a bandaged and hobbling invalid would severely undercut this message, and so Child foregoes the tremendous dramatic potential of the disguise in favor of conventional didacticism.
Child instead invents various disguises and other tricks to liven up the escape. Most notably she creates a third character, Jim, who escapes from slavery at the same time as the Crafts. Jim is everything that Child’s William and Ellen are not: they are light-skinned, and he is dark; they speak in standard, genteel English, and he speaks in comic dialect; they deliver earnest, sentimental speeches, and he sings humorous ditties and capers in stereotypical “darky” fashion. Child is clearly catering to her northern audience’s expectations. It is as if she is trapped by competing stereotypes: heroes must be sympathetic, so they must be light-skinned, but a play about “Negroes” must include “darky humor,” so Jim enters to mimic the Crafts like a doppelganger formed from the dark pigment that has been literarily excised from William’s skin. Such “mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate . . . a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (Bhabha 86).
This intensive surveillance is apparent in a scene in which Jim appears to “shadow” the Crafts during their escape, at a point when William and Ellen are hiding in the woods and singing a sentimental verse:
[While they are singing, a black face peeps out from between the boards, and watches them curiously for a minute, and is then lighted up with a broad smile. The head is withdrawn behind the boards, and presently, when all is still, a voice is heard singing:]
“Jim crack corn—don’t care!
Ole massa’s gone away!”
[William and Ellen start, and look behind them.]
William: I could almost swear that was Jim’s voice.
Ellen: You know all the slaves sing that. It can’t be that Jim is here. (158–159)
Jim appears here as the dark other that haunts the Crafts, the anonymous “black face” that substitutes for personhood in nineteenth-century white conceptions of African Americans. He is further associated with an anonymous dark-skinned mass in Ellen’s claim that “all the slaves sing” the song Jim is using to signal them, and William and Ellen’s singularity is emphasized by the fact that they are not singing that traditional song. In the absence of disability, Jim seems to represent racial bodily difference in an exaggerated extreme, so that the Crafts may remain heroically “white.”
However, the racial erasure and rematerialization produced in the play appears to collapse back upon itself when the three fugitives must escape into Canada, pursued, like the real Crafts, by their former owners under the Fugitive Slave Act. In Child’s version, William and Ellen must be “stained black” to escape recognition. Meanwhile Jim must vanish altogether, since he “can’t be stained any blacker” (176). The fugitives join a group of mourners, and Jim is actually carried inside a coffin—a trick possibly inspired by the notorious 1849 escape of Henry Box Brown who shipped himself to freedom in a wooden crate. Jim also hides under an icehouse while Ellen and William picnic with abolitionists above, her identity hidden by a veil and his by a “brown wig” (163–165). Again Child invents disguises and subterfuges to replace those actually used by the Crafts and in doing so splits them in two and buries the darker half in a cellar, a move strangely reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, and liable to similar interpretations as those of feminists who see the lunatic, mixed-race Bertha as personifying the exiled rage and sexuality of the pallid Victorian heroine Jane Eyre.18 Yet, by the play’s closing scenes, William and Ellen are not only stained black but “locked up in a tomb” along with Jim, to escape with him into Canada the next day. Without disability to function as bodily supplement, the play finally constructs race as an inescapable and confining fact, the “drop of black blood” in William and Ellen’s veins binding them inexorably to racial otherness.
We may contrast this portrayal with that of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s William and Ellen Craft: A Play in One Act, published in 1935. Johnson portrays the Crafts speaking in dialect, reflecting a newfound valuation of African American cultural specificity and language traditions (McCaskill in Craft and Craft 106). And while it seems at first that Johnson’s retelling will also omit disability from the disguise, since William initially describes the plan as involving only gender crossing, this does not prove to be the case:
Ellen (going up to William trembling): You sho you kin get us through, William?
William: Sho honey; ain’t I been on the train time and time again wid young Marse, an’ can’t I read and write?
Ellen: But how kin I be like young Marse? I’m all a shakin’ now.
William (soothing her): All you got to do is walk. You don’t have to talk, you don’t have to do a thing but just walk along bigity like a white man. See here. (Shows her how to walk.) Try it.
Ellen (tries to walk like him): Dis way?
William: You doin fine! You see now you is supposed to be sick, you got a toothache, you goin’ to a doctor in Philadelphia, you is nearly deaf, an’ yo’ nigger slave is taking you—understand? (Johnson 173–174)
Johnson depicts William as hyper-able: able to conceive of the plan, able to read and write, able to show Ellen how to walk like a white man and to bolster her failing spirits. The sudden proliferation of impairments in the end of this conversation appears seemingly from nowhere—neither Ellen’s illiteracy nor its arm-sling solution are even mentioned—but is symbolically produced as the feminized abject other to William’s hyper-able masculinity. Disability and stereotyped femininity are both stabilized here to supplement the racial pride and empowerment that appear as Johnson’s primary theme and motivation for her play.
Like Johnson’s, most narratives of the Crafts’ escape portray William as the primary devisor and motivator of the disguise and Ellen as requiring persuasion and assistance. This is certainly true of the Crafts’ own narrative, in which William tells us, “After I thought of the plan, I suggested it to my wife, but at first she shrank from the idea” (Craft and Craft 21). In contrast, Josephine Brown’s account of the escape in her 1856 biography of her father, William Wells Brown, emphatically reverses these roles:
“Now, William,” said the wife, “listen to me, and take my advice, and we shall be free in less than a month.”
“Let me hear your plans, then,” said William.
“Take part of your money and purchase me a good suit of gentleman’s apparel. . . . I am white enough to go as a master, and you can pass as my servant.”
“But you are not tall enough for a man,” said the husband.
“Get me a pair of very high-heeled boots, and they will bring me up more than an inch, and get me a very high hat, then I’ll do,” rejoined the wife.
“But then, my dear you would make a very boyish looking man, with no whiskers or mustache,” remarked William.
“I could bind up my face in a handkerchief,” said Ellen, “as if I was suffering dreadfully from the toothache, and no one would discover the want of beard.”
“What if you were called upon to write your name in the books at hotels, as I saw my master do when traveling, or were asked to receipt for any thing?”
“I would also bind up my right hand and put it in a sling. . . . ”
“I fear you cannot carry out the deception for so long a time, for it must be several hundred miles to the free States,” said William, as he seemed to despair of escaping from slavery by following his wife’s plan.
“Come, William,” entreated his wife, “don’t be a coward!” (76–77)
I have reproduced this account at length since it provides such a dramatically contrasting view, not only to the Crafts’ narrative—which, after all, was published four years later than this account and thus can achieve only a tenuous status as the “original”—but to William Wells Brown’s own account discussed earlier.19 While William L. Andrews, in his introduction to Josephine Brown’s Biography of an American Bondsman, characterizes the work as “primarily a digest of her father’s autobiographical writings . . . [offering] little information about her subject that was genuinely new,” her chapter devoted to the Crafts certainly presents a far different account from that given by her father in his letter to the Liberator (Andrews, introduction xxxiii). One can only speculate as to the source of Josephine Brown’s unorthodox version of the Crafts’ story. Certainly she must have heard their story told many times in the seven years intervening between her father’s letter and her book’s publication, since the Crafts were touring with her father on the abolitionist circuit. However, accounts of the Crafts’ appearances, both in the United States and England, concur that William was always the spokesman and Ellen spoke only when entreated by the audience.20 Without further historical evidence, it is impossible to know whether Brown’s account was based on private conversations with Ellen or whether its peculiar nature stemmed from her own stymied feminist sensibility, straining at the confines of “acceptable” black female writing of her time, and particularly frustrated with confining her writing to memorializing her famous father. In either case it is clear that Josephine Brown’s account should lead us to view with healthy skepticism portrayals of Ellen Craft as passive and meek and William as active and strong.21
Looking closely at Josephine Brown’s account, we may discover evidence for her impatience with gender inequities.22 She adds a problem and a solution never mentioned in the Crafts’ or other accounts, when William objects that Ellen is “not tall enough for a man” and Ellen responds by demanding “high-heeled boots” and “a very high hat.” Being “not tall enough for a man” appears, to Brown’s William, a more immediate objection than clothing, hair, smooth cheeks, or even illiteracy—all the elements that contribute to the disguise in the Crafts’ account. Symbolically being “not tall enough for a man” suggests the devaluing and underestimating of Ellen’s authority; practically it presents a problem of normalization that demands prosthetic adjustment. Significantly disability appears here not as a mask or bandage placed upon the body but as a condition inherent in the body that must be “fixed” to meet social expectations.
Many historians have noted that constructions of femininity in the nineteenth century and beyond characterized the female body as inherently deficient, unhealthy, and abnormal.23 Additionally, in the nineteenth century there was a proliferation of medical claims that women would become disabled by education or political participation, as in claims that overeducated women’s “reproductive organs are dwarfed, deformed, weakened, and diseased” and that “enfranchising women would result in a twenty-five percent increase in insanity among them” (Baynton 42). These arguments often pointed to reading and writing as activities that would exacerbate women’s inherent frailty and tendency toward disease (Herndl 78). As a black woman claiming authorship, Josephine Brown contended not only with the oppressive relationship of femininity and disability but with parallel claims regarding the very humanity of African Americans. It is not surprising, then, that while she was engaged in so radical (for her time) a project as authoring a biography, questions of power and authority subtly emerged between the lines of her “purely factual” account.24
Enclosing the Invalid
To further explore these mutual interweavings of race, gender, and disability through issues of authority and power, I will close with an examination of the racial dimensions of the particular disability con performed by the Crafts. It is clear that William’s presence as the servant of “Mr. Johnson” is as fundamental to Ellen’s successful performance of invalidism as are the sling, poultice, and green spectacles she wears. For instance, one of Ellen’s proliferating impairments is a difficulty in walking, apparently produced not by logistical necessity (like the bandaged hand or face) but simply because such infirmity is part of the expected invalid role. This disability is primarily performed by William, who ostentatiously assists Ellen when entering and leaving buildings and train carriages (Craft and Craft 34, 36, 48). This performance shores up the image of Ellen as a feeble invalid and thus ironically reinforces her male persona; since conventionally women would be assisted in this fashion, William’s chivalry would undermine Ellen’s male disguise were the gesture not naturalized by her adoption of the feminized invalid persona (and by the racial assumption that white women did not lean upon black men). By appearing to assist Ellen in walking, William functions as a sign of her impaired legs, much as the bandage on her hand signifies its impairment. This apparent interchangeability of William with nonverbal signs such as a cane, crutch, or invalid (wheeled) chair at once objectifies him and undermines that objectification through the reader’s knowledge that he is in fact a speaking subject engaged in a daring rebellion.25
William’s agency is more apparent when he performs Ellen’s disability in her absence. On the steamer from Savannah to Charleston, when his “master” turns in early, William explains that “as the captain and some of the passengers seemed to think this strange and also questioned me respecting him, my master thought I had better get out the flannels and opodeldoc which we had prepared for the rheumatism, warm them quickly by the stove in the gentleman’s saloon, and bring them to his berth” (Craft and Craft 30). Clearly the performance of disability falls as much to William as to his “master”; when William responds to the passengers’ questions with a public display of his role as caretaker to a white invalid, he reenacts Ellen’s feigned deafness of the previous scene. In both cases the Crafts deflect attention by mobilizing white assumptions regarding the validity and presumptive innocence of illness. At the hotel in Charleston, William again makes a public display of heating the bandages, ensuring that Ellen receives the best service and sympathy of the proprietors, even as William himself is treated with the usual disdain (34). Afterward, on the train to Richmond, a white passenger questions William before joining Ellen in her carriage: “He wished to know what was the matter with [my master], where he was from, and where he was going” (38). In a reversal of the usual nineteenth-century white assumptions about white and black reliability, the passenger appears to seek validation from William before speaking to his “master” directly. This reversal appears in another white passenger’s first-person account, in which he privileges William’s information about “Mr. Johnson’s” condition over his own observation that the invalid “walked rather too gingerly for a person afflicted with so many ailments” (Sterling 15).26 In this instance William’s role as servant is more crucial to the deception than Ellen’s apparently imperfect acting of her part.
Once the Crafts reach freedom, however, the caretaking relationship between subordinate servant and invalid master must be restored to its “natural” form of husband caring for (subordinate) wife. Weinauer comments on the necessity of representing Ellen as an ideal Victorian woman to compensate for the dangerous gender transgression of the preceding narrative in which Ellen not only dresses as a man but is referred to as “he” and “my master” (Weinauer 38–48). To accomplish this task, ironically Ellen is narratively transformed into the very white invalid she was pretending to be: highly sentimentalized, weak, genteel, and sensitive.27 Even as their train approaches Philadelphia, Ellen begins to take on this role. During a brief stop, she is filled with “terror and trembling” because William is not there to help her from the carriage (Craft and Craft 48).
Once the Crafts arrive on free soil, Ellen, now “wife” again in William’s narration, “burst into tears, leant upon me, and wept like a child . . . [She was] so weak and faint that she could scarcely stand alone” (Craft and Craft 50). She is subsequently described in the narrative as “nervous and timid” (52), having “unstrung nerves” (53), and “unwell” (66). Biographer Dorothy Sterling amplifies this account: “The next days were a blur to Ellen. She had moments of exhilaration, when, once more in women’s clothing, she tossed the bits and pieces of her disguise around the room. Then reaction set in, and the sleepless nights and anxious days took their toll. Exhausted physically and emotionally, she rested in her room at the boarding house, while news of the Crafts’ escape spread to antislavery circles in the city” (19). In Sterling’s description, Ellen is confined like an invalid woman to her bedroom, discursively and physically isolated as “the news” spreads without her. This immobility is emphasized on the next page of Sterling’s biography, when the Crafts are urged to leave Philadelphia for Boston, but Ellen is “physically very much prostrated” and needs to rest before making another move (20).
During the Crafts’ subsequent voyage to England, William tells us that Ellen “was very poorly, and was also so ill on the voyage that I did not believe she could live to see Liverpool. However,” he adds, “after laying up at Liverpool very ill over two or three weeks, [she] gradually recovered” (Craft and Craft 66). Sterling again amplifies this account with imagery of motion and confinement: “Ellen spent the crossing in a dark, crowded cabin in the hold of the ship, seasick and feverish, while William paced the deck, wondering if she would survive” (37). Like the character of Jim trapped in the coffin in Child’s play, Ellen becomes narratively consigned to immobility and darkness, despite having just pulled off one of the lengthiest and most daring escapes in fugitive slave history. And, as in Child’s play, this symbolic confinement resonates with the struggle to reconcile race as free signifier with race as bodily fact, and disability emerges as the product and anchor of that struggle.
There appears to be no question that Ellen experienced bouts of physical illness during her life after slavery. However, the ways she is described not only in her narrative but by biographers and abolitionists seem significant beyond their basis in her physical experience. For example, “in letters to a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Mary Estlin . . . said of Ellen ‘I think Ellen’s health has never sufficiently recovered the shock of their cruel persecution in Boston to make her equal to all the tossing about she has since had to encounter and I’m never so happy as when she is under our immediate protection’” (Sterling 41). An abolitionist wrote of the attempt to kidnap William and Ellen under the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston in 1850, “Somebody took care of Ellen Craft. William less needed help; he armed himself with pistols . . . and walked in the streets in the face of the sun” (qtd. in Craft and Craft 100). Ellen needs “protection”; she needs to be taken “care” of. Certainly these descriptions are inflected by gender and race, by assumptions about frail females and dependent slaves. But those inflections intersect with statements about Ellen’s health to portray her in reality as the invalid we previously knew as a fraudulent construction.28 Thus at the very moment of the successful manipulation of fantasies of identification to achieve freedom, those fantasies emerge ironically with the apparent power to redefine the resistant subject into her immobilized double.
The centrality of the disability con to Ellen Craft’s masquerade demonstrates how disability, race, and gender became mutually entangled in the production of both crises of identification and their fantastic solutions. Before turning to other examples of that entanglement in parts II and III, however, extended discussion of the disability con is warranted. Such discussion is crucial for two reasons: first, as indicated in this chapter, analyses of race and gender in American culture have rarely integrated disability as an equally constructed and significant social category, and thus focused attention to disability is needed to set the stage for discussions of how these identities combine into modern fantasies of identification. Second, as in the preceding discussion of Ellen Craft’s disguise, I will continue to highlight the supplementary dynamic in which disability is not merely another factor entwined with race and gender but often functions in a supplementary role to anchor physical difference. Thus I argue that racial and gendered difference is repeatedly found to be identifiable only through and against the disabled body, and further consideration of the complex constitution of that body is a vital first step.
