Читать книгу Picture Freedom - Jasmine Nichole Cobb - Страница 9
Оглавление1. “A Peculiarly ‘Ocular’ Institution”
An amorphous Atlantic took shape around the enslavement of African peoples. Black bondage fortified a perimeter around the Atlantic world and constituted a burgeoning U.S. identity, as both New England and the U.S. South “flourished under slavery.”1 The execution and the abolition of slavery in the United States functioned to constitute the early republic as part of the Atlantic. As the Atlantic world expanded, playing host to a sprawling dispersal, “changes across [its] time, space, and jurisdiction” appear at the intimate level of a single household up through the remote relations of metropole and colony.2 Visual culture provided measures for the assessment of fitness or belonging, as both pictures and practices represent sites of confrontation among unfree African descendants and Whites who held them in captivity.
Fugitive Freedom in the Atlantic
Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman sat for her portrait (figure 1.1) as a free woman in 1811.3 This amateur painting by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick pictures Freeman well dressed in Federalist-period clothing. In addition to her blue dress, Freeman dons a white fichu to cover her cleavage and a white bonnet to cover her head. Her clothing choices depict Freeman as a respectable free woman in possession of her own body, while the adornment of her gold necklace adds a flourish of conspicuousness to the image (figure 1.2). Freeman’s portrait reflected her “regal love of the solid, & the splendid wear” of fine “chintzes and silks.”4 Although her body sits askew from the artist, Freeman’s side-eye stare meets the viewer of her portrait. This image, in a gilded frame, pictures a woman who achieved emancipation by confrontation and by a clear sense of entitlement to the founding values that defined the colonial United States in the context of an evolving Atlantic world. Freeman’s decision to sit for a portrait represents a conscious invocation of the visual on her part, a moment in which she applied her sense of self-possession to the terms of looking and being seen that, in part, defined chattel slavery.
Figure 1.1. Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, 1811. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Freeman’s other very poignant disrespect to slavery’s structure of the visual is central to the story of her formal pursuit of freedom. Catherine Maria Sedgwick drafted a lengthy account of Freeman’s life as a free and paid servant to the Sedgwick family, which the English literary magazine Bentley’s Miscellany published in 1853.5 According to Sedgwick, “action was the law” of Freeman’s “nature,” and thus, for her, “servitude was intolerable.”6 Sedgwick’s account of Freeman’s life begins with an account of Freeman’s servitude under her abusive former violent mistress, Ms. Ashley. One day, when “making the patrole of her kitchen” [sic], “Madame Ashley” observed that Freeman’s sister Lizzy, “a sickly timid creature,” had reserved scraps of dough from a “wheaten cake” she had baked for the Ashley family in order to make her own. Madame Ashley, enraged, labeled Lizzy a “thief” before she “siezed [sic] a large iron shovel red hot from cleaning the oven, & raised it over the terrified girl.” However, before the shovel could land on Lizzy, Freeman “interposed” her body, taking the blow instead. Ashley cut Freeman to the bone with the hot shovel, leaving her with “a frightful scar” for the rest of her life. However, in a recurring act of resistance, Freeman regularly brandished the scar to visitors of the Ashley home. When Freeman reflected on the incident, she explained that although she had “a bad arm all winter,” she made sure that “Madam had the worst of it.” Freeman refused to cover the scar, and when visitors asked Freeman what happened, she replied, “ask Misses.” Freeman displayed her wounded body to undermine Ashley’s womanhood, purposefully using her insurrectionary exhibition to pose the question, “Which was the slave, & which the real mistress?” Freeman’s question queried domesticity as a White woman’s gender norm as well as a privilege determined by the space of the home. The sympathy Freeman intentionally invoked from visitors when exposing her scar potentially dislodged Ashley’s designation as “mistress” of the house, even if briefly. Freeman used the scar to assert her own domesticity and to punish Mistress Ashley. Where the home served as the arena for White women to display domesticity, Freeman’s presentation took up that space as a site of refutation and reassertion. She ignored slavery’s customary practice of denying Black pain and White culpability, she undermined predeterminations of domesticity through the way in which she maneuvered within the Ashley home, offering her body as evidence of her owner’s malfeasance.
Figure 1.2. A bracelet of gold beads made from Freeman’s necklace. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Freeman confronted the racial visual order of slavery, both through the portrait and through the ability to conjure sympathy via the display of her wound. Freeman refuted the daily practice of Black women’s subjugation within the intimate confines of the home and at the hands of White women through recourse to the visual. Social interaction in the context of slavery required that unfree Black women like Lizzy and Freeman live and work as invisible helpmates who made life easier for White women like Ashley. Freeman challenged these conventions by drawing attention to White crimes and Black women’s corporeal needs. In this context, Freeman’s acts functioned as cultural transgressions. Freeman’s offering of a free Black woman for portrait and her confrontation with Mistress Ashley represent measures that destabilized slavery’s architecture of visual domination. In the intimate proximity of the master’s home, Freeman used her body in defense of her sister, Lizzie. She then revealed her body to shame Mistress Ashley in front of others, and finally, she covered her body but focused her eyes for the sake of creating a picture. In all of these instances, Freeman defied a visual terrain steeped in the suppression of Black women’s self-possession and unaccustomed to Black women’s self-appointed pictures.
My aim in this book is to discuss the ways in which picturing freedom intervened in slavery’s institutionalized visual culture and to reveal exhibitions of freedom as disruptive to this visual landscape. Although the picturing element of this scenario involves some actual illustrations, like Freeman’s portrait, we can also think of the flickering glance that might have accompanied the display of her wound as another tool that Freeman used to force Ashley to picture freedom. Each of these appeals to the visual divulges the way in which Black people’s demonstrations of freedom in the context of slavery were problematic. In this chapter, I describe the way in which the organization and maintenance of chattel slavery intertwined the racial and the visual. I argue that this intricate formulation made the appearance of freedom a difficult thing to discern in its earliest occurrences. Drawing on the language of the “peculiar institution,” I describe slavery as a “peculiarly ocular institution” that utilized an unstable visual logic of race to enslave persons of African descent and to protect Whites from the threat of the gaze. The term “peculiar institution,” coined by South Carolina senator John Calhoun in the nineteenth century, describes slavery as oddly intransient given its conceptual necessity to White prosperity.7 Referring to slavery as “the peculiar institution” helped to diminish the unpleasant realities of slavery and allowed its advocates to argue for the perpetuation of bondage while removing the human connotation associated with the term. Offering a theory of the “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution,” I mean to underscore slavery’s visual culture as an impediment to recognizing freedom. Moreover, I offer this notion to contextualize Black visuality as shaped by and resistant to slavery’s visual culture. This theory of the peculiarly ocular nature of slavery frames the reception of freedom and the new tactics of spectatorship that I describe throughout this book.
The mediation of slavery was also central to the institutionalization of this peculiar visual culture as early print media helped to circulate a set of racio-visual codes to readers and viewers throughout the Atlantic world. Much of the print material involved in the transatlantic transport of Africans for enslavement, from auction advertisements to runaway notices, emphasized physical traits, sometimes with the help of illustrations, and targeted White viewers. I offer an analysis of these items below to explain how media conjured a racio-visual logic in support of slavery. Thinking through visual culture as a “generative” site for the deployment of slaving ideologies, I describe the runaway and the mediation of the runaway as distinct, but interrelated, examples of slavery’s visual assumptions.8 Whereas media supporting slavery helped proliferate the visual construction of race, the runaway forcibly destabilized these presumptions.
Media in support of slavery points to the runaway as a distinctive problem, but I collect these reclamations of freedom under the rubric of fugitivity. While slavery alone was enough to initiate a perpetual state of “not belonging” for people of African descent, the fugitive conditions of homelessness and obscurity also correspond to exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery. Whites often curiously regarded demonstrations of freedom among Black people in the context of slavery, receiving such displays as out of place. Even someone like Freeman might have been somewhat of a mystery to Whites, both in her ability to manipulate the visual terms of slavery in the Ashley house as well as in her demonstration of freedom through portraiture. Yet, the confounding nature of Black freedom in the context of slavery did not result from the “fugitive vision” of exceptional Black people who transformed from unfree to free cultural producers, but from the way in which slavery intertwined race and visuality.9 I argue that displays of Black freedom took up the questions of legibility and home that defined fugitivity and haunted the transatlantic. The idea and the image of the Black fugitive symbolized insurgence against both a specific master who properly “owned” the runaway, and against the state, which depended upon Black people’s compliance with slavery as the rule of law. Blacks who ran away were fugitives from justice but also fugitives from an evolving conception of the Atlantic world as home. While slavery constructed people of African descent as legible and comprehensible, freedom and fugitive freedom took up illegibility as permanent conditions that countered the parlor’s reliance on slavery.
Even the juridical demand for freedom took up the issue of fugitivity in the face of the transatlantic slave trade. Freeman’s reclamation of liberty explicitly proposed questions about home and belonging in a transatlantic landscape. Freeman managed both local and large-scale notions of domesticity in the process of resisting slavery. She was one of the first people of African descent to sue for liberation in the United States, filing one of the earliest “freedom suits” in the state of Massachusetts in 1781.10 In Sedgwick’s narrative of Freeman’s life, she reports on Freeman’s experience of hearing a public reading of the Declaration of Independence in Sheffield, Massachusetts, from which Freeman discerned that U.S. Americans’ right to liberty from England translated to her right to freedom from Whites and from slavery. On hearing “that paper read yesterday that says ‘all men are born equal—&, that every man has a right to freedom,’” Freeman asked, “‘wont the law give me my freedom?’”11 Freeman’s idea that the Declaration of Independence applied to her is indicative of her notion of a transatlantic belonging as a precedent to U.S. national identity. Her pursuit of emancipation was not yet about her right to U.S. citizenship, but about her right to the freedom to which people in the colonial United States were entitled in the Atlantic world.
My interest is about how the fugitive element of exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery called attention to the ways in which people of African descent confronted the visual conditions of slavery by acting outside its institutional presets of interracial interactions. Spectacular exhibitions of freedom problematized and abraded the visual culture of slavery. Fugitive free Blacks reveal that the enslaved might outwardly appear resigned even while calculating escape. Fugitive free people of African descent masterfully understood assumptions about race, vision, and visuality, and then used this knowledge to steal themselves and upend the foundational assumptions of slavery’s visual culture. The ascertainment of freedom by way of fugitivity suggested a calculated incongruence between the outward appearance of the Black body and the internal perceptions of the unfree person. Freeman’s commitment to her sister may have made running away a less likely choice for her—a notion consistent with the fact that most runaways were men.12 Nonetheless, her method of achieving liberty still conjured questions of domestic belonging and an opaque display of freedom meant to torment her abuser. My description of slavery’s peculiar visual culture is meant to situate early exhibitions of freedom within a fraught and domineering context for reception. This chapter explains the visual culture of slavery as one undergirded by an unreliable praxis that depended on “visible” signifiers of race to conflate seeing and subjectivity, to racialize the eye/I. Whereas the practices of transatlantic slavery institutionalized a visual construction of race and racial ways of seeing, late-eighteenth-century assertions of Black freedom offered interruption.
A Peculiar Ocularity
Slavery functioned as a peculiarly “ocular” institution. Its daily execution thrived in a racio-visual economy that determined ways of seeing and ways of being seen according to racial difference. In trying to imagine the visual culture of slavery, one might most immediately consider the routine monitoring of bondspersons’ behavior on plantations since this was central to slavery’s policing tactics. C. Riley Snorton asserts that “plantation governance schemes” and the role of the overseer, in particular, were chief among slavery’s practices of visual domination.13 Additionally, the whole process of chattel slavery relied heavily upon visual culture wherein the idea of the eye was a matter of racialization. Indeed, to possess both the eye and an “I” was a matter of raciality in the context of slavery. The divisions of social power into White or Black also parsed the faculty of sight into discrete racial categories. More specifically, slavery organized an omniscient White eye/I to police and manage Black bodies, constructing sight as a racially distinct experience, and as the sovereign domain of Whiteness. Summarily, slavery parsed visibility along racial lines as well, distinguishing and racializing people of African descent from Whites through the presumption of an innate visibility. Whereas practices of enslavement relied on the eye within social encounters, the visual culture of slavery constructed race and racialized the act of seeing.
But slavery’s peculiar ocularity was more than the mere visual habits that made slavery possible. By slavery’s peculiar ocularity, I mean the very specific visual idiosyncrasies and contradictions utilized within the visual logics of slavery that were at once contrary and commonplace in early U.S. life. These visual logics of racial decorum were irrational, unreliable, and often collided with one another, even as they were crucial to enslavement philosophies. For example, while Whites exercised visual authority over Blacks, there were also numerous instances of Black overseers or “drivers”; these Black overseers could be as cruel or more benign than their White counterparts, but their race meant that their authority was limited by law. Black slave drivers existed somewhere between official White overseers and enslaved Blacks in this peculiar visual culture.14 To think of slavery as a peculiarly ocular institution is to think of how systemic bondage fetishized a connection between vision and race in ways that were simultaneously nonsensical and naturalized. Slavery entailed a tautological, and thus self-sustaining, visual rationale. The peculiar visual practices of slavery happened in the day-to-day processes of enslavement that inconsistently used the eye to determine signifiers of race, and thereby determine social, economic, political, and visual possibilities. Slavery organized a strange approach to race that emphasized sight and intertwined raciality with visuality. The hegemony of slavery’s peculiar ocularity relied on visibility to enslave, and relied on invisibility to carry out slavery with feigned innocence. Slavery coded Black raciality as visible, and thus associated the denial of freedom with racial perceptibility. Not only did the sight of persons of African descent first suggest they should be enslaved, but, more importantly, the habitation of an observable racial identity coincided with enslavement, over time. This kind of racio-visual logic persisted, making it necessary for free Black people to furnish paperwork to prove their freedom to random Whites in northern U.S. states, and for all persons of African descent to live under the suppressive scrutiny of various “codes” to legislate proper behavior.15
Saidiya Hartman’s canonic text offers up the term “scenes of subjection” as language useful for thinking through the overdetermination of Blackness in the field of vision, or hypervisibility, where forced displays of jubilee and the sight of the coffle were essential to characterizations of Blackness as inherently spectacular.16 The theater of slavery—the scenes of violence and order—existed for disciplining race, with noted accentuation on pain and the “spectacle of power.”17 The visible Black body appeared on display for the sake of White pleasure and Black terror. In the moment that Black bodies met the subjugation of slavery, they simultaneously encountered the visual ordering of race. In written details about skin color, hair texture, and overall physicality, slavery theorized Black raciality as an observable phenomenon as early as the moment of purchase. Unfree Africans were often “graded” in the slave market, delineated as “Second Rate or Ordinary Men,” sometimes “Extra Girls or No. 1 Girls,” as “slave speculators” tried to rate the value of human cargo against other goods like cotton or sugar.18 Not only did these tactics assign fiscal value to Black bodies, but descriptions were part of an overall practice of closely examining unfree people. Scenes of subjection happened through both intimate and distant forms of social contact. The peculiarly ocular institution transformed the display of individual unfree people into a large-scale cultural practice of constant observation, prefiguring Black bodies and people of African descent as demanding surveillance. This approach to the visual imagined the Black body as intrinsically visible, as decipherable. The construction of vision and visibility in the context of slavery also organized Black raciality around an inherent need for management or oversight from Whites.
Ironically, although slavery’s visual matrix positioned Blackness as a visible phenomenon, this unreliable visual culture also projected unfree people of African descent as deftly capable of a sly invisibility. Mainstream belief in the idea of Black visibility happened in concert with a perpetual suspicion about unfree Blacks trying to escape. Although the coffle situated the Black body as an entity on view for the White eye/I, the ever-present possibility of escape also positioned unfree Black people as likely to avoid observation. This coupling imagined people of African descent as simultaneously easily observable and also requiring special techniques of visual policing. Black bodies were both hypervisible and yet capable of a certain invisibility. For example, in mid-eighteenth-century New York City, Whites in local government enforced laws requiring enslaved persons to be indoors after sundown or to carry candle lights (as well as explanatory passes) after dark; lawmakers made it illegal for an unfree Black (body) to be unlit after dark.19 The idea that technological intervention helped illuminate the Black body advanced the idea that without help, Black people could easily avoid White surveillance in the colonial United States. These social practices imagined that Black skin was able to evade visibility, or the White gaze, despite the way in which Black corporeality was thought of as uniquely palpable. Mandating Black illumination constructed Black skin as textured in such a way as to avoid visual faculties. Accordingly, slavery required surveillance and public vigilance against a deceptive Black visibility. Such beliefs fanaticized the Black body’s inherent ability to evade observation and its ability to deceive even the most astute White observer.
This condition of hypervisibility depended upon the suppression of a Black gaze. Although slavery constructed the Black body as deceptive, the matrix also construed unfree Black people as devoid of the ability to properly see, prefiguring them as visible objects that lacked the ability to consciously manipulate notions of visuality. The matrix of slavery’s peculiar visual culture meant to suppress the Black eye/I. In the daily practice of slavery, many Whites failed to recognize that enslaved Black people engaged in processes of observation, or that they monitored Whites’ behaviors. Likewise, the system of slavery failed to entertain the existence of an inner Black subject, with a sense of will, who realized her own mistreatment or violation.20 These social beliefs appear in records of unfree Black house servants who listened in on White people’s conversations.21 In this rubric, slavery’s atrocities happened to individuals who were supposedly unable to critically observe acts of sexual assault and kidnapping. When Whites did not presume that Black people were unable to cast a critical eye on the system of slavery, they demanded that unfree people look away. For example, if a bonded man or woman delivered the wrong kind of “look” toward a free White, such an offense was deemed disrespectful to the individual and to slavery’s power relations—a punishable crime in the state of Virginia.22 Whites socially mandated that people of African descent avoid issuing looks in service of the maintenance of slavery.
Accordingly, slavery’s peculiarly unreliable visual culture entailed a number of inconsistencies that helped maintain constant distinctions of race. African descendants could not avoid visibility, but the law required that they make themselves visible to White sight. Similarly, unfree Blacks inherently lacked any kind of critical perception, but the law forbade them from looking at Whites. The peculiar nature of visual culture in the context of slavery mimicked the strange nature of ocularity in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In the presence of transatlantic slavery, “a deep belief in knowing by seeing” emerged as “key” to race relations.23 Cartesian dualism lent visual credence to its power structures, producing an unrelenting faith in the “disembodied eye” in popular culture as well as within intellectual discourses. Whereas within this “ontology of sight,” as described by Martin Jay, “the one who casts the look is always a subject and the one who is its target is always turned into an object,” ocularity within the context of the Enlightenment easily attached itself to philosophies of race and enslavement.24 The subjective “I” found its underpinning in the Cartesian “eye,” and thus the racialization of subjectivity also enlisted the visual. To put it differently, early ruminations on the eye/I always already trafficked in conceptions of race. Enlightenment theories of the visual were imbedded within the proliferation of slavery. The eye as dissociated from corporeality accommodated a larger context that severed Whiteness from the body. Similarly, emphasis on the utility value of the Black body or Blackness as pure embodiment rendered persons of African descent as devoid of ocular faculties. The construction of ocularity in the period of Enlightenment established the ability to see, or the state of being visual, as connected to raciality. Bodies prefigured as visible, and thus racialized, necessarily remained distant from any practices of looking. Slavery united the racial and the visual through everyday practices. These philosophical ruminations on the eye, perspective, and corporeality (as associated with Descartes) are not severed from the practices of slavery that they helped to facilitate. These racial distinctions within the visual neatly connected to the Cartesian notion of subjectivity, problematically parsing the individual into mind or body, eye or embodiment.
Although a number of laws and social practices emphasized the significance of the Black body and unfree Black people to the system of slavery, notions of the White eye were also fundamental to the inconsistent nature of this peculiar institution. Acts such as locating Africans for kidnapping and identifying individuals who were “strong” enough to withstand the Middle Passage constructed slavers as gifted in assessing bodies for subjugation. Particularly when it came to purchasing chattel, slavery demanded an expert White eye/I to examine the bodies of potential purchases. Yet, while it took a certain innate visual skill to choose people of African descent who were good investments, slavery’s marketplace actively existed as a place of illusions where Whites oiled unfree people to make them appear strong, fed Blacks enough to make them look healthy, and prodded them to seem joyous. Walter Johnson explains that “being a ‘good judge of slaves’” was an important attribute for southern White men, making “the inspection and evaluation of black slaves” a central part of social hierarchy and one’s “public identity.”25 The “White man’s” ability to “see” enslaved people was a notable skill, even as Johnson notes that Whites in charge of trading took care to physically alter Black bodies for sale, shaving beards, dying hair, feeding them fatty diets, and forcing them to dance.26 In the transactions of slavery, the Black body represented the terrain on which Whites attempted to trick other Whites, or to demonstrate their own expertise. The White eye/I could simultaneously exist as expert at the slave market, and as one who suffered deception there as well.
The investiture of Whiteness with exceptional visual abilities is one of slavery’s most peculiar offerings. The cultivation of Whiteness through the faculties of the eye represents a key element of slavery’s visual domination. Although “slavery operated behind a certain invisibility, as far as its European beneficiaries were concerned,” where European colonists could avoid visual encounters with enslaved peoples and colonized territories geographically removed from the empire, slavery also helped to render Whiteness invisible by diminishing the specificity of the White body.27 The establishment of “White” as a racial group happened through a number of processes in the U.S. context, and slavery’s visual culture was one of them. Matthew Frye Jacobson describes the “making” of “Caucasians,” where the cultivation of White raciality “is not merely [about] how races are comprehended, but how they are seen.” Jacobson exposes the intertwining of citizenship with Whiteness in the nation’s founding documents, simultaneous to questions of immigration, naturalization, and the abolition of slavery.28 Connecting Whites and citizenship made ascending to Whiteness a politically salient project for immigrants. Over time, White bodies became unmarked by race as the “possessive investment in whiteness,” from the colonial period onward, happened through the articulation of non-Whiteness, through emphasis on the specificity of Native, African, Asian, and Mexican American bodies.29 The importance of distinction helped to obscure White raciality by rendering Whiteness as an achievement, by making “White” a thing of racial ascendance for European ethnic immigrants trying to assimilate. To be recognized as White was to be recognized in relation to both Black and White servitude. Of the vast number of unskilled Europeans who immigrated to the colonial United States, one-half to two-thirds of them sold themselves into indentured service for five to seven years, facing hardships similar to slavery on a day-to-day basis, notwithstanding the “length of bondage and the involuntary and hereditary nature of slavery” as a unique and unfortunate distinction for African descendants.30 White servants in the colonial United States often identified as English, Scots, Irish, and German immigrants, and they also ran away from servitude because of brutal punishment. The appearance of “white” skin helped many indentured servants escape, although, at times, Celtic accents or tattered clothing gave them away, leading to their recapture.31 Nonetheless, these instances reveal how tracking down Whites to reinstitute their servitude required attending to multiple characteristics besides the appearance of the body. So while some would-be Whites could not instantly lay claim to slavery’s organization of White invisibility, the ability to call on the privileges of Whiteness in social interaction and, more importantly, the ability to be seen as other than a “slave” brought some degree of leverage for European immigrants that people of African descent were not afforded. A White “convict servant maid, named SARAH WILSON” ran away from her master and changed her name to “lady Susanna Carolina Matilda,” which she offered to make “the public believe that she was his Majesty’s sister.” Along with the name change, Sarah/Susanna made her clothes “with a Crown and a B” to support her story.32 Sarah/Susanna could move into another kind of visibility in the context of the colonial United States, transitioning from the object of surveillance to presenting herself as fit for observing others.
The remarkable White runaway Benjamin Franklin provides another useful example of how some indentured servants could utilize the visual apparatus of slavery to their advantage. Franklin’s body was rife for surveillance when he suffered a brutal apprenticeship under his brother James Franklin of Boston. Like other White indentured servants, Franklin lived under conditions that inherently involved scrutiny and management by some other more powerful person. However, Franklin quickly took to self-invention and began to act as free during his brother’s incarceration for printing seditious comments in his own newspaper. Franklin’s White privilege enabled him to establish relationships with other Whites and flee to Philadelphia under the auspices of “being” a free man.33 The idea of Franklin’s White body created opportunities for other kinds of visibilities, apart from servitude, allowing him to run away and pass into a class of seemingly self-made free White men. Franklin navigated the early republic as a nondescript, free White, and not simply a European ethnic, because of the ways in which the public received Whiteness in a slave society. Not only could he refuse the positions of surveillance that came along with servitude, but he could also presume visibility at his pleasure. When Franklin decided to publish essays and put his name on the masthead in his brother’s New England Courier newspaper, he assumed a right to be seen as a free White man, even as he remained unfree on paper.34 Franklin’s servitude and his freedom demonstrate how, although not every European descendant automatically achieved the full privileges allotted to Whiteness on a spectrum of race, they also were not visually barred from national inclusion solely and permanently on the basis of skin color. Franklin moved from indentured to free because he could rely on a viewing public to treat him as free, despite what his brother might say. White servitude illustrates ownership as a factor in the achievement of invisibility, although it is not the entire story. White servants could not claim invisibility in the same ways that White owners could, but many indentured servants aspired toward this visual role, and slavery’s racio-visual order provided various routes to this position. As David Waldstreicher writes, “Whites must be seen to be white,” and yet “whiteness as power is maintained by being unseen.”35 Slavery organized White invisibility around the cultivation of Whiteness as unhinged from the physical body. Whiteness existed in privileges exclusive of or closed off to people of African descent. Through slavery, Whiteness became the racial identity that seemed, strangely, least racialized and yet best able to morph into other racial performances at will.36 The emergence of Blackface minstrelsy exacerbated the constructed irrelevance of White corporeality within slavery’s visual culture. David Roediger explains that minstrel performers were self-consciously White, using Blackface to illustrate that fact for audiences, and issuing playbills that emphasized the contrasts between the “reality” of the White performer and the transformation into a performance of Black raciality.37 Visually, the peculiar institution helped to diminish the significance of White corporeality. Slavery’s peculiar ocularity advantageously denied the way in which the White body remained just as present in the act of slavery as the Black body. Whites used Black bodies in the most utilitarian sense, to plow, to build, to labor, to nurse, to pleasure, and although White bodies remained ever-present in these encounters, the position of visual authority helped to diminish White corporeality. Whiteness earned invisibility within the social processes of slavery by occupying multiple roles of surveillance within the procedures of enslavement. Unfettered by the physical body, the White I/eye could be everywhere, and always. Here, Whites were always on the lookout, and never to be looked at.
Mediating the Runaway
Media in support of slavery typically figured Whites as particularly gifted in the realm of sight. Print items hailed White viewers, objectified Black bodies, and nurtured Whiteness as a viewing position. A diverse array of print ephemera, such as auction advertisements, runaway advertisements, and pickup notices, traveled to readers throughout the northern and southern U.S. states. White viewership became essential to the institutionalization of slavery’s visual culture, as print media undergirded the slave economy. Slaving media, then, normalized Whiteness as a disembodied viewing position by excluding slavers, auctioneers, purchasers, owners, and catchers from the page. Instead, these items announced the arrival of new chattel for sale or called on the White viewing public to assist in the reclamation of enslaved property—all summarily emphasizing the specificity of the Black body and deemphasizing the White body. A still-burgeoning U.S. media industry became central to the buying and selling of chattel persons with advertisements that invited free White viewers, specifically, to visit auction sites and view scantily clad Black bodies for display and for purchase.
Print media offered a strong foundation for the reification of a peculiar visual culture. Various advertisements in support of slavery appeared in colonial newspapers and cheap broadsides during the first one hundred years of U.S. news printing, after the 1690 issue of the Publick Occurrences Both Foreign and Domestick, and before the expanded circulation of the penny press.38 While real-time racialized practices of looking governed interracial encounters within domestic personal spaces such as the farm and the home, print cultures mediated Black bodies and Black freedom as unnatural and unlawful in the domestic space of the nation. These items buttressed a visual culture of domination by disseminating visual codes of race to larger and more varied audiences. While a limited number of free Whites might have been present to see a designated number of enslaved Africans sold at auction, the auction advertisement perpetuated this culture of looking at Black bodies by sharing information about the sale across a large geographical area to more viewers than might have been convened to witness the marketplace. With its wide and regular occurrence—printers could issue their papers on a daily basis by the late eighteenth century—the print media connected to slavery made the institution’s governing racial precepts more permanent and prevalent in the public imaginary.
Media portrayals representing unfree Blacks calcified slavery’s peculiar ocularity by further enlisting White viewers into skewed visual dynamics. Although these materials targeted property-owning Whites, the cultivation of Whiteness as a viewing position cut across designations of free, indentured servants and property owners. At the level of interpellation, slaving media “hailed” White viewers, asking them to understand that print materials were speaking to them, directly.39 Print media called upon Whites to imagine themselves as the intended audience for the mediation of slavery and to participate in slavery’s culture of surveillance. Slavers readily enlisted print to help control the “slave population” by cultivating “a network of interested onlookers” to protect Whites from property loss.40 Slavery advertisements functioned as perceptual documents, as materials that taught Whites how to see Blackness, but also encouraged Whites to believe that Blackness was a thing to see, and that White subjectivity functioned as a domain for looking. Slavery’s media further promoted the development of a White eye/I by focusing attention on Black bodies and away from White bodies, especially away from Whites who were actively involved in the processes of enslaving others. Print media insinuated a White audience—a band of readers for whom literacy was not outlawed. It further invested Whiteness with the power to look, and encouraged Whites to remain on the lookout for people of African descent.
The runaway notice was the most prevalent and most powerful example of media used to develop White viewership. Runaway advertisements in regional newspapers circulated across state boundaries to inform the public, both literate and illiterate, that an owner or an overseer needed (and would pay for) assistance in retrieving fugitive property. Runaway notices are important to the visual archive because they were among the earliest pictures of Black freedom; they portrayed people of African descent more negatively than all of slavery’s media materials did. These items pictured Black freedom as stolen, situated among other kinds of theft; frequently, they marked runaways as unstable individuals who represented a danger to law-abiding persons. Runaway notices detail Blacks doing more than just absconding; Blacks are also depicted as stealing clothes, passing as White, and using “passes” given to run errands in order to escape. The accompanying illustrations are standard images of “free” men and women, Blacks depicted without chains and shown in motion, often with one foot off the ground. Images of an enslaved figure seemingly on the run, in possession of stolen goods, the body itself a stolen good, shown with an enlarged monetary amount on the page, called out to Whites to watch for Black fugitives and to remain attentive to free Black people, in general. Runaway materials imagined fugitive Black people as elusive figures who treacherously evaded visual attention by deploying various tricks to manipulate their bodies and to deceive White owners. Runaway notices picture freedom (unlike the abolitionist material I discuss later) as the sly cultivation of tropes that tricked the eye. They reveal fugitive Blacks as “confidence men” and women who seized clothing, literacy skills, manual labor skills, and local spatial knowledge to escape enslavement and to erode public confidence in the institution of slavery.41 Media meant to assist in the capture or retrieval of Black bodies imagined them as uniquely visible, open to the scope of the White gaze or duplicitous in their attempts to “pass” for free. Ironically, these publications also revealed how runaways capitalized on slavery’s peculiar visual culture, showing that while slavery demanded a deferred gaze from unfree persons as a signal of deference, fugitive free Blacks actively manipulated these demands on Black spectorial practice.42 Such a discrepancy only intensified anxieties of observation.
Picturing freedom in slavery’s media meant imagining Black freedom as wholly problematic. Runaway notices indicate that the first and farthest-reaching illustrations of freedom were derogatory. Quite simply, in their existence and their format, runaway notices imagined Black freedom as misbegotten and volatile. Postings with bold letters that described “RUNAWAY,” both as a person and an action, illustrated with a Black figure in motion, helped to assert freedom as a stolen entity, further diminishing the sense that slavery purloined life and labor from Black bodies. Additional details included in runaway advertisements also organized Black freedom as dangerous. Many runaway ads described multiple kinds of theft: the fugitive body, clothing taken for disguise, as well as pilfered horses and weapons. Runaway advertisements were intended to help the public identify very specific individuals who escaped custody. Printed notices about fugitive free Blacks attempted to give precise details about “the demeanor, dress, speech, character, abilities, background, and possible destination of runaway slaves” to describe them more robustly than any other depiction of unfree persons during this period.43 Through word and image, these materials “recreated the slave’s body as a living and moving text” that encouraged viewers to read the Black body, to find the scars, brandings and wounds described in the announcements on the physical person.44 Runaway notices attended to the specificity of the individual fugitive rather than to the collective bounty. Runaway advertisements helped to parse unfree Blacks into legible groups or “personality types” such as “‘surly,’ ‘sour,’ ‘impudent,’ and ‘bold’” in one category; “‘shy,’ ‘complaisant,’ and of ‘meek countenance’” in another; and “‘cunning,’ ‘artful,’ ‘sensible,’ ‘ingenious,’ and ‘smooth tongued’” in a third.”45 These descriptors represented the needs of White owners attempting to make sense of Black runaways, after the fact. They pictured free Blacks as crafty and visually fraudulent, disrespectful and wild, for running away from slavery.
The specificity of the individual runaway notice was somewhat undercut by pairing them with images of Black bodies taken from larger sheets of newspaper cuts or prototypes. The salience of advertising to the early U.S. print industry emphasized the role of pictures in relaying messages to consumers. These advertisements similarly imaged the figure of a mobile Black body bound for escape, despite other kinds of textual distinctions. Images were an important aspect of the mediation of slavery because depictions of Black bodies may have made runaway notices and auction advertisements understandable to an illiterate populace. Most Whites throughout the colonial United States remained illiterate well into the nineteenth century, although literacy rates for White adults in the northeastern states were generally higher than in the southern and western territories due to their unique economic, geographic, and historical conditions.46 Literacy rates were difficult to determine, even once U.S. census takers began accounting for the “literate” and “illiterate” class for the 1840 survey. Moreover, a literate individual might have been able to read or write, but not necessarily both, since many people learned to read first, and then received separate instruction in writing. The ability to sign one’s name was often a marker of literacy in the colonial United States, but this determinant only revealed itself in a class of people privileged to sign property documents, such as wills and deeds.47 Pictures cut across all of these designations, appealing to various kinds of readers. Both literate and illiterate Whites could discern the meaning of the stereotyped figure of a runaway. Numerous advertisements for runaways often appeared on a single page of a newspaper, like the sheet from the South Carolina Gazette shown as figure 1.3. Both ads are headlined “RUNAWAY,” but the top notice for “a tall, slim, black negro wench, named JENNY” may not have been as accessible as the lengthier ad below for “Saul,” “Charlotte,” and “Fortune,” a man “notoriously known for his Villainy.” This notice illustrated three different people with the stock illustration of a presumably “African” person—in motion, clad in nativist garb, carrying a stick.48 Not only does the image distinguish one ad from the other, but it also helps the longer ad stand out on a page among other kinds of images.
Black women were in precarious positions once framed within the confines of the runaway notice. First, as mothers, Black women runaways needed to choose between leaving their children behind or taking them on the run. A number of Black women ran away from slavery while pregnant. Although “it was not easy to feed, clothe, care for, and protect children” in these scenarios, a number of women did, as indicated by notices that list an infant “at the breast” of a runaway.49 Still, other women who were not nursing children might find their bodies described in advertisements in ways that invited sexual objectification. A “mulatto woman, named Silvie” ran away with a fifteen year-old boy, “Joseph,” but the ad directs readers to look for a “flat belly, and a mark on both sides of her breast” when trying to identify this woman.50 Such a description gave further license to any would-be captor to examine Silvie’s body—or that of any Black woman presumed to be Silvie—should they find her.
This objectification might have informed Harriet Jacobs’s method of getaway. In Jacobs’s retelling of her escape from the Norcom plantation to her grandmother’s house, she navigates the flight by passing for a free Black sailor. Jacobs describes “Linda Brent,” the pseudonymous Jacobs, donning “a suit of sailor’s clothes—jacket, trousers, and tarpaulin hat.” She punctuated this ensemble with a masculine “rickety gate” and by “blackening” her face with “charcoal.”51 Jacobs’s decision to present herself as a free Black sailor rendered her “invisible on the street” in a way that she might not have experienced if she merely stole typical dress clothes and ran away.52 Jacobs intended this theatrical appearance to place her among numerous Black sailors for whom no one in particular may have been looking. Free and enslaved Black seafarers sailed through every north Atlantic seaport from as early as 1740.53 Moreover, if Jacobs anticipated her owner issuing a runaway notice for her capture, this presentation bore little resemblance to the description of her in the advertisement. James Norcom’s published description of Jacobs in an 1835 issue of the American Beacon typified runaway advertisements, presuming that Jacobs manipulated her race and costume in effort to escape. Describing Jacobs as a “light mulatto” with thick black hair “that curls naturally” but can “be easily combed straight,” Norcom suggested that Jacobs might not be immediately recognizable as someone else’s property. Offering extensive details, Norcom warned the public that Jacobs may be on the run, “tricked out in gay and fashionable finery,” clothing that she likely made herself.54 Norcom imagined Jacobs through slavery’s peculiar visual culture and its corresponding media framework. Within this structure, Jacobs should be seeking Whiteness and dressing as a free woman, not accentuating her Blackness. Jacob’s successful escape reveals her ability to evade the structuring vision of the runaway notice, as well as the surveillance of the Norcom plantation.
Figure 1.3. “RUNAWAY, From the Subscriber’s Plantation in St. Stephen’s Parish,” South Carolina Gazette, September 26, 1771.
Conversely, media advertising Black people for sale were far more imaginative than items issued for their recapture. Purchase materials encouraged Whites to visit the auction to choose from an array of able-bodied Black people. In general, media advertising the sale of enslaved persons encouraged more enthusiastic perceptions of Black people. Many of these items eschewed the vilifying language of Black racial identity that appeared on other kinds of advertisements and instead offered favorable reviews about able Black bodies for sale. One advertisement for a “private sale” emphasized the availability of “valuable slaves, mostly this country born” listing nameless persons variously described as “a driver and very good cooper,” a “fisherman boat negro and field slave,” and “a wench who is a good cook, washer and ironer, and dairy and poultry woman.”55 While the actual auction positioned unfree persons as inanimate objects, media promoting the sale of enslaved persons constructed bondspersons as able-bodied service persons. Slave auction advertisements convened audiences to participate in the spectacle of the sale and helped to whet buyers’ appetites. Many of these notices lumped people and objects together such as one ad for “A NEGRO WENCH” listed as a “cook and washerwoman” for sale alongside “a clock, a billiard-table, a chariot,” random other home furnishings, “a parcel of lumber, bricks” and “plantation tools.”56 A number of auction advertisements mentioned the sale of people alongside the sale of hogs, cows, and mules—many listing an entire plantation for sale, one replete with “Three Slaves, about Thirty Hogs, and a Stock of Cattle” to go with several hundred acres of land.57 Most auction advertisements diminished any sense of individuality for enslaved men and women, instead remaking once-free Africans into a large, collective Black mass of washed and oiled bodies available for purchase. And while these descriptions did not recognize the humanity of individual men, women, and children, advertisements did more than promise buyers that the cargo was healthy and capable, paradoxically flattering unfree people as skilled workers.
The images on these materials were distinct as well. A full column of one southern newspaper moved through the various images of Black bodies in the context of slavery, denoting each position with a different image (figure 1.4). The three separate ads for auction emphasized the “CARGO” of “NEGROES” for sale, “choice and healthy,” as indicated by the chiseled muscles. These images positioned the human cargo as ready to work; Blacks are shown wearing loincloths, facing the viewer of the paper, open chested, holding work implements, and waiting for direction. These images contrast sharply with the two figures assigned to the runaway notices. Although the “cargo” is described as docking from Sierra Leone, Barbados, and the Gold Coast, it is the runaways who are imprinted as “foreign,” depicted in nativist garb, holding tools that now signal weaponry, and with one foot off the ground to indicate their movement.58 Arguably, enslaved people of the colonial period were often from identifiable locations outside the United States. However, the contrast in these images depicts the conscious use of indicators of “Africanness” and foreignness to distinguish between people who are committed to working as unfree and people who have broken this agreement by running away. Blackness read as Africanness becomes more relevant, and visible, for Black people who act outside the dictates of slavery’s visual and social contracts.
Pickup notices similarly described the physical attributes of captured Blacks to readers. Jailers used public notices to capture fugitives and to notify owners of the whereabouts of their escaped property. Again, these items connected the idea of the residual “Africanness” of some runaways to the act of fleeing, showing Africanness as a characteristic that accelerated fugitivity and made a captive status harder to maintain. One warden issued a lengthy list of detainees, including two Black women, Clarinds and Lyda, with “country marks” all over their bodies. The warden also reported that these women could report their own names, even though they “cannot” recall the names of their masters.59 The warden does not indicate that Clarinds and Lyda might have purposefully withheld the name of their master. Instead, he focuses readers’ attention toward their bodies and their “country marks.”60 This ad, like others, maneuvered within White certainty about Blackness as self-effacing and failed to consider Black people as calculating. Runaways destabilized certainty about how much Blacks ever genuinely submitted to slavery’s ocularity and called into question every facet of social interaction that occurred before the crime of theft, including the apparent submission to surveillance and the ideology of an undeniably visible Black body.
Figure 1.4. “TO BE SOLD,” South Carolina Gazette, June 30, 1772.
Black Visuality and Performance
Runaways exhibited freedom, which theft helped to obscure. Whereas “performing Blackness” in the context of slavery meant the “‘naturalization’ of blackness” as constituted in “pained contentment,” the expression of Black freedom in the form of fugitivity served as interruption.61 Hartman expertly lays out the way in which the compulsory performances of Blackness under enslavement were about slavery’s use of force and emphasis on the flesh to index a “truth” about Blackness. She goes on to explain that “stealing away” revealed the very sense of agency of which Black bodies were thought to be devoid, such that the runaway “transgressed the law of property” and conceptions of racial essence.62 The act of running away destabilized slavery’s philosophy of an innate and unconscious Black body by revealing the unfree person as calculating and capable of other kinds of presentations. “Performing Blackness” in refutation of slavery was different from the performative experience of subjection and spectacle because it accentuated the limits of domination.
I point this out in order to address the specific array of visual transgressions that distinguished behaving free from behaving unfree, and how those attributes were beyond the pale of the law. Runaways utilized an “intimate understanding of the dominant society’s perception of freedom,” sometimes acquired through watching the free people for whom they worked, to steal themselves and portray themselves as free.63 By using dress, language, and knowledge of White perceptions of Blackness, fugitive free people cultivated carefully honed methods of exhibiting autonomy. In the processes of freeing themselves, the fugitive free made productive use of slavery’s ill-conceived visual matrix by playing to the dictates of the peculiar institution and upending those assumptions at choice moments for escape. While it was illegal for an unfree person to liberate herself from slavery, and sometimes that theft invoked other companion thefts, running away involved a general disobedience about slavery’s visual instructions that haunted the act of escape, even when no other “crime” was committed.
Black people who purportedly feigned freedom also exemplified a regard for the visual aspects of free performance.64 White owners often used the phrase “Pretends to be free” in both northern and southern runaway advertisements, as such designations indicated a special kind of absconder. Runaways who “acted” free were doing more than transgressing the law of property; they were also conducting themselves as free through their interactions with Whites and how they maneuvered in public. These people could be especially devious because they stopped succumbing to slavery’s visual imperatives the moment they left the site of their enslavement. When “A Negroe Wench, named Phebe” ran off from Marcus Hook, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, she did not let the numerous scars on her face and body from her owner’s punishments stop her; she covered them with a handkerchief, took the name “Sarah,” and presumably joined “free Negroes” in Philadelphia or Germantown.65 The markings reported in the notice do not just help would-be captors find Phebe/Sarah, but they also suggest that the signs of slavery on her body do not interrupt her performance. A number of runaways duplicated this routine, even mingling with Whites in the process. When Cato, “alias Toby,” ran away from Middletown, New Jersey, he also ignored the slave markings signed on his body. Richard Stillwell, Cato/Toby’s former owner, warned the public that “he is a sly artful fellow, and deceives the credulous,” potentially mingling with Whites “pretending to tell fortunes, and pretends to be free.” With these tools in his repertoire, Cato stayed gone for at least a year.66 These stories reveal that the stolen clothes were not just for covering the body or masking a “slave status” in quick and fleeting interactions in public. Many fugitives enlisted props for a very elaborate performance of Blackness as free people, performances where they encountered Whites and continued the “act.”
Black runaways relied on elusiveness, and not just the absence of slavery, as an important element of liberty. “The fugitive exposes the groundlessness” of the “distinction between person and property,” even at the potential cost of “silence, invisibility, and placelessness.”67 The choice to be obscure is a central part of redacting concepts of performing Blackness organized through slavery. People who ran away often conducted themselves in a way that resisted being read, despite slavery’s repetitive treatment of the Black body as legible. Daphne Brooks calls the “spectacular opacity” of Black performance onstage a thing of resistance, sometimes erupting and sometimes proffered at will, meant to disrupt demands for transparency from Black performers.68 Offstage, the indiscernible nature of Black performance in the flight to freedom occurred among people who exercised this opacity at will, by both removing themselves from the surveillance of slavery, but also by managing the body and engaging the White gaze in ways that refused transparent readings. Whereas “enslavement” as well as “the resistance to enslavement” constituted the “performative essence of blackness” and “black performance,” the indefinable nature of fugitivity also becomes a constitutive element of Blackness in the field of vision.69 Black runaways materialize the fugitive aspects of performed Blackness, the habitation of opacity and obscurity that occurs across experiences of freedom in the slave era.
The experience of not belonging as part of the fugitive condition manifested even for those African descendants who were born free in the context of slavery. Fugitivity, both as a state of rootlessness and of illegality, haunted all free performances of Blackness. In his description of Blackness as “inextricably bound” to fugitivity, Fred Moten locates the “right to obscurity,” the right to “keep a secret” in the project of emancipation.70 Enlightenment’s overreliance on the eye as a means of objective knowledge formation and White demands for people of African descent to appear transparent in their motives circumscribed the lives of Black people who were born free and the reception of Black raciality. Consequently, slavery forcibly organized a distinction between the supposedly “real” Black-self as outwardly perceived and the internal ruminations on the entailments of Blackness; the racio-visual logics of slavery demanded distinctions between authenticity and sincerity.71 Slavery’s presumptions about Black raciality enforced a compulsory insincerity, an unavoidable choice between seeing oneself according to the dictates of the peculiar matrix or denying it altogether. Free performances of Blackness navigated these objectifying conceptualizations of Black visuality.
Fugitive free people denied slavery’s ocularity, ignoring the supposedly fixed nature of Black visibility, as well as the idea of White omniscience. Formerly enslaved Blacks re/acquired freedom by playing upon racio-visual logics, tailoring performances of Blackness to undermine a peculiar visual culture. In a context that fixated on the eye during interracial encounters, Black visuality took shape in the acts of submitting to and resisting the visual cultures of slavery. Fugitive free Black people who stole items, ruined property and killed animals before deserting their owners simultaneously seized and subverted the White gaze. These acts of destruction, when coupled with the act of stealing away, reveal fugitives who capitalized on the failures of surveillance and on the moments when Whites would realize their misfortune. Fugitivity contradicted notions of a blind Black (non)subject. When a free person performed Blackness, as a runaway, she asserted her visual capacity. Although slavery’s visual culture reimagined the fugitive as either docile or duplicitous, stealing one’s self and portraying oneself as free also emphasized the ability to see and manipulate racial visibilities. Enslaved Blacks who ran away played on assumptions about the undeniable fact of the Black body and, in the process, deployed gazes that resisted slavery’s ocularity.
The other fugitive element of the free performance of Blackness had to do with the fleeting nature of belonging. Fugitivity, as a state of being and a matter of fleeing justice, was also about the way in which the runaway had no clear place to go, no clear place of belonging in the context of slavery. “Fugitivity is not only escape” but is also “being separate from settling.”72 Some runaways ran north or adjacent, to blend in with communities of freeborn Black people. However, the idea of fugitivity as applicable to all free people of African descent points to the impending sense of homelessness for Black people in a slaving society. If the act of reading the Black body defined the way in which African descendants lived day-to-day in slavery, than the illegibility of fugitivity only complicated the runaway’s claims to a home. The fugitive’s displaced existence is not just about removal from a previous home or a given master’s domicile but also from the idea of “home” as a place to return to through the act of running away. “Fugitives,” by name, only have a place from which to flee, but no particular place to arrive. Again, this aspect of fugitivity marked the runaway as well as the juridical free person, as the task of emancipation involved creating a home. Read against the transatlantic parlor as a home space, fugitivity created a contest of belonging. The runaway implicitly queried the dichotomies between unfree and free, legible and illegible, native and foreign. Fugitivity meant trying to claim a cohesive Atlantic world as home when persons of African descent could not properly claim the nation and the nation did not properly claim fugitives. How could the inherent homelessness of Black freedom fit within the domestic space of the Atlantic world, especially marked against the parlor’s penchant for display?
Some runaways revealed a remarkably expansive sense of transatlantic belonging and awareness of the parlor’s decorum. Seizing an opportunity in 1771, James Somerset fled his master’s custody. Somerset started his life on the western cape of Africa (the specific location unknown), before slavers kidnapped and delivered Somerset to Virginia for sale into bondage. Charles Stewart purchased Somerset, who remained Stewart’s property from the age of eight and until Somerset freed himself at the age of thirty-three.73 In Boston, Somerset ran errands and delivered messages on Stewart’s behalf, laboring in relatively close contact to his master. Unfree Black people in the North were not only farmers. Many unfree men like Somerset worked in closer proximity to Whites than did some unfree Black women, who often worked outdoors until moving indoors to labor as domestics closer to the nineteenth century.74 Somerset and Stewart sailed from Boston to England in 1769, where Somerset continued to move about alone on Stewart’s behalf, learning his way around town and making his own acquaintances with Blacks and Whites. This bit of autonomy did not constitute freedom in Somerset’s mind, although Stewart furnished his chattel with fine garments of silk and sometimes money. Few records of Somerset’s procedures are recorded, but read in the context of runaway performances of Blackness, we can assume that by the time Somerset absconded on October 1, he may have been somewhat literate, but most assuredly he was decently dressed, familiar with his surroundings, and able to rely on friends to assist in his escape. Although slave catchers recaptured Somerset on November 26, 1771, he still made an astute decision to escape in England. In the United States, Stewart enlisted the public to capture Black fugitives, taking out at least one advertisement for another man who ran away, promising a “Pistole reward” to “whoever will apprehend and bring him to me.”75 These same networks of White surveillance were a little less effective for Stewart in England, however. Before Stewart could send the recaptured Somerset to Jamaica to suffer the brutal enslavement of plantation bondage, White abolitionists filed suit, arguing that Stewart could not detain Somerset; Judge Lord Mansfield determined that English law did not make clear provisions for chattel slavery to exist within England proper and freed Somerset. Stewart misread as fidelity Somerset’s daily life as an unfree person, his leaving “home” on errands and returning in the evening. Somerset’s escape reveals Black visuality as embroiled in the balance between illegibility and homelessness that is the fugitive condition.
Read in the context of innumerable runaways, Somerset is one of an unknown number of brilliant bondspersons who freed themselves in an environment built entirely upon Black captivity. Somerset’s escape was comparable to that of many other fugitives documented in runaway notices. A number of enslaved persons gained their master’s trust, acquired fine garments, made acquaintances, appeared content in their servitude, and then fled at a calculated moment. Although many times the fugitive just randomly took off, a greater number of runaways stole themselves at very important times, “when their absence was inconvenient and disruptive.”76 Like many others, Somerset’s assertion of fugitive freedom revealed a schism between a Black bondsperson’s outward appearances and self-perceptions, between visibility and vision.
The unique significance of this escape, however, is that it called upon the space of the transatlantic world for freedom, rather than bondage. Somerset’s decision to run away suggested the willful deployment of fugitivity, both its illegibility and its punitive homelessness. Somerset engaged the issue of transatlantic belonging through the fugitive’s opacity. News of Somerset’s escape joined a transatlantic circuit already reporting insurrection among enslaved Africans in Surinam, St. Vincent, and Jamaica.77 Somerset’s well-timed escape may have drawn on a transatlantic consciousness of running away or, quite simply, on the existence of a supportive web of friends located outside the colonial U.S. territories. Regardless, Somerset’s bid for freedom reveals his mastery of the Atlantic world as a domestic interior wherein his fugitivity—his illegibility and his displacement—entailed productive possibilities when used to exploit the visual assumptions of slavery.
The Somerset case became significant for what it meant about the amorphous space of the transatlantic. Newspapers on both sides of the ocean bandied about the horrors of slavery, the reach of U.S. property rights, and the meaning of Mansfield’s decision as one that unabashedly condemned slavery on British soil.78 Many proponents and detractors of the Somerset verdict understood the case as meaningful for the British Empire, with people of African descent benefiting in a corollary manner. The English lawyer Francis Hargrave published his argument on the trial, explaining that “questions arising on this case do not merely concern the unfortunate person who is the subject of it” because “they are highly interesting to the whole community.” Hargrave recognized “the right claimed by Mr. Steuart to the detention of the negro is founded on the condition of slavery,” a condition of the men’s relationship before their Atlantic voyage. However, Hargrave contended, “if that right is here recognized, domestick slavery, with it’s [sic] horrid train of evils, may be lawfully imported into this country, at the discretion of every individual foreign and native.”79 Essentially, lawyers on behalf of Somerset and his White abolitionist supporters argued, in part, that allowing Stewart to reclaim Somerset was to risk England’s position in the transatlantic interior. Somerset’s freedom was not simply about his own autonomy or the inhumanity of slavery toward people of African descent, but also about the danger of slavery to spatial boundaries of the British Empire and the relevant national identities of the English. Of course, these same concerns were important elements in arguments against Somerset’s manumission as well. One anonymous tract argued that abolishing slavery in one territory “would not put an end to it; and if it is annihilated in the British dominions only, it can answer no other purpose, but to ruin a great many unoffending families, and to encrease the sugar colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, Holland, &c. upon the downfall of ours.” Arguing that British slavery was less harsh than was the Portuguese, this writer contended the British “slave trade is not of that magnitude that is suggested by its opposers.”80 The Somerset decision threatened the innocent—namely, British benefactors of slavery. A unified transatlantic parlor connected through slavery meant a shared regard for the meanings associated with emancipation, including its moral and economic consequences.
Sense making about Somerset reverberated the power relationships between empires. Many eighteenth-century interpretations of Somerset’s freedom wrongfully imagined that Mansfield’s decree abolished slavery, even as this ambivalent decision simply assured that a master could not forcibly remove a bondsperson from England and that the bonded individual could “secure a writ of habeas corpus to prevent that removal.”81 Nonetheless, misinterpretations of Somerset’s trial superseded the issue of accuracy and configured both Mansfield’s decision and the British Crown as more sympathetic to slavery as problematic. Thus, Somerset fueled England’s still-paternalistic position toward its colonies and compelled U.S. antislavery thinkers to consider the transatlantic perception of early America.82 Although in truth Somerset ended de jure, not de facto, slavery in England, suppressing the legal basis for slavery in England, it ultimately became the crux for many early U.S. courts that “erroneously relied upon Somerset to help abolish slavery in the north,” based on the British example.83 This misperception about British benevolence proliferated even as many Black Loyalists found themselves marginalized in England and living in poverty after the Revolutionary War.84
Fugitives reveal the tactical management of racial visibility, showing African descendants subverting the hypervisible constructions of Black raciality circulating in advertisements, and cultivating critical spectator practices. Somerset’s escape suggested that enslaved Blacks did not just run away, but that they might even be shrewd in selecting critical moments in which to flee. Runaways like Somerset intimated a keen awareness of presumptions about complacency, shyness, and impudence in the performance of Blackness. Somerset’s well-timed escape suggested that Whites might never know the interior lives and ulterior motives of their bondspersons; thus, free performances of Blackness forced Whites to contend with the inherent failures of slavery’s visual logic. While slavery presumed, even required, that Black people evade the visual, fugitives used these same assumptions to their advantage.
Previewing Freedom
The act of picturing freedom mediated the relationship between the parlor’s demands for display and freedom’s fugitive obscurity. On and off the page, it intervened in the transatlantic penchant for exhibiting the Black body and the free person’s need for illegibility. Picturing freedom invited visual examination of Black bodies and welcomed viewers to scrutinize Black autonomy. The opaqueness of spectacular demonstrations of freedom remained fleeting and illegible unless transcribed to paper. Thus, to picture freedom in print, to attach the quotidian performance of Black freedom to the permanence of the page, made these demonstrations fit for the parlor. Print culture functioned as an essential element for fitting the free Black body into the domestic space of the transatlantic parlor, managing the simultaneous requirements of demonstration and disguise. Pictures of freedom were both things for display in the home and incomplete records for interpretation.
African descendants who pictured freedom in slavery resisted dominant organizations of the visual. Fifty-three kidnapped Mende people of Sierra Leone ousted the crew of the Amistad, a Spanish slave ship, in 1839 as it sailed from Havana to Puerto Principe, Cuba. Portuguese merchants working for a Cuban trading company held the Mende confined in warehouses, selling them off into slavery under the cover of night. The abduction of the Mende people from Sierra Leone to Cuba was already illegal by this time since an Anglo-Spanish treaty of 1817 had established that Africans imported to Cuba after May 1820 were legally free.85 However, the Spanish government maintained a lax attitude toward the treaty, as well as to British and U.S. efforts to outlaw transatlantic trade of Africans, because slavery in Cuba was increasingly profitable after the Haitian revolution.86 Portuguese merchants illegally enslaved the Mende and were poised to profit off the sale once in Cuba, but when slavers made a second effort to transport the Mende from one locale to another, the captives revolted. They killed all but two of the ship’s crew, including the ship’s captain, sparing only those who could help them sail back to Africa. Although the two navigators purposefully misdirected the ship for several weeks, it was only during a stop for provisions in Long Island that the U.S. Navy illegally seized the Amistad and the captives, transporting them to New London and then New Haven, Connecticut, for trial on charges of piracy, mutiny, and murder.87 Through this long and winding journey through the Atlantic, the people onboard the Amistad faced the subjugating glares of slavery and the spatial demands for transparency.
