by Rachel May
I described the man above—the man who revealed his back to show scars of abuse—an “enslaved or formerly enslaved man,” and I think about a conversation I had with a friend the other night. She was talking about ticking off the boxes on a form to indicate whether she’s single or married. She ticked off “single,” but the automated form popped up and informed her she could not be single because she had once been married.
“That’s right,” said another friend, “now you’re divorced. You can never be single again.”
The condition of marriage defines her forever, no matter how far past it was—she’s always known to have once been married, and now to no longer be married.
Am I defining that man by his condition of having once been enslaved, instead of simply seeing him as a man? Unlike marriage (at least, in my friend’s case), enslavement wasn’t a choice. Why should I define him as having been enslaved? Why not say that he’s a man? A man, naked to the waist. Is that what I should have said?
When I began trying to understand how to tell the stories of Eliza, Minerva, and Juba, and met with Beverly Gordon-Welch in Boston, we sat in her office, which had a great window along one side that looked out to all the other offices. I could see the women working and talking on the phone while we spoke. And, when I started by saying that I was trying to write about “the slaves,” she stopped me, and said, “Enslaved women.”
“Enslaved women,” I repeated after her, like a child learning a language.
“That’s right,” she said, “if you say simply ‘slave,’ then you’re objectifying her again. She was already objectified once, back then, as a woman who was treated as an object to be bought and sold, and now you’re doing it again, in the present moment when you call her ‘a slave.’”
“I see,” I said, “thank you.”
You have probably seen a man named William Casby in a photograph by Richard Avedon. The photo was taken in 1963, a century after these letters between Susan and her brothers were written, and Richard Avedon titled this piece, William Casby, Born in Slavery. In his book on photography, Camera Lucida, published in 1980, Roland Barthes labels the photograph, William Casby, Born a Slave. Laura Wexler writes that Barthes’s analysis of the photograph keeps William Casby “frozen” in the era of slavery as Barthes does the looking-at-pain that Susan Sontag writes about: “the man I see here has been a slave; he certifies that slavery has existed, not so far from us; and he certifies this not by historical testimony but by a new, somehow experiential order of proof (a proof no longer merely induced). I remember keeping for a long time a photo I had cut out of a magazine . . . which showed a slave market . . . my horror and fascination as a child came from this: that there was a certainty that such a thing had existed: not a question of exactitude, but of reality: the historian was no longer the mediator, slavery was given without mediation, the fact was established without method.”
Barthes says he kept that photograph tucked away safely, “keeping [it] for a long time.” Wexler argues that Barthes continues to see Casby as only an enslaved man: “It is for Barthes as if Casby is still a slave, wearing the mask of that social station . . . Nor does Barthes think further about William Casby. He especially does not remark upon the tiny reflection of Avedon and his camera that the photograph reveals in Casby’s eyes.”
This image of the camera, Wexler says, allows Casby to turn back upon the viewer the truth of his objectification by the camera, “shooting back the objectifying gaze.” Wexler writes that Barthes “ignores Avedon’s remarkable reconceptualization of the power relations of photography” and instead “reproduces slavery’s social relations by turning Avedon’s animation of Casby’s sight into a dead thing once again, ‘outside of society and its history.’” Barthes, she says, denies him the power of refuting the gaze, and sees him, continually, as “a slave,” an object, the “dead thing.”
Just as people use the “selfie” and the Internet to distribute their own visions and representations of themselves, Wexler writes that Douglass used the new form of the daguerreotype, distributed widely in the late 1830s, to create his own images of himself, ones that show an educated, powerful man. Suddenly, with the daguerreotype, it was possible to make one’s own image in ways that hadn’t been possible before. There’s one painting of Douglass, a portrait for which he sat (apparently with hesitation, as he was wary of painted and drawn portraits), but most of what we see of him, we see as photographs whose composition he alone controlled. “In this series, I propose, it is possible to discern decisions Douglass repeatedly made about self-representation and watch him holding firm to a particular interpolation into the American canon of ‘illustrious’ men.” Wexler writes that while Douglass was born “socially dead” as an enslaved man, he now displays “signs of distinction assumed deliberately by a man who had formerly been denied it.” She compares Douglass to Lincoln in his careful presentation of his portrait throughout time. The photo of him, above, wearing what Robin Hill calls “a luxurious tie, paired with a vest intricately embroidered with floral designs” illustrates the “rapt attention” to which he paid his clothes, “often wearing stylish yet somber suits, and well-pressed shirts and cravats, guarding a presentation of bourgeois respectability.” Hill writes that his wife, Anna, “ensured that a freshly pressed shirt awaited his arrival at each destination.” Having spent so long living as an enslaved man, and knowing that he faced the system to which Winthrop and so many others like him stubbornly clung, he used his clothes and pose to help ensure his reception as an educated, respected thinker.
The coat and suit collars are raised high on the neck, a style common during the mid-nineteenth century and a sign of moral rectitude. . . . The head and shoulders fill most of the compositional space. The figure appears not only stately but imposing; even when viewed at eye level, the eyes seem to be looking down upon the viewer and commandeering the space between the image’s surface and the point of the spectator.
Hill writes that Douglass used this same pose, over and over again, in the years and decades to come, in pictures that “helped to create and guarantee his citizen status, visually proclaiming Douglass’ ‘natural right’ to own property and thus be said to be equal, which is to say autonomous and free.”
Sojourner Truth, also an abolitionist and public intellectual, did this same photographic work. Augusta Rohrbach writes that “The success of her intervention [in the creation of her own image] relies on an idea about the relationship between the subject and its photographic representation that was common to 19th century viewers. Roland Barthes identifies the peculiar power of the photographic image, allowing that a photograph is ‘somehow co-natural with its referent’; it retains a level of presence not necessitated by other referential systems. Indeed, as a signifier, the photograph documents ‘the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens.’”
Rohrbach explains that Truth’s portraits consistently feature her in a bonnet and white cape, holding white yarn in her hand as it unspools, employing the “trappings of femininity” she used in photographs she sold to support herself. She did this, Rohrbach argues, because “She knew that race mattered and that as a dark-skinned black woman she needed to find ways to make race work to her advantage.” She understands the “complexities of agency within the context of visual and print culture” as she chooses different representations of herself. In the 1860s, she chooses the Quaker bonnet instead of the scarf that covered her head in the sketch that served as her book’s frontispiece in 1850. In the 1860s photograph, she wears a buttoned dress with a full skirt, and a white woven shawl. The punctum—the detail Barthes would say catches our eye and stays with us even as we move away from the photo—is the book that often sits on a table beside her or rests in her hands. The book signifies her own autobiography, her claim to tell her own story (by dictating it to a writer, as “Aunt Sally” and other formerly enslaved people did when they had been denied literacy by whites); she distributed that story and her images widely in the
abolitionist movement throughout the 1850s and ’60s. This is the quiet, lasting presence of the photo that is the ultimate resistance. She has claimed her freedom, her identity as a formerly enslaved woman, and as a woman with access to the femininity that Susan sewed towards, and a woman with the right to not only own a book but to write her own—all rights she’d been denied as an enslaved woman. Wendy S. Walters reminds me that she’d have been killed for owning a book as an enslaved woman.
Truth copyrighted her own image and distributed it widely, which was, Rohrbach reminds us, part of her “reaction . . . against and interventions in a dominant white culture’s production of her image.”
For both Truth and Douglass, imagery went beyond a reclamation of self; photography also played an important role in their abolitionism. In 1861, the South was seceding and Lincoln gave a speech defending slavery as a legal system in the South. Douglass responded. Laura Wexler writes that “For Douglass, the temporizing of Lincoln’s defense of the legality of slavery in the slave states was just as much a distortion of reality as the grotesque images that white artists made of black faces and bodies, rendering them unacceptable in the armed forces. Photographic seeing could help address that problem because it could correct the distorted representations of black manhood that put the Union at risk . . . Viewed correctly, black men could come to life in the white imagination, and Lincoln would find the soldiers the Union needed to win the war . . .” She goes on to say that Douglass believed that “Technological process could bring not only the external but also the inner nature of man more clearly to light; he believed that picture-making—‘the process by which man is able to invert his own subjective consciousness into the objective form . . . was in truth the highest attribute of man’s nature.’”
Technology—which had perpetuated slavery in the South with the proliferation of cotton mills in the North at the start of the nineteenth century—could also be harnessed for this greater good.
Wexler argues that Douglass adds “a fourth perspective to Barthes’ more famous three: that of the revenant, or one who returns from the dead.” So, as Douglass was considered socially dead, as an enslaved man, he returns alive into American society in his speeches and images. “Barthes was afraid of the specter but Douglass welcomed what came back from slavery’s grave. The revenant is an effect of liveliness produced over time. It requires images that repeat, or return, to which we may return multiple times to try to comprehend the intentions of their makers.” She goes on to say that these images belong as much to the past as to the future. “We project the persistence of the liveliness that inserts itself into the historical record.”
In finally understanding this concept of the revenant, and how it relates to tangible objects, be it a daguerreotype or handicraft, the resistance of the objectification that Winthrop and his siblings enacted in the South, I returned to the archives I’d been studying, and the quilt, and the potential for the “liveliness of the people” who were silenced in these quilt tops.
In The Pleasure of the Text, Barthes describes what he calls “tmesis.” He says that readers create “abrasions” in the text by skimming or skipping—as if the text, or because the text—is an object upon which we make a mark, we create “gaps or seams” as we read. He notes that the “erotic part of the garment is where it gapes.” I think about Emily Dickinson and her shifts between writing and garment sewing, and the close relationship between sewing and writing for nineteenth century women, maybe for Susan, or Phillis Wheatley, or Jane, too. The “seam of the two edges, interstices of bliss. . . . occurs in the uttering, not in the sequence of utterances.” This “seam or flaw” is called “tmesis.” “It is the very rhythm of what’s read and what’s not read that creates the pleasure of great narratives.”
In this case, the author of the quilt—Susan and Hasell Crouch—didn’t intentionally create a narrative but have nonetheless left one that I’ve been trying to decode for the last six years, making my own abrasions as I read their stories and search for more. Others will come, just as I came after Franklin, to make abrasions of their own.
I think of all the markers of people’s lives left behind—not just letters and diaries but dolls, baskets, fragments of dresses, and quilts. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich writes about the importance of recognizing women’s work as thoroughly as we recognize the many documents and letters left behind by white men.
We might begin with Anne Bradstreet’s famous line: ‘I am obnoxious to each carping tongue/ Who says my hand a needle better fits.’ That sentence establishes a creative tension between pens and needles, hands and tongues, written and non-written forms of female expression, inviting us not only to take oral traditions and material sources more seriously . . . but also to examine the roots of the written documents we take so much for granted.
Ulrich argues for the importance of reading textiles as texts in and of themselves—like Harriet Powers’s quilt with its creation of her world, the stories she was told and witnessed, or the scraps of fabric that Minerva and Eliza and Jane wore as dresses they might have sewn themselves. As I studied this quilt, it became evident that there was another story within these seams. We know snippets, pieces of an unseen whole. When Hilton petitioned to sell Hasell’s seven enslaved people, the pew at St. Philip’s that he’d inherited from his aunt, and the Sullivan’s Island house, it was so that “the widow can return to the north.” Susan made her choices in her time, and the result was the changed lives of the people she owned. We all make choices in our time. How will I tell this story? How will I find the people quieted in these seams and gaps? In what systems of oppression am I implicated? This has been my odyssey. I’ve followed trails I’d never imagined, seen places that hold stories of people I needed to know. I see how much more I have to learn—all the books I’ve yet to read.
Every time I sit down to sew, now, I think of Jane. I buy little new fabric, now that I know the conditions under which it’s made. If I can critique Susan for buying all the industrially-woven calicos for the quilt, which she knew were made from cotton picked by enslaved people, how can I buy clothes I know are made by people who work in conditions I would find abhorrent if I were to see them myself? I don’t entirely avoid buying new cloth. The women who hold jobs at factories abroad need those jobs to survive. But I can at least try to live by my values, use and reuse all the fabric I buy, and speak out about working conditions here and abroad. Capitalism makes it difficult to live outside of its hold; when I buy a used couch and plan to reupholster it instead of buying a new couch made abroad, I find the only affordable fabric is made in China. I buy most of my clothes secondhand, on websites like ThredUp and in thrift stores, but when I need new shoes, the only ones I can find made in the USA are beyond my budget, even if these are the only shoes I buy for two years. I allow myself to do as a historian of slavery has advised—I do my best, buy most of my clothes and goods secondhand, buy fair trade and organic cloth as much as possible, and make exceptions when I have to.
I can pay attention, listen, speak when it’s helpful, and keep educating myself. The version of this nation with which I was raised is not the truth. I grew up recognizing inequality, injustice, racism—but I hadn’t plumbed down into its roots as I have since I met Minerva, Eliza, Jane, and Juba Simons. Researching this story, traveling and reading so intensively, searching for traces of these women, and for the contexts that shaped their worlds, has sent me into sorrow and rage, especially as our current world unfolds around us. I began to write this story when the case over Trayvon Martin’s murder was decided; George Zimmerman was acquitted, declared not guilty of murdering Trayvon Martin, a child. At this same time, I read Winthrop’s letter about the murdered “negroe” and the white man who would be acquitted. And I saw more clearly. This is not just the continued legacy of enslavement, not a straight and plodding line through time, but an overlapping, circling, ever-present reality; then is now. It has always happened. It has never stopped happening. As I finish this book, OJ Simpson is relea
sed on parole, and I think back to my earlier days in North Carolina, when students made racist jokes about his trial. About the controversies we face now over the Confederate flag and monuments to Confederate soldiers. On my travels, I look for the monuments to people like Denmark Vesey, who is honored in a park in Charleston, and Sargeant Carney, the Civil War hero who’s honored in a plaque on the battery, and Robert Smalls, whose escape I read about that day I visited the Old Slave Mart Museum.
I look to the past and seek the people whose stories enliven a world I didn’t know but can still feel in the present. I reach for the tactile—the clothes, a quilt, the thin paper on which loops of cursive huddle to fill the page. I visit historic sites and feel the give of wooden floors beneath my feet, imagine other peoples’ feet on those boards, other people’s breath and hands touching these walls. I hear what docents and tour guides are saying as well as what they’re not saying; I ask them questions. I learn about the food people made in the past, their daily habits, the authors they might have read, speakers they’d have heard—and this past seems to exist around me in the present, informing my days, changing the places I thought I knew.
12
Portraits
Imagine: Juba Simons chooses her dress carefully that morning, trying to decide if it will be the blue calico or green and yellow striped dress she’ll wear for her portrait. This is her first photograph, and she’s considered every detail. She’ll carry the Bible she bought from her white neighbor in the months after the war, when he was desperate for cash to feed his family. She’s been saving for years for this moment, and celebrated every purchase that marked her freedom. Each transaction was a triumph, signaling to the whites around her that they were no longer the masters and she was no longer enslaved. She is free. She works for whom she chooses, buys and sells what she chooses, establishes her own home apart from theirs, finally out from under their constant gaze and the constant threat of their punishments. Best of all, she chooses her own clothes, at last. None of that old red print Susan forced her to wear, in that plain print and simpler pattern than all of Susan’s ruffled and buttoned dresses, cloaks, and gloves. She scoffs at the memory of Susan receiving that cloth from her family at the north, laying it all out on the table with the air of a religious touching sacred objects, running her hand down each folded layer of cotton, all those pretty calicos in blue and green and soft white and pink. And for Eliza and Minerva and herself? The drab print, that mucky brown Juba always despised, which Susan deemed good enough for the women she thought she could own.