by Tiya Miles
Enslaved people undertook feats of great imagination, courage, and grit to acquire the materials needed to sustain and cushion their existence. Making things, receiving things, having and using things of their own had immediate purpose as well as deep symbolism. For unfree people, things could soften an unrelenting daily routine, as practical items like shoes, quilts, and drinking cups protected against the elements and diminished deprivation. Having things also undermined the logic of slavery in a society in which it was formally illegal for “property” to own property. As possessors of stuff, Black people demonstrated their personhood, reflecting dignity inwardly to themselves and outwardly to others. Possessing things inspired pride and challenged the belief that Black people were unworthy of property’s privileges.7 As a formerly enslaved woman from Mississippi insisted: “Lord, chile, if they had two dishes, four plates, a cup and a saucer, they thought they had something; then somebody might give’m a table, and maybe a homemade safe; and they thought they was the smartest things in the world.”8 Having possessions was a salve that reinforced a sense of self-worth in a society that demeaned Black people by equating them with objects.
Yet, so many things that enslaved Blacks made or acquired would eventually be lost, stolen, confiscated, or left behind due to the interstate slave trade that dominated Black experience in the first half of the nineteenth century.9 When speaking of her aunt in an interview in 1929 or 1930, a formerly enslaved woman from Tennessee paused to retrieve a special object: “I am gonna show you something that my auntie made, and she was gonna make me one, but they took her away. She used to make everything. My auntie done it. She was gonna make me a spread, too, to go over all my bed, but the white folks took her away.” As the speaker caressed the bedspread her aunt had made, she brought to mind the pain of that long-ago separation. Her repetition of the moment of her aunt’s sale speaks to trauma, indicating the impact of this loss many decades after the Civil War. The speaker cherished the work of her aunt’s hand. She refused to sell the textile, even amid economic deprivation and the onset of the Great Depression when “everything has been so tight.” She said about the coverlet: “A white woman told me the other day if I would carry this to the capitol I would get something for it. I am gonna keep this as long as I live, because my aunt made it.”10 In the view of this speaker, the bedspread had already “gotten something” more valuable than money: a feeling of closeness with the aunt who had been snatched away. As an adult, this formerly enslaved woman became a quilter, entreating her children to make bed coverings alongside her, perhaps with the hope that a special one among these textiles, too, would one day enfold memories.
For generations of Black people dispossessed of their freedom, belongings held a deep emotional valence, representing not only dreams but also ties to the people with whom one belonged by choice, as opposed to those to whom one belonged by force. In this way, things linked kin together, materializing family members’ devotion even across insurmountable distance.11 In contrast to the Martins, who legally owned her, Rose owned very little. But Rose’s list of things to pack, as recorded by Ruth on Ashley’s sack, indicates where Rose placed her emotional investments. Some of the items Rose packed, like the pecans, might have been chosen in part for potential exchange value. But the list includes no prices or equivalencies; the items are not recalled as if they were ever intended for trade. These things were more meaningful to Rose, as understood by her descendant, for their symbolic, rather than their commercial, value. In silent rebuke of the emotionally bankrupt inventory of the slaveholder, Rose prized things that reaffirmed relational ties.
THE LANGUAGE OF DRESS
A “tattered” dress appears first in Ruth’s embroidered catalog. This placement should give the object weight for us. It hints that the dress was the first thing packed, or the first thing recalled, or the main thing highlighted in this family’s separation saga. The list and its order presages, perhaps, a personal trait of Ruth the sewer, who, as we will later see, gained public notice for her stylish attire in Philadelphia. Whether or not Rose packed the dress first, it is clear from the list that Rose thought immediately about the problem of clothing Ashley. Rose knew, as did many women ensnared by slavery, that apparel is simultaneously material and social. By providing Ashley with a dress, worn and frayed as it may have been, Rose insisted on Ashley’s right to bodily protection and feminine dignity, while also emphasizing the relationship between them. A tattered dress was a thousand things to Rose and her figurative sisters in slavery: protection, honor, artistry, memory, and connection. In our hands and imaginations, a garment like the dress Rose gave Ashley might index social-relational worlds crosscut by the intricate weaves of race, gender, and status.
Across the sweep of human history and vast differences in climate and culture, people have clothed their bodies to reflect complex relationships among them.12 Wearers adopted select apparel to transmit social messages through color, pattern, texture, fiber type, and the particular flourishes of skilled workwomanship.13 How one dresses is a form of social communication in a complex field of relational power plays. In the U.S. South, dress “became a language” in which enslavers and enslaved were fluent.14 The relationship between these two groups was fundamentally based on a power differential that authorized one to control the other, and visible distinctions emphasized that critical line of difference. The categorization of “Negroes” as a race fit for slavery (and also of “Indians” previously) already relied on a shorthand of visual cues. It was easier to set aside a class of people as inferiors if they shared readily identifiable characteristics: the skin color, hair texture, and facial features that became the building blocks of race. Fabric, an additional layer on top of these features, signified who owned others or who could be owned. Slaveholders sought to materialize and dramatize the debasement of enslavement, covering captive brown-skinned bodies in coarse fabrics dyed in drab colors and marked by simple prints. Masters and mistresses attempted to dictate what fabrics and styles their workers could don, for the express purpose of highlighting the wearers’ low status. States that systematized and codified slavery even wrote clothing bans into legislation called sumptuary laws.
Dress made by an unidentified enslaved woman or women. Collection of the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, gift of the Black Fashion Museum, founded by Lois K. Alexander-Lane.
South Carolina legislators passed the colony’s first slave law, “An Act for the Better Ordering of Slaves,” in 1690, stipulating first and foremost that “in his Majesty’s plantations in America, slavery has been introduced and allowed, and the people commonly called negroes, Indians, mulattoes and mustizoes, have been deemed absolute slaves.” The law required, among other stipulations, that no slave could leave the owner’s premises without a ticket and promised that owners would be reimbursed in case of the state’s execution of human property. By 1735 lawmakers had added restrictions about clothing expenditure to the slave code. Section 26 specified the boundaries of permissible slave dress in detail:
Whereas, many of the slaves in this Province wear clothes much above the condition of slaves, for the procuring whereof they use sinister and evil methods…no owner or proprietor of any negro slave or other slave whatsoever (except livery men or boys) shall permit or suffer such negro or other slave to have or wear any sort of apparel whatsoever, finer, other, or of greater value, than negro cloth, duffelds, coarse kearsies, osnabrigs, blue linnen, checked linnen or coarse garlix or calicoes, checked cottons or scotch plaids, garlix or calico under the pain of forfeiting all and every such apparel and garment that any person shall commit his negro or other slave to have or wear.15
Clothing, as South Carolina’s oligarchic rulers knew, was deeply political, bespeaking moral values, social standing, and social allowances.16 But Black captives were acquiring access to materials and garments far above their station just decades into Carolina’s experiment wit
h slavery. Unfree people, especially women, were getting ahold of fine fabrics primarily through long-term liaisons with white men. Women as well as men also purchased fabric and premade articles on the informal or underground market of one-to-one exchanges and pawnshops.17 They shopped for items that they felt might distinguish them using money earned through the extra work of hiring themselves out beyond the hours required on-site by their masters.
Black people’s means of accessing this clothing, the South Carolina sumptuary law accused, was “sinister and evil.” This barely veiled language pointed to the suspicion that Blacks were engaging in theft as well as sexual misconduct to acquire fine clothing. For Charleston was an urban milieu, similar to New Orleans, where elite white men were known to have relatively flagrant and orchestrated erotic dalliances with unfree women of color, sometimes through coercion or force, other times through a subtle arrangement of material exchange, and, often, through a complex set of motivations and interactions that combined these elements and more. In this glamorous seaside colonial city, enslaved women could outshine free white women in appearance and apparel, despite the statute outlawing their donning of fancy dress. This was also true for Charleston’s neighboring coastal city, Savannah, where, according to long-term visitor Emily Burke, it was still difficult to distinguish who was and was not enslaved in the antebellum period. “As a general thing the slaves in the city wear good clothing,” Burke observed. “Many even dress extravagantly and decorate their persons with a great deal of costly jewelry….I have seen ladies in the streets with such light complexions and dressed so elegantly that when told they were Negroes I could not willingly credit the assertion.” This New England schoolteacher’s comment suggests that dress, like skin color, was key to identifying southern status. Enslaved people in urban areas realized this and took advantage of their relatively greater access and mobility. Later, when Emily Burke visited in the home of a planter and encountered an elderly enslaved woman “flitting about to get a peep at the newcomer” while “dressed in a coarse osnaburg gown,” Burke professed herself to be “a little amused.” Observing Black people, and particularly women, attired in accord with her expectation of their subjugated status seems to have relieved Burke’s social anxiety.18
As Burke’s confusion and discomfort indicates, clothing was a contested arena in southern society. Dress marked not only status but also, as one prominent Civil War historian has pointedly put it, the stability of that status.19 Fluctuations in who had access to which fabrics and in who was permitted to wear certain articles of dress portended societal disruption. While some slaveholders bent the law to allow favored unfree people to acquire nice clothing and some enslaved men and women provided such items for themselves against their owners’ permission, other whites vehemently protested Blacks’ adoption of high fashion and ridiculed what they saw as copycat clothing styles. In 1772, a European traveler bunking with a monied planter in Charleston published a letter in The South-Carolina Gazette castigating the mannerisms of urban Blacks. While he found enslaved people in the countryside to be appropriately matched to their apparel, “clad suitable to their Condition, contented, sober, modest, [h]umble, civil and obliging,” he judged Charleston slaves to be “the very Reverse—abandonedly unmannerly, insolent, and shameless—and many of the female slave[s] by [f]ar more elegantly dressed, than the Generality of women.” This caustic observer, who signed his accusations anonymously as “The Stranger,” blamed Black women, who, he had heard from his planter friends, “prostrate their Bodies to all Persons that will offer them a Penny.” He also condemned the cohabitation of white men, “as Husband, with Negro Women…to whom any person is a welcome Bed-fellow.”20
It is not untrue that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved women sometimes directed the attention of their free white sex partners toward items of apparel that were otherwise denied them. As the memoirs of Black women tell us, however, sexual ties that might enable better material conditions came at great physical and emotional cost. We might also see Black women’s encasement of their bodies in layers of silk and chintz as “defensive costume,” a means of fending off verbal as well as physical assault. To dress above their station was to call upon the sartorial security of the white lady, who, clad in laces, wires, and ruffles, kept her body private, kept unwanted others at a measured distance, and signaled the hidden resource of familial status that could be leveraged for her defense. The silent and secret emotional toll paid by enslaved women to obtain elegant dress went unnoticed by those in the white upper class who stereotyped them all as lascivious “black Strumpet[s].”21
Why, this European “Stranger” demanded, were slave women cloaked in “splendor” and traipsing about the open streets? Where were the “Magistrates, Constables, and Watchmen” charged with policing them? Those same Blacks who dressed in finery, gambled, drank, and cursed aloud in the open of what the traveler thought should be a crystalline white city posed an insidious, closeted threat to the colonies. “What Dependence can we have,” the stranger demanded of his readers, on Blacks who would behave so outrageously? The answer: none. Captive Blacks and American Indians could not be counted on to willingly maintain a status quo in which boots trampled upon their backs. And one can scarcely imagine a more precarious position than being dependent on a class of people with every reason to detest you. Enslavers feared that unfree people dressing above their station and thereby expressing, as well as feeling, a sense of equality with their betters was a step along the road to outright rebellion. South Carolina would have to tame and cage enslaved people in order to extract full-scale servility, relying on tools as subtle as “the language of clothes” and as brutal as the Work House, where corporal punishment was imposed.
Colonial lawmakers passed the 1735 statute on slave dress in order to hold the garment line of social hierarchy. Certain cloths were for certain people, just as bathrooms and water fountains would be two centuries later, in the Jim Crow era. A new law on slave dress in South Carolina would not appear until 1814, when Charleston city leaders passed an ordinance prohibiting owners from bringing slaves “in irons” or “insufficiently clothed” into public view. The ruling elite apparently feared sartorial feast as well as famine, disallowing fancy dress and then, decades later, when a paternalist ethos had solidified, discouraging an outward display of cruelty. But subjugation through dress persisted.22
In order to obey the law and satisfy their own cost-saving impulses, enslavers like Robert Martin could call on a variety of providers for textiles made expressly for the enslaved population. Producing subpar apparel for millions of unfree African Americans was big business. British textile manufacturers were the earliest suppliers of such fabrics in the 1700s, soon followed by New England companies, dominated by those in Massachusetts and Rhode Island in the early and mid-1800s, and then joined by southern textile producers.23 The cloth for human bodies treated like chattel was purposefully substandard, made of poor-quality fibers roughly and efficiently woven. Certain types of fabric fitting this description became associated with slave dress and were increasingly sought for that purpose: osnaburg (an unfinished German linen), linsey-woolsey (a coarse linen or sometimes cotton-and-wool combination), homespun (home- or plantation-made fabric), and, to a certain extent, calico (plain-weave cotton prints) and hemp. Most often, these fabrics intended to clothe the enslaved were left white in color, dyed blue or gray, or woven with blue and white stripes or checks. The general sameness of these tones and prints, meant to set a people apart, shares a similarity with prison garb as well as with forced hooding. Uniformity served to broadcast their wearers’ subjugation, obscure individuality, and suppress expression of cultural identities through dress.24
Manufacturers, sellers, and buyers described this special category of low-grade fabric as “Negro cloth” (sometimes referred to as “Niger,” “Plantation,” or “Slave” cloth).25 Negro cloth was not one specific textile. It was, instead, a motle
y category including any kind of fabric possessing characteristics (cheapness, coarseness, dullness) meant to publicly identify and demean the wearer. While all manner of white working-class and poor people wore clothing made of affordable fabrics like linsey-woolsey, they sought out the best grade of the category they could afford and would not deign to wear fabric marketed as Negro cloth. Enslavers in South Carolina and elsewhere, however, took pains to acquire it, a virtual brand unto itself that conveyed the opposite of luxury. As New England’s textile-manufacturing industry surged in the industrial revolution, this fabric became more readily available. Planters ordered Negro cloth directly from American companies, particularly from mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, that were weaving cotton produced by the unfree people it would clothe and from the Peace Dale Manufacturing Company in Rhode Island, as well as from local distributors who advertised in the same newspapers that carried an abundance of notices for “runaway” slaves.26
Child’s “slave cloth” sleeveless jacket and pants. Unknown maker, Louisiana, 1850s. Cotton; hand-spun and hand-woven. From the Collections of Shadows-on-the-Teche, a Site of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, New Iberia, Louisiana.