by Tiya Miles
Negro cloth produced a counterintuitive doubling effect, making those forced to wear it highly visible in society as abject inferiors and at the same time perfectly invisible as social actors of any consequence.27 A free white person, no matter his or her station, could pass through a novel city or an unfamiliar plantation, take in the scene at a glance, and know how the various residents were to be treated, based on the fabric, cut, style, and condition of their apparel. For in addition to being made of rough cloth, slave dress was rudely cut, without attention to fit or fashion. Women wore plain shifts (long, loose, straight dresses) with petticoats (loose undergarments). Sometimes enslaved people received a pair of shoes or a coat. It was not uncommon for enslaved children—both boys and girls—to be clothed in apparel resembling a loose shirt called a “slip.” One English journalist visiting a South Carolina rice plantation described a young girl wearing a shapeless “sort of sack” as her clothing.28 Although Negro cloth was made of rough-hewn, sturdy fibers, it disintegrated quickly under the conditions of hard daily use in a subtropical climate such as the coastal Southeast, leaving enslaved people in near rags much of the year.29
Clothing was usually distributed by owners or plantation managers once or twice annually. Summer and winter apparel varied by household but usually included just one or two whole suits of dress for the season or the fabric required to sew them. Louisa Picquet, who never gave up on finding her mother, despite decades of separation through sale, detailed the inadequate clothing worn by those in bondage. She remembered: “In the summer-time we never wore but two-pieces—only the one under, and the blue homespun over. It is a striped cloth they make in Georgia just for the colored people.”30 One woman enslaved in Tennessee similarly recounted in an interview, “We went barefooted ’til Christmas….In the Spring, they would buy brown domestic and make underclothes out of that and you would have two dresses. Some of the mean ones just had white gingham dresses and they would be so narrow that they would split them sometimes.” A man interviewed in the early 1900s described the apparel of boys and girls on the plantation where he was enslaved: “Boys until they got up large enough to work wore little slips. We called them shirts; they’d sew it up like a sack and cut a hole in the neck for your head to go through….There wasn’t much difference in the dress of girls and boys. The women wore theirs straight, too, they called them sacks….Sometimes it would fit and sometimes it wouldn’t.”31 In addition to being uncomfortable, ill-fitting, and woefully inadequate to protect the wearer against the elements, these shapeless shirts worn by girls and boys alike deemphasized gender in a larger society in which perceived differences between boyhood and girlhood, manhood and womanhood were stridently marked and observed.32
Eliza Potter, the free Black hairdresser who traveled through the Midwest and the South arranging the coiffure of wealthy white ladies (and taking detailed notes), addressed the hypocrisy of New Orleans slaveholders who made the “greatest show” of appearing at the opera in fine fashion yet kept their enslaved workers raggedly dressed. “Some of the slaves have no hats on, and others are scarcely half clad, and that of the coarse stuff that goods are packed in,” Potter charged. Outside Natchez, Mississippi, she described “slaves badly treated, half clothed, half fed, and misused in every way.” Potter concluded of her southern sojourn: “The cruelty there was more than I could bear.”33 Substandard clothing (cheap, scratchy, shapeless, thin, and poorly cut) kept an enslaved woman in her place, both in the eyes of others and, it was hoped by owners, in her own mind. Particularly in a society as image-conscious as Charleston, ragged, unartful apparel struck a great contrast to the silks, cashmeres, jewels, furs, feathers, and fabric finery of the planter elite. The impoverished, disheveled appearance of these Black wearers contributed to a public “proof” of their innately inferior status.
White observers recirculated this sense of proven deficiency as captured by dress. Frederick Law Olmsted, a landscape architect and author from New England, wrote these lines, difficult to read for their degree of insult, about Black women he observed on a trip through South Carolina and Georgia in the 1850s:
The women struck their hoes as if they were strong, and well able to engage in muscular labor. The expression of their faces was generally repulsive, and their tout ensemble anything but agreeable to the eye. The dress of most of them was uncouth and cumbrous, dirty and ragged; reefed up, as I have once before described, at the hips.34
To Olmsted, the Black woman was a masculinized figure, made grotesque as much by her unflattering, indecent attire as by her physical strength. Among white women observers, even Harriet Martineau, a staunch abolitionist from Great Britain, fell prey to the negative stereotyping such costuming could elicit. While visiting a string of plantations across the South in the 1830s, Martineau was overcome with aversion. “There is something inexpressibly disgusting,” she confessed, “in the sight of a slave woman in the field….In her preeminently ugly costume, the long, scanty, dirty woolen garment, with the shabby large bonnet at the back of her head, the perspiration streaming down her dull face, the heavy tread of the splay foot, the slovenly air with which she guides her plough, a more hideous object cannot well be conceived.” For Martineau, the enslaved woman’s degrading apparel fused with her posture of defeminizing work and racialized physical features to create a monstrous body. Ugliness and manliness, as materialized through dress, became part of the Black woman’s perceived essential nature.35
Unfree people resented the stingy rationing of coarse and stigmatizing clothing and at times informed their owners of their discontent, declaring certain shipments of Negro cloth worse than others and even refusing to accept particular fabrics. Because nineteenth-century enslavers often strove to cajole their owned people into higher work production before forcing them through violence, these appeals sometimes worked.36 Records of exchanges between planters and New England manufacturers reveal slave owners reporting the distaste of their workers for some fabrics and their relative preference for others. All of this negotiation occurred, however, on a charged, uneven field of action in which enslaved people could attempt to influence owner behavior but could never enforce outcomes. Slaveholders—women as well as men—held the ultimate controls of the pocketbook and the chastening rod and did not hesitate to use them.
In an example of manipulative prowess, one New Orleans mistress attempted to bribe the women she owned into having more children (hence begetting more slave property). Her tactic is preserved in a letter to a dry goods merchant, whom she entreated: “I must request the favor of you to add 28 yards of cheap calico….Please let it be gay. I have always given a dress of such to every woman after…she has a young child….They do much better being encouraged a little.” Another white female owner had an enslaved woman named Charlotte physically punished and then sought to diminish this act of cruelty by directing the abused woman to “look cheerful, and be good and friendly with her” and then lending Charlotte a “silk dress” to wear on Sunday. Charlotte was an aunt of Elizabeth Keckley, the future dressmaker of a First Lady; Keckley described the incident and called her aunt’s mistress “severe with her slaves in some respects.” Since this mistress had only “one silk dress in the world, silk not being so plenty in those days,” as Keckley recounted, and since the mistress found herself with a social occasion to attend that same week, she had to request her own dress back from her slave, a turning of the tables that Charlotte must have taken some degree of satisfaction in.37
Enslaved people were keenly aware of these psychological tricks—of clothing meant to demean the wearer and gifts intended to extort labor as well as to ensure loyalty. The fortunate few who escaped slavery and wrote autobiographies of life behind the southern lines often reflected on their hatred of slave dress and the social work it performed. These writers knew exactly what was at stake: that slave clothing was a uniform of inferiority, a method for simultaneously enforcing bodily deprivation and social
degradation. As Harriet Jacobs angrily recalled about her “scanty wardrobe” as a preteen: “I have a vivid recollection of the linsey-woolsey dress given me every winter by Mrs. Flint. How I hated it! It was one of the badges of slavery.”38
Elizabeth Keckley was hired out by her owner in 1850s St. Louis, and her skills as a dressmaker so inspired clients that one of them loaned her the funds to purchase her freedom as well as her son’s. Keckley relocated with her son, who had been conceived through the sexual assault of a white man, to Washington, D.C., where she sewed delicate garments for high-ranking political wives. Mary Todd Lincoln, spouse to President Abraham Lincoln, was Keckley’s most devoted (and emotionally dependent) client. Keckley’s thoughtful memoir of her years in captivity and in Washington reveals the power dynamics of slavery poignantly recalled, as well as a perspective on national politics. Keckley remembered that when she was called upon, at the age of four, to tend her mistress’s baby, she was relocated to the main house from the “rude cabin” where her mother resided, and her wardrobe improved to “simple attire” that “was a short dress and a little white apron.” With this Keckley also recorded a memory of her first “lash[ing],” a severe beating suffered for not knowing how to properly pick up the infant. Enslaved children, Keckley learned at a tender age, were trained in their work by means of punishment and insult. Her uniform, even “improved,” set her apart as a person worthy of such abuse.39
Louisa Picquet knew slave dress and harsh treatment intimately. Born near Columbia, South Carolina, to a fifteen-year-old enslaved girl named Elizabeth and their master, John Randolph, Louisa was soon relocated. Randolph sold the enslaved mother and daughter because Louisa looked too much like another infant in the household, the half-sibling born to Randolph and his wife. Louisa’s pale skin color and straight hair, as we have previously seen, were signs of the sexual indiscretions that haunted numerous enslaving families, especially the white mistresses within them. Under a new regime of control in Mobile, Alabama, Louisa’s mother suffered sexual exploitation by their second master, Mr. Cook, who serially impregnated her. This master then eyed the teenaged Louisa, inaugurating a true story of generations of enslaved women preyed upon by the same man that would inspire the plot of Gayl Jones’s terrifying novel Corregidora.40
After gaining her freedom and moving to Cincinnati, decades later, when her third owner (who had purchased her from Cook) died, Louisa painfully recalled that her assigned dress in slavery was “very thin” and “low-neck’d.” When Picquet’s second master, Mr. Cook, had whipped her with a cowhide lash for refusing to appear in his room and succumb to his barely disguised sexual demands, he had gained easy access to her thirteen-year-old body through the skimpy material of her slave uniform. Picquet described the marks his assault left on her, repeating, in a pained haze of remembrance, “I was dressed so thin.” This thinness of enslaved women’s clothing, the grossly inadequate coverage that violated societal norms for their gender in the nineteenth century, is another feature that set their apparel apart, not just as Black people but also, and especially, as women. In a vicious cycle of mistreatment and slander, Black women’s revealing dress became evidence of their hypersexuality in the attestations of slaveholders and travelers.41 Rose would have recognized, too, the difference a dress could make to a girl always in danger of bodily exposure and abuse, and hence prioritized giving a dress, perhaps the only extra change of clothing she had, to Ashley.
In contrast to the costume of the unfree woman, the lady of cultivation must never be caught improperly attired, warned Emily Thornwell, the author of The Lady’s Guide to Perfect Gentility in Manner, Dress, and Conversation, published in 1856 in Louisa Picquet’s city of newfound freedom, Cincinnati. Thornwell was referring to white women, but she did not say so, since Black women were already imagined by the author and her readership as existing outside of the category “lady.” “Disorder of a lady’s toilet…the result of negligence or slovenliness” was, Thornwell declared, “unpardonable.” Neither “great heat of weather” nor “cold and rainy weather” will “permit us to go in slippers, or with our legs and arms bare, or to take nonchalant and improper attitudes,” she intoned, as these behaviors were “an error of persons of a low class.”42 Enslaved Black women could not hope to approximate these gendered standards of propriety. Scant dress, as well as hard labor in hot environs that necessitated the hiking up of skirts, were conditions of their forced servitude that led to grossly unfair charges of immodesty and sexual immorality.43
Enslaved women found the clothing forced upon them insulting to their dignity. Worse, enslaved women were themselves tasked with the taxing, monotonous labor of making plantation textiles by hand. While some planters ordered ready-made cloth for their human property, most preferred the cost savings that came from directing slaves to produce their own necessities.44 Enslaved women were crucial spokes in the wheel of slave apparel and plantation cloth production. Most would have known how to do the basic spinning, weaving, and sewing required to keep a slave quarters population in clothing and coverings, as a part of, or sometimes as a secret supplement to, fabric and apparel rations. On one Alabama plantation, nursing mothers were commanded to weave in order to produce immediate benefit for their owner while they breastfed. The formerly enslaved man whose boyhood job it had been to ferry the product of their labor to the big house called it “nursling thread.” On plantations with greater enslaved populations and production capacity, Black women were put to work in weaving or loom houses, designated exterior structures where they spun thread on spinning wheels and wove cloth on looms.
Some women worked in both hands-on and managerial capacities as head weavers. The fabric they made would later be sewn into clothing for their families and others on the estates. In interview after interview, formerly enslaved women and men remembered their female relatives making fabric and clothing into the night and vividly recalled the sound of the looms. Ida Adkins, in North Carolina, recollected: “Mammy worked in the weaving room. I can see her now setting at the weaving machine and hear the pedals going plop, plop.” One man remembered: “My mother would spin. She would make our clothes. She would take the cotton and card it, then she would weave that, and after that it would come to cloth; then she would take that and put it in the loom and weave it. My mother done all the washing and ironing and cooking and work in the field, too.” This speaker also shared the memory of “seeing my old mother spinning with tears running down her cheeks, crying about her brother who was sold and carried to Arkansas.” How often, we might wonder, was the cloth produced on plantation looms interwoven with sorrow? The same man quoted previously about sack-like clothing recalled: “My mother worked in the field….The women had to work in the field and spin four cuts before they went to bed.” A woman called Vergy remembered doing textile work as a child, a common occurrence: “I had my five cuts a day to make, just like the old folks….I had to pull the thread like this, and pull it over the loom like this, and then cord it. It was real work, I tell you….Yes, it was really work.” Vergy’s mother also worked at the loom, and Vergy recalled how “Mammy just kept on weaving” as her mistress sent for the master to whip Vergy’s mother for some petty offense. Ellen Cragin, in Arkansas, remembered her mother working “so long and so often that once she went to sleep at the loom.” Ellen’s mother was awakened by a beating meted out by the owner’s son, who had once been nursed at her breast.45
Slave owners noted Black women’s textile production on large estates. Eliza Lucas Pinckney, an agriculturalist and entrepreneur, whose family had emigrated from the Caribbean island of Antigua to Charleston in the early 1700s, attested to enslaved women’s excellence in spinning and weaving. Pinckney managed her family’s plantation on the Cooper River during her father’s absence, while he served in the British military and as lieutenant governor of Antigua, a slaving and sugar colony. Eliza Pinckney is credited with the widespread adoption of indigo cultivation in South Carolina.
She had her enslaved people experiment with seeds her father sent from the island. In a letter to her father in 1746, Pinckney wrote about cloth production on their American estate: “The sensible Negro woman and hundreds of others learned well to spin, and excellent cloth has been always woven in the low country of Carolina.”46 Enslaved cloth-makers were also experienced with natural dyes like the indigo that owners made them grow for profit, as well as dyes from varieties of tree bark collected in the woods. Black women’s unpaid labor produced much of the fabric needed to supply the plantations where they lived and worked, contributing to the sense of “self”-sufficiency that masters of these rural fiefdoms often sought. But even under authoritarian conditions, Black women’s textile production exceeded their owners’ ability to control their creativity and inner feeling. Many children of weavers recalled the skill, artistry, and pride Black women put into their handmade fabrics. Susie King, from Arkansas, fondly recalled her “good mother” who wove some and dyed all the cloth. Susie herself became a fabric craftswoman, telling an interviewer, “I loved to weave, all them bright colors, blue and red and green and yellow.”47
Rudimentary spinning and weaving was viewed by slaveholding society as necessary but low-level work fit for Black women.48 Only a small subset of enslaved women received advanced training in sewing, piecing cloth, and even embroidery, often from mother figures but also from practitioners to whom they were informally apprenticed. In 1775, South Carolina planter Ralph Izard is said to have contracted with a townswoman named Martha Chubb to train eight enslaved girls in spinning and weaving.49 Elizabeth Keckley learned needlecraft from her mother, whose mistress, Mrs. Burwell, “was a hard task-master,” assigning her mother “so much work to do in making clothes, etc., for the family, besides the slaves.”50 Elizabeth learned at her worn-out mother’s knee the skill of making, measuring, cutting, and assembling fabric that would later become her livelihood. As a child, she was put to work knitting socks while minding the baby on whose behalf she had received her first beating.