by Tiya Miles
Black seamstresses produced the majority of garments enslaved people wore, either from fabric made on-site or from imported low-grade cloth. They also created domestic textiles like coverlets and quilts. On the largest estates, Black women were directed to spin fiber into thread, weave thread into cloth, and produce—in cramped, hot quarters—badges of slavery.51 Their callused hands crafted the slave uniform their children and fellow captives would wear, along with the finer patterned quilts the slave-owner family members would drape across their polished mahogany bedsteads. Theirs was a “hidden world of…enslaved artisans whose skills with spindle, loom, and sewing needle were an integral part of the antebellum South.”52
RAIMENT ROLLED IN BLOOD
Even as enslaved women bent beneath the relentless burden of the spinning wheel, they took up the symbolism of clothing. In a proxy war of warp and weft, enslaved people fought back on plantations and farms, as well as in cosmopolitan cities like Charleston, by creatively mixing materials to fashion clothes that defied their station. They sabotaged attempts at sartorial control by their owners as well as lawmakers, knowingly and deliberately.53 Black men and women often dreamed of obtaining new clothing and footwear. Soft clothes and well-fitting shoes that honored their bodies challenged the notion that they were a subset of the species deserving to be dressed in rags and sacks. When enslaved people had the means, they often set their sights on cloth and apparel that signaled their essential worth. Ledger books from stores operating on plantations indicate how enslaved people spent their scarce funds. Slaveholders housed these stores on their premises because they’d realized that unfree people sought material pleasures, and they wanted to capture this population’s meager income while discouraging attempts to acquire things from afar.
Unfree people whose spending has been traced in plantation store records across Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia spent most of their rarely obtained dollars on “Cloth, Clothing, Sewing Supplies, [and] Handkerchiefs,” which made up 64.6 percent of their purchases across six surviving account books. Food, the second-largest category of spending in these ledgers, captured only 14.6 percent of enslaved people’s money by comparison. When enslaved women could not purchase new clothing, they sometimes surreptitiously took swaths of fabric, ribbons, buttons, and even fully made dresses from their mistresses, at times radically altering the garments to avoid detection. Black women transformed these bolts of hard-won cloth into masterpieces of cut and color that earned them back an ability to signify their sense of self-worth and community value through dress.54
By hook or by crook, through theft, trade, or sometimes purchase, enslaved women acquired colorful fabric and fanciful trimmings. They sacrificed nights, time most often set aside for familial caretaking, cabin maintenance, and extra work that might earn them money, to engage in the labor of producing clothing for themselves. They created striking outfits with specially procured cloth, Negro cloth at their disposal, and homespun they wove themselves. One man formerly enslaved in North Carolina described the harsh treatment of his mother, “whose mistress did not provide her with clothes.” Determined to create her own wardrobe, his mother acquired a wheel with the help of her husband and spun “in the night” in her cabin. The mistress, seeking to commandeer all of the woman’s work time, confined her to the plantation spinning house twelve hours a day. In response, the son recalled, his mother “would then go home, and, fixing her wheel in a place made in the floor to prevent its making a noise, she would spin for herself, in order that she might be decently clad.”55 Through a degree of self-motivated work that is difficult to conceive of, Black women fashioned their wardrobes and expressed creative imagination, ornamentation, and personal style. They risked punishment to wear these self-designed dresses at religious and social gatherings with their families and community on Sundays, often a day off from labor, and at secret evening revelries that took place in the woods at plantation borders. Relying on natural items to finish and embellish their clothing, enslaved women used vines and tree limbs to replicate the full-bodied look of the iconic southern hoopskirt, which symbolized femininity and luxurious excess in the 1850s and 1860s.56 Notably, the hoop also created “protected space” around the wearer, a symbolic shield for their bodies.57 Celebration, pleasure, and joy of the body in snatches of time beneath the moon’s clarifying light returned enslaved women to themselves.
Black girls also experienced newfound pleasure when dressed in keeping with the gender norms of their times. One girl, whose mother was sold away when she was six, later remembered being purchased and moved to Mississippi, where a kindly mistress (a recurring character type in many slave narratives, as is the cruel mistress) took pity on her. After professing the girl to be a “Po’ little thing…a little motherless child,” this new mistress “got some domestic and some calico and made…a dress and some drawers.” The woman who had been that girl recalled many decades later: “I was never dressed so fine in my life….I went out in the woods where there was lots of cedars thick around and…pulled up my dress and just looked and danced and danced.” Due to the vividness of her description, we can almost see this parentless girl dancing alone in the forest, the skirt of her dress playfully lifted so that she could admire the fabric. Whatever her new owner’s motives, the pride and pleasure the girl felt at being clean and dressed with care inspired a sublime moment.58
Black women also fought daily battles for their dignity in more dramatic ways. A few were bold enough to tear the clothing right off of their mistresses’ backs, acting on resentment as well as self-defense. A girl enslaved in Tennessee, nicknamed “Puss” by her mother, Fannie, watched her mistress hit Fannie with a stick for unknown reasons. In the absence of the master of the household, “Ma struck back and a fight followed….The thought seemed to race into my mother’s mind to tear mistress’ clothing off her body….She caught hold, pulled, ripped and tore. Poor mistress was nearly naked when the storekeeper got to them and pulled ma off.” When the master returned, he promised to have Fannie “whipped by law”; the mistress proclaimed that Fannie would be knocked down “like a beef.” Fannie was hired out after this incident and returned a year later wearing “new clothes, and a pair of beautiful earrings,” a vision of triumph to her daughter made real through the symbol of dress. Puss “decided to follow [her] mother’s example.” “I intended to fight,” she recalled many years later, “and if I couldn’t fight, I’d kick; and if I couldn’t kick, I’d bite.”59
Black women also took advantage of the disruption of the Civil War to rifle through plantation chests and put on the dresses of their mistresses, “want[ing] to give their exhilaration the shape of their own form.”60 And after the war, the notion of freedom included the right to be properly clothed. Elizabeth Keckley recounted an example of this desire to wear respectable clothes in association with a free life. Soon after the Civil War ended, Keckley encountered a woman on the street who had migrated from her former plantation to Washington, D.C. Bent at the spine with old age, the woman confided to Keckley that she had hoped to receive a “shife” (shift dress) from Mrs. Lincoln while there in the nation’s capital. While Keckley interpreted this expectation as a remnant of slavery in which the master or mistress distributed clothing rations, the garment may also have represented a bid for respectability and the protection of modesty that the speaker believed should come as part of the package of freedom.61
With such transformative rewards to the psyche and spirit, it is no wonder that Black women took risky measures to shake off the stain of Negro cloth and shapeless tunics. Even in the most frightful circumstances, they hunted for items of clothing and clung to the pieces they acquired with fierce protectiveness. Louisa Picquet, whose second owner had beaten her for evading his sexual advances, took the risk of accepting six half dollars from him, although she recognized this as a bribe. Her master was drunk at the time, so Louisa convinced herself that he would forget about the money and the implied e
xpectation of an erotic exchange. Why would she behave so recklessly? Louisa had never touched so much money before, and she knew what she would do with it: purchase a special dress. This garment would be nothing like her thin, drab, inadequate covering. “I had seen a flowered muslin dress in the store several times,” she recalled. “And I take a fancy to it; I thought it look beautiful. It was perfectly white, with a little pink leaf all over it.” The full skirt of the dress captured her imagination, as did the soft white cloth. Picquet, who was herself light enough to pass for white but would never know those privileges due to her birth to a slave mother, may have longed for the protective powers that perfect whiteness seemed to bestow upon some women. This fine white dress graced with a springtime motif of flowers seemed interlaced with goodness, dignity, and purity. Louisa wanted to feel these qualities attached to her person in a way that verified her inner worth. She took her master’s money, inciting his ire when she did not later return to his room as ordered. Cook exacted severe punishment for Louisa Picquet’s disobedience, whipping her naked body and leaving a tangle of scars on her flesh, one of which, she disclosed, she would take to the grave.62
Louisa’s decision reveals to us just how much enslaved women valued the chance to care for themselves, to restore their feminine honor in an era that prized gentility and modesty, through dress. Not long after this encounter, Picquet’s owner sold her to a third man, nearly fifty years old and also seeking sexual prey. On the auction block beneath the roving eyes of this known species of vulture, Louisa begged for a chance to retrieve her special muslin dress, tucked away, we can imagine, in a holding room where people were kept pre-sale. But Louisa would be separated from the white dress that had restored some portion of her autonomy and dignity, as well as from her mother, who sobbed and prayed when a “gentleman” bid Louisa’s price up to $1,500. Very few enslaved people were purchased for an amount that high, which would today be nearly equivalent to $38,900. Young, attractive women—many, but not all, mixed race and pale of skin—fetched these astronomical prices because of their intended use as sexual servants called “fancies.” When hairdresser Eliza Potter traveled down the Ohio River, she commented on this trade in girls with “beauty enough to arouse the base lust of some Southern buyer.” These innocents, Potter felt, were “doomed” to “ignominy.”63 Perhaps Louisa did feel doomed. John Williams, Louisa’s new owner, denied her wish to recover the white muslin gown, promising to supply her “plenty of nice dresses.” Louisa’s last thought of the dress that she had risked so much for was wrapped up in sadness at parting from her family. She hoped that perhaps her mother would find the frock, reuse the material to clothe Louisa’s baby brother, and have something beautiful to remember her by.64
On the steamboat ride to New Orleans, Louisa learned how she would be forced to procure the promised “nice dresses.” Her owner explained “what he had bought [her] for,” then swore that if she did as told, he would provide her with niceties, but if she refused him, he would “whip [her] almost to death.” Williams kept Louisa as his “housekeeper” and sex slave in New Orleans until freeing her upon his death, twenty years later. Supported by limited proceeds from the sale of Williams’s furniture, Louisa went north to Cincinnati, where she married a Black minister also born to an enslaved woman and her master, and published an account of her life in slavery to raise money to free her mother.65
Even as Louisa Picquet was desperate to retain her muslin dress, Elizabeth Keckley worried over her wardrobe in North Carolina. Separated from her mother when their master decided to send Elizabeth to his eldest son, young Mr. Burwell, she wrote a letter that circles round and round clothing. In it, she asks her mother, still enslaved in Virginia, to “tell Aunt Bella that I was very much obliged to her for the present; I have been so particular with it that I have only worn it once.” She frets over “not know[ing] whether my frock was clean or dirty.” And before concluding, she begs her mother for a dress, desiring, perhaps, another item touched by a loved one’s hands. “I wish you would send me a pretty frock this summer,” Elizabeth writes, asking for the garment to be relayed through the chain of people who owned and managed her family. She signed the missive, “Farewell, darling mother. Your affectionate daughter, Elizabeth Keckley.” Keckley could write, a rare skill, and yet literacy could not save her from the cruelty of a system that devalued her as a person.66
In this note that Elizabeth knew would be read by slaveholders, she told her mother about a dress she had been gifted, a dress she wanted, and a dress she was sewing (“the body and sleeves to make, and only one hour every night to work on it”) but not about her “griefs and misfortunes,” revealed years later in her narrative, that could “fill ten pages.” Keckley did not disclose the “torture” she had suffered under the reign of Burwell, a Presbyterian minister, and his vindictive wife. Intent upon having her strong will broken, the minister placed her in the household and under the authority of Mr. Bingham, “the village schoolmaster,” a “hard, cruel man.” When the schoolmaster coolly declared, for no reason Elizabeth could fathom, “I am going to whip you…take down your dress this instant,” she refused, attempting to protect her privacy as “a woman in full development” ordered to disrobe before a man who had promised to assault her. She recounts in her narrative how she “resisted with all [her] strength” while the schoolmaster “succeeded in binding [her] hands and tearing [her]dress from [her] back.” Our review of this scene will close here, before the worst of Elizabeth’s sufferings, which she chose to keep from the mother who could not protect her. The ripped raiment and torn pride that Elizabeth bore were scars she carried alone.67
We do not know if that summer frock Elizabeth Keckley requested ever arrived, only that she was surely seeking a different, deeper kind of cover when she asked her mother for a dress. We do know that Elizabeth would develop her mother’s knack for the craft; years later, she proudly reported: “I had acquired something of a reputation as a dress-maker.” Talking of dresses, making dresses, and donning the self-defense of dresses was a balm for enslaved women’s sufferings, sorrows, and sullied dreams. Their decorous apparel, sewn by hands intent on surviving “the lowest yet,” was raiment rolled in blood.68
The Keckley Quilt (1862–80). This quilt is thought to have been made by Elizabeth Keckley from silk scraps of Mary Todd Lincoln’s dresses. Sprays of flowers, eagles, and baskets of fruit frame a blue-and-yellow mosaic design, with a richly textured eagle in flight in the center. The word Liberty is spelled in gold letters below the eagle. According to quilt historian Ricky Clark, quilt collector and quilt historian Ruth Finley attributed this quilt, which she then owned, to Elizabeth Keckley in a 1954 lecture titled “Quilts.” Finley said this quilt “pieced of Mrs. Lincoln’s dresses” was “a personal gift from Mrs. Keckley to Mrs. Lincoln, who used it as a counterpane on her bed at the White House. As such—a personal gift—Mary Lincoln took it with her when she left after her husband’s assassination—left with Lizzie Keckley to companion her shattered health and broken life.” Image courtesy of the Kent State University Museum; photograph by Joanne Arnett.
Amid the gloom of slavery, women like Rose and girls like Ashley recaptured the beauty of color and shape that brought pleasure and dignity to their lives. But the initiative Black women took in their dress angered some white slaveholding women, who recognized the silent affront to their authority. In Charleston, a woman named Silla “was only allowed to wear such dresses as her mistress described,” according to the formerly enslaved man Sam Aleckson, who depicted her in his autobiography. But Silla was “fond of dress” and had access to material provided by an enslaved brother. Silla, also a devout Methodist, labored secretly at night to sew “a beautiful dress made in the latest style, a rich mantilla, and a bonnet that was not inexpensive.” With the permission of their owners, unfree people could choose among a range of Christian services on Sunday morning: Episcopalian, Anglican, Congregational, Catholic, Pre
sbyterian, Baptist, Lutheran, and more. Those in Jewish households may have attended Beth Elohim Synagogue with their owners on Saturdays. Enslavers who believed in a paternalistic approach to chattel bondage thought religion could be employed to temper the behavior of their slaves while at the same time allowing these owners to demonstrate proper kindness and guidance. The Methodist meeting, which permitted a greater degree of expressiveness in worship, was popular with enslaved people in early- and mid-nineteenth-century Charleston.69
However, Silla’s mistress only allowed the people she owned to attend her house of worship. Silla broke two rules when she glided into the Methodist church looking so fine that Sunday morning. She returned to the mistress’s house late after the church service and tried to sneak in undetected in her lovely suit of clothes. But Charleston’s walled estates were built for surveillance and containment, and the mistress, Octavia, had taken “her seat on the piazza which commanded a full view of the servants’ entrance.” She spied Silla and meted out immediate punishment, ordering Silla to set a fire and sacrifice her bonnet to it. The symbolic significance of the burning bonnet would not have been lost on either woman, as the bonnet was an “important” accessory, Emily Thornwell lectured in The Lady’s Guide, “characterizing a lady’s appearance.” Octavia had never permitted Silla to wear a bonnet, forcing the enslaved maid to instead “have her head tied with a bandanna,” a tag of servitude that the iconic Aunt Jemima character would famously wear less than a century later. Octavia concluded this vindictive spectacle with a command: “Go and take off those horrid things and never let me see you in them again.” Silla’s silent message of corporeal possession and personal expression had communicated clearly. Her mistress attempted to kill such dangerous inclinations and the self-worth—indeed, self-ownership—they signaled.70