Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  This journalist had one fact of Mary’s enslavement incorrect. Judge Neale did not own her father. He reports a “general sentiment” of “astonishment,” and in that feeling, his colleagues at the New-York Daily Times, “fully concur.” The word “astonishment” suggests an overpowering of his senses, as if in surprise or in reaction to the sudden presence of something unaccountable and unaccounted for. Astonishment is a temporary disturbance in our categories of experience, rattling our assumptions of what is “us” and “not us.”

  The Times is further surprised that Mary was ever “held” as a slave. This shift in language, that Mary was “held” in slavery, subtly communicated a hope that she had not been born into slavery. The novel Ida May provides him with the fantasy of a white child who had been kidnapped into slavery, and thus was “held” wrongfully as a slave. The journalist was redirecting readers’ focus away from the taboo of sexual slavery. “Prominent individuals of the city” might prefer to believe Mary was the victim of kidnapping and wrongful enslavement rather than the product of nonconsensual sex between white masters and the enslaved women Letty, Prue, and Elizabeth.

  Some prominent individuals were more direct. A month earlier a racist take on the subject had appeared in the press along with a “general laugh.”

  A GOOD REPARTEE.

  A friend recently from Washington has related to us a little incident that transpired a short time ago in the Senate Chamber, and which made some amusement among the members.

  Mr. Gillette, our Senator, sits near to Toombs of Georgia, and they frequently pass a good-humored joke. A few mornings ago, just before the Senate was called to order, while several of the members were standing near, Toombs said to Gillette: “They say, Gillette, that you abolitionists are mad with the Almighty for making the n**rs black.” “Your informant is slightly mistaken,” replied Gillette; “we are only mad with you slaveholders for making them white.” The allusion to the bleaching process that is going on among the colored population of the South was at once understand by all, and Toombs joined with much good humor in the general laugh.

  —Connecticut Courant, February 3, 18554

  To shock a white audience into awareness of the pain of slavery, illustrations in popular books depicted white people enduring slave life: white bodies at auction, white bodies being whipped, and so on. This narcissistic attention to “white slavery” moved front and center in white-authored fictional works such as Ida May, Richard Hildreth’s The White Slave (which depicted Archy and his wife and half-sister Cassy at the whipping post), Dion Boucicault’s Broadway hit The Octoroon, and of course Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which featured several white heroines. In theaters in New York, the white child star Cordelia Howard performed the role of Ida in dramatizations of Ida May and then Little Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, sometimes both on the same day.5

  As the pro-slavery author Edward J. Stearns pointed out in 1853, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “when our sympathies are to be enlisted in behalf of fugitives, [Stowe] takes care to have them not negroes, nor even mulattoes, but quadroons,—men and women all but white, and who, therefore, according to the fitness of things, ought not to be in slavery at all.” Had Eliza and Harry presented as black when they appeared at Senator Bird’s door, “certainly the Senator never would have helped her off. This, Mrs. Stowe very well knew, and therefore she took care to have her fugitives all but white.”6

  Mary’s photograph allowed the reading public, busy consuming these stories of white trauma, to consider a white, and formerly enslaved, child. Even if readers had never seen the daguerreotype, knowing it existed gave truth to fiction.

  The South did not mistake this strategy. Beverley Tucker saw right through Sumner’s “white slave” propaganda. His language was coarse, but the message was clear: white supremacy motivates the abolitionists’ latest move toward white girls. Tucker elicited disgust in his dehumanizing descriptors for black people, and while these paragraphs are now difficult to read, they illustrate how mainstream racist ideology aligned beauty and value with Caucasian features. He makes Sumner a “ring-master” and Mary, a romantic heroine.

  SENATOR SUMNER, “IDA MAY,” AND THE SOLID MEN OF BOSTON

  It is no light task, quote the old adage, “to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear,” but that operation is not more difficult and impossible than the process of making a hero out of a big, black, odorous buck negro—or a heroine out of a thick-lipped, goat-nosed, nappy-headed negro wench. The Abolitionists have made many efforts to do so. They have shed oceans of crocodile tears over Fred Douglas, and shed honest blood as a sacrifice to Anthony Burns. But they were engaged in an up hill business. The dismal black could not be washed out, the thick lips could not be reduced, the flat nose could not be elevated, the nappy hair could not be straightened, and the African odor defied Eau de Cologne and otto of roses. Without the removal of these obstacles heroism was a plain impossibility. The essential element of romance was wanting, and everybody knows that heroes and heroines are romantic beings.

  Here was a crisis, an emergency, that frowned its terror on the Abolitionists of Massachusetts. But there was one man who was equal to the great occasion. He saw the peril, and he determined to meet it. This man was Senator Sumner. We may imagine his anguish until he succeeded. We may fancy his eyes “in a fine frenzy rolling.” We may picture to ourselves his tall, stout figure convulsed with spasms of philanthropic sympathy. We may imagine how he wrung his hands and tore his hair. But at length the mind of the statesman springs a great thought. A sudden inspiration comes to this relief, and he exclaims like the ancient mathematician, “eureka—eureka.” As the apostle was moved to go to Damascus, so was Senator Sumner—the grave and the august Massachusetts Senator, moved to go to the borders of Virginia to hunt for a slave without the disgusting African marks of a flat nose, thick lips, &c. &c. The grave Senator makes his pilgrimage. He finds a girl in slavery who is nearly white. The base low marks that intervene between the unadulterated African and heroism, are absent. She is quite white. She is bought by the Senator (another person furnishing the funds) and transplanted like a tender lily to Massachusetts. But before she is sent to that solid and erudite state, a daguerreotype of her is taken, over which the august Senator presides. It is sent to Massachusetts. It is shown to the solid men of Boston and to all the grave legislators of Massachusetts. Inasmuch as we spoke of this daguerreotype and the Senator’s letter, which accompanied it, we forbear at present to say more about it, and return to the original. . . .

  The abolitionists have at last found out what the Southern people found out long ago—that it is sheer nonsense to undertake to invest thick-lipped Africans with romance. They have found out that to sustain, protract, and render effective their sympathy with African slaves, they must catch a white one with all the marks of the Caucasian race, and show her as a poor persecuted slave to the solid men of Boston, and the grave legislators of Massachusetts. Senator Sumner is the ringmaster, and he sequins himself most creditably.

  But this girl, picked up by the grave Massachusetts Senator is so white, that we confess, we are not without our suspicions. When carried to the office of the editor of that immaculate sheet, the New York Times, he thus exclaims: “She is one of the fairest and most indisputable white children that we have ever seen. ‘Prominent individuals’ who saw her, expressed their ‘astonishment that she should ever have been held a slave.’ ”

  Several thoughts here suggest themselves. One is, that she is in all probability, not a bought slave, but a humbugged white girl. The second is, that, if white, as the New York Times declares, it is very silly in the Abolitionists to undertake to illustrate African slavery by means of a white girl.

  The innocent girl finds herself with a new and romantic name. They make her swop her Virginian and her true name for the delectable appellation of—“Ida May.”

  She is crowned with the flowers of romance. She is made a heroine because she is white. But, to cut the matter short, we beg leave to say
that we have a kindness for slaves—more kindness than all the Abolitionists put together; and we wish “Ida May” much happiness. We hope that her new masters will marry her off to one of the sons of one of the rich and solid men of Boston. No doubt Senator Sumner will give her away, and the Rev. Theodore Parker will perform the ceremony.

  —Beverley Tucker, March 14, 18557

  The New-York Daily Times retorted in a short response entitled “Encouraging”: “The Washington Sentinel has said a witty thing—we were going to quote it, but the joke reaches through a column, and we have not space to save the curiosity in. It is all about Senator Sumner’s ‘Ida May,’ who, it shrewdly suggests must be a ‘bogus’ slave because the Times has pronounced her white.”8

  The Times neglected to mention Tucker’s theory that “it is very silly in the Abolitionists to undertake to illustrate African slavery by means of a white girl.” Sumner, by bringing a white child out of slavery, had intended to upend the racial construct and thereby blur the edges of slavehood. But members of his audience simply regarded her as an exception to the rule of black and white, a “bogus” representative of the class of enslaved persons.

  Edward Lillie Pierce, Sumner’s nineteenth-century biographer, put it best when he called Mary’s daguerreotype a bait-and-switch: “many were affected by the sight of [a] slave apparently white, who were unmoved at the contemplation of negroes in bondage.” Sumner’s strategy generated sympathy, but at a high cost. By confirming racial difference—white slave equals white sympathy—he did not call for sympathy and, more crucially, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for persons of color. This equation was complicated by class and gender norms surrounding white womanhood. The near-white mothers and girls at the heart of antislavery novels trouble the social landscape only insofar as they exposed new communities of white women who needed protecting from white men. By inviting judgments about white and black “fitness” for enslavement (sexual or otherwise), mixed-race characters could either confirm a message and vision of a shared humanity or, just as easily, solidify existing racial prejudice.

  13

  The Williams Family

  Boston, March 7, 1855

  The family traveled on to Boston by boat and rail, via the Fall River Route—the fast, luxurious, and modern way to make the journey in 1855. Brainard reserved staterooms for Prue, Evelina, Elizabeth, Oscar, Mary, and Adelaide Rebecca, and separate quarters for himself, at the rate of four dollars a person. Had the steamship company known who they were, it might have denied them staterooms, but as it was, Brainard settled their reservations, using money Henry Williams had sent by way of John Andrew. The 238-mile journey would take only 8 hours and 22 minutes, one-eighth the time it would have taken them to travel overland, which took four days and required staying three nights in uncertain lodgings. After the overnight journey, they would arrive in Boston (as the steamship company advertised) “before the first appointment of the day.”

  In this case, their first appointment would be reunion with husband and father Henry Williams; they were eager to be on their way. On Thursday, March 8, after “prominent members of the city” took their measure in the offices of the New-York Daily Times, on Nassau Street, they set out crosstown, making their way through the weekday crowd during the last hour of business on a cold day. Mary and her family boarded the steamship at Hudson River Pier 2 N.R. (North River), at Morris Street, a short walk from the Battery. (That pier no longer exists today, having been filled in and built up as Battery Park City.)

  Their steamship, captained by Benjamin Brayton, was the seven-year-old Empire State, which had been dedicated the year Mary was born. It departed New York on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday afternoons. On alternate days, the Bay State, the company’s other ship, plied the route. The Bay State Steamboat Company, run in the 1850s by William Borden, was the first in a long line to navigate the Fall River route. The Bay State was once the largest inland steamship in America, built and furnished at a cost of $175,000, with 420 “commodious and well-ventilated” berths in 315 feet. The newer Empire State was built in 1847 to the same specifications, only “still more costly and elegant” and forty feet longer. Magazines praised the ships as “chase and neat, but not gaudy.” In their day these were floating palaces, with dining rooms, card salons, and dance halls fit for presidents and robber barons. According to one story, Gilded Age owner of the Bay State Steamboat Company James Fisk kept two hundred canaries in golden cages just to enliven his steamships’ long corridors.1

  The steamer pulled out of Pier 2 N.R. at four o’clock and slowly rounded Castle Garden. This being March, Castle Garden was closed for the season, though along the ramparts of the Battery, a few intrepid men and women could always be seen, as Herman Melville assured us, looking out to sunset or sea despite the hard wind. The Empire State headed up the East River, treating Mary, Oscar, and Adelaide to a view of the city in silhouette against the setting sun. By dinner service, the steamer had turned east through Hell’s Gate into a dark Long Island Sound.

  All night the Empire State followed the coast of Long Island as its passengers danced, tucked themselves into their warm staterooms, or if among the black or half-price travelers, found frigid chairs tied to the lower decks. In the predawn light, the ship touched at Newport, Rhode Island, then headed north to the port town of Fall River, Massachusetts. It was a short night. Everyone, down to the last sleepy passenger, had to be packed and ready to disembark at six a.m. At the bottom of the gangplank, porters hustled them a dozen or so feet across the platform, to board waiting railcars. The Fall River train station was inside the wharf, directly adjacent to the docked steamships, an ingenious design. The steamers’ arrival times were precisely synchronized with train departures on the Old Colony Railroad.

  The train to Boston would take an hour and forty minutes. Later that night the Massachusetts coast would see record snow and hurricane-force winds. Nearby rail lines in Plymouth, Duxbury, and Cape Cod would become impassable beneath snowdrifts. On Saturday afternoon, stages that were due to connect to the Old Colony Railroad could not force themselves through, so passengers deserted their coaches and walked the three or four miles to Duxbury in the wind and snow, or else spent the night among strangers in the farmhouses scattered along that route.2

  But early Friday morning was clear, and their train made the remaining fifty-three miles to Boston without incident. Mary and her family arrived in South Station at eight a.m. on March 9, 1855. Forty-four days after manumission, their free life began.

  Henry Williams walked down the Old Colony line platform as the engine pulled in, enveloping him in rising steam and noise. He searched every window for a familiar face, stepping aside as porters swung out from their doors, lowering the steps before the train fully slowed. The cold air dissipated any warmth from the boilers. Valets met the first-class cars with carts and heavy coats. Business commuters pressed in the direction of the exits. Baggage carts were pulled up the ramp. Henry searched this scene for his wife.

  The steam and noise subsided as the platform filled with passengers wrapped in the quiet of reunion. Once the opening shouts of recognition were sounded through the window glass, the family disembarked to gather around him in a long embrace. At the train station that morning, husband and wife were restored to each other after an absence of five dangerous years. Henry met his daughter Adelaide Rebecca, now a school-aged child. His son Oscar was almost out of boyhood, a smaller version of himself.

  Henry was to them like a father returned from war. He had passed through all trials. The three women too had endured. The children were growing, smart and fine. All present had once expected never to see one another again, and the joy must have come on whole, blessedly unmitigated by disappointment and loss. Their tears held equal parts relief and joy.

  In that moment when Henry Williams was restored to his roles of father, husband, and son-in-law, he reattached himself to a private life that he had been denied—denied for five years by distance,
and for a lifetime by slavery. He reassumed the responsibilities and endorsements of a large family. This extended family of seven was his to have and to hold. He had refused to capitulate to John Cornwell or Thomas Nelson or John C. Weedon or Charles Sumner. He had fought for the heart of his wife and fundraised for their children, whether they looked like him or not. He had taken back this dear prize for himself.

  The Boston papers were on hand to witness. The Boston Recorder ran the headline, “A Family United.”3 The Boston Courier, announcing the “Arrival of Senator Sumner’s Protégés,” confirmed that Mary was indeed, “a very handsome child, with fair skin and regular features.”4

  John Andrew, too, witnessed the reunion he had helped effect. He was proud of the role he had played in what he termed “the happy and complete re-establishment of this poor family, restored to each other.” The word re-establishment was not wholly correct or incorrect, and he revised his thought. As enslaved people, they had had no legal claim to one another, but now Henry could take his place as head of the household without impediment. Andrew had made certain of his client’s rights to the extent of the law’s protections in a slaveholding society. Legally speaking, this family was complete; it would be up to them to make themselves whole.

  4 Court Street March 10,’ 55

  My dear Sumner,

  I have just rec’d yours of the 8th,—and the “free papers.”

  Since the case of Ludwell is in abeyance for the present, trust be until further news from Judge Neale, I write to him by this day’s mail, not only in reply to a letter rec’d this week; but, also to say that—in your absences from Washington—he need not trouble you with the subject; but may correspond with me directly, as heretofore,—I hope the money for Ludwell maybe got before by the time it is needed—and so no time for payment be required.