Girl in Black and White

by Jessie Morgan-Owens

  Elizabeth and the three children arrived safely and well, yesterday morning.

  After all the negotiation with the two contending parties, on their behalf, and all the anxieties, disappointments and delay, of two or three years of effort; with the husband and father constantly calling on me, and relying on my encouragement & aid, in raising his funds, keeping up his hopes, & looking out for the protection of his family, in any way I could.—You may be assured that I contemplated the happy and complete re-establishment of this poor family, restored to each other, no more as slaves, but in full freedom and peace, with more thankfulness than I can tell.

  For all your constant kindness to them while in Washington, and your attention and aid to me, I need not say that I am heartily grateful.—

  Faithfully, truly yours, J. A. Andrew5

  An ambrotype of Oscar and Mary would be made soon after their arrival in Boston, at Cutting and Bowdoin studios. Mary wears the same plaid day dress as in the daguerreotype by Vannerson, though long sleeves have been added for the season, along with a new lace collar. Her expression, however, is entirely changed: something about her appears confident and proud, and her eyes snap.

  Her brother Oscar, considerably darker-complected, wears a suit that seems too big for him, and he seems to tower over Mary. Little is known about him, apart from brief mentions of him as the handsome, eagle-eyed philosopher in John Andrew’s broadsheet “History of Ida May” (page 136).

  James Ambrose Cutting and David Bowdoin produced ambrotypes together for just over a year, and the one they made of Mary and Oscar is now in the Massachusetts Historical Society Photograph Collection, along with the Vannerson daguerreotype. Photograph number 2.128 is described as “a Quarter-plate ambrotype in leather case of two unidentified slave children in whom, according to a note enclosed with the case, Gov. John A. Andrew of Massachusetts ‘took an interest.’ ”

  Cutting added a layer of protective glass to the ambrotype, affixing it to the emulsion side of the plate using balsam of fir.6 This method successfully sealed the images made on the glass plates of the ambrotype, using the wet collodion process, so it would last more than a century. For much of the 1850s, Cutting charged his fellow photographers twenty-five dollars to license his patents. Some photographers, like Julian Vannerson, paid up, but the fee made Cutting known to the trade as an unpopular “process-monger.” Cutting would eventually bundle his patents with those of John Whipple, who had seen more success in keeping his “secret processes” lucrative.

  Mary Mildred and Oscar Williams, ambrotype by Cutting & Bowdoin, ca. 1855.

  The Cutting and Bowdoin ambrotype depicts Mary as a member of a loving family. Unlike in the Vannerson daguerreotype, she is not a poster child but a child; not an orphan but a sister; not the kidnapped “Ida May” but a child of racially mixed parents. The perceptible difference between these two images is no wonder: one was made for private remembrance, the other for public consumption.

  This image later became a memento mori, or photograph of a person who has passed. Oscar would die five years later, when he was fifteen, of tuberculosis. The first years of the Williamses’ Boston life would be haunted by this disease, commonly known then as consumption because it completely destroys the body, uses it up. Newcomers to city life, living in old buildings and in close quarters through unforgiving winters, were susceptible to its grip. Even a strong young body like Oscar’s could not withstand the wasting energy of this disease.

  In the press, the moniker “Ida May,” and the fictional backstory that went with it, stuck to Mary. “Little Ida May” became the predominant way she was referred to, though her given name Mary Mildred Botts occasionally appeared in papers, such as in the Courier. The Messenger went so far as to say that “the girl’s name was changed to ‘Ida May’ by Mr. Sumner; and by that name she will, in future be known.”7 Masters took liberties with slaves’ names, and at least one journalist seems to have thought Sumner owned her. Other newspapers called her “Ida May II,” as though she were a sequel.8 This renaming could be innocuous, like a stage name, or it could be symptomatic of a deeper issue: when people’s names are changed, neutralized, or erased, they are lost to history. Further, a name change removes the protections of a large loving family.

  In the novel, Ida May was a white child “kidnapped” into slavery. Mary’s nickname, “Little Ida May,” attached that fictional story to her. Sumner wanted Mary’s race to read as “white,” not “made white,” so for that reason, he captioned her image with a story about the kidnapping of a white girl, Ida May. It was as if Ida May, last seen in the papers beaten senseless by her kidnappers, had been spectacularly resurrected by Charles Sumner (and fund-raising) three months later. Abolitionists commonly promoted sensational stories of “mistaken” enslavement, to demonstrate how the Fugitive Slave Act might encourage the kidnapping of free people into slavery.

  Ida May was published to great fanfare in 1854; Solomon Northup had published his true slave narrative of mistaken captivity, Twelve Years a Slave, a year earlier. Then in the spring of 1855, Northup took to the antislavery circuit to lecture on his experiences in Louisiana, and on at least two occasions, Mary stood by his side as “Little Ida May.” They were a notable pair: a grown man and father, hardened by years of labor, and a little girl with strawberry hair.9 They had one thing in common: the American public felt their enslavements to be unfair. It was a seductive argument. Kidnapping was a simple injustice rather than a systemic one, and thus easier to solve.

  Solomon Northup’s narrative proved that free persons could be sold into slavery without recourse, because of the color of their skin. In a contemporary slave narrative, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, William Craft made this reminder: “slavery in America is not at all confined to persons of any particular complexion.” His wife, Ellen Craft, the daughter of a slave and her master, “passes” for a white invalid man in the narrative. But Craft wanted to extend the threat of kidnapping to include all children, to engage all readers. He warned white parents, “it is almost impossible for a white child, after having been kidnapped and sold into or reduced to slavery, in part of the country where it is not known (as often is the case), ever to recover its freedom.”10

  But unlike “Little Ida May,” Mary Mildred Williams was not kidnapped. She had been born into slavery—and into a loving family. She never lost either her identity or her mother. Her father had been working and waiting for her. By conflating Mary’s true story with Ida May’s fictional one, Sumner whitewashed her story, painting over generations of sexual exploitation with a single kidnapping. In the spotlight, Mary was isolated from her entire family. Her robust family support was inconvenient to the telling of Ida May’s orphan tale. And by raising awareness for those few children kidnapped into slavery, Sumner eclipsed the multitudes who were taken from their parents as a matter of business. The Liberator exclaimed in its first issue, “There were kidnapped in the past year . . . MORE THAN FIFTY THOUSAND INFANTS, the offspring of slave parents!!!”11

  While the public thought Mary Mildred Botts had been renamed “Ida May” by her famous patron, in her private life Mary took her father’s name, becoming Mary Mildred Williams. Henry Williams had left the surname Botts in Virginia and changed his name upon his arrival in Boston. Now his wife and three children followed suit.

  Our name attaches us to our family, and families were separated by slavery. Most people assumed Mary’s father was her mother’s master, J. C. Weedon, because of the pale color of her skin. Therefore, it is doubly important that we use the name Mary Mildred Williams, her father’s chosen name for her—and not her father’s master’s family name, Botts—to refer to Mary in future.12

  The small note affixed to the copy of the daguerreotype of Mary kept by Caroline Alvord Sherman reads “Mulatto raised by Charles Sumner,” although anyone familiar with Senator Sumner would hardly expect him to raise a ward. In the novel Ida May, Ida’s parents are thought to be dead. No wonder then, that good people came for
ward to adopt Mary, to take up the parental role that her slave masters must have defiled. William Knight of Medway, Massachusetts, having read Sumner’s letter about Mary in the papers, sent the senator an offer to adopt “Little Ida May” and raise her with his own sons.

  Medway, February 28, 1855

  Hon. Charles Sumner

  Dear Sir, I noticed in the paper last evening a letter to Dr. Stone in which you say you have a little “Ida May” redeemed from slavery; if she has no home or there is none provided for her, we would be happy to take her, and give her all the privileges we give our own children.

  We have only two little boys, and the idea of having an active, intelligent little girl would be very pleasing.

  Most respectfully yours, Wm Knight13

  Knight’s note recognizes that should Mary already have a home, he will honor that claim. He offers white privilege by name: “all the privileges that we give our own children.” Elizabeth and Henry Williams faced a difficult choice, presented to them many times over the course of Mary’s fame: to give her up to white society.

  Did Mary ever read Ida May, or have it read to her? When she was a child, the announcers who introduced her as “Little Ida May” would no doubt have sketched the novel for the audience. Despite its antislavery fervor, the novel was available for purchase in Washington, and Elizabeth could have procured a copy, resplendent in its cobalt blue binding. Whether or not seven-year-old Mary read the novel, its message was clear: some children were not meant for slavery. She was one of them.

  Frederick Bailey, the slavery name of Frederick Douglass, was also seven years of age when he learned he was a slave. He had witnessed, first hand, that enslavement promises violence. As the man remembered the inquisitive child, Douglass recalled how his aunt Esther’s torture initiated a productive line of inquiry.

  The heart-rending incidents, related in the foregoing chapter, led me, thus early, to inquire into the nature and history of slavery. Why am I a slave? Why are some people slaves, and others masters? Was there ever a time this was not so? How did the relation commence? These were the perplexing questions which began now to claim my thoughts, and to exercise the weak powers of my mind, for I was still but a child, and knew less than children of the same age in the free states. As my questions concerning these things were only put to children a little older, and little better informed than myself, I was not rapid in reaching a solid footing. By some means I learned from these inquiries that “God, up in the sky,” made every body; and that he made white people to be masters and mistresses, and black people to be slaves. This did not satisfy me, nor lessen my interest in the subject. . . .

  Then, too, I found that there were puzzling exceptions to this theory of slavery on both sides, and in the middle. I knew of blacks who were not slaves; I knew of whites who were not slaveholders; and I knew of persons who were nearly white, who were slaves. Color, therefore, was a very unsatisfactory basis for slavery.

  Once, however, engaged in the inquiry, I was not very long in finding out the true solution of the matter. It was not color, but crime, not God, but man, that afforded the true explanation of the existence of slavery; nor was I long in finding out another important truth, viz: what man can make, man can unmake. The appalling darkness faded away, and I was master of the subject.

  —Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom14

  Young Frederick walks us through the steps he made away from ignorance once Esther’s whipping has made slavery visible to him. The scales fall from his eyes; he remembers this moment as a transformative conversion experience that has left him “master of the subject.” Douglass earns his mastery through contemplation of visible evidence, and like all uncovered truths, it appears self-evident. Mary found herself to be of these “puzzling exceptions.” What solutions did she learn from becoming “Ida May”?

  14

  “Features, Skin, and Hair”

  Boston, March 1855

  On her second day in Boston, Saturday, March 10, “Little Ida May” was expected to appear at the Boston State House, where, alongside Solomon Northup, she would be presented to the Massachusetts legislature and members of the press. Northup’s story preceded him, as Mary’s daguerreotype preceded her. A few weeks earlier John Andrew had written Sumner, “I feel also desirous that Members of the legislature shall have a sight of those children,” for “their presence may add impressiveness” to the issues under consideration.1 Dr. Stone had organized Northup and Mary’s visit—it would be a spectacular sideshow on a day when the State House would have the public’s full attention.

  That Saturday the state legislature would consider two petitions, both Vigilance Committee efforts. The first was a petition for state action to curtail the Fugitive Slave Law. The second was a bill calling for the removal of Justice Edward G. Loring as Suffolk County probate judge. A year earlier, Loring had adjudicated the Anthony Burns trial, returning Burns to slavery, in compliance with the Fugitive Slave Act and in the face of vocal public opposition. On the day Mary and Northup appeared, the Committee on Federal Relations would hear new information in the controversial Loring case.2

  Earlier in the week, at the State House, the Reverends Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips had been indicted by the U.S. Circuit Court for obstruction of justice. Parker and Phillips were called to court for their rousing speeches on behalf of Burns at Faneuil Hall on the eve of his sentencing. Higginson and his compatriots had broken down the courthouse doorway in an attempt to free Burns during his hearing before Justice Loring; a guard lost his life in the melée that followed. The day after Higginson’s court appearance, Anthony Burns was returned to Boston, a man freed by fund-raising.

  With this much antislavery news happening in the space of a week, it is notable that Northup and Mary’s visit was so widely covered in the press. The Worcester Spy reported that “Solomon Northup, of N. York, who spent twelve years as a slave on the Red River, and Ida May, the little redeemed slave, from Washington, were in the Hall of the House on Saturday, for a short time, and excited much sympathy and interest. The little girl has no feature which indicates any negro origin.—Her eyes sparkled just like those of any other little girl when she saw the big cod-fish hanging in the hall.”3 The Boston Courier noticed that “she is a good looking child, with a pale face a very little freckled, chestnut colored hair, and has no characteristics of the negro race in her features.”4 In contrast, the correspondent for the St. Albans Messenger, from Vermont, maintained a healthy incredulity to the proposition that the members of the Massachusetts legislature would welcome Mary’s presence in these proceedings.

  Hon. Charles Sumner, an abolitionist and Senator from Massachusetts, has created no little sensation in this city, with his “white slave girl,” whom he bought and brought from Virginia. He has been dubbed a slaveholder by some of his enemies, inasmuch as he purchased the girl’s freedom with his own funds, and upon his own responsibility. The girl, although a mulatto, has quite a fair, white complexion, and will easily pass for “white folks.” Her family still remains in bondage; so, in order to more effectually enlist sympathy, Mr. Sumner had several copies of a daguerreotype taken of her, and circulated among his abolition friends, with a view of raising funds sufficient to buy the rest of the family. . . . She was taken to the State House soon after her arrival here, and was much caressed and flattered by members of the Legislature; which circumstance was a little singular, considering that they were Know Nothings, and she slightly tinctured with “foreign extraction.”

  —“Boston Correspondence,” St. Albans Messenger, March 22, 18555

  Her staged appearance at the State House was “a little singular,” contended the St. Albans reporter, considering that the majority of elected officials in Massachusetts in 1855 were members of the white supremacist American Party, otherwise known as the Know Nothings. These ethnocentrists were unlikely to “caress” and “flatter” a child of indeterminate race.

  William Cooper Nell,
acting as a correspondent for Frederick Douglass’s Paper, reported on Mary’s appearance with likeminded cynicism about the Know Nothing response. He began, as most contemporary reports of Mary did, by confirming that her racial features were white: “She is perfectly white.” Then, as he was speaking to the black abolitionist community reading Frederick Douglass’s Paper, he shifted his tone: her whiteness, not her slave-ness, produced excitement in white, nativist audiences. Black Bostonians were not surprised by her color, because, “white fugitives” were a daily appearance in their community.

  BOSTON, March 12, 1855.

  Anthony Burns arrived in this city on Wednesday afternoon. In the evening there was a grand reception meeting at the Tremont Temple. About two thousand persons were present. Burns was loudly cheered when he went in, and took his seat; after which, three cheers were called for and given . . . The meeting was an enthusiastic one, and the sentiments of the speeches were pretty generally approved of and loudly cheered by the audience. Rev. Dr. Kirk was the chief speaker of the evening. He made one remark which, we confess, we did not understand; he said, “a black man is a man, every inch of him. Under the skin, all is human.” We wonder if the learned Doctor means that the skin, hair and nails of the black man are not human? Perhaps he means if a black man was skinned and scalped, and his toe and fingernails taken off, then the rest of him would be human. Now, we like the Doctor’s speech very much, but we are inclined to think that the Doctor, in this instance, was a little ambiguous. We shall be glad to report progress in this matter at an early day, as we hear that Dr. Rock is to lecture soon on the varieties of the human species, and review Mr. Pettit’s speech in Congress on the inferiority of the African race; and I hope to be able to learn more particularly what is meant by “all under the skin is human.” Burns spoke very well; he has, however, a little too much of the slaveholder’s religion, which cripples him. We think however, that he will soon get over that, if he remains in New England . . .