Architecture readings and a 300-word comment

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Chapter Title: TRANS CAPABLE: FUNGIBILITY, FUGITIVITY, AND THE MATTER OF BEING Book Title: Black on Both Sides

Book Subtitle: A Racial History of Trans Identity

Book Author(s): C. RILEY SNORTON

Published by: University of Minnesota Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt7dz.6

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tranS caPaBle FUngibility, FUgitivity, and the Matter oF being

[The] New World . . . marked a theft of the body— a willful and vio- lent . . . severing of the captive body from its motive will, its active desire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a ter- ritory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender- related, gender- specific.

— hortenSe SPillerS, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: an american grammar Book”

“FungIble,” accordIng to Its etymology, first appeared in the English language in Henry Colebrooke’s Treatise on Obligations and Con- tracts, Part 1, in 1818. Colebrooke, having spent a considerable period of his life as a colonial bureaucrat and judge in India, returned to En- gland to write about the particularities of British contract law; he also wrote about Hinduism and Hindu philosophy before his death, in 1871. Fungible articles, which he delineated according to their characteristic quantifiability— “alike liquidate and exigible”— required legal definition in relation to matters of compensation.1 Yet, Colebrooke maintains, “even things, which are not fungible, may be subjects of compensation; being due under general obligation respectively as cattle, slaves, horses.”2 The legal treatment of slaves and animals as both “subjects of com- pensation” and “not fungible” indicates, at least in part, the anxiogenic time in which the Treatise was produced. By the time of publication,

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Denmark– Norway (1803), Haiti (1804), the United Kingdom (1807), the United States (1808), Mexico (1810), Chile (1811), the Netherlands (1814), Uruguay (1814), Venezuela (1816), Spain (1818), France (1818), and Portugal (1818) had all passed legislation criminalizing transatlantic slave- trading activity. In some of these instances, slavery was also legally disestablished.

Although the United States formally abolished the importation of people for the purposes of enslavement in 1808, the internal slave trade remained legally intact until 1865. Some states, either by fed- eral ordinance or through state legislation, passed laws that annulled or gradually phased out the legal practice of slavery within their ter- ritories. Alternately expressed in terms of “compromises,” “provisos,” and “clauses,” the demarcation and annexation of territories and states evinced how slavery and settler colonialism structured official discourses of nation building and foreign policy, articulating a grammar rife with euphemism to disavow the violent processes by which land and per- sons would find primary legal expression as property. The variegated landscape of enslavement— its applications, abrogations, and diffuse rationales— staged the grounds for fungibility to emerge as a legal inter- cession intra- and internationally. How, then, would the “slave,” as “not fungible” and as a “subject of compensation,” come to emblematize a series of crises in imperial sovereignty, value, and ontology in the twi- light of formal slavery? Relatedly, how did the legal categorization of the slave, in Saidiya Hartman’s terms, link “the figurative capacities of blackness [with] the fungibility of the commodity”?3 If, as Hortense Spillers explains in the epigraph, the capacity for gender differentiation was lost in the outcome of the New World, ordered by the violent theft of body and land, it would stand to reason that gender indefiniteness would become a critical modality of political and cultural maneuvering within figurations of blackness, illustrated, for example, by the frequency with which narratives of fugitivity included cross- gendered modes of escape.4 Spillers named this process “ungendering,” the not accidental coincident of “fungible” in the twilight of formal slavery— also described as the transition from slavery to freedom or from slaving economies to the free market— which prompts an understanding of the phenomena she identifies in terms of the transitive expressivity of gender within blackness.5

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In this regard, captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being. Given that the ungen- dering of blackness is also the context for imagining gender as subject to rearrangement, this chapter examines how fungibility became a criti- cal practice- cum- performance for blacks in the antebellum period. To suppose that one can identify fugitive moments in the hollow of fungi- bility’s embrace is to focus on modes of escape, of wander, of flight that exist within violent conditions of exchange. Transitive— as in fungible passing into fugitive— and transversal— as in fugitivity intersecting fun- gibility, this chapter explores the fugitive (and at once fungible) narra- tives of black people— born free or into captivity— in the era of slavery’s formal transition. Here, the transitivity and transversality of fungibil- ity and fugitivity find expression in a line of a poem by Fred Moten, wherein the figures under principal review in this chapter “ran from it and [were] still in it.”6 Fugitive narratives featuring “cross- dressed” and cross- gender modes of wander and escape, most often described in terms of “passing,” function as a kind of map for a neglected dimension of what Spillers defined as the semiotic terrain of black bodies under cap- tivity, wherein gender refers not to a binary system of classification but to a “territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender- related, gender- specific.”7

William Still notes in his preface to The Underground Rail Road (1872) the different ways fugitives “disguised in female attire” or “dressed in the garb of men” made use of gender fungibility as a contrivance for freedom.8 Providing numerous examples of this occurrence, Still’s mono- graph included accounts of the escapes of Clarissa Davis of Virginia, alias Mary D. Armstead, in 1854; Maria Ann Weems of the District of Columbia, alias Jo Wright, in 1855; and Ellen Craft of Georgia, alias William Johnson, in 1848. Barbara McCaskill also describes how Har- riet Tubman once “disguised a Black man as a bonneted woman in order to obstruct his arrest and re- enslavement by Northern deputies,”9 and Harriet Jacobs narrated her cross- gender fugitive practice, as told from the perspective of the pseudonymous protagonist Linda Brent, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in the United States in 1861.10 Prior to these examples, northern white readers would have encountered the story of Mary Jones, alias Peter Sewally, also referred

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to as the Man- Monster or as Beefsteak Pete. Jones, although born free in New York City, was imprisoned in 1836 on charges of grand larceny in conjunction with pickpocketing.11 This polyonymous figure, along with a later namesake, Mary Ann Waters, who appeared in a pickup notice— a genre of slaving media meant to notify enslavers of the loca- tion of their escaped property— in 1851, illustrated how the transitive and transversal relations between blackness and transness were narrated reiteratively in this period in terms of “cross- dressing and theft,” not only as they both gave expression to the particularities of their criminalized acts but also as they pertained to the fungible, fugitive deeds carried out by actors figured as property- cum- persons.12

The first part of this chapter focuses on the two Marys and their emergence in the antebellum white press; the subsequent sections turn to Brent/Jacobs’s Incidents and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery to explore how the fungibility of gender mapped the terrain of these fugi- tive passages. Even as the cross- gender aspects of the escapes titillated abolitionist audiences, they also required resignification in order to pre- sent these incidents as examples of the extreme measures fugitives took to escape the problems of slavery rather than as a contingency of a contem- poraneous pseudoscientific project that linked blackness with gender and sexual polymorphous perversity. Most often this was achieved by fram- ing such cross- gendered modes of escape in terms of cunning wit on the part of the fugitive actor, who manages to successfully assume and main- tain an unnatural performance of artifice. In this narration, passing ex- presses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing— as a limited durational performance— signals a “return” to a natural- cum- biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans- identificatory practices— both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty- first centuries.

No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic refer- ent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness pro- vided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un- gender- specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for

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imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “some- thing akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliber- ate calculation” of one’s fungible status.13 Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed desig- nations of male- man- masculine and female- woman- feminine remained open— that is fungible— and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow. As the title “Trans Capa- ble” suggests, disability figures prominently in this archive, and disability theory is indispensable for analyzing, for example, the visual and textual maneuvers by which Ellen and William Craft would become William Johnson and his servant, just as it was with rendering the lives of Anar- cha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others as they were circumscribed and written out of James Marion Sims’s archives in the preceding chap- ter. Together, this chapter and its companion, “Anatomically Speaking” (chapter 1), explore how transness became capable, that is, differently conceivable as a kind of being in the world where gender— though biologized— was not fixed but fungible, which is to say, revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility.

the two Marys: Fungible Fugitivity as “Cross- Dressing and theft” According to the New York Herald, Mary Jones took a “tour of pleasure” with Robert Haslem, a white master mason, one summer night in 1836, probably somewhere near the Greene Street bordello where Jones was a greeter and performed cooking and assorted domestic tasks for other sex workers associated with the popular brothel.14 After their transac- tion, Jones and Haslem parted ways, with Jones carrying Haslem’s wal- let in tow. It was a perilous exchange, which required skill and with which Jones apparently had much practice. According to news coverage and the arresting officer’s account, Jones was found with several wallets on her person at the time of capture. When Haslem eventually realized that his wallet and $99 were taken and replaced with another wallet containing a bank order for the then sizable sum of $200, rather than

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accepting his good fortune, he tracked down the second wallet’s initial owner, convincing the other man to accompany him in reporting the crime.15 They, along with the arresting officer and the officer’s brother, devised and executed a plan to apprehend Jones that night. Jones was tried for grand larceny on June 16, 1836, in the Court of General Ses- sions. Induced to appear before the court in the same clothes worn on the night of her arrest, Jones was, as Tavia Nyong’o has described, “roundly mocked and prodded by a gawking and contemptuous crowd,” in a sur- real, spectacular scene.16

Asked at trial to account for her dress before the court, Jones responded: “I have been in the practice of waiting upon Girls of ill fame . . . and they induced me to dress in Women’s Clothes, saying I looked so much better in them and I have always attended parties among the people of my own Colour dressed in this way— and in New Orleans I always dressed in this way.”17 Though the context of her con- fession undoubtedly shaped this response, Jones’s description of three dis- tinct geographies— the Greene Street brothel, the parties among people of her own race, and New Orleans, where she “always dressed in this way”— named variously scaled sites in which Jones’s gender expression, as an intracultural maneuver, was met with a reception at odds with the ridicule she faced that day in the Court of General Sessions.18 Though Jones pleaded not guilty, the Herald reported that the jury, “after con- sulting a few moments,” returned with a verdict that found her culpable of the crimes of which she was charged. She was sentenced two days later to five years of hard labor at Sing Sing.19

Approximately one week after the trial, the lithographic portrait The Man- Monster began to appear in print shops across New York City. Without the inclusion of a sequence of names— engraved below the figure, as “Peter Sewally alias Mary Jones&c&c”— or the description of Jones’s sentencing, the image would seem to have portrayed, as Jona- than Ned Katz has argued, “a rather ordinary- looking and unthreatening black woman in a clean white dress with small blue flowers.”20 The New York World ’s description of her courtroom appearance was perhaps a refer- ent for the subsequent caricature, referring to Jones as, “attired a la mode de New York, elegantly, and in perfect style. Her or his dingy ears were decked with a pair of snow white ear rings, his head was ornamented with a wig of beautiful curly locks, and on it was a gilded comb, which

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The Man- Monster, Peter Sewally, alias Mary Jones. Published by h. r. robinson, 1836. collection of the new- york historical Society.

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was half hid amid the luxuriant crop of wool.”21 The cultural significance of the lithographic form explains, in part, The Man- Monster’s imagistic content. According to Erika Piola, lithographs became readily available in the 1830s, as “thousands of copies of a cartoon could be printed, issued, and sold in a short period, especially during political scandals.”22 The image’s profitable reproducibility created a different, albeit familiar, articulation of racial- cum- sexual exchange, in which white value accrued in relation to black unfreedom, as the story of Jones’s carceral life pro- duced revenue for printmakers throughout the city.

The rise in lithographic production altered the imagistic land- scape of slavery. As Jasmine Cobb notes, “[L]lithography advanced the circulation of caricatures as well as newspapers and advertisements for runaways,” contributing to a “visual culture that readily enlisted Whites to search for Black people.”23 As a result, abolitionists hesitated to depict free black people in image form, choosing instead to pursue the question of and quest for black emancipation in and through text. Because lithog- raphy was instrumentalized in slaving culture, the image of The Man- Monster elicited a reading that worked on multiple registers, as caricature gave expression to the particularity of Jones’s media spectacle and the visual antagonism toward imagining black freedom. In this sense, and in its depiction of a “rather ordinary- looking” black woman, the inter- play of the lithograph’s title and image worked to confirm a contempo- raneous common sense about the fungibility of blackness, in which the interchangeability of gender figured one aspect of blackness’s capacity, as it transversed captivity. A productive relation emerges between The Man- Monster and the fourteen colored lithographs that constituted Edward Williams Clay’s cartoon serial Life in Philadelphia (1828), as cotermi- nous representations of black freedom. Clay’s caricatures of free black women, which, according to Cobb, depicted them as “unwomanly and outside of middle- class definitions of womanhood,” also illustrated the gender fungibility of blackness in the antebellum United States, where visual culture elided and ambiguated the descriptive distinctions between captive and free, northern and southern forms of black life.

As Jones’s commoditized caricature gave rise to a meditation on the gender fungibility of black flesh during slavery, her salacious coverage in the penny press illustrated that the matter of black freedom was equally vexed in print. Newspapers focused on the details of her “disguise” and on the question of whether Haslem recognized the gender of his sexual

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partner at the moment of their transaction. The Sun told its readership, in Latin, how Jones engaged in sex acts with her clients by wearing a “piece of cow [leather?] pierced and opened like a woman’s womb . . . held up by a girdle.”24 This detail— apparently appropriate only for the eyes of the educated upper class— gave rise to the epithet “Beefsteak Pete,” which appeared recurrently in subsequent media coverage. Though Jones initially served time for grand larceny, in the mid- 1840s, she would re- emerge in the press in relation to charges of vagrancy, another iteration of “theft,” which pivoted on her public perambulations and the appear- ance of freedom. On December 21, 1844, the New York Herald informed its readership that “the notorious Beefsteak Pete” had been “sent up to the Island for six months as a vagrant, and since that time . . . has been repeatedly sent back.”25 Katz also notes, that “on August 9, 1845 . . . the Commercial Advertiser reported that ‘a notorious character, known as Beef- steak Pete, was arrested on Thursday night, perambulating the streets in woman’s attire.’”26 The frequency with which the moniker “Beefsteak Pete” was additionally modified by “notorious character” may suggest how the macho epithet was meant to invoke for the readers of the penny press an image of the “ordinary- looking” black woman who was labeled a man- monster.

The same New York World article, which seems to have served as a referent for Jones’s lithographic caricature, also described her as a “great he negro” who conducted “a fair business [of ] both . . . moneymak- ing, and practical amalgamation.” As Nyong’o has argued, “the modifier ‘practical’ redoubles the satire insofar as it indexes the standard aboli- tionist charge that equality in theory meant amalgamation in practice.”27 In addition and in practical terms, Jones’s sex work and gender pre- sentation also illustrated how fungible fugitivity conjoined matters of imagination and theft. Although it is not possible to declare definitively, and with all the force of the historical record, whether Jones’s attire of women’s clothes was a matter of personal definition— a kind of trans self- fashioning— it is clear that the practice of “cross- dressing,” a process without a stable gender referent, created an imaginative context for Jones and her johns, as the ungendering of blackness created a space for emer- gence within dynamics of political, economic, and cultural modes of exchange. The praxis of emergence was most frequently criminalized such that (as Jones’s narrative bears out) theft described the manner with which free blacks were seen as being in illicit possession of themselves and their

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perambulations, according to the logic of antebellum law, the press, and popular culture, requiring carceral containment as a response.

Nowhere were these dynamics more evident than in the pickup notice issued for Mary Ann Waters by the warden of the city and county jail in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1851. Like Jones, Waters was a black “cross- dressing” sex worker who emerged in discourse in relation to her capture. The pickup notice, in keeping with the conventions of the genre, provided the usual details regarding the age and appearance of the cap- tive, in addition to information about the process and place for recovery of property. In this visualizing document— imaged through the eyes of the Fugitive Slave Act and the warden— Waters’s “speech” is narrated in terms of a disavowal, as both an acknowledgment and a denial of how fungibility and fugitivity expressed Waters’s condition, exemplified in the phrase “a Negro Man, who calls himself Mary Ann Waters” and later in the document: “Says he is free.” As further illustration, the descrip- tion of Waters’s dress and the duration of time she had “been hiring out in the city of Baltimore as a woman” transverse the pickup notice’s slav- ing discourse of visuality, simultaneously acknowledging her life “as a woman” in Baltimore while denying Waters’s name, to articulate how fungibility— although it may have created different epiphenomenal rela- tions in the ephemerality of sexual transactions embedded within larger economies of racial- cum- sexual exchange— did not exceed or provide ref- uge from slavery’s hegemony over the material and semiotic arrangement of black flesh. Relatedly, the pickup notice, as a document for recapture, also conveyed the transitive relation between fungibility and fugitivity, wherein Waters’s trans performance holds open the possibility of even- tual discharge. (The question emerges, discharge into what?) The final address to the owner, “to come forward, prove property, pay charges, and take said negro away; otherwise he will be discharged according to the law,” expresses both a set of instructions and a threat, as it also clarifies how the Fugitive Slave Act provided an enforceable narration for how to apprehend race and gender in terms of visuality and literacy. Just as Waters’s gender fungibility articulated the terms in which fugitivity could be subsumed and reincorporated into captivity, it also produced a way of seeing how black flesh would animate the semiotics of gender, wherein sex and gender became inexhaustibly revisable according to the racial logic of consumption as they passed in and out of carceral states.

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In this sense, the matter of whether Waters was actually a fugitive slave or a free black is not really the point, because the status of the slave as “not fungible” yet “subject to compensation” under racial slavery atten- uated the supposed distinction.

Whereas Waters was captured and interred in the archive through the pickup notice, Jones reemerged in the press reiteratively into the twentieth century, even after the formal end of slavery and the period of Reconstruction. In an article entitled “Many Gastronomic Records Established,” published on October 2, 1908, in the Virginia Enterprise, “‘Beefsteak Pete,’ a Bowery character” was reported to have “consumed 17 pounds of meat from which he takes his cognomen at one setting, and five days later he raised this figure to 24 pounds, thus making a total of 41 pounds of meat consumed in two days.”28 Here, Jones, in the twi- light of her life, attempted to resignify that epithet constituted by the flesh of what Nyong’o described as a “surrogate vagina” into a “gastro- nomic record” based on a no less spectacular form of consumption.29 As an anecdote and an archival trace, Jones’s carnivorous feat illustrates what Vincent Woodard has argued is the question that emerged “long before the poignant questions of the color line and the Negro problem,” as that “more pressing problematic” of “How does it feel to be an edible, consumed object?”30 The temporal collapse of Du Bois’s paradigmatic analyses and Jones’s archival installation signals how the logics of con- sumption and exchange would continue to delineate black flesh.

Pickup notice for Mary ann Waters, 1851. collection of the Maryland State archives.

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As this resignification occurred by way of eating, which, as Kyla Wazana Tompkins has described, functioned in nineteenth- century print culture to attach “extreme commodity pleasure to nonwhite bod- ies,” Jones’s “gastronomic record” conjoins and highlights the tacit link between certain gustatory practices and aspects of masturbatory grati- fication.31 Consuming her surrogate flesh to make a new meaning for her name, Jones exemplifies what Spillers explains in her noted essay on psychoanalysis and race— that “there is an aspect of human agency that cannot be bestowed or restored by others,” such that eating, in this sense, becomes a tactic “for gaining agency” that “is not an arrival but a depar- ture, not a goal but a process.”32 As an erotic act that emerges by way of a familiar, if not commonplace, practice of racial- cum- sexual exchange, eating precipitates the question “What is (the discourse of ) sexuality to the fungible?” (a demonstration of, at least, a temporal disordering of psychoanalytic and sexological rubrics in which these particular acts may be regarded as a psychosexual regression from the genital to the oral phase). Jones’s archival installation also evinces how amalgamation some- times occurs by way of mastication, wherein the combining of flesh— both hers and not hers— exists as a relay between self- fashioning and an ever- pressing “out there.”33 Here, Jones’s mouth serves a double func- tion of “processing food into digestible matter and in producing sense,” wherein the eating, in this regard, becomes a way, as Tompkins has argued, “to reembody oneself, both as food and as its container.”34 Perhaps this reading figures Jones as ever the pragmatist, whose calculation to eat as much as she could of that stigmatized surrogate flesh produced a record in the archive of self- revision by way of accumulation and consumption. This is a consequence of reading the archive for gender as an always racial and racializing construction— as a strategy for living and dying— that in this instance provides a way for thinking about what forms of redress are possible in/as flesh.

on the Color of Gender: the “loophole of Retreat” in the Morass of Racial Slavery Although the publication of Harriet Jacobs’s narrative followed Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom by one year, Incidents, in its discussions of the racialization of gender and the gendering of race, functions like a

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legend for reading the Crafts’ fugitive narrative, as well as a prism for reviewing the political and cultural maneuvers of the two Marys. Pub- lished in 1861 under the titles Linda; or, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, the text at the titular level reflects the interanimating antagonisms between the sub- ject, object, and voice of its author (Jacobs), its narrator- cum- protagonist (Linda Brent), and its editor (Lydia Maria Child). As scholars have noted, Jacobs began to conceptualize her story in book form as early as 1851 or 1852.35 After an unfruitful attempt to secure Harriet Beecher Stowe— author of the best- selling novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin— as her amanuensis, Jacobs began writing her book on her own. Having completed the man- uscript in 1858, after at least two publishers expressed interest only to go bankrupt before releasing the text in print, Jacobs ultimately paid to have the book privately printed in early 1861.36 Initially conceived to address an audience of northern white women, the narrative takes a cross- genre form, having been described as a fugitive narrative that in- cludes elements of sentimental, gothic, and antislavery novel forms, that carried particular racial and gender significance for its various audiences, including critics, given that it was the first text of its kind to be pub- lished by a black woman in the United States.37 Valerie Smith notes how Incidents contravened the plot of the standard fugitive narrative, which, according to convention up until that point, traced “not only the journey from slavery to freedom but also the journey from slavehood to man- hood.”38 Partially through its manipulation of form, Jacobs’s narrative, according to Hazel Carby, also “revealed the concept of true woman- hood to be an ideology, not a lived set of social relations.”39 Incidents is rife with intertextual signs, offering numerous metaphors, allegories, and “incidents” that speak both to the conditions of Brent’s fugitive passage and to the context of Jacobs’s narrative production.

Brent’s dramatic escape maps a terrain of ungendered blackness that simultaneously marks the intersection and mutual envelopment of fugitivity and fungibility. Narrative portrayals of the protagonist’s sexual negotiations clarify aspects of Brent/Jacobs’s ungendering. Saidiya Hart- man has described how Incidents underlines the “unwieldiness of sexu- ality— the entanglements of instrumentality and pleasure” expressed by a chattel person, constituted by an “indifference to injury, the extended use and dispossession of the captive body, the negation of motherhood,

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and the failures and omissions of the law”; “these elements or ‘incidents’ determine the condition of enslavement and engenderment.”40 As Spill- ers also suggests, “Though this is barely hinted on the surface of the text, we might say that Brent, between the lines of the narrative, demar- cates a sexuality that is neuter- bound, inasmuch as it represents an open vulnerability to a gigantic sexualized repertoire that may be alternately expressed as male/female.”41 In the delineation of the various ways cap- tivity coercively decouples bodily comportment from the dominant symbolics of gender and sexuality in Incidents, Brent/Jacobs’s maneu- vers forcefully raise the question once more: What is sexuality to and for the fungible? As a partial response, Brent’s “deliberate calculation” to bear children for Mr. Sands is an instance of the kinds of actions avail- able under captivity; the narrator- cum- protagonist relates, “It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit to compulsion. There is some- thing akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment.”42 The numer- ous circumscriptions and qualifications in Brent’s description shed light on Jacobs’s critique- cum- exposition of the impossibility of normative gender and sexual reciprocity under captivity. Rather, gender and sex- uality appear by way of their constitutive injury, such that, as Aliyyah Abdur- Rahman argues, Jacobs’s narrative highlights how “incidents of abuse serve as both metonym and metaphor for the lived experience of American slavery.”43

Though Brent determines a sexual relationship with Sands to be “less degrading” than compulsory concubinage to her enslaver, Dr. Flint, that calculation, as some critics have argued, came with little measure for protection.44 Sands’s decision to make their black daughter the per- sonal slave of his wife and Brent’s concern over her daughter’s imminent life in captivity catalyze Brent/Jacobs’s conscripted movement, inaugu- rating the narrative action of the fugitive drama of Incidents. The chore- ography of Brent/Jacobs’s escape begins as it ends, with the protagonist finding harbor in the home of a “sympathetic” white woman. The cir- cumstances of her earliest hiding place foreshadow the garret that she later labels a “loophole of retreat,” which Hartman defines as a “space of freedom that is at the same time a space of captivity.”45 Brent’s depen- dence on the unnamed white woman also prefigures the vexed form of “freedom” the protagonist experiences as a servant in the North. The

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recurring theme of finding spaces for maneuvering within confinement aptly describes, as Christina Sharpe has suggested, Brent/Jacobs’s con- dition— as fugitive, abolitionist, and author— in terms of being “still protected and unprotected in her relationships with whites.”46

Before her temporary concealment within the white mistress’s storeroom, Brent/Jacobs describes having been bitten by “a reptile of some kind”— a detail in the narrative that not only explains some of the perils of fugitivity but also foreshadows the protagonist’s various encoun- ters with the Snaky Swamp. The recurrence of the swamp, as yet another site of temporary refuge for the protagonist, amplifies her narrative’s elu- cidation of freedom in terms of the vexed spaces of ongoing fugitivity that emerge, however briefly, from within more general conditions of unfree- dom and constraint. Just as the “loophole” refers to both the small space in Brent/Jacobs’s grandmother’s attic that contains the protagonist for seven years and the hole that Brent makes in that space in order to see outside, the swamp stages the transversal relationship between fugitive life and death, as it also allegorizes how fungibility emerges as a tactic of maneuvering from within the morass of slavery’s identity politics. To and from the Snaky Swamp Brent moves in “disguise,” and in these “cross- dressed” perambulations enacts a fugitive plot that stages through Brent’s ungendered body the various ways fungibility and fugitivity pass into one another. That crossing in form, narrative, and flesh condenses the text’s narration of the conditions of captive life, as it provides a way to interpret Brent/Jacobs’s numerous calculations in Incidents in terms of fungible fugitivity.

In the chapter “New Perils,” readers learn how Betty, the enslaved cook and servant of the “sympathetic” white woman, brings Brent “a suit of sailor’s clothes,— jacket, trousers, and tarpaulin hat.”47 Donning her “disguise,” Brent passes through town twice, describing her return trip in this way: “I wore my sailor’s clothes, and had blackened my face with charcoal. I passed several people whom I knew. The father of my children came so near that I brushed against his arm; but he had no idea who it was.”48 Jacobs’s use of the transitive verb “pass” to describe mov- ing through space also portends the intransitive sense of the term, as the scene renders the mechanisms by which gender and racial subver- sion are assumed. This intransitive passing, as the performance of false identity, reached its peak of usage in print in the mid- to late 1800s,

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coinciding with the initial publications of both Jacobs’s and the Crafts’ fugitive narratives, though its particular meaning had emerged in the mid- fifteenth century during the first wave of European colonization.49 Many of the accounts of cross- gendered escape explicitly articulated themselves as “passing narratives,” particularly in the case of the Crafts, who, from the first printed iteration of their story, in 1849, are referred to as a pair of passing figures: one passing as a disabled white gentleman; the other, as his servant.

As Jacobs’s scene relates, for fugitive movement Brent completes her attire of sailor’s clothes by blackening her face. Cobb suggests that this blackening may have been an anticipatory gesture; when James Nor- com (Jacobs’s enslaver) published a description of her in the 1835 issue of the American Beacon, he presumed that she would be “seeking white- ness and dressing as a free woman, not accentuating her Blackness” and finding a “cross- dressing” and ungendered mode for escape.50 Although the description of sartorial arrangements seems to conform to passing’s logic of movement for protection or privilege, Jacobs’s use of charcoal to darken her complexion tropes— by inverse logic— on more commonly held beliefs (and fears) about racial passing. As “passing” became a term to describe performing something one is not, it trafficked a way of think- ing about identity not only in terms of real versus artificial but also, and perhaps always, as proximal and performative. Like a vertical line with arrows on either end, passing is figuratively represented by moving up or down hierarchized identificatory formations. This articulation of ver- tical identity also coordinates with forms of binary thinking, typified, for example, by the language of “the opposite” sex.

As passing is most commonly understood, one ascends into privi- lege, being, and distinction, or, as Jacobs’s blackening suggests, into the converse of those things, which is to say, into fungibility, thingness, and the interchangeable. In this vertical model, blackness functions as the possibility of distinction in which fungibility acts as the requisite grounds from which distinction is forged. Here, blackness, as it was for the two Marys and in the numerous narrations of the Crafts— particularly in William’s fugitive performance as slave— points to a place where being undone is simultaneously a space for new forms of becoming. Brent/ Jacobs’s blackened blackness gives expression to her condition as fungible within the logic of U.S. slavery, in which the system of colorism, as Nicole

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Fleetwood has argued, “produces a performing subject whose function is to enact difference . . . an act that is fundamentally about assigning value.”51 As it relates to the scene of Jacobs’s brushing past Sands, her status as “it” also indicates how blackness- as- fungible engenders forms of nonrecognition, as Jacobs’s performance elucidates how blackness and going blacker become an embrace of the conditions that might allow one to pass one’s friends and lovers undetected. In this encounter, fun- gibility sets the stage for gendered maneuvers on a terrain constituted by modes of viewing blackness, in which Jacobs’s blackness and going blacker color her gender as well as her face.

The ecological characteristics of the Snaky Swamp serve an alle- gorical function in illustrating how fungibility produced what Brent/ Jacobs describes as a “hiding- place” for those “in no situation to choose.”52 While preparing herself to enter that fugitive space that articulated a simultaneous promise of life and death, Brent/Jacobs tells the reader of how her previous snakebite and fear of snakes filled her with an especial dread. Narrating the encounter with the swamp in detail, Brent describes how the lush natural environment that concealed her and her compan- ion also teemed with predatory and poisonous wildlife:

Peter landed first, and with a large knife cut a path through bam- boos and briers of all descriptions. He came back, took me in his arms, and carried me to a seat made among the bamboos. Before we reached it, we were covered with hundreds of mosquitos. In an hour’s time they had so poisoned my flesh that I was a pitiful sight to behold. As the light increased, I saw snake after snake crawl- ing round us. I had been accustomed to the sight of snakes all my life, but these were larger than any I had ever seen. To this day I shudder when I remember that morning. As evening approached, the number of snakes increased so much that we were continu- ally obliged to thrash them with sticks to keep them from crawling over us. The bamboos were so high and so thick that it was impos- sible to see beyond a very short distance. Just before it became dark we procured a seat nearer to the entrance of the swamp, being fearful of losing our way back to the boat. . . . I passed a wretched night; for the heat of the swamp, the mosquitos, and the con- stant terror of snakes, had brought on a burning fever. I had just dropped asleep, when they came and told me it was time to go back to that horrid swamp. I could scarcely summon courage to

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rise. But even those large, venomous snakes were less dreadful to my imagination than the white men in that community called civilized.53

Incidents portrays the swamp as a death- space for human life, or, more precisely, a space of near death into which some other quality of living is assumed out of necessity. Its perception as uninhabitable is what also constitutes the swamp as a “loophole of retreat.” Yet the protagonist also notes at the conclusion of her description how she prefers the terror of the swamp and its inhabitants over the forms of racial and gender terror exercised by white men in so- called civilization. Though Brent/Jacobs has direct experience of both, the passage elects the use of “imagination” to describe the differences between the two sites. This word choice elic- its a reading of the passage in terms of its referentiality to an abolitionist literary and public imaginary. As Anne Bradford Warner describes, the Snaky Swamp is, on one level, an “intertextual parody” of Stowe’s recur- rent depiction of black fugitive life set within a romanticized backdrop of the swamps and particularly pronounced in Stowe’s characterization of the Dismal Swamp in the 1857 novel Dred.54 John J. Kucich has addi- tionally argued that the African spiritualist symbolism in Jacobs’s repre- sentation of the Snaky Swamp functions as a mode of literary or textual concealment, rendering the swamp in ways that remain “irreducible to European- American norms.”55

Yet here, as with flesh, the swamp is both material and metaphys- ical. In addition to being a polyvalent literary device, the Snaky Swamp is a real place. Located west of Edenton, North Carolina, it bears a geo- graphical proximity to the Great Dismal Swamp, a site for the longer- durational inhabitation of marooned Africans and native people, that conveys how its ecological features produced an adversarial terrain for human life, rife with the imminent and ever- present difficulties of co- habitation with its nonhuman animal inhabitants for the displaced and dispossessed. Incidents returns to the (idea of the) Snaky Swamp in a brief exchange between Brent and the sea captain who eventually trans- ported her to Philadelphia: “As we passed Snaky Swamp, he pointed to it, and said, ‘There is a slave territory that defies all the laws.’ I thought of the terrible days I had spent there, and though it was not called Dis- mal Swamp, it made me feel very dismal as I looked at it.”56 The captain’s

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characterization of the Snaky Swamp as defiant of all laws bespeaks what Sylvia Wynter describes as the development of a “new world view,” a system of ordering logics that accompanied the “discovery” of the Amer- icas and that were expressed according to a series of binary oppositions including master and “natural” slave, rational and irrational, and habit- able and uninhabitable territories.57 As Katherine McKittrick relates, “Post 1492, what the uninhabitable tells us . . . is that populations who occupy the ‘nonexistent’ are living in what has been previously concep- tualized as unlivable and unimaginable. If identity and place are mutu- ally constructed, the uninhabitable spatializes a human Other category of the unimaginable/native/black.”58 The captain’s pronouncement also invokes the swampland’s transversal histories of maroonage with a more dogmatic and theological sense of slavery. Whether for two days, as in Incidents, or ten generations, as Daniel Sayers contends in his research on the archaeological remains in the Great Dismal Swamp, the region’s inhabitation by marooned beings is figured and transversed according to a colonial- settler “subjective understanding” of the swamps as sites of terror and lawlessness beyond the parameters of god’s grace.59

Though the wetland region the Great Dismal Swamp was named by Col. William Byrd of Virginia in 1728, Brent/Jacobs offers here an alternative explanation for why it bears the name Snaky Swamp from the lived experience of a fugitive inhabitant.60 It is a landscape that slav- ery produces and reiteratively capacitates as a viable option, or, more precisely, as the choice/nonchoice for those “in no situation to choose” between one form of mortality over another. In this sense, one returns to the seemingly paradoxical construction of fungible fugitivity and its relation to the swamp’s material and metaphysical region of mortality. Gesturing toward a similar epistemic structure, the swamp expresses the conditions for the fugitive’s experience of “something akin to freedom,” enabled by modes of apprehension, domination, and control introduced and refined within the morass of plantation identitarian logics. In this sense, Brent’s cross- gender foray to and from the Snaky Swamp is a redou- bled articulation of the fugitive possibilities within and structured by the geographical and metaphysical architecture of slavery: a dissent into the mud, a blackening of blackness, the mutability of a body defined as in- exhaustibly interchangeable, an inhabitation of the virtually uninhabit- able, being within the zone of nonbeing.

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The oft- quoted conclusion of Incidents, in which Brent tells her reader that “my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage” includes a qualifying confession: “The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own.”61 This description of freedom— or “something akin” to it— punctuates the fun- gible fugitivity that Incidents stages, wherein blackness is that vestibular- izing paradigm that is both within and outside the nation- as- home, and in which black people find no home but a loophole of retreat— in life and within the symbolics of gender.

Whereas the earlier discussion of the two Marys offers a way to understand gender fungibility in terms of cross- dressing and theft, this section’s focus on Brent/Jacobs’s fugitive theater explores how blackness functioned as a site for an elaboration of gender in which the fungible interchangeability of sex for chattel persons revealed gender within black- ness to be a polymorphous proposition. The ungendering of blackness, then, opens onto a way of thinking about black gender as an infinite set of proliferative, constantly revisable reiterations figured “outside” of gender’s established and establishing symbolic order. Its symbolic order, which is simply one articulation of the ordering of things, relies upon gendered others to maintain an epistemological coherence. Using Inci- dents as a legend to read the Crafts’ fugitive narrations, the balance of this chapter explores how fungibility articulated the Crafts’ thousand- mile run for freedom. Reading the Crafts’ escape as an example of fun- gible fugitivity wherein the gender and race of Ellen and William were reiteratively rearranged in their quest for freedom highlights how matters of self- determination and personal sovereignty were regarded as existen- tial and ontological concerns. This chapter, in complement to the pre- ceding one, examines fungibility as another expression of the multiple deployments of black flesh, in its capacity to make and remediate per- sonhood through ontological rearrangement.

Crafting Fugitivity with Fungibility In 1848, a little more than three years after Sims began his series of exper- iments on his named and unnamed “patients,” William and Ellen Craft executed a plan to flee the conditions of enslavement on their respective plantations in Macon, Georgia. Different versions of their escape would

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be reported periodically over time, first in a letter from William Wells Brown to William Lloyd Garrison, published in The Liberator on Janu- ary 12, 1849; with greater elaboration in Josephine Brown’s biography of her father, Wells Brown, in 1856; and later in the 1860 publication of William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, among many others. Their escape received ongoing international news coverage and became fodder for fictional representations in the forms of novels and plays, and as orators, the Crafts were prized speakers on the antislavery circuit in the United States and the United Kingdom.

The particular details of their escape varied across the numerous iterations. The earliest circulations of their narrative conveyed the Crafts’ relationship with the prominent abolitionist, operative of the Under- ground Railroad, and their eventual manager William Wells Brown, who escaped from slavery more than ten years before the Crafts, in 1834. In his abbreviated first telling, a paragraph- length letter published in the Liberator, Wells Brown employed the intransitive use of “pass” three times to describe the Crafts’ four- day fugitive journey, referring to Ellen as “so near white, that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman.”62 In his brief account of their escape, Wells Brown told Garrison and the readers of The Liberator of how “Ellen dressed in man’s clothing . . . passed as the master, while her husband passed as the servant.”63 Passing would become a recurring refrain in subsequent narrations of the Crafts’ escape. Wells Brown further explained in the brief letter that the Crafts’ illiteracy, which reflected the law for chattel persons, precipitated further sartorial adjustments: “Ellen, knowing that she would be called upon to write her name at the hotels, &c., tied her right hand up as though it was lame, which proved of some service to her, as she was called upon several times at hotels to ‘register’ her name.”64 For Wells Brown, the dis- ability Ellen assumed to become her husband’s master, Mr. William John- son, acted as further evidence against the popular proslavery adage that framed slaves as unable to “take care of themselves.” In the conclusion to his letter, Wells Brown simply wrote, “Ellen is truly a heroine.” In this first iteration of their fugitive tale, Ellen Craft receives considerable and, according to Daphne Brooks, unprecedented attention as “an equally heroic counterpart to that of her husband.”65 Although his version of the Crafts’ narrative would receive greater elaboration in subsequent retell- ings, the tone set in the letter to Garrison remains consequential to how

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contemporaneous and contemporary audiences interpret what Wells Brown described as “one of the most interesting cases of the escape of fugitives from American slavery.”66

Ellen’s complexion as “near white” has been a focal point for abo- litionists, journalists, and scholars. As many have noted, Ellen’s color aired the taboo of miscegenation, even as it also underscored the fre- quent occurrence of sexual violence for those held in captivity.67 In addi- tion, especially as it played out in the United Kingdom, Ellen’s white aesthetic visually amplified the horrors of slavery. For British audiences, it was further proof of the provincial brutality of their former colony. The difference in color between William and Ellen also produced a rationale for her cross- gendered escape. Although she may have been expected to be read as a white woman, her coupling with William would have brought greater scrutiny and surveillance during their fugitive pas- sage, necessitating Ellen’s gender transformation so that the Crafts could travel together homosocially, as was mandated by a legal and social invec- tive against interracial heterosociality— particularly for white mistresses— within slavery’s sexual- cum- racial logics. This is not to imply that the appearance of homosocial interracial couplings should be perceived as absent of sexual activity, for, as Aliyyah Abdur- Rahman argues, slavery’s “economies of desire and sexuality . . . provided a cover under which aberrant sexuality flourished.” According to Abdur- Rahman, “The in- stitution granted to all whites— slaveholders and non- slaveholders— the full- fledged legal right and unchecked personal authority to exploit, consume, and destroy the slave’s psyche and body in whatever ways they chose.”68

Before her escape, Ellen was held captive by her half- sister, Eliza Collins, for whom Ellen acted as a “ladies’ maid.”69 According to William Craft’s account, “Notwithstanding my wife being of African extraction on her mother’s side, she is almost white— in fact, she is so nearly so that the tyrannical old lady to whom she first belonged became so annoyed, at finding her frequently mistaken for a child of the family . . . [that she] gave her when eleven years of age to a daughter, as a wedding present.”70 Ellen’s father and first enslaver, Maj. James P. Smith, possessed Ellen’s mother, Maria— who was half- white— as his slave. Less is known about William Craft. He was skilled as a cabinetmaker in Macon, Georgia, and, like Ellen, as a child he and his family were separated and sold. Described

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in Wells Brown’s letter in The Liberator as “much darker” than his wife, William remained relatively circumspect about his mixed- race heri- tage throughout his abolitionist career.71 William’s description in the first Liberator article is also curiously circumspect, as Wells Brown notes only three things about the hero: his complexion, his “pass[ing] as the servant,” and his illiteracy at the time of their escape. William, how- ever, in speech and in print, proved a pivotal figure in the transmission of details surrounding their fugitive moves.

Several years before the publication of William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, Josephine Brown published a biography of her father under the title Biography of an American Bondman. In her monograph, she depicts the dialogue between Ellen and William that launched their escape. According to Brown’s retelling, Ellen conceived of the entire plan, formulating each aspect of their fugitive plot in response to William’s skeptical questions. Ellen proposed to cut her hair and wear men’s clothes— high- heeled boots, a top hat, a covering about her mouth, a sling for her right arm, and binding around her right hand— in order to present herself as Mr. William Johnson, a “most respectable- looking gentleman.”72 Even still, according to Biography of an American Bondman, William voiced suspicion about Ellen’s capacity to carry out the plot. Brown wrote:

“I fear you could not carry out the deception for so long a time, for it must be several hundred miles to the free States,” said Wil- liam. . . . “Come, William,” entreated his wife, “don’t be a coward! Get me the clothes, and I promise you we shall both be free in a few days. You have money enough to fit me out and to pay our passage to the North, and then we shall be free and happy.” This appeal was too much for William to withstand, and he resolved to make the attempt, whatever might be the consequences.73

Brown provides nearly every detail of Ellen Craft’s sartorial plan to become Johnson except for the pair of green spectacles that would later be imaged in the engraved portrait and frontispiece of Running a Thou- sand Miles for Freedom. Brown’s depiction contrasts most sharply with William’s later description around the ascription of the plot’s author- ship. In his biography, William credits himself with conceiving their elaborate plan for escape and then describes how he had to convince his

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wife to join him in his detailed plot. In reference to the discrepancy between Brown’s and Craft’s accounts, Barbara McCaskill compellingly argues that William’s revision of the narrative “stands as an example of how black abolitionists often wrote formerly enslaved Africans into con- ventional gender roles.”74 Yet consider that McCaskill’s explanation on this particular matter might be extended to rethink the various contriv- ances that constitute the Crafts’ narrative, chief among them the fre- quency with which the Crafts are taken up as passing performers par excellence.

In the form of a question, one might ask, How does the story of the Crafts pass as a passing narrative? The political effect of fram- ing their story as such produces and naturalizes the Crafts within a dominant heteropatriarchal conscription, and it also gestures toward the popularity and long public memory for their tale as a fugitive nar- rative told in the form of a transatlantic romantic adventure. Passing, particularly as it is invoked to describe the Crafts’ performance of false identity, suppresses the violence that maps the relationship between fungibility and blackness under captivity. Returning to Wells Brown’s first formulation— “Ellen dressed in man’s clothing . . . passed as the mas- ter, while her husband passed as the servant”— one notes how these con- cerns become more pronounced around William’s figuration. What does it mean for a (fugitive) slave to “pass” as a slave? In their autobiography, William Craft describes an exchange between Mr. Johnson, a white mis- tress, and a “very respectable- looking young gentleman,” as it occurred on a train ride between Virginia and Baltimore during the Crafts’ fugi- tive passage. I quote Craft here at length, as the scene throws the afore- mentioned questions into stark relief:

At Richmond, a stout elderly lady . . . took a seat near my master. Seeing me passing quickly along the platform, she sprang up as if taken by a fit, and exclaimed, “Bless my soul! there goes my nigger, Ned!”

My master said, “No; that is my boy.” The lady paid no attention to this; she poked her head out of

the window, and bawled to me, “You Ned, come to me, sir, you runaway rascal!”

On my looking round she drew her head in, and said to my master, “I beg your pardon, sir, I was sure it was my nigger; I never

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in my life saw two black pigs more alike than your boy and my Ned.”

After the disappointed lady had resumed her seat . . . she closed her eyes, slightly raising her hands, and in a sanctified tone said to my master, “Oh! I hope, sir, your boy will not turn out to be so worthless as my Ned. . . . Oh! I was as kind to him as if he had been my own son. Oh! sir, it grieves me very much to think that after all I did for him he should go off without having any cause whatever.”

“When did he leave you?” asked Mr. Johnson. “About eighteen months ago, and I have never seen hair or hide

of him since.” “Did he have a wife?” enquired a very respectable- looking young

gentleman, who was sitting near my master and opposite to the lady.

“No, sir; not when he left, though he did have one a little before that. She was very unlike him; she was as good and as faith- ful a nigger as any one need wish to have. But . . . she became so ill, that she was unable to do much work; so I thought it would be best to sell her, to go to New Orleans, where the climate is nice and warm.”

“I suppose she was very glad to go South for the restoration of her health?” said the gentleman. “No; she was not,” replied the lady, “for niggers never know what is best for them. She took on a great deal about leaving Ned and the little nigger; but, as she was so weakly, I let her go.”

“Was she good- looking?” asked the young passenger, who was evidently not of the same opinion as the talkative lady. . . .

“Yes; she was very handsome, and much whiter than I am; and therefore will have no trouble in getting another husband. I am sure I wish her well. I asked the speculator who bought her to sell her to a good master. . . . [S]he has my prayers, and I know she prays for me.”75

The scene functions as a mise en abyme, as a smaller copy within the larger portrayal of the context and logics that shaped the Crafts’ escape. Among the numerous mirrored images, the description of the young passenger as a “very respectable- looking young gentleman” is nearly iden- tical to Craft’s description of his wife- cum- master, inviting a reading of

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the unnamed abolitionist and William Johnson as somehow related by the Droste effect, a recursive imaging, in which a picture appears within itself. In addition to the separated chattel couple, which trope William and Ellen, particularly in the inclusion of details about their complexion, Craft also stages a conversation between a cruel and clueless white mis- tress, who might stand in for Ellen’s first enslaver’s wife or for her half- sister or for any number of white women who benefited from and were complicit with slavery, as well as an abolitionist who by the scene’s conclu- sion exclaims to Mr. Johnson, “What a . . . shame it is for that old whin- ing hypocritical humbug to cheat the poor negroes out of their liberty!”76

The passage’s opening flourish makes use of “passing” to describe William Craft’s movement through the train car, a display of mobility that immediately arouses the white mistress’s suspicion. William Johnson is compelled to account for William Craft, hailed as Ned and curiously called “sir” in the dialogue, and his movement in the scene. Johnson’s declaration of ownership of Craft in the scene— “No, that is my boy”— is, however, ignored until the nameless white mistress has visually con- firmed for herself that William Craft is not Ned. This detail amplifies how William Johnson, cast as a “clever disguise,” cannot fully come into view in the retrospective retellings of their fugitive passage. In one sense, Johnson must fail in the narrative so that Ellen Craft, the near white woman, can emerge as a more compelling version of her “true self.” In another sense, William Craft writes a scene that resounds with his role on the antislavery speakers’ circuit and as the author of Running a Thou- sand Miles for Freedom, casting himself as an authorizing and interpretive figure for William Johnson.

Johnson quickly falls from view after uttering his ineffectual claim to Craft as his property, and the scene turns to the dialogue between the “stout elderly lady” and the “young passenger.” In the description of the separated chattel couple, which the white mistress provides, readers are brought into a tragic romance between Ned and his very handsome, very white, and disabled wife. The resemblance here is striking, as the scene belies that though Ned and William Craft are not the same, they are at least mirrors of each other (a variation of Colebrooke’s description of the fungible/not- fungible condition of slaves under contract law). The resonances in descriptions between Ned’s nameless wife and Ellen Craft figure William Johnson as Ellen’s negative image, a textual formulation

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in the frontispiece of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, ellen craft is posed as William Johnson, bearing several key discrepancies from the narrative description.

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that imagistically opens the monograph in the frontispiece, where Ellen is presented as William Johnson sans the signifiers of disability. Moreover, the turn to dialogue between the white mistress and the young passen- ger illustrates how the figure of the abolitionist is heralded as William Craft’s most effective interpreter, over and against the figure of William Johnson, his mirrored double.

At every narrative turn, the specter of violence is suppressed within the scene: first in the use of “sir” in a dialogue that conveys how the train ride between Virginia and Baltimore could quickly become a scene of William Craft’s recapture; and second, in the extended dialogic depic- tion of the tragic romance of Ned and his wife, who run along a gaunt- let track both parallel to and interlaced with William and Ellen Craft. The impetus to mitigate the violence in this scene, on one level, high- lights how Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom was developed to sat- isfy particular audiences, as represented by the abolitionist figure written into the dialogue. Yet, perhaps more importantly, this impetus also sub- tends how passing became a way to suppress the violence that constructed the Crafts as fungible under the conditions of slavery. As Daphne Brooks wrote in her introductory comments to Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, the logic of the Craft narrative “calls attention again and again to the serious ‘joke’ that the couple plays out in order to reach free- dom.”77 The biography operates, then, by offering its readers the prom- ise of being let in on a “joke,” and in so doing offers up a preferred way to read their escape narrative in a manner that confirms who they had become— or were becoming— in a contemporaneous international imag- inary. In this sense, not only Running but also Wells Brown’s initial letter and William Still’s 1872 account in The Underground Railroad function as textual maneuvers to secure the Crafts’ status as husband and wife, against all the ways— legal, social, and ontological, to name a few— in which their marriage could be imminently and immanently revoked as a consequence of their status as (fugitive) slaves.

Their status, as it animates the phrasing of the title of Craft’s mono- graph, in which the couple would “run” a thousand miles for (rather than to) freedom, also frames how black freedom, and the degree to which blackness could come to modify freedom as a concept, would be approached as matters of ethnology and ontology. Frank Wilderson argues, “For the Black, freedom is an ontological, rather than experiential

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question,” and in this formulation he distinguishes ontology from expe- rience in order to convey how black freedom is thinkable only in terms of categories of being.78 A consideration of the temporality of the Crafts’ escape illustrates how the matter of black ontology (and the question that rests upon it: black freedom) was far from settled in science, with its frequent interchange of “race” and “species”; or in law, as illustrated in the form of further remunerative policies (such as the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850) to guard against slavery’s formal abrogation in a period marked by the disestablishment of transatlantic slave trading. One might read Wilderson’s assertion here as, at the very least, an important warning against the taken- for- granted ascription of (fugitive) slaves as categorically free and concomitantly vested with the symbolic trappings of person- hood, of which gender would be included. But Wilderson also suggests that the violence, “which turns a body into flesh . . . destroys the possibil- ity of ontology because it positions the Black in an infinite and inde- terminately horrifying and open vulnerability, an object made available (which is to say, fungible) for any subject.”79 Yet, as Spillers has pointed out, gender (and the categorical exclusion from its symbolics) becomes its material staging ground.80 Wilderson’s assertion of the impossibility of black ontology is buttressed by a theory of gender that draws on Judith Butler and on which he writes that there is “no philosophically credible way to attach an experiential, a contingent, rider onto the notion of freedom when one considers the Black— such as freedom from gender or economic oppression.”81 In posing gender as contingent to blackness, Wilderson’s argument becomes incapable of perceiving un/gendering as a mode of violence that makes black fungibility palpable, which is to say that his assertion rests on a refusal of the ways gender is itself a racial arrangement that expresses the transubstantiation of things.

The logic of passing would apprehend Ellen’s cross- gendered fugi- tivity as the primary case of gender fungibility here, but it is true for both Crafts, as a disability analytic brings into sharper focus. As Ellen Samuels has argued in her essay “‘A Complication of Complaints,’” the Craft narrative not only highlights how matters of narration are inextri- cably linked to questions of authority, but also indexes how the Crafts’ story is shaped by the Derridean concept of supplementarity “as that which is added to an apparently complete text but is actually necessary to its meaning, ‘the not- seen that opens and limits visibility.’”82 For

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Samuels, illiteracy might be understood as a kind of disability, and thus for Ellen to become a white master, she must become differently dis- abled, to inhabit simultaneously a “complication of complaints” that mask her structurally imposed impairment.83 In addition, as Samuels explains, “If we understand the invalid as ‘one who is served,’ it is clear that William’s presence as the servant of ‘Mr. Johnson’ is as fundamental to Ellen’s successful performance of invalidism as are the sling, poultice, and green spectacles she wears.”84 Here, Samuels’s formulation opens a way for thinking about how William Craft’s (fugitive) slave status engen- dered him as another disability “prop” in a polysemous supplementarity in which Craft’s narration would reveal how Mr. Johnson’s gender was formed from that fungible “it,” which fashioned Ellen into Johnson and William into any thing. Captivity became the terrain for the Crafts’ exclusion from the dominant semiotics of gender, providing the con- ditions that would allow fungibility to become fertile ground for flight. Indeed, in one key sense, as the Crafts’ narrative illustrates, fungibility and fugitivity figured two sides of a Janus- faced coin, in which the same logic that figured blackness as immanently interchangeable would also engender its flow.

transnationalism and the transubstantiation of things William and Ellen Craft were legally married in Boston in the same year the U. S. government passed the Fugitive Slave Law. The confluence of these two events framed the couple’s transatlantic crossing and inaugu- rated their nineteen years in exile in the United Kingdom. After spending two weeks in Halifax, Nova Scotia, the Crafts boarded the SS Cambria on December 11, 1850, and disembarked approximately eight days later in Liverpool, England.85 Throughout the mid- to late eighteenth cen- tury, Liverpool’s docks had been enmeshed in a long and bloody history of transatlantic trading activity; after the legal disestablishment of trans- atlantic slave trading, in 1807, and the abolishment of slavery through- out the British Empire, in 1833,86 port cities across the United Kingdom acted as sites of convergence for blacks colonized by the British Empire and moved by its ongoing imperialist projects. As McCaskill notes, upon their arrival, the Crafts would “have heard British, African, and Carib- bean accents rising and falling around them.”87

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William Craft described their arrival in Liverpool as the first time the couple were “free from every slavish fear.”88 His pronouncement might be interpreted as another indication of the geographical and financial conditions that gave rise to the publication of his autobiogra- phy, which William most clearly articulated in the narrative’s final bit of prose: “In short, it is well known in England, if not all over the world, that the Americans, as a people, are notoriously mean and cruel towards all coloured persons, whether they are bond or free.”89 Speaking to a transnational audience of abolitionists and others, whom he hoped to persuade to an antislavery position, Craft frames the “cruelty” of Amer- ican slavery as an ethnological issue, which is to say that he casts Ameri- can whiteness in terms of its particular species’ characteristics. His use of ethnological language in his closing prose is instructive for reading how the Crafts’ transnational circulation contributed to their symbolic slip in a secularizing chain of being, as ethnological rationales intervened to make sense of the movement of different bodies across the Atlantic in the decline of imperialist reliance on chattel slavery. The purity of geo- racialized groups came under particular scrutiny. As Ellen’s form sym- bolized, and as the numerous cases of white enslavement in Running further illustrate, anxieties over the racial purity and locational bound- edness of ethnological forms required complementary discursive strate- gies to explain the order of things. Within shifting contexts of national sovereignty and modes of capitalist accumulation, such strategies would also engender a kind of transubstantiation for the Crafts, from fugitive slaves to diasporic actors.

Not unexpectedly, the Crafts— first William, and later Ellen— participated in the U.K.’s antislavery lecture circuit as a way to sup- port themselves financially upon arrival. As R. J. M. Blackett notes, “Although British audiences had heard and read of the daring escapes of slavery of men like [Frederick] Douglass, [Moses] Roper, and [Josiah] Henson, never before had they heard a tale which involved such bold- ness and romance.”90 Their narrative played on audiences’ romanti- cized affective attachment to the idea of the American frontier, and in their presentations William and Ellen choreographed their story to have a maximum impact on the attendees: “William told of their escape, and at the end of his narrative, in a tear- jerking scene, Ellen was invited up on the stage.”91 As Blackett explains, Ellen’s appearance— and the

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visual- cognitive dissonance her white aesthetic produced— was frequently greeted with audible shock from the crowd, and she became a “symbol of Southern slavery’s barbarity (particularly the defilement of women) for British abolitionist[s].”92

In June 1851, the Crafts, along with William Wells Brown and several members of the British antislavery movement, staged a demon- stration at the Great Exhibition of All Nations in London’s Crystal Palace. In a letter from William Farmer to William Lloyd Garrison, published in The Liberator, Farmer narrated that once the party arrived at the U.S. artist Hiram Powers’s sculpture Greek Slave (1844), they produced an image of Punch’s “The Virginian Slave: Intended as a Comparison to Power’s [sic] ‘Greek Slave,’” to illicit a response from visitors from the United States regarding the meaning of juxtaposing the two figures. The U.S. government selected the Greek Slave to represent American art in the Great Exhibition in part because of its popularity with audiences in the United States. In conjunction with its 1847– 48 tour, Powers’s friend and tour manager composed a pamphlet to explain the statue’s significance, as “an emblem of the trial to which all humanity is sub- ject.”93 Antislavery newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass’s North Star and the National Era, discussed that tour in terms that foreshadowed the Crafts’ later demonstration, signifying on the degree to which the Greek Slave could be made to reflect on the conditions of U.S. slavery. Farmer wrote that, after producing the Punch image at the Great Exhibit, “the comparison of the two soon drew a small crowd, including several Amer- icans, around and near us. Although they refrained from any audible expression of feeling, the object of comparison was evidently understood and keenly felt.”94

While the controversy over the nudity of Powers’s sculpture galva- nized an estimated hundred thousand patrons to view the Greek Slave on its 1847– 48 tour, the Great Exhibit demonstrators made use of the taboo of interracial sexuality to draw on their audiences’ emotions. In their political performance, the juxtaposition between the sculpture and the drawing worked in tandem with the arrangement of the groups to convey the meaning of their protest. As Farmer noted in his letter, “Mr. McDonnell escorted Mrs. Craft, and Mrs. Thompson; Miss Thompson, at her own request, took the arm of Wm. Wells Brown, whose compan- ion she elected to be for the day; Wm. Craft walked with Miss Amelia

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on display at the 1851 great exhibition of all

nations in london’s crystal Palace, hiram Powers’s

Greek Slave (1844) provided a context for a

group, which included the crafts and William

Wells Brown, to provoke audiences to contend with

the ongoing realities of u.S. slavery.

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Published in 1851 in the satirical weekly Punch, Joseph tenniel’s “the Virginian Slave: intended as a companion to Power’s [sic] ‘greek Slave’” was presented by the demonstrators in an effort to illicit an affective (and preferably verbal) response to the juxtaposition of u.S. slavery and slavery within antiquity.

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Thompson and myself. This arrangement was purposely made in order that there might be no appearance of patronizing the fugitives, but that it might be shown that we regarded them as our equals, and honored them for their heroic escape from Slavery.”95 Although Farmer explains how the groupings were representative of their egalitarian aims, the pres- ence of differently raced, differently gendered bodies walking arm in arm made use of the spectacle and specter of miscegenation to frame and amplify the juxtaposition of black and white slaves for potential onlook- ers at the Great Exhibit. Ellen’s white aesthetic, as it had been instru- mentalized on the antislavery speakers’ circuit, again played a key role in making sense of the scene. As Uri McMillan notes, the promenade of couples throughout the Exhibit would function by the logic of “ready- mades,” prompting their viewers to reconsider the quotidian existent landscape through “highly aestheticized and experimental self perfor- mances” that made their bodies into sites for art.96 Ellen’s proximal pres- ence to the staging of black and white enslaved female forms highlighted how such a juxtaposition required the erasure of miscegenated figures; her appearance made a triptych of agitprops against contemporaneous visualities of race. Yet, as the only fugitive woman among the group of demonstrators, Ellen in her participation also produced a reading of her gender through a similar logic of proximity, placing her form in relation to the sculpture as well as to the other women in her party. Fully clothed and presumably dressed in her fineries for the occasion, Ellen sharply contrasted in her presentation with the nudity of the enslaved female representations and the visual access that subtended the logics of slav- ery, placing her in nearest proximity to the other white women partici- pants. Her act of looking was yet another dimension of her performance for freedom.

In 1852, during the Crafts’ time at the Ockham School in Surrey, rumors began to circulate about Ellen’s supposed unhappiness in Eng- land. False reports proffered by proslavery activists suggested that Ellen wished to return to enslavement in Georgia. McCaskill explains, “In the false reports circulated in the press, Ellen is described as a passive, pos- sessed, and commodified item of negotiation, property, and exchange,” “as accruing no more or no less value than the fluctuating currency of [the slaveholding South’s] mercantile economy.”97 Such propagandistic speculations conferred and confirmed Ellen’s status as “fungible,” as they

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also ventriloquized William Craft’s desire for that category of being. On December 23, 1852, Ellen responded with an open letter published simultaneously in the Pennsylvania Freeman and the National Anti- slavery Standard. Laying the rumors to rest, Craft wrote, “I had much rather starve in England, a free woman, than be a slave for the best man that ever breathed upon the American continent.”98 Here, the syntax belies gender’s forms, as Ellen explicates the corollary between freedom and womanhood, which is to suggest not that women did not face gendered oppression but that the ontology of gender required freedom as its pre- requisite. The sentence conveys this point by making use of “free woman” to describe her “starved” position in England as preferable to a structural re/inhabitation of an ungendered, fungible “slave.”

Her published letter, one of the few occasions in which audiences would engage her prose, confirmed what was previously staged at the Great Exhibit— that even amid their hardships in England, the Crafts’ changed legal and geographical context gave rise to a different experi- ence of life and being. As Cobb notes, “Fugitivity, as a state of being and a matter of fleeing justice, was also about the way in which the runaway had no clear place to go, no clear place of belonging in the context of slavery.”99 Thus, fugitivity could not mitigate the logic of slavery and the attendant ordering of the category of the “slave” to the nation, nor could it provide escape from slavery’s legal, scientistic, and optic modes of capture and reinstatement. No longer fugitives but diasporic actors, Ellen and William tried on different legal language to articulate a com- plex form of not quite belonging, a life in exile in England. The Crafts were not among the first black Americans to live as refugees there; in the late eighteenth century, the Black Loyalists found temporary residence in London before relocating more permanently to the then British col- ony of Sierra Leone.100

After three years at Ockham, the Crafts relocated to West London, where they continued to grow their family, which would eventually in- clude five children: Charles Estlin Phillips, William, Brougham, Alfred, and Ellen. The elder Ellen regularly entertained prominent abolitionists on tour in England and served as the primary caretaker for their five young children. William resumed his activity as an antislavery speaker, and they both, according to some accounts, developed the 1860 text that chronicled their escape from slavery. The publication of Running a

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Thousand Miles for Freedom went into reprinting twice in its first two years, and the revenue from sales of the frontispiece caused William to speculate about whether he could use the income to secure his sister’s release from enslavement.101

In the year following Running’s release, William Craft would join the African Aid Society, whose aim was “to make the Niger the Mis- sissippi of West Africa and through commerce and Christianity bring ‘civilization’ to [that] part of the world.”102 The founding of the soci- ety just preceded the Lancashire Cotton Famine, a four- year depression in the textile industry in northwest England produced by the dramatic decrease of availability of cotton from the U.S. South during the Amer- ican Civil War. As Blackett explains, “The emergence of emigrationism among black Americans after 1855 and the growing interest in African colonization gave a new fillip to the search for an alternative source”; the society thus consisted primarily of a “growing group of abolitionists and Lancashire cotton men eager to promote the cultivation of cotton by free labor in the British dominions,” principally through the estab- lishment of official trade agreements with the Kingdom of Dahomey (now Benin), located on the western coast of Africa.103

Throughout the winter and spring of 1862, Craft raised funds to visit Dahomey. His aims were manifold: to convert the peoples of Dahomey to Christianity, to persuade the king to cultivate and trade cot- ton with Great Britain, and to abolish the Dahomean customs of human sacrifice and enslavement. The Aborigines Protection Society commented on his mission in its twenty- sixth annual report: “There is something truly noble in the idea of a coloured man, himself rescued by his own exertions and those of his devoted wife from the barbarism of Ameri- can slavery, so disinterestedly giving his services to the cause of degraded Africa.”104 His expressed dedication to the project of “civilizing” Dahomey was far from disinterested. According to Dorothy Sterling, Craft’s trips to Dahomey functioned as an alternative to his possible enlistment in the Civil War, which he had considered briefly.105

After receiving approval from the British Foreign Office, Craft set sail for Dahomey in November 1862; after spending five months in Lagos, he eventually met the king in May 1863. In a report prepared for the Dahomean Committee, Craft wrote his appraisal of his first mission:

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The Dahomians who now make palm- oil, and grow cotton on a small scale, seem fully to appreciate my arguments, and expressed their willingness to act promptly upon my suggestions, provided I would return to Whydah and assist them in carrying them out. And as the King gave me a large place of business at Whydah and as much land and as many people as I may wish to have to teach cotton growing, I shall return there as soon as possible to assist in civilizing the people, and endeavoring, by the blessing of God, to prepare their minds for the better reception of his truth.106

Craft’s procolonial prose underscored what he would write in less offi- cial documents about his first trip, which included “baffled descriptions of the polygamous relationships that he observed” and critical assess- ments of the existent missionary presence in the region.107 His report to the society was the first of many that William made about Dahomey for British audiences. On the heels of his return, he also made a speech, under the title “On a Visit to Dahomey,” for the British Association for the Advancement of Science.108

The London Times covered the association meeting in detail, focus- ing on several interactions between Craft and two ethnologists at the annual conference: “On this occasion Section E, devoted to geography and ethnology, was most densely crowded, partly to hear Mr. Crawfund’s paper on Sir Charles Lyell’s Antiquity of Man, and partly Dr. Hunt’s paper on the Physical and Mental Character of the Negro, to which latter it was known that Mr. Craft, a gentleman of color, recently from Dahomey, and formerly, it was stated, a slave in the Southern States, would reply.”109 The threefold description of William Craft in the Times— a “gentleman of color,” a recent traveler to Dahomey, and a former slave— is instruc- tive for determining how Craft’s transatlantic perambulations would recast him within a symbolic chain of being. His encounters with the ethnologists staged his transubstantiation to supreme effect.

Both Crawfund and Hunt imparted theories of humankind that were premised on African inferiority and European superiority. Leav- ing the question of monogenetic versus polygenetic structures of being unsettled, Crawfund’s presentation, as quoted in the Times, concluded that “no one is more strongly convinced than I am of the vastness of the gulf between civilized man and the brutes; or is more certain that, whether from them or not, he is assuredly not of them.”110 Crawfund also extended

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Lyell’s and others’ earlier work on the distinction between human and animal to affirm U.S. (southern) law, as an articulation of the proper ordering of humankind and the logical expression of a natural antipa- thy between races and species, citing that “neither the freedman in the Caribbean nor the slaves in areas where they were a majority in the United States had assumed dominant positions over whites.”111 Accord- ing to Blackett, Craft responded to Crawfund’s paper “by pointing out that rather than any natural antipathy a considerable portion of the black population of America was in fact mixed, and that in spite of the laws which banned inter- racial marriages. The generally degraded state of the black population was due, he observed, not to any inherent racial char- acteristics but to social oppression.”112

Hunt’s paper, as it was reported in the Times and recorded in the Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 33rd Meeting (1863), made three points, which affirmed Crawfund’s earlier presentation. Hunt argued that “many cases of civilized blacks are not pure negroes” but individuals who were able to advance due to their inheritance of admixture with other races, which he deemed higher in an order of being.113 The black race, he claimed, was without history, and as such, “there is as good reason for classifying the negro as a distinct species from the European as there is for making the ass a distinct spe- cies from the zebra.”114 The Times reported Craft’s response to Hunt’s presentation at length:

Mr. Craft (an escaped “contraband” who has resided for some years in this country) said that,— “Though he was not of pure African descent, he was black enough to attempt to say a few words in reference to the paper which had just been read.” His grandmother and grandfather were both of pure negro blood. His grandfather was a chief of the West Coast; but through the treachery of some white men, who doubtless thought themselves greatly his superi- ors, he was kidnapped and taken to America, where he was born. He had recently been to Africa on a visit to the King of Dahomey. He found there considerable diversities even among the African[s] themselves. Those of Sierra Leone had prominent, almost Jewish features. Their heels were quite as short, on the whole, as those of any other race, and upon the whole they were well formed. . . . When Julius Caesar came to this country, he said of the natives that

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they were such stupid people that they were not fit to make slaves of in Rome. (Laughter.) It had taken a long time to make English- men what they now were, and, therefore, it was not wonderful if the negroes made slow progress in intellectual development. . . . He pointed to Hayti as furnishing an instance of independence of character and intellectual power on the part of the negro, and con- tended that in America the degraded position which he was forced to occupy gave him no chance of proving what he was capable of doing.115

In this fourth description of Craft, the Times depicts William (again) as formerly enslaved and, with the use of “contraband,” signifies on the distinction between his refugee status in England and his fugitive posi- tion in the former colony. The direct quote from William, which claims a mixed racial heritage even as it also confers and confirms that he is “black enough” to respond to Hunt’s claims, posits a double articula- tion of authority, a kind of deployment of double consciousness in which his former enslavement stands as a testament to his acculturation to whiteness— and, by metonymic extension, to “civilization”— and his blackness positions him as a translator between two worlds. Though Craft did not discuss his family in any depth in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, he offers a genealogy here that would include West African nobility and that subtly frames his interactions with the Daho- mean king for his British audiences.

As in Running, William makes use of the language and logic of ethnology to point out racial and intraracial difference. Mia Bay has described black ethnology as a form of “self- defense” that blended sci- ence, history, and scripture to highlight “the mutability of human affairs.”116 Black ethnology is also another expression of the transub- stantiation of things, in the sense that its spiritual, historical, and scien- tific underpinnings created (alternative) modes of exchange that revalued and redefined objects and essences, persons and populations, according to its internal logic. In describing the physical characteristics of various African nationalities, Craft alludes to the ways Hunt’s (and Crawfund’s) paper cannot account for variation within racial categories. Turning to Julius Caesar, William conveys, in one sense, that the English were once characterized in similar terms, a declaration met with laughter from the audience of scientists. Yet in another sense, Craft is also speaking here

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to the contemporaneous ethnological distinction between British and American forms of whiteness, a difference that pivoted on their legal dispositions toward slavery. It is perhaps no surprise, then, that William Craft would conclude with the matter of Haiti, the former French col- ony, which, in addition to demonstrating how the “independence of character and intellectual power” spurned the disestablishment of trans- atlantic trading, also acted as a counterpoint and a possible (ethnologi- cal) future for blacks in the United States.

The Times reported that William was “loudly applauded”117 for his response, and, as Blackett notes, “The debate at the Association’s meeting reverberated through British intellectual and philanthropic cir- cles for some time, adding fuel to the debate over race” and the “place of the Negro in Nature” during Great Britain’s new wave of expansion in Africa in the 1860s.118 The Crafts would participate in this new wave of British colonial expansion; William returned to Dahomey for three years beginning in January 1864, and Ellen established a “ladies’ auxil- iary” of the British and Foreign Freedman’s Aid Society, which, among their activities, solicited money for the establishment of a girls’ school in Sierra Leone, “where the young women of this British colony would receive their first Christian and industrial education.”119 The Crafts’ activities corresponded with Britain’s approach to blackness as a global “problem.” As Sterling notes, “After the [American] Civil War, the British antislavery movement shifted its emphasis to encompass black people everywhere. In addition to sending clothing, books, and farming imple- ments to the newly freed people of the American South, the former abolitionists . . . turned their attention to the British colonies in Africa and the Caribbean, where, they believed, the most pressing need was to bring Christian civilization to ‘the heathen.’”120

As the formal abrogation of slavery in Europe and its colonies coincided with an uptick in European colonial- imperialist expansion, the Crafts’ personae and activities found interpretation through a dif- ferent— though no less antiblack— lens. In this shifting terrain of human precarity, marked by an ongoing, unfinished project of subjectifying and subjugating blackness through the mechanisms of law and science, the Crafts gained a kind of distinction through their efforts to articu- late themselves in relation to fluctuating modes of sovereignty by taking up the British colonial- imperialist project. As Running reveals, U.S.

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forms of whiteness proved so cruel— and so totalizing— as to make fungibility the Crafts’ mode for freedom. Yet within a differing geog- raphy of black life, one indexical of the simultaneous expansion and contraction of forms of exploitation, violation, and violence that con- structed racial difference on a global scale, the question of freedom, and the attendant question of ontology, forcefully reemerged. Though one might conceive of this particular conjuncture of time (post– American Civil War) and space (England) as a rupture or break that yielded the capacity to upend the order of things, this would not be completely accurate. It was not a break in thought or being but a shift or slip (sub- tle yet violent) in an ordering of things that would, to riff on Sylvia Wynter, continue to reflect the proverbial colonial knot of being/power/ truth/freedom that overrepresented the ethnological form of European Man as human.121

It is in this sense that one returns to the image that constituted the frontispiece of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. The engraving of Ellen Craft had a distinct, mass- produced life before Running’s publica- tion, appearing in various British and American periodicals throughout the 1850s, often deployed to announce an upcoming lecture or some- times purchased for a shilling for personal use. As Michael Chaney notes, “[T]he earliest publications of the engraving cannot be classified techni- cally as illustrations since they do not visualize referents outside of their immediate context.”122 In other words, they were produced as fungible artifacts, which is to say that they were made to conform to any given context by the very logic of accumulation that underwrote the project of chattel slavery. In another sense, the portrait illustrated, by way of preface and through its preceding circulation, how fungibility contex- tualized the Crafts’ narrative. Whereas Running showcased William’s illicit literacy, the engraving represented the crime of self- possession, not in a metonymic sense, for, as other scholars have also noted, the image fails to represent accurately either Ellen Craft or William John- son.123 As McCaskill writes, “Her top hat, jacket, heraldic tassel, tartan, and tidily tacked tie— all status symbols of white male authority and privilege— and her closed- mouthed, reflective smile jointly tell a story of dignity, patience, and reason.”124 In this sense, the portrait tropes on the genre of portraiture, which is to say that the imaged figure portrays

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the subject for whom the genre was developed: man. Yet the frontispiece and the various narratives discussed in this chapter also illustrate how “gender,” “race,” and “sex” found reiterative arrangement in an imbri- cated field wherein the designations between human and person, black and white, and sex and gender were not easily mappable as distinctly biological or social terrains.

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