Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
little information about her subject that was genuinely new,” her chapter devoted to the Crafts certainly presents a far different account from that given by her father in his letter to the Liberator (Andrews, introduction xxxiii). One can only speculate as to the source of Josephine Brown’s unorthodox version of the Crafts’ story. Certainly she must have heard their story told many times in the seven years intervening between her father’s letter and her book’s publication, since the Crafts were touring with her father on the abolitionist circuit. However, accounts of the Crafts’ appearances, both in the United States and England, concur that William was always the spokesman and Ellen spoke only when entreated by the audience.20 Without further historical evidence, it is impossible to know whether Brown’s account was based on private conversations with Ellen or whether its peculiar nature stemmed from her own stymied feminist sensibility, straining at the confines of “acceptable” black female writing of her time, and particularly frustrated with confining her writing to memorializing her famous father. In either case it is clear that Josephine Brown’s account should lead us to view with healthy skepticism portrayals of Ellen Craft as passive and meek and William as active and strong.21
Looking closely at Josephine Brown’s account, we may discover evidence for her impatience with gender inequities.22 She adds a problem and a solution never mentioned in the Crafts’ or other accounts, when William objects that Ellen is “not tall enough for a man” and Ellen responds by demanding “high-heeled boots” and “a very high hat.” Being “not tall enough for a man” appears, to Brown’s William, a more immediate objection than clothing, hair, smooth cheeks, or even illiteracy—all the elements that contribute to the disguise in the Crafts’ account. Symbolically being “not tall enough for a man” suggests the devaluing and underestimating of Ellen’s authority; practically it presents a problem of normalization that demands prosthetic adjustment. Significantly disability appears here not as a mask or bandage placed upon the body but as a condition inherent in the body that must be “fixed” to meet social expectations.
Many historians have noted that constructions of femininity in the nineteenth century and beyond characterized the female body as inherently deficient, unhealthy, and abnormal.23 Additionally, in the nineteenth century there was a proliferation of medical claims that women would become disabled by education or political participation, as in claims that overeducated women’s “reproductive organs are dwarfed, deformed, weakened, and diseased” and that “enfranchising women would result in a twenty-five percent increase in insanity among them” (Baynton 42). These arguments often pointed to reading and writing as activities that would exacerbate women’s inherent frailty and tendency toward disease (Herndl 78). As a black woman claiming authorship, Josephine Brown contended not only with the oppressive relationship of femininity and disability but with parallel claims regarding the very humanity of African Americans. It is not surprising, then, that while she was engaged in so radical (for her time) a project as authoring a biography, questions of power and authority subtly emerged between the lines of her “purely factual” account.24
Enclosing the Invalid
To further explore these mutual interweavings of race, gender, and disability through issues of authority and power, I will close with an examination of the racial dimensions of the particular disability con performed by the Crafts. 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. For instance, one of Ellen’s proliferating impairments is a difficulty in walking, apparently produced not by logistical necessity (like the bandaged hand or face) but simply because such infirmity is part of the expected invalid role. This disability is primarily performed by William, who ostentatiously assists Ellen when entering and leaving buildings and train carriages (Craft and Craft 34, 36, 48). This performance shores up the image of Ellen as a feeble invalid and thus ironically reinforces her male persona; since conventionally women would be assisted in this fashion, William’s chivalry would undermine Ellen’s male disguise were the gesture not naturalized by her adoption of the feminized invalid persona (and by the racial assumption that white women did not lean upon black men). By appearing to assist Ellen in walking, William functions as a sign of her impaired legs, much as the bandage on her hand signifies its impairment. This apparent interchangeability of William with nonverbal signs such as a cane, crutch, or invalid (wheeled) chair at once objectifies him and undermines that objectification through the reader’s knowledge that he is in fact a speaking subject engaged in a daring rebellion.25
William’s agency is more apparent when he performs Ellen’s disability in her absence. On the steamer from Savannah to Charleston, when his “master” turns in early, William explains that “as the captain and some of the passengers seemed to think this strange and also questioned me respecting him, my master thought I had better get out the flannels and opodeldoc which we had prepared for the rheumatism, warm them quickly by the stove in the gentleman’s saloon, and bring them to his berth” (Craft and Craft 30). Clearly the performance of disability falls as much to William as to his “master”; when William responds to the passengers’ questions with a public display of his role as caretaker to a white invalid, he reenacts Ellen’s feigned deafness of the previous scene. In both cases the Crafts deflect attention by mobilizing white assumptions regarding the validity and presumptive innocence of illness. At the hotel in Charleston, William again makes a public display of heating the bandages, ensuring that Ellen receives the best service and sympathy of the proprietors, even as William himself is treated with the usual disdain (34). Afterward, on the train to Richmond, a white passenger questions William before joining Ellen in her carriage: “He wished to know what was the matter with [my master], where he was from, and where he was going” (38). In a reversal of the usual nineteenth-century white assumptions about white and black reliability, the passenger appears to seek validation from William before speaking to his “master” directly. This reversal appears in another white passenger’s first-person account, in which he privileges William’s information about “Mr. Johnson’s” condition over his own observation that the invalid “walked rather too gingerly for a person afflicted with so many ailments” (Sterling 15).26 In this instance William’s role as servant is more crucial to the deception than Ellen’s apparently imperfect acting of her part.
Once the Crafts reach freedom, however, the caretaking relationship between subordinate servant and invalid master must be restored to its “natural” form of husband caring for (subordinate) wife. Weinauer comments on the necessity of representing Ellen as an ideal Victorian woman to compensate for the dangerous gender transgression of the preceding narrative in which Ellen not only dresses as a man but is referred to as “he” and “my master” (Weinauer 38–48). To accomplish this task, ironically Ellen is narratively transformed into the very white invalid she was pretending to be: highly sentimentalized, weak, genteel, and sensitive.27 Even as their train approaches Philadelphia, Ellen begins to take on this role. During a brief stop, she is filled with “terror and trembling” because William is not there to help her from the carriage (Craft and Craft 48).
Once the Crafts arrive on free soil, Ellen, now “wife” again in William’s narration, “burst into tears, leant upon me, and wept like a child . . . [She was] so weak and faint that she could scarcely stand alone” (Craft and Craft 50). She is subsequently described in the narrative as “nervous and timid” (52), having “unstrung nerves” (53), and “unwell” (66). Biographer Dorothy Sterling amplifies this account: “The next days were a blur to Ellen. She had moments of exhilaration, when, once more in women’s clothing, she tossed the bits and pieces of her disguise around the room. Then reaction set in, and the sleepless nights and anxious days took their toll. Exhausted physically and emotionally, she rested in her room at the boarding house, while news of the Crafts’ escape spread to antislavery circles in the city” (19). In Sterling’s description, Ellen is confined like an invalid woman to her bedroom, discursively and physically isolated as “the news” spreads without her. This immobility is emphasized on the next page of Sterling’s biography, when the Crafts are urged to leave Philadelphia for Boston, but Ellen is “physically very much prostrated” and needs to rest before making another move (20).
During the Crafts’