Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
that U.S. Americans’ right to liberty from England translated to her right to freedom from Whites and from slavery. On hearing “that paper read yesterday that says ‘all men are born equal—&, that every man has a right to freedom,’” Freeman asked, “‘wont the law give me my freedom?’”11 Freeman’s idea that the Declaration of Independence applied to her is indicative of her notion of a transatlantic belonging as a precedent to U.S. national identity. Her pursuit of emancipation was not yet about her right to U.S. citizenship, but about her right to the freedom to which people in the colonial United States were entitled in the Atlantic world.
My interest is about how the fugitive element of exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery called attention to the ways in which people of African descent confronted the visual conditions of slavery by acting outside its institutional presets of interracial interactions. Spectacular exhibitions of freedom problematized and abraded the visual culture of slavery. Fugitive free Blacks reveal that the enslaved might outwardly appear resigned even while calculating escape. Fugitive free people of African descent masterfully understood assumptions about race, vision, and visuality, and then used this knowledge to steal themselves and upend the foundational assumptions of slavery’s visual culture. The ascertainment of freedom by way of fugitivity suggested a calculated incongruence between the outward appearance of the Black body and the internal perceptions of the unfree person. Freeman’s commitment to her sister may have made running away a less likely choice for her—a notion consistent with the fact that most runaways were men.12 Nonetheless, her method of achieving liberty still conjured questions of domestic belonging and an opaque display of freedom meant to torment her abuser. My description of slavery’s peculiar visual culture is meant to situate early exhibitions of freedom within a fraught and domineering context for reception. This chapter explains the visual culture of slavery as one undergirded by an unreliable praxis that depended on “visible” signifiers of race to conflate seeing and subjectivity, to racialize the eye/I. Whereas the practices of transatlantic slavery institutionalized a visual construction of race and racial ways of seeing, late-eighteenth-century assertions of Black freedom offered interruption.
A Peculiar Ocularity
Slavery functioned as a peculiarly “ocular” institution. Its daily execution thrived in a racio-visual economy that determined ways of seeing and ways of being seen according to racial difference. In trying to imagine the visual culture of slavery, one might most immediately consider the routine monitoring of bondspersons’ behavior on plantations since this was central to slavery’s policing tactics. C. Riley Snorton asserts that “plantation governance schemes” and the role of the overseer, in particular, were chief among slavery’s practices of visual domination.13 Additionally, the whole process of chattel slavery relied heavily upon visual culture wherein the idea of the eye was a matter of racialization. Indeed, to possess both the eye and an “I” was a matter of raciality in the context of slavery. The divisions of social power into White or Black also parsed the faculty of sight into discrete racial categories. More specifically, slavery organized an omniscient White eye/I to police and manage Black bodies, constructing sight as a racially distinct experience, and as the sovereign domain of Whiteness. Summarily, slavery parsed visibility along racial lines as well, distinguishing and racializing people of African descent from Whites through the presumption of an innate visibility. Whereas practices of enslavement relied on the eye within social encounters, the visual culture of slavery constructed race and racialized the act of seeing.
But slavery’s peculiar ocularity was more than the mere visual habits that made slavery possible. By slavery’s peculiar ocularity, I mean the very specific visual idiosyncrasies and contradictions utilized within the visual logics of slavery that were at once contrary and commonplace in early U.S. life. These visual logics of racial decorum were irrational, unreliable, and often collided with one another, even as they were crucial to enslavement philosophies. For example, while Whites exercised visual authority over Blacks, there were also numerous instances of Black overseers or “drivers”; these Black overseers could be as cruel or more benign than their White counterparts, but their race meant that their authority was limited by law. Black slave drivers existed somewhere between official White overseers and enslaved Blacks in this peculiar visual culture.14 To think of slavery as a peculiarly ocular institution is to think of how systemic bondage fetishized a connection between vision and race in ways that were simultaneously nonsensical and naturalized. Slavery entailed a tautological, and thus self-sustaining, visual rationale. The peculiar visual practices of slavery happened in the day-to-day processes of enslavement that inconsistently used the eye to determine signifiers of race, and thereby determine social, economic, political, and visual possibilities. Slavery organized a strange approach to race that emphasized sight and intertwined raciality with visuality. The hegemony of slavery’s peculiar ocularity relied on visibility to enslave, and relied on invisibility to carry out slavery with feigned innocence. Slavery coded Black raciality as visible, and thus associated the denial of freedom with racial perceptibility. Not only did the sight of persons of African descent first suggest they should be enslaved, but, more importantly, the habitation of an observable racial identity coincided with enslavement, over time. This kind of racio-visual logic persisted, making it necessary for free Black people to furnish paperwork to prove their freedom to random Whites in northern U.S. states, and for all persons of African descent to live under the suppressive scrutiny of various “codes” to legislate proper behavior.15
Saidiya Hartman’s canonic text offers up the term “scenes of subjection” as language useful for thinking through the overdetermination of Blackness in the field of vision, or hypervisibility, where forced displays of jubilee and the sight of the coffle were essential to characterizations of Blackness as inherently spectacular.16 The theater of slavery—the scenes of violence and order—existed for disciplining race, with noted accentuation on pain and the “spectacle of power.”17 The visible Black body appeared on display for the sake of White pleasure and Black terror. In the moment that Black bodies met the subjugation of slavery, they simultaneously encountered the visual ordering of race. In written details about skin color, hair texture, and overall physicality, slavery theorized Black raciality as an observable phenomenon as early as the moment of purchase. Unfree Africans were often “graded” in the slave market, delineated as “Second Rate or Ordinary Men,” sometimes “Extra Girls or No. 1 Girls,” as “slave speculators” tried to rate the value of human cargo against other goods like cotton or sugar.18 Not only did these tactics assign fiscal value to Black bodies, but descriptions were part of an overall practice of closely examining unfree people. Scenes of subjection happened through both intimate and distant forms of social contact. The peculiarly ocular institution transformed the display of individual unfree people into a large-scale cultural practice of constant observation, prefiguring Black bodies and people of African descent as demanding surveillance. This approach to the visual imagined the Black body as intrinsically visible, as decipherable. The construction of vision and visibility in the context of slavery also organized Black raciality around an inherent need for management or oversight from Whites.
Ironically, although slavery’s visual matrix positioned Blackness as a visible phenomenon, this unreliable visual culture also projected unfree people of African descent as deftly capable of a sly invisibility. Mainstream belief in the idea of Black visibility happened in concert with a perpetual suspicion about unfree Blacks trying to escape. Although the coffle situated the Black body as an entity on view for the White eye/I, the ever-present possibility of escape also positioned unfree Black people as likely to avoid observation. This coupling imagined people of African descent as simultaneously easily observable and also requiring special techniques of visual policing. Black bodies were both hypervisible and yet capable of a certain invisibility. For example, in mid-eighteenth-century New York City, Whites in local government enforced laws requiring enslaved persons to be indoors after sundown or to carry candle lights (as well as explanatory passes) after dark; lawmakers made it illegal for an unfree Black (body) to be unlit after dark.19 The idea that technological intervention helped illuminate the Black body advanced the idea that without help, Black people could easily avoid White surveillance in the colonial United States. These social practices imagined that Black skin was able to evade visibility, or the White gaze, despite the way in which Black corporeality was thought of as uniquely palpable. Mandating Black illumination constructed Black skin as textured in such a way as to