Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
meant to assist in the capture or retrieval of Black bodies imagined them as uniquely visible, open to the scope of the White gaze or duplicitous in their attempts to “pass” for free. Ironically, these publications also revealed how runaways capitalized on slavery’s peculiar visual culture, showing that while slavery demanded a deferred gaze from unfree persons as a signal of deference, fugitive free Blacks actively manipulated these demands on Black spectorial practice.42 Such a discrepancy only intensified anxieties of observation.
Picturing freedom in slavery’s media meant imagining Black freedom as wholly problematic. Runaway notices indicate that the first and farthest-reaching illustrations of freedom were derogatory. Quite simply, in their existence and their format, runaway notices imagined Black freedom as misbegotten and volatile. Postings with bold letters that described “RUNAWAY,” both as a person and an action, illustrated with a Black figure in motion, helped to assert freedom as a stolen entity, further diminishing the sense that slavery purloined life and labor from Black bodies. Additional details included in runaway advertisements also organized Black freedom as dangerous. Many runaway ads described multiple kinds of theft: the fugitive body, clothing taken for disguise, as well as pilfered horses and weapons. Runaway advertisements were intended to help the public identify very specific individuals who escaped custody. Printed notices about fugitive free Blacks attempted to give precise details about “the demeanor, dress, speech, character, abilities, background, and possible destination of runaway slaves” to describe them more robustly than any other depiction of unfree persons during this period.43 Through word and image, these materials “recreated the slave’s body as a living and moving text” that encouraged viewers to read the Black body, to find the scars, brandings and wounds described in the announcements on the physical person.44 Runaway notices attended to the specificity of the individual fugitive rather than to the collective bounty. Runaway advertisements helped to parse unfree Blacks into legible groups or “personality types” such as “‘surly,’ ‘sour,’ ‘impudent,’ and ‘bold’” in one category; “‘shy,’ ‘complaisant,’ and of ‘meek countenance’” in another; and “‘cunning,’ ‘artful,’ ‘sensible,’ ‘ingenious,’ and ‘smooth tongued’” in a third.”45 These descriptors represented the needs of White owners attempting to make sense of Black runaways, after the fact. They pictured free Blacks as crafty and visually fraudulent, disrespectful and wild, for running away from slavery.
The specificity of the individual runaway notice was somewhat undercut by pairing them with images of Black bodies taken from larger sheets of newspaper cuts or prototypes. The salience of advertising to the early U.S. print industry emphasized the role of pictures in relaying messages to consumers. These advertisements similarly imaged the figure of a mobile Black body bound for escape, despite other kinds of textual distinctions. Images were an important aspect of the mediation of slavery because depictions of Black bodies may have made runaway notices and auction advertisements understandable to an illiterate populace. Most Whites throughout the colonial United States remained illiterate well into the nineteenth century, although literacy rates for White adults in the northeastern states were generally higher than in the southern and western territories due to their unique economic, geographic, and historical conditions.46 Literacy rates were difficult to determine, even once U.S. census takers began accounting for the “literate” and “illiterate” class for the 1840 survey. Moreover, a literate individual might have been able to read or write, but not necessarily both, since many people learned to read first, and then received separate instruction in writing. The ability to sign one’s name was often a marker of literacy in the colonial United States, but this determinant only revealed itself in a class of people privileged to sign property documents, such as wills and deeds.47 Pictures cut across all of these designations, appealing to various kinds of readers. Both literate and illiterate Whites could discern the meaning of the stereotyped figure of a runaway. Numerous advertisements for runaways often appeared on a single page of a newspaper, like the sheet from the South Carolina Gazette shown as figure 1.3. Both ads are headlined “RUNAWAY,” but the top notice for “a tall, slim, black negro wench, named JENNY” may not have been as accessible as the lengthier ad below for “Saul,” “Charlotte,” and “Fortune,” a man “notoriously known for his Villainy.” This notice illustrated three different people with the stock illustration of a presumably “African” person—in motion, clad in nativist garb, carrying a stick.48 Not only does the image distinguish one ad from the other, but it also helps the longer ad stand out on a page among other kinds of images.
Black women were in precarious positions once framed within the confines of the runaway notice. First, as mothers, Black women runaways needed to choose between leaving their children behind or taking them on the run. A number of Black women ran away from slavery while pregnant. Although “it was not easy to feed, clothe, care for, and protect children” in these scenarios, a number of women did, as indicated by notices that list an infant “at the breast” of a runaway.49 Still, other women who were not nursing children might find their bodies described in advertisements in ways that invited sexual objectification. A “mulatto woman, named Silvie” ran away with a fifteen year-old boy, “Joseph,” but the ad directs readers to look for a “flat belly, and a mark on both sides of her breast” when trying to identify this woman.50 Such a description gave further license to any would-be captor to examine Silvie’s body—or that of any Black woman presumed to be Silvie—should they find her.
This objectification might have informed Harriet Jacobs’s method of getaway. In Jacobs’s retelling of her escape from the Norcom plantation to her grandmother’s house, she navigates the flight by passing for a free Black sailor. Jacobs describes “Linda Brent,” the pseudonymous Jacobs, donning “a suit of sailor’s clothes—jacket, trousers, and tarpaulin hat.” She punctuated this ensemble with a masculine “rickety gate” and by “blackening” her face with “charcoal.”51 Jacobs’s decision to present herself as a free Black sailor rendered her “invisible on the street” in a way that she might not have experienced if she merely stole typical dress clothes and ran away.52 Jacobs intended this theatrical appearance to place her among numerous Black sailors for whom no one in particular may have been looking. Free and enslaved Black seafarers sailed through every north Atlantic seaport from as early as 1740.53 Moreover, if Jacobs anticipated her owner issuing a runaway notice for her capture, this presentation bore little resemblance to the description of her in the advertisement. James Norcom’s published description of Jacobs in an 1835 issue of the American Beacon typified runaway advertisements, presuming that Jacobs manipulated her race and costume in effort to escape. Describing Jacobs as a “light mulatto” with thick black hair “that curls naturally” but can “be easily combed straight,” Norcom suggested that Jacobs might not be immediately recognizable as someone else’s property. Offering extensive details, Norcom warned the public that Jacobs may be on the run, “tricked out in gay and fashionable finery,” clothing that she likely made herself.54 Norcom imagined Jacobs through slavery’s peculiar visual culture and its corresponding media framework. Within this structure, Jacobs should be seeking Whiteness and dressing as a free woman, not accentuating her Blackness. Jacob’s successful escape reveals her ability to evade the structuring vision of the runaway notice, as well as the surveillance of the Norcom plantation.
Figure 1.3. “RUNAWAY, From the Subscriber’s Plantation in St. Stephen’s Parish,” South Carolina Gazette, September 26, 1771.
Conversely, media advertising Black people for sale were far more imaginative than items issued for their recapture. Purchase materials encouraged Whites to visit the auction to choose from an array of able-bodied Black people. In general, media advertising the sale of enslaved persons encouraged more enthusiastic perceptions of Black people. Many of these items eschewed the vilifying language of Black racial identity that appeared on other kinds of advertisements and instead offered favorable reviews about able Black bodies for sale. One advertisement for a “private sale” emphasized the availability of “valuable slaves, mostly this country born” listing nameless persons variously described as “a driver and very good cooper,” a “fisherman boat negro and field slave,” and “a wench who is a good cook, washer and ironer, and dairy and poultry woman.”55