Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
convened audiences to participate in the spectacle of the sale and helped to whet buyers’ appetites. Many of these notices lumped people and objects together such as one ad for “A NEGRO WENCH” listed as a “cook and washerwoman” for sale alongside “a clock, a billiard-table, a chariot,” random other home furnishings, “a parcel of lumber, bricks” and “plantation tools.”56 A number of auction advertisements mentioned the sale of people alongside the sale of hogs, cows, and mules—many listing an entire plantation for sale, one replete with “Three Slaves, about Thirty Hogs, and a Stock of Cattle” to go with several hundred acres of land.57 Most auction advertisements diminished any sense of individuality for enslaved men and women, instead remaking once-free Africans into a large, collective Black mass of washed and oiled bodies available for purchase. And while these descriptions did not recognize the humanity of individual men, women, and children, advertisements did more than promise buyers that the cargo was healthy and capable, paradoxically flattering unfree people as skilled workers.
The images on these materials were distinct as well. A full column of one southern newspaper moved through the various images of Black bodies in the context of slavery, denoting each position with a different image (figure 1.4). The three separate ads for auction emphasized the “CARGO” of “NEGROES” for sale, “choice and healthy,” as indicated by the chiseled muscles. These images positioned the human cargo as ready to work; Blacks are shown wearing loincloths, facing the viewer of the paper, open chested, holding work implements, and waiting for direction. These images contrast sharply with the two figures assigned to the runaway notices. Although the “cargo” is described as docking from Sierra Leone, Barbados, and the Gold Coast, it is the runaways who are imprinted as “foreign,” depicted in nativist garb, holding tools that now signal weaponry, and with one foot off the ground to indicate their movement.58 Arguably, enslaved people of the colonial period were often from identifiable locations outside the United States. However, the contrast in these images depicts the conscious use of indicators of “Africanness” and foreignness to distinguish between people who are committed to working as unfree and people who have broken this agreement by running away. Blackness read as Africanness becomes more relevant, and visible, for Black people who act outside the dictates of slavery’s visual and social contracts.
Pickup notices similarly described the physical attributes of captured Blacks to readers. Jailers used public notices to capture fugitives and to notify owners of the whereabouts of their escaped property. Again, these items connected the idea of the residual “Africanness” of some runaways to the act of fleeing, showing Africanness as a characteristic that accelerated fugitivity and made a captive status harder to maintain. One warden issued a lengthy list of detainees, including two Black women, Clarinds and Lyda, with “country marks” all over their bodies. The warden also reported that these women could report their own names, even though they “cannot” recall the names of their masters.59 The warden does not indicate that Clarinds and Lyda might have purposefully withheld the name of their master. Instead, he focuses readers’ attention toward their bodies and their “country marks.”60 This ad, like others, maneuvered within White certainty about Blackness as self-effacing and failed to consider Black people as calculating. Runaways destabilized certainty about how much Blacks ever genuinely submitted to slavery’s ocularity and called into question every facet of social interaction that occurred before the crime of theft, including the apparent submission to surveillance and the ideology of an undeniably visible Black body.
Figure 1.4. “TO BE SOLD,” South Carolina Gazette, June 30, 1772.
Black Visuality and Performance
Runaways exhibited freedom, which theft helped to obscure. Whereas “performing Blackness” in the context of slavery meant the “‘naturalization’ of blackness” as constituted in “pained contentment,” the expression of Black freedom in the form of fugitivity served as interruption.61 Hartman expertly lays out the way in which the compulsory performances of Blackness under enslavement were about slavery’s use of force and emphasis on the flesh to index a “truth” about Blackness. She goes on to explain that “stealing away” revealed the very sense of agency of which Black bodies were thought to be devoid, such that the runaway “transgressed the law of property” and conceptions of racial essence.62 The act of running away destabilized slavery’s philosophy of an innate and unconscious Black body by revealing the unfree person as calculating and capable of other kinds of presentations. “Performing Blackness” in refutation of slavery was different from the performative experience of subjection and spectacle because it accentuated the limits of domination.
I point this out in order to address the specific array of visual transgressions that distinguished behaving free from behaving unfree, and how those attributes were beyond the pale of the law. Runaways utilized an “intimate understanding of the dominant society’s perception of freedom,” sometimes acquired through watching the free people for whom they worked, to steal themselves and portray themselves as free.63 By using dress, language, and knowledge of White perceptions of Blackness, fugitive free people cultivated carefully honed methods of exhibiting autonomy. In the processes of freeing themselves, the fugitive free made productive use of slavery’s ill-conceived visual matrix by playing to the dictates of the peculiar institution and upending those assumptions at choice moments for escape. While it was illegal for an unfree person to liberate herself from slavery, and sometimes that theft invoked other companion thefts, running away involved a general disobedience about slavery’s visual instructions that haunted the act of escape, even when no other “crime” was committed.
Black people who purportedly feigned freedom also exemplified a regard for the visual aspects of free performance.64 White owners often used the phrase “Pretends to be free” in both northern and southern runaway advertisements, as such designations indicated a special kind of absconder. Runaways who “acted” free were doing more than transgressing the law of property; they were also conducting themselves as free through their interactions with Whites and how they maneuvered in public. These people could be especially devious because they stopped succumbing to slavery’s visual imperatives the moment they left the site of their enslavement. When “A Negroe Wench, named Phebe” ran off from Marcus Hook, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, she did not let the numerous scars on her face and body from her owner’s punishments stop her; she covered them with a handkerchief, took the name “Sarah,” and presumably joined “free Negroes” in Philadelphia or Germantown.65 The markings reported in the notice do not just help would-be captors find Phebe/Sarah, but they also suggest that the signs of slavery on her body do not interrupt her performance. A number of runaways duplicated this routine, even mingling with Whites in the process. When Cato, “alias Toby,” ran away from Middletown, New Jersey, he also ignored the slave markings signed on his body. Richard Stillwell, Cato/Toby’s former owner, warned the public that “he is a sly artful fellow, and deceives the credulous,” potentially mingling with Whites “pretending to tell fortunes, and pretends to be free.” With these tools in his repertoire, Cato stayed gone for at least a year.66 These stories reveal that the stolen clothes were not just for covering the body or masking a “slave status” in quick and fleeting interactions in public. Many fugitives enlisted props for a very elaborate performance of Blackness as free people, performances where they encountered Whites and continued the “act.”
Black runaways relied on elusiveness, and not just the absence of slavery, as an important element of liberty. “The fugitive exposes the groundlessness” of the “distinction between person and property,” even at the potential cost of “silence, invisibility, and placelessness.”67 The choice to be obscure is a central part of redacting concepts of performing Blackness organized through slavery. People who ran away often conducted themselves in a way that resisted being read, despite slavery’s repetitive treatment of the Black body as legible. Daphne Brooks calls the “spectacular opacity” of Black performance onstage a thing of resistance, sometimes erupting and sometimes proffered at will, meant to disrupt demands for transparency from Black performers.68 Offstage, the indiscernible nature of Black performance in the flight to freedom occurred among people who exercised this opacity at will, by both removing themselves from the surveillance of slavery, but also by managing the body