Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
to enslavement” constituted the “performative essence of blackness” and “black performance,” the indefinable nature of fugitivity also becomes a constitutive element of Blackness in the field of vision.69 Black runaways materialize the fugitive aspects of performed Blackness, the habitation of opacity and obscurity that occurs across experiences of freedom in the slave era.
The experience of not belonging as part of the fugitive condition manifested even for those African descendants who were born free in the context of slavery. Fugitivity, both as a state of rootlessness and of illegality, haunted all free performances of Blackness. In his description of Blackness as “inextricably bound” to fugitivity, Fred Moten locates the “right to obscurity,” the right to “keep a secret” in the project of emancipation.70 Enlightenment’s overreliance on the eye as a means of objective knowledge formation and White demands for people of African descent to appear transparent in their motives circumscribed the lives of Black people who were born free and the reception of Black raciality. Consequently, slavery forcibly organized a distinction between the supposedly “real” Black-self as outwardly perceived and the internal ruminations on the entailments of Blackness; the racio-visual logics of slavery demanded distinctions between authenticity and sincerity.71 Slavery’s presumptions about Black raciality enforced a compulsory insincerity, an unavoidable choice between seeing oneself according to the dictates of the peculiar matrix or denying it altogether. Free performances of Blackness navigated these objectifying conceptualizations of Black visuality.
Fugitive free people denied slavery’s ocularity, ignoring the supposedly fixed nature of Black visibility, as well as the idea of White omniscience. Formerly enslaved Blacks re/acquired freedom by playing upon racio-visual logics, tailoring performances of Blackness to undermine a peculiar visual culture. In a context that fixated on the eye during interracial encounters, Black visuality took shape in the acts of submitting to and resisting the visual cultures of slavery. Fugitive free Black people who stole items, ruined property and killed animals before deserting their owners simultaneously seized and subverted the White gaze. These acts of destruction, when coupled with the act of stealing away, reveal fugitives who capitalized on the failures of surveillance and on the moments when Whites would realize their misfortune. Fugitivity contradicted notions of a blind Black (non)subject. When a free person performed Blackness, as a runaway, she asserted her visual capacity. Although slavery’s visual culture reimagined the fugitive as either docile or duplicitous, stealing one’s self and portraying oneself as free also emphasized the ability to see and manipulate racial visibilities. Enslaved Blacks who ran away played on assumptions about the undeniable fact of the Black body and, in the process, deployed gazes that resisted slavery’s ocularity.
The other fugitive element of the free performance of Blackness had to do with the fleeting nature of belonging. 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. “Fugitivity is not only escape” but is also “being separate from settling.”72 Some runaways ran north or adjacent, to blend in with communities of freeborn Black people. However, the idea of fugitivity as applicable to all free people of African descent points to the impending sense of homelessness for Black people in a slaving society. If the act of reading the Black body defined the way in which African descendants lived day-to-day in slavery, than the illegibility of fugitivity only complicated the runaway’s claims to a home. The fugitive’s displaced existence is not just about removal from a previous home or a given master’s domicile but also from the idea of “home” as a place to return to through the act of running away. “Fugitives,” by name, only have a place from which to flee, but no particular place to arrive. Again, this aspect of fugitivity marked the runaway as well as the juridical free person, as the task of emancipation involved creating a home. Read against the transatlantic parlor as a home space, fugitivity created a contest of belonging. The runaway implicitly queried the dichotomies between unfree and free, legible and illegible, native and foreign. Fugitivity meant trying to claim a cohesive Atlantic world as home when persons of African descent could not properly claim the nation and the nation did not properly claim fugitives. How could the inherent homelessness of Black freedom fit within the domestic space of the Atlantic world, especially marked against the parlor’s penchant for display?
Some runaways revealed a remarkably expansive sense of transatlantic belonging and awareness of the parlor’s decorum. Seizing an opportunity in 1771, James Somerset fled his master’s custody. Somerset started his life on the western cape of Africa (the specific location unknown), before slavers kidnapped and delivered Somerset to Virginia for sale into bondage. Charles Stewart purchased Somerset, who remained Stewart’s property from the age of eight and until Somerset freed himself at the age of thirty-three.73 In Boston, Somerset ran errands and delivered messages on Stewart’s behalf, laboring in relatively close contact to his master. Unfree Black people in the North were not only farmers. Many unfree men like Somerset worked in closer proximity to Whites than did some unfree Black women, who often worked outdoors until moving indoors to labor as domestics closer to the nineteenth century.74 Somerset and Stewart sailed from Boston to England in 1769, where Somerset continued to move about alone on Stewart’s behalf, learning his way around town and making his own acquaintances with Blacks and Whites. This bit of autonomy did not constitute freedom in Somerset’s mind, although Stewart furnished his chattel with fine garments of silk and sometimes money. Few records of Somerset’s procedures are recorded, but read in the context of runaway performances of Blackness, we can assume that by the time Somerset absconded on October 1, he may have been somewhat literate, but most assuredly he was decently dressed, familiar with his surroundings, and able to rely on friends to assist in his escape. Although slave catchers recaptured Somerset on November 26, 1771, he still made an astute decision to escape in England. In the United States, Stewart enlisted the public to capture Black fugitives, taking out at least one advertisement for another man who ran away, promising a “Pistole reward” to “whoever will apprehend and bring him to me.”75 These same networks of White surveillance were a little less effective for Stewart in England, however. Before Stewart could send the recaptured Somerset to Jamaica to suffer the brutal enslavement of plantation bondage, White abolitionists filed suit, arguing that Stewart could not detain Somerset; Judge Lord Mansfield determined that English law did not make clear provisions for chattel slavery to exist within England proper and freed Somerset. Stewart misread as fidelity Somerset’s daily life as an unfree person, his leaving “home” on errands and returning in the evening. Somerset’s escape reveals Black visuality as embroiled in the balance between illegibility and homelessness that is the fugitive condition.
Read in the context of innumerable runaways, Somerset is one of an unknown number of brilliant bondspersons who freed themselves in an environment built entirely upon Black captivity. Somerset’s escape was comparable to that of many other fugitives documented in runaway notices. A number of enslaved persons gained their master’s trust, acquired fine garments, made acquaintances, appeared content in their servitude, and then fled at a calculated moment. Although many times the fugitive just randomly took off, a greater number of runaways stole themselves at very important times, “when their absence was inconvenient and disruptive.”76 Like many others, Somerset’s assertion of fugitive freedom revealed a schism between a Black bondsperson’s outward appearances and self-perceptions, between visibility and vision.
The unique significance of this escape, however, is that it called upon the space of the transatlantic world for freedom, rather than bondage. Somerset’s decision to run away suggested the willful deployment of fugitivity, both its illegibility and its punitive homelessness. Somerset engaged the issue of transatlantic belonging through the fugitive’s opacity. News of Somerset’s escape joined a transatlantic circuit already reporting insurrection among enslaved Africans in Surinam, St. Vincent, and Jamaica.77 Somerset’s well-timed escape may have drawn on a transatlantic consciousness of running away or, quite simply, on the existence of a supportive web of friends located outside the colonial U.S. territories. Regardless, Somerset’s bid for freedom reveals his mastery of the Atlantic world as a domestic interior wherein his fugitivity—his illegibility and his displacement—entailed productive possibilities when used to exploit the visual assumptions of slavery.
The Somerset case became significant for what