Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
I argue that this collection of representations excluded free Black people from definitions of U.S. national belonging, and that neither venue cultivated a picture of Black citizenship. This chapter analyzes pro- and antislavery media together, as items that compounded the notion of racial hypervisibility, and explores early depictions of Black freedom throughout U.S. print culture. It describes the treatment of Black freedom in the Black press and explains how the powerful combination of words and images in caricatures became the unchecked representation of Blackness in the larger cultural imaginary. Chapter 4 moves toward thinking about the relationship between Black freedom and U.S. national identity.
I conclude Picture Freedom by discussing the transatlantic utility of Black freedom in internationally circulating representations. Chapter 5, “Racing the Transatlantic Parlor: Blackness at Home and Abroad,” draws upon the transatlantic parlor as a metaphor of inter/national belonging and a place for situating Black domesticity. I argue that viewers domesticated Black freedom—made it fit within the purview of the home—through depictions that simultaneously included and excluded people of African descent within visions of empire. I analyze the evolving form and content of print portrayals of free Blacks shared across U.S., British, and French parlors, with a detailed analysis of the caricatured origins of “Vues d’Amerique du Nord.” Produced in 1834, this scenic French wallpaper used an image from Clay’s original caricature to portray Black freedom in North America. My analysis offers a detailed reading of the transatlantic visual culture focused upon problematizing Black emancipation as a method for broaching Black belonging.
Picturing Freedom
Picture Freedom considers the emergent visual culture shaped by competing representations of free Blacks, realized in the relationship between items like the daguerreotype and the caricature I discussed in the beginning of this introduction. Both types of objects are constitutive elements of an inter/national narrative about Blackness as a thing apprehended by the eye and seen/scene to a host of other visual interactions unspecific to modern technologies. Black women were not just figures that other artists thought to include in their cultural works; they also invented their own accounts of Black visuality in the changing context of transatlantic slavery. Sarah Mapps Douglass, artist, abolitionist, and sister to the aforementioned daguerreotypist Robert Douglass, created a number of illustrations like this Black butterfly (figure I.4) and shared them with an exclusive group of friends.76 On its own, this resting creature, painted in a scene of leaves and flowers, may seem unremarkable. However, read in the context of hostile illustrations of Black women, such as figure I.5, Back to Back, Douglass’s seemingly innocuous offering demarks an important point of contrast from this “cutting” vision of Black freedom.77 The illustrated Black butterfly set in nature, reads quite differently from this ornately dressed woman, who only serves as an accompaniment to an equally extravagant male partner. The delicacy of butterfly wings is distinct from the abrasive shoulders of the woman in caricature, the former marking a fragility to free Black womanhood that is entirely absent from the hostile approach to picturing freedom, and generally unrecognized in a context focused upon kidnapping and enslaving Black women.
Black women’s modes of picturing freedom were essential to the parlor as a place for preparation—a private place to perfect new Black visibilities. African descendants, and Black women in particular, cultivated national identities through developing different postures toward the visual. Free Black people produced multifocal visions of Black visuality that oscillated between resisting and submitting to the logics of slavery. In the presence of hostile images like Back to Back, the racial animus of slavery never quite disappeared, and in fact, only materialized in internationally popular forms of cultural production. Ironically, graphic humor made for coping with the actual sight of “uppity” free Blacks— plastered in shop windows that sold prints and present in homes that entertained company— also made Blacks more visible in public culture. Through the fashionable consumption of ostentatious Black bodies in pictures, free Black people became more popular through images that re-presented them for amusement. Thanks to efforts to picture freedom, Blackness became ubiquitous and a permanent staple in the U.S. popular imaginary.
Figure I.4. Sarah Mapps Douglass, “A token of love from me, to thee,” ca. 1833, Amy Matilda Cassey Album. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Figure I.5. Edward Williams Clay, Back to Back, 1829. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
This book offers a new way to think about Black visuality and emancipation by proposing Black freedom as a visual problem that Whites and Blacks variously managed with practices of picturing. Different from antislavery rhetoric and political documents, visual cultures captivated with the prospect of Black freedom used strange and unexpected practices to resituate Blackness within the transatlantic imaginary. Transatlantic slavery produced a visual order to everyday life by organizing unfree Blacks into cadres of invisible helpmates that lived and worked in destitution but in close proximity to Whites. Images that groped through Black freedom amid de jure and de facto slavery circulated the Atlantic Ocean while living Black people who made themselves visible in contradistinction to slavery worked hard to create distance from a legacy of bondage and exploitation. These artifacts archive the manner in which Black freedom presented a crisis to national and international codes of looking at race and nationhood. They intimate a desire for sense making about freedom and illustrate the ways that ordinary people and image producers alike attempted to make “free” status meaningful for others through depiction. Welcomed into the parlor on sheets of paper, relegated to fleeting pieces of popular ephemera, free Black people provided a platform for experimenting with ideas of home. Although Black women were entirely uninvited as animate visitors in certain parlors, excluded from the concept of “guests” that might sit on a White woman’s sofa, White homes strangely welcomed free Black men and women as silent objects with no gaze of their own, in ridiculing depictions.
1. “A Peculiarly ‘Ocular’ Institution”
An amorphous Atlantic took shape around the enslavement of African peoples. Black bondage fortified a perimeter around the Atlantic world and constituted a burgeoning U.S. identity, as both New England and the U.S. South “flourished under slavery.”1 The execution and the abolition of slavery in the United States functioned to constitute the early republic as part of the Atlantic. As the Atlantic world expanded, playing host to a sprawling dispersal, “changes across [its] time, space, and jurisdiction” appear at the intimate level of a single household up through the remote relations of metropole and colony.2 Visual culture provided measures for the assessment of fitness or belonging, as both pictures and practices represent sites of confrontation among unfree African descendants and Whites who held them in captivity.
Fugitive Freedom in the Atlantic
Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman sat for her portrait (figure 1.1) as a free woman in 1811.3 This amateur painting by Susan Anne Livingston Ridley Sedgwick pictures Freeman well dressed in Federalist-period clothing. In addition to her blue dress, Freeman dons a white fichu to cover her cleavage and a white bonnet to cover her head. Her clothing choices depict Freeman as a respectable free woman in possession of her own body, while the adornment of her gold necklace adds a flourish of conspicuousness to the image (figure 1.2). Freeman’s portrait reflected her “regal love of the solid, & the splendid wear” of fine “chintzes and silks.”4 Although her body sits askew from the artist, Freeman’s side-eye stare meets the viewer of her portrait. This image, in a gilded frame, pictures a woman who achieved emancipation by confrontation and by a clear sense of entitlement to the founding values that defined the colonial United States in the context of an evolving Atlantic world. Freeman’s decision to sit for a portrait represents a conscious invocation of the visual on her part, a moment in which she applied her sense of self-possession to the terms of looking and being seen that, in part, defined chattel slavery.
Figure 1.1. Elizabeth “Mumbet” Freeman, 1811. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)