Picture Freedom. Jasmine Nichole Cobb
Catherine Maria Sedgwick drafted a lengthy account of Freeman’s life as a free and paid servant to the Sedgwick family, which the English literary magazine Bentley’s Miscellany published in 1853.5 According to Sedgwick, “action was the law” of Freeman’s “nature,” and thus, for her, “servitude was intolerable.”6 Sedgwick’s account of Freeman’s life begins with an account of Freeman’s servitude under her abusive former violent mistress, Ms. Ashley. One day, when “making the patrole of her kitchen” [sic], “Madame Ashley” observed that Freeman’s sister Lizzy, “a sickly timid creature,” had reserved scraps of dough from a “wheaten cake” she had baked for the Ashley family in order to make her own. Madame Ashley, enraged, labeled Lizzy a “thief” before she “siezed [sic] a large iron shovel red hot from cleaning the oven, & raised it over the terrified girl.” However, before the shovel could land on Lizzy, Freeman “interposed” her body, taking the blow instead. Ashley cut Freeman to the bone with the hot shovel, leaving her with “a frightful scar” for the rest of her life. However, in a recurring act of resistance, Freeman regularly brandished the scar to visitors of the Ashley home. When Freeman reflected on the incident, she explained that although she had “a bad arm all winter,” she made sure that “Madam had the worst of it.” Freeman refused to cover the scar, and when visitors asked Freeman what happened, she replied, “ask Misses.” Freeman displayed her wounded body to undermine Ashley’s womanhood, purposefully using her insurrectionary exhibition to pose the question, “Which was the slave, & which the real mistress?” Freeman’s question queried domesticity as a White woman’s gender norm as well as a privilege determined by the space of the home. The sympathy Freeman intentionally invoked from visitors when exposing her scar potentially dislodged Ashley’s designation as “mistress” of the house, even if briefly. Freeman used the scar to assert her own domesticity and to punish Mistress Ashley. Where the home served as the arena for White women to display domesticity, Freeman’s presentation took up that space as a site of refutation and reassertion. She ignored slavery’s customary practice of denying Black pain and White culpability, she undermined predeterminations of domesticity through the way in which she maneuvered within the Ashley home, offering her body as evidence of her owner’s malfeasance.
Figure 1.2. A bracelet of gold beads made from Freeman’s necklace. (Courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society)
Freeman confronted the racial visual order of slavery, both through the portrait and through the ability to conjure sympathy via the display of her wound. Freeman refuted the daily practice of Black women’s subjugation within the intimate confines of the home and at the hands of White women through recourse to the visual. Social interaction in the context of slavery required that unfree Black women like Lizzy and Freeman live and work as invisible helpmates who made life easier for White women like Ashley. Freeman challenged these conventions by drawing attention to White crimes and Black women’s corporeal needs. In this context, Freeman’s acts functioned as cultural transgressions. Freeman’s offering of a free Black woman for portrait and her confrontation with Mistress Ashley represent measures that destabilized slavery’s architecture of visual domination. In the intimate proximity of the master’s home, Freeman used her body in defense of her sister, Lizzie. She then revealed her body to shame Mistress Ashley in front of others, and finally, she covered her body but focused her eyes for the sake of creating a picture. In all of these instances, Freeman defied a visual terrain steeped in the suppression of Black women’s self-possession and unaccustomed to Black women’s self-appointed pictures.
My aim in this book is to discuss the ways in which picturing freedom intervened in slavery’s institutionalized visual culture and to reveal exhibitions of freedom as disruptive to this visual landscape. Although the picturing element of this scenario involves some actual illustrations, like Freeman’s portrait, we can also think of the flickering glance that might have accompanied the display of her wound as another tool that Freeman used to force Ashley to picture freedom. Each of these appeals to the visual divulges the way in which Black people’s demonstrations of freedom in the context of slavery were problematic. In this chapter, I describe the way in which the organization and maintenance of chattel slavery intertwined the racial and the visual. I argue that this intricate formulation made the appearance of freedom a difficult thing to discern in its earliest occurrences. Drawing on the language of the “peculiar institution,” I describe slavery as a “peculiarly ocular institution” that utilized an unstable visual logic of race to enslave persons of African descent and to protect Whites from the threat of the gaze. The term “peculiar institution,” coined by South Carolina senator John Calhoun in the nineteenth century, describes slavery as oddly intransient given its conceptual necessity to White prosperity.7 Referring to slavery as “the peculiar institution” helped to diminish the unpleasant realities of slavery and allowed its advocates to argue for the perpetuation of bondage while removing the human connotation associated with the term. Offering a theory of the “peculiarly ‘ocular’ institution,” I mean to underscore slavery’s visual culture as an impediment to recognizing freedom. Moreover, I offer this notion to contextualize Black visuality as shaped by and resistant to slavery’s visual culture. This theory of the peculiarly ocular nature of slavery frames the reception of freedom and the new tactics of spectatorship that I describe throughout this book.
The mediation of slavery was also central to the institutionalization of this peculiar visual culture as early print media helped to circulate a set of racio-visual codes to readers and viewers throughout the Atlantic world. Much of the print material involved in the transatlantic transport of Africans for enslavement, from auction advertisements to runaway notices, emphasized physical traits, sometimes with the help of illustrations, and targeted White viewers. I offer an analysis of these items below to explain how media conjured a racio-visual logic in support of slavery. Thinking through visual culture as a “generative” site for the deployment of slaving ideologies, I describe the runaway and the mediation of the runaway as distinct, but interrelated, examples of slavery’s visual assumptions.8 Whereas media supporting slavery helped proliferate the visual construction of race, the runaway forcibly destabilized these presumptions.
Media in support of slavery points to the runaway as a distinctive problem, but I collect these reclamations of freedom under the rubric of fugitivity. While slavery alone was enough to initiate a perpetual state of “not belonging” for people of African descent, the fugitive conditions of homelessness and obscurity also correspond to exhibitions of freedom in the context of slavery. Whites often curiously regarded demonstrations of freedom among Black people in the context of slavery, receiving such displays as out of place. Even someone like Freeman might have been somewhat of a mystery to Whites, both in her ability to manipulate the visual terms of slavery in the Ashley house as well as in her demonstration of freedom through portraiture. Yet, the confounding nature of Black freedom in the context of slavery did not result from the “fugitive vision” of exceptional Black people who transformed from unfree to free cultural producers, but from the way in which slavery intertwined race and visuality.9 I argue that displays of Black freedom took up the questions of legibility and home that defined fugitivity and haunted the transatlantic. The idea and the image of the Black fugitive symbolized insurgence against both a specific master who properly “owned” the runaway, and against the state, which depended upon Black people’s compliance with slavery as the rule of law. Blacks who ran away were fugitives from justice but also fugitives from an evolving conception of the Atlantic world as home. While slavery constructed people of African descent as legible and comprehensible, freedom and fugitive freedom took up illegibility as permanent conditions that countered the parlor’s reliance on slavery.
Even the juridical demand for freedom took up the issue of fugitivity in the face of the transatlantic slave trade. Freeman’s reclamation of liberty explicitly proposed questions about home and belonging in a transatlantic landscape. Freeman managed both local and large-scale notions of domesticity in the process of resisting slavery. She was one of the first people of African descent to sue for liberation in the United States, filing one of the earliest “freedom suits” in the state of Massachusetts in 1781.10 In Sedgwick’s narrative of Freeman’s life, she reports on Freeman’s experience of hearing a public