Indeed the disability con is an important element for many fugitive slave narrators, such as James Pennington, who pretended to have smallpox, and Lewis Clarke, who employed disguises very similar to those of Ellen Craft, including green spectacles and handkerchiefs tied around his forehead and chin (Pennington 565; Clarke and Clarke 139, 147). A number of historians have briefly noted the use of feigned illness and disability among slaves as a means of resistance, as well as the related cultural dynamics of suspicion and surveillance, yet this context is not generally invoked in discussions of Ellen Craft, unlike examples of gender or race-based masquerades.5 My consideration of disability in the Crafts’ narrative is not to negate other critics’ arguments but rather to enhance and complete them, particularly those that argue for the narrative’s portrayal of a mutually constitutive relationship between race, gender, and class. In these many insightful analyses of Ellen Craft’s “tripartite disguise” (Browder 121), the fourth crucial element of that disguise is rendered invisible and haunting.6
Yet a close reading of the narrative evolution of Ellen Craft’s disguise clearly demonstrates the intimate and constitutive relationship of race, gender, class, and disability. In William’s narration, he and Ellen first think of racial masquerade, suggested by Ellen’s white skin. Next they decide upon gender-crossing, due to the perceived impropriety of a white woman traveling with a black man. But the class status of the white male persona adopted then presents the new obstacle of literacy:
When the thought flashed across my wife’s mind, that it was customary for travelers to register their names in the visitors’ book at hotels, as well as in the clearance or Custom-house book at Charleston, South Carolina—it made our spirits droop within us. So, while sitting in our little room upon the verge of despair, all at once my wife raised her head, and with a smile upon her face, which was a moment before bathed in tears, said, “I think I have it!” I asked what it was. She said, “I think I can make a poultice and bind up my right hand in a sling, and with propriety ask the officers to register my name for me.” (Craft and Craft 23–24)
At this point the concept of the invalid—of passing as disabled—enters the disguise and soon becomes its central enabling device. The crucial function of disability for the disguise is emphasized by its remarkable proliferation throughout the narrative, which begins immediately after the conversation just quoted. Ellen fears that “the smoothness of her face might betray her; so she decided to make another poultice, and put it in a white handkerchief to be worn under the chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head” (24). Then, nervous about traveling in the “company of gentlemen,” Ellen sends William to buy “a pair of green spectacles [tinted glasses]” to hide her eyes (24). We immediately discover the efficacy of these stratagems, as William observes that, during the escape, “my wife’s being muffled in the poultices, &c., furnished a plausible excuse for avoiding general conversation” (24). At the time of the disguise’s inception, no specific illness or condition is referenced, although later in their journey, Ellen will claim to have “inflammatory rheumatism” (38).
In fact during the Crafts’ four-day journey, Ellen acquires new impairments whenever discovery is threatened: when spoken to by an acquaintance who might recognize her voice, she “feigns deafness” (Craft and Craft 29); when other passengers are inclined to become too social, she goes to bed, citing her rheumatism (30); and when two young white ladies appear overly interested in the dapper gentleman, Ellen quickly becomes faint and must lie down quietly (39). As “problems of possible recognition, of hotel registration, and of reading are all solved by more and more complete adoption of the role of invalid master” (Byerman 74), we see that the validity of Ellen’s racial, gender, and class passing hinges upon the invalidity of her body.
Yet that invalidity has been naturalized or ignored by critical readings of the Crafts’ narrative, discussed as a purely material and expedient factor rather than a social identity requiring analysis. For instance, it is only after the Crafts’ narrative has explained the elements of the invalid disguise that we reach that favorite moment of critics, the transformation of Ellen into a “most respectable-looking gentleman” through cross-dressing and a haircut (Craft and Craft 24). The transgression of this gender, race, and class masquerade is so interesting that critics and historians alike tend to disregard the fact that Ellen does not actually travel as this “respectable-looking gentleman” but as his invalid double, bandaged and poulticed and spectacled in the extreme. Clearly, passing as white, male, and even wealthy is not enough to effect the Crafts’ escape. In fact none of these acts of passing could have succeeded, apparently, without the necessary component of passing as disabled.
This complex interdependency of identities, signified in the text when William tells an inquiring traveler that his master suffers from “a complication of complaints,” presents a troubling challenge to scholars of African American history. Both abolitionists and freedmen of the Crafts’ time and African Americanist scholars and critics today appear deeply invested in the recuperation of the black body from a pathologizing and dehumanizing racism that often justified enslavement with arguments that people of African descent were inherently unable to take care of themselves—in other words, disabled.7 Thus we find throughout nineteenth- and twentieth-century narratives and scholarship an emphasis on wholeness, uprightness, good health, and independence—all representational categories that the Crafts paradoxically needed to subvert in order to attain actual freedom.8 As Jennifer James observes, “In post–Civil War African American literature particularly, it was imperative that the black body and the black ‘mind’ be portrayed as uninjured by the injuring institution of slavery in order to disprove one of the main antiblack arguments that surfaced after emancipation—that slavery had made blacks ‘unfit’ for citizenship, ‘unfit’ carrying a dual physical and psychological meaning” (15). With this awareness of the complicated and important history behind representations of disability in the African American context, it is nevertheless important to elucidate the presence of disability in the Crafts’ narrative to understand how the entwined fantasies of racial, gender, and disability identification functioned both to enable their escape and to shape its subsequent interpretations.
Lindon Barrett, for example, argues that “the central act of the Crafts’ escape is the removal of what is designated as an African American body from [a] position of meaninglessness to the condition of meaning and signification” (323). By claiming that the bodies of African Americans have been “taken as signs of nothing beyond themselves,” Barrett recasts the function of whiteness in the Crafts’ escape as providing not only literal freedom but ontological existence. In contrast, Dawn Keetley suggests that Ellen’s passing as a white man functions as “a concealment of any distinguishing features, rather than as a positive accrual of ‘white’ and ‘male’ features” (14). Thus Ellen’s disguise—or at least the descriptions of her disguise in the narrative—“highlight what she is not” (14). Both of these analyses draw upon deconstructive theory to read race as a matter of a paradoxically absent presence or present absence. This analysis relies on Derrida’s concept of the supplement, as that which is added to an apparently complete text but is actually necessary to its meaning, “the not-seen that opens and limits visibility” (163).
I suggest that not only is the supplement a useful concept for examining the function of disability in the Crafts’ narrative but that many critical analyses of the narrative also unconsciously rely upon disability as supplement. Sterling Lecater Bland, for example, discusses Ellen’s mobility and agency without referencing her invalid disguise, instead emphasizing “Ellen’s remarkable ability to challenge a series of raced, classed, and gendered associations” (Voices 148, my emphasis). Such a dynamic is also particularly noticeable in Barrett’s repeated referrals to Ellen’s bandaged hand in a paragraph ostensibly devoted to analysis of her racialized body:
Like the bandaged hand, the inscription of the white male figure on the black female body of Ellen is an essential element of the Crafts’ escape. . . . Like the bandaging of her hand, Ellen’s regendering refigures advantageously
