of her hand, divides her body. The new status of this body within the condition of meaning necessitates that it be divisible. The bandaging of her hand and cropping of her hair redirect and redistribute the interpretive gaze aimed at her. (331, my emphasis)
The mantra-like repetition of “the bandaged hand” in this paragraph repeatedly evokes but endlessly defers the presence of disability as fundamental to Ellen’s disguise—and thus to her racial meaning. In this sense disability appears to function for Barrett, much as it functions within the narrative, as the necessary “bridge” that enables racial and gender mobility while itself remaining fixed and apparently immobile. This dynamic can also be understood through Butler’s concept of the constitutive outside, “the excluded and illegible domain that haunts the former domain as the spectre of its impossibility, the very limit to intelligibility” (Bodies that Matter xi). The pertinence of Butler’s analysis to this particular example is highlighted in her further clarification of the constitutive outside as “a domain of unthinkable, abject, unlivable bodies” (xi). The extent to which the body marked by disability is unthinkable and even frightening for contemporary critics studying the Crafts’ narrative is captured in Barbara McCaskill’s description of Ellen’s bandaged face as a “facial monstrosity” (“Yours” 520).
Figure 1.1. Ellen Craft in her adapted disguise. From Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.
McCaskill is referring to Ellen’s “likeness,” the engraved portrait that was sold to raise money for the abolitionist cause even before the publication of the Crafts’ narrative, and which has accompanied every published edition of the narrative (Fig. 1.1). The engraving shows the head and upper body of what appears to be a smooth-faced young white gentleman with curly dark hair escaping a top hat to cover his ears. He is dressed in a black suit and stiff white collar, with a light-colored tartan plaid sash crisscrossing his front. His face is not bandaged, and the “green spectacles” used during the escape appear to have been replaced by a pair with clear lenses. The only remaining element of the invalid disguise is the white sling, which no longer supports the figure’s arm but simply hangs around his neck, slightly tucked between elbow and body. In this hanging position, parallel to the tartan sash, the sling looks like another sash or scarf, its disability function obscured to the point of invisibility.
The fact that this engraving purports to represent Ellen in her disguise yet actually represents an adapted version of the disguise with all signs of disability removed or obscured, has confounded many critics. Bland, referring to William/the narrator’s observation that “the poultice is left off in the engraving, because the likeness could not have been taken well with it on” (Craft and Craft 24), remarks, “What is unclear is whose likeness would be obscured by the poultice. Is the engraving intended to represent Ellen, William’s wife? Or is the engraving intended to show Ellen in the disguise she used to pass as a white gentleman traveling with his black slave? The engraving fully succeeds at neither, thus forcing the reader to ponder the reason for the apparent deviation” (Bland, Voices 150). While Bland does not offer an answer to this question, Ellen Weinauer concludes that the removal of the poultice suggests that “it would appear that the purpose of the engraving is to represent not ‘Mr. Johnson,’ but Ellen herself” (50). But if the purpose was to represent Ellen, why is she still dressed in her male costume? As Keetley observes, the picture does not show one “discernible race or gender,” instead portraying “a permanent state of racial and gender ambiguity” (14).
I contend that the purpose of the portrait is to represent the “most respectable-looking gentleman” so beloved of critics—that is, to represent the aspects of Ellen’s disguise that subvert nineteenth-century assumptions regarding the immutability of race and gender, while removing those aspects that even by implication show the African American body as unhealthy, dependent, and disabled. Thus McCaskill’s characterization of a couple of bandages as a “monstrosity” is clarified by her claim that “[with] her bandaged maladies a mere and known pretense, Ellen’s frontispiece portrait articulates the death of herself as a captive commodity and her resurrection as a wily, liberated subject” (“Yours” 516). Here McCaskill clearly applauds the removal of signs of disability and reads their removal metonymically as an indicator of freedom and autonomy.
The irony of obscuring or removing signs of disability from representations of Ellen is that disability, like race, has historically been viewed as a fixed bodily condition; it is not so easily removed as a bandage. Yet in the case of Ellen Craft, it appears at first that the performative, constructed nature of both disability and gender contrast with the seeming inherency of race. For Ellen must don bandages and spectacles to pass as disabled and must cut her hair and wear a suit to pass as a man, but apparently she need do nothing at all in order to pass as white. For she is white, if whiteness is defined purely by the color of her skin and texture of her hair.9 An 1849 article in the Wisconsin Free Democrat insisted, “Let it not be understood that she is a Negro. Ellen Crafts [sic], though a slave, is white” (Keetley 18n17). By 1852 the abolitionist Rev. Frances Bishop could emphasize another slave woman’s fairness, not with the common comparison to a British or southern white woman but simply by describing her as “quite as white as Ellen Craft,” a sign of Ellen’s resignification into a pure and reified whiteness (Armistead, LAS 44).10 Josephine Brown, daughter of the prominent abolitionist William Wells Brown, writes that “Ellen was as white as most persons of the clear Anglo-Saxon origin. Her features were prominent, hair straight, eyes of a light hazel color, and no one on first seeing the white slave would suppose that a drop of African blood coursed through her veins” (76).11
When Josephine Brown calls Ellen “the white slave,” she is clearly not suggesting that Ellen is a European kidnapped into slavery but rather is making the common abolitionist point that racial justifications of slavery were becoming increasingly more difficult to support, due to the “visible, progressive ‘whitening’ of the slave body throughout the century” (Wiegman 47). For the idea of race as inherent and fixed was exactly contradictory to the aims of the Crafts’ narrative and the abolitionist movement, both of which sought to display racial ambiguity precisely to “deauthorize racial categories” and thus counter a racially based system of slavery (Keetley 14; Bland, Voices 145). Instead representations of Ellen Craft function according to Marjorie Garber’s claim for the transvestite (285), demonstrating how social anxiety regarding the idea of inherent bodily identity is displaced from race onto gender and class and finally—and most fundamentally—onto disability.
Representations of Ellen’s whiteness in the abolitionist press were almost always accompanied by references to gender and class, as when William Wells Brown described an encounter between Ellen and Lady Byron in which the British noblewoman found that Ellen “was so white, and had so much the appearance of a well-bred and educated lady, that she could scarcely realize that she was in the presence of an American slave” (J. Brown 80–81). The invocation of Ellen as a genteel lady was echoed by Samuel May, general agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, when he wrote that Ellen appeared to be “a Southern-born white woman” and expressed extreme horror at the thought “of such a woman being held as a piece of property, subject to be traded off to the highest bidder” (Sterling 23–24). In this case, idealized (white) womanhood functions as supplement, a placeholder for social distinctions based on physical difference, so that racial difference may be shown to be an arbitrary legal construction. Weinauer makes this point forcefully in her critique of the Crafts’ narrative, arguing that William Craft as narrator “insists, finally, on the natural status of gendered categories, writing Ellen into her proper place within them. Unlike the meanings assigned to race and class memberships, meanings that Craft presents as discursive, interested constructions, ‘woman’ is assigned a meaning that is fixed, immutable, and presumably disinterested” (38).
The role played here by gender in supplementing race is undeniable. Yet I suggest that the meanings ascribed to disability are even more “fixed and immutable” and
