when disability is represented through the disability con. This entanglement of meanings emerges from both nineteenth-century and contemporary efforts to negotiate the paradox of the racial body: the dilemma of arguing that race is a social, constructed identity even while confronted with the reality of racially marked bodies.12 In the case of Ellen Craft, race is at once shown to be arbitrary and constructed, since she is defined as black yet appears white, and physically inherent, since her body itself is all the disguise she needs to appear white. Here disability comes into play, as the social identity most strongly identified with physical difference and the body, to function as the necessary supplement that allows the bodily nature of race to be obscured. This shadow function of disability is to hold the fact of physicality, unmoored from social or representational meanings; its effect is to produce arguments that define race and disability as separate and virtually incompatible entities, when in fact they are deeply connected and mutually constitutive.
Consider the topic of literacy, a central theme of African American literature from its inception, and certainly a key factor in the Crafts’ narrative. Discussions of literacy and illiteracy are by definition discussions of ability and disability—the ability to read and write, or its lack. The disability of illiteracy profoundly impacted the lives of formerly enslaved authors like the Crafts and Frederick Douglass; the acquisition of literacy is a material and symbolic triumph that resounds from Douglass’s Narrative to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and beyond. Yet to discuss illiteracy as disability resonates with centuries of characterizations of African Americans as flawed or defective, incapable of acquiring the ability that has come to equal personhood in post-Enlightenment Western culture.13 Such characterizations came as much from white proponents of slave rights as from slave owners, as in the quotation from The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841 that Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. use as the epigraph to their landmark study The Slave’s Narrative:
“Things for the Abolitionist to Do”
1. Speak for the Slave, . . .
2. Write for the Slave, . . .
“They can’t take care of themselves.” (4)
In his extended discussion of literacy in the Crafts’ narrative, Barrett argues that literacy is a more powerful sign of whiteness than the white body itself, that “light or racially ambiguous skin is ultimately insufficient as an ‘ontological’ marker of whiteness” (324). Thus he complicates the claim that Ellen need “do” nothing to appear white, when whiteness is understood as a social identity predicated upon literacy. Here Barrett teeters on the edge of an analysis of the mutually constitutive nature of race and disability, noting that the bandaging of Ellen’s hand “is the indispensable correlate to Ellen’s racially ambiguous skin. In this context it is the ultimate sign of whiteness” (326–327). But to Barrett, the social meanings mobilized by Ellen’s bandaged hand are stable and fixed: it will be “read not as a sign of illiteracy but as a sign of illness that will earn her credibility and sympathy” (325). The deflection of possible intellectual disability onto physical disability is, for Barrett, inescapably tied to the fact of whiteness. He essentially equates the bandaged hand, a physical sign of the inability to write, with the visible fact of black skin, also at that time assumed to signify the inability to write. Such an equation at once hints at the importance of examining intersections of race and disability and excludes such an examination.
For Ellen Craft, displacing the disability of illiteracy onto a physical impairment enables her escape from slavery by allowing her to travel as a white man: it allows her to function as a mobile subject. The complex relation of literacy and mobility, and its necessary connection to disability, is apparent in the contrasting circumstance of Harriet Jacobs in her well-known 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Even while confined to a tiny crawlspace, Jacobs was able to employ her literacy to manipulate her former owner and obtain her children’s freedom by writing false notes to be mailed from various locations. Both women brilliantly played upon assumptions about their abilities to achieve freedom; Jacobs, however, suffered long-term physical effects from her long confinement, while Ellen Craft was able to learn to read and write and thus shed the disability of illiteracy. So disability in each case was neither fixed nor immutable but existed as a shifting, contingent identity. And in each case, disability surfaced in relation to race through the issues of literacy and mobility.
Multiple Identities, Multiple Representations
We can see this dynamic, as well as the continued entanglement of gender, race, and disability, in the numerous “retellings” and adaptations of the Crafts’ escape. Not only did the Crafts tell their story on the abolitionist stage countless times during the nearly twelve years before publication of their narrative, but a number of authors retold or adapted their tale in the cause of abolition, and, later, racial pride and historical memory. Probably the first of these “retellings” was Williams Wells Brown’s letter to the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator on January 12, 1849, about two weeks after the Crafts arrived in Boston (Craft and Craft 76). Brown describes the disguise in an order reflecting his own probable assumptions about the importance of social identities: first, he tells us that “Ellen is so nearly white, that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman.” Then he informs us that “Ellen dressed in men’s clothing,” and finally, about halfway through his letter, Brown mentions that Ellen “tied her right hand up as though it was lame.” Even this brief allusion to disability appears to require immediate recuperation, as Brown immediately adds, “which proved to be of service to her, as she was called upon several times at hotels to ‘register’ her name,” thus foregrounding the substitution of one ability for another—the ability to pass for the ability to read and write. Brown’s account reflects simultaneously a heightened consciousness of race and gender passing and a submerged anxiety regarding disability passing, especially by an enslaved African American.
When Brown later adapted the Crafts’ story for his 1853 novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, he similarly downplayed the element of disability and, to a certain extent, gender in the disguise. His character, Clotel, has lived a privileged existence as a white man’s mistress before being enslaved, so she is presumably literate and thus need not bind up her arm. Probably to accord with his characterization of Clotel as a highly refined, sentimental, and modest Victorian heroine, Brown also downplays her choice of man’s clothing for the disguise, portraying this element as largely a product of Clotel’s cruel and jealous mistress having forced her to cut her hair short. Interestingly, though, Brown’s Clotel also expresses a sentiment entirely absent in the Crafts’ own account, as the character of William (in this version only an acquaintance) tells her, “You look a good deal like a man with your short hair.” Clotel responds, “I have often been told that I would make a better looking man than a woman. If I had the money I would bid farewell to this place” (141). The first half of this response expresses a rather radical notion of gender crossing for our Victorian heroine, while the second half strangely equates male appearance with the ability to escape, as if Brown had never heard of the countless women who escaped from slavery.14 This is a rare moment when Brown’s sentimental, abolitionist authorial mask slips to offer tantalizing glimpses of a more individual view that both expands and forecloses the possibilities of gender. It is not surprising that, immediately following this comment, Brown tells us that Clotel “feared that she had said too much” (141).
Clotel also uses the same alias as Ellen Craft, “Mr. Johnson,” and Brown actually reproduces a newspaper correspondent’s eyewitness account of Ellen’s disguise as if it referred to his fictional heroine (Clotel 145–146).15 And like Ellen, Clotel travels as an invalid, wearing green glasses, tying a white silk handkerchief around her head, and pretending “to be very ill” (143). Yet without the bandaged hand necessitated by illiteracy, Brown’s heroine does not need to perform disability in the repeated and proliferative manner of Ellen Craft; she does not pretend to faint, feign deafness, limp, or stagger around dramatically as in the Crafts’ narrative. Brown’s downplaying of disability here is probably motivated
