in 1864. In this version Brown greatly shortened his account of the escape and removed disability completely from the disguise, omitting the bandages and including the green glasses as part of his heroine’s “gentlemanly appearance” rather than as a sign of invalidism (Clotelle 47).16 (Although the heroine keeps to her stateroom “under a plea of illness,” the idea that she is actually playing the role of an invalid is never mentioned in this version.) These changes suggest a retreat from the disability aspects of the Crafts’ story prompted by the postbellum need to present the newly emancipated African American subject as healthy, independent, and worthy of freedom, in opposition to proslavery claims that freedom was unhealthy and even disabling for African Americans, producing, in one southern physician’s words, “a beautiful harvest of mental and physical degradation” (Baynton 39). Without the necessary factor of illiteracy, other devices of disability such as the bandaged hand, limp, and feigned deafness are easily sloughed off from Brown’s conception of the necessary and acceptable components of a slave’s triumphant escape. (I would argue that, then as now, signs of disability are viewed as acceptable only when necessary.)
This dynamic is taken even further in another adaptation of the Crafts’ story in the 1858 play The Stars and Stripes: A Melo-drama by the white abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child. Like Brown, Child chooses to make the Crafts literate, and thus erases the element of disability from their disguise. In fact Child aggressively foregrounds her characters’ literacy, portraying William reading aloud about freedom from the newspaper and Ellen writing a pass for another slave to use for his escape (141, 147). This characterization is of a piece with Child’s choice to make both of the Crafts light-skinned, clearly seeking to portray them to a white audience as “refined” in every aspect. As a northern abolitionist character says to Ellen, “No one would believe that you were not a white woman,” and William is described in the stage directions as a “genteel-looking light mulatto” (165, 123).
There is no mention of disability or illness in Child’s portrayal of the Crafts’ escape, but illness enters her play in another fashion, when her comic white proslavery characters speak of “drapetomania” as the reason that William and Ellen ran away:
Masters: The fact is, sir, the niggers are a very singular race. They have several diseases, peculiar to themselves. The one which prevails most generally, is called by our doctors, drapetomania; and the only way I can account for this strange affair, is by supposing that Bill and Nellie had an attack of that disease.
North: Pray what sort of disease may that be, sir?
Masters: It means a mania for running away. . . . The learned Dr. Cartwright, of Louisiana University, has written a celebrated book about nigger diseases. He advises that the whip should be freely applied for the first symptoms of drapetomania. He calls it “whipping the devil out of ’em.” But the fact is, I never perceived any symptoms of it in Bill. He always seemed healthy. It is a very singular disease, that drapetomania! There’s no telling who may be seized by it. Some of the planters think it is becoming epidemic. (173–174)17
Child reverses the actual circumstances of the Crafts’ escape: rather than portraying healthy slaves pretending to be ill, she portrays healthy slaves being labeled as ill by their white oppressors. Since we are clearly meant to mock and disbelieve the white proslavery characters, their very insistence on William and Ellen as “diseased” (the word disease appears seven times during the full exchange) is meant to convey the fugitives’ supreme healthiness—and by extension, the healthy and natural character of freedom itself. Showing Ellen as a bandaged and hobbling invalid would severely undercut this message, and so Child foregoes the tremendous dramatic potential of the disguise in favor of conventional didacticism.
Child instead invents various disguises and other tricks to liven up the escape. Most notably she creates a third character, Jim, who escapes from slavery at the same time as the Crafts. Jim is everything that Child’s William and Ellen are not: they are light-skinned, and he is dark; they speak in standard, genteel English, and he speaks in comic dialect; they deliver earnest, sentimental speeches, and he sings humorous ditties and capers in stereotypical “darky” fashion. Child is clearly catering to her northern audience’s expectations. It is as if she is trapped by competing stereotypes: heroes must be sympathetic, so they must be light-skinned, but a play about “Negroes” must include “darky humor,” so Jim enters to mimic the Crafts like a doppelganger formed from the dark pigment that has been literarily excised from William’s skin. Such “mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate . . . a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (Bhabha 86).
This intensive surveillance is apparent in a scene in which Jim appears to “shadow” the Crafts during their escape, at a point when William and Ellen are hiding in the woods and singing a sentimental verse:
[While they are singing, a black face peeps out from between the boards, and watches them curiously for a minute, and is then lighted up with a broad smile. The head is withdrawn behind the boards, and presently, when all is still, a voice is heard singing:]
“Jim crack corn—don’t care!
Ole massa’s gone away!”
[William and Ellen start, and look behind them.]
William: I could almost swear that was Jim’s voice.
Ellen: You know all the slaves sing that. It can’t be that Jim is here. (158–159)
Jim appears here as the dark other that haunts the Crafts, the anonymous “black face” that substitutes for personhood in nineteenth-century white conceptions of African Americans. He is further associated with an anonymous dark-skinned mass in Ellen’s claim that “all the slaves sing” the song Jim is using to signal them, and William and Ellen’s singularity is emphasized by the fact that they are not singing that traditional song. In the absence of disability, Jim seems to represent racial bodily difference in an exaggerated extreme, so that the Crafts may remain heroically “white.”
However, the racial erasure and rematerialization produced in the play appears to collapse back upon itself when the three fugitives must escape into Canada, pursued, like the real Crafts, by their former owners under the Fugitive Slave Act. In Child’s version, William and Ellen must be “stained black” to escape recognition. Meanwhile Jim must vanish altogether, since he “can’t be stained any blacker” (176). The fugitives join a group of mourners, and Jim is actually carried inside a coffin—a trick possibly inspired by the notorious 1849 escape of Henry Box Brown who shipped himself to freedom in a wooden crate. Jim also hides under an icehouse while Ellen and William picnic with abolitionists above, her identity hidden by a veil and his by a “brown wig” (163–165). Again Child invents disguises and subterfuges to replace those actually used by the Crafts and in doing so splits them in two and buries the darker half in a cellar, a move strangely reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, and liable to similar interpretations as those of feminists who see the lunatic, mixed-race Bertha as personifying the exiled rage and sexuality of the pallid Victorian heroine Jane Eyre.18 Yet, by the play’s closing scenes, William and Ellen are not only stained black but “locked up in a tomb” along with Jim, to escape with him into Canada the next day. Without disability to function as bodily supplement, the play finally constructs race as an inescapable and confining fact, the “drop of black blood” in William and Ellen’s veins binding them inexorably to racial otherness.
We may contrast this portrayal with that of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s William and Ellen Craft: A Play in One Act, published in 1935. Johnson portrays the Crafts speaking in dialect, reflecting a newfound valuation of African American cultural
