plan as involving only gender crossing, this does not prove to be the case:
Ellen (going up to William trembling): You sho you kin get us through, William?
William: Sho honey; ain’t I been on the train time and time again wid young Marse, an’ can’t I read and write?
Ellen: But how kin I be like young Marse? I’m all a shakin’ now.
William (soothing her): All you got to do is walk. You don’t have to talk, you don’t have to do a thing but just walk along bigity like a white man. See here. (Shows her how to walk.) Try it.
Ellen (tries to walk like him): Dis way?
William: You doin fine! You see now you is supposed to be sick, you got a toothache, you goin’ to a doctor in Philadelphia, you is nearly deaf, an’ yo’ nigger slave is taking you—understand? (Johnson 173–174)
Johnson depicts William as hyper-able: able to conceive of the plan, able to read and write, able to show Ellen how to walk like a white man and to bolster her failing spirits. The sudden proliferation of impairments in the end of this conversation appears seemingly from nowhere—neither Ellen’s illiteracy nor its arm-sling solution are even mentioned—but is symbolically produced as the feminized abject other to William’s hyper-able masculinity. Disability and stereotyped femininity are both stabilized here to supplement the racial pride and empowerment that appear as Johnson’s primary theme and motivation for her play.
Like Johnson’s, most narratives of the Crafts’ escape portray William as the primary devisor and motivator of the disguise and Ellen as requiring persuasion and assistance. This is certainly true of the Crafts’ own narrative, in which William tells us, “After I thought of the plan, I suggested it to my wife, but at first she shrank from the idea” (Craft and Craft 21). In contrast, Josephine Brown’s account of the escape in her 1856 biography of her father, William Wells Brown, emphatically reverses these roles:
“Now, William,” said the wife, “listen to me, and take my advice, and we shall be free in less than a month.”
“Let me hear your plans, then,” said William.
“Take part of your money and purchase me a good suit of gentleman’s apparel. . . . I am white enough to go as a master, and you can pass as my servant.”
“But you are not tall enough for a man,” said the husband.
“Get me a pair of very high-heeled boots, and they will bring me up more than an inch, and get me a very high hat, then I’ll do,” rejoined the wife.
“But then, my dear you would make a very boyish looking man, with no whiskers or mustache,” remarked William.
“I could bind up my face in a handkerchief,” said Ellen, “as if I was suffering dreadfully from the toothache, and no one would discover the want of beard.”
“What if you were called upon to write your name in the books at hotels, as I saw my master do when traveling, or were asked to receipt for any thing?”
“I would also bind up my right hand and put it in a sling. . . . ”
“I fear you cannot carry out the deception for so long a time, for it must be several hundred miles to the free States,” said William, as he seemed to despair of escaping from slavery by following his wife’s plan.
“Come, William,” entreated his wife, “don’t be a coward!” (76–77)
I have reproduced this account at length since it provides such a dramatically contrasting view, not only to the Crafts’ narrative—which, after all, was published four years later than this account and thus can achieve only a tenuous status as the “original”—but to William Wells Brown’s own account discussed earlier.19 While William L. Andrews, in his introduction to Josephine Brown’s Biography of an American Bondsman, characterizes the work as “primarily a digest of her father’s autobiographical writings . . . [offering] little information about her subject that was genuinely new,” her chapter devoted to the Crafts certainly presents a far different account from that given by her father in his letter to the Liberator (Andrews, introduction xxxiii). One can only speculate as to the source of Josephine Brown’s unorthodox version of the Crafts’ story. Certainly she must have heard their story told many times in the seven years intervening between her father’s letter and her book’s publication, since the Crafts were touring with her father on the abolitionist circuit. However, accounts of the Crafts’ appearances, both in the United States and England, concur that William was always the spokesman and Ellen spoke only when entreated by the audience.20 Without further historical evidence, it is impossible to know whether Brown’s account was based on private conversations with Ellen or whether its peculiar nature stemmed from her own stymied feminist sensibility, straining at the confines of “acceptable” black female writing of her time, and particularly frustrated with confining her writing to memorializing her famous father. In either case it is clear that Josephine Brown’s account should lead us to view with healthy skepticism portrayals of Ellen Craft as passive and meek and William as active and strong.21
Looking closely at Josephine Brown’s account, we may discover evidence for her impatience with gender inequities.22 She adds a problem and a solution never mentioned in the Crafts’ or other accounts, when William objects that Ellen is “not tall enough for a man” and Ellen responds by demanding “high-heeled boots” and “a very high hat.” Being “not tall enough for a man” appears, to Brown’s William, a more immediate objection than clothing, hair, smooth cheeks, or even illiteracy—all the elements that contribute to the disguise in the Crafts’ account. Symbolically being “not tall enough for a man” suggests the devaluing and underestimating of Ellen’s authority; practically it presents a problem of normalization that demands prosthetic adjustment. Significantly disability appears here not as a mask or bandage placed upon the body but as a condition inherent in the body that must be “fixed” to meet social expectations.
Many historians have noted that constructions of femininity in the nineteenth century and beyond characterized the female body as inherently deficient, unhealthy, and abnormal.23 Additionally, in the nineteenth century there was a proliferation of medical claims that women would become disabled by education or political participation, as in claims that overeducated women’s “reproductive organs are dwarfed, deformed, weakened, and diseased” and that “enfranchising women would result in a twenty-five percent increase in insanity among them” (Baynton 42). These arguments often pointed to reading and writing as activities that would exacerbate women’s inherent frailty and tendency toward disease (Herndl 78). As a black woman claiming authorship, Josephine Brown contended not only with the oppressive relationship of femininity and disability but with parallel claims regarding the very humanity of African Americans. It is not surprising, then, that while she was engaged in so radical (for her time) a project as authoring a biography, questions of power and authority subtly emerged between the lines of her “purely factual” account.24
Enclosing the Invalid
To further explore these mutual interweavings of race, gender, and disability through issues of authority and power, I will close with an examination of the racial dimensions of the particular disability con performed by the Crafts. It is clear that William’s presence as the servant of “Mr. Johnson” is as fundamental to Ellen’s successful performance of invalidism as are the sling, poultice, and green spectacles she wears. For instance, one of Ellen’s proliferating impairments is a difficulty in walking, apparently produced not by logistical necessity (like the bandaged hand or face) but simply because such infirmity is
