(Craft and Craft 34, 36, 48). This performance shores up the image of Ellen as a feeble invalid and thus ironically reinforces her male persona; since conventionally women would be assisted in this fashion, William’s chivalry would undermine Ellen’s male disguise were the gesture not naturalized by her adoption of the feminized invalid persona (and by the racial assumption that white women did not lean upon black men). By appearing to assist Ellen in walking, William functions as a sign of her impaired legs, much as the bandage on her hand signifies its impairment. This apparent interchangeability of William with nonverbal signs such as a cane, crutch, or invalid (wheeled) chair at once objectifies him and undermines that objectification through the reader’s knowledge that he is in fact a speaking subject engaged in a daring rebellion.25
William’s agency is more apparent when he performs Ellen’s disability in her absence. On the steamer from Savannah to Charleston, when his “master” turns in early, William explains that “as the captain and some of the passengers seemed to think this strange and also questioned me respecting him, my master thought I had better get out the flannels and opodeldoc which we had prepared for the rheumatism, warm them quickly by the stove in the gentleman’s saloon, and bring them to his berth” (Craft and Craft 30). Clearly the performance of disability falls as much to William as to his “master”; when William responds to the passengers’ questions with a public display of his role as caretaker to a white invalid, he reenacts Ellen’s feigned deafness of the previous scene. In both cases the Crafts deflect attention by mobilizing white assumptions regarding the validity and presumptive innocence of illness. At the hotel in Charleston, William again makes a public display of heating the bandages, ensuring that Ellen receives the best service and sympathy of the proprietors, even as William himself is treated with the usual disdain (34). Afterward, on the train to Richmond, a white passenger questions William before joining Ellen in her carriage: “He wished to know what was the matter with [my master], where he was from, and where he was going” (38). In a reversal of the usual nineteenth-century white assumptions about white and black reliability, the passenger appears to seek validation from William before speaking to his “master” directly. This reversal appears in another white passenger’s first-person account, in which he privileges William’s information about “Mr. Johnson’s” condition over his own observation that the invalid “walked rather too gingerly for a person afflicted with so many ailments” (Sterling 15).26 In this instance William’s role as servant is more crucial to the deception than Ellen’s apparently imperfect acting of her part.
Once the Crafts reach freedom, however, the caretaking relationship between subordinate servant and invalid master must be restored to its “natural” form of husband caring for (subordinate) wife. Weinauer comments on the necessity of representing Ellen as an ideal Victorian woman to compensate for the dangerous gender transgression of the preceding narrative in which Ellen not only dresses as a man but is referred to as “he” and “my master” (Weinauer 38–48). To accomplish this task, ironically Ellen is narratively transformed into the very white invalid she was pretending to be: highly sentimentalized, weak, genteel, and sensitive.27 Even as their train approaches Philadelphia, Ellen begins to take on this role. During a brief stop, she is filled with “terror and trembling” because William is not there to help her from the carriage (Craft and Craft 48).
Once the Crafts arrive on free soil, Ellen, now “wife” again in William’s narration, “burst into tears, leant upon me, and wept like a child . . . [She was] so weak and faint that she could scarcely stand alone” (Craft and Craft 50). She is subsequently described in the narrative as “nervous and timid” (52), having “unstrung nerves” (53), and “unwell” (66). Biographer Dorothy Sterling amplifies this account: “The next days were a blur to Ellen. She had moments of exhilaration, when, once more in women’s clothing, she tossed the bits and pieces of her disguise around the room. Then reaction set in, and the sleepless nights and anxious days took their toll. Exhausted physically and emotionally, she rested in her room at the boarding house, while news of the Crafts’ escape spread to antislavery circles in the city” (19). In Sterling’s description, Ellen is confined like an invalid woman to her bedroom, discursively and physically isolated as “the news” spreads without her. This immobility is emphasized on the next page of Sterling’s biography, when the Crafts are urged to leave Philadelphia for Boston, but Ellen is “physically very much prostrated” and needs to rest before making another move (20).
During the Crafts’ subsequent voyage to England, William tells us that Ellen “was very poorly, and was also so ill on the voyage that I did not believe she could live to see Liverpool. However,” he adds, “after laying up at Liverpool very ill over two or three weeks, [she] gradually recovered” (Craft and Craft 66). Sterling again amplifies this account with imagery of motion and confinement: “Ellen spent the crossing in a dark, crowded cabin in the hold of the ship, seasick and feverish, while William paced the deck, wondering if she would survive” (37). Like the character of Jim trapped in the coffin in Child’s play, Ellen becomes narratively consigned to immobility and darkness, despite having just pulled off one of the lengthiest and most daring escapes in fugitive slave history. And, as in Child’s play, this symbolic confinement resonates with the struggle to reconcile race as free signifier with race as bodily fact, and disability emerges as the product and anchor of that struggle.
There appears to be no question that Ellen experienced bouts of physical illness during her life after slavery. However, the ways she is described not only in her narrative but by biographers and abolitionists seem significant beyond their basis in her physical experience. For example, “in letters to a member of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, Mary Estlin . . . said of Ellen ‘I think Ellen’s health has never sufficiently recovered the shock of their cruel persecution in Boston to make her equal to all the tossing about she has since had to encounter and I’m never so happy as when she is under our immediate protection’” (Sterling 41). An abolitionist wrote of the attempt to kidnap William and Ellen under the Fugitive Slave Act in Boston in 1850, “Somebody took care of Ellen Craft. William less needed help; he armed himself with pistols . . . and walked in the streets in the face of the sun” (qtd. in Craft and Craft 100). Ellen needs “protection”; she needs to be taken “care” of. Certainly these descriptions are inflected by gender and race, by assumptions about frail females and dependent slaves. But those inflections intersect with statements about Ellen’s health to portray her in reality as the invalid we previously knew as a fraudulent construction.28 Thus at the very moment of the successful manipulation of fantasies of identification to achieve freedom, those fantasies emerge ironically with the apparent power to redefine the resistant subject into her immobilized double.
The centrality of the disability con to Ellen Craft’s masquerade demonstrates how disability, race, and gender became mutually entangled in the production of both crises of identification and their fantastic solutions. Before turning to other examples of that entanglement in parts II and III, however, extended discussion of the disability con is warranted. Such discussion is crucial for two reasons: first, as indicated in this chapter, analyses of race and gender in American culture have rarely integrated disability as an equally constructed and significant social category, and thus focused attention to disability is needed to set the stage for discussions of how these identities combine into modern fantasies of identification. Second, as in the preceding discussion of Ellen Craft’s disguise, I will continue to highlight the supplementary dynamic in which disability is not merely another factor entwined with race and gender but often functions in a supplementary role to anchor physical difference. Thus I argue that racial and gendered difference is repeatedly found to be identifiable only through and against the disabled body, and further consideration of the complex constitution of that body is a vital first step.
2. Confidence in the Nineteenth Century
From the entanglements and potent implications of Ellen Craft’s masquerade, we now move to consideration of the disability con writ large, in its peculiarly prominent cultural emergence in the middle of the nineteenth century. Just four years after the Crafts’ escape, on July 8, 1849, an article appeared in the New York Herald describing the crimes
