informed Harriet Jacobs’s method of getaway. In Jacobs’s retelling of her escape from the Norcom plantation to her grandmother’s house, she navigates the flight by passing for a free Black sailor. Jacobs describes “Linda Brent,” the pseudonymous Jacobs, donning “a suit of sailor’s clothes—jacket, trousers, and tarpaulin hat.” She punctuated this ensemble with a masculine “rickety gate” and by “blackening” her face with “charcoal.”51 Jacobs’s decision to present herself as a free Black sailor rendered her “invisible on the street” in a way that she might not have experienced if she merely stole typical dress clothes and ran away.52 Jacobs intended this theatrical appearance to place her among numerous Black sailors for whom no one in particular may have been looking. Free and enslaved Black seafarers sailed through every north Atlantic seaport from as early as 1740.53 Moreover, if Jacobs anticipated her owner issuing a runaway notice for her capture, this presentation bore little resemblance to the description of her in the advertisement. James Norcom’s published description of Jacobs in an 1835 issue of the American Beacon typified runaway advertisements, presuming that Jacobs manipulated her race and costume in effort to escape. Describing Jacobs as a “light mulatto” with thick black hair “that curls naturally” but can “be easily combed straight,” Norcom suggested that Jacobs might not be immediately recognizable as someone else’s property. Offering extensive details, Norcom warned the public that Jacobs may be on the run, “tricked out in gay and fashionable finery,” clothing that she likely made herself.54 Norcom imagined Jacobs through slavery’s peculiar visual culture and its corresponding media framework. Within this structure, Jacobs should be seeking Whiteness and dressing as a free woman, not accentuating her Blackness. Jacob’s successful escape reveals her ability to evade the structuring vision of the runaway notice, as well as the surveillance of the Norcom plantation.
Figure 1.3. “RUNAWAY, From the Subscriber’s Plantation in St. Stephen’s Parish,” South Carolina Gazette, September 26, 1771.
Conversely, media advertising Black people for sale were far more imaginative than items issued for their recapture. Purchase materials encouraged Whites to visit the auction to choose from an array of able-bodied Black people. In general, media advertising the sale of enslaved persons encouraged more enthusiastic perceptions of Black people. Many of these items eschewed the vilifying language of Black racial identity that appeared on other kinds of advertisements and instead offered favorable reviews about able Black bodies for sale. One advertisement for a “private sale” emphasized the availability of “valuable slaves, mostly this country born” listing nameless persons variously described as “a driver and very good cooper,” a “fisherman boat negro and field slave,” and “a wench who is a good cook, washer and ironer, and dairy and poultry woman.”55 While the actual auction positioned unfree persons as inanimate objects, media promoting the sale of enslaved persons constructed bondspersons as able-bodied service persons. Slave auction advertisements convened audiences to participate in the spectacle of the sale and helped to whet buyers’ appetites. Many of these notices lumped people and objects together such as one ad for “A NEGRO WENCH” listed as a “cook and washerwoman” for sale alongside “a clock, a billiard-table, a chariot,” random other home furnishings, “a parcel of lumber, bricks” and “plantation tools.”56 A number of auction advertisements mentioned the sale of people alongside the sale of hogs, cows, and mules—many listing an entire plantation for sale, one replete with “Three Slaves, about Thirty Hogs, and a Stock of Cattle” to go with several hundred acres of land.57 Most auction advertisements diminished any sense of individuality for enslaved men and women, instead remaking once-free Africans into a large, collective Black mass of washed and oiled bodies available for purchase. And while these descriptions did not recognize the humanity of individual men, women, and children, advertisements did more than promise buyers that the cargo was healthy and capable, paradoxically flattering unfree people as skilled workers.
The images on these materials were distinct as well. A full column of one southern newspaper moved through the various images of Black bodies in the context of slavery, denoting each position with a different image (figure 1.4). The three separate ads for auction emphasized the “CARGO” of “NEGROES” for sale, “choice and healthy,” as indicated by the chiseled muscles. These images positioned the human cargo as ready to work; Blacks are shown wearing loincloths, facing the viewer of the paper, open chested, holding work implements, and waiting for direction. These images contrast sharply with the two figures assigned to the runaway notices. Although the “cargo” is described as docking from Sierra Leone, Barbados, and the Gold Coast, it is the runaways who are imprinted as “foreign,” depicted in nativist garb, holding tools that now signal weaponry, and with one foot off the ground to indicate their movement.58 Arguably, enslaved people of the colonial period were often from identifiable locations outside the United States. However, the contrast in these images depicts the conscious use of indicators of “Africanness” and foreignness to distinguish between people who are committed to working as unfree and people who have broken this agreement by running away. Blackness read as Africanness becomes more relevant, and visible, for Black people who act outside the dictates of slavery’s visual and social contracts.
Pickup notices similarly described the physical attributes of captured Blacks to readers. Jailers used public notices to capture fugitives and to notify owners of the whereabouts of their escaped property. Again, these items connected the idea of the residual “Africanness” of some runaways to the act of fleeing, showing Africanness as a characteristic that accelerated fugitivity and made a captive status harder to maintain. One warden issued a lengthy list of detainees, including two Black women, Clarinds and Lyda, with “country marks” all over their bodies. The warden also reported that these women could report their own names, even though they “cannot” recall the names of their masters.59 The warden does not indicate that Clarinds and Lyda might have purposefully withheld the name of their master. Instead, he focuses readers’ attention toward their bodies and their “country marks.”60 This ad, like others, maneuvered within White certainty about Blackness as self-effacing and failed to consider Black people as calculating. Runaways destabilized certainty about how much Blacks ever genuinely submitted to slavery’s ocularity and called into question every facet of social interaction that occurred before the crime of theft, including the apparent submission to surveillance and the ideology of an undeniably visible Black body.
Figure 1.4. “TO BE SOLD,” South Carolina Gazette, June 30, 1772.
Black Visuality and Performance
Runaways exhibited freedom, which theft helped to obscure. Whereas “performing Blackness” in the context of slavery meant the “‘naturalization’ of blackness” as constituted in “pained contentment,” the expression of Black freedom in the form of fugitivity served as interruption.61 Hartman expertly lays out the way in which the compulsory performances of Blackness under enslavement were about slavery’s use of force and emphasis on the flesh to index a “truth” about Blackness. She goes on to explain that “stealing away” revealed the very sense of agency of which Black bodies were thought to be devoid, such that the runaway “transgressed the law of property” and conceptions of racial essence.62 The act of running away destabilized slavery’s philosophy of an innate and unconscious Black body by revealing the unfree person as calculating and capable of other kinds of presentations. “Performing Blackness” in refutation of slavery was different from the performative experience of subjection and spectacle because it accentuated the limits of domination.
I point this out in order to address the specific array of visual transgressions that distinguished behaving free from behaving unfree, and how those attributes were beyond the pale of the law. Runaways utilized an “intimate understanding of the dominant society’s perception of freedom,” sometimes acquired through watching the free people for whom they worked, to steal themselves and portray themselves as free.63 By using dress, language, and knowledge of White perceptions
