fugitive free made productive use of slavery’s ill-conceived visual matrix by playing to the dictates of the peculiar institution and upending those assumptions at choice moments for escape. While it was illegal for an unfree person to liberate herself from slavery, and sometimes that theft invoked other companion thefts, running away involved a general disobedience about slavery’s visual instructions that haunted the act of escape, even when no other “crime” was committed.
Black people who purportedly feigned freedom also exemplified a regard for the visual aspects of free performance.64 White owners often used the phrase “Pretends to be free” in both northern and southern runaway advertisements, as such designations indicated a special kind of absconder. Runaways who “acted” free were doing more than transgressing the law of property; they were also conducting themselves as free through their interactions with Whites and how they maneuvered in public. These people could be especially devious because they stopped succumbing to slavery’s visual imperatives the moment they left the site of their enslavement. When “A Negroe Wench, named Phebe” ran off from Marcus Hook, in Chester County, Pennsylvania, she did not let the numerous scars on her face and body from her owner’s punishments stop her; she covered them with a handkerchief, took the name “Sarah,” and presumably joined “free Negroes” in Philadelphia or Germantown.65 The markings reported in the notice do not just help would-be captors find Phebe/Sarah, but they also suggest that the signs of slavery on her body do not interrupt her performance. A number of runaways duplicated this routine, even mingling with Whites in the process. When Cato, “alias Toby,” ran away from Middletown, New Jersey, he also ignored the slave markings signed on his body. Richard Stillwell, Cato/Toby’s former owner, warned the public that “he is a sly artful fellow, and deceives the credulous,” potentially mingling with Whites “pretending to tell fortunes, and pretends to be free.” With these tools in his repertoire, Cato stayed gone for at least a year.66 These stories reveal that the stolen clothes were not just for covering the body or masking a “slave status” in quick and fleeting interactions in public. Many fugitives enlisted props for a very elaborate performance of Blackness as free people, performances where they encountered Whites and continued the “act.”
Black runaways relied on elusiveness, and not just the absence of slavery, as an important element of liberty. “The fugitive exposes the groundlessness” of the “distinction between person and property,” even at the potential cost of “silence, invisibility, and placelessness.”67 The choice to be obscure is a central part of redacting concepts of performing Blackness organized through slavery. People who ran away often conducted themselves in a way that resisted being read, despite slavery’s repetitive treatment of the Black body as legible. Daphne Brooks calls the “spectacular opacity” of Black performance onstage a thing of resistance, sometimes erupting and sometimes proffered at will, meant to disrupt demands for transparency from Black performers.68 Offstage, the indiscernible nature of Black performance in the flight to freedom occurred among people who exercised this opacity at will, by both removing themselves from the surveillance of slavery, but also by managing the body and engaging the White gaze in ways that refused transparent readings. Whereas “enslavement” as well as “the resistance to enslavement” constituted the “performative essence of blackness” and “black performance,” the indefinable nature of fugitivity also becomes a constitutive element of Blackness in the field of vision.69 Black runaways materialize the fugitive aspects of performed Blackness, the habitation of opacity and obscurity that occurs across experiences of freedom in the slave era.
The experience of not belonging as part of the fugitive condition manifested even for those African descendants who were born free in the context of slavery. Fugitivity, both as a state of rootlessness and of illegality, haunted all free performances of Blackness. In his description of Blackness as “inextricably bound” to fugitivity, Fred Moten locates the “right to obscurity,” the right to “keep a secret” in the project of emancipation.70 Enlightenment’s overreliance on the eye as a means of objective knowledge formation and White demands for people of African descent to appear transparent in their motives circumscribed the lives of Black people who were born free and the reception of Black raciality. Consequently, slavery forcibly organized a distinction between the supposedly “real” Black-self as outwardly perceived and the internal ruminations on the entailments of Blackness; the racio-visual logics of slavery demanded distinctions between authenticity and sincerity.71 Slavery’s presumptions about Black raciality enforced a compulsory insincerity, an unavoidable choice between seeing oneself according to the dictates of the peculiar matrix or denying it altogether. Free performances of Blackness navigated these objectifying conceptualizations of Black visuality.
Fugitive free people denied slavery’s ocularity, ignoring the supposedly fixed nature of Black visibility, as well as the idea of White omniscience. Formerly enslaved Blacks re/acquired freedom by playing upon racio-visual logics, tailoring performances of Blackness to undermine a peculiar visual culture. In a context that fixated on the eye during interracial encounters, Black visuality took shape in the acts of submitting to and resisting the visual cultures of slavery. Fugitive free Black people who stole items, ruined property and killed animals before deserting their owners simultaneously seized and subverted the White gaze. These acts of destruction, when coupled with the act of stealing away, reveal fugitives who capitalized on the failures of surveillance and on the moments when Whites would realize their misfortune. Fugitivity contradicted notions of a blind Black (non)subject. When a free person performed Blackness, as a runaway, she asserted her visual capacity. Although slavery’s visual culture reimagined the fugitive as either docile or duplicitous, stealing one’s self and portraying oneself as free also emphasized the ability to see and manipulate racial visibilities. Enslaved Blacks who ran away played on assumptions about the undeniable fact of the Black body and, in the process, deployed gazes that resisted slavery’s ocularity.
The other fugitive element of the free performance of Blackness had to do with the fleeting nature of belonging. Fugitivity, as a state of being and a matter of fleeing justice, was also about the way in which the runaway had no clear place to go, no clear place of belonging in the context of slavery. “Fugitivity is not only escape” but is also “being separate from settling.”72 Some runaways ran north or adjacent, to blend in with communities of freeborn Black people. However, the idea of fugitivity as applicable to all free people of African descent points to the impending sense of homelessness for Black people in a slaving society. If the act of reading the Black body defined the way in which African descendants lived day-to-day in slavery, than the illegibility of fugitivity only complicated the runaway’s claims to a home. The fugitive’s displaced existence is not just about removal from a previous home or a given master’s domicile but also from the idea of “home” as a place to return to through the act of running away. “Fugitives,” by name, only have a place from which to flee, but no particular place to arrive. Again, this aspect of fugitivity marked the runaway as well as the juridical free person, as the task of emancipation involved creating a home. Read against the transatlantic parlor as a home space, fugitivity created a contest of belonging. The runaway implicitly queried the dichotomies between unfree and free, legible and illegible, native and foreign. Fugitivity meant trying to claim a cohesive Atlantic world as home when persons of African descent could not properly claim the nation and the nation did not properly claim fugitives. How could the inherent homelessness of Black freedom fit within the domestic space of the Atlantic world, especially marked against the parlor’s penchant for display?
Some runaways revealed a remarkably expansive sense of transatlantic belonging and awareness of the parlor’s decorum. Seizing an opportunity in 1771, James Somerset fled his master’s custody. Somerset started his life on the western cape of Africa (the specific location unknown), before slavers kidnapped and delivered Somerset to Virginia for sale into bondage. Charles Stewart purchased Somerset, who remained Stewart’s property from the age of eight and until Somerset freed himself at the age of thirty-three.73 In Boston, Somerset ran errands and delivered messages on Stewart’s behalf, laboring in relatively close contact to his master. Unfree Black people in the North were not only farmers. Many unfree men like Somerset worked in closer proximity to Whites than did some unfree Black women, who often worked outdoors until moving indoors
