I.2, which depicts a Black man, overdressed in top hat and waistcoat, making a house call to “Miss Dinah,” used speech, gesture, and physical space to turn Black freedom into a humorous notion. Although the unseen Dinah imagines herself as too important to answer the door, Dinah’s servant reveals that her mistress is “bery petickly engaged in washing de dishes.” In lieu of a visit, the gentleman caller leaves a card at the door for the woman of this basement “parlor.” While polite rules of conduct required a lady of the house to receive all her guests unless she was ill, Miss Dinah denied her visitor because she remained engaged in the lowly domestic work of dishwashing. The joke of the image is that arrogant free Black people like Dinah, her servant, and her visitor remained in feeble social and domestic positions. Clay used the pitiable cellar to symbolize the truth about self-important people of African descent; even in freedom, Black people remained too connected to slavery and low socioeconomic standing to move out of the basement and into the above-ground space of the house, or the parlor of the home. Clay created many images like this scene, often overwhelming the page with commentary on the rules of proper decorum and inverted social conventions to portray Black freedom as ridiculous or implausible. Responding to a small, but growing number of free Black people gaining economic stability and building independent communities in the urban North, Clay used pictures to rethink the consequences of freedom.
This book explains how seemingly divergent cultural productions were engaged in the same project of domesticating Black freedom during the slaving era—rendering free African descendants as part of the U.S. landscape and translating their belonging for dominant culture. It takes up modes of picturing Black freedom before the Civil War and before the daguerreotype to trace its emergence in the transatlantic imaginary.8 By “picturing,” I refer to a whole set of embodied processes involved in the act of creating a picture, as well as to a means of theorization.9 I argue that the visual practices of both free Whites and free Blacks attempted to represent Black freedom as belonging within the purview of the home space—variously defined as the house, the nation, and the Atlantic world—called together by trade among slaving empires, and diverse schemas employed within to dissolve slavery.10 I show how picturing freedom before the advent of photographic technologies reorganized Black visuality, repositioning Black people within the conceptual space of the Atlantic world, summarily making inroads into the eventual abolition of slavery. Visual culture represents a site wherein free Black people organized new ways of existing within the domiciles of slaving nations. It was also a vehicle for Whites to experiment with notions of Black freedom. Picturing freedom enabled different, but interrelated, modes of situating Black people within the empire as a home space. Such a cultural practice was necessary for disentangling Blackness from slavery within the shared space of the nation. Competing conceptualizations of Black freedom were essential to how Black and White viewers reimagined national belonging and racial identity between lithograph and daguerreotype, between the years of gradual emancipation laws emerging in 1780 and the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
Figure I.2. Edward Williams Clay, “Is Miss Dinah at Home?,” 1828, “Life in Philadelphia” series. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Women and Black Visuality
Black women, and Black feminist visual practices, are central to Picture Freedom for what each reveals about the relationship between visuality and domestic belonging near the end of the transatlantic slave trade. Black women were essential to the maintenance of slave societies in the Atlantic world because they replenished a stolen labor force through giving birth. Laws about the matrilineal nature of slavery determined the slave status of children based upon the status of their mothers.11 In slavery, Black female bodies served as sites for sexual violence as well as labor production, beginning as early as the initial disembarkation of the transatlantic voyage. Many African women suffered rape onboard slave ships before arriving in the “Americas,” where their lives were “characterized, above all, by incessant work.”12 Accordingly, early visual portrayals of Black women’s bodies represent them as unique emblems of exploitation. Image captures of slavery, such as Louis Agassiz’s infamous nude daguerreotypes, reflect how evidence of nursing and whipping written on Black women’s bodies were fascinating to White spectators.13 Yet, in these images of unfree people, Black women who “calmly reveal their breasts” also offer “detached, unemotional, and workmanlike” attitudes toward the camera.14 Mythologies of Black women’s bodies were essential to slavery, but when constructed for the purposes of representation, unfree Black women managed to organize means of distancing an inner self from the material body that appeared before the lens. The “emancipatory” parsing of the body from the flesh that “enabled the slaves and their descendants” to organize a “countermemory” to dominant organizations of the body, making slavery part, but not the sum, of Black women’s experiences, describes this important distinction.15 Conceptualizations of Black female bodies were entirely relevant to discourses of visibility, even as the histories of Black women’s flesh are dissimilar across designations of free and unfree.
Free Black women provide the most robust examples of the cultural work required to imagine freedom during slavery. Despite their relative privilege, freedom for African descendants, in the context of slavery, was a “fragile” determination, according to Erica Armstrong Dunbar, even for elite or upper-class Blacks.16 Free Black people, and especially women, also suffered from the peculiar racial decorum that proliferated during slavery, even as the law did not consign them to masters on paper. While Black men contended with the fact that freedom required “the non-traditional political activities and education of their wives, sisters, and daughters,” free and elite Black women remained entangled in discourses of Black visibility and demands for their public activism to buttress a larger Black community.17 For these reasons, my determination of Black freedom is not limited to political and civic frameworks of citizenship, although ensuing ideals of self-possession and property are relevant to this study. I am interested in what it meant to make freedom visually manifest in the context of slavery. How did people of African descent make freedom visually evident? Accordingly, my discussion focuses on Black women, and Black people, whom I variously, even if controversially, consider free for the purpose of illustration. I read the image of freedom through items pertaining to fugitives and manumitted persons as well as Black people who were “born” free to mothers who were not enslaved. Black freedom as a problem of imagination was not limited to the juridical notions of “free,” as realized in numerous accounts of Black people who behaved as free, despite having “owners.” Orlando Patterson offers the idea of a “tripartite” freedom—personal, sovereign, and civic—to discuss a continuum of individual and social autonomy.18 Picture Freedom considers Black freedom in popular imaginaries, which in many instances superseded or ignored the lawful determinations of liberty, but reveal freedom as something demonstrable and as a posture toward visual discourses. Not to be discounted in the context of slavery, the cultural underpinnings of Black freedom were indeed political, even if they were different from juridical conceptions of autonomy. The unlikely examples I discuss demonstrate that “freedom is active and creative.”19 The trajectory of this argument does not conflate enslavement with freedom or assign complicity to the unfree; instead, by including diverse examples of “free,” my aim is to consider the array of concepts relevant to imagining Black freedom in its earliest relevance to the Atlantic.
Picture Freedom considers efforts to imagine both Black men and Black women as free in the context of slavery, but as a study in Black feminist visual theory, the analysis simultaneously considers “the black female body and the gaze” rather than treating each as a distinct entity.20 I emphasize the ways in which Black women’s bodies were particularly important to imagining freedom and to accepting free people of African descent into the folds of empires. In Picture Freedom, free Black women’s bodies are not simply passive victims of dominant scopic regimes but are also disruptive vessels that Black women manipulated to evidence a female gaze. My approach to early-nineteenth-century visual culture employs feminist theories of spectatorship and explores Black women’s early contributions to shaping Black visuality. Picture Freedom considers Black women as visual theorists
