Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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not ‘Mr. Johnson,’ but Ellen herself” (50). But if the purpose was to represent Ellen, why is she still dressed in her male costume? As Keetley observes, the picture does not show one “discernible race or gender,” instead portraying “a permanent state of racial and gender ambiguity” (14).
I contend that the purpose of the portrait is to represent the “most respectable-looking gentleman” so beloved of critics—that is, to represent the aspects of Ellen’s disguise that subvert nineteenth-century assumptions regarding the immutability of race and gender, while removing those aspects that even by implication show the African American body as unhealthy, dependent, and disabled. Thus McCaskill’s characterization of a couple of bandages as a “monstrosity” is clarified by her claim that “[with] her bandaged maladies a mere and known pretense, Ellen’s frontispiece portrait articulates the death of herself as a captive commodity and her resurrection as a wily, liberated subject” (“Yours” 516). Here McCaskill clearly applauds the removal of signs of disability and reads their removal metonymically as an indicator of freedom and autonomy.
The irony of obscuring or removing signs of disability from representations of Ellen is that disability, like race, has historically been viewed as a fixed bodily condition; it is not so easily removed as a bandage. Yet in the case of Ellen Craft, it appears at first that the performative, constructed nature of both disability and gender contrast with the seeming inherency of race. For Ellen must don bandages and spectacles to pass as disabled and must cut her hair and wear a suit to pass as a man, but apparently she need do nothing at all in order to pass as white. For she is white, if whiteness is defined purely by the color of her skin and texture of her hair.9 An 1849 article in the Wisconsin Free Democrat insisted, “Let it not be understood that she is a Negro. Ellen Crafts [sic], though a slave, is white” (Keetley 18n17). By 1852 the abolitionist Rev. Frances Bishop could emphasize another slave woman’s fairness, not with the common comparison to a British or southern white woman but simply by describing her as “quite as white as Ellen Craft,” a sign of Ellen’s resignification into a pure and reified whiteness (Armistead, LAS 44).10 Josephine Brown, daughter of the prominent abolitionist William Wells Brown, writes that “Ellen was as white as most persons of the clear Anglo-Saxon origin. Her features were prominent, hair straight, eyes of a light hazel color, and no one on first seeing the white slave would suppose that a drop of African blood coursed through her veins” (76).11
When Josephine Brown calls Ellen “the white slave,” she is clearly not suggesting that Ellen is a European kidnapped into slavery but rather is making the common abolitionist point that racial justifications of slavery were becoming increasingly more difficult to support, due to the “visible, progressive ‘whitening’ of the slave body throughout the century” (Wiegman 47). For the idea of race as inherent and fixed was exactly contradictory to the aims of the Crafts’ narrative and the abolitionist movement, both of which sought to display racial ambiguity precisely to “deauthorize racial categories” and thus counter a racially based system of slavery (Keetley 14; Bland, Voices 145). Instead representations of Ellen Craft function according to Marjorie Garber’s claim for the transvestite (285), demonstrating how social anxiety regarding the idea of inherent bodily identity is displaced from race onto gender and class and finally—and most fundamentally—onto disability.
Representations of Ellen’s whiteness in the abolitionist press were almost always accompanied by references to gender and class, as when William Wells Brown described an encounter between Ellen and Lady Byron in which the British noblewoman found that Ellen “was so white, and had so much the appearance of a well-bred and educated lady, that she could scarcely realize that she was in the presence of an American slave” (J. Brown 80–81). The invocation of Ellen as a genteel lady was echoed by Samuel May, general agent of the Anti-Slavery Society, when he wrote that Ellen appeared to be “a Southern-born white woman” and expressed extreme horror at the thought “of such a woman being held as a piece of property, subject to be traded off to the highest bidder” (Sterling 23–24). In this case, idealized (white) womanhood functions as supplement, a placeholder for social distinctions based on physical difference, so that racial difference may be shown to be an arbitrary legal construction. Weinauer makes this point forcefully in her critique of the Crafts’ narrative, arguing that William Craft as narrator “insists, finally, on the natural status of gendered categories, writing Ellen into her proper place within them. Unlike the meanings assigned to race and class memberships, meanings that Craft presents as discursive, interested constructions, ‘woman’ is assigned a meaning that is fixed, immutable, and presumably disinterested” (38).
The role played here by gender in supplementing race is undeniable. Yet I suggest that the meanings ascribed to disability are even more “fixed and immutable” and that disability functions as the invisible, submerged supplement to the bodily realities of both gender and race—even, or perhaps especially, when disability is represented through the disability con. This entanglement of meanings emerges from both nineteenth-century and contemporary efforts to negotiate the paradox of the racial body: the dilemma of arguing that race is a social, constructed identity even while confronted with the reality of racially marked bodies.12 In the case of Ellen Craft, race is at once shown to be arbitrary and constructed, since she is defined as black yet appears white, and physically inherent, since her body itself is all the disguise she needs to appear white. Here disability comes into play, as the social identity most strongly identified with physical difference and the body, to function as the necessary supplement that allows the bodily nature of race to be obscured. This shadow function of disability is to hold the fact of physicality, unmoored from social or representational meanings; its effect is to produce arguments that define race and disability as separate and virtually incompatible entities, when in fact they are deeply connected and mutually constitutive.
Consider the topic of literacy, a central theme of African American literature from its inception, and certainly a key factor in the Crafts’ narrative. Discussions of literacy and illiteracy are by definition discussions of ability and disability—the ability to read and write, or its lack. The disability of illiteracy profoundly impacted the lives of formerly enslaved authors like the Crafts and Frederick Douglass; the acquisition of literacy is a material and symbolic triumph that resounds from Douglass’s Narrative to Richard Wright’s Black Boy and beyond. Yet to discuss illiteracy as disability resonates with centuries of characterizations of African Americans as flawed or defective, incapable of acquiring the ability that has come to equal personhood in post-Enlightenment Western culture.13 Such characterizations came as much from white proponents of slave rights as from slave owners, as in the quotation from The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841 that Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. use as the epigraph to their landmark study The Slave’s Narrative:
“Things for the Abolitionist to Do”
1. Speak for the Slave, . . .
2. Write for the Slave, . . .
“They can’t take care of themselves.” (4)
In his extended discussion of literacy in the Crafts’ narrative, Barrett argues that literacy is a more powerful sign of whiteness than the white body itself, that “light or racially ambiguous skin is ultimately insufficient as an ‘ontological’ marker of whiteness” (324). Thus he complicates the claim that Ellen need “do” nothing to appear white, when whiteness is understood as a social identity predicated upon literacy. Here Barrett teeters on the edge of an analysis of the mutually constitutive nature of race and disability, noting that the bandaging of Ellen’s hand “is the indispensable correlate to Ellen’s racially ambiguous skin. In this context it is the ultimate sign of whiteness” (326–327). But to Barrett, the social meanings mobilized by Ellen’s bandaged hand are stable and fixed: it will be “read not as a sign of illiteracy but as a sign of illness that will earn her credibility and sympathy” (325). The deflection of possible intellectual disability onto physical disability is, for Barrett, inescapably tied to the fact of whiteness. He essentially equates the bandaged hand, a physical sign of the inability to write, with the visible fact of black skin, also at that time assumed to signify the inability to write. Such an equation at once hints at the importance of examining intersections of race and disability and excludes