Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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her escape from slavery by allowing her to travel as a white man: it allows her to function as a mobile subject. The complex relation of literacy and mobility, and its necessary connection to disability, is apparent in the contrasting circumstance of Harriet Jacobs in her well-known 1861 narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Even while confined to a tiny crawlspace, Jacobs was able to employ her literacy to manipulate her former owner and obtain her children’s freedom by writing false notes to be mailed from various locations. Both women brilliantly played upon assumptions about their abilities to achieve freedom; Jacobs, however, suffered long-term physical effects from her long confinement, while Ellen Craft was able to learn to read and write and thus shed the disability of illiteracy. So disability in each case was neither fixed nor immutable but existed as a shifting, contingent identity. And in each case, disability surfaced in relation to race through the issues of literacy and mobility.
Multiple Identities, Multiple Representations
We can see this dynamic, as well as the continued entanglement of gender, race, and disability, in the numerous “retellings” and adaptations of the Crafts’ escape. Not only did the Crafts tell their story on the abolitionist stage countless times during the nearly twelve years before publication of their narrative, but a number of authors retold or adapted their tale in the cause of abolition, and, later, racial pride and historical memory. Probably the first of these “retellings” was Williams Wells Brown’s letter to the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator on January 12, 1849, about two weeks after the Crafts arrived in Boston (Craft and Craft 76). Brown describes the disguise in an order reflecting his own probable assumptions about the importance of social identities: first, he tells us that “Ellen is so nearly white, that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman.” Then he informs us that “Ellen dressed in men’s clothing,” and finally, about halfway through his letter, Brown mentions that Ellen “tied her right hand up as though it was lame.” Even this brief allusion to disability appears to require immediate recuperation, as Brown immediately adds, “which proved to be of service to her, as she was called upon several times at hotels to ‘register’ her name,” thus foregrounding the substitution of one ability for another—the ability to pass for the ability to read and write. Brown’s account reflects simultaneously a heightened consciousness of race and gender passing and a submerged anxiety regarding disability passing, especially by an enslaved African American.
When Brown later adapted the Crafts’ story for his 1853 novel Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter, he similarly downplayed the element of disability and, to a certain extent, gender in the disguise. His character, Clotel, has lived a privileged existence as a white man’s mistress before being enslaved, so she is presumably literate and thus need not bind up her arm. Probably to accord with his characterization of Clotel as a highly refined, sentimental, and modest Victorian heroine, Brown also downplays her choice of man’s clothing for the disguise, portraying this element as largely a product of Clotel’s cruel and jealous mistress having forced her to cut her hair short. Interestingly, though, Brown’s Clotel also expresses a sentiment entirely absent in the Crafts’ own account, as the character of William (in this version only an acquaintance) tells her, “You look a good deal like a man with your short hair.” Clotel responds, “I have often been told that I would make a better looking man than a woman. If I had the money I would bid farewell to this place” (141). The first half of this response expresses a rather radical notion of gender crossing for our Victorian heroine, while the second half strangely equates male appearance with the ability to escape, as if Brown had never heard of the countless women who escaped from slavery.14 This is a rare moment when Brown’s sentimental, abolitionist authorial mask slips to offer tantalizing glimpses of a more individual view that both expands and forecloses the possibilities of gender. It is not surprising that, immediately following this comment, Brown tells us that Clotel “feared that she had said too much” (141).
Clotel also uses the same alias as Ellen Craft, “Mr. Johnson,” and Brown actually reproduces a newspaper correspondent’s eyewitness account of Ellen’s disguise as if it referred to his fictional heroine (Clotel 145–146).15 And like Ellen, Clotel travels as an invalid, wearing green glasses, tying a white silk handkerchief around her head, and pretending “to be very ill” (143). Yet without the bandaged hand necessitated by illiteracy, Brown’s heroine does not need to perform disability in the repeated and proliferative manner of Ellen Craft; she does not pretend to faint, feign deafness, limp, or stagger around dramatically as in the Crafts’ narrative. Brown’s downplaying of disability here is probably motivated by his dislike for portraying his slave heroes as weak or damaged, an interpretation that is strengthened by the revisions he made when he republished his novel in 1864. In this version Brown greatly shortened his account of the escape and removed disability completely from the disguise, omitting the bandages and including the green glasses as part of his heroine’s “gentlemanly appearance” rather than as a sign of invalidism (Clotelle 47).16 (Although the heroine keeps to her stateroom “under a plea of illness,” the idea that she is actually playing the role of an invalid is never mentioned in this version.) These changes suggest a retreat from the disability aspects of the Crafts’ story prompted by the postbellum need to present the newly emancipated African American subject as healthy, independent, and worthy of freedom, in opposition to proslavery claims that freedom was unhealthy and even disabling for African Americans, producing, in one southern physician’s words, “a beautiful harvest of mental and physical degradation” (Baynton 39). Without the necessary factor of illiteracy, other devices of disability such as the bandaged hand, limp, and feigned deafness are easily sloughed off from Brown’s conception of the necessary and acceptable components of a slave’s triumphant escape. (I would argue that, then as now, signs of disability are viewed as acceptable only when necessary.)
This dynamic is taken even further in another adaptation of the Crafts’ story in the 1858 play The Stars and Stripes: A Melo-drama by the white abolitionist and feminist Lydia Maria Child. Like Brown, Child chooses to make the Crafts literate, and thus erases the element of disability from their disguise. In fact Child aggressively foregrounds her characters’ literacy, portraying William reading aloud about freedom from the newspaper and Ellen writing a pass for another slave to use for his escape (141, 147). This characterization is of a piece with Child’s choice to make both of the Crafts light-skinned, clearly seeking to portray them to a white audience as “refined” in every aspect. As a northern abolitionist character says to Ellen, “No one would believe that you were not a white woman,” and William is described in the stage directions as a “genteel-looking light mulatto” (165, 123).
There is no mention of disability or illness in Child’s portrayal of the Crafts’ escape, but illness enters her play in another fashion, when her comic white proslavery characters speak of “drapetomania” as the reason that William and Ellen ran away:
Masters: The fact is, sir, the niggers are a very singular race. They have several diseases, peculiar to themselves. The one which prevails most generally, is called by our doctors, drapetomania; and the only way I can account for this strange affair, is by supposing that Bill and Nellie had an attack of that disease.
North: Pray what sort of disease may that be, sir?
Masters: It means a mania for running away. . . . The learned Dr. Cartwright, of Louisiana University, has written a celebrated book about nigger diseases. He advises that the whip should be freely applied for the first symptoms of drapetomania. He calls it “whipping the devil out of ’em.” But the fact is, I never perceived any symptoms of it in Bill. He always seemed healthy. It is a very singular disease, that drapetomania! There’s no telling who may be seized by it. Some of the planters think it is becoming epidemic. (173–174)17
Child reverses the actual circumstances of the Crafts’ escape: rather than portraying healthy slaves pretending to be ill, she portrays healthy slaves being labeled as ill by their white oppressors. Since we are clearly meant to mock and disbelieve the white proslavery characters, their very insistence on William and Ellen as “diseased” (the word disease appears seven times during the full exchange) is meant to convey the fugitives’ supreme healthiness—and by extension, the healthy and natural character of