Fantasies of Identification. Ellen Samuels
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instead invents various disguises and other tricks to liven up the escape. Most notably she creates a third character, Jim, who escapes from slavery at the same time as the Crafts. Jim is everything that Child’s William and Ellen are not: they are light-skinned, and he is dark; they speak in standard, genteel English, and he speaks in comic dialect; they deliver earnest, sentimental speeches, and he sings humorous ditties and capers in stereotypical “darky” fashion. Child is clearly catering to her northern audience’s expectations. It is as if she is trapped by competing stereotypes: heroes must be sympathetic, so they must be light-skinned, but a play about “Negroes” must include “darky humor,” so Jim enters to mimic the Crafts like a doppelganger formed from the dark pigment that has been literarily excised from William’s skin. Such “mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate . . . a difference or recalcitrance which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers” (Bhabha 86).
This intensive surveillance is apparent in a scene in which Jim appears to “shadow” the Crafts during their escape, at a point when William and Ellen are hiding in the woods and singing a sentimental verse:
[While they are singing, a black face peeps out from between the boards, and watches them curiously for a minute, and is then lighted up with a broad smile. The head is withdrawn behind the boards, and presently, when all is still, a voice is heard singing:]
“Jim crack corn—don’t care!
Ole massa’s gone away!”
[William and Ellen start, and look behind them.]
William: I could almost swear that was Jim’s voice.
Ellen: You know all the slaves sing that. It can’t be that Jim is here. (158–159)
Jim appears here as the dark other that haunts the Crafts, the anonymous “black face” that substitutes for personhood in nineteenth-century white conceptions of African Americans. He is further associated with an anonymous dark-skinned mass in Ellen’s claim that “all the slaves sing” the song Jim is using to signal them, and William and Ellen’s singularity is emphasized by the fact that they are not singing that traditional song. In the absence of disability, Jim seems to represent racial bodily difference in an exaggerated extreme, so that the Crafts may remain heroically “white.”
However, the racial erasure and rematerialization produced in the play appears to collapse back upon itself when the three fugitives must escape into Canada, pursued, like the real Crafts, by their former owners under the Fugitive Slave Act. In Child’s version, William and Ellen must be “stained black” to escape recognition. Meanwhile Jim must vanish altogether, since he “can’t be stained any blacker” (176). The fugitives join a group of mourners, and Jim is actually carried inside a coffin—a trick possibly inspired by the notorious 1849 escape of Henry Box Brown who shipped himself to freedom in a wooden crate. Jim also hides under an icehouse while Ellen and William picnic with abolitionists above, her identity hidden by a veil and his by a “brown wig” (163–165). Again Child invents disguises and subterfuges to replace those actually used by the Crafts and in doing so splits them in two and buries the darker half in a cellar, a move strangely reminiscent of Charlotte Brontë’s madwoman in the attic, and liable to similar interpretations as those of feminists who see the lunatic, mixed-race Bertha as personifying the exiled rage and sexuality of the pallid Victorian heroine Jane Eyre.18 Yet, by the play’s closing scenes, William and Ellen are not only stained black but “locked up in a tomb” along with Jim, to escape with him into Canada the next day. Without disability to function as bodily supplement, the play finally constructs race as an inescapable and confining fact, the “drop of black blood” in William and Ellen’s veins binding them inexorably to racial otherness.
We may contrast this portrayal with that of Georgia Douglas Johnson’s William and Ellen Craft: A Play in One Act, published in 1935. Johnson portrays the Crafts speaking in dialect, reflecting a newfound valuation of African American cultural specificity and language traditions (McCaskill in Craft and Craft 106). And while it seems at first that Johnson’s retelling will also omit disability from the disguise, since William initially describes the plan as involving only gender crossing, this does not prove to be the case:
Ellen (going up to William trembling): You sho you kin get us through, William?
William: Sho honey; ain’t I been on the train time and time again wid young Marse, an’ can’t I read and write?
Ellen: But how kin I be like young Marse? I’m all a shakin’ now.
William (soothing her): All you got to do is walk. You don’t have to talk, you don’t have to do a thing but just walk along bigity like a white man. See here. (Shows her how to walk.) Try it.
Ellen (tries to walk like him): Dis way?
William: You doin fine! You see now you is supposed to be sick, you got a toothache, you goin’ to a doctor in Philadelphia, you is nearly deaf, an’ yo’ nigger slave is taking you—understand? (Johnson 173–174)
Johnson depicts William as hyper-able: able to conceive of the plan, able to read and write, able to show Ellen how to walk like a white man and to bolster her failing spirits. The sudden proliferation of impairments in the end of this conversation appears seemingly from nowhere—neither Ellen’s illiteracy nor its arm-sling solution are even mentioned—but is symbolically produced as the feminized abject other to William’s hyper-able masculinity. Disability and stereotyped femininity are both stabilized here to supplement the racial pride and empowerment that appear as Johnson’s primary theme and motivation for her play.
Like Johnson’s, most narratives of the Crafts’ escape portray William as the primary devisor and motivator of the disguise and Ellen as requiring persuasion and assistance. This is certainly true of the Crafts’ own narrative, in which William tells us, “After I thought of the plan, I suggested it to my wife, but at first she shrank from the idea” (Craft and Craft 21). In contrast, Josephine Brown’s account of the escape in her 1856 biography of her father, William Wells Brown, emphatically reverses these roles:
“Now, William,” said the wife, “listen to me, and take my advice, and we shall be free in less than a month.”
“Let me hear your plans, then,” said William.
“Take part of your money and purchase me a good suit of gentleman’s apparel. . . . I am white enough to go as a master, and you can pass as my servant.”
“But you are not tall enough for a man,” said the husband.
“Get me a pair of very high-heeled boots, and they will bring me up more than an inch, and get me a very high hat, then I’ll do,” rejoined the wife.
“But then, my dear you would make a very boyish looking man, with no whiskers or mustache,” remarked William.
“I could bind up my face in a handkerchief,” said Ellen, “as if I was suffering dreadfully from the toothache, and no one would discover the want of beard.”
“What if you were called upon to write your name in the books at hotels, as I saw my master do when traveling, or were asked to receipt for any thing?”
“I would also bind up my right hand and put it in a sling. . . . ”
“I fear you cannot carry out the deception for so long a time, for it must be several hundred miles to the free States,” said William, as he seemed to despair of escaping from slavery by following his wife’s plan.
“Come, William,” entreated his wife, “don’t be a coward!” (76–77)
I have reproduced this account at length since it provides such a dramatically contrasting view, not only to the Crafts’ narrative—which, after all, was published four years later than this account and thus can achieve only a tenuous status as the “original”—but to William Wells Brown’s own account discussed earlier.19 While