by Tiya Miles
Like other fashion accoutrements of middle- and upper-class American society in the nineteenth century, elaborate hairwork was intended for white wearers. A Charleston art reviewer, when describing the Victorian-era craft in retrospect in the 1940s, pointed out how “the hair of the living…was used in romance and fashion” and “advertised to be more desirable than jewels and more becoming, in contrast to a delicate white skin.”66 White women of means, already trained in embroidery as one of the cultured “feminine” arts, were the most common creators of hairwork, and they crafted their pieces as private keepsakes and for interpersonal exchanges, rather than for the marketplace. Wealthier individuals could hire members of a new class of artisans, also mostly women, able to craft locks of a customer’s loved one’s hair into elaborate “fancywork” pieces. While African Americans did become hairwork artists and merchants in the 1800s and participated in Victorian cultural practices, one historian suggests they may have viewed detached pieces of hair differently than did white Victorians in the period—as evidence that a child lost to the slave trade was still alive. In this case, hair functioned as a signifier of hope rather than as a memento of death.67
Hairwork album of Etta Smith, 1858–1924. “This meticulously kept hairwork album, created by Etta Smith of Gaysport, Pennsylvania, from 1858 to 1924, exemplifies the intimate and sentimental nature of Victorian hair collection and display. Arranged in braids and wreaths, each labeled with the name of the person from whom it was snipped (sometimes posthumously), each of the 90 tresses serves as a quiet testimonial to friendship and family.” From 75 Stories, 75 Years: Documenting the Lives of American Women at the Schlesinger Library, exhibition, 2018. Photograph by Kevin Grady/Harvard Radcliffe Institute. Courtesy of the Schlesinger Library, Harvard Radcliffe Institute.
Hair, then, was proof for Victorians that separation is not necessarily final. Division would, in fact, be impossible, because each of us is deeply connected to the other, and hair, again, is the evidence. “Hair is the thread that binds us to our ancestors across time,” says the award-winning fiber artist Sonya Clark, referring to our contemporary experience with the material. Clark uses human hair in the re-fabrication of common objects (such as violin strings) and re-creates the elaborate stylings of contemporary African American braidwork in silk on canvas.68 In addition to viewing hairdressing as “the primordial fiber art,” Clark sees hair as a special material laden with cross-cultural and trans-historical meaning. “Hair is power,” she says. “Note the Samson myth, Rastafarian dreadlocks, and Angela Davis’s Afro in the 1960s. Hair grows approximately 5 inches a year and measures our lives like Lachesis of the Three Fates in Greek mythology. A carrier of DNA, hair is the essence of identity. Deep within each strand, the vestiges of our roots and histories resound.” Working within an African diasporic tradition of visual art, Clark sees hair as a way of “know[ing] our ancestors,” in keeping with a Yoruba belief that self-knowledge flows from ancestral connection. As a genetic carrier tracing back through discrete family lines all the way to the origins of humanity, hair is, in this way of thinking, a tie between present (and future) life and the near and far past.69 A braid of Rose’s hair, then, may have been a token of deep familial lineage, a reminder that Ashley belonged not only to a long line of African ancestors but also to the greater human family. Hair, in this way of reckoning, parallels the work of history by binding individuals to one another across vast time periods and story lines.
Eliza Potter, a Black hairdresser in the 1850s, when Ashley was still enslaved in South Carolina, understood the race, gender, and class dynamics that made care of the hair so important to women. Born free in New York, Potter labored as a domestic servant, then briefly married. She traveled to Canada, Ohio, New York, England, France, and across the southern states while working as a hairstylist. She helped an enslaved man escape from prison in Kentucky because she believed in a higher standard than U.S. slave law, one she called “the bar of God.” Early in her career, Eliza traveled with a family, as their employee, to Paris, where she learned to speak French, visited the Palace of Versailles, and began working for a countess. There she learned the “fine arts” of flower-making, dressmaking, and hairdressing. Of these crafts, Eliza proclaimed, “Nothing but hair-dressing pleased my fancy for any length of time.” She returned to the States with a “talent in hair-dressing” in the French style that attracted wealthy white clients.70 In the early 1850s, she took up residence in Cincinnati and traveled to Kentucky, Louisiana, and Mississippi to craft hairstyles for southern belles. Potter’s services to the white elite and aspiring middle classes were in demand in mid-century as she styled hair for soirees and weddings while keeping a minute record of the rich and famous. Her tell-all account published in 1859 included frank revelations about slaveholding society while detailing her labor as both a hairstylist and a chronicler of events.
Back in Cincinnati, Eliza Potter lived comfortably on the border of a respectable white neighborhood downtown, where she opened her home to formerly enslaved women and trained apprentice hairdressers.71 She saw herself as a tradesperson and craftswoman “dependent on the public for a livelihood.”72 In the long tradition of Black women who serviced the personal needs of whites, Eliza Potter closely watched and listened to her clients. Her memoir, described as a “graphic narrative” and a “bestseller” by reviewers in 1859, reveals her to be an astute observer with a journalistic eye and ear.73 Eliza claimed of her own talent for peering beyond the pretense of performance: “I have seen so much of human nature in my humble position that I can, by looking at a man or woman, tell what they are.” With her penetrating gaze, Potter took note of American ladies desiring to marry titled European men who returned their interest only to recoup lost fortunes, wealthy husbands who doted on their wives in public and abused them behind closed doors, and the trickery of a vacationing coastal lady who pretended to help an enslaved girl obtain her freedom, then sold her.74
Eliza Potter inserted herself into the historical record. Her ability to notice and notate events stemmed from her sharp mind and the access she gained to the intimate spaces of people’s lives. As she declares in her “Author’s Appeal” at the start of her book:
The physician writes his diary, and doubtless his means of discovering the hidden mysteries of life are great. The clergyman, whose calling inspires the deepest of confidence…sends forth his diary to an eager world, and other innumerable chroniclers of fireside life have existed; but the hairdresser will yield rivalship to none in this regard….She will tell her story in simpler language; but it will be none the less truthful, none the less strange.
While Potter declares her narrative style simple, she also claims the value of her intellectual work, refusing to “yield rivalship,” by which she means relinquishing her writerly authority to those who have more education or higher class standing. Later in the book, she refers to herself as a “historian” outright.75 We might say that in Eliza Potter’s memoir, hairdressing and historical writing are activities requiring equivalent skill in the interpretation of social life. Indeed, hair seems to hold an associational kinship with history, as both enwrap deep human lineages. Hair is a tether between persons, as the Victorians felt, and also a genetic tie to the past, as we now know. The symbolism of both meanings converge in Rose’s decision to pack her hair. In bestowing a braid upon Ashley, Rose passed on a piece of herself while transmitting a cosmic continuity that slavery could not sunder. Her gift might remind Ashley that she belonged—to a Black family that persevered through racial animus and a human family that had once not known it.
With her package of clothing, nuts, and hair carefully wrapped and stowed away, Rose may have turned her thoughts to delivery. Did she seek help in identifying Ashley’s whereabouts, the way Vilet did when in search of her precious girl in Georgia? Did Rose attempt to send the bundle out to Milberry Place Plantation by way of another person the Martins owned? Enslaved women wh
o sought freedom for themselves or their children consistently looked to allies for aid. We know this from the testimony of slave narratives, where ordinary Black men and women and white women and men answer calls for help, and through the documented experiences of formerly enslaved women in Charleston who depended on alliances in order to gain freedom.76
Chart F-2, Caroline Bond Day Genealogical Chart. African American anthropologist Caroline Bond Day interviewed mixed-race Black families and created detailed charts featuring photographs and hair cuttings for her master’s thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families, 1932. Day’s thesis underscores both the individuality of hair and the ways hair connects family lines. She wrote, “It is doubtful two people are ever seen with hair that is exactly alike,” even as she traced “the inheritance of hair form.” Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University, PM 993-21-10/100160.1.132.
The notion of a mother tracking her child with assistance in order to bestow a gift is not unheard of in the annals of slavery. In a moving story, an enslaved woman named Winnie Martin had received several beads from her mother. Winnie was sold away with her daughter for having a sexual relationship with a white man and forced to separate from her young son, John Sella Martin. In a determined search for her son, Winnie managed to enlist “a coloured man from the country, who had brought in a load of cotton.” When the man found the boy, holed up in a gambling hotel with his new owner in Georgia, he handed the child “a rag of cotton cloth, tied all about with a string.” Later, as an adult, John remembered this earth-shattering moment from his boyhood: “I opened it, and found some blue glass beads—beads given to my mother by her mother as a keepsake when she died. I knew by that token that he was a messenger from my mother….I had often heard her say that nothing would make her part from these beads.”77 Winnie had found an ingenious and courageous way to comfort her child through material items that would always remind him of her love and his familial lineage.
Rose may have sought allies, too, in delivering her emergency pack. Did she suspect that Ashley had been transported into the city center, where Charleston traders did a hefty turn in the scarred flesh and blood goods of the slave trade? Did she search the side streets of Charleston, risking arrest by the armed city guard? Or was Ashley much closer to Rose on the eve of her sale than she had been in months or years prior? The inscription sewn into the sack indicates that Rose bestowed the bag in person. Perhaps Ashley had been collected from the rural estate and deposited at the Charlotte Street house for a brief time prior to her relocation. If Milberry Martin had Ashley moved to the brick villa, Rose may have found an opportunity to seize a private word with her there. Rose would have acted during the night,*1 a time of sanctuary to the enslaved when textiles were fashioned, rude quarters were made habitable, extra vittles were stewed in the pots, and escape plots were planned and executed.78 Perhaps, in the darkness during the spring or summer of 1853,*2 Rose pulled her own precious girl into the corner of the yard, cradled the child against her, and smoothed down her dusty, plaited hair.79 What we know of this moment, though, we must take from the only record, Ruth Middleton’s chronicle from family memory. According to Ruth, Rose spoke to her child in those parting minutes when she handed over the dingy cotton bundle. Rose may have believed these to be her last words on the eve of a parting that could have the same effect as a death.80 If so, we might dwell on the notion that the sack was a kind of living will, an expression of what Rose intended for her daughter to do in the case of relentless limbo: carry on with the armor of love.
How did little Ashley feel upon receipt of this weighty inheritance? Perhaps she reacted like the young John Martin did when the man dispatched by his mother gave him the “rag of cotton cloth” filled with beads. “I trembled all over,” John recounted in his memoir, so shaken was he to have been lost to his family, then suddenly found. If Ashley trembled, if she sobbed into Rose’s encircling arms, she might also have grasped the lifeline her mother extended that night. Rose had created a vision of life in and among the thickets of fear and packed that picture into the sack. The maternal bond exhibited by Rose was stronger for being hard-won.81 Enslaved mothers like Rose battled the hounds for their children, using whatever means they could. And, in so doing, they wrestled not only to rescue individual offspring but also to save Black family lines.82
* * *
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When did Rose know? We must presume that Rose always knew that she would birth a motherless child. For this was the root of slavery: theft of the maternal. Since the inauguration of the transatlantic slave trade in the late 1400s, through the acceleration of the American domestic slave trade in the early 1800s, and still today, Africans and people of African descent have borne a crisis of mother loss. The memoirist and cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman captured this profound historical state when she traveled to Ghana in search of her African roots. Her numbing insight arrived at on the journey became the organizing idea of a breathtaking travel narrative. “Lose your mother,” Hartman found in her book of the same title, was the forced imperative of the slave trade and a raw truth of African American experience.83 We are a people suffering from the loss of a motherland, a mother tongue, and a mother’s knowledge of our new names. It might even be said that the search for true belonging and the quest for relational repair lie deep at the heart of the modern Black psyche. In the face of devastating mother loss, our ancestors’ answer was mother love: a graspingly fierce, imperfect insistence on making and tending generations.84 An affirmation of Black life embedded in love and stashed in a sack is, after all, what Rose was packing for.
Skip Notes
*1 Often a source of fear because of what opaqueness hides, night has also been an aid to fugitives and a cloak for secret, resistant activities. Darkness carried with it a special kind of buffer that might at times have felt like a source of power to the enslaved. Defining oneself as “part of the night” could also have been experienced as a kind of “kinship” with nature by the captured and the hunted.
*2 The sale of an enslaved person could take place at any time, depending on the needs or whims of the owners. Still, the market had cycles, as did the growing of crops. The typical season for slave sales was September through May. Many sales took place in autumn, following a summer season during which traders collected the “goods.”
ROSE’S INVENTORY
Viz Wine @ 7, 700, Furniture in late residence Charlotte st. 4,820, China and Glassware 200[,] 2 Carriages & Harness 400, 1 pr Horses 150[,] 1 Cow 100[,] 1 slave Cicero 1,000[,] 1 slave Sophia 300, 1 slave James 100, 1 slave Jack 800, 1 [ditto sign] Rose 700[,] 1 [ditto sign] David 800, 1 [ditto sign] Old Woman 100, Silver plat[e] 2,500…1
—Robert Martin, property appraisement, 1853
It held a tattered dress[,] 3 handfulls of pecans[,] a braid of Roses hair.
—Ruth Middleton, sack embroidery, 1921
We have in Ashley’s sack a nearly unparalleled opportunity for insight into the lives of enslaved women. In the bag Rose packed and the description Ruth appended, we see an index of treasures. In contrast to the blatant devaluation of enslaved people as people evident in slave owners’ property lists, the slave woman’s inventory, a countercompilation, points us to the deep worth of Black female humanity as well as to the role of things in defending enslaved people’s dignity as humans and as women. We find, in the single line that composes Ruth’s itemization, a parry to the planter’s belittlement. This chapter will pause to dwell on the idea that one of Rose’s packed items—a dress—offers a case study of the kinds of things Black women prized.
The list of “things” Robert Martin left behind when he died unwinds across time like a measuring tape. We can deduce that Martin esteemed fine wine, fancy furnishings, and the ornate silver article that is the last thing on the list before it turns to a detailed accounting of mortgages and investment bonds. We can discern from this document that
the Martins traveled about in carriages roughly equal to the cost of two Black children, and that people held as property at 16 Charlotte Street did not stand out from objects in the eyes of the financial appraisers.2 Like many enslaved people who overheard what they were “worth” in the parlor of the big house or the marketplace of the auction house, Rose likely had a sense of her assigned value as judged by her owners.3 But what of Rose’s own list of things? What might it tell us about her scale of values?
We lack estate records for enslaved people.4 Nevertheless, we can gather from their firsthand accounts, personal letters, and post–Civil War testimony that possessions were just as valuable to the enslaved as they were to enslavers—and perhaps even more so. Though crushingly poor, enslaved people did attain property, mainly through working around the clock in moments the master did not claim. During that “off” time on evenings or Sundays or after their assigned tasks had been completed on the Lowcountry rice estates, enslaved people grew food or made objects that could be traded for other things or sold for cash. They also sometimes worked for hire, receiving a portion of the pay (as approved by their owners), and with this they could buy items. Once enslaved people acquired things, they struggled not to lose those things to theft or sudden relocation. As one prize-winning legal historian has noted, enslaved people often thought first about the safety of their families and next about the safekeeping of their things.5 One Virginia woman, when facing the impending sale of herself and a child after already losing one son, wrote sorrowfully to her husband in 1852: “Myself and other child is for sale also….My things is in several places…and if I should be sold I don’t know what will become of them.”6 As this rare letter indicates and slave narratives amply demonstrate: Black people held in bondage lamented not only the loss of kin but also the loss of cherished things that could be counted among life’s companions.
