Solomon Northrop [sic], of your State, who was sold into slavery, and kept there for twelve-long years, is now in Boston; he will hold a meeting here this week, and tell his sorrowful story.
Honorable Charles Sumner, the pride of Massachusetts, has arrived home, and brings with him “Little Ida May.” She is perfectly white, and on that account produces intense excitement. We see daily white fugitives, and the cupidity of a slaveholder would suffer him to keep anyone, even his mother, in slavery. When white men learn this, and that their own liberties are in danger, then they will see the reasonableness of an unconditional emancipation. S. Northrop and “Ida” visited both branches of the Legislature on Saturday.
The kidnappers are again among us. “A short, chunky Irishman” is the hunter. A warrant has been issued but the probabilities are, that the fugitive is now safe.
—W. C. Nell, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, March 16, 18556
Frederick Douglass’s Paper had positively reviewed Ida May, at length, earlier that year, observing that the novel had the power to electrify audiences. But when regarding Ida May’s avatar apparent, three months later, Nell explained that black abolitionists, like himself, were not all that impressed by “little Ida May.” Black communities in Boston could hardly be surprised by anything a slaveholder might do. The greedy slaveholder might even keep his children’s mother enslaved, his children, or as the article exaggerates—his own mother—in slavery. Would this new example of the “cupidity” of one group of white men persuade another group of white men to see the reasonableness of abolition?
This notice in Frederick Douglass’s Paper discussed two figures who appeared along with Mary: Solomon Northup and Anthony Burns. The day before, William Cooper Nell had written to his friend Amy Kirby Post, “the past week has been prolific with anti slavery interest . . . —Return of Anthony Burns—arrival of the Little White Slave Ida May and also of Solomon Northrup.”7 Nell unerringly framed “the Little White Slave Ida May” with these two black men in relief.8 They arrived on the Boston antislavery scene with one message in common: the white American public felt their enslavements to be unfair applications of the Fugitive Slave Law.
White Americans of this time cast a practiced eye on the children of mixed parentage to assess them for blackness. Mary’s skin operated as a living document, a history of slavery, that American audiences apparently knew how to read. Consider, for example, the similarity between initial descriptions of Mary. The Boston Telegraph reported that in her daguerreotype Mary seemed to be “a most beautiful white girl, with high forehead, straight hair, intellectual appearance, and decidedly attractive features.’ ”9 A Boston Courier reporter, who met her at the State House, reported that she was a “good-looking child, with a pale face a very little freckled, chestnut colored hair, and has no striking characteristics of the negro race in her features.”10 These italicized words highlight the formulaic procedure of assessing for whiteness. With the word “features,” these writers refer to Caucasian face shapes (nose, lips, and eye shape) as “regular,” or ascribing to a norm. There is a script they follow: in the places on Mary’s body that they look, in the words that they use to describe what they see, and in the affirmation of her qualities (assumed to be white qualities) of intelligence and beauty. The procedure is the same from city to city. Features, skin, and hair are the markers that divide races.
If bought and brought home, a photograph of Mary’s features, hair, and skin could be examined privately at leisure. We study Mary’s face for the markers of race and identity, as though we remember all the steps in that absurd, complicated dance.
Contemporary popular culture reaffirmed the script for making phenotypic, or race-type, examinations. In the examination scene in Ida May, Walter Varian, Ida May’s future husband, scrutinizes her body shortly after his uncle has purchased her. At this point in the story, Ida is ten years old, and she has been enslaved for five years. Walter looks her over carefully and concludes, “I have no doubt she is of white parentage.” Walter walks his uncle through the evidence. “You notice that though she is not very fair, her skin has the clear darkness of a brunette, and not the yellowish tinge which marks the lighter shades of the negro race. Her features, her whole form and mien, show that she is wholly of the Anglo-Saxon lineage.”11
Walter trusts himself to discern the truth of Ida’s white heritage, despite the fact that Ida has been enslaved for half of her childhood. Her “Anglo-Saxon lineage” is confirmed through a pseudo-scientific analysis of her “form and mien.” Walter’s facility in reading the signposts of race shows that he is not “astonished” to find out that this slave girl is a white girl, he is convinced of it, and furthermore, he knows that his analysis of her features has the power to make her free. Walter, who came of age and was educated in the North, is clearly practiced and confident in this specialized kind of looking. He has feelings for Ida almost immediately, despite their difference in age. Mostly, he is relieved to not have fallen in love with a slave.
Not every man in the novel has Walter’s response. Every time Ida is sold, her price is assessed according to a routinized expectation that her future utility included sex. Her kidnappers sell her to James Bell at a bargain due to her emaciated, feverish, and mentally broken condition, saying, “I tell you, it goes to my heart to have to part with her this way, for she’ll sell for a thousand dollars, as a fancy girl, in ten years.” Five years later, when Ida’s health and beauty are recovered, Mrs. James Bell designs that Ida be sold to avoid the ignominy of a tempted husband. At the moment of her purchase by Charles Maynard, her future guardian, the narrator comments that Mr. Maynard, who “was acquainted with the market value of such articles,” hurried the proceedings to avoid conversation with the slave-driver, “whose coarse jokes and allusions to what Ida would soon be worth as a ‘fancy girl,’ aroused disgust and anger.”
Phenotypic examination held legal weight both in fictional marriage plots and in actual court cases. Take, for example, the trial of Salome Muller, from a kidnapping story out of New Orleans, recounted in a review of Ida May.12
There was no trace of African descent in any feature of the face of Salome Muller. She had long, straight black hair, hazel eyes, thin lips and a Roman nose. The complexion of her face and neck was as dark as that of the darkest brunette. It appears however, that, during the twenty-five years of her servitude, she had been exposed to the sun’s rays in the hot climate of Louisiana, with head and neck unsheltered, as is the custom of the female slaves, laboring in the cotton or the sugar field. The parts of her person which had been shielded from the sun were comparatively white.
— Boston Atlas, quoted in Liberator, December 185413
Salome undressed before the court into her childhood whiteness. She shed the clothes and color of slavery, and claimed to be an orphaned German immigrant mistakenly enslaved from 1818 until a friend recognized her in 1843. When she successfully sued for her freedom the following year, the abolitionist press saw her case as shaking the racial foundation of slavery. Southerners thought the same case confirmed their social system, since Louisiana courts had chivalrously rescued one white woman from mistaken bondage.
In the 1859 hit The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana, New York audiences were called upon to examine the body of the title character, the beautiful ingénue Zoe, to determine the constraints race might place on her mobility through marriage. Although exposing her race to George Peyton has the potential to end their relationship, Zoe walks her lover and her audience through an examination of her body.
Zoe. And what shall I say? I—my mother was—no, no—not her! Why should I refer the blame to her? George, do you see that hand you hold? Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a bluish tinge?
George. Yes, near the quick there is a faint blue mark.
Zoe. Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white?
George. It is their beauty.
Zoe. Could you see the roots of my hair you would see the same dark, fatal
mark. Do you know what that is?
George. No.
Zoe. That—that is the ineffaceable curse of Cain. Of the blood that feeds my heart, one drop in eight is black—bright red as the rest may be, that one drop poisons all the flood; those seven bright drops give me love like yours—hope like yours—ambition like yours—life hung with passions like dewdrops on the morning flowers; but the one thing—forbidden by the laws—I’m an Octoroon!
—Dion Boucicault, The Octoroon, or Life in Louisiana (1859)14
Zoe’s three marks of race have nothing at all to do with skin: the quick of the nail, the roots of the hair, and the whites of the eyes. The marriage plots between Walter and Ida and between Zoe and George showed how this mode of looking, the phenotypic gaze, was animated by desire and rarely indifference. Zoe chose not “to refer the blame” on her racially mixed and sexually enslaved mother; she also does not assume “blame” herself. The Peyton men were to blame.
These words and gestures are remarkably consistent across texts; they focus on the examination of nails, eyes, and hair. In The Octoroon, on Salome Muller’s bared shoulders, in Ida May’s “clear darkness,” and in Mary’s “slightest trace” of “Negro blood,” the markers for race are nearly invisible and often misleading.
Dramatically, Zoe’s self-examination walks her audience through the pretended scrutiny of an actress’s body, though they already know the outcome. In New York performances of The Octoroon at the Winter Garden Theater, the playwright’s second wife—the Irish star Agnes Robertson—famously played Zoe.
Recently, historian Carol Wilson has concluded that Salome Muller was in fact Sally Miller, a shrewd woman who, like Mary, was born into slavery. Mistaken by a passerby for a German doppelgänger, Sally saw her chance at liberation and took it.
The New-York Daily Times claimed that Mary was “so white as to defy the acutest judge to detect in her features, complexion, hair, or general appearance, the slightest trace of Negro blood.” If racial markers could not provide proof of free status, or correctly identify a girl as African or German, or as lawfully marriageable or no, then how precarious, how absurd it was to have race be the sole basis for an entire system of exploitative labor.
15
Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Worcester, Massachusetts, March 27, 1855
In late March, Mary traveled to Worcester, Massachusetts, to appear with Solomon Northup at the Non-Resistant Convention, a radical pacifist movement best understood as an experiment in Christian perfectionism. Non-Resistants believed that if humanity freed itself from violence and coercion in its earthly institutions, they could bring about the second coming of heaven on earth. No resistance meant no violence, not even in self-defense. No warfare, no military, no prisons, no death penalty, and no profit by institutions supported by coercion, including capitalism and colonialism. The logical conclusion of radical pacifism is anarchy: Non-Resistants did not acknowledge human governments, as they were invariably framed by violence, and each individual conscience was held to a higher law. Non-Resistants were deeply committed to ending slavery and worked toward peaceful, immediate emancipation through moral suasion, or as William Lloyd Garrison put it, through “appeal to the reason and conscience of slaveholders.” Words and vigilance would be their weapons.
Gradually, even the most radical peace activists—including Garrison himself—began to accommodate violence in the service of freedom. Slave insurrection, for example, was seen as a necessary use of force. Passive nonresistance did not apply to the fugitive, the oppressed, or the enslaved: one must be free from coercion to choose to act peaceably.1 It was in this context that Solomon Northup was invited to lecture at the close of the convention on Saturday, to “share his story of agony” as a “faithful prototype of ‘Uncle Tom.’ ”2 Northup’s talk was advertised as a tale of violence overcome. “He was carried to New Orleans, sold to a planter on the Red River, and was beaten, outraged and abused, till life became a daily agony. Let him have a full house.” This event in Worcester would be one of the last Non-Resistant Conventions, and those in attendance held an assortment of positions on the subject of violence in the service of abolition.
A reform convention could also be a cold winter evening’s entertainment. Having moved to Worcester in 1852, the Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson described it as “a seething center of all the reforms.”3 For the women of Worcester, the wives of fortunes in iron and steel, attendance at these regular events was expected. Mrs. Hannah Marsh Inman wrote in her daily diary about chores (“Washing Day again”); her toothaches (she had eight teeth pulled on March 16); the price of yarn (50 cents); and her activism. “February 9. Sewing, Joanna washing. Storm. Evening attended an AntiSlavery lecture delivered by Frederick Douglas, very good indeed.” She circulated in antislavery discussion groups, reading clubs, benefit concerts, and sewing circles, on a tight rotation, without much comment beyond which neighbors she saw there. “March 2, 1855: Making soap. PM went to the funeral of Doct. Basset, after to the AntiSlavery sewing circle, a goodly number out.” She read Ida May on December 31, 1854, and made no comment upon it, though a title mention was rare. In Worcester, being a frugal middle-class radical abolitionist appears to have been as ordinary as baking.
[March] 23 Doing a little of all sorts. PM went out shopping, made two calls, came home very tired indeed.
24 A large baking and company to dinner. Evening attended the Nonresistant Convention, an address by Adin Ballue, very good indeed.
25 Attended through the day and evening very much interested in the discussions. They had for speakers William L. Garrison, Henry C. Wright, Steven S. Foster and wife, Mr. Higginson, and some others.
26 Very dull this morning. A call from Simeon. PM one from Miss Kennedy.
27 Ironing and boiling dinner. PM Lucy Bacon came to make a visit. Evening all went to the Soiree at the Hall. Little Ida May the white slave was there from Boston. Went and had two teeth filled.
28 Baking all the forenoon. PM went out to make calls, a call from Mrs. Cutting. Eve at home.
29 Went with Lucy to spend the day with Mrs. Phettiplace. Evening at home.
30 Company to spend the day. Mrs. Moesly here to tea. Evening all went to lecture. Sick all day and not very happy.
31 Saturday has come again with all its cares and toil. PM went out shopping with Lucy. At 4 o’clock she left for home. Evening attended Solomon Northrop’s lecture. Thus endeth another day of my short life.
—Hannah Marsh Inman, diary entry for March 23, 19554
On the evening of Tuesday, March 27, the Non-Resistant Convention opened with “The Soiree of the Free Church,” and according to the newspaper, it was a party that was “numerously attended, and passed off in a very pleasant manner.” Mrs. Inman, like all her wide circle, braved record snow to attend. At the height of the evening, an announcer called for girls under ten years of age to join him on stage. There was a delay, as the Mrs. Inmans in the audience considered the propriety of such an exhibition. The crowd pulled children up to the stage, as parents reluctantly gave them up up in the spirit of the evening. To the five local girls, the organizer surreptitiously added Mary. Once the girls were on the platform behind him, he gestured toward them and asked the audience, which of them was the redeemed slave child that the press called “Little Ida May”? Could they determine which girl was born to slavery by the color of her skin alone?
THE WHITE SLAVE.—The Soiree of the Free Church, which took place at Horticultural Hall, last evening, was numerously attended, and passed off in a very pleasant manner. Little Mary Botts, the white slave child was present, and excited all the sympathies of those who saw her. She, in company with five other little girls, taken promiscuously from the meeting, was placed upon the platform, and she was the last child amongst them, indicated by the persons present, as the slave child. She has auburn hair, blue eyes, and a skin as fair as any Circassian. She will remain, to-day, at the house of A. P. Ware, 23 Crown Street.
—Worce
ster Spy, March 29, 18555
Imagine the excruciating embarrassment felt by these six girls on stage and their mortified parents as the crowd threw out suggestions. Last one to the left! That one there, beside you! One girl’s eyes grew wide in disbelief as the audience pointed out her “yellowish tinge.” Another cried for her mother. Yet another giggled at the absurd turn the evening had taken, but her laugh became edged with hysteria as the audience closed in for a better look. Men peeked under bonnets to see the color of a girl’s hair at the roots. They pulled hands down closer to the footlights to see if a bluish tint could be found in the bed of small fingernails. One girl stood still as a trapped creature when the crowd came to a consensus around her suspected blackness, much to her father’s dismay.6
Mary would be available for visitors to call on in person at Mr. A. P. Ware’s house for the rest of the convention. Mrs. Ware, well known to the convention set, took Mary home.
The Reverend Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the pastor of the Worcester Free Church, was in the audience that night, though he was not a pacifist. He was a radical Republican, and an activist for antislavery and women’s rights, from his Harvard days through the end of the Civil War. He proudly wore a scar across his chin from leading the fight at the courthouse in Boston to free Anthony Burns. He thought the use of Mary as entertainment and spectacle to be distasteful and told others so. If the people wanted spectacle and exotic Circassian beauties, they could attend P. J. Barnum’s lecture, “The Art of Making Money” at city hall the following night.
Girl in Black and White Page 18
