Crimes of Performance

Abstract

In this article, I focus on the intersections between discourses of crime and illegality with modes of performance in the multiple impersonations staged by William and Ellen Craft, two married fugitive slaves who escaped from chattel slavery in the United States in 1848 through a complex set of layered performances. I begin illustrating the linkages between crime and performance by tracing the workings of a dynamic I term “fugitive transvestism” in an aesthetic representation of Ellen Craft, specifically an engraving she posed for in 1851 that was later published in The London Illustrated News. In doing so, I not only reveal the engraving as a site where we can witness Craft's embodied performances, rather than a seemingly static document, but also focus on the crimes of “being” acted by Craft that surface in the engraving itself. In addition, I further reveal the performative and criminal acts committed by Ellen Craft, by later moving to a discussion of prosthetics, focusing attention on the mechanisms of Craft's escape costume. Prosthetic performances, as I discuss them, were dramatic and tactical strategies employed by the Crafts that continue to reveal the suturing of crime and performance in Ellen Craft's counterfeit embodiment of her alter-ego, while taking it further into yet another set of unlawful impersonations. Thus, this essay will evince how the Craft's multiple crimes of performance enabled their mobility across 19th-century spatial sites and representational spheres.

Keywords:

• aesthetics
• commodities
• crime
• performance
• slave narratives

Notes

Anonymous, The Boston Liberator, February 9, 1849.

William Craft and Ellen Craft, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom: The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1999), 20–21.

Lindon Barrett, “Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom,” American Literature 69, no. 2 (June, 1997): 324.

R. J. M. Blackett, “The Odyssey of William and Ellen Craft,” in Beating Against the Barriers: Bibliographical Essays in Nineteenth-Century Afro-American History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 105.

For a fictionalized account of an escape that bears striking parallels to the Crafts's escape, see William Wells Brown, Clotel, or, the President's Daughter: A Narrative of Slave Life in the United States (London: Patridge and Oakey, 1853). In addition, versions of the Crafts's story, as well as their later life in the British Isles, appeared in other work by William Wells Brown as well as his daughter, Josephine Brown. See Josephine Brown, Biography of an American Bondman, by His Daughter (Boston: R. F. Wallcut, 1856). Engravings of Ellen and William Craft, as older adults, were published in William Still's The Underground Rail Road: a record of facts, authentic narratives, letters, & c., narrating the hardships, hair-breadth escapes, and death struggles of the slaves in their efforts for freedom, as related by themselves and others or witnessed by the author: together with sketches of the some of the largest stockholders and most liberal aiders and advisers of the road (Philadelphia: Porters & Coates, 1872).

The newspaper The North Star, for instance, published a “recent case which goes ahead of even the Crafts, for craftiness,” in which a “mulatto man, whose complexion had been bleached by successive amalgamations, so as to approximate closely that of our own favored race,” traveled from Georgia and eventually through Wilmington, Delaware using a land and nautical route similar to the Crafts. The North Star, March 1, 1850. Meanwhile, another newspaper article announced that an African American man from Alabama, who was “quite dark and of small stature” disguised himself “in female apparel and passed as the servant of his wife, who is white.” “Another Remarkable Escape,” Frederick Douglass Paper, February 25, 1853.

See Cheryl Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (1993): 1709–1795.

Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, 10.

The case of Salomé Muller, a German immigrant who successfully sued the Louisiana Supreme Court to be released out of slavery, is briefly discussed in the Crafts's escape narrative. For more on Ellen Craft and the mutability of racial categories, see Barbara McCaskill, “‘Yours Very Truly‘: Ellen Craft—the Fugitive as Text and Artifact,” African American Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1994); Ellen M. Weinauer, “‘A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman': Passing, Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom,” in Passing and the Fictions of Identity, ed. Elaine K. Ginsberg (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996).

See Henry Louis Gates, “The Trope of the Talking Book,” in The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127–169; Robert B. Stepto, “I Rose and Found My Voice: Narration, Authentication, and Authorial Control in Four Slave Narratives,” in From Behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), 3–31.

Ibid., 129.

Stepto, “I Rose and Found My Voice,” 3.

Paul Gilroy, “‘… To Be Real’: The Dissident Forms of Black Expressive Culture,” in Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance, ed. Catherine Ugwu (Seattle: Bay Press, 1995), 15.

Susette Min, “Aesthetics,” in Social Text 100, Special Issue: Collective History: Thirty Years of Social Text, ed. Brent Hayes Edwards and McCarthy Anna (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, Fall 2009), 27.

See the last chapter “The Sorrow Songs,” in W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folks (New York: Norton, 1999).

The engraving appeared in The London Illustrated News for April 19, 1851. For discussion of the image and the article that accompanied it, see Dorothy Sterling, “Ellen Craft: The Valiant Journey,” in her Black Foremothers: Three Lives (Old Westbury, Conn.: Feminist Press, 1979), 34–35.

This usage of an African American woman's portrait-engraving as a frontispiece explicitly refers to poet Phillis Wheatley and the frontispiece engraving that accompanied her 1773 book Poems on Various Subjects Religious and Moral, the first by a colonial American woman to accompany her own writings. For more on the history and construction of this image, see Gwendolyn DuBois Shaw, “‘On Deathless Glories Fix Thine Ardent View’: Scipio Moorhead, Phillis Wheatley, and the Mythic Origins of Anglo-African Portraiture in New England,” in Portraits of a People: Picturing African Americans in the Nineteenth Century (Seattle: University of Washington Press, Addison Gallery of American Art, 2006), 26–43.

McCaskill, “Yours Very Truly,” 7.

For more on Sojourner Truth's photographs and the technology of the carte de visite photograph, see Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North, 1830–1880 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1995), 40–44. For discussion of Ellen Craft's engraving and its role in raising funds for purchasing the freedom of William Craft's sister, see Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, 10.

See, for instance, Peggy Phelan, “Developing the Negative: Mapplethorpe, Schor, and Sherman,” in Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (New York: Routledge, 1993), 34–70; Laura Wexler, “Black and White and Color: The Hampton Album,” in Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in the Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 127–176; Deborah Willis, “The Sociologist's Eye: W. E. B. Du Bois and the Paris Exposition,” in A Small Nation of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African-American Portraits of Progress, eds. Deborah Willis and David Levering Lewis (New York: Amistad Press, 2003), 51–78.

Daphne Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006), 360, 384.

See Judith Wilson, “Hagar's Daughters: Social History, Cultural Heritage, and Afro-U.S. Women's Art,” in Bearing Witness: Contemporary Works by African-American Women Artists, ed. Jontyle Theresa Robinson (New York: Rizzoli, 1996), 100–101; Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 362–363.

Peterson, Doers of the Word, 40.

Art historian Judith Wilson discusses how the pose of bondswoman in Forever Free references an earlier work, Patrick Wilson's Kneeling Slave (1835). She goes on to discuss, importantly, how the model for this profile of a slave in bondage has mistakenly been interpreted as a man and was, in fact, a black woman. See Wilson, “Hagar's Daughters.”

Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 85.

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1981), 13, 14.

See W. J. T. Mitchell, “Showing Seeing: A Critique of Visual Culture,” in The Visual Culture Reader, ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (New York: Routledge, 2002), 86–101. I am thinking specifically of what Mitchell identifies as his aim of “making seeing show itself, to put it on display, and make it accessible to analysis” (86).

Judith Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in The Performance Studies Reader, ed. Henry Bial (New York: Routledge, 1988, 2007), 187.

Richard Schechner, Performance Studies: An Introduction (New York: Routledge, 2002), 24.

See Weinauer, “A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman,” 50.

See Judith Halberstam, Female Masculinity (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998), 21.

Weinauer, “A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman,” 50.

Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18, no. 2 (Summer 1966): 152.

Peterson, Doers of the Word, 138, 51. For more on Sojourner Truth's speech and the exposing of her body to her audience, see Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 155–163. My thinking on black women's roles apropos the cult of true womanhood is heavily indebted to the work of Hazel Carby. I am specifically thinking of her argument that “any historical investigation of the ideological boundaries of the cult of true womanhood is a sterile field without a recognition of the dialectical relationship with the alternative sexual code associated with the black woman. Existing outside the definition of true womanhood, black female sexuality was used to define what those boundaries were.” See Hazel V. Carby, Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 30.

Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, 28.

See Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003): 5.

David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (New York: Verso, 1999), 13. It is worth noting that Roediger attributes this argument to Du Bois's Black Reconstruction.

Ibid., 25.

Ibid., 52, 53, 56, 57.

I thank Hazel Carby here for continually pushing me to think more explicitly about the multiple class dimensions of Ellen Craft's performance.

I acknowledge and thank Kellie Jones for this insight and its importance.

Craft and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles to Freedom, 38.

Barrett, “Hand-Writing,” 327.

For more on whiteness as property, see Harris, “Whiteness as Property.”

Joseph R. Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2. Roach's theory of surrogation draws on French philosopher René Girard's trope of the “monstrous double.”