THE ADVERTISEMENT (1849)

Thanks to a librarian at the Newark Public Library, who printed the advertisement, sealed it in a manila envelope, and mailed it to me, I finally held in my hands the newspaper clipping that became central to the historical and cultural production of the Crafts’ escape. Anticipating its arrival, which is from an extensive inventory of New Jersey papers on microfilm, here is documented the famous escape of the so-called “Georgia Fugitives.” Significantly, it was William Wells Brown (1814–84), a fugitive slave himself and a major figure to the abolitionist cause, who came upon the advertisement in mid-January 1849, and read it aloud at the seventeenth annual meeting of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society at Faneuil Hall in Boston on 24 January 1849.Footnote ²⁰ Before the pair joined him onstage, which in previous years had hosted Frederick Douglass, Henry “Box” Brown, Henry Bibb, and Brown himself, Brown, the report for the meeting reveals, “read an extract from a New Jersey paper, a correspondent of which had observed this fugitive couple on board of one of the steamboats, and had been struck by something unusual in their appearance.”Footnote ²¹ With Brown's help, the advertisement is made central to the first telling of the Crafts’ escape and their introduction to the world. Figure 1 shows the entirety of “An Incident at the South,” just as Brown would have seen it. Included at its end is an “accompanying extract,” which Brown wrote earlier that month, on 4 January 1849, after meeting the Crafts in Pineville, Pennsylvania.

Figure 1.

Advertisement, “An Incident at the South,” anonymously published in the Daily Mercury, 19 Jan. 1849. Microfilm. Courtesy of the Newark Public Library.

In the final lines, the author admits to having come upon the story of the Crafts’ escape in the New York Herald, which had been originally published in The Liberator on 12 January 1849. Brown's description of the Crafts’ escape, entitled “Singular Escape from Slavery,” was originally a letter penned on 4 January 1849, and sent to William Lloyd Garrison (1805–79), the leading abolitionist in Boston. In his letter, Brown emphasizes Ellen's ability to pass for “white” in the first line, yet not the costume: “Ellen is so near white, that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman.”Footnote ²² Brown also discusses Ellen's cross-dressing and feigning disability to access public spaces reserved for major politicians supporting US slavery:

Removed from the description are details from Brown that inform Garrison that the Crafts will attend the seventeenth annual meeting later that month. It was Garrison who shortened the letter, titled it, and published it in The Liberator. A week later, on 17 January 1849, Brown's letter appeared in the New York Herald, and it was then that the author of “An Incident at the South” learned of his “traveling companions,” penned the advertisement, and published it two days later in the Daily Mercury.

Supported by Garrison's Anti-Slavery Society and escorted into the popular imagination by Brown, the Crafts and their riveting tale circulated throughout the United States and Britain, well into the 1850s.Footnote ²⁴ Their story appeared in newspapers like New York's North Star (February 1849, Brown's letter), Iowa's Anti-slavery Bugle (February 1849, letter and advertisement), Wisconsin's The Chronicle (February 1849, letter), and Virginia's Richmond Enquirer (June 1849, brief summary). Some newspapers recall the thrill of the escape with a female lead and offer a range of titles, such as “A Negro Romance” (Iowa), “Boston Excitement” (North Carolina), “Daniel Webster and Slavery” (Missouri), “American Slavery” (England), and “Ellen Craft, the Macon Fugitive” (Arkansas). By September 1850, references to the Crafts’ escape emphasize the threat of the Fugitive Slave Act, and by December of the same year, the Crafts made their second escape, also by boat, to Liverpool, England. Newspapers across and beyond the United States continued to track the Crafts, including Washington, DC's Daily Republic (November 1850), North Carolina's Wilmington Journal (November 1850), Aberdeen's Aberdeen Journal (February 1851), England's York Herald (March 1851), South Carolina's Edgefield Advertiser (November 1852), Arkansas's Southern Shield (October 1852), Missouri's Hannibal Journal (December 1852), and Alabama's Tuskegee Republican (September 1852). Three major voices are repeatedly cited: William Wells Brown and his introduction of the Crafts at Faneuil Hall with “an article from a Newark paper”; Frederick Douglass and his statement of support while on the abolitionist stage with the Crafts – “What an exhibition! … What an appearance is here presented! … Their escape shows that they are worth to be freemen”; and Harriet Beecher Stowe and her publication of Uncle Tom's Cabin, to quote one writer: “We would respectfully suggest to Mrs Harriet Beecher Stowe, that this incident in the life of Ellen Craft, furnishes abundant material out of which, with her vivid imagination, she might elaborate a romance as interesting and as truthful as ‘Uncle Tom's Cabin.’”Footnote ²⁵

The Crafts were central to anti-slavery societies on both sides of the Atlantic. According to HollyGale Millette, Ellen's stage performances adhered to specific strategies of the anti-slavery cause, in which the female slave's “white” body either presented the horrors of miscegenation or mirrored back to the spectator a “whiteness” of privilege not meant for her.Footnote ²⁶ Surely, in the fugitive slave's transatlantic reinvention, as influenced by abolitionist circles, we find other masks donned and manipulated by Ellen. However, as McCaskill explains, “For myriad cultural purposes, audiences down the generations have loaded onto the Crafts both dreams and anxieties of race and freedom, yet William and Ellen are more complex than that.”Footnote ²⁷ Their flight to freedom in the US depended on how Ellen's performance of cross-dressing and feigning disability led to confounding gender and race. The complexity of their flight, however, which upholds an autonomy from the many writerly efforts that attempt to capture their passing plot, begins with “An Incident at the South” because the Crafts resisted its transnational implications to protect their story and rewrite their own history. What exactly does the advertisement narrate and capture of the fugitives' story?

The beginning lines of the advertisement play a critical role. They establish a historical setting for imagining the “incident” or encouter with Crafts in the South:

Cartographically speaking, the Crafts’ escape is inextricably tied to the sea; that is, southern transatlantic waters. The sea is vital to the racial (mis)reading of Ellen's costume, her performance of disability, and the image of Spanish master and loyal servant. According to Matthew Brown, “The strong presence of the sea is grossly under-examined in American literature, doubly so in African American literature.”Footnote ²⁹ Citing the work of Haskell Springer, Brown's reinterpretation of Olaudah Equiano's life of sailoring and at sea emphasizes the “cultural consciousness” of mid-nineteenth-century America and the important role of the sea: “the sea hardly registers today in our cultural consciousness as setting, theme, metaphor, symbol, or powerful shaper of literary history.”Footnote ³⁰ In the case of Equiano, according to Brown, “When Equiano is in Savannah, for instance, he is taken into custody by men,” yet escapes enslavement because he speaks perfect English and, Brown continues, “Equiano is clearly identifiable as a sailor, with his queue haircut and sailor's clothes.”Footnote ³¹ Thus Equiano's freedom and mobility lie in a power within Atlantic sailor culture, which Brown carefully identifies: “That power Equiano gains by going to sea, however, is not simply limited to his ability to free himself. The freedoms sailors enjoyed, even in conditions that were almost the equal of literal slavery for all common sailors – white and black – potentially made them agents of freedom for others.”Footnote ³² Although not in the disguise of a sailor, Ellen gains a power by running to sea. Because of the poultices around her head (to muffle her speaking and hide her feminine face), her short haircut (which William cut square at the back of the neck), and her capacious overcoat (which was black and decorated with thick tassels and colorful sashes), Ellen is clearly identifiable as a Spanish gentleman. These southern transatlantic waters permit “Mr. Johnson and servant” access to a cross-racial terrain, and a history in which the Spaniard on a boat (conquistador or master) is forever wed to its Spanish descendants and even a major character in American sea literature.

Previous book-length literary studies have turned attention to the dominant and looming Spanish presence that persisted for centuries in southern transatlantic waters, but also in the greater American Souths. Stanley T. Williams, in The Spanish Background of American Literature (1955) – and the first of its kind to examine a “Spanish influence” in US literatures – points to how Spanishness resurfaces in American letters and evolved into a powerful narrative device to declare US nationalism and superiority. Following Williams's lead, María DeGúzman, in Spain's Long Shadow: The Black Legend, Off-Whiteness, and Anglo-American Empire (2005), explores how the rhetoric of the Spanish Inquisition and la leyenda negra allowed Anglo-Americans to construct an imaginative relation of antagonism toward Spain and its descendants. More recently, John C. Havard, in Hispanicism and Early US Literature: Spain, Mexico, Cuba, and the Origins of US National Identity (2018), identifies stock narratives in which an emerging discourse thus contributed to the developing sense of American exceptionalism. Havard, DeGúzman, and Williams examine works by major authors whose writings further Spanish stereotypes, motifs, and figurations, including Charles Brockden Brown, Joel Barlow, James Fenimore Cooper, Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Herman Melville. Williams encourages us to consider a different cartographic axis in accordance with the racial anxieties of the early nineteenth century and a rapidly transforming landscape: “We did not possess all America; this fact, in one mood or another, was in many minds, particularly those of our leaders. Although we might keep aloof or simulate superiority or indifference, still, there it was to the south, that mighty and alien civilization.”Footnote ³³ Influenced by Williams, DeGúzman tracks “Spain's long shadow” beginning with the transatlantic voyages of Cristóbal Colón, his arrival at the nexus of las Américas, and the emergence of an anti-Spanish rhetoric toward Spain and its conquistadores by Dominican friar Bartolomé de Las Casas, who introduced what Williams calls “la crueldad y el fanatismo español,”Footnote ³⁴ and DeGuzmán calls a “presumed blackguardism of the Spaniards”:

The racist discourse persisted into the nineteenth century and became a major literary device in which, DeGúzman states, “In this legend, ‘the Spaniard’ became a typological emblem of religious and political intolerance, tyranny, misrule, conspiracy, cruelty, barbarity, bloodthirstiness, backwardness, slothfulness, and degeneracy. However fragmented, this ‘historical’ story – the Black Legend with its culturally and racially stigmatizing implications – gives a determining shape to the power of blackness haunting … ‘American’ fictions.”Footnote ³⁶ According to Havard, “Anglo-American concern with Spain and Spanish-ness goes back to the nation's very roots, indeed predating the revolutionary period, but it became increasingly significant as the nineteenth century progressed.”Footnote ³⁷ Together, and chronologically speaking, Williams, DeGúzman, and Havard create a history from the sixteenth century to the end of the twentieth, uncovering an intrigue with Spain's discovery of las Américas, their influence on rivaling nations, and how Spanish-ness was utilized to great narrative effects.

Placed alongside Brown's attention to the sea in African American literature, Williams, DeGúzman, and Havard help us to understand a Spanish influence that in turn helps us to make sense of the racial (mis)reading in Ellen's cross-dressing, feigning disability, and running to sea. There is an incomplete history and there are erased heritages across this vast southern region, at and around the land, borderlands, and sea that, as Martha Menchaca discusses in Recovering History, Constructing Race: The Indian, Black, and White Roots of Mexican Americans (2001), must be examined by reassembling documents of various types that piece together the mixed racial history of Mexican Americans, including Spanish colonial history and African slavery. Depending on Mexican anthropologists Aguirre Beltrán and James Diego Vigil, Menchaca traces the construction of race from the Spanish colonial period, to the introduction of slavery, to Anglo-American expansion, and turns attention to the intersections across the Souths between Spanish ancestry, Indian descent, and African blood, emphasizing the ambiguity of mestizo and mulatto identities.Footnote ³⁸ Menchaca – as well as Williams, DeGúzman, and Havard – provides an appropriate historical lens through which to understand Ellen's running to sea. From the port at Savannah, to passing the island of St. Helena, to arriving at Charleston, these southern transatlantic waters help to set the stage for the racial (mis)reading of Ellen's “Mr. William Johnson” on a boat. Her large black coat and feigning disability, which is accentuated by “William” the loyal slave, both in his conversations with inquiring passengers (for example, his declaring that Mr. Johnson suffers from “a complication of diseases,” “principally with the ‘rheumatism,’ and was scarcely able to walk or help himself in any way”), and also his overt performance of helpful servant, all coincide and intersect to render familiar tropes of “Spanish-ness” and Spanish masquerade.

The passenger, upon first seeing Mr. Johnson enter the cabin “supported by his servant, a strapping negro,” had found “something so mysterious and unusual about the young man,” not only his “low womanly voice,” but, more, Mr. Johnson “was bundled up in a capacious overcoat; his face was bandaged with a white handkerchief, and its expression entirely hid by a pair of enormous green spectacles.”Footnote ³⁹ The passenger brings race into view (not white/Black, but master/slave) and its intersection with gender (“low womanly voice”), dress (“capacious overcoat”), and disability (“bandaged with a white handkerchief”). The passenger signals further attention to Mr. Johnson having appeared “anxious to avoid notice” and to the importance of his own servant declaring him “an invalid,” and surmises that invalidity causes his need to “retire early.”Footnote ⁴⁰ According to Ellen Samuels, disability in Ellen's performance is accentuated by William:

While Samuels offers us the significance of a conjoined performance of invalidity between Ellen and William, her reading of disability remains within a Black–white binary, whereas the passenger declares a race that challenges the North–South paradigm. “Spanish extraction” thus gains a powerful rhetorical effectiveness because of numerous intersecting variables – the extravagance of the “invented” costume, the over-display of disability and illness, the ambiguity and uncanniness of the pose on a boat, alongside a dark-skinned slave, and at sea. What materializes for the passenger is a familiar figure of the southwest, southern borderlands, and southern transatlantic waters; that is, the other master in the history of antebellum America. As historian Kathleen Donegan put it to me during our correspondence, “This was not a figure that the American did not know or could not read, but a figure made integral to the story of European colonialism and American slavery.”

John Disturnell's (1801–1877) famous map, entitled Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico (1847), and used by Nicolas Trist during territorial negotiations with Mexico, offers a cartographic glimpse into the intricate web of cross-cultural contact as the contours of the United States and Mexico were being established. The map helps us to grapple with how southern states understood their relationship to Spanishness. It also encourages us to understand migration, displacement, and incidents of (tres)passing across the Greater Souths (Figure 2).Footnote ⁴²

Figure 2.

John Disturnell's Mapa de los Estados Unidos de Méjico: segun lo organizado y definido por las varias actas del congreso de dicha républica y construido por las mejores autoridades (1847), published in Nueva York by J. Disturnell. Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

Not far removed from the vast space that we now call the “southern borderlands” was an expansive region at the southeastern corner of what is now the United States, which conquistadores roamed, colonized, and settled. Known as la Florida or Spanish Florida, this terrain is often referred to as the first major region explored and settled by Europeans, and it encompassed present-day Florida but also portions of Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana. The history of Spanish arrival, exploration and settlement across this terrain was common knowledge to rivaling European powers. According to J. Randolph Anderson, and what he calls “The Spanish Era in Georgia,” the acquisition of this territory and English settlement includes Charles Town, South Carolina, and Savannah, Georgia.

The region of Georgia was a dividing border between English presence in South Carolina and Spanish presence in la Florida. While the English persisted in territorial expansion into the South, Spain used la Florida as a buffer to protect its Caribbean colonies and peninsula from the English. Even after 1821, when Spain ceded this territory to the United States through the Adams–Onís Treaty of 1819–21, Spanish descendants still inhabited and traversed the region. Paul Cohen reminds us that la Florida was a refuge for runaway slaves, and although Mexico did not abolish slavery in its own territories until 1829, Mexicans played a significant role in protesting slavery in the United States by aiding fugitive slaves, well before 1821.Footnote ⁴⁴

Beyond la Florida and into the frontier region, including Texas, Carrie Gibson explains in El Norte: The Epic and Forgotten Story of Hispanic North America, slaves “were sometimes aided by Tejanos, to the annoyance of Anglo owners, though other Tejanos were slave owners themselves.”Footnote ⁴⁵ According to Gregory Rodriguez, however,

In the decade before the Civil War, this southeastern, southern, and southwestern region also still carried with it that “hemispheric conflict” between Anglo-America and Spain/New Spain/Mexico. During this mid-nineteenth-century period of political and cultural conflict between developing nations, here is the presence of Spanish descendants, including Mestizos, Tejanos, Californios, Españoles, and/or Mexican and Mexican American travelers, both in the cultural imaginary and as historical figures gaining passage through dangerous “white” spaces of a racialized slave economy. This “reinterpretation of Ellen,” Anna Brickhouse states in correspondence, “might very well uncover a submerged history of knowledge about the hemisphere that was used to powerful narrative effects [and] that could in fact change historical outcomes.”Footnote ⁴⁷

Although the Crafts knew about the racial (mis)reading in the advertisement, in addition to the many appropriations of their passing plot into Spanish (or Italian) masquerades, both Ellen's portrait (1850) and their slave narrative (1860) refuse to unmask a specific racial performance. Instead, the use of Ellen's portrait at the front of their narrative further complicates Ellen's racial passing in relation to her cross-dressing, feigning disability, and running to sea as narrated in “An Incident at the South.” Intriguingly symbolic is how Ellen's performance of disability (or what Mel Y. Chen described for me in terms of “the neurasthenia condition” and disabling conditions during this historical period) “might be cross-racially intervening into the figure of the Spanish decadent colonial.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Spanish-ness was a property of classed whiteness and it became increasingly medicalized. While Chen suggests that we must “inquire into the specific kinds of qualities that converge or mingle, however intermittently and unorganized, in the Spanish figure,” Brickhouse points to “a history of knowledge about the hemisphere” – and about Spanish-ness – that must be uncovered and examined for its “powerful narrative effects,” like Spanish shadows or presence on the page. How the Black female subject of miscegenation engineered this looming historia through her costume and performance is made somewhat visible in the partial disguise she dons in her famous portrait.

THE PORTRAIT (1850)

In 1850, Ellen dressed in the partial disguise of “Mr. Johnson” and posed for an engraved portrait. In the same year as US Congress passed the Fugitive Slave Act and at a time when the Crafts conducted lectures with William Wells Brown, three (white) Bostonians collaborated to create an engraving of Ellen: Joseph Andrews (1806–73) and Stephen Alonzo Schoff (1818–1905) engraved the portrait of Ellen from a daguerreotype made by Luther Holman Hale (1823–85).Footnote ⁴⁹ The engraving was first published in the London Illustrated News on 19 April 1851, yet before its publication it was distributed at anti-slavery meetings and began offering mid-nineteenth-century audiences a glimpse into her escape. “To abolitionists, these engravings or pictorial texts authenticated Ellen's trauma and inaugurated written testimony of her escape,” as McCaskill explains, “in the same manner that male and female fugitives legitimized their pain and retorted detractors through what Houston A. Baker, Jr., calls the ‘Negro exhibit’ – public displays of scars and signs of torture that escaped slaves, in silence, presented during their lectures to white Northern audiences.”Footnote ⁵⁰ According to McCaskill, Ellen's “decision to sit for the picture may have been inspired by Douglass, William Wells Brown, and other famed and fabulous runways,” and the transatlantic circulation of the portrait at anti-slavery meetings helped “market Ellen's story.”Footnote ⁵¹ Examining the portrait in light of the racial (mis)reading in “An Incident at the South” further complicates Ellen's pose, because it reveals the invalid gentleman now nearly recovered. By 1860, however, when the engraving becomes the frontispiece portrait to the Crafts’ long-awaited slave narrative, the Crafts set out to reclaim Ellen's “invented” costume, not only from the authors who made them famous (and who removed disability entirely from their fictions, but perhaps influenced by the portrait), but also from the author of “An Incident at the South” who declared a Spanish masquerade. The Crafts thus complicate previous versions of their escape, including the altered costume in the portrait which removes layers of disability that Ellen herself engineered and that are linked to Spanish-ness.

Upon opening the 1860 edition of Running, staring back at the reader is Ellen's “Mr. Johnson.” Although Ellen sits for white artists, her pose returns a mirroring and mockery of the master by the light-skinned female slave who was made subject to the horrors of miscegenation. Not only does Ellen challenge the act of reading male fugitive slave portraiture (think of Douglass, Bibb, or Brown), but her racially mixed body displaces the narcissistic viewer who sees his/her sex and race performed by the daughter of the master. Jasmine Nichole Cobb, in Picture Freedom, explains Ellen's possession of the master's body through a Du Boisean sense of “double consciousness” or how the female fugitive slave realizes an ability to reconstruct “outward constructions” in her transformation and performance.Footnote ⁵² Considering her “genius of fugitivity,” and what exactly “it revealed to Whites,” Cobb states that “Black visuality was not simply Black visibility – that the social fact of Blackness in the visual field entailed surprising complications.”Footnote ⁵³ Ellen's transformative abilities persecute her white rapist, and in her gazing back at the viewer Ellen becomes the master's wife, his daughter, his sister, his mother, and the master himself. The effect of Ellen's portrait in relation to “An Incident at the South” adds further ambiguity and androgyny.

Not until the reader is immersed in Running – and just before the account of the escape – does William Craft explain the changes to Ellen's costume in the portrait: “The poultice is left off in the engraving, because the likeness could not have been taken well with it on”; that is, the poultice would have covered “the smoothness of her face,” “the expression of the countenance, as well as the beardless chin.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Also missing are the “enormous green spectacles” that covered her eyes, which the passenger in “An Incident at the South” detects and which William discusses in the narrative: “My wife, knowing that she would be thrown in a good deal into the company of gentlemen, fancied that she could get on better if she had something to go over the eyes; so I went to a shop and bought a pair of green spectacles.”Footnote ⁵⁵ William then cut Ellen's long hair and, in the often-quoted line of their narrative, states, “I found that she made a most respectable looking gentleman” (Figure 3).Footnote ⁵⁶

Figure 3.

Frontispiece engraving of Ellen Craft in disguise, by Stephen Alonzo Schoff after Luther Holman Hale's daguerreotype, in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (London: William Tweedie, 1860). Courtesy of the Mary Evans Picture Library.

Now that the poultices are removed, and “Mr. William Johnson” appears recovered from some ailments, is this the pose of a Spanish gentleman and/or can we still detect, as the passenger aboard the General Clinch detected, “a darkness of complexion that betokened Spanish extraction”? Yes, if it were not for the gender and race trouble initiated by the title below the portrait: “ELLEN CRAFT, .”

Alongside the removal of the poultices, the title unmasks Ellen's gender and destabilizes the racial (mis)reading of “An Incident at the South.” In McCaskill's words, the “facial monstrosity is omitted in the frontispiece engraving,” which downplays a significant layer of disability that coincided with “a darkness of complexion” and rendered a figuration of “Spanish extraction.”Footnote ⁵⁷ The whiteness of the poultices may have created the necessary contrast to Ellen's light skin – that “Mr. Johnson” is not “white” or Anglo-American, but of another European lineage. What the viewer sees is a constructed process of Ellen's racial, gendered, disabled, and transnational (un)becoming. However, there is nothing accidental about the staging of this ambiguity either, especially with the absence of Ellen's autograph and the presence of three white and male Bostonian autographs. After all, as Douglass stated in the North Star (1849), “Negroes can never have impartial portraits at the hands of white artists.”Footnote ⁵⁸ Here, in this constructed frame, Ellen sits in a transformative state that declares a resistance of capture, and because the poultices are removed from her face and she dons clear spectacles, she now speaks to the duped and perplexed viewer. She forces the viewer to accept the light-skinned female slave's “possession” of the master's likeness. As Cobb argues, “Free Black women provide the most robust examples of the cultural work required to imagine freedom during slavery.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Here, the female fugitive slave declares her freedom. Although this is only the partial disguise, what begs to be read is Ellen's threatening potential to the patriarch, the phallus, and US slavery. Essential to Ellen's abilities to “pass” is the female fugitive slave's extreme efforts to imagine the unimaginable: her desire to birth daughters far from the white man's power of possession. The engraving is yet another glimpse into Ellen's transnational masquerades, here upstaged by the seasoned fugitive slave.

Still, the racial (mis)reading of “Spanish extraction” also looms in the portrait. In Joseph M. Bennett's The Illustrated Toilet of Fashion (1850), a description of the “Spaniard's costume” illuminates the racial stereotype inherited by descendants in Mexico, South America, and also the United States:

Placing Bennett's description alongside Ellen's portrait and “An Incident at the South” allows us to grapple with similar narrative depictions of the “Spaniard's costume” and thus explore the patterns replicated in Ellen's “invented” costume (Figure 4).

Figure 4.

“The Spanish hat and cloak” from Joseph M. Bennett, The Illustrated Toilet of Fashion; Or Annals of Costume, from the Earliest Period to the Present Time (New York: Booth & Foster, 1850).

Ellen's costume thus follows the racial performative traditions of the “Spaniard's costume,” yet her version is anchored in the textiles of southern and Anglo-American culture. Ellen dons a capacious black cloak. Draped over it is a light-colored patterned sash that is decorated with elegant black tassels. Resting on her chest is a lustrous black cravat, in a loose taffeta of fine silk, and perfectly set over a tall-standing white collar. Hanging around her neck is a white cloth, which looks like a second sash but upon closer inspection here is a poultice made into a sling that holds and hides her right and writing arm (which excuses Ellen from signing the engraving). Sitting on her head is an exceptionally tall silk hat, in the likeness of Abraham Lincoln. Through clear spectacles, “the fugitive slave” returns the viewer's gaze, and from the shade of her hat's brim, what begs to be read is her skin tone in relation to the costume. The white cloth that holds and hides the right and writing hand of the master – the hand that wields the law – helps to demarcate the off-white and transnational potential. Significantly, the pose is not locked into any single race (or gender). Rather, Ellen inhabits the contradiction and occupies the vast space of possibility between the mask and the real. Part of the complexity is that Ellen confounds the “experience” of the daguerreotype because the fugitive slave behind the mask – ELLEN CRAFT – masters and manipulates the illusion. According to Sarah Blackwood, drawing upon Douglass, “the figure depicted is, indeed, ‘a human being,’ while simultaneously destabilizing the relation between representation and reality – ‘as if in the act of running’.” (emphasis added)Footnote ⁶¹ Above all, the master's slave–daughter achieves passage out of her abject position of Blackness to find passage in other abject positions, including Spanishness, to become the conquistador's inheriting son.

Coincidentally, Bennett's illustration also conceals the left arm of his Spanish gentleman with garments and sashes that cross his chest. Lindon Barrett, in “Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom,” shifts attention from “[l]ight or racially ambiguous skin” to the “‘ontological’ marker of whiteness”: “Their solution is to underscore what would amount to the betraying illegibility of Ellen's handwriting were she to attempt to write. They highlight, in sum, the very incapacity that would render them suspect.”Footnote ⁶² Barrett states that “the bandaging of Ellen's hand is anything but an arbitrary element of the Crafts’ escape” and should not be read as “a substitute for literacy,” but rather “it is the indispensable correlate to Ellen's racially ambiguous skin.”Footnote ⁶³ Although disability is downplayed in the portrait, both in “An Incident at the South” and later in Running disability and racial passing are inextricably linked and are articulated as such: Ellen puts her arm in a sling (to avoid signing her name to board trains), feigns deafness (to avoid speaking with passengers), adds poultices around her head (to hide a beardless chin), wears green spectacles (to hide her eyes and avoid eye contact), and leans on her loyal slave (to display difficulty walking). Jenifer L. Barclay, in The Mark of Slavery: Disability, Race, and Gender in Antebellum America, provides a critical lens onto the influences of disability on race (and gender) that help realize the potential of Ellen's Spanish masquerade:

Although the decision to remove disability from the portrait tampers with the historicity of disability as linked to race, Barclay reminds us that “perceptions of, attitudes toward, and beliefs about disabilities … change over time and depend on culture.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Ellen's costume and performance are intertwined in a period of the late 1840s that saw dramatic geopolitical anxieties over land, the borderlands, the vast South, and southern transatlantic waters, because of the Mexican–American War, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and the Fugitive Slave Act. The female fugitive slave not only troubles slavery's visual culture; she also creates what Paul Ricoeur calls the “surplus of meaning” of an object or symbol. In other words, Ellen's extravagance underscores “meaning” and “double meaning” in terms of an excess, that is “to be both as broad and as precise as possible,” and in the extravagance of her passing and performance lies the ambiguity, or what I like to call Ellen's extravagant passing.Footnote ⁶⁶ The extravagance helps prompt the potential of Ellen's transnational masquerades.

In 1860, as the Crafts set out to reclaim their story from the abolitionists and novelists who made them famous, Running pursues its own trajectory to play out for the reader Ellen's racial ambiguity and feigning disability, running to sea, and without precedent. In the years before their narrative's publication, McCaskill explains, “English abolitionists advertised copies of Ellen's portrait for sale, alongside notices of Uncle Tom in their publications,”Footnote ⁶⁷ and while it may have been Stowe's book “that reminded audiences of the Crafts’ tenacious escape – and probably left them wondering where the firsthand version was,”Footnote ⁶⁸ the firsthand version was published in London, like Brown's Clotel, and written for a British audience. Although Ellen would never set into writing her version of the escape, William did and most likely with Ellen by his side. When nineteenth-century readers finally held in their hands that firsthand version, and as they gazed at its frontispiece portrait, there was no question whether this freewoman existed. Still, her illusive quality, now in the hands of the Crafts, prodded readers to ask, “Is it true?” And it prods us to ask, “Is it a Spanish masquerade?”

THE SLAVE NARRATIVE (1860)

Placed at the start of Running, the engraved portrait is meant to confound its spectators and engage them in a fictional exploration and the transformative power of the light-skinned female slave, well before the narrative account of her transformation and escape. To borrow the words of Ellen M. Weinauer, in her chapter “‘A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman': Passing, Possession, and Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom” (1996), “It is this image that introduces the text and haunts it.”Footnote ⁶⁹ In every which way, the frontispiece portrait challenges the narrative presentation of Ellen's extravagant passing, while also introducing the potential of the mulatta in her transnational masquerades – her many masks – versus the tragic characterization of the African American woman in literature. At work in the frontispiece portrait is a dynamic play on the reader at the border where image-as-text and text-as-image meet. Although the frontispiece portrait interferes with the narrative telling of Ellen's “invention” of the costume, one thing is for sure: the frontispiece portrait visually problematizes a spectrum of notions in reading and seeing, that of naming, identity, and performance, in addition to authenticity and deceit, but also definitions of the “real” and the methods or system by which identity is invented. After all, when the pair sat down to write their slave narrative, they knew of “An Incident at the South” and the many versions that followed the cue of Ellen's Spanish masquerade. Submerged in various scenes throughout Running is the potential of racially (mis)reading Ellen's extravagant passing in terms of “Spanish extraction.”

Unlike other slave narratives, Running discloses the complete costume that Ellen invented, the passing plot that she asserted, and the masquerade that she mastered. Similar to “An Incident at the South” and the portrait, Running confirms Ellen's transnational masquerades. In Running, William pursues a “narrative aesthetic” that represented a culmination of more than a decade of public speaking and education. Put simply, William is hard at work in reclaiming the escape from abolitionists. While the start of Running draws upon the discourse of the abolitionist stage, in tone and in a style that includes seminal tropes found in the slave narrative tradition (for example, the separation of families, the loss of children, the desires for sanctioned marriages), William also turns to the methods of fiction that defined the period, including London's literary culture. Whereas Brown may have provided guidance in the transition from the abolitionist stage to the literary world, three years of study with the wife of the famous Romantic poet and the woman who was “educating England” at the Ockham School, Lady Byron, would have exposed the Crafts to “an extensive library” and the opportunity to prepare a different kind of manuscript versus that of predecessors.Footnote ⁷⁰ Writing a dozen years after their 1848 escape, William may very well have been trying to write a best seller that brought together techniques from the abolitionist stage, strategies from slave narratives, and tropes from classic and popular fictions. Running thus emerges as its own authority to bear witness to a different kind of narration and a different kind of experience of fugitivity. Whereas writing for an American readership would have demanded an entirely different perspective, writing for a British audience allowed the opportunity to reengineer the escape and make extraordinary the mutability of Ellen's passing. Perhaps, too, the aim was to restore the figure of the mulatta from tragic heroine (since Clotel is based on Ellen herself) to that of genius.

Running thus contains a carefully calculated literary edge that is concerned with reconfiguring the role of the light-skinned heroine of American slavery. Its hybrid visual–textual experience is also meant for an audience obsessed with the sentimental tradition, the genre of Gothic horror, and the classic plots from the Elizabethan stage. There is also a textual and visual craftsmanship to Running, and a closer look at its 111 pages reveals a narrative trajectory propelled by the multiple and conflicting ways of seeing the subject of its frontispiece portrait. Unlike other slave narratives, the narration of Running is not tucked in between pages and pages of documentary proof and/or letters written on behalf of the Crafts, by either abolitionists, editors, or publishers. Readers of slave narratives expected a “careful layering of heterogeneous material into a collective and invulnerable whole,” as John Sekora phrases the process in “Black Message/White Envelope” (1987): “If the story of a former slave was thus sandwiched between white abolitionist documents, the story did carry the aegis of a movement preaching historical veracity.”Footnote ⁷¹ Instead, and because Running was published in London, British readers did not need to flip through any proselytizing documents, like those found in master texts by Frederick Douglass or William Wells Brown. The reason: an abolitionist army had already escorted the Crafts into the popular imagination. Additionally, the narrative is uniquely divided into two parts that center on two escapes, not the lives of the fugitives. Briefly put, Part I provides the details of the first escape from Georgia to Philadelphia, and Part II discusses the second escape from Nova Scotia to England. In each part, William is aware of his audience and deliberately positions the British reader as a central character, always connecting the British reader to the story of escape, and in intimate ways, such as parenthetical whispers, puns, and brief explanations of American perspectives.

In Part I, William carefully introduces and discusses the first escape by crafting arguments pertaining to Ellen's subversive potential. He begins by exposing the horrors of white slavery and passing in the wrong direction in American slave culture. From the start, William turns the figure of the mulatta into a spectacular figure of racial mobility. He discloses Ellen's accidental “white” passing in childhood, then turns attention to her becoming Mr. Johnson, and then provides insight into her transformation into a “white” woman. In Part I, Running emphasizes Ellen's transformations from the master's daughter to the master himself to the master's wife. Part of the narrative complexity pertains to the fact that William never calls Mr. Johnson “white” and while there is mention of Ellen's “white” passing (as a child and woman), it is never in reference to Mr. Johnson. These instances appear in the opening and final sequence of the narrative but never during the escape from Macon to Philadelphia. First, William writes, “it occurred to me that, as my wife was nearly white, I might get her to disguise herself as an invalid gentleman,” and then, a few pages later, he mentions her “fair complexion”; though he speaks of it in terms of her passing as a white woman, “it would have been a very difficult task for my wife to have come off as a free white lady, with me as her slave.”Footnote ⁷² Part of the imaginary force attached to descriptions of the “invented” costume is the “whiteness” that it suggests but which William never confirms.

Perhaps critics have used newspaper accounts that emphasize Ellen's “whiteness” to work backwards and reflect on her performance as Mr. Johnson. This may include a few seminal voices as well: William Wells Brown's reference in a US newspaper that “Ellen is so near white, that she can pass without suspicion for a white woman,” or Stowe's comment in her book entitled Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands, which was quoted in the Bury and Norwich Post, and Suffolk Herald (28 February 1855) in England, and after she met the Crafts: “Had it not been for my introduction, I could never have fancied Ellen to have been any other than some English girl, with rather a paler cheek than common.”Footnote ⁷³ Perhaps repeated descriptions of the “white slave” in the British press (when Ellen Craft, William Craft, and Brown toured the United Kingdom) may have prompted critics to consider “white” in terms of Anglo-American-ness: McCaskill states that Ellen transformed into a “free, privileged, primary, racially pure, genetically superior white man”; Garber describes Ellen as “the light-skinned wife disguised as a white man”; Sterling Lecater Bland Jr. calls Ellen's passing that of a “white young gentleman”; Charles Heglar, who includes the layer of disability in his description, presents Ellen's pose as that of “an invalid ‘white’ planter”; and Ellen Samuels, who also examines the role of disability in the performance, claims that Ellen assumes the disguise of a “white invalid gentleman.”Footnote ⁷⁴ Although these critics appropriately frame their arguments with Running's opening critique, their textual and discursive analyses of the “whiteness” that Ellen performs do not contextualize the repression of Mr. Johnson's racial identity in light of the opening narrative argument concerned with the arbitrariness of “whiteness” in mid-nineteenth-century America.

In the opening pages, William recalls stories of kidnappings and the disappearances of “white” children and adults, introducing a new portrait of slavery. As Stephan Talty states in Mulatto America (2004), “The white slave added another kind of bad dream to the repertoire.”Footnote ⁷⁵ Drawing upon the strategy of “imaginative substitution,” often used on the stage and in slave narratives, William relates the kidnappings of immigrant children (such as Salomé Müller, and the tanning of an Ohio son) to the horrors suffered by slave mothers. After all, William writes, “he who has the power, and is inhuman enough to trample upon the sacred rights of the weak, cares nothing for race or colour.”Footnote ⁷⁶ William also connects Ellen's accidental passing as a daughter of her father–master, James C. Smith, to the kidnappings. First, William explains the conflict with the master's wife:

Then William comments on the conflict with racial miscegenation and (mis)reading complexion – “It may be remembered that slavery in America is not at all confined to persons of any particular complexion; there are a very large number of slaves as white as any one” – culminating in an argument that emphasizes Ellen's conversion experience and her refusal to relegate her children to the “peculiar institution.”Footnote ⁷⁸ William writes the following just moments before he explains how the pair planned their escape:

Perhaps to demonstrate effectively the female slave's experience and introduce the fugitive heroine and her voice to the escape narrative genre, the narrative tone departs from the opening critique to experiment with more coded and subversive rhetorical and literary strategies. Not until the following year would the experience of Harriet Jacobs emerge in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), and Hannah Bond's autobiographical fiction has been only recently discovered and was published in 2002.

Unlike his contemporaries, William divulges the details of the escape, explaining where the couple devised the plan, how they collected the costume, and Ellen's transformation. In the space of several pages, the British reader is given access to the space of the mulatta's cottage, which was becoming a seminal trope in African American literature. William writes, “She being a ladies’ maid, and a favourite slave in the family, was allowed a little room to herself; and amongst other pieces of furniture which I had made in my overtime, was a chest of drawers; so when I took the articles home, she locked them up carefully in these drawers.”Footnote ⁸⁰ Like a nefarious Pandora's box, the Crafts hide the master's masculine costume – while Ellen sews his trousers, William acquires his hat, glasses, and cloak in town. The pair also obtain holiday “passes” from their masters in order to spend Christmas with family on nearby plantations. On the eve of the escape and in a moment of brilliant inspiration and inventiveness, Ellen decides to disable the costume in order to mobilize it in public space. Although ventriloquized through William, here is her voice whose brain engineers the passing plot of invalid master and loyal slave: “I think I have it!” she tells William, and then she says, “I think I can make a poultice and bind up my right hand in a sling, and with propriety ask the officers to register my name for me.”Footnote ⁸¹ Thus Ellen's voice makes visible the function of the white cloth in the frontispiece portrait. However, William is quick to mention the articles missing from the portrait: “It then occurred to her that the smoothness of her face might betray her; so she decided to make another poultice, and put it in a white handkerchief to be worn under the chin, up the cheeks, and to tie over the head,” and even requested “something to go over the eyes” – a “pair of green spectacles.”Footnote ⁸² After William cuts her hair “square at the back of the head, and got her to dress in the disguise and stand out on the floor,” he then declares, “I found that she made a most respectable looking gentleman.”Footnote ⁸³ In a playful tug at the sleeve of the British reader, this is not the gentleman of the frontispiece portrait. Rather, Ellen made a most rheumatic-looking gentleman. Here, like in the advertisement, disability/invalidity and racial passing coincide and collide. Yet, and as stated, William never draws attention to a specific racial impersonation. However, in a seminal scene of the narrative, we find Ellen's Spanish masquerade.

With the physical transformation complete, William narrates a series of incidents to display their passing plot. Upon arriving at Charleston, and following the encounter in “An Incident at the South,” the Crafts board a train to Richmond, Virginia, where the pair meet two young women and their father. Narrated in two pages, the encounter occurs in a first-class compartment and what occurred there only Ellen could have known since William was forced to travel in a separate car for baggage. Throughout the scene, the Crafts are hard at work in its narration and refuse to relegate their escape to the interpretations and limitations in “An Incident at the South,” Uncle Tom's Cabin, and Clotel. Instead, the Crafts empower Ellen's racial passing in a narrative reconstruction that prods what is known (the racial (mis)reading of “Spanish extraction”) against what is unknown (the potential of her transnational masquerades). The ways in which the Crafts render Ellen's experience might be the closest to her version that we will ever have.

William sets the American stage for a British audience, especially for readers familiar with cross-dressing plots and mistaken love from the Elizabethan stage. He carefully articulates how the American railroad, in particular the unthinkable space of the first-class train compartment, is intercepted by Black fugitivity and made an option for escape. Like the remarkable mailing of Henry “Box” Brown or the incredible sailing of Olaudah Equiano, Ellen finds passage in first-class trains.Footnote ⁸⁴ William writes,

Like in “An Incident at the South,” William provides the father (and reader) a language through which to interpret Ellen's costume and performance of the ailing body beneath it. After recruiting the father into the ruse, William returns to Ellen and informs the reader of a dangerous occurrence: “During the gentleman's absence, the ladies and my master had a little cosy chat.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Because William, the slave, is in another car, he pauses the flirtatious interaction between Mr. Johnson and the daughters to accentuate the passing plot for the inquiring father. William explains that his master, Mr. Johnson, suffers from “inflammatory rheumatism” and is traveling north to be cured by a family physician.Footnote ⁸⁷ That “little cosy chat” may very well have been the foreplay before the comic bed scene, which reads as a sort of bed trick on the ladies, their father, and the reader. Because the father is so taken by the performance of invalidity, he further recruits his daughters into the passing plot and orchestrates a more intimate encounter between his daughters and the available bachelor, Mr. Johnson.

William's narrative treatment of the encounter thus demonstrates to a British audience the bonded effort and theatrical performance of “Mr. Johnson and servant” in which Ellen must have a keen awareness of categories of identification (gender, race, class, sexuality, and disability/invalidity) in order to execute the respective role of a most rheumatic gentleman. William writes,

The encounter would have also reminded British readers of the cross-wooing heroines from classic English romantic comedies, who had audiences roaring with laughter when the transvestite figure fortuitously duped the unbeknownst and then desperately tried to evade any sexual advances. Although Mr. Johnson jumps at the suggestion of a nap, his nap proves to be more trouble than he bargained for, which William is all the more willing to entertain. While a nap protects the ruse, the layers of race, gender, and invalidity are further entangled when the ladies undress Mr. Johnson and cover his body with his “fashionable cloth cloak” or rather cloak-turned-blanket. With their shawls under his head, the two women watch Mr. Johnson sleep, gazing and fetishizing over a supposedly masculine and ailing body now further concealed by the black cloak. Just as the nap aims to protect the passing plot, it also helps exaggerate the performance. Alongside the two women, the reader watches gender and sexuality in operation with disability and race but also class and transnationalism, where empathy (and love) encourage the women to partake of the servant's role for the master. The suspense of the scene lies in the separation of Ellen from William, and the danger of Ellen maintaining all the categories in her extravagant passing. The mulatta figure beneath the “fashionable cloth cloak” is similar to Henry “Box” Brown's coffin-like escape and resurrection. Ellen is also playing near-dead, and lies there on the couch wrapped by the Spaniard's signature cloak (like a coffin), while disability/invalidity is magnified by her act of “passing out” that is made possible through her art of seduction.

The scene ends with William shuffling between accurately recalling the encounter and poking fun at the love trouble. In a climactic moment of female love play across the page, the daughters break their silence, which Ellen would have heard and later recalled for William:

The narrative break in William's “I suppose” encourages wonderment around female perspective during the passing plot. After one daughter releases a “long sigh” and expresses joy, William stresses her reaction with the free indirect adoption of the endearment “papa,” which coincides with the father being further quiet-ed by female desire: “Oh! dear me,” the other daughter confesses, “I never felt so much for a gentleman in my life!” Here we find not antebellum fears toward the light-skinned slave (or the Black female body and her sexuality) but a suppressed desire and the fantasy of cross-race relations from the perspective of two young southern belles. In the final comment of the scene, William tells the reader, “To use an American expression, ‘they fell in love with the wrong chap’” – but who exactly was this “wrong chap”?Footnote ⁹⁰ Beneath the comedy of the encounter, William marks something about Ellen's mastery over masquerade. Even William Lloyd Garrison, in his personal copy of Running that was gifted to him by the Crafts, responds to the “American expression” in the margin with “rats” and “oh fudge.”Footnote ⁹¹ In the use of “wrong chap” is William Craft pointing to the wrong gender, the wrong race, or both? Is he commenting on disability/invalidity? Or is he referring to the fact that this bachelor is not the heir of his father's estate? At best, the phrasing points to Ellen's mastery over the master's key instruments of authority and all that is afforded to the invisible phallus. What comes together in the scene is Ellen's potential of a Spanish masquerade, which “An Incident at the South” suggests, yet which William withholds in direct ways to embolden what actually lies beneath that “fashionable cloth cloak” – the performative genius of Black female fugitivity.

Harking back to the final line of “An Incident at the South” – “he was either a ‘woman or a genius’” – the acquaintance calls attention to an arbitrary structure that delineates Ellen's gender yet allows her to evolve Frederick Douglass's famous formula into her own. In an entirely different binary – of woman/genius – its nonlinear terms break the binary of man/woman to propose a reading of the paradoxical that hinges on the notion of queer. Although the use of either/or renders any woman inherently not genius (a term typically reserved for men and denied to women), Ellen confounds what it means to be “woman” (physical) in relation to what it means to be “genius” (spiritual). Long before “genius” became a creative impulse, it was defined as “either” a spiritual attendant “or” a transcendent personification, where the potential of the latter also includes an “element of eccentricity,” “romantic vision,” and “infirmaries of genius,” such as lameness, rheumatic fever, and hypochondria, which, Marjorie Garber argues, is related to brilliance and creativity.Footnote ⁹² If illness and disability/invalidity evoke genius, then Ellen's performance allows her to provoke a cultural knowledge and social agency that also reverberate through categories of race, but also gender. According to Rosemary Garland-Thomson, because “disability feminizes all disabled figures,” Ellen's disabling of the master's body thus feminizes him, and she presents a body whose mark of otherness is only further complicated by the racial and geographical debates of the period.Footnote ⁹³ As Ellen is capable of conjuring the deception of the Spaniard's mask, the author of “An Incident at the South” confesses that the women/genius behind the mask is now dabbling in the art of theatrical alchemy, an art form long associated with the natural genius of another William, England's William Shakespeare. Instead, her genius emerges from a range of wooden and steel stages of antebellum America. And from these stages the Black female fugitive slave voices an outrageous critique and threatens the master's ailing son, his inheritance, and rites of passage.

Above all, Ellen's transformation moves away from the masculine “experience” of transformation to introduce a feminine “experience” that complicates the traditional male-centered paradigm. Instead, Ellen – the light-skinned female slave of miscegenation – becomes of significant value to the anti-slavery cause as the other voice of slavery in opposition to the linear plot of transformation set by male fugitive slaves, in particular the voice of Douglass, who set the trajectory for northern white audiences when he said, “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man.”Footnote ⁹⁴ Ellen's transformation – from slave to Mr. Johnson to freewoman – introduced a new trajectory: you have seen how a woman was made a slave; you shall see how she was made a man and master; you shall see how he was then made a woman or a genius.