The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown

Martha Cutter

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9780812298642
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: African American Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia, to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "Box Brown, " as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the United States, the United Kingdom, and Canada until his death in 1897. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown is the first book to show how subversive performances were woven into Brown's entire life, from his early days practicing magic in Virginia while enslaved, to his last shows in Canada and England in the 1890s. It recovers forgotten elements of Brown's history to illustrate the ways he made himself a spectacle on abolitionist lecture circuits via outlandish performances, and then fell off these circuits and went on to reinvent himself again and again. Brown's stunts included creating a moving panoramic picture show about his escape; parading through the streets dressed as a "Savage Indian" or "African Prince"; convincing hypnotized individuals that they were sheep who would gobble down raw cabbage; performing magic, dark séances, and ventriloquism; and even climbing back into his "original" box to jump out of it on stage.In this study, Martha J. Cutter analyzes contemporary resurrections of Brown's persona by leading poets, writers, and visual artists. Both in Brown's time and in ours, stories were created, invented, and embellished about Brown, continuing to recreate his intriguing, albeit fragmentary and elusive, story. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown fosters a new understanding not only of Brown's life but of modern Black performance art that provocatively dramatizes the unfinished work of African American freedom.

CHAPTER 1 Slavery and Freedom in US Visual Culture

The Performative Personae of William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth

Frederick Douglass was the most photographed nineteenth-century man in the US—more photographed than even President Lincoln—yet he rarely smiled in his pictures; one stated goal of his photographs was to counteract stereotypical images of “fancy-free” enslaved African Americans that he felt were endemic within photographs and illustrations of them. Sojourner Truth sold and marketed images of herself, sometimes with an enigmatic motto that read: “I sell the shadow to support the substance.” William and Ellen Craft escaped slavery through a ruse in which Ellen Craft—who was light-skinned—temporarily “passed” as (or pretended to be) not only white but also male, and William (who was darker-skinned) passed as her servant; to raise funds they sold an image of Ellen Craft in disguise, but in this image many parts of the costume she wore during her escape were removed, creating yet another persona for her. And the abolitionist author William Wells Brown exhibited a panorama of his escape from slavery called William Wells Brown’s Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave (1850) in which the protagonist and creator (Wells Brown) barely appears at all.

In photography, portraits, and panorama, these individuals seemed to present a version of their “true self” to the US public. Yet if examined closely, their imaging reveals that they were manipulating or visually performing some version of their identity. All these individuals were expected to realistically enact their enslavement and escape in speeches and lectures on the abolitionist stage and in their narratives. However, in the terrain of these various visual media they created subversive personae that allowed them to negotiate their self-representation, as well as remake and critique the visual realm via a fugitive performance that contests and complicates the ways they were viewed.¹

This chapter uses the visual performances of these five leading abolitionists in portraiture, panorama, and photography as a context to understand the radicalism of Box Brown’s performance work and visual self-presentation. I am most interested in how these five individuals—some of the most well-known Black abolitionists in the antebellum era—manipulated visual media to perform resistant versions of themselves yet did not entirely break from abolitionist codes for the proper and realistic presentation of stories of slavery, escape, and freedom. Visual media such as illustrated books, drawings, and photography were used extensively by white abolitionists to document the horror of slavery, and such visual modes were expected to be truthful. The five individuals discussed in this chapter played with the line separating the factual self from a performative or dramatized one, yet never quite crossed over this line in the way that Box Brown did, nor did they play with enslavement as if it were a toy, prop, or show. Because of this, at least in part, Wells Brown, the Crafts, Douglass, and Truth kept their names alive within the historical story of abolition, while Box Brown became a minor footnote in abolitionist history.

The Black abolitionists discussed in this chapter create complicated personae that allow them to question the realm of the visual. The visual personae created by Wells Brown, the Crafts, Douglass, and Truth cloak them in a certain invisibility, even as they seem to be proffering themselves to the world as true and valid representational subjects.² More importantly, these personae mediate their own visual representations but also allow them to gain a degree of agency within a visual domain. These individuals also create a type of visual static that interferes (often) with the smooth processing of their images. In using the term “visual static,” I go beyond Janet Neary’s very useful concept of “representational static.” Neary argues that in written narratives of enslavement, representational static constitutes “resistance to the speculative gaze” and takes the form of “unruly narrative gestures embedded in texts” that draw attention to the forces that produce, transmit, and authenticate images of enslavement.³ In using the term “visual static” I draw on a more pictorial domain in which images are distorted or muddled by captions that are oblique and elusive, disguises, and other specifically visual practices. I draw metaphorically on the concept of visual static or snow, an eye syndrome in which visual information is processed by the brain and eyes in such a way that individuals see flickering dots, like snow or static, within their visual field, as well as other visual distortions. In my usage of this term, visual static or snow makes something harder to see, contain, and surveil, blurring the image of the “real” person.⁴ Certain practices deployed by the Black abolitionists discussed here create a form of visual static within the images so that viewers see a hazy, flickering image of the formerly enslaved individual. This visual static constitutes resistance to a white gaze that would capture their image and (by extension) their full identity.

The story I tell in this chapter is complex, for we find individuals reacting in different ways to the two engines of the dominant culture that had created the prevailing visual representation of the enslaved: white abolition and the minstrel show. Many white abolitionists, both in England and in the US, tended to rely on a visual exhibition of the enslaved as abject, pitiful, passive, and tortured viewed objects, as Jasmine Cobb, Marcus Wood, Simon Gikandi, and I have argued.⁵ The popular nineteenth-century minstrel show, for its part, portrayed the enslaved as foolish, stupid, docile, or servile spectacles on the nineteenth-century stage. It therefore was vital that Black abolitionists attempt to circumvent this depiction of the enslaved as the abject and powerless objects of a white gaze, while also protecting themselves from incessant visual surveillance.

Like Box Brown, the individuals discussed in this chapter were fully aware of the problematic nature of visual media for those who were marginalized and disenfranchised by the dominant culture; visually, the enslaved often were represented as passive objects, rather than individuals with any degree of agency or power, or with any ability to look back at a viewer. In a discussion of changing modes of penal surveillance, the French philosopher Michel Foucault analyzes a circular prison structure called a panopticon whereby guards could constantly view their prisoners from within a central tower; in discussing this structure, he argues that “visibility is a trap.”⁶ What he means by this in a broader sense is that visibility can be a coercive social force, a means by which individuals are surveilled and controlled, and they often internalize this idea of perpetual scrutiny. Metaphorically the panopticon (whereby enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals are under continual surveillance by the overseer, the enslaver, or a white-dominant society) reflects the prevalent way of apprehending the politics of visuality under slavery. Moreover, as Nicholas Mirzoeff has argued, slavery itself depended on a structure in which the enslaved were deprived of the right to look (literally or symbolically blinded) and became the object of constant surveillance.⁷

However, as I show in this book via Brown and other African Americans who engaged visual modes, formulations such as those by Foucault are not seamless; there are ways in which formerly enslaved individuals exploit gaps and cracks in social structures of visuality that would seek to contain or surveil them, finding a resistant mode of looking back or performances that foil the spectator, turning him or her into the spectacle. Judith Butler argues that what we might call agency, freedom, or possibility is always “produced by the gaps opened up in regulatory norms, in the interpellating work of such norms, in the process of their self-repetition.”⁸ What she means by this is that freedom or agency as such is never pure but produced instead by exploiting fissures in systems of power and regulation. In this case we might say that Black abolitionists manipulate the visual realm to exploit gaps in its control, and from these fissures new modes of self-empowerment and resistance emerge via the visual realm itself. Before assessing their use of various visual media, however, I briefly turn to visual representations of enslavement within white abolition and the minstrel show to give context for the struggle of Black abolitionists to avoid being caught in a visual space that would only encourage stereotypical views of African American identity.

Visual Representations of Enslavement Within White Abolition and the Minstrel Show

While it might seem evident that the minstrel show would promote an image of the enslaved as less than fully human, the case with white abolitionists, both in England and in the US, is more complicated. To create sympathy for the enslaved, white abolitionists (with a few notable exceptions) tended to rely on a presentation of the enslaved as pitiful, passive, and tortured objects without the right to look back at a viewer. As Marcus Wood has carefully documented, abolitionist books, broadsides, pamphlets, and other visual materials were filled with the splayed and broken, half-naked and beaten bodies of the enslaved. Perhaps in the short term such a practice was effective, at least as a fundraising tactic; such presentations of the enslaved sold well, as I have already documented.⁹ Yet, in the longer term, this replication of debased images of the enslaved kept them within the space of abjection and pity, rather than equality.

Some theorists have argued against reproducing any of these derogatory images either verbally or via illustrations in order not to contribute to the dehumanization of the enslaved, while others have argued that such a reproduction is unavoidable and necessary.¹⁰ For my part, I consciously reproduce a few of these images to support my argument in this chapter and this book about modes through which Box Brown and other Black abolitionists performed themselves visually to resist dominant practices of looking at, and being seen by, predominantly white viewers. I include such images not to shock readers but because they demonstrate how enslaved or formerly enslaved individuals struggle to be represented as agentive or empowered within a visual realm controlled by white abolitionists.

One very popular image used by abolitionists in the US and England was that of the so-called “supplicant slave”—an enslaved man (or woman) down on his hands and knees, pleading to a white viewer with the question, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?” In 1800 or thereabouts the New-Jersey Society Promoting the Abolition of Slavery created a certificate of membership using this image; it depicts a white man gesturing toward a semi-naked and chained slave while holding a Bible in his hands. As if to bless this example of white benevolence toward the enslaved and the Christianization of a “savage,” divine light from Heaven shines down through a break in the clouds (see Figure 1.1). The viewer’s perspective in this type of imaging is directed at a low body (the slave) who begs to be granted his humanity by a white man who stands above him. In this pictorial image, the enslaved figure seems to query his own human identity, asking: “Am not I a Man and a Brother?” He looks up at the white man, rather than out at the viewer. Viewers cannot meet his glance because it is directed inward; we cannot perhaps see our own image in him due to this type of looking-in rather than looking-out. The figure depicted therefore lacks “I-sight,” a term that I will later explicate as a practice of sighting (seeing or envisioning the self), citing (authorizing the self via citation), and siting (placing the self within time and space; see Chapter 3). The enslaved man is instead represented as an object to be examined, rather than a human subject. I have discussed the imaging of the enslaved extensively elsewhere, so I will not belabor the point here except to say that many white abolitionist visual illustrations fail to depict the enslaved as self-possessed, resourceful human beings with the right to their own visual practices of looking and being seen by the viewer.¹¹

Moving forward to the mid-nineteenth century, we find a more technologically sophisticated usage of this same type of imaging in white abolitionist photography; as the historian Matthew Fox-Amato documents, from its earliest days photography “powerfully influenced how bondage and freedom were documented, imagined, and contested.”¹² In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations for Archives Consulted
• Introduction. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown, the Man Who Mailed Himself to Freedom
• Chapter 1. Slavery and Freedom in US Visual Culture: The Performative Personae of William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, Frederick Douglass, and Sojourner Truth
• Chapter 2. Becoming Box Brown, 1815–1857
• Chapter 3. Performing Fugitivity: Henry Box Brown on the Nineteenth-Century British Stage, 1857
• Chapter 4. Performing New Panoramas, Mesmerism, Spiritualism, and Second Sight, England, 1857–1875
• Chapter 5. Canada, the United States, and Beyond: Performing Slavery and Freedom, 1875–1897
• Chapter 6. The Absent Presence: Henry Box Brown in Contemporary Museums, Memorials, and Visual Art
• Chapter 7. Playing in the Archives: Box Brown in Contemporary Children’s Literature and Visual Poetry
• Coda. The Resilience of Box Brown and the Afterlives of Slavery
• Color plates
• Appendix. Selected Contemporary Creative Works About Henry Box Brown
• Notes
• Index