Orton Plantation, Wilmington, North Carolina, Exterior III. Photograph by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., 1945. White plantation house with columns. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, LC-C602-CT-[043].
THE POT CALLING THE KETTLE
White goods and the Construction of Race in Antebellum America
In I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969), Maya Angelou devotes an entire chapter to discussing a white woman’s china. At ten years old, the autobiographical character, Marguerite, must learn, like all “Negro girls in small Southern towns,” the “mid-Victorian values” of embroidery, elaborate table settings, organized meals, and the language of specialized ceramics (87). In order to do so, she must go to “the source of those habits”: “a white woman’s kitchen.” This white woman, Mrs. Cullinan, keeps house with “inhuman” exactness: “This glass went here and only here. That cup had its place and it was an act of impudent rebellion to place it anywhere else. At twelve o’clock the table was set. At 12:15 Mrs. Cullinan sat down to dinner (whether her husband had arrived or not). At 12:16 Miss Glory brought out the food.” Marguerite marvels at the proliferation of specialized dishes: there is “a salad plate, a bread plate and a dessert plate … goblets, sherbet glasses, ice-cream glasses, wine glasses, green glass coffee cups with matching saucers, and water glasses … [s]oup spoons, gravy boat, butter knives, salad forks and carving platter,” which, taken together, “almost represented a new language” (88–89). The language of tableware belongs exclusively to the white ladies who gather each afternoon for cold drinks, but although the ceramics constitute a “white” language, they carry messages for the black servants of the household also. Marguerite and Miss Glory may serve with Mrs. Cullinan’s dishes, but their own unspecialized drinking glasses are segregated to a separate shelf.
Marguerite soon discovers that Mr. Cullinan has fathered children with a black woman in town, but has left Mrs. Cullinan childless. Although this discovery is understated in Marguerite’s story, the husband’s interracial adultery informs the organization of Mrs. Cullinan’s entire household. When Mrs. Cullinan organizes a minutely set table and enforces strict punctuality for dining, she claims a control over her husband which she clearly does not have outside the dining room. These manifold pieces of white china become surrogate children, through which Mrs. Cullinan might compete with the specters of nonwhite children introduced into the family by her husband’s lack of discipline. She assembles her dishes into an army, ordering and maneuvering them as precisely as a general, hoping to drive out the blackness and all its manifestations—or at least confine it to a corner shelf. When Mrs. Cullinan tries to appropriate Marguerite also by calling her “Mary,” Marguerite responds with the ultimate symbolic violence. Deliberately breaking the white woman’s favorite dishes, Marguerite sends Mrs. Cullinan to the floor crying, “ ‘Oh Momma. Oh, dear Gawd. It’s Momma’s china from Virginia’ ” (92). But Mrs. Cullinan’s comic overreaction becomes understandable in terms of the real battle—for here is a black servant girl, herald of an ineluctable invasion, systematically destroying Mrs. Cullinan’s forces.
In the same way, the United States of the early nineteenth century fought to stanch the flow of blackness introduced by slavery, free blacks, and racial mixtures from invading the developing definition of “America.” Everyday household goods were a means to self-definition and national definition, but they were also a desperate campaign against the blackening of that image and against the darkening conscience of a newly freed people practicing slavery. The “whitening of America,” noted by archaeologist James Deetz, describes a consumer trend preferring increasingly white and refined goods from the Revolutionary War until the Civil War. In the whitening of dishes, house paint, and gravestones that Deetz identifies and the nineteenth-century whiteness of household interiors, sentimental clothing fashion, and literary heroines, antebellum consumers practiced a material exercise on a national level. These white things, I would argue, served a similar function to Mrs. Cullinan’s plates: they recognized the dangers of black slavery by trying to overwhelm it and push it back—beyond the walls of the house, outside the surrounding lands, even beyond the grave. They acknowledged slavery’s brutalizing effects by enforcing greater civilization and refinement. They rationalized its exploitation by stressing the difference between fine white china and coarse brown cups.
The “whitening” of America was in part a process of trying to establish definite boundaries between races: while washing the living spaces of white folks white, it continued to “color” whatever slave and servant spaces it could. Increasingly throughout the nineteenth century, white consumers knitted around themselves signifiers of whiteness, helping the nation attempt to segregate, deny, expel the blackness of slavery.
Touching all activities and all times of day, household objects explicitly linked slave labor with darkness and the master’s wealth with whiteness. The white goods preferred by consumers were also the most expensive, refined, and specialized. White paint and architecturally accented houses boasted of a professional designer; a cornice could cost more than an entire room to install. The rough-hewn slate gravestones were replaced by smooth, mass-marketed white marble that had to be imported. Porcelain-quality ceramics appeared in specialized sets that required elaborate training for their proper use. The corresponding goods issued to slaves were marked for contrast—by dark color, coarse finish, chipped or broken or dilapidated condition, and unspecialized design. Slave areas were geographically designated where possible, as most slave houses were segregated to the rear of the plantations. More often, the segregation was visual: laws required slaves to wear coarse “negro cloth,” ceramics issued to slaves were often dark or buff-colored, or chipped and unmatched hand-me-downs from the master’s set, or perhaps the wooden troughs and tin plates described by Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.1
Lydia Maria Child addresses a racial code that reveals the oppositional thinking becoming apparent by the nineteenth century: “as slavery inevitably makes its victims servile and vicious, and as none but negroes are allowed to be slaves, we, from our very childhood, associate everything that is degraded with the mere color” (Appeal 66, italics in text). Her emphasis on “mere color” also exposes the power that color, once unmoored from its original racial associations, attains. Nineteenth-century authors lifted racial readings from the “mere color” of everyday objects in order to draw added meaning from them. The children’s abolition journal The Slave’s Friend “tells young readers that ‘the chestnut has a dark skin.… But its kernel is all white and sweet. The apple, though it looks so pretty, has many little black grains at the heart …. Now little boys and girls can’t be abolitionists until they get rid of all these black grains in their hearts’ ” (qtd. in Samuels 160). A chestnut takes on racial applications, and an apple, drawing from these, also implies morality—without ever overturning a valuation based on color. A review of Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, written in 1851, complains of the immorality implied, but not mentioned, in the novel: “ ‘the language of [Hawthorne], like patent blacking, “would not soil the whitest linen,” and yet the composition itself, would suffice, if well laid on, to Ethiopize the snowiest conscience that ever sat like a swan upon that mirror of heaven, a Christian maiden’s imagination’ ” (qtd. in Grossman 25). In a succession of similes, language becomes patent blacking, which gains personhood and becomes African: the blackness of these threatens the whiteness of linen, conscience, and a Christian maiden’s imagination. In Moby Dick, Ishmael reads race into an everyday rope: comparing the traditional tar-covered hemp rope with the newly popular Manilla rope, he claims that “there is an aesthetics in all things” (238). Manilla rope “is much more handsome and becoming to the boat, than hemp. Hemp is a dusky, dark fellow, a sort of Indian; but Manilla is as a golden-haired Circassian to behold” (238). “Circassian” is another term for Caucasian, which includes a pun relating the woven rope to Circassian fabric. But the leap from seeing white rope as Caucasian or a dark chestnut as black to viewing the neighbor’s white house as inherently racial seems tiny and inevitable.
Earlier in Moby Dick, Ishmael tries to undermine the negative associations of blackness with the subversive admission, “[A]s though a white man were anything more dignified than a whitewashed negro” (60). Ralph Waldo Emerson uncovers a similar prejudice in his apparently optimistic statement, “We may yet find a rose-water that will wash the negro white” (157). Although both philosophers attempt to minimize race by painting it as only skin deep, they reveal what pro-slavery writers also insisted: that blackness and whiteness were biologically inescapable and socially determining.2 Both views suggest that the dark complexion itself is the source of slavery and racial prejudice, and that the plight of the “negro” may be countered by a cleansing treatment of whiteness. Blackness of the body merges into slavery, which as a condition describes tasks, privileges, social conditioning. In the racially charged atmosphere of antebellum America, a person could scarcely see white and not think of its opposite, which was not merely black, but black, Negro, slave.
Beneath the degradation of a mere color, Child laments the process of “racialization,” in which “slave and black became synonyms” (Nakayama and Martin 16). Law and common practice worked to reinforce the connection between slavery and the color black, but the link also depended upon the coincidence of emerging industrialism and America’s democratic experiment. In all the slave states except Delaware, Kenneth Stampp relates, “the presumption was that people with black skins were slaves unless they could prove they were free. Any strange Negro found in a southern community without ‘freedom papers’ was arrested as a fugitive” (194). Especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, “both legal and social presumptions equated being visibly colored with being a slave,” and “the idea of race was inseparable from the idea of slavery” (Kawash 43, 42). Emerging industrialism fostered a visual culture, a social understanding of visual clues that could replace detailed biographical knowledge of people in an increasingly mobile society (Halttunen). The conflict between older and newer styles of status judgment formed itself into binary thinking—so that visual binaries took the form most clearly as black and white. Ownership of property, culminating in the property of one’s own body, made up the outward show of status; slavery was cast as the ultimate lack of property or status.
“White” and “black” were signified by various types of property, however; they were material designations more than merely biological, so that users of the darkened goods were colored black, regardless of skin color. These objects worked to make race—and slavery—into a condition of color that seemed natural but not personal: white things, their ownership and proper management, constituted racial whiteness, and skin became simply another white thing. African American writers, abolitionists, and other social commentators might have attacked some of the racial assertions underlying the justifications of slavery—pointing to slaves’ work discipline, manners, cleanliness, and even pale skin—but they also had to address the covert conversation carried on in the goods they saw and used every day. The very simple conflation offered by Child, of “everything that is degraded” with “mere color,” remains simple, as increasing amounts of goods circulated and signified, reflected and reinforced the link between ownership of white things and privileged racial whiteness—and the assignment of, or defaulting to, darker things with slave conditions.
The houses, dishes, and gravestones that Deetz finds becoming whiter after the Revolution did so in an archaeologically sudden amount of time. Houses underwent exterior and interior changes, becoming segmented according to architects’ designs and becoming white according to exterior fashions. Georgian architecture, describing a strict bilateral symmetry in a house’s layout, spent much of the eighteenth century replacing Medieval housing styles and one- or two-room cabins.3 This change created a greater universality in style among regions. Although regional differences existed—and these included dates when styles became popular as well as landscape layout and building materials used—similarities among Georgian houses “far exceeded the differences” (Deetz, Small Things 112). Before the nineteenth century, large houses were often painted white while the smaller ones were painted more “natural” colors.4 But Georgian architecture by the late eighteenth century was characterized by whiteness: from the red, tan, green, or unpainted look of ethnically specific houses, popular choice moved to “nearly invariable whiteness” (Glassie, Folk Housing 156). Houses achieved this basic whiteness through evolution. Glassie traces a progression in house decoration strikingly similar to that of ceramic design once whiteness was achieved: “[i]n time the change [in house color] was from several basic colors (white, red, yellow) to one color with multicolored trim … to one color with one trim color … and finally to blank white.”5
Orton Plantation, Wilmington, North Carolina, Exterior III. Photograph by Gottscho-Schleisner, Inc., 1945. White plantation house with columns. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, Gottscho-Schleisner Collection, LC-C602-CT-[043].
This style of whiteness was uniquely American. According to architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, “Romantic Classicism,” which he uses to include the various “revival” styles such as Greek and Roman revival, arrived in the United States near the turn of the nineteenth century and remained until the Civil War, and these styles were characterized by symmetry and whiteness. The “almost universal use of Grecian forms in domestic building,” he continues, was specifically American, because buildings derived not from European architects but rather from Americanized versions published in guidebooks (121). These various classical styles replaced, among the more progressive builders, the Georgian style. In Roman Classicism, the building imitates Roman temple form, with four column and plain white moldings (Blumenson 23). Greek revival follows Greek temple form, with columns and full entablature, and often the entire building is painted white (Blumenson 27).
Gothic revival houses, which became popular in the 1830s, were part of a counter-current Picturesque movement, emphasizing asymmetry, more elaborate and textured detail (Hitchcock 143). In the style of Gothic architecture, John Ruskin argues in 1851, “slavery is done away with altogether” (160). The standardization, division of labor, and repetitive manufacture that produces other revival styles implicate their consumers “in the slave trade,” Ruskin argues: “and in a much more cruel one than that which we have so long been endeavoring to put down.”6 Ruskin not only comments upon an artistic response’ to a counter-cultural concern here, but also demonstrates how even building construction, however distant in time and place, is colored by considerations of slavery. Despite the presence of Gothic revival houses, nonetheless, the white house with green shutters was “almost a cliché for middling houses” by the mid-nineteenth century (Bushman 258).
At the same time, this whitening process was occurring with ceramics and the rules of dining. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, American households rarely ritualized meals. Usually, a table was set with only the essential plates, spoons, and drinking vessels, and “people typically ate with their hands and sat on benches, trunks, or the edges of beds” (Shackel 101). Meals were taken communally from wooden trenchers and pewter plates, or with unspecialized buff or red ceramics glazed in yellow or green. By the mid-eighteenth century, however, trenchers began to be replaced by more standardized, specialized dishes, and by whitish rather than natural-colored ceramics (Deetz, Small Things 47). European potters experimented in order to duplicate the fine white porcelain of China, which England finally mastered in 1792 (Majewski and O’Brien 24). By the 1780s, the popularity of English Staffordshire pearlware accomplished a “[n]ear complete whiteness of the ceramic assemblage.”7 Beginning with the nineteenth century, refinements in ceramic manufacture were paralleled by a movement towards even whiter dishes: pearlware eclipsed creamware; cream-colored ware improved upon yellow ware; and whiteware arrived between 1820 and 1830 as “a logical development along a continuum of refinements in paste and glaze.” This popular whiteware, mostly used as tableware, was “almost pure white in color” but was almost always decorated (Majewski and O’Brien 22). Deetz explicitly states this progression from buff-colored ceramics in the 1750s, to an off-white dish with ivory-colored glaze, to a white body and bluish-white glaze, to a strictly white pottery with a colorless glaze in the 1830s (Deetz, Small Things 48). But whitening continued beyond the ceramic dish, and after 1850 the finer near-porcelain white ironstones “were either left plain or embellished with unpainted molded geometric, foliate, or floral motifs” (Majewski and O’Brien 23). A contemporary advisor prescribes a “ ‘china of entire white’ ” as “ ‘the most popular for everyday use,’ ” and the ceramic record confirms this practice (Wall, “Family Meals” 126).
Historian Alan Gowans notes the similarities between ceramic and architectural styles of the early nineteenth century, declaring that pastels set against white trims made “whole buildings, outside and in, resemble in effect contemporaneous Wedgwood china” (Gowans 168). Among architecture and gravestones, similarities evolved as well. A popular design on nineteenth-century gravestones was the classical column engraved as a border. Even more striking, larger markers of sculpted marble columns which appear broken at the top serve as a visual tale of a promising life prematurely ended. These designs emerge early in the century and continue to dot cemeteries at the Civil War. In both North and South, the widespread urn gravestones also refer to ceramic vessels; in the South, however, folk customs utilized actual ceramic markers baked into urn shapes (Brackner).
In the seventeenth century, a very few Boston gravestones were made from a “white, sandlike material,” but in the eighteenth century stones were carved from dark-colored schists, slates, and sandstones (Deetz, “Material” 223). Contrary to popular belief, Harriet Merifield Forbes writes, much of the slate used was not imported; regional varieties and local stonecutters’ skill lent irregularity to a graveyard’s look (8). Even earlier, field stones from the surrounding country, roughly carved or not, were used to mark graves (Forbes 8). Soon after the American Revolution, however, grave markers began appearing in imported white marble, and churchyard graves became standardized and white.
Although the choice for white stones was simultaneous with the choice for white dishes, the marble that became popular in the early nineteenth century, “or at least some form of white stone, could have been used earlier” (Deetz, “Material” 223). These stones also showed change in shape and design. Halfway into the eighteenth century, the popular designs found on New England gravestones shifted from a death’s head motif to a cherub, and by the close of the century to the willow-and-urn design (Dethlefsen and Deetz 504). The willow-and-urn motif “signals the end of the slate-gravestone tradition in New England” (Dethlefsen and Deetz 503). In addition, the rough blocks marking eighteenth-century graves gave way to a stone more smoothly finished, on both front and back (Deetz, “Material” 227). Great amounts of research have been done focusing on the changing styles of these stones in New England—although Southern and Western studies also enrich the record—but the whiteness of these markers throughout the early nineteenth century remains a given.8
The timing of whiteness’s popularity in America is especially significant. In architecture, the white revival styles became popular in the 1790s. For ceramics, the technology for whitening also pre-existed its demand—it had been available since the 1560s—but consumer desire only grew at the turn of the nineteenth century (Yentsch, “Symbolic” 213). Pure white ceramics existed with Chinese porcelain in the seventeenth century, but, “significantly, [these] were never central to food-ways” (Deetz, “Material” 223). In the North, gravestone styles shifted from local slates to imported marbles gradually, from the mid-eighteenth century until whiteness reached prominence by the 1820s. In the Southeast, however, the change was more dramatic: the year 1800 seems to be an invisible boundary, after which only a few rare dark stones appeared in the churchyards. The coincidental timing of these white goods points to a near obsession with whiteness in these decades: combined with an interest in impossibly white heroines among novelists with diverse political agendas, and with the mounting abolitionist movement, women’s movements, and class riots, these white things represent an ideological army, expected to fight its battles on multiple fronts.
Color was the most overt indicator of ceramic vessels’ functions and their users’ status. Natural colors were most often applied to coarse storage or cooking vessels, while white was used for the finer display dishes. Ceramics were graded from the coarse earthenwares and stonewares, to the more refined earthenwares, to the dense, thin, and expensive porcelains. Although ware color in part depended on the clay available, color distinctions defined the type and use of vessels rather than the other way around. In other words, vessels used for food preparation, storage, and cooking were made predominantly nonwhite. In Philadelphia, for example, local potters produced inexpensive redwares for use in the kitchen, pantry, cellar and chamber, but “middling and upper middling Philadelphians owned little [of it], even to store prepared and preserved foods” (De Cunzo 69). Since wealthier urban households could afford to purchase fresh food, even storage became a lower-class activity. The “whitening” dishes were almost all refined earthenwares, meant for the table, and the porcelains were largely for dining or display (McKee, personal interview 1997). Coarse earthenwares and stonewares composed utilitarian storage and cooking vessels, and some pre-nineteenth-century serving and eating vessels (McKee, personal interview 1997). Despite available technology, “stoneware cooking or storage vessels were produced in the dark-toned tradition of earlier earthenwares long into the nineteenth century” (Yentsch, “Symbolic” 213). And the coarser local pottery almost never became tableware or tea sets (McKee, personal interview 1995).
Until nearly the Civil War, British manufacturers mastered the ceramic market, but the product imported to the United States was aimed specifically at Americans. By the 1790s, the British had circulated inexpensive creamware worldwide; in 1797, a traveler claims to have seen it throughout Europe, the West Indies, and America (Miller, “Marketing” 2–3). However, the whitish Staffordshire ceramics popular in the United States were manufactured with a sensitivity to this market. White ironstone dishes were made specifically for America and “not sold at all in Britain where they were made … presumably because there was no demand for them there” (De Cunzo 78). In fact, the United States was Staffordshire’s largest customer “every year between the end of the War of 1812 and the eve of the Civil War,” purchasing close to half of the manufacturer’s exports. Staffordshire therefore accommodated some of its designs to American tastes—which included the whiteness of the dishes no less than their periodic designs of American heroes and events (Miller, “Marketing” 3).
The earliest examples of English ceramics made specifically for America began with Josiah Wedgwood and the Revolutionary War effort (Klamkin 3). Marian Klamkin offers a survey of patriotic china: Wedgwood’s early products included intaglio seals declaring sympathy with the rebelling colonies with “the motif of a coiled rattlesnake and the legend ‘Don’t Tread on Me,’ ” first distributed in 1777. Afterwards, in the beginning of the nineteenth century, “yellow ware” in the shape of jugs, mugs, and punch bowls was manufactured and decorated in Liverpool for the American market (Klamkin 5–6). Most of the American-influenced pottery made in England before the Civil War consisted of inexpensive earthenware and was decorated with various American scenes or political messages. Presidential candidates from John Adams to Richard Nixon found their faces on plates and jugs of the poorest quality ceramics—the focus being the message rather than utility.
Aside from the busts and silhouettes of famous statesmen, images of architecture predominate in American designs. Plates celebrate the White House (with cows in the foreground), New York City Hall, Columbia College and Yale, Boston’s Museum, State House, and Hospital—ranging even to the corner view of Mitchell and Freeman’s China and Glass Warehouses in Boston. Even designs with non-architectural foci, such as a “Historic elm” in Massachusetts or the “Sternwheel steamboat” in Philadelphia include classical white architecture in the background (Klamkin 32, 31). American ceramics therefore trumpeted their coalition with architecture in the progress of whitening. America’s participation in the world market of mass-produced plates accompanied a specifically American passion for Roman and Greek revival styles, telling of an evolution in the etiquette of dining and household use which necessarily left some people behind.
The Wedgwood company participated in American politics twice without acknowledging its involvement: with the “Don’t Tread on Me” seals and with antislavery ceramics alone, Wedgwood did not place its mark on its products (Klamkin 6). As early as 1786, Josiah Wedgwood produced ceramic cameos that pictured the silhouette of a kneeling slave in chains. The uncharacteristic colors of black and white jasper were often accompanied with the motto, “ ‘Am I not a Man and a Brother?’ ” This design was later copied by other ceramic manufacturers and set into “rings, shirt pins, buttons, brooches, and so forth” to be distributed to abolitionist Americans and British. Around 1837, a Staffordshire potter produced an elaborate antislavery plate whose design was then transferred to tea and dinner services. Printed in “a light purplish blue”—a color popular in Europe but less favored than the cobalt blue common to American dishes—images and pictures nearly blanket the white background. A gift to American abolitionists from the English Anti-Slavery Society, the original plates were to be sold at auction and proceeds donated to the Society of Abolitionists (Klamkin 102). Wedgwood also refrained from placing its mark on this design.
Wedgwood’s ceramic participation in abolition made supporting the cause more visible, but its choice of settings also distinguished its purchasers. Painted on cameos for items such as rings and brooches, or printed on the dining sets of the highly refined, the image of the kneeling slave reinforced his contribution to whitened luxury even as he condemned it. Cameos did not become plain-looking pins, but rather were set in gold, surrounded by pearls to become an ornament, so that abolitionists could be seen as proprietors of their kneeling black “brothers” as much as their Southern opponents were. While the cameo’s startling black-on-white reminded onlookers of a situation they may have preferred to ignore, it also reinforced the contrast between the wealthy white wearers and the objects of their energies.9 This supplicating slave became, through ceramic mass-production, “the single most common visual representation of a black slave” (Savage 21). The abolitionist movement also produced black marble images of this slave as visual mementos, and the image found its way onto many products, from “books and broadsides to pincushions and pen wipers” (Savage 23). An even more sensational depiction of a fugitive slave cowering in a swamp, and hounded by a whip-wielding slave hunter and dogs, “became so popular as a symbol that dinner plates were made with the scene for a center motif; the handles of silverware were embossed with the story.”10 The troubling junction of an elegant meal and such a terrible image contributed to the racial politics of material things, I would argue, even as it denounced the abuses of slavery. The contrast between white comfort, sensually presented by the meal and the dining accessories, and black abuse, represented on dishes and silverware, enlisted the diners’ sympathy but also emphasized their superiority—their wealth, refinement, self-mastery, and whiteness.
In producing ceramics, local American potters were successful with some “blue and gray” and yellow-with-brown-glazed stoneware, but Americans were largely unsuccessful with creamware; the British creamwares and other whitewares made up most of table and tea ware in the nineteenth century (Noel Hume 99–101). In the stonewares, the American pottery was also used for “storage, spittoons, harvest bottles, cream pans, and pitchers”—all marked for private, non-display functions (Noel Hume 101). Unrefined American-produced earthenware was “the match of [its] English cousins” (Noel Hume 99). Such coarse earthenware was also used for food preparation and storage rather than for display, and color ranged from red to green.
Shades of whiteness and fineness became almost a chart for household status: degrees off of white demonstrated the task’s descending rank in the household. This distinction translated to the vessels’ users as well: servants, slaves, and lower-class housewives cooked and “put up” food, while businessmen and families with servants and slaves held polite gatherings and ate from the dishes. Thus working vessels were marked as the out-of-style, less refined types, outlining the evolution of tableside civilization. In the white households of the South, much greater quantities of white ceramics have been found than in the North (Yentsch, “Symbolic” 221). Ceramics found on slave sites were distinct from those used by the neighboring planters; although slaves may have used discarded, unmatched dishes from the planter’s household, they were more often issued dark, undecorated earthenwares. At slave sites in Cannon’s Point plantation in Georgia, John Solomon Otto finds that these coarse earthenwares made up almost 70 percent of ceramic sherds found (105). The contrast between the planters’ white dishes and the slaves’ dark dishes highlights the suddenness of the material record’s whitening. In the South, where slaves represent a conspicuous reminder of debt and danger, white plates were more abundant; on Southern plantations, where slaves greatly outnumbered their white masters, the material battle was even more pronounced.
This studied contrast to the dining ware of slaves reveals a conscious assignment of hierarchy to color, design, and specialization of ceramics. Otto suggests that slaves could obtain dishes in a number of ways: receiving a specially issued type from the planter, receiving chipped or damaged hand-me-downs from the planter’s table, or purchasing their own dishes with money earned in their spare time (95). In the last case, the slave participates in the market and in the meanings that his or her dishes radiate. In the first two ways, however, the social meaning of ceramics lies in the master’s power: “[t]he slaves’ association with these ceramics is entirely material; no economic relation occurs between slaves and masters where these items are concerned, and the slaves do not enter the marketplace” (Orser 100). The planter’s savings when slaves obtained their own goods then had to be balanced against the risk of allowing them to assign their own meanings to these goods. For the majority of planters, meaning won out: most slaves used wooden plates and trenchers, discarded bowls and chipped plates, or specially issued dark ceramics.11
Use of white dishes and the manners needed to handle their specialized forks and plates indicated a degree of mastery usually withheld from slaves. In fact, the color of dishes illustrated the evolutionary difference between masters and slaves, as ritualized dining guarded against “a recognition that the process of eating might reduce all involved to an animal level of appetite and competition” (Kasson 139). Frederick Douglass acknowledges table manners to be part of white mastery, declaring that a slave child “is never chided for handling his little knife and fork improperly or awkwardly, for he uses none. He is never reprimanded for soiling the tablecloth, for he takes his meals on the clay floor …. He is never expected to act like a nice little gentleman, for he is only a rude little slave” (My Bondage 31). Freedom from the requirements of gentlemanly behavior, however, necessitates an association with the animal. Douglass later describes how at mealtime “the children were called, like so many pigs; and like so many pigs they would come” (85). Thus, when Frederick Douglass recalls eating from a wooden tray with an oyster shell, he reveals not only a material hierarchy ranging from “natural” slave dish to refined white tableware, but he also exposes the evolutionary justification embedded in ceramics: slaves eat in a decades-old tradition of wooden plates or earthenware, while the upper class dines on elaborately ordered white ceramics.
Speaking as an educated, successful, and mixed-race ex-slave—an embodiment of cultural contradictions—Douglass allows his readers to cling to the polarities that dishes enforce: gentleman or animal, master or servant, white or black. Indeed, these binaries inform the construction of whiteness that he would undermine. After conceding the civilized manners denied to slaves, Douglass asserts the superior etiquette practiced by them. He explains that slave children must show respect for elders, address them as “Uncle” and “Aunt,” and acknowledge favors with a “tank’ee.” Subtly, Douglass turns the exclusionary function of white etiquette against itself: “[s]o uniformly are good manners enforced among slaves,” he claims, “that I can easily detect a ‘bogus’ fugitive by his manners” (My Bondage 48–49).
John Pendleton Kennedy explicitly links dining with civilization in his Virginian plantation novel, Swallow Barn (1832), as his narrator recalls an elaborate Southern dinner party that includes the area’s gentlemen and their families. Among the bountiful meats, poultry, seafood, and pickles, the mistress somewhat disturbingly presents a ham “clothed in its own dark skin, which the imaginative mistress of the kitchen had embellished by carving into some fanciful figures” in a manner “worthy of imitation” (326). After describing in detail the layout of the table, the narrator gives equal attention to the slaves serving at the table: “A bevy of domestics, in every stage of training, attended upon the table, presenting a lively type of the progress of civilization, or the march of intellect; the veteran waitingman being well-contrasted with the rude half-monkey, half-boy, who seemed to have been for the first time admitted to the parlor” (326–327). Admission into the formal parts of the house directly corresponds to evolutionary development and intelligence for this pro-slavery writer—and this rule applies to the slaves as well as their masters. Of course, the “bevy” of servants stands separate in all respects from those dining: the slaves are described as part of the table setting, not as part of the company.
For the planters, participation in the dining room depended upon proper comportment within—the training in etiquette and manners that demonstrated proper use of refined goods. So strict did injunctions become against outbursts of any kind, that the narrator detects in a man’s “rather obstreperous laugh” evidence of descending class status (328). From the gentleman’s inappropriate laughter at the dinner table, the narrator finds him occupying “that questionable ground which a gentleman of loose habits and decaying reputation is pretty sure to arrive at in his descending career,” which includes associating with lower-class men who make a “visible impression on his manners” (328). In this instance, the conviction that manners reflect high-class training is so powerful that a decline in class status must necessarily produce a lapse in manners.
As an overtly pro-slavery novel, Swallow Barn labors to present the rationalizations between planter and slave in a positive light. In a description of slave cabins, for example, their physical contrast to Frank Meriwether’s sprawling mansion with its “thick brick walls” and courtyard “suggesting the idea of comfort in the ample space” the buildings fill, does not disqualify the cabins’ own “picturesque” comfort (27, 28). The slave quarter consists of “hovels,” some of which are “built after the fashion of the better sort of cottages” except that “age had stamped its heavy traces upon their exterior” (449). The roofs are mossy, the weatherboarding broken “into chinks” (449). The “more lowly” style of cabins, also the “most numerous,” is “composed of the trunks of trees, still clothed with their bark,” “with so little regard to neatness that the timbers … jutted beyond each other”: the hovels’ dimensions are not more than “twelve feet square, and not above seven in height” (449). The cabins have a door and a window, and wood chimneys coated with mud. Despite their primitiveness, they form “an exceedingly picturesque landscape”: “[t]he rudeness of their construction rather enhanced the attractiveness of the scene” (449). In all, the narrator summarizes, they could be compared in appearance to tea kettles (450).
Kennedy uses this setting to explain the happiness of the slaves, which renders such crowding “picturesque” rather than squalid. Although the narrator has claimed to have visited the plantation with Northern abolitionist preconceptions, observation of his cousin’s management has changed his mind: “In short,” he concludes about the slaves, “I think them the most good-natured, careless, light-hearted, and happily-constructed human beings I have ever seen. Having but few and simple wants, they seem to me to be provided with every comfort which falls within the ordinary compass of their wishes” (454, 455). With this posture, the narrator takes the slaves out of the range of the American economic system. They do not desire much; these desires are readily provided; they form a simple closed equation of not having and not wanting. Throughout the novel the narrator freely associates slaves with animals—in this same passage, they become “tarrapins luxuriating in the genial warmth,” noisy “blackbirds,” and “parasitical” (451, 454). In another nation, he admits, the black population might become respectable, but in the “Old Dominion” the slave system successfully shelters it from want.
One’s house provided another evolutionary declaration, and the plantation landscape presented it to the field slaves, visitors, and passersby who were never admitted to view the master’s china. In 1818, a Southern traveler notes that “ ‘a journey from New Orleans to the mouth of the Sabine, exhibits man in every stage of his progress, from the palace to the hut’ ”—outlining that one’s dwelling was always an exhibit advertising one’s evolutionary distance from savages and slaves (qtd. in Bushman 383). In the seventeenth century, slave housing was similar to that provided for white indentured servants—often they slept in the master’s house, or in any of the scattered sheds, or in large, “dormitory-style dwellings” (McKee, “Ideals” 197, 195). In the eighteenth century, slave quarters were removed to form a “village” of their own; one typical arrangement lined slave houses along the drive approaching the main house (McKee, “Ideals” 197; Lewis 38). These visible cabins served to demonstrate a planter’s wealth, and would have been kept as ordered as possible; they usually belonged to the house slaves. J. W. Joseph also notes that field slave quarters in colonial times were more often located on the periphery of the plantation, away from the view of the master and freer from his control (58). Stored in unspecialized sheds, slaves received a treatment similar to other farming tools. In the far-off fields, the predominantly African slaves could be viewed as people, but ones with a closer connection to nature than to civilization—workers who were culturally as well as geographically distant from the European settlers.
At the end of the eighteenth century, the arrangement in general shifted from lining the forecourt of the main house to flanking the house on either side (Lewis 38). Common slave quarters for house slaves were smaller than the big house, which itself was usually smaller than a moderately sized Northern house. One room per slave family usually measured twelve or fifteen feet square. According to Olmsted, touring the South in the 1850s, slave cabins were usually “log-cabins, of varying degrees of comfort and commodiousness. At one end there is a great open fire-place, which is exterior to the wall of the house, being made of clay in an inclosure, about eight feet square and high, of logs. The chimney is sometimes of brick, but more commonly of lath or split sticks, laid up like log work and plastered with mud …. Several cabins are placed near together, and they are called ‘the quarters’ “(Olmsted 81–82). The most common type in the nineteenth century was a double cabin for two different families, with a central chimney serving both sides and a door on each half (Vlach, Back 22).
In the nineteenth century, slave cabins occupied the same space and category as other work sheds on the plantation: among the cabins were kitchens, stables, outbuildings, and overseers’ houses. These separate outbuildings performed similar functions to the one large barn found on the Northern house lot. They served also, in their resemblance to slave cabins, to remind slaves of their place, among livestock and other household goods. North of the Mason-Dixon line, barn arrangement varied according to climate, but all conveyed a definition of work different from Southern barns. In New England, the layout was sometimes a courtyard arrangement, with house and barn parallel and sheds in between, forming a loose square. Sometimes house and barn each had separate clusters of sheds around them (Glassie, “Eighteenth” 415). Visually this arrangement allowed equal importance to the social building and the work building even though they were kept separate. In the South, the kitchen and various outbuildings were housed in small sheds ranging behind the planter’s living quarters. This distancing of all work areas from the house proper rendered the main house a strictly formal white domain. Donald Linebaugh argues that the distance between the main house and such sheds as the kitchen, the dairy house, and the smoke house was a predominantly practical concern: stored food and processed milk carried with them strong odors, and the kitchen added excessive heat (3). Yet his argument fails to consider the implications of such practical concerns. The desire to segregate smells, to maintain a hygienic family gathering place, developed alongside the desire to segregate slave labor. In the not-too-distant past, Anglo-Saxon ancestors had been sharing their homes with the livestock.
Planters took pains to present these sheds and their functions in a certain way also. Some farms, for example, lined sheds up alongside the house, next to slave cabins. These would not only display the main house’s grandeur better by contrast, they would present a united, productive front to those approaching by the front drive. Such flanking buildings would not proclaim their own presence, but rather would reinforce the status of the main house by stating their ability to provide for the farmer’s needs. Often, however, the outbuildings were located behind the house, not intended for view by visitors (Joseph 59). In this way, white planters could connect the blackness of their slaves with the bruteness of manual labor, and send them both from their sight simultaneously.
Traditionally, overseer’s houses were placed halfway between the main house and the slave cabins, clearly marking the rank and function of the inhabitant (Vlach, Back 136). Although mediating between the master and his slaves, however, the architecture of the overseer’s house and the goods within it told different stories. Otto finds on Cannon’s Point plantation that the overseer’s house resembles the master’s in “construction materials, permanency, square footage per occupant, and location”—thereby distinguishing the free whites on the plantation from the slaves (Joseph 60). As seen from material remains around the cabins, however, the overseer resided on closer terms economically with the slaves than with the master (Joseph 60). The discrepancy emphasizes the importance of visual ranking according to race: unless one entered the overseer’s house or shared a meal with him, the overseer’s relation to his employer would appear closer than his relationship to the slaves. The overseer’s status on individual plantations varied, however. On some farms, the overseer’s house was located among the slave cabins and distinguished only by its slightly larger size and position at the head of the street (Vlach, Back 136). How the overseer was housed thus depended on the emphasis that the planter placed on race in relation to class, or perhaps the race of the overseer: any visual links with the planter’s house would be a claim for his whiteness and social superiority.
The layout and form of the house was therefore a racial statement similar to the assignment of dishes, and on Southern plantations the statement was made with greater emphasis. Frederick Douglass understands the meanings of the walls and dishes and, in shaping his narrative, uses these material messengers to reverse the binary and impose a slave’s perspective upon his readers. His foremost argument against slavery is the ignorance it enforces. He begins his Narrative of the Life with a series of claims about the knowledge that has been withheld from him,12 and then proceeds to withhold strategic knowledge from his readers throughout the narrative. As he imposes this perspective, he inverts the white readers’ understanding of their environment—of white things. In his revision of the Narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass elaborates on the techniques and descriptions that have been successful in the earlier work. As he describes his plantation, for example, he begins with the buildings farthest from the great house:
There was the little red house, up the road, occupied by Mr. Sevier, the overseer. A little nearer to my old master’s, stood a very long, rough, low building, literally alive with slaves, of all ages, conditions and sizes. This was called “the Long Quarter.” Perched upon a hill, across the Long Green, was a very tall, dilapidated, old brick building—the architectural dimensions of which proclaimed its erection for a different purpose—now occupied by slaves, in a similar manner to the Long Quarter. Besides these, there were numerous other slave houses and huts, scattered around in the neighborhood, every nook and corner of which was completely occupied. Old master’s house, a long, brick building, plain, but substantial, stood in the center of the plantation life, and constituted one independent establishment on the premises of Col. Lloyd. (My Bondage 47)
The houses of Mr. Sevier and “Old Master” stand on either end of the slave housing, physically surrounding the hundreds of slaves for supervision and control. Mr. Sevier’s house, small, red, and far away from the great house, marks him as a lesser overseer, while Old Master’s is made of brick and at “the center of plantation life,” indicating him as the chief clerk of Colonel Lloyd and of higher rank than Mr. Sevier.
While Old Master’s dwelling may be between the slaves’ and the plantation owners’, and thus literally in the center of the plantation’s work area, Douglass reveals a slave’s perspective in designating it central. To the owner of the plantation, the great house would be central, balanced by the workyards in back and the formal entrance and lawns in front. The landscape according to upper-class viewers, Dell Upton argues, existed as a series of barriers, while the issue of control dominates a slave’s vision (“Imagining” 74). For the wealthy white viewer, the early nineteenth-century landscape would have appeared as a network of white houses, with the terraced floral grounds as frames, and roads as a means from one to another. For this reason, Olmsted, as an upper-class Northern traveler, expresses exasperation when he receives directions from slaves or common folk. He quotes at length the directions received from a farmer, which include fallen-in cabins, fences, unidentifiable schoolhouses and hidden big houses. But of these Olmsted sees “hardly anything” except “a continuation of pine trees, big, little, and medium in size, and hogs, and a black, crooked, burnt sapling” (52). From a slave he repeatedly asks the distance to a certain house, but the slave can only estimate how long the journey will take (54). His frustration comes from a difference in perspective: the farmer’s directions draw from a knowledge of the history of the area and of the endpoints of each small path. The slave’s concerns are for the travelling time that he might control, rather than the measured land that he cannot. Olmsted only becomes confused when directed through ruined cabins and unused fields: these are the hidden and ignored elements of a planter’s formal landscape. For Douglass, a slave who is absolutely ruled by Old Master, the plantation radiates from his overseer’s house to the fields, hardly accounting for the formal grounds that would constitute Olmsted’s landmarks.
Douglass recreates this viewpoint when he culminates his description with “the grandest building my eyes had then ever beheld, called, by everyone on the plantation, the ‘Great House.’ ” He continues, however, reversing the perspective his audience would be accustomed to from reading travel literature such as Olmsted’s. Illustrating the house from back to front, Douglass proceeds from its outbuildings, “all neatly painted,” to the house itself, and finally to the formal carriage drive leading to the road. The great house was “a large, white, wooden building, with wings on three sides of it. In front, a large portico, extending the entire length of the building and supported by a long range of columns, gave to the whole establishment an air of solemn grandeur” (My Bondage 47). A model of Greek revival architecture, the great house simultaneously signifies mastery over the dilapidated slave cabins and upper-classness over the overseer’s little red house. For Greek revival architecture, Gwendolyn Wright argues, popularity depended on its flexibility of meaning. In the east, its reference to ancient Greek democracies and the current Greek fight for independence praised “civic virtue and social reform,” while in the West it represented “simple ways and democratic strength,” and in the South, “the heritage of slavery and aristocratic leadership” (Wright 33). Possibly, a fascination with ancient Greece and its internal contradictions, combined with the whiteness and order of the architecture, seems more to indicate America’s agonizing over its own best and worst ideas. Douglass reads the mansion’s message both as it is intended and in the more cynical view of the exploited slave: it “was a treat to my young and gradually opening mind,” he proclaims, “to behold this elaborate exhibition of wealth, power, and vanity” (My Bondage 47).
At the end of his description, Douglass arrives at the front entrance, which includes a “large gate, more than a quarter of a mile distant from” the house; the “road, or lane, from the gate to the great house, was richly paved with white pebbles from the beach” (My Bondage 47). Douglass thus concludes his description with the white road leading to the mansion as peripheral, if grand. Studying the Stocktons’ late eighteenth-century site, Morven, in Princeton, New Jersey, archaeologist Anne Yentsch finds a user-oriented design to its paths also. According to Yentsch, the landscaping there similarly distinguished functions of the house, assigning rank to each activity according to the coloring of the walks. The area around the front door—the public entrance—and the entrance for visiting businessmen and clients were paved in a whitish limestone material and elevated from the rest of the yard. The entrance to the kitchen and the doorway leading to the well and icehouse, used by slaves and farm laborers, were paved in a “reddish brown fieldstone material” and depressed from the rest of the yard. Yentsch interprets these color-codings as denoting high (white) and low (brown) rankings, community-oriented versus family-oriented activities—but they can clearly also indicate the formal refinement belonging to the whites of the Big House as compared to the manual labor assigned to the slaves behind it (“Access” 258).
As the paths and work areas were color-coded according to the labor performed there, certain types of labor were also inextricably bound to race. Olmsted reports that “no white man would ever do certain kinds of work (such as taking care of cattle, or getting water or wood to be used in the house); and if you should ask a white man you had hired, to do such things, he would get mad and tell you he wasn’t a nigger” (64). The entire plantation community understood the racial implications of the formal and work areas and the privilege or insult implied in the use of each.
In Narrative of the Life, Douglass uncovers the code of this white conversation in his discussion of Colonel Lloyd’s “large and finely cultivated garden” (59). The “greatest attraction of the place,” this garden is visited by people from far and near and abounds in “fruits of almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the delicate orange of the south” (59). Many urban and most rural households had gardens, but only the wealthiest arranged them into vast formal showcases for the house. More decorative than functional, landscaped gardens also carried an intentional message, and often intended to mislead. In the eighteenth century, these gardens were designed to enhance the visible impact of the house: its message of control and superiority was broadcast to the community. Typical of a Georgian garden was the same strict bilateral symmetry of the house. With outlined paths and molded flowerbeds and shrubbery, colonial gardens demonstrated a minute control over nature. These manicured grounds, providing a frame and a visual guide to the central white house, were meant to explain their owners’ superiority, Leone argues, as a “natural” condition (Leone 250). Proper rules for constructing a garden resemble those for civilized dining or house construction; design guidebooks in the nineteenth century continued a tradition of order and mastery as asserted in eighteenth-century formal gardens. Measurements and precise math were necessary to create the right effect. Elaborate efforts accompanied the wealthy’s display of scientific mastery, which by association, implied social and economic mastery as well.
Although visitors tour Colonel Lloyd’s garden, his slaves are prohibited from entering and denied a view by its high surrounding walls. Douglass emphasizes the fruits of both the North and the South contained within this garden in order to implicate both regions in such a display of wealth, which nonetheless flaunts its exclusion of the black laborers. This garden is admired by the plantation’s important visitors, but is also “not the least source of trouble” for the slaves (59). Since slaves are often tempted to steal fruit from it, the master paints his fence completely with tar, and whips any slaves caught with a trace of tar on their bodies. In this way, the slaves begin to realize “the impossibility of touching tar without being defiled” (59, italics in text). The master thus translates the monumental attraction of his garden into a statement of control and racial inferiority for his slaves. The slaves are made afraid of this transferable blackness, the tar, which becomes both boundary and threat—and their own blackness deflected back onto themselves. The inaccessibility promised by the garden’s black walls reflects the exclusionary efforts of the plantation’s white walls and dishes. But Douglass manipulates the reader according to these same principles. According to narrative tradition, we are entitled to a description of this pastoral paradise, but Douglass masters his slave’s-eye view thoroughly, by leaving us also outside the walls.
A large, black granite monument erected in the latter twentieth century stands in the churchyard of St. Peter’s in Columbia, South Carolina, memorializing the slaves whose wooden gravemarkers were lost to a nineteenth-century fire. Since death records for the slaves were scarce, the church has merely devoted the now-blank grassy space at the back of the yard to these burials. Throughout the rest of the churchyard, tall and sculpted white marble gravestones eulogize deceased white parishioners. Although the black monument is reverential, the contrast cannot be overlooked: fire or not, the wooden slave markers were doomed to an early destruction, and their studied insignificance reminded onlookers that even dead, black and white had a status.
As the first years of the nineteenth century witnessed the shift to white marble that stressed this contrast, they also saw a change in the popular motif that white folks’ gravestones displayed. Before 1750, Dethlefsen and Deetz report, the markers in New England cemeteries carry death’s-heads designs “almost universally” After 1760, this motif traded popularity with the cherub design, although particularly in rural cemeteries, a transition design called “spirit faces” can be found. Less frequently—although more in the South—portraits of the deceased appear on the headstone. The change to white marble brought with it a change to the urn-and-willow design, which at the beginning of the nineteenth century became “absolutely universal” and “the hallmark of Victorian gravemarkers” (Dethlefsen and Deetz 508).
The dates marking the changes from death’s head to willow-and-urn and slate to marble vary from region to region and in themselves are only estimates. Date of death on a tombstone does not indicate the exact date of engraving: sometimes years passed before families commissioned a tombstone for the deceased. At the same time, markers may have been engraved in advance of an order and waited years for a buyer, or one stone could have been carved to serve two family members though one still lived. However, Benes concludes that on the average in New England, stones were carved within two or four years of the individual’s death (5). Studying the emblems on these stones, Dethlefsen and Deetz detect a “battleship” pattern of popularity dates: the range of years when cherubs predominate, for example, covers the twenty years from 1760 to 1780, with examples to be found less often in the years immediately before and after (505). In the Southeast, the shifts in style “lagged approximately twenty years behind the initial shift in New England” (Gorman and DiBlasi 89). The move from death’s head to cherub occurred in Charleston cemeteries between 1750 and 1799 (Gorman and DiBlasi 89).
Line drawings of southern and northern death’s head motifs (top) and cherub motifs (bottom).
In Massachusetts, however, in cemeteries such as Burial Hill in Plymouth and Mount Auburn in Boston, the nineteenth-century shift to marble was more sporadic than that in Charleston. Burial Hill contains many dark slate tombstones with urn-and-willow carvings, even into the 1830s, and in fact has few decorated marble stones. In Charleston, the darker stones are nearly absent after the year 1799, and white marble becomes ubiquitous. Only a few nineteenth-century examples of black slate exist in the churchyards of Charleston: a willow-and-urn engraving for Solomon G. Low of Gloucester, Massachusetts, who died in 1822, and an 1809 tombstone with a skull and crossbones carved entirely in German.13 Even these exceptions prove the rule. In Massachusetts, a slate willow-and-urn would not have been uncommon in 1822, and the Charleston stone reminds its viewers that this was the dead man’s native state. The elaborate script on the German stone, itself a rarity, renders a double difficulty in reading the inscription. This stone also mentions a foreign nativity: Germany.14
(Left) Willow motif on white marble, St. John’s Lutheran, Charleston, South Carolina. Mrs. Lydia Ann Malt, died 1858. (Right) Willow-and-urn design on black slate gravestone, Burial Hill, Plymouth, Massachusetts. Stone belongs to Captain Rufus Robbins, died 1826. Photographs by Bridget Heneghan.
The reasons for such a definite break in gravestone color in the South may be explained by the scarcity of carvers. In Charleston, engravers would often stay for a few months to establish a practice, and then move back to New England and receive orders (Combs 6). The availability of raw material also played a role. Shipping costs, even for native stones, were often prohibitive: while marble quarries were found in Alabama in the early century, even Alabamans found local shipping costs to be comparable to importing from New England (Brackner 22). Possibly, if family members were required to ship a gravestone regardless, they chose the marble just coming into fashion.15 The churchyards of Charleston also represented the wealthiest of slaveholding families, so that expensive marble stones at the beginning of the nineteenth century might be more monolithically present than in Northern churchyards.16
At the same time, Charlestonians bore color-related anxieties in 1800 that New Englanders had shed. By 1800, slavery had virtually disappeared from Northern states: Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island legislated a gradual abolition beginning in the 1780s, and New York and New Jersey legislated effective abolition in 1799. By 1792 “there were antislavery societies in every state from Massachusetts to Virginia” (Franklin 93). Toussaint L’Ouverture, leader of the slave rebellion in Haiti, was “at the height of his power” in 1800 and other slave rebellions surrounded the century mark (Franklin 101). On January 1, 1808, the African slave trade was outlawed federally. Southern slaveholders would have felt themselves attacked nationally and internationally and may have responded with an assertion of ideological purity in the form of white markers—monuments combining individual, civic, and religious declarations. After the Civil War, many nonwhite stones may be found in both North and South. As the official anxieties would have been liberated, preferences moved towards a greater variety of stones for gravemarkers.17
Cemetery scene with white marble stones, obelisk, and willow tree, Mt. Auburn Cemetery, Boston, Massachusetts. Photograph by Bridget Heneghan.
At the same time, rural cemeteries became popular in the cities of the North and South, providing landscaped gardens and shaded walks for burial grounds. Opened in Boston in 1831, Mount Auburn was the first American cemetery landscaped into a park-like setting. Mount Auburn directly addressed gravestone materials along with its rules for order and solemnity. Mount Auburn rules dictated that “carriages could not be driven faster than a walk, refreshments could not be brought in, no flowers could be picked and decorous behavior would be enforced at all times” (French 84). Whiteness, moral elevation, and good manners were explicitly linked by the gravestones: “Each family plot could be fenced, but only in metal or stone, not in wood. The grave markers would have to be of stone, except that slate, the traditional material for headstones in the old burial grounds was specifically disallowed. There were no specific restrictions on the style of gravestones, but approval by the trustees according to their canons of taste was implied” (French 80). Within the decade, several other cities imitated Mount Auburn’s design.
Outside of the plantation plots of the upperclasses—which more closely followed these Northern cemetery styles—Southern whites developed a distinct, communal burial tradition. Beginning at about the turn of the nineteenth century, folk cemeteries share common traits derived from both European and African practices. While studies of Southern cemeteries are scarce because burials more often took place on isolated family plots, these rural graveyards are scattered throughout the Upland South, which extends south from Maryland and east from Texas (Jeane 109). The early model of folk cemetery is characterized by “hilltop location, scraped ground, mounded graves, east-west grave orientation, preferred species of vegetation, creative decoration, graveshelters, and evidence or practice of cults of piety” (Jeane 111). This style continued from the early nineteenth century until the Civil War. Since hills make poorer farmland, folk cemeteries are often located on hilltops, but the image produced by bare, mounded dirt, graveshelters, and special decorations contrasts sharply with the trend of winding garden paths or crowded churchyard cemeteries favored in the North. Theories clash concerning the origin of folk cemetery practices. D. Gregory Jeane argues that although “[b]lacks living in the same communities share some of the same cemetery traits,” the folk cemetery “is a complex of cultural traits associated with white Anglo-Saxon communities” (120). He points to European examples of scraped graves, especially in Belgium and France, and finds analogues for graveshelters in the British “house-form tomb” and lych-gate (122). On the other hand, Vlach traces the use of shells, mounding, and broken pottery to African origins, and Terry Jordan argues that scraping the ground stemmed from African influence also (Vlach, Back; Jordan).
In folk cemeteries, all grass is scraped from the area surrounding graves, resulting eventually in “exposure of clay beds” and a hardened surface to the yard (Jeane 113). In addition, dirt is mounded above the grave, and these mounds are regularly re-formed after settling. Usually, the graves have no markers, although rarely they can be found with markers of wood or local stone. Even more rarely will these stones bear a name or date, “crudely inscribed,” although wooden stakes might be carved into circles or diamonds. Jeane reports graves in Texas and Louisiana marked by stacked “clay turpentine cups.” “What is decidedly missing” from all folk cemeteries, he adds, “is the frequent use of commercially produced gravestones of granite or marble” until after the Civil War (114). However, whitewashed stones can be found, and “[l]arge, white flint stones” used to mark or outline graves (Montell 112, 121). Shells can also commonly be found decorating graves, outlining several graves, lining a single plot, or covering the entire mound.
Graveshelters dotted the folk cemetery, and were constructed of wood, with “four corner-posts, often surrounded by picket fencing, supporting a shallow, gable-ended roof” (Jeane 115). For a society that often did not provide barns for its livestock, graveshelters seem a particularly zealous treatment of the dead. However, the gable-ended roof mimicked in miniature the I-house that signaled respectability; and the picket fence had become a middle-class mark of refinement by the middle of the nineteenth century (Bushman 160). The people establishing these gravesteads were among the lower classes, however, since plantation owners more often had their own family plots. Jeane reports that “no graveshelters have been observed in black graveyards” (115). In this view, rural folk designed their own version of white things, “making do” despite a shortness of means and materials. Perhaps denied a large white house in life, they might erect a tiny house for death. Turning from the prohibitively expensive marble, they might construct a monument from “conch, freshwater mollusks, and saltwater bivalves” (114). Lacking the resources to import white marble, Southern lower classes nonetheless marked their graves with whiteness.
Wandering in Savannah, Olmsted accidentally encounters a “graveyard for negroes” where some of the markers “were mere billets of wood, others were of brick and marble, and some were pieces of plank, cut in the ordinary form of tombstones” (174). While Olmsted transcribes the short misspelled messages of a few markers, he also recalls the elaborate inscriptions on a large brick tomb and a stone table. Both were placed for preachers by their church. In addition, Olmsted describes one white marble stone which records “the worth fidelity and virtue of Reynolda Watts.” The marker, erected by her owner, gives credit to the owner for the virtues of the deceased: “Reared from infancy by an affectionate mistress and trained by her in the paths of virtue, She was strictly moral in her deportment, faithful and devoted in her duty and heart and soul a.” The inscription abruptly ends because the rest of the stone is buried in sand. A few other stones, “similar in character to the above, [were] erected by whites to the memory of favourite servants,” Olmsted observes, suggesting that the white marble stones were the contribution of masters rather than family members of the slaves (175). Also, if these markers were “similar in character” to the one cited, they seemed as much a memorial to the master’s benevolent influence and the possibility of a perfect master-slave relationship, as to the slave herself.
When the narrator of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom reports his mother’s death, he mourns the failure of any sentimental deathbed scene, since he is not told of either her death or her funeral. And though he mentions “the stately mansions of the dead”—the “vast tombs” of his master’s white family that tell of its “antiquities … as well as of [its] wealth” in his survey of the plantation, he reminds the reader that his mother’s grave is, “as the grave of the dead at sea, unmarked, and without stone or stake” (48, 43). Again, he couches his complaints in terms that whites will understand, pointing to the denial of knowledge—of important deaths, or place of burial, or genealogical history—that gravestones mark.
Planters—even the reforming kind—had little to say about the burial of their slaves. A committee of Alabama planters resolved in 1846 that a slave should know that he or she will be “decently buried,” and a Mississippi planter recommends that “an hour shall be set apart … for his burial” (Breeden 289). The racial contrast implied by this disregard can be marked even in a contemporary abolitionist’s observations. In the 1850s, “the Roving Editor” James Redpath toured the South in search of fodder for his abolitionist arguments. In the midst of his diatribes, however, he pauses to contemplate the cemetery of a town struck by yellow fever. His “tears [start] up unbidden,” he writes, as he stands in a white cemetery and looks upon a grave marked only by “a shingle” (136). The tombstone’s inscription is written in pencil; it “had nothing poetical, or solemn or sacred about it.” Redpath reports to have “wept like a girl” at the thought of “[s]hingles for tombstones—no time for marble; for the chisel, a pencil—hastily used” (136). While sympathetic to the slaves, Redpath mourns the haste of this white burial; nonetheless, such a wooden marker would have been standard for a slave. Redpath inadvertently exposes the message delivered to slaves as he mourns this unusual arrangement for a white: the intent is not poetry, solemnity, or sacredness, but rather a nod towards protocol in the midst of more important business.
In Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs uses the full range of whitening goods in her assault on racialist middle-class pretensions.18 Like Douglass, she uses the tools of white householders to expose the evils of slavery in terms they can understand. She begins her message by identifying the markers of slavery and white superiority and then exaggerates them to unbearable proportions, until the claims themselves must be seen as ridiculous. Acknowledging that the status of black womanhood and “feminine” slave have no specific place in the material economy, Jacobs creates an alternate economy and then presents the excluding Anglo-American system from this outside perspective. Her claim for the text is greater than abolition, greater even than revising the stultifying Cult of Domesticity.19 Her narrative exposes the cultural work of white things themselves as part of a cramped, closed economy, outside of which is teeming with people who can not only observe the participants, but also laugh at them.
In fact, ironic laughter occurs often in this story of a slave woman’s trials—and she does not hide that it is directed at a white audience. Her narrative is full of material jokes, and the laughter marks the times she explains them. Jacobs provides her readers with a textual example, in fact, to illustrate this material mockery in written form: in what Jacobs styles a “Competition in Cunning,” she attempts to free her children by sending letters to her master and her grandmother, supposedly from the North.20 The content of these two letters, intended less to convey information than to mislead her master, makes two appeals. In the letter to Dr. Flint, she reminds him of her abused life in slavery. In the letter to her freed grandmother, she appeals to the mother-child bond and praises domesticity. The narrative’s designs should be recognizable within these messages also; certainly, the scholarship has focused on Jacobs’s project as addressing both the evils of slavery and the limitations of the Cult of Domesticity. But while both letters contain accurate statements, they are, in fact, taunts to those within the system. After Jacobs has sent these letters, she contrives to witness her master’s reaction—in whispers through cracks in the walls, through open doors, or as reported by other servants. Dr. Flint’s attempts in turn to deceive his slave become “as good as a comedy to [her]” (103). The comedy, she insists, is that those in power believe their own fictions and therefore fall prey to the fictions drawn by the outcasts.
That she sees through the pretensions does not make her competition less deadly serious, however. The conditions of her own and other characters’ slavery are brutal and demoralizing, and her immediate project remains abolition and family freedom. Jacobs draws fully upon the conventions of white goods in exposing the evils of slavery and its physical signs. She detests the “linsey-woolsey” clothing that her mistress issues her, for example, because her grandmother provides her clothing, and the single rough dress provided by Mrs. Flint serves only as “one of the badges of slavery” (11). She invokes the sacredness of the cemetery when she claims that her master’s sexual advances torment her even while kneeling at her mother’s grave (28). And when a local reverend condescends to preach to slaves, he offers his kitchen as a meeting place. Traditionally a slave domain, this building becomes the proper place for slaves to hear his message of unquestioned obedience to masters. But he keeps them waiting while he remains in his “comfortable parlor,” the traditional arena for upper- and middle-class socializing and display (69). Tired of waiting and aware of the architectural sermon silently delivered, the slaves leave to “enjoy a Methodist shout” (69).
A widespread prop in sentimental literature is the tea table, set with elaborate dishware and proclaiming white racial and upper-class superiority. In fiction, the tea table presents a feminized, sentimental vehicle for maintaining these messages. In her use of the white china of the tea table, Jacobs depicts how easily abused these powerful white things are—but ultimately she also has the last laugh. Jacobs’s free black grandmother knows how to set a proper tea table, but one that overpowers racial differences in its appeal to sentiment. Often, Aunt Marthy shares tea with Miss Fanny, the old maiden who has freed her, and “[o]n such occasions the table was spread with a snow-white cloth, and the china cups and silver spoons were taken from the old-fashioned buffet” (88). Together the women would “work and chat, and sometimes, while talking over old times, their spectacles would get dim with tears” (89). In this scene, Jacobs images a novelistic ideal: the white owner and black ex-slave labor together rather than one for the other, and the women ultimately look the same through their tears.
But slave ownership perverts this sentimental success. When Mrs. Flint, who has been nursed by Aunt Marthy, becomes the owner of Jacobs and the sexual threat Jacobs represents, she no longer takes tea with Aunt Marthy (89). Mrs. Flint’s duties as housekeeper involve the white china of the dining room: through this specialized dishware, she is responsible for training her family in time-discipline and manners that the ritual of dining enforces. But her slaves see a different exercise at work. “If dinner was not served at the exact time” on communion Sundays, she would “station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking” so that the cook would have nothing to eat (12). Mrs. Flint uses the virtue of time management as a means of torment. But even further, she affronts a basic rule of politeness by spitting, and offers this rude display as sustenance for her slaves. The gesture of spitting itself, which is often remarked on as a nasty habit among lower classes and men, reveals slaveholding’s violence as Mrs. Flint unmakes her upper-class femininity to punish her slaves.
Dr. Flint likewise violates the code of the civilized and civilizing tea by transforming it into torture. While preparing to whip a slave, he orders the man to be tied to a joist in the work house, and “[i]n that situation he was to wait until the doctor had taken his tea” (13). Thus he posits his own gentility against the slave’s depravity, and Jacobs draws on the symbolic power of tea even while she critiques its romanticized refinement. The slave, hanging in the work house while the master lounges in the dining room, is meant to realize the vast distance between their positions—especially since this is the slave who has quarreled with his wife for bearing Dr. Flint’s child. Later, Dr. Flint extends this lesson in evolution when he forces his cook to eat the dog’s food after the rabid dog rejects it. By building upon a knowledge of the civilizing influence of ceramics, therefore, Jacobs uses an ideology immediate to her middle-class readers, rather than relying on accounts of distant brutalities or the abstract problems of perpetual bondage. Seen from her outside perspective, however, these prized white things become repulsive.
After Jacobs finally finds her way North, she must herself struggle over the tea table. When she arrives at a hotel in Rockaway with the white child in her charge, the waiter requests that she stand behind the child’s chair for dinner, and then take her own supper in the kitchen (176). Instead, she leaves the table, and refuses to comply with codes. In the end, she claims triumph: she traps the white waiters in their own racial system. The waiters are forced either to allow her to join the white dinner crowd, or to perform special services in bringing her dinner to her room. Eventually they “concluded to treat [her] well,” so that this time, at least, she has the last laugh (177).
Since the narrator has demonstrated her understanding of the racial stakes of white architecture and ritual, she reveals her criticism when she signifies against them. In the first paragraph of the book, Jacobs describes her parents as “a light shade of brownish yellow” (5). Later, she challenges the enslavement of Africans based on race, asking, “And then who are Africans? Who can measure the amount of Anglo-Saxon blood coursing in the veins of American slaves?” (44). When she escapes, she challenges the practice indirectly, signifying upon her slavery by painting herself black. As she steals to her grandmother’s house for her long confinement, she wears sailor’s clothes and “blacken[s] [her] face with charcoal” (113). In this scene, a black woman, so often the imitated object of blackface plays, smears her own face with charcoal and tries to “ ‘walk ricketty, like de sailors’ ”—which has its own humor even if afterwards Jacobs suffers the physical and emotional trials of the swamp (112). Like the white men performing in blackface minstrelsy, she must use artificial means to appear black, but her performance aims at escape from, rather than escape to, the imagined carefree life of slaves.
Jacobs similarly reveals her ridicule of white ideology when she arranges her house for patrollers. After Nat Turner’s insurrection, Jacobs receives warning that “country bullies and poor whites” may search her home. She writes, “I knew nothing annoyed them so much as to see colored people living in comfort and respectability; so I made arrangements for them with especial care. I arranged every thing in my grandmother’s house as neatly as possible. I put white quilts on the beds, and decorated some of the rooms with flowers” (63). Aware, she tells us, that she can annoy the poor whites, she decorates her house with the symbols of white femininity and respectability—symbols that exclude the soldiers as much as they do herself. She presents these invaders with the visual insult of a house neatly and carefully prepared, demonstrating discipline and economic success, decorated as if for guests, but owned and enjoyed by free blacks and slaves. Therefore, even while she taunts the violent patrollers, she creates a scene of refinement familiar to middle-class white readers; the home’s invasion by ruffian males speaks more personally to them than even Jacobs’s own helplessness before the men.
Finally, Jacobs draws upon the sentimentality of the graveyard scene when she decides to escape. She travels to the woodland “burying ground for slaves” in order to deliver her vow, that she will free herself and her children or die in the attempt: “For more than ten years I had frequented this spot, but never had it seemed so sacred as now. A black stump, at the head of my mother’s grave, was all that remained of a tree my father had planted. His grave was marked by a small wooden board, bearing his name, the letters of which were nearly obliterated. I knelt down and kissed them, and poured forth a prayer to God for guidance and support in the perilous step I was about to take” (90–91). The scene recalls any number of embroidered, painted, or literary pictures popular in the mid-nineteenth century, of dutiful children kneeling at their parents’ memorials, but Jacobs manipulates the props to create a different message. The markers are not white marble monuments, but rather a blackened stump and a decayed wooden board. They do not represent public memorials intended for display: her father’s name barely remains, and her mother’s marker only recalls a former tree. Her family, which owns a house downtown, could probably afford a monument, but they save their money for buying children into freedom and providing for enslaved relatives when their masters do not. Her father has marked the site of her mother’s grave with a living tree rather than stone, emphasizing a value on natural beauty rather than artificial display. But even after the tree has died and blackened, the daughter kneels and kisses it. The voice she hears from these graves also counsels counter to the whitened message of feminine submission: Jacobs hears her father bid her “not to tarry till [she] reached freedom or the grave” (91). Jacobs invokes the preaching power of the gravestone for this message. As early American gravestones warned passersby to “Prepare for death and follow me,” the father’s marker also speaks. The wisdom of the grave beckons her not to mortality, however, but to the North.
When Jacobs effects her escape, she continues to use the messages she has been sent as a slave against themselves. When Dr. Flint offers to make her a “lady,” equipped with a “small house … in a secluded place,” Jacobs rejects the position and the system that allows it (53). In fact, only when Dr. Flint’s son at the plantation moves Jacobs from the servants’ quarters to the great house does she resolve to run. She refuses to be a secluded “lady,” but will not be allowed to be a servant only; the architecture finally offers her no position but escape. She then leaves not through a door but through a window—the parlor window. Escaping via the formal and social sanctum of the house, which seeks to deny her existence even as it tries to fetter her by its feminine ideology, she pierces its contradictions. In opening its window, she makes her existence felt through her absence and sacrifices Anglo ideology to the practical demands of a slave mother.
In her first hiding place, she re-inscribes her status as chattel, secreting herself in the upstairs storeroom of a sympathetic mistress, where things are put that are “out of use” (100). When inspection threatens, the slave cook Betty hurries her “across the yard, into the kitchen,” where she stows Jacobs beneath “a plank in the floor” (103). The kitchen, Betty indicates, is her domain, and the architecture sustains her belief. When Jacobs is in Betty’s kitchen, Betty considers her to be among “ ‘my tings’ ” and therefore will fight for her (103, italics in text). In recommendations to improve slave housing, many planters suggest that elevating the floors and adding plank flooring would make a healthier, cleaner living space. Reform-minded slave-owners comment upon the “very natural … propensities” of slaves to accumulate trash about their quarters, and several suggest that elevated plank floors ensure that “air can circulate freely under them, and that no filth may collect under them” (Breeden 128, 134). One planter posits the benefits of flooring: “[w]hen thus elevated, if there should be any filth under them, the master or overseer, in passing, can see it and have it removed” (Breeden 120–121). Jacobs’s hiding beneath the plank flooring only mocks the planters’ supposition that better housing will prohibit slaves from keeping “filth” or contraband hidden beneath their floors.21
Her final hiding place Jacobs describes in detail, providing measurements and conditions: she stays in the garret of a small shed that serves as a storeroom, “nine feet long and seven wide,” with the “highest part … three feet high,” and with no light and no air (Jacobs 114). She provides measurements not much more cramped than the twelve feet square per family remarked upon by Olmsted and Kennedy. Her “dungeon” resembles the slave cabins that reformers criticize as being “always too small and too low,” “[s]mall, low, tight and filthy,” generating sickness with their “bad air” (Breeden 127, 120, italics in text). Explicitly, she compares her tight confinement to slavery itself, only preferring the physical discomfort to the spiritual one (Jacobs 114). As she describes her relief at boring an inch-wide hole in her crawlspace, where she can “enjoy the little whiff of air that floated in” and perhaps read or sew by its point of light, she positions her readers inside the low, cramped space that reformers only view from the outside. For example, a small planter claims that slaves “ ‘prefer darkness to light,’ ” but nonetheless recommends they be required to take some sun and be provided with a window in their cabins (Breeden 131). Another asserts that although blacks “bear crowding much better than white people” because “the negro does not consume as much oxygen as the white man,” slaves should nevertheless not be overcrowded (Breeden 128). Within this hyperbolically cozy space, Jacobs combines the conventions of slavery and domesticity to illustrate the clash when they meet. A woman and a slave, she suffers an interiority within the attic room that becomes pathetic. She huddles next to her pinpoint of light to engage in the genteel pastimes of reading and sewing. Romanticization is impossible for such domesticity: Jacobs pursues her portrait of white femininity and slavery propaganda until the image is ridiculous.
Upholding this attic enclosure, Aunt Marthy’s household has members both free and slave, with varying degrees of blackness and several different owners. The house itself flaunts the success of its inhabitants—an ex-slave owning a two-story house in North Carolina would have been rare. The descriptions Jacobs gives of her garret and its relationship to her grandmother’s house correspond with a sketch that Jean Fagin Yellin provides of the house of Molly Horniblow, Jacobs’s grandmother.22 In Jacobs’s descriptions, the garret belongs to a storage shed added onto the front end of Aunt Martha’s house, overlooking the street. The storeroom, Jacobs notes, “opens upon a piazza,” which also leads to the front door (Jacobs 114; Yellin 216). The long, deep house, with the entrance on the side of the house rather than facing the street, is similar to the house type appearing in Charleston, South Carolina—another Southern port city—at the same time. In Charleston, lack of space resulted in regulations allowing only a specific number of feet per lot to face the street; therefore, Charlestonians built narrow but deep houses. Their house lots were ordered front-to-back also: the front presented a formal architecture, while “functions of increasing dirtiness—descending from kitchen to privy—range[d] back along a workyard” (Zierden and Herman 205). Through the early nineteenth century, Martha A. Zierden and Bernard L. Herman find, Charlestonians increasingly enclosed their houses, building walls and shifting the entrance to the side of the house in a way that “not only blocked and channeled physical access … but also increasingly denied visual access” (207). In so doing, these citizens followed a trend which Upton believes was climaxed in Monticello: their houses remained a fixture on the landscape, but the inhabitants “could see and not be seen” (Upton, “Imagining” 84). Zierden and Herman believe this domestic enclosure was encouraged in Charleston by the perceived threat of slave insurrections (220).
Aunt Marthy’s house, modeled after Molly Horniblow’s, has its entrance on the side like these Charlestonian houses; however, the storage shed over which Jacobs hides contradicts the frontal formality that was common in Charleston. In Richmond, Virginia, on the other hand—where many African Americans worked skilled jobs—the typical home owned by free African Americans was a one-room wooden house with appended shed fronting the street, although some African Americans owned larger brick buildings (Kimball 125). What is striking about this layout is the prominent shed: whereas the trend in Anglo-American housing in the nineteenth century was to hide the outbuildings, camouflage them behind the big house or set them at the back of the city lot, Aunt Marthy’s family positions her shed in plain view.23 The ideal that suggests that proper ladies do not labor, at least in view of a visitor, does not affect her household: Aunt Martha makes her living as a baker, and she can be proud of an occupation that has brought her status and freedom for some of her family.
That the shed is not hidden affords Jacobs a narrative edge, as well: her garret looks onto the main street, so that she can observe city life even while hidden. From this position, she can “see without being seen,” and observes her owner’s comings and goings as well as several town scandals. Jacobs prepares the reader for this situation in an earlier chapter, “The Church and Slavery.” She and her brother leave a sermon given by the Rev. Mr. Pike “highly amused,” demonstrating again her desire to undercut sacred white precepts. His sermon, quoted at length, is a warning of God’s perfect surveillance—a perfection aspired to by the slave owners who would walk down a slave street and detect from a distance any illegal filth beneath the cabins. Reverend Pike accuses, “Instead of serving your masters faithfully … you are idle and shirk your work. God sees you. You tell lies. God hears you” (Jacobs 69). He repeats his refrain, “God sees you,” five times. Jacobs’s amusement surely comes from the preacher’s optimism—that slave owners have religious access to total control of their slaves and that the slaves take him seriously.
More accurately, the slaves, not their masters, have the better vantage from which to survey the complete lives of those who live with them. As Annalucia Accardo and Alessandro Portelli maintain, the Denmark Vesey rebellion of 1822 in Charleston, South Carolina, exposed what slaveowners needed to deny for their own peace of mind: the possibility of traitorous house slaves. Earlier and later rebellions likely stressed the same recognition, but participants in Vesey’s rebellion were the same slaves whom masters trusted to protect their families when they were called out of town. One slave owner observed, “ ‘[I]t is now well ascertained that most of the coachmen & favorite servants in the City knew of it [the rebellion] even if they had not participated in the intentions and plans proposed’ ” (77). Awake to such dangers within her own household, a planter’s daughter remarks in her diary, “ ‘Every black man is a possible spy’ ” (79).
Jacobs claims to be haunted by her master’s advances—“My master met me at every turn …. If I went out for a breath of fresh air … his footsteps dogged me. If I knelt by my mother’s grave, his dark shadow fell on me even there” (28). Mrs. Flint also watches her, hovering over her in her sleep until Jacobs fears for her life. But Jacobs is also constantly aware of their presence, and when she retreats to her attic, she becomes the spying specter. The first person she sees from her loophole is Dr. Flint, and besides watching her children playing and neighboring slaves suffering in the street, she “peeped at” Dr. Flint on his way to recapture her as well (116). From the garret, she looks down upon the unaware actors, distanced by her inability to descend. Her surveillance is much closer to that described in Pike’s sermon, because she remains invisible in her scrutiny. She even manages to be several places at once, when she mails letters from the North and hears them received while still in North Carolina. The world that for her white owners barely even registers visibly—the non-capitalist world of the gendered black woman, unsatisfied slaves, variously imprisoned bodies—can view the master’s social fictions all the more clearly for being excluded from them.
At the same time, however, Jacobs never allows her joke to diverge far from practical, physical existence. Her torment as a slave, in the garret, and in the North is not only actual but corporeal. Her elevated garret perspective is also a “ ‘dungeon,’ a torture chamber, a prison, a grave,” a symbol of “slavery’s extreme entrapment” (Goddu 148). She can observe without detection, but she cannot be a transparent eyeball, because her body continues to be overrun with rats, infested with chiggers, spattered with turpentine, cramped with cold, and suffocated by heat.
The “Competition in Cunning” she stages with her letters is clearly won “by herself,” but it is also an invitation to her readers to view their pretensions from the loophole of her social exclusion. The abuses of slavery, the limits of the Cult of Domesticity, the cultural products of her readers’ environment of white things remain serious, as does her desire to establish an independent family household in the North. She can laugh, though, at the performances these white things impel upon her white neighbors. They are not funny, but they are a joke.
The meaning attached to a concrete object made it not only ideologically powerful, but also liable to attack: the disenfranchised could use these goods to perform a subtle resistance. Slaves might safely display their rebellion through their own choice of dishes and housing. If slaves accepted the ideology of whiteness, the distinctions that white interiors and specialized, whitened dishes indicated, one would assume that, when possible, they would imitate these ware types and colors. However, Leland Ferguson argues that because South Carolina slaves crafted their own vessels in different forms than the planters’ dishes, they enacted a material resistance (“Struggling with Pots”). “Colono Ware,” which refers to “low-fired, handbuilt pottery found on colonial sites,” was produced by Native Americans as well as African Americans, both of whom served on South Carolina plantations (Ferguson, Uncommon 19). At the same time that British manufacturers worked to create whiter plates, slaves produced their own vessels reflecting both Native American and West African traditions.24 Colono Ware makes up 70 percent of all ceramics recovered in twenty-three South Carolinian slave quarters, and 48 percent of all ceramics recovered from rural sites. Since it comprises only 2.2 percent of urban ceramics recovered, it is likely that slaves wanted only the opportunity to create familiar vessels: urban slaves would have been more likely to be issued dishes (Ferguson, “Struggling” 31).
Other African traditions traced to American slaves show a twist to the assigned hierarchy of white dishes: rather than increasingly varied and specialized plates and cups, most Colono Ware vessels were large bowls, of the same size, and undifferentiated in design. Otto finds in nineteenth-century Georgia that even the handed-down vessels used by slaves were predominantly bowls (103). These vessels resemble those found in West Africa, where large starchy meals were served in communal bowls and eaten with the hands (Ferguson, “Struggling” 33). In making large earthenware bowls or using large serving bowls handed down from the planter—or even the wooden trencher described by Douglass—slaves retained African ties and actively resisted the developing ideology that privileged whiteness.
When slave houses remained on the periphery of the plantation and slaves built their own shelter, they could similarly signify against whiteness. Especially in the lowland swamps of Georgia and the Carolinas, these peripheral settlements showed greater African retentions: at Yaughan and Curriboo plantations were found “wall trench-mud walled and post-wattle and daub constructions” in slave villages, which reflect West African building techniques (Joseph 65). Vlach argues that even the modernized slave cabins of the 1840s and 1850s reflect African preferences, as they share the average twelve by twelve foot floor plan, gableside door, and lack of windows (Vlach, Back 166). After the Revolution, masters exerted more control, drawing the cabins closer to the main house and exercising more supervision. One ubiquitous story tells of a slave, born in Africa and taken to Georgia, who built himself a traditional African house in the 1840s or 1850s. A fellow slave recounts how the master tore it down because “ ‘he ain’ want no African hut on he place’ ” (qtd. in McKee, “Ideals” 196). A slave woman in Mississippi, as reported by her daughter, resisted “whitening” by refusing a plank floor for her cabin, since” ‘she was a African’ “and was accustomed to dirt floors (qtd. in Vlach, Back 165). Vlach also cites several examples of slaves’ resisting the imposed order of streets or row houses, when given the chance. A portion of Mount Vernon, “Muddy Hole Farm,” had a black overseer, and there the cabins were “located … randomly among the trees at the edge of the cleared fields.” Elsewhere on the plantation, in quarters supervised by white overseers, the cabins were “set in straight lines at regular intervals along the edge of a road.” At a plantation in South Carolina, a slave village located far from the “central processing area” exhibits the standard row of slave housing, but the buildings “all were set at odd, irregular angles to one another” (Vlach, Back 14).
‘Old Time Cabin.’ Photograph by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899 or 1900. The cabin is constructed of hewn logs with shingle roof and wooden chimney. In front, two African American men and an African American woman, rickety table and chair, and dark stoneware vessel. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-68312.
On the graves of blacks throughout the South, “broken crockery, broken glassware, broken pitchers, soap dishes, lamp chimneys, coffee cups, bits of stucco, and countless other items, generally from the kitchen, have been used” (Montell 120). Although Montell finds an African belief that breaking these ceramics released their spirits so they could accompany their owner to the next world, the choice of articles also points to an awareness of the message of white things. Soap dishes and coffee cups accompanied the dead to their final rest, perhaps serving them through the items’ associations of wealth, or perhaps serving them in their final defeat by fracture. Censured as filthy, allocated to kitchen work, preached inferiority by pottery, nineteenth-century blacks may have killed greater spirits than those of the dishes when they placed their remains at the grave.