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CHAPTER 1
A Home of One’s Own
By the mid–nineteenth century, the political and cultural landscape of the United States had been shaped for at least 200 years by lifelong servitude for those believed to have “African blood.” In concert with Enlightenment thinking, white Americans assured themselves that God had created some groups for the purpose of serving others (Kendi). Systematically subordinating people who were not inferior required aggressive assertions about the difference between those in power and those vulnerable to them. Family and reproduction were effective areas for constructing difference that supposedly proved natural inferiority,1 so Anglo Americans insisted their (sometimes) darker counterparts felt little that resembled their own intimate attachments. These assertions must be seen as reactive violence. It was because the humanity of enslaved people was so apparent that denials of it had to be continual and brutal. As Cedrick Robinson puts it, “the cargoes of laborers also contained African cultures, critical mixes … of language and thought, of cosmology and metaphysics, of habits, beliefs, and morality. These were the actual terms of their humanity” (124). Yet, even when most were in chains, black people in the United States did not act simply on their awareness of their humanity; they pursued greater and greater success. African-descended people succeeded, and their triumphs included the creation of homes despite being denied basic resources for domestic stability. As demonstrated in the Introduction, black accomplishment is always attacked, but achievement in the realm of traditional domesticity is particularly so.
The aggression that answered black success included the American Colonization Society, founded in 1817; the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; and the Dred Scott decision of 1857. The American Colonization Society constituted know-your-place aggression in that it emerged from the idea that, if black people were not going to be enslaved, they should reside somewhere other than the United States. The organization gained traction as abolitionists found common cause with proslavery activists. Though they seemed ideologically opposed, these groups agreed it was unreasonable to expect white Americans to tolerate the presence of, to say nothing of rights for, free black people. Of course, some blacks embraced emigration. Convinced they would never enjoy decent treatment in the United States, they were willing to seek more just possibilities elsewhere. Black advocates of colonization and emigration took a stance that makes sense.2 Who wouldn’t want a life in which one’s achievements aren’t answered with violence? Still, the good sense of their stance only underscores the degree to which debate has always characterized the community conversation about success.
Because many African-descended people in the United States did not seek life elsewhere but acted on the belief that they belonged in the country they helped build, the aggression of the American Colonization Society was joined in 1850 by the violence of the Fugitive Slave Act. This legislation countered what Robin Kelley calls “freedom dreams” with discursive violence that encouraged both discursive and physical violence. Facing tremendous odds and brutal punishment if captured, enslaved men and women nevertheless often fled. Their doing so constituted a victory in that the enslaved had retained enough self-determination to resist staying in their “proper” place.3 The national government responded to that victory with hostility. Ratified in 1850, the Fugitive Slave Act required all citizens to assist in returning to bondage anyone suspected of having run away from slavery, and it obliterated a fugitive’s right to a jury trial. Cases would be handled by special commissioners who would be paid $5 if an alleged fugitive were released and $10 if handed over to the claimant. The law literally offered incentives for being hostile to an entire population’s human desire for freedom. The message was clear: there would be federal cooperation with enslavers and federal opposition to anyone acknowledging freedom might be a human right, even for those not considered white.
This legislation’s 1850 ratification expressed the government’s resistance to conceiving of nonwhite people as humans with a right to the fruit of their labor. For those caught in slavery’s web, it also communicated that familial bonds would continue to be attacked with the blessing of the country’s leaders.4 After the Fugitive Slave Act went into effect, free black people who otherwise had no interest in leaving the United States became convinced emigration was their people’s best hope, reluctantly aligning with white activists who had founded the American Colonization Society and its colony in Liberia. Others fled to Canada and encouraged their brethren to follow. For instance, Mary Shadd relocated there and founded the Provincial Freeman newspaper, giving black readers in the United States information that made Canada less intimidating and more inviting, thereby acknowledging imagined community and contributing to its multivalent community conversation. Also, “from 1830 until well after the Civil War, once captive and already free Blacks came together in state, regional, and national conventions to strategize about how they might achieve educational, labor, and legal justice” (ColoredConventions.org). Through the convention movement, African Americans defined and redefined accomplishment, and participants viewed the Fugitive Slave Act as an assault, as a reaction to community members’ success at refusing to internalize the notion that they were inferior to white counterparts and should have no aspirations.
The violence of the Fugitive Slave Act was not enough to satisfy the nation’s appetite for know-your-place aggression; in 1857, the Supreme Court declared black people had “no rights which the white man was bound to respect” in Dred Scott v. Sandford. This decision is best understood as a reaction to black success.5 Harriet and Dred Scott had commanded recognition of their humanity and their rights when allowed to marry each other in a public ceremony in a free territory. They had lived as free people for years but filed suit in 1846, hoping the court would recognize that their having relocated to the slave state of Missouri had not changed their status. They likely took these extraordinary legal steps because Scott’s former owner had died, creating the possibility that his heirs would sell him, thereby separating him from his wife Harriet (Hunter, Bound in Wedlock, 82). Such a move would constitute a brutal assault on the life they had successfully built by returning them to their “proper” place. Years before, Scott had been listed in a territorial census as “the head of his household, which affirmed that [he and Harriet] conducted themselves as a married couple and as free people” (ibid. 81). The court’s decision to strip the couple of the status former enslavers had acknowledged was designed to insist nonwhite people have privileges, not rights. This judgment must be seen as a violent reaction to an entire population, the homes they build, and the triumphs they secure against the odds.6
Even as the United States reinforced the belief that those who are not straight, white, and male can only belong to the nation and its acknowledged citizens, black women remained focused on how to keep claiming success.7 One observes this investment in two Civil War–era texts that showcase practices of making-oneself-at-home while never ignoring white-authored attacks on black people’s aspirations and achievements. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and Elizabeth Keckley’s Behind the Scenes; Or, Thirty Years a Slave and Four Years in the White House (1868) highlight black women’s efforts to move from being house slaves to having homes of their own.8 Yet, readers attentive to success will notice that even when deprived of households of their own, African Americans cultivate a sense of home and belonging nonetheless. Slavery does not diminish their investment in pursuing achievement, even the type most likely to be attacked: domestic stability. As Saidiya Hartman might put it, black women constantly face the “absence of a proper domain” (Scenes 109), so they make it from scratch and in the midst of violence. This chapter therefore follows Deborah McDowell’s lead by considering how black women’s cultural production “dramatizes not what was done to slave women, but what they did with what was done to them” (146, original emphasis).
Slave Cabins as Spaces of Triumph
Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a novelized autobiography in which the author presents herself as Linda Brent, the heroine of a sentimental coming-of-age story, but Jacobs concludes by insisting her protagonist’s journey had been more a quest for freedom than for marriage. Educated white women readers made sentimental novels a sensation, and these stories revolved around the development of a virtuous heroine who learns to “feel right,” to prioritize morality and to sympathize with the less fortunate, and her doing so yields the reward of having a husband and children to nurture. Understanding these expectations, but also challenging them, Jacobs’s narrator explains, “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with marriage. I and my children are now free! [However,] The dream of my life is not yet realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own, I still long for a hearthstone of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for [mine]” (167). Jacobs’s definition of success prioritizes freedom over marriage, but freedom is not truly satisfying without a home of one’s own. It is therefore revealing to examine the text for its drive toward achievement and for how often Linda defines accomplishment in relation to homemaking. Though the concluding passage downplays her domestic desire by emphasizing her children, the narrative focus on domesticity exposes how relentlessly Linda defines, redefines, and pursues success while taking note of white violence.
Because Jacobs depicts practices of making-oneself-at-home even while addressing a white audience whose abolitionist support she seeks for those still in bondage, Incidents reflects and advances the community conversation that fuels homemade citizenship. Black readers and interlocutors are never neglected. The text contributes to self-affirmation no less than it protests conditions, and its protest is not at all separate from self-affirmation.
Jacobs frames Linda’s life story by highlighting know-your-place aggression; she emphasizes that white Americans are aware that the enslaved succeed in maintaining dignity, so they deliberately try to brutalize that dignity out of them. When Linda’s father dies when she is around 6 or 7 years old, rather than allow her to be with her family, she is “ordered to go for flowers, that my mistress’s house might be decorated for an evening party. I spent the day gathering flowers and weaving them into festoons, while the dead body of my father was lying within a mile of me” (13). The narrative pinpoints why enslavers make such demands: “He was merely a piece of property. Moreover, they thought he had spoiled his children, by teaching them to feel that they were human beings” (ibid.). As narrator, Linda tracks black self-affirmation no less than she identifies reactionary white aggression. For instance, when her uncle Benjamin runs away and is captured, his holding on to his sense of self constitutes a victory whites seek to brutalize out of him. His enslaver places him in jail, vowing to leave him there until he is “subdued.” If he is not subdued, his oppressor swears to sell him even if the price is low. During the six months that Benjamin is imprisoned, the indignities he endures include being chained and covered with vermin (24). When he is finally to be sold, the trader is hesitant because he has “heard something of his character, and it did not strike him as suitable for a slave” (ibid.). Benjamin’s body has been mutilated and his psyche assaulted, but Incidents records his victory. In this, the text corroborates what a real-life mother said of her son, that “it would be ‘hard work for him to bring his mind to be a slave’” (D. Berry 65). Every entity supporting subjugation aims to destroy all signs of black humanity and self-regard, and Jacobs’s text is ever alive to that reality.
As it showcases Linda’s determination to claim success by creating a home for herself and her family, Incidents never loses sight of the nation’s investment in stomping those aspirations out of them. By focusing on households, the text gestures toward enslaved women’s awareness that domesticity, as an ideology, casts the “properly” domestic woman as “the modern reconstruction not just of the female self but of self-hood in general” (Romero 25). This orientation is part of Jacobs’s skillful appeal to white women familiar with sentimentality. However, if one reads not simply for how the text protests conditions to recruit for its cause but also for how it affirms its author and her family and community, then additional insights await. By age 14, Linda has begun accepting the correlation between houses and selfhood by watching her grandmother, but Jacobs also highlights the debate about definitions of success that this correlation prompts. Even as youngsters, Linda and her uncle Benjamin—who is so close in age “that he seemed more like my brother than my uncle” (10)—envy Aunt Martha. Jacobs has Linda explain: “By perseverance and unwearied industry, she was now mistress of a snug little home, surrounded with the necessaries of life. She would have been happy could her children have shared them with her” (18). While noting the pain her grandmother feels at being separated from loved ones, Linda insists Aunt Martha’s cabin is preferable to her own situation, living in the Flint household. With this, even though Aunt Martha is free, Linda corroborates what historian Erica Dunbar has found, that most bondswomen would have preferred the living quarters occupied by field hands because, even if conditions were rough, such cabins “offered what house slaves longed for: privacy” (57). Because she and Benjamin make no secret of their misery, Aunt Martha encourages them to view their lot as “the will of God: that he had seen fit to place [them] under such circumstances; and though it was hard, [they] ought to pray for contentment” (18). However, Linda is unequivocal; she and her uncle Benjamin “reasoned that it was much more the will of God that we should be situated as she was. We longed for a home like hers” (ibid., emphasis added).
Here, Jacobs highlights debate as an embodied practice of belonging that sustains African Americans. Linda and her young uncle do not agree with Aunt Martha, and their discussion expresses and bolsters the attachment they feel to each other. As important, especially because Linda and Benjamin cannot immediately change their circumstances, Jacobs’s representation of their articulated dissatisfaction becomes an example of making-oneself-at-home both in the text and in the lived world. For Linda and Benjamin as well as for Jacobs, holding fast to their own standard for being content constitutes self-affirmation even while unable to escape know-your-place aggression. Linda and Benjamin cannot claim a home of their own, but they do not accept the logic that capitulation is the appropriate response.
Though Linda cannot live with her grandmother, she benefits from her having succeeded in securing a home of her own. Aunt Martha provides Linda with treats as well as with necessities to make her life more comfortable than the Flints do. For, “little attention was paid to the slaves’ meals in Dr. Flint’s house. If they could catch a bit of food while it was going, well and good” (13). Thus, Jacobs shows that Aunt Martha achieves an efficient domesticity, offering her loved ones relief and helping them cope. The narrator recalls, “I was frequently threatened with punishment if I stopped there; and my grandmother, to avoid detaining me, often stood at the gate with something for my breakfast or dinner. I was indebted to her for all my comforts, spiritual or temporal. It was her labor that supplied my scanty wardrobe” (ibid.). As modest as these achievements are, they are met with know-your-place aggression. Being able to provide comfort and support surely gives a sense of purpose to Aunt Martha’s lifetime of struggle, and there is no doubt she considers her current situation an accomplishment, but her granddaughter is threatened because enslavers insist upon diminishing black achievements.
While honoring what Aunt Martha does to alleviate the cruelties of the Flint household, Jacobs will not allow Linda to silence a painful truth: “Even the charms of the old oven failed to reconcile us to our hard lot” (19). At one point, Linda’s brother William says he wishes he had died with their father because the world is bad, and everyone seems unhappy. Linda corrects him by insisting not everyone is miserable; people with “pleasant homes, and kind friends, and who were not afraid to love them” are happy (ibid., emphasis added). Jacobs thereby notes that, by age 14, Linda understands that slavery makes those in its clutches afraid to love—not only afraid to love their friends and family but also their homes.
With love deemed dangerous, how will Linda define success? At least temporarily, her answer involves good behavior. Linda tells her brother, “We must be good; perhaps that would bring us contentment” (ibid.). Using domesticity to make sense of daily realities, Linda weds good behavior to contentment and perhaps eventual justice. After all, she believes her grandmother’s “perseverance and unwearied industry” had yielded a home of her own, a space representing not only relief and succor but also success. Yet, this conclusion requires Linda to ignore the fact that white people need not behave decently to enjoy benefits, including homes of their own.
The injustice of a focus on good behavior becomes undeniable when Linda narrates one of her grandmother’s greatest homemaking victories, but Jacobs refrains from having Linda comment on it directly. Aunt Martha’s son Benjamin does not want her to buy his freedom, so he claims it himself by running away, but because her son Phillip does not, she eventually purchases him. Linda reports, “She paid eight hundred dollars, and came home with the precious document that secured his freedom. The happy mother and son sat together by the old hearthstone that night, telling how proud they were of each other, and how they would prove to the world that they could take care of themselves, as they had long taken care of others” (26–27). The chapter closes on a particularly ironic note: “We all concluded by saying, ‘He that is willing to be a slave, let him be a slave’” (27, original italics). Thus, Aunt Martha pays white Americans $800 for a man whose uncompensated labor had already benefited them. In exchange, she and her son get to “prove” they can take care of themselves, can create the sort of home life that deserves respect and protection. Here, the text interacts with African Americans’ lived experiences. Though it was as rare as successful escape, many enslaved people worked tirelessly to buy loved ones. As usual, American institutions thrived on denying black humanity while also relying on it. If black familial bonds meant nothing, white people would not have been able to profit from such sales. The violence inhered in white people’s insistence upon simultaneously recognizing and disregarding black humanity.9 Of course, Aunt Martha and Phillip had been taking care of themselves all along; they simply had not been “free” to take care of themselves. Yet, they had always had the freedom to do what they were now doing with that bill of sale: provide for themselves while enriching white people. What did they gain, then? As narrator, Linda does not comment directly on the incongruence of their defining this as a moment of tri...
