“lost property,” Jane, an enslaved woman who survived the Middle Passage, stumbles into history. In her brief encounter with the “official” record, Jane emerges in the archive disfigured by her capture, captivity, enslavement, and the power of her owner in this written document. The scars on enslaved women’s “flesh” as described in runaway advertisements disclose more than who owned them, what they wore, and to whom they might have run even as they limit their historicization. The very description of this wounded “flesh” represents one of the points at which black bodies became racialized objects, and their scars produce multiple axes of meaning.
Contradictions between Jane’s constructed humanity as an enslaved “negro woman” and the memory of a time before enslavement in Barbados play out in the descriptions of her textualized flesh. The “country marks in her forehead” exemplify the temporality of her life, a time before captivity when she belonged to a kinship.1 The “firebrand on one of her breasts” marks not only her capture and objectification, but also the violation of bodily exposure at the time of her branding.2 The advertisement re-exposes her body to history. “A large mark of her country behind her shoulder almost to the small of her back” may be from another kinship ritual performed, or a mark of abuse in the moment of her capture in West Africa. “A stab of a knife in her neck” exemplifies the extreme peril and powerlessness of her captivity. It may have happened in a moment of defense in the process of capture or on board the ship across the Atlantic. These scars turn into enslaved women’s stories—symbols of the deep penetration of violence that mark the relationship between the body of the archive, the body in the archive, the material body, and the enslaved female body in space.
Jane materializes briefly in a runaway advertisement from a condition of trauma describing all that her owner wanted the public to know about her—scarred and running—in a few sentences. With this scant accounting we must write her history. Jane’s language, possible ethnic origins (although dubious in this description by her owner), history of violence, and the crisis of her condition as an enslaved subject are herein revealed.3 Her subjectivity, constituted through theft from Africa, violence marked on her flesh, and her unrecorded suffering “is a life that [had] to be lived in loss.”4 Tragically and perversely, her flesh and her bodily movements in flight to “freedom” become her archive.
Enslaved women interacted with local urban spaces and their bodies became concentrated sites of meaning that in turn represented their inhumanity to owners or other whites and their predicament to other slaves. The public discourse of runaway advertisements exposed their private scarred bodies even as they were concealed in fugitivity. Thus, the condition of slavery permeated all spaces; and where slavery existed, “there is no place that is wholly liberatory” not even the archive, itself layered with “geographies of domination” and violence.5 Attention to how power was mobilized and deployed through space—urban space, body-space, archival space—and how colonial authorities confronted, confined, and distorted mobile enslaved bodies complicates what was possible in the alternative spaces created by the enslaved. As Katherine McKittrick argues, dwelling on the relationship between bodies and space also “reveals that the interplay between domination and black women’s geographies is underscored by the social production of space.”6 The archive encompasses another space of domination in this configuration and represents the link between the objectification of enslaved women and historical dispossession.
The following discussion utilizes a methodological practice that aims to subvert the archival discourse that filters the past only through white (male and female) voices by dwelling on the scars of other fugitive women. Close readings of scarred enslaved bodies in runaway ads alongside analyses of urban space—the built environment—and theoretical scholarship concerned with black women’s bodies as sites of meaning demonstrate how enslaved women encountered and were configured by urban slavery and the difficulties constituent to their historical narration.7 In the subsequent section we will follow Jane through the streets of Bridgetown. Jane’s movement through the town maps the sensorial and architectural history of slavery in this urban site from an enslaved woman’s perspective. Experiencing Bridgetown from Jane’s view—emanating from the silences within the runaway ad—the historian’s focus is redirected to the sensorial perspective of the historically disempowered enslaved woman. After Jane’s flight through town, a detailed chronology of Bridgetown’s history illuminates the vulnerability of slaves in an urban environment with the port town’s exposure to natural disaster, disease, and invasion. In addition, the layout and geographical particularities of Bridgetown embody the confluence of urban space and enslaved punishment.
Fugitive Women: The Body in the Archive
As identifying marks, the scars on enslaved bodies signified different meanings for various groups of people within Barbados slave society. For the colonial authorities they served as punishment for the victim and terror to the enslaved population. For the enslaved they confirmed one’s condition of captivity and this “body memory”—the permanent marks and meanings inscribed on the body—also transferred knowledge of enslavement to future generations.8 An enslaved child would come to understand that the scars on her caregivers represented pain and unfreedom. Put another way, the scars became a different type of “country mark,” produced by a ritual of violence that identified a person to other enslaved people not by their “ethnic” origin but by their dishonored condition that branded them as commodities.
Hortense Spillers makes an important intervention in understanding the distinction between the “enslaved body” and “flesh” “as the central one between captive and liberated subject-positions,” which is helpful in reading scars on enslaved bodies and to account for their multiplicity of meanings.9 Spillers argues that the human body is a site imbued with cultural significations (race, gender, sexuality), but it is the violence upon the flesh of African captives—“its seared, divided, ripped-apartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or ‘escaped’ over-board”10—that is the point at which African captives became differentiated from human subjects and made into commodified objects.11 Consequently, in runaway ads the flesh is the site of objectification that becomes the material from which the enslaved, in this case fugitive enslaved women, come into what I call a mutilated historicity. This term refers to the violent condition in which enslaved women appear in the archive disfigured and violated. Mutilated historicity exemplifies how their bodies and flesh become “inscribed” with the text/violence of slavery.12 As a result, the quality of their historicization remains degraded in our present attempts to recreate their everyday experiences. The infliction of scars, lacerations, burns, and wounds of captivity reproduce African captive objectification and display as a “social hieroglyph” that communicates enslaved status to others—enslaved and free—and these flesh injuries are the remains with which we must construct their history.13
All Jane’s probable movements, the impetus of her flight and experience in fugitivity, are unknowable in the existing archive. The publicity and intention of the runaway ad challenges her concealment and freedom. Fugitivity in this context denotes the experience of enslaved women as fugitives—both hidden from view and in the state of absconding. It also signifies the fragile condition of runaways who came into visibility through runaway advertisements. If fugitivity is “the artful escape of objectification”14 (racial, commodified, legal/political), Jane’s disappearance was a defiant act against these constraints. The fugitive slave subverted the very paradigm of enslavement—immobility, disembodiment, violation—and created an alternative self in what Stephanie Camp terms a “rival geography.”15 Yet, the discourse of runaway advertisements remained an ever looming and corporeal threat for the absconding slave. This discursive power combined with the legal right of whites to interrogate, inspect, probe, and detain any black suspect made fugitivity both an insecure and defiant status.16 Jane’s owner conjured an image of her body that enabled others to access her through their surveillance and her bodily exposure.17 As the earliest slave laws of Barbados indicated, the fear and reality of rebellion and maroon resistance in the mid-seventeenth century made running away punishable by death if the slave had been captured after one year.18 These laws lasted into the mid-eighteenth century.19 Fugitivity then,