and contemplation. Conversations with Rhaisa Williams, Dwayne Mann, Cecilio Cooper, and Chelsea Ferguson have been particularly helpful, alongside the exceptional assistance of Caitlin Bruce, Amina Asim, and most especially, Juliette Lim.
Most of all, I thank my family, including a host of aunts, uncles, cousins, siblings, parents, and grandparents, who encouraged me throughout this process. Lottie Cobb, Daryl Cobb, and Helen Webster have always been divine, even while on earth. Clinton Webster has been a blessing in my life; I would not have made it here without his love and devotion. I am most grateful to my mother, Caryl Harris, who has always fostered my curiosity, even when inconvenient. She has supported me in everything I have ever attempted, escorting me on every wild endeavor and filling my room with books. Danielle, Darrell, Dana, Nyall, and especially Monique cheered me on the entire way, along with my aunts Jean Webster and Marilyn Johnson, who nurtured me. I am also immensely grateful for friendships that travel, like family, surviving space and time: Lynette Lee, Keyanna Pompey, Shanice Jackson, and Precious Daniels. Finally, I am thankful for my chosen family, which sustains me everyday. Loie faithfully attended work daily, under my desk, until this book was complete. Kenyon Whittington teaches me something new every day and supports me in ways far bigger than I can dream. I could not have finished this book without you; thanks for ceaseless love and dedication. Thank you all for the support.
Introduction: Parlor Fantasies, Parlor Nightmares
Freedom put color in the cheeks of Black people in the nineteenth century. African descendants who sat for daguerreotypes around 1855 made sure to document self-possession with proper attire and a little rouge for the flesh, such as members of the Dickerson family in antebellum Philadelphia.1 Though this marker of vitality appeared in many daguerreotypes, Black people sitting for early photographic portraits marked themselves against the deprivation and sallowness demanded by slavery with such details. Black women, such as the unidentified sitter in figure I.1, showed up at the studio highly decorated for the occasion of portraiture, dressed in fine garments of thick satin with lace embellishments that were punctuated with modest hoop earrings. While the unidentified Black men in the Dickerson family portraits needed to be proper only from the bust up, much of a lady’s body appeared in the image, so her dress needed to drape perfectly. Every aspect of the self demanded perfect execution for picture taking in the mid-nineteenth century. Self-proclaimed ladies and gentlemen of African descent likely braved stares on their way to the studio as they prepared to create a new visual archive of Blackness before the abolition of slavery. Privileged Black people convened to represent freedom.
The unknown people pictured in the Dickerson daguerreotypes commissioned these images several years before the Civil War.. Free people who wanted portraits worked with an artist, in this case, likely Robert Douglass Jr., a Black artist and daguerreotypist who snapped pictures at an art studio near Philadelphia’s Twelfth and Arch Streets.2 The daguerreotype—predecessor to the modern photograph—was then in vogue, and these customers could afford this expensive process, many having patronized Douglass since the 1840s. His earliest customers paid approximately five dollars for each image and its morocco case. Together with the artist, Black patrons made decisions about how to pose, whether or not to add color to their cheeks, and what casing to use to preserve the image.3 These women staged smartness with clothing and jewelry, and, with the books they included within the frame of the photograph, they staged intelligence and literacy. Common studio props such as tables, chairs, and vases appear in these images to ground the subjects in furnished, home-like settings. Framed in small leather cases that open like books on metal hinges, these prized possessions document the look of free communities in the mid-nineteenth century. The cases protect miniature archives of Black self-making and early pictures of freedom in the decades moving toward the end of U.S. slavery.
Figure I.1. Portrait of an unidentified woman from the Dickerson Daguerreotype Collection, ca. 1850. (Courtesy of The Library Company of Philadelphia)
Black people appearing in early daguerreotypes used this new media form to picture freedom, to image and imagine people of African descent as self-possessed and divorced from slavery. Such illustrations countered a long history of contemptuous representations of Black people by portraying “black pride and identity” in daguerreotypes.4 These people were not just creating distance between freedom and slavery’s mediation of Blackness, as distributed in auction advertisements, for example. They were reimagining and reconstructing Black visuality removed from the cultural logics of slavery. Daguerreotypes offered a sense of “truth” in representation, with images that seemed unencumbered by human interpretation like hand-drawn illustrations. Daguerreotypes employed technological intervention for the capture of nature; and many free Black people enjoyed them as tools of “critical black memory,” countering a fifty-year history of Black subjugation via visual representation with their own images.5 The occasion to sit for a Black photographer meant the opportunity to archive a changing Black visuality and the new visibilities exhibited among free people of African descent. These materials evidenced the gaze of the free Black photographer shot through the lens of the camera, the gaze of the free Black person seated as subject looking through the other side, and, finally, the gaze of any visitor who viewed these daguerreotypes on display in the home. Blacks pictured in these early photographs used portraiture to seize control over representation of the free Black body. With the artist, these patrons created a palpable record of freedom and Black visibility that bolstered the contemporaneous displays of autonomy staged within Black communities. These images documented the existence of free “Americans” of African descent, even as the issue of Black freedom and national belonging remained in question. Pictures of freedom in Black homes of the antebellum North simultaneously wielded “spectacle and possession,” documenting the way in which people of African descent appeared within various conceptions of the domestic; they display ownership of the self as distinct from slavery.6 These daguerreotypes circulated in a preemancipation context where viewers consumed a bevy of other renditions of Black freedom—items that were variously hostile, humorous, obscure, affirmative, and persistent.
Mainstream media pictured Black freedom quite differently for White Americans who were uncertain about or downright unhappy with the idea of Black freedom as well as with the dissolution of slavery. A robust genre of “racial Americana” emerged at the turn of the nineteenth century, weaving an “American” folk culture tapestry of U.S. nationalism and fetishizing racism that appeared on theater stages, as well as in cartoons, print ephemera, and sheet music.7 The racial caricaturist Edward Williams Clay illustrated Black freedom with a popular lithographic series, titled “Life in Philadelphia,” that depicted free Blacks engaged in ridiculous forms of civic and domestic life. Clay’s vision of Black freedom emphasized elaborate dress and improper speech to portray free people as foolhardy and self-important. His illustrations positioned people of African descent as ill-prepared to experience liberty or autonomy. Examples such as figure I.2, which depicts a Black man, overdressed in top hat and waistcoat, making a house call to “Miss Dinah,” used speech, gesture, and physical space to turn Black freedom into a humorous notion. Although the unseen Dinah imagines herself as too important to answer the door, Dinah’s servant reveals that her mistress is “bery petickly engaged in washing de dishes.” In lieu of a visit, the gentleman caller leaves a card at the door for the woman of this basement “parlor.” While polite rules of conduct required a lady of the house to receive all her guests unless she was ill, Miss Dinah denied her visitor because she remained engaged in the lowly domestic work of dishwashing. The joke of the image is that arrogant free Black people like Dinah, her servant, and her visitor remained in feeble social and domestic positions. Clay used the pitiable cellar to symbolize the truth about self-important people of African descent; even in freedom, Black people remained too connected to slavery and low socioeconomic standing to move out of the basement and into the above-ground space of the house, or the parlor of the home. Clay created many images like this scene, often overwhelming the page with commentary on the rules of proper decorum and inverted social conventions to portray Black freedom as ridiculous or implausible. Responding to a small, but growing number of free Black people gaining economic stability and building independent communities in the urban North, Clay used pictures to rethink the consequences of freedom.
This book explains how seemingly