The Mark of Slavery by Jenifer L. Barclay

Author:Jenifer L. Barclay [Barclay, Jenifer L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Slavery, People With Disabilities, History, United States, Civil War Period (1850-1877)
ISBN: 9780252052613
Google: 7Q0iEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
Published: 2021-04-13T02:49:54+00:00

“The Secret of Master’s Cruelty”: Disability in Fugitive Slave Narratives

Fugitive slave narratives described harrowing journeys from slavery to freedom and were one of the most convincing strategies for promoting antislavery sentiments. These eyewitness accounts—with white testimonials that verified their accuracy and authenticity—attested to the brutalities of enslavement. They drew powerfully on the principles of Christianity and democracy to affirm the humanity of enslaved people and denounce the hypocrisy of an American institution that denied them their inalienable right to freedom.69 In the antebellum years, many Americans recognized the power of these poignant firsthand accounts to garner sympathy and recruit individuals to the abolitionist cause, a quality that allowed later readers to dismiss the texts as suspect sources and abolitionist propaganda.70 Slave narratives explicitly detailed gruesome scenes of violence and exploitation, exposing the “precariousness of empathy and uncertain line between witness and spectator.”71 At the time of their publication, however, these graphic depictions of black suffering—from physical punishments to inner torment when sold away from family and friends—drew extensively on the language and imagery of disability to heighten readers’ indignation about the barbarity of slavery.

Images of disabled slaves and allusions to various disabilities were central to intensifying the heart-wrenching effects of fugitives’ accounts. Some narratives even implored readers to extend their pity to the continued difficulties fugitives endured after they attained nominal freedom in the North. Slave narratives’ references to disability and disabled people sometimes reaffirmed prevailing negative views (i.e., that brutal punishments reduced healthy, “normal” people to useless invalids or cripples). In other cases, they suggested an understanding of disability unique from those held by most whites. Stressing that disabled individuals were invaluable members of enslaved families and communities, slave narratives portrayed them not as liabilities but assets and their poor treatment at the hands of slaveholders as particularly egregious.72 Slave narratives also blurred the line between rhetoric and reality when authors recounted their own experience of permanent or temporary physical and psychological disabilities. These tracts were not merely sentimental rhetoric or extensions of medical and legal discourses that linked blackness to disability, though their white readership likely interpreted them through these filters.

Antebellum slave narratives employed disability rhetoric and imagery as a strategy to cultivate white sympathy and detail crucial experiences of enslaved life, which sometimes revealed understandings of disability unique to enslaved blacks. Disability rhetoric saturated fugitive slaves’ discussions of punishment, labor, separation and sale, family and community, and gender exploitation. Some narratives provided valuable insights into the lives of enslaved people with disabilities, based on firsthand experiences or as someone who witnessed their treatment. Usually, there was a distinction between the nondisabled fugitive narrator and the disabled slaves they described, a practice that invited the gaze of sympathetic whites engaged with the text. There are cases, however, in which allusions to the narrator’s own disability—or perceived disability—prevailed directly on readers to identify with the author. Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and a lesser-known Autobiography of Henry Parker each employed this approach.

Given the inherent

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