The Matter of Black Living by Autumn Womack

Author:Autumn Womack [Womack, Autumn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780226806914
Google: sQZXEAAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2022-01-15T04:29:47+00:00

Figure 2.2 Sketch of the Baker family and the accompanying article describing their journey north, Boston Herald, July 19, 1899

The incongruence between the visual depiction of exemplary domesticity and the textual narrative of familial crisis is important here. Absent the specter of poverty and lynching, the image recalls a pre-lynching iteration of intact domesticity while looking forward to the reconstituted kinship that Jewett’s efforts promised to deliver. Together, Jewett’s plan for domestic rehabilitation and the line drawing recall the work of nineteenth-century educational reformers who, as Laura Wexler has argued, capitalized on the appeal of the “before and after” model to advertise the efficacy of reformers’ intervention and Indigenous peoples’ capacity to be civilized.81 Rather than marshaling the visual pairing to course correct a path that was believed to be incapable of ever reaching industrialized civilization, Jewett evoked the paradigm to index a not-too-distant past that she could help retrieve. Within this new temporal economy, the “after” image registers a time before the before. A special dispatch from her personal journalist Mr. Larsen added additional fuel to the temporal crosshatch. In his account of the Bakers’ presence at the train station where they would commence their journey to Boston, Larsen simultaneously conveyed the transformative work that Jewett had already begun while suggesting that the Bakers’ current condition was a welcome return to prior domestic bliss: “They were all very black and of slight build, and as they sat there were very different from what they were when Miss Jewett visited the little ramshackle cottage on the outskirts of the city the day before. At that time the trousers of the boys were out at the knees and were supported by one suspender.” In contrast to the scene of domestic havoc that Jewett supposedly encountered, after embracing Jewett’s offer, the Bakers, Larsen reported, are “rigged out in new clothing, furnished though the generosity of Miss Jewett and the Bakers are all well and happy.”82

The dissonance between image and the text—that is, between the visual register of domestic idealism and the narrative description of familial precarity—begins the temporal deferral that would ultimately recalibrate the binarism separating living and dead, evidentiary and live, and past and present, all of which the exhibit would come to both exploit and manage. And just as the sketch heralds a past moment while calling forth an unrealized future, it would also turn out to be a preenactment of the exhibit itself and ultimately the photographic portraits. But even before the Bakers emerged on stage, the line drawing was picked up by press outlets as the exhibit’s official iconography, creating an additional temporal rerouting. On July 23, the Boston Post printed a sketch nearly identical to the image that had appeared in the Boston Herald a week earlier (fig. 2.3). What interests me here is the way in which a temporal crisscrossing gets sewn into the Baker Exhibit’s fabric, which ultimately provides the occasion for both performative irruptions and political reordering.

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