Girl in Black and White by Jessie Morgan-Owens

Author:Jessie Morgan-Owens
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2019-02-25T00:00:00+00:00

The New-York Daily Times retorted in a short response entitled “Encouraging”: “The Washington Sentinel has said a witty thing—we were going to quote it, but the joke reaches through a column, and we have not space to save the curiosity in. It is all about Senator Sumner’s ‘Ida May,’ who, it shrewdly suggests must be a ‘bogus’ slave because the Times has pronounced her white.”8

The Times neglected to mention Tucker’s theory that “it is very silly in the Abolitionists to undertake to illustrate African slavery by means of a white girl.” Sumner, by bringing a white child out of slavery, had intended to upend the racial construct and thereby blur the edges of slavehood. But members of his audience simply regarded her as an exception to the rule of black and white, a “bogus” representative of the class of enslaved persons.

Edward Lillie Pierce, Sumner’s nineteenth-century biographer, put it best when he called Mary’s daguerreotype a bait-and-switch: “many were affected by the sight of [a] slave apparently white, who were unmoved at the contemplation of negroes in bondage.” Sumner’s strategy generated sympathy, but at a high cost. By confirming racial difference—white slave equals white sympathy—he did not call for sympathy and, more crucially, the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for persons of color. This equation was complicated by class and gender norms surrounding white womanhood. The near-white mothers and girls at the heart of antislavery novels trouble the social landscape only insofar as they exposed new communities of white women who needed protecting from white men. By inviting judgments about white and black “fitness” for enslavement (sexual or otherwise), mixed-race characters could either confirm a message and vision of a shared humanity or, just as easily, solidify existing racial prejudice.

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