Fair Women Are Transformed into Negresses

Molly Rogers
Pub­lished Jan. 18, 2012

“Fair women are trans­formed into Negresses”(1)

The Uncanny Object

In the sum­mer of 1976, employ­ees of Har­vard University’s Peabody Museum of Archae­ol­ogy and Eth­nol­ogy dis­cov­ered fif­teen daguerreo­types in the museum attic. The pho­tographs were made in 1850 and they depict five African men and two African Amer­i­can women, all of whom were slaves in or near Colum­bia, South Car­olina. The names of the peo­ple are known—the men are Jack, Jem, Fassena and Alfred, and the women Drana and Delia—as are a few details on the cir­cum­stances of their lives. The daguerreo­types are con­sid­ered to be the ear­li­est known pho­tographs of iden­ti­fi­able Amer­i­can slaves.

The daguerreo­types are also among the ear­li­est known pho­tographs made to sup­port anthro­po­log­i­cal sci­ence. Com­mis­sioned by the Swiss-born nat­u­ral­ist and Har­vard pro­fes­sor Louis Agas­siz, they were intended to serve as evi­dence for an early the­ory of human diver­sity, one favored by slave­hold­ers. The the­ory, later called poly­ge­n­e­sis, held that there had not been one act of creation—one orig­i­nal pair, as the Bible stipulated—but many: God had cre­ated a Black Adam and Eve, an Asian Adam and Eve, and so on. Diver­sity, Agas­siz and other pro­po­nents of this the­ory claimed, dated back to Cre­ation. Yet despite the sup­port of well-known and respected sci­en­tists, poly­ge­n­e­sis was not widely accepted because it con­tra­dicted Chris­t­ian doc­trine; how­ever, for many it was prefer­able to the alter­na­tive expla­na­tion, that diver­sity was the result of changes occur­ring over vast peri­ods of time. Evo­lu­tion, as this idea would come to be known, con­jured for nine­teenth cen­tury Amer­i­cans images of racial shape-shifting and proved highly dis­taste­ful to most white people.

Not long ago I viewed the daguerreo­types at the Peabody Museum. I was writ­ing a nar­ra­tive his­tory of the pho­tographs, cov­er­ing the social and polit­i­cal cir­cum­stances that led to their mak­ing and the mean­ings that may have been found in them.(2) This was a project I under­took in my own time—the book was my response to the pow­er­ful nature of the photographs—and it required a great deal of research in areas com­pletely new to me, includ­ing the his­to­ries of early anthro­pol­ogy and slav­ery in ante­bel­lum Amer­ica. It was only after six years of research that I had the oppor­tu­nity to exam­ine all fif­teen daguerreo­types for the first time, the long delay due as much to my need to under­stand what I was look­ing for in the pho­tographs before actu­ally see­ing them as it was due to the logis­tics of vis­it­ing the museum and the need to con­vince cura­tors that I was a legit­i­mate researcher. Decid­edly rare and invalu­able objects, the daguerreo­types are closely guarded by museum staff, and rightly so. I eagerly antic­i­pated see­ing the daguerreo­types in per­son, which I knew would be very dif­fer­ent from look­ing at reproductions.

Gaz­ing upon a daguerreo­type is a pecu­liar expe­ri­ence. Made using a direct-positive process, the daguerreo­type is a mir­ror image—the subject’s right-hand side is on your left—and a one-of-a-kind object: there is no neg­a­tive, and so copies can­not be made unless the orig­i­nal is re-photographed. The image itself is ephemeral, dis­ap­pear­ing when the pho­to­graph is tilted slightly. But more star­tling is the appar­ent depth of the image, a result of the way in which daguerreo­types were pack­aged. Placed in a dec­o­ra­tive case with a glass cov­er­ing to pro­tect the sur­face of the image, the metal plate of the daguerreo­type is a mir­ror image in a sec­ond sense: it reflects back your own image as you look at the pho­to­graph. At the same time, any bits of dust or marks on the glass cov­er­ing are reflected in the pho­to­graphic image such that they appear to be sit­u­ated behind the per­son rep­re­sented. This com­bi­na­tion of see­ing your own reflec­tion in the sur­face of the image and see­ing what appears to be space behind the per­son in the pho­to­graph cre­ates a sense of spa­tial depth that is uncanny. To hold and gaze upon a daguerreo­type por­trait is to exist in a vir­tual space along­side the sub­ject of the image.

One of the Peabody’s cura­tors brought the daguerreo­types to me, each one care­fully wrapped to pro­tect the leather-bound case, the group stored together in a box. After the cura­tor had removed them from the box, I was left with a pair of white cot­ton gloves and tacit instruc­tions to han­dle the daguerreo­types with care. When I asked for a mag­ni­fy­ing glass—each exquis­itely detailed image is less than four inches across by five inches high—one was found for me to use. I started with the two images of Delia.

As I exam­ined the pho­tographs, scru­ti­niz­ing Delia’s body with the aid of a mag­ni­fy­ing glass—seeking in her image evi­dence of mal­treat­ment, of the cir­cum­stances under which the image was made, and of her indi­vid­ual character—an unpleas­ant feel­ing came over me. Louis Agas­siz had com­mis­sioned Delia’s pho­tographs after phys­i­cally exam­in­ing her. The images were intended to serve as aides-memoire to this osten­si­bly sci­en­tific exam­i­na­tion and also as evi­dence of his find­ings, which he could show to other peo­ple. The pho­tographs were there­fore dou­bly linked to Delia’s vio­la­tion: they were both the cul­mi­na­tion of an inva­sive exam­i­na­tion and a sec­ond instance of this objec­ti­fy­ing scrutiny. And there I was, exam­in­ing Delia much as the sci­en­tist had done: she was exposed against her will and in her body I sought infor­ma­tion, facts, evi­dence. That the kind of the evi­dence I hoped to find dif­fered from that of the Swiss nat­u­ral­ist offered lit­tle con­so­la­tion. Ulti­mately, there was no avoid­ing the fact that I was regard­ing Delia as an object and doing so for my own gain. This dis­com­fit­ing iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with Agas­siz (not to men­tion slave­hold­ers and undoubt­edly oth­ers who shared their atti­tudes on race) brought tears to my eyes and led me to ques­tion my own inter­est in and use of the daguerreotypes.

I came away from the Peabody Museum won­der­ing about my work and my rela­tion­ship to images of suf­fer­ing and oppres­sion. Is it pos­si­ble to look at these pho­tographs in a way that does not re-enact the objec­ti­fy­ing gaze of the sci­en­tist, the slave­holder and the pho­tog­ra­pher? How should we look at and write about images that are com­plicit with cru­elty?(3)

Imag­i­na­tive Liberation

One solu­tion to this prob­lem might be to acknowl­edge the “human­ity” of the peo­ple in the pho­tographs, as some writ­ers have done. Delia was pho­tographed for the pur­pose of prov­ing poly­ge­n­e­sis, which some peo­ple inter­preted to mean that dif­fer­ent races con­sti­tuted sep­a­rate species. Con­se­quently, it pro­vided sci­en­tific and there­fore appar­ently irrefutable jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for slav­ery. Louis Agas­siz exam­ined Delia and the other peo­ple that were pho­tographed on his instruc­tions in order to deter­mine their “racial type,” which is to say he viewed them as abstrac­tions rather than indi­vid­u­als. We, how­ever, know bet­ter. We view Delia dif­fer­ently, see­ing her not as a racial type, nor per­haps even pri­mar­ily as a slave (another kind of “type”), but as a young woman who worked on a plan­ta­tion out­side Colum­bia, South Car­olina, and who was forced to remove her cloth­ing so that a sci­en­tist could exam­ine and record her appear­ance. We acknowl­edge her humil­i­a­tion, and so rec­og­nize her human­ity, and in this way restore to her what had been taken away. Alan Tra­cht­en­berg calls this “imag­i­na­tive lib­er­a­tion.” By rec­i­p­ro­cat­ing the look of the per­son in the pho­to­graph, he writes, “we have acknowl­edged what the pic­tures most overtly deny: the uni­ver­sal human­ness we share with them. Their gaze in our eyes, we can say, frees them.”(4)

But can we really say this, that Delia’s gaze, in our eyes, frees her?  The metaphor of free­dom is a poor choice, in my view. Look­ing at a pho­to­graph can­not “free” an enslaved person—only run­ning away, man­u­mis­sion or uni­ver­sal eman­ci­pa­tion could and did do this, and pos­si­bly also moments of resis­tance. Look­ing at Delia’s pho­to­graph and see­ing there a human being rather than a racial type or a piece of prop­erty does not mag­i­cally restore what was taken from her; it does not redress the many wrongs, the many vio­la­tions per­pe­trated against her, includ­ing hav­ing her pho­to­graph taken for sci­en­tific pur­poses. It mat­ters how we regard such pho­tographs because under­stand­ing why they were made mit­i­gates some­what the objec­ti­fy­ing gaze, but such regard can­not have any affect upon Delia her­self. To sug­gest that we can “free” a per­son by look­ing at her pho­to­graph is to over­look the speci­ficity of that per­son, the very real details of her life, both good and bad: in other words, it ren­ders her into an abstraction.

I also have a prob­lem with Trachtenberg’s claim for a “uni­ver­sal human­ness.” It is true that Delia was pho­tographed for the very pur­pose of negat­ing the idea of a shared human­ity, and while there is noth­ing wrong with declar­ing an oppo­si­tion to this idea—such asser­tions are per­haps even nec­es­sary, what­ever their pitfalls—at the same time the his­tory of early anthro­pol­ogy shows us that “the human” is far from a uni­ver­sally under­stood and agreed upon con­cept. The the­ory of poly­ge­n­e­sis, which was widely debated dur­ing the nine­teenth cen­tury, held that the class of beings we had long called “humans” were actu­ally many dis­tinct types of beings. Such dis­putes over the cause and mean­ing of racial dif­fer­ence tell us that “the human,” rather than being a nat­ural cat­e­gory, is always con­tin­gent on the cir­cum­stances in which the term is being applied—it is, in other words, a con­cept steeped in his­tory. It is also another abstrac­tion, how­ever well inten­tioned.(5)

Imag­i­na­tive lib­er­a­tion as Tra­cht­en­berg describes it seems to me the sort of thing Susan Son­tag had in mind when she wrote, “Pho­tographs turn the past into an object of ten­der regard, scram­bling moral dis­tinc­tions and dis­arm­ing his­tor­i­cal judg­ments by the gen­er­al­ized pathos of look­ing at time past.”(6) Since the daguerreo­types have so lit­tle to say about the peo­ple they depict, what else can we find in them but some ele­men­tal qual­ity shared by all peo­ple? This is not an unrea­son­able posi­tion to take, but surely mat­ters should not rest there. Else­where Son­tag wrote: “No ‘we’ should be taken for granted when the sub­ject is look­ing at other people’s pain.”(7)

The claim for a shared human­ity with Delia says more about a need to dis­tance our­selves from peo­ple such as Agas­siz and the racial ideas he val­ued than about the per­son depicted in the pho­to­graph. After all, who wants to iden­tify with a racist? At the same time, it is eas­ier to base an empathic (and reas­sur­ing) gaze on the catchall notion of a shared human­ity than on any­thing about Delia as an indi­vid­ual because we know so lit­tle about her. The archives and libraries are full of infor­ma­tion on Agassiz—his cor­re­spon­dence, pub­lished sci­en­tific work, and books writ­ten about him—but there is pre­cious lit­tle about the peo­ple depicted in the daguerreo­types. Nev­er­the­less, we do know some details about Delia’s life. For exam­ple, her job was with a black­smith, an unusual occu­pa­tion for a woman in the nine­teenth cen­tury, even on a plan­ta­tion.(8) Con­tem­po­rary slave nar­ra­tives also tell us about liv­ing con­di­tions under slav­ery. So there are sources that could be used to say some­thing spe­cific about Delia. Yet, as I became involved in my own work, I was sur­prised to find that none of the schol­ars and his­to­ri­ans who had writ­ten about the pho­tographs seemed to have con­sid­ered Delia, Jack, Jem, Drana, Alfred and Fassena as indi­vid­u­als. They made no room for Delia as a per­son, pre­sent­ing her only as the object of sci­en­tific and pho­to­graphic scrutiny, and an exam­ple of uni­ver­sal human­ness.(9)

Shift­ing the focus from dis­cus­sions of vit­ri­olic racism, polit­i­cal oppres­sion, and the abuse of indi­vid­u­als to the more reas­sur­ing vision of uni­ver­sal human­ity (and with it the sug­ges­tion that we are far from such hor­rors today) may ease the dis­com­fort of look­ing at images of suf­fer­ing but it also excuses us from look­ing at these images and think­ing about who and what they depict.

Once we look away, it is dif­fi­cult to look back.

Imag­i­nary Lives

Sit­ting in the Peabody Museum, dis­turbed by the way scrutiny of the daguerreo­types brought me uncom­fort­ably close to Agas­siz, I decided that in my own work I needed to depict the peo­ple in the pho­tographs as indi­vid­u­als, as sub­jects rather than objects. By doing this I could dis­rupt the orig­i­nal intended mean­ing of the pho­tographs, influ­enc­ing how oth­ers saw the images and the peo­ple in them. But could I in fact do this, espe­cially given the paucity of rel­e­vant source mate­r­ial? I had dis­cov­ered a few facts about each of the peo­ple depicted, but the prospect of sim­ply work­ing these into a con­ven­tional nar­ra­tive his­tory, where they might log­i­cally appear, was dis­sat­is­fy­ing.(10) For instance, Jack’s involve­ment with the First Bap­tist Church of Colum­bia would be rel­e­vant in a dis­cus­sion of how slave­hold­ers used reli­gion as a pro­phy­lac­tic against insur­rec­tion.(11) But drop­ping such a fact into the gen­eral dis­cus­sion would have meant releas­ing sig­nif­i­cant infor­ma­tion into a deep pool where it would have been all but lost. Alter­na­tively, teas­ing out the impli­ca­tions of the fact within the dis­cus­sion by explor­ing what it meant for Jack to be an active church mem­ber would cre­ate an awk­ward digression.

My solu­tion for giv­ing the peo­ple depicted in the images a sub­jec­tive pres­ence in the book, one that bal­ances depic­tion of the men who made and used the daguerreo­types, was to use lit­er­ary tech­niques. The first of these was to incor­po­rate into the text the words of W.E.B. DuBois, Ralph Elli­son and Zora Neale Hurston as a way to rebut the dom­i­nant racist dis­course of the nine­teenth cen­tury. The main nar­ra­tive of the book presents the African Amer­i­can response to early anthro­po­log­i­cal sci­ence, with John H. John­son, a “col­ored man” from Philadel­phia, and the well-known black abo­li­tion­ist Fred­er­ick Dou­glass appear­ing to demon­strate that not every Amer­i­can found poly­ge­n­e­sis a com­pelling the­ory.(12) But I also drew from the wealth of African Amer­i­can writ­ing that has emerged since the pho­tographs were made. When Agas­siz reveals his dis­gust of black peo­ple, sin­gling out “that hideous hand” belong­ing to a hotel waiter as the focus of his revul­sion, Zora Neale Hurston’s voice responds with a con­trast­ing atti­tude. “But the thing that held my eyes were their fin­gers,” she says of her first pro­longed encounter with white peo­ple. “They were long and thin, and very white, except up near the tips. There they were baby pink. I had never seen such hands. It was a fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cov­ery for me. I won­dered how they felt.”(13) Agas­siz and Hurston were both cap­ti­vated by hands dif­fer­ent from their own, but Hurston was moved to won­der what it would be like to touch those other hands, to engage in inti­mate, human con­tact with them.

In another exam­ple, when the man charged with over­see­ing the com­mis­sion for the daguerreo­types, Dr. Robert Gibbes, writes to a col­league, “I have just fin­ished the daguerreo­types for Agas­siz of native Africans of var­i­ous tribes. I wish you could see them,” the reply comes not from the sci­en­tist to whom he wrote, but Ralph Elli­son.(14)  The pas­sage in the book reads thus:

“I wish you could see them,” Gibbes wrote—but did any­one see them—really see them? And when we say “them,” are we talk­ing about the daguerreo­types them­selves, or the peo­ple depicted in the images? Cer­tainly Agas­siz and other men looked at the daguerreo­types, but what did they see?  Did they see a slave? A young woman or an old man? A car­pen­ter or a man from West Africa? Some­one who liked to sing, or dance, or chew tobacco?  Did they see a hea­then or a sin­ner, a Mus­lim or a Christian?

“I am an invis­i­ble man,” says the nar­ra­tor of Ralph Ellison’s epic story of race in the twentieth-century. “I am a man of sub­stance, of flesh and bone, fibre and liquids—and I might even be said to pos­sess a mind.”

How can a man with such attrib­utes, a human being, be invisible?

“I am invis­i­ble, under­stand, sim­ply because peo­ple refuse to see me.”

For Elli­son, to ren­der a man black requires only that you look closely, scru­ti­nize his body, his move­ments and his man­ner, and at the same time that you see noth­ing of the man. “When they approach me they see only my sur­round­ings, them­selves, or fig­ments of their imagination—indeed, every­thing and any­thing except me.”(15)

In dia­logues across time and place, Hurston’s and Ellison’s voices respond to those of Agas­siz and Gibbes—speaking for Delia and indeed for many other enslaved people—and in so doing pre­vent the racist atti­tudes of the nine­teenth cen­tury from going unanswered.

My sec­ond lit­er­ary tech­nique was to use fic­tion to present the men and women depicted in the pho­tographs as active sub­jects pos­sess­ing agency despite their sta­tus as slaves. To accom­pany each of the fif­teen pho­tographs, I wrote a short fic­tional “vignette” sug­gested by fac­tual infor­ma­tion, which con­sid­ers the per­spec­tive of the per­son in the adja­cent image. In this way the fact of Jack’s mem­ber­ship with the First Bap­tist Church of Colum­bia, a mat­ter of church record, becomes a scene in which a man sit­ting in church allows the tran­quil­lity he receives from reli­gion to ease the strain of being a slave dri­ver. This vignette not only presents the fact of Jack’s reli­gious affil­i­a­tion but also sug­gests an entire point-of-view, a way of being and think­ing that under­scores Jack’s subjectivity.

Even as they enrich the his­tor­i­cal nar­ra­tive of the book, the fic­tional vignettes also dis­rupt and com­pli­cate the more con­ven­tional account by pre­sent­ing an alter­na­tive view of the per­son depicted, one that stands in oppo­si­tion to the more famil­iar image of the objec­ti­fied slave. A good exam­ple of this is Jem, who “belonged” to F. W. Green—this was prob­a­bly Fred­er­ick W. Green, a mechanic from Mass­a­chu­setts who lived in Colum­bia. Green seems to have owned the Red Bank Cot­ton Fac­tory in Lex­ing­ton, South Car­olina, which sug­gests that in 1850 Jem lived in the city, rather than on a plan­ta­tion. This infor­ma­tion informs all three of Jem’s vignettes. In the first, he nego­ti­ates the poten­tially haz­ardous streets of Colum­bia, demon­strat­ing his rel­a­tive auton­omy (when com­pared with plan­ta­tion slaves) and his skill in deal­ing with white peo­ple in the urban land­scape. In the sec­ond and third vignettes I empha­size Jem’s sophis­ti­ca­tion. Here is an excerpt from the sec­ond vignette, in which he serves din­ner at Green’s house:

He stood out­side the door, shift­ing his weight from one leg to the other. He had spent the day rush­ing around in prepa­ra­tion for the party, arranged only that morn­ing when the Doc­tor paid an early visit. His feet ached.

The bell rang, a shrill sum­mons cut­ting through the tumult of voices. He hadn’t expected it again so soon.

Before enter­ing the room he took a moment to com­pose him­self, straight­en­ing his jacket, smooth­ing his trousers, and remov­ing all expres­sion from his face. He could hear the Doc­tor speak­ing, some­thing about a recent visit to Charleston. He waited for a pause in the story and then entered the room.

In the third vignette Jem finds him­self again wait­ing, this time to have his daguerreo­type made:

“We’re ready for you now.”

He did not move, not imme­di­ately, but when he did rise to his feet he stood tall and took a moment to smooth his cloth­ing before fol­low­ing the man into the next room.

 On both occa­sions Jem smoothes his cloth­ing before enter­ing the room, a ges­ture that sug­gests he is self-confident and socially sophis­ti­cated. The ges­ture also cre­ates a very dif­fer­ent pic­ture from the daguerreo­type, and dif­fer­ent too from the sec­ond vignette’s ensu­ing chap­ter, in which he and the other peo­ple are exam­ined and pho­tographed naked. In this way the vignettes, while pre­sent­ing scenes relat­ing to the book’s over­all nar­ra­tive, are designed to cre­ate an image that nei­ther con­firms nor rein­forces the stark and bru­tal image of the daguerreotype.

The vignettes also func­tion as alter­na­tive cap­tions. The offi­cial cap­tions to the daguerreo­types were assem­bled after the images were made and by dif­fer­ent peo­ple at dif­fer­ent times; they also con­firm and val­i­date the images as sci­en­tific objects. Each cap­tion includes the photographer’s name, a title, the medium used, the date it was made, infor­ma­tion about the museum that owns the image, and an acces­sion num­ber. The offi­cial cap­tion to one of Jem’s pho­tographs reads as follows:

 Joseph T. Zealy, Jem, Gul­lah. belong­ing to F. W. Green, Colum­bia, SC, quarter-plate daguerreo­type, 1850. Cour­tesy Pres­i­dent and Fel­lows of Har­vard Col­lege, Peabody Museum of Archae­ol­ogy and Eth­nol­ogy, 35–5-10/53045.

The title of the work is drawn from the label that Agassiz’s col­league Dr. Gibbes wrote and affixed to the daguerreo­type case in 1850; the Peabody Museum, cur­rent owner of the image, assigned the remain­der of the infor­ma­tion. “Jem” was likely a name assigned by whites, and so may not have been the name this man used among his own peo­ple. The phrase “belong­ing to F.W. Green” under­scores his sta­tus as a slave and so strips him of dig­nity and agency. The museum infor­ma­tion has the fur­ther unfor­tu­nate effect of rein­forc­ing the orig­i­nal pur­pose of the image by nam­ing an insti­tu­tion, a sci­en­tific dis­ci­pline, and a cat­a­logue num­ber. Noth­ing in the cap­tion describes the image or tells us much about its sub­ject (if we take “sub­ject” to mean not early anthro­po­log­i­cal sci­ence but the man in the image). Rather, it sug­gests a kind of prove­nance, one closely allied with the sta­tus of the image’s object, the orig­i­nal pur­pose of the image, and its sub­se­quent insti­tu­tional uses.

As a cap­tion the vignette offers some­thing very dif­fer­ent. By pre­sent­ing the (imag­ined) view­point of the per­son in the image, each vignette offers a means of look­ing back from the photograph—a look­ing out­ward to accom­pany our look­ing at the image. This empathic view is made explicit in the first vignette par­tic­u­larly, in which Delia stares directly at the cam­era (and so at us) while hav­ing her pic­ture made, but at the same time the fic­tion allows us to share her point-of-view, to look at her but also to see what she sees and how she sees it. While this piece of fic­tion can never undo the wrongs Delia expe­ri­enced in her life­time, nor does it claim to rep­re­sent Delia’s actual voice, it can pro­vide the reader with a view that coun­ters our habit­u­ated under­stand­ing of enslaved men and women as pas­sive victims.

‘Fair women are trans­formed into Negresses’

The fic­tional vignettes are intended to per­mit the reader to imag­ine the points-of-view of Delia, Jem and the other peo­ple in the pho­tographs, to look at them but also to see what they might have seen—but is such a thing really pos­si­ble? More than once in the course of research­ing and writ­ing about the daguerreo­types I was asked whether as a light-skinned woman I am qual­i­fied to imag­ine the points-of-view of enslaved Africans and African Amer­i­cans. Are my fic­tions not a kind of ven­tril­o­quism or appro­pri­a­tion, one deeply inap­pro­pri­ate given the course of Amer­i­can his­tory? Can we who live in a very dif­fer­ent era really share the points-of-view of enslaved African Amer­i­cans, or have I sim­ply invented an affin­ity with the peo­ple in the pho­tographs, one per­haps not unlike the com­mon ground of “uni­ver­sal human­ness,” in order to avoid my own uncom­fort­able iden­ti­fi­ca­tion with the nat­u­ral­ist and his oppres­sive science?

The medium of pho­tog­ra­phy surely encour­ages feel­ings of close­ness with the per­son depicted. As I’ve already men­tioned, the phys­i­cal prop­er­ties of a daguerreo­type bring the viewer and sub­ject of the image into a shared pho­to­graphic space, a jux­ta­po­si­tion that encour­ages iden­ti­fi­ca­tion. When too much light strikes the image, a daguerreo­type will also become a neg­a­tive image such that light tones become dark and dark tones light. “Fig­ures have a strange effect,” noted the sci­en­tist Sir John Her­schel upon see­ing neg­a­tive pho­to­graphic images; “fair women are trans­formed into negresses &c.”(16)

Another form of pho­to­graphic trans­for­ma­tion may be found in the case of Mary Mil­dred Botts, a seven-year-old “white slave” who was “so white as to defy the acutest judge to detect in her fea­tures, com­plex­ion, and gen­eral appear­ance, the slight­est trace of Negro blood.”(17) Mary Mildred’s pho­to­graph, used by abo­li­tion­ists to chal­lenge the social and sci­en­tific clas­si­fi­ca­tion of racial cat­e­gories, relied on the iden­ti­fi­ca­tion white peo­ple would have had with her with upon see­ing the girl’s image. But this iden­ti­fi­ca­tion also brought home the slip­per­i­ness of race and so the insta­bil­ity of social norms, thus unset­tling the sta­tus of the viewer. Close­ness with the sub­ject of the pho­to­graph can raise some knotty prob­lems: far from con­firm­ing an individual’s iden­tity, pho­tographs cre­ate con­fu­sion through jux­ta­po­si­tion, oppo­si­tion and trans­po­si­tion. Affin­ity between the viewer of a pho­to­graph and its sub­ject, even across social and racial bound­aries, and the uncer­tainty of this affin­ity are part and par­cel of the pho­to­graphic experience.

So back to the ques­tion at hand: What qual­i­fies me, a “white” per­son, to pre­sume an affin­ity with Delia, an enslaved African Amer­i­can, one suf­fi­cient to imag­ine and write moments from her life?

The ques­tion is not new. The dif­fi­cul­ties of writ­ing bio­graph­i­cally about any­one, but par­tic­u­larly about some­one of a dif­fer­ent race, gen­der, social or eco­nomic status—or indeed from another era—have long been con­tem­plated and tack­led by biog­ra­phers and his­to­ri­ans, with more than sat­is­fac­tory results.(18) The key is to sit­u­ate one’s own sub­jec­tiv­ity against that of the bio­graph­i­cal sub­ject with care and full aware­ness of the issues at stake. Race is an impor­tant fac­tor in my encounter with Delia, if not the most impor­tant fac­tor, for I would nei­ther be look­ing upon her like­ness in the daguerreo­types nor writ­ing about her involve­ment in their mak­ing (and seek­ing ways to redress the injus­tice done to her) if she had not been black at a time of wide­spread and insti­tu­tion­al­ized dis­crim­i­na­tion. Race, in this respect, is every­thing and con­se­quently my own (dif­fer­ent) race has to be acknowledged.

Race, how­ever, was not an impor­tant fac­tor in writ­ing the vignettes. Delia was more than sim­ply “black,” her iden­tity and the kinds of expe­ri­ences she may have had and with which a per­son might (or might not) be able to iden­tify go well beyond the color of her skin. When writ­ing about Delia and imag­ing a per­son­al­ity for her, I did not think of her as African Amer­i­can or enslaved, but as a young woman who worked hard at her job and did not always under­stand the world around her. Sim­i­larly, Jack was not just a slave dri­ver but also a father and a man who found solace in reli­gion; and Jem for me was a man deeply proud of his intel­li­gence and guile. In other words, in devis­ing my fic­tions, I explored dif­fer­ent facets of each per­son, aspects of their (pos­si­ble) per­son­al­ity as sug­gested by known his­tor­i­cal details. The pho­tographs may be about race, intended as they were to prove a the­ory of racial diver­sity, but my fic­tions are not. They are about indi­vid­ual men and women endeav­or­ing to cope with and under­stand the imme­di­ate cir­cum­stances of their lives.

The fact remains, how­ever, that we do not—cannot possibly—know what Delia thought nor can we appre­hend her actual per­son­al­ity. “So maybe you see me but you sho in hell don’t see what I see.”(19) So says one man to another in Ralph Ellison’s posthu­mously pub­lished novel June­teenth, a force­ful reminder that research and imag­i­na­tion can only take us so far and that my fic­tions can­not pos­si­bly speak of Delia’s actual expe­ri­ence. But given the broader his­tory in which Delia and her pho­tographs fig­ure, I’ll take a few moments of what she may have thought over noth­ing at all from her per­spec­tive or—worse—the scientist’s and the slaveholder’s points-of-view exclu­sively. We have plenty of the lat­ter in the form of sci­en­tific trea­tises and pro-slavery tracts, and not nearly enough of Delia.

Post Script: Imag­i­na­tive Lib­er­a­tion Revisited

In a dis­cus­sion of the pho­tographs made by the Khmer Rouge at Tuol Sleng prison in Cam­bo­dia, Susan Son­tag wrote: “These Cam­bo­dian women and men of all ages, includ­ing many chil­dren, pho­tographed from a few feet away, usu­ally in half fig­ure, are… for­ever look­ing at death, for­ever about to be mur­dered, for­ever wronged.”(20) I find this pas­sage deeply dis­turb­ing. Why con­demn these peo­ple to such a ter­ri­ble fate, the very same fate the Khmer Rouge envi­sioned for them when the images were made? Are these peo­ple only to be remem­bered as vic­tims?  Per­haps this is what Alan Tra­cht­en­berg really meant by “imag­i­na­tive liberation”—not to lib­er­ate peo­ple from their lives or undo the grave injus­tices they expe­ri­enced, but to release them from the pho­to­graph, from the frame that holds them end­lessly in the pose of the vic­tim. Delia, Jack and the many other peo­ple enslaved in South­ern cities and on plan­ta­tions were not slaves only; they were many other things besides, their per­son­al­i­ties no less com­plex than our own. It may not be easy to see past the painful cir­cum­stances of the pho­to­graph, but surely there are per­spec­tives other than vic­tim­hood from which we should endeavor to look.