The Study of Racialism

mistermulatto · New User Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 45 }

Who's Your Mama?
\"White\" Mulatta Genealogies, Early Photography, and Anti-Passing Narratives of Slavery and Freedom
P. Gabrielle Foreman
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Partus sequitur ventrem.
The child follows the condition of the mother.
US slave law and custom

If we shift from a politics of substance to a politics of optics, identity itself no longer possesses the reassuring signs of ontological distinction that we are accustomed to reading.
Amy Robinson

The right to see and be seen, in one's own way and under one's own terms, has been the point of contention.
Laura Wexler

1. Passing For or Passing Through?
\"Passing\" for white, and the representational strategies some phenotypically indeterminate African-American women used to claim privileges granted to whites, name phenomena as different as night and day. Examination of the assumptions about racial aspirations that occupy the space between the two illuminates how paradigms that trump expressed and expressive black female will and agency circulate both in the nineteenth century and in current [End Page 505] literary criticism. Mulatto/a-ness as a representational trope often designates a discursive mobility and simultaneity that can raise questions of racial epistemology, while it also functions as a juridical term that constrains citizenship by ante- and postbellum law and force. The women I examine in this essay use their own bodies to challenge such constraints by expressing a desire, not for whiteness, but for familial and juridical relations in which partus sequitur ventrem produces freedom rather than enslavement for African Americans, light and dark.

Many contemporary scholars, however, deploy \"white mulatto/a genealogies,\" a term I use not to describe the lighter shades of a politically determined African-American racial classification but to highlight an overemphasis on patrilineal descent and an identification with and projection of white desire that continually revisits the paternal and the patriarchal, the phallic and juridical Law of the (white) Father. Russ Castronovo exemplifies such configurations in Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (1995) when he asserts \"texts by ex-slaves prohibit the restoration of any genealogical line, suggesting that only in the discontinuity and disorder of bastard histories does remembering properly construct freedom\" (193); he goes on to assert that \"the slave's genealogy-both as personal history and as national critique . . . recontextualizes freedom from plenitude and promise to a narrative of lack and deferral\" (200). Others, like Lauren Berlant, offer considerations of undifferentiated \"mulatta genealogies\" that examine racial mixtures in unspecified and unsituated ways. Eric Sundquist's important To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature (1993) enacts a more explicit erasure of black female agency by offering a (masculinist) nationalist paradigm that enacts and encourages readings of race in the nineteenth century as if women did not have a voice. 1

One might class these critical interventions with the misnamings Hortense Spillers has outlined in \"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe\" both as historical reflections and contemporary evocations of \"the provisions of patriarchy, here exacerbated by the preponderant powers of an enslaving class [which] declare[s] Mother Right, by definition, a negating feature of human community\" (80). 2 Most readers of African-American literary traditions, and certainly those familiar with the historically contextualized work of scholars like Barbara Christian, Ann duCille, Frances Smith Foster, and Carla Peterson, recognize that while light-skinned protagonists dominate the literary work of African-American women until well into the twentieth century, white mulatta genealogies nonetheless ignore the recognizable contours of a significant African-American familial politics in slavery and its representation. 3 [End Page 506] Moreover, any cursory glance at black female texts penned in the nineteenth century reveals that despite their differences, Harriet Jacobs, Ellen Craft, Harriet Wilson, Lucy Delaney, and Louisa Picquet, as well as Frances E. W. Harper's and Pauline Hopkins's most famous protagonists, all work to steal away African-American agency by recovering black female motive will and active desire as well as by recuperating an economically, legally viable and racially inflected motherhood. 4

Critics who focus on white mulatta genealogies thus misrepresent many of the issues. They tend to assume, as Castronovo makes explicit, that \"despite evidence of matriarchal resistance . . . the absence of a recognized patriarchy placed slaves within a genealogical void\" (201). The slave \"issued forth not from a woman, but from a matrix of nonhistory, from a textual-sexual space that signified emptiness and absence, illegitimacy and silence\" (201). Even a critic as sophisticated as Patricia Williams can assert that \"instead of black motherhood as the generative source for black people, master-cloaked white manhood became the generative source\" (163). Such contentions erase the historical, racial, and textual configurations of their subjects and ignore the very contextual framework that should inform our theorizing. Nineteenth-century black women's principal affiliation is expressed in their claim to and for maternal relations, which, under the law stating that children follow the condition of the mother, ties offspring, however light, to their often darker maternal ancestors. The desire to slip phenotypically white bodies over the border into a Fatherland of \"whiteness\" that promised (material) racial rewards, recognition, and inheritance is associated with white mulatta genealogies emphasizing the rise of the exceptional individual over the collective; the history of color-conscious communities that adhered to this kind of racism is well documented. Yet these practices should not be conflated with attempts to disrupt the binary racial meanings the women I address challengethey press for more fluidity in the sets of signifiers assigned to the classifications of white and black in the US and struggle for rights, recognition, and freedom not only for themselves but for their African-American mothers, brothers, and sisters. \"Narratives of miscegenation are not monolithic,\" as Jennifer DeVere Brody reminds us (16). When addressing the literature that includes in its textual family works with distinctly situated racial explorations, we should differentiate passing narratives and white mulatta genealogies from anti-passing texts.

The semiotics of \"passing\" are hardly black or white; both the codes and the meanings of passing are situated and can be radically different. Louisa Picquet and Ellen Craft, two of the indeterminately [End Page 507] colored enslaved women I examine, often pass based on \"similarity and contiguity\"they pass metonymically (Garber 282). Craft, who transposes into a genteel planter traveling North, passes purposefully with her unmistakably black husband, William, ostensibly her bondsman, in order to escape slavery. Yet neither actually passes for white. Rather, Craft passes through whiteness in order to endow her family (to be) with meanings of freedom and self-possession denied to slaves and to the \"unowned\" population of African Americans who were \"free\" (Williams 21). Once Ellen and William Craft reach the North, the narrative emphasizes her dramatic return both to her gendered and racial identities.

While \"the literature of passing . . . has as its central concern the American mechanism for the cultural and genetic reproduction of whiteness,\" as Harryette Mullen suggests (73), the women I address here again make efforts to identify with and recuperate blackness in a familial context, one which duCille and Claudia Tate have established is as radical a ground as more explicitly \"political\" arenas. 5 Indeed, Ellen Craft's reluctance to get married while still enslaved and her simultaneous desire for a legibly black man and legally and phenotypically black and free children are what precipitate the Crafts' attempt to escape. Likewise, though Picquet is encouraged to pass with her (even whiter) children, rather than abandoning race and family, she tours the country in 1860 trying to convince people that she is black so she can raise money to free her still enslaved mother and brother. If a person \"becomes adeptly white\" (what blacks do when they cross over the color line) when he or she \"acquires a partner whose credentials are unquestionable and produces perceptibly white (not mulatto or mixed) offspring,\" then Picquet and Craft exhibit a racial will that defies identification with the Law of the (white) Father and the (patriarchally endowed) family that is often attributed to narratives in which mulattas appear (Mullen 78-79).

Examining eighteenth-century runaway advertisements, David Waldstreicher posits that \"to get slaves or servants back into the role . . . owners had to describe what . . . attributes they possessed that might or might not help him or her pretend to be free\" (248). If we exchange the phrase \"back into the role\" of slave with \"back into the role of black\" and describe the attributes that these women possessed that might help them \"pretend to be\" white, we underscore the concept of passing through whiteness rather than passing over and out of the race, of temporary appropriation that stops short of ontological identification. No one has to catch these women or \"get\" them \"back into their racial role\" in any literal sense. While dominant national consciousness conflates [End Page 508] freedom with whiteness, these women are clear that they resist such associations and are working to cleave hierarchically fixed meanings from racial classifications. 6

I focus on several nineteenth-century texts in which the connection among (black) families, freedom, and race-based status are the principal concern of the subjects. A reading of the politics of color in Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) and in Lauren Berlant's \"The Queen of America Goes to Washington: Harriet Jacobs, Frances Harper, and Anita Hill\" provides the bridge to in-depth examinations of the narratives of Picquet, The Octoroon (1861), and Craft, Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom (1860). 7 My central concern is to illuminate specific ways in which some mulatta bodies create a narrative crisis of knowing and seeing for those readers with racial power that can be quite disconnected from the subject's expressed racial will, even if that will is not constant or fully recoverable. What do we make of the anxiety phenotypically \"white\" bodies attract even as they are not attempting to pass? And, as images circulated in print media in ever-growing quantities, how did these shape readers' reception of bodies they couldn't easily identify? By revisiting the frontispiece and the opening passage of The Octoroon, we will also see how photography, introduced in 1839 and popularized as a truth-producing technology in the antebellum era, intersects with other representations of the enslavedslave narratives and runaway advertisements, for exampleto produce multiple \"mulatta\" meanings.

2. Fraudulent Relations: Berlant, Brent, and the Politics of Color
A persistent concern with (white) paternity continues to encourage the erasure of black women's maternal affiliation and racial agency in some contemporary critical readings of Incidents, arguably now the most famous of all writings by nineteenth-century black women. Recognized as essay of the year by American Literature, Berlant's \"The Queen of America\" smartly articulates some of the very issues of law, sexual vulnerability, and racial-sexual-national codings and representations to which critics like Castronovo refer, issues that are central to some of the best work in the field. Yet as she introduces the term \"mulatto genealogy,\" she so destabilizes race that she facilitates the creation of a bodily category into which any Other can fit. Writing of the postbellum period in another essay, she contends that \"the mulatta figure is the most abstract and artificial of embodied citizens. She [End Page 509] gives lie to the dominant code of juridical representation by repressing the 'evidence' the law would seeka parent, usually a motherto determine whether the light-skinned body claimed a fraudulent relation to the privileges of whiteness\" (\"National Brands\" 113). Berlant refers to the trope of the \"tragic mulatta,\" to the figure whose skin and will allows her to pass over the line into \"whiteness\" by repressing the dark mother. Yet again one must note that in most nineteenth-century African-American women's narratives, the captive or runaway of \"mixed parentage\" is characterized by the repression of the white father. In part, most narrators both elide and simultaneously express evidence of bodily violence, coercion, or \"choice\" as they recuperate rather than repress the enslaved mother.

Ultimately, Berlant creates in the figure of the mulatta an ahistorical and conflated amalgamation of Brent, Iola Leroy, and an \"abstract national body\" that projects Berlant herself into the resistant voice that in her own trajectory should belong to Anita Hill. Berlant links Jacobs's metaphorical use of the ear and discursive penetration to the Hill-Thomas Senate hearings as she describes her own fantasy to \"enter a senator's body and to dominate it through an orifice he was incapable of fully closing, an ear or an eye. This intimate fantasy communication aimed to provoke sensations in him for which he was unprepared, those in that perverse space between empathy and pornography that . . . [are] constitutive of white Americans' interest in slaves, slave narratives, and other testimonials of the oppressed\" (\"The Queen\" 475). Tying the dynamics of the hearings, so to speak, to the representational erotics of slavery, Berlant consciously reproduces what is ultimately a desire to project white phallic power and voice, the Law of the Father that the senators embody, through a revised mulatta subjectivity. This example of a \"phantasmic vehicle of identification\" (Hartman 1 Cool

is unsettling, especially since Berlant's rendition uses Hill as a proxy through which to speak to the powerful, while it extends Hill's inability to make herself heard by silencing her and erasing her body and the specificity of her (darkly) racialized experience entirely. This is a double-edged empathy, for \"in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is occluded by the other's obliteration\" (18-19). Such \"a recourse to fantasy reveals an anxiety about making [Hill's pain] legible; [and] this anxiety is historically determined by the denial of black sentience\" (19). Moreover, Berlant elides the way color and desire are represented, rather than enacted, nationally; that is, Hill's supposed spurned woman fantasy projection and its ostensible self-evidence were both a legacy of black women's putative hypersexuality [End Page 510] they always want itand a none-too-veiled commentary on her color: \"Why would he want her,\" was the implication of some senators, \"when he can have what's in the big house?\" Full examinination of these dynamics would actually link Hill's sexual predicament to the national negation of black female exploitation that Jacobs exposes. Yet in an example of what Saidiya Hartman calls the \"violence of identification,\" Berlant instead makes Hill the last critical stop in a mulatta genealogy and displaces Hill with the critic's own phallogocentric imaginings (Hartman 20).

Berlant's grouping and her use of a white mulatta genealogy allow her to label Jacobs, whose parents were both \"black,\" and Leroy, a phenotypical, juridical, and fictional quadroon, both and equally mulatta; it also fails to calibrate the difference between Jacobs's use of color as a stand-in for sexual and marital agency and Harper's patent, intentional use of the mulatta as trope. 8 While one might take Peterson's assertion that \"Jacobs explicitly calls attention to the dominant culture's construction of Linda as a mulatta\" to support Berlant's reading, it seems to me Jacobs does not illustrate how the dominant culture constructs Linda as a mulatta per se; rather, Jacobs calls our attention to Linda's status as a sexually vulnerable and sentient slave girl like all others light and dark (Peterson 570). Flint's hissing \"you have let your tongue run too far damn you,\" to a woman, his property, who like her enslaved husband was \"black,\" while their child was very fair, is but one example (Jacobs 13). Later, Jacobs emphasizes her situation as a culturally and legally determined black nursemaid or fugitive slave, when again, not gradations of color but binary distinctions and collective resistance determine treatment. Linda resolves \"to stand up for my rights\" and finally wins respectful treatment. Jacobs does not frame this as an individual triumph, even though she has just stressed that other nurses were \"only one shade lighter in complexion.\" Rather, she urges collective resistance. \"Let every colored man and woman do this,\" she avers, \"and eventually we shall cease to be trampled under foot by our oppressors\" (176-77).

Jacobs's description of the origin of her categorization as a \"mulatto\" distances her tale from any generational tragic mulatto story and points us to the possibility of her grandmother's rape (and hers as well); she also dismisses the possibility of her own personally ambiguous paternity. 9 Outlining her definitive nonwhite parentage, Jacobs comments, \"in complexion, my parents were a light shade of brownish yellow and were termed mulattoes\" (5). Her own direct genealogy contrasts with the unstable configuration of parental identity and categorization of/as property that the classic tragic mulatto tale embodies. That story also depends on [End Page 511] the impossibility of bodily taxonomy, a consanguinity with the shades of whiteness that rarely, if ever, includes \"light shades of brownish yellow.\"

Jacobs's mulatta story does not stand as a primary site of revision and resistance in Incidents unless we distinguish her specific use of color from tropes that refer to \"whiteness\" and its attendant and often elusive meanings of freedom and protection. The \"white\"-aristocrat-turned-\"black property,\" Marie's mulatta-as-metaphor story in Iola Leroy (1892), for example, points both to the absurdity of racial constructions (a familiar national critique) and to the putative rewards of racial passing (a familiar individual critique). It also recalls the begged, borrowed, and \"what did I do to be so black and blue\" tales included in Clotel (1853) and the beginning of the Craft narrative, just as it similarly recasts Cassie's move from madness to mother in Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852); none of these narrative paradigms echo the meanings attached to the mulatta's use in Incidents. With their emphases on freedom's contingency on finding families and (re)creating homes, these texts position mothers similarly, but \"mulattas\" very differently.

3. Ma' Freedom or Maternal Framing in Louisa Picquet: The Octoroon
The Reverend Hiram Mattison's Louisa Picquet: The Octoroon (1861) is exemplary in revealing the tensions between nineteenth-century white patriarchal and black maternal mulatta genealogies. Mattison meets Picquet while she is traveling through Ohio en route to New York and soliciting subscriptions for the last of the funds she needs to free her mother and brother. Through a series of questions and answers that form the first half of the text, Picquet attempts to \"control the narrative and position herself as its subject,\" using both her image and \"resistant orality as self-defense and self-authorization\" (Fulton 101). When Picquet tries to tell the story of her family, Mattison leads her back to relating \"white love adventures,\" as one chapter is incongruously titled. His concern is the continuous parade of \"near white\" or \"very light\" concubines that \"pollute\" Southern homes. Mattison quotes Picquet directly in the first half of The Octoroon (or represents himself as doing so) as she tells of her struggle as a 14-year-old against one master's sexual aggressions, which she evades, despite the beatings that ensue, although her mother cannot. Despite her ingenuity and the help she enlists, Louisa is sold and then raped by her new owner, an aging Mr. Williams, who soon after leaving the auction block explained \"what he bought me for\" [End Page 512] (20). When he dies, as she had prayed for him to, he sets Louisa and her children by him free, insisting that they go North \"and not let any one know who I was, or that I was colored\" (23). Now \"unowned,\" Picquet works to reconstruct her family according to her own will. Like the heroines she anticipates, she marries another \"mulatto\" man and spends 11 years raising money to free her mother and brother. While doing so, she continually works to convince people to read her physically indeterminate body as black rather than white.

The Octoroon echoes both the much-noted tensions between author and sponsor in slave narratives and the recognizable thematics of slave fiction and autobiography. Midway through the text, the growing friction between Mattison's subject and Picquet's subjectivity comes to a head as her narrative freedom conflicts with his wish to maintain discursive mastery. Seemingly sick of his incessant, prurient questions about the ever-lightening color of enslaved women's and white men's \"children,\" she describes her husband's daughter, who lives with them, as \"the darkest one in the house\" and \"the smartest one we got too\" (27). Like Picquet, the text has traveled away from the terrain Mattison wishes to map. When she starts to tell of the fugitives that they have housed in the North and her continued attempts to find her mother, Elizabeth Ramsey, and to convince Ramsey's owner to sell the rest of the family back to her, Mattison abruptly changes the narrative structure from oral transcriptions to his own third-person narrative, easing out both Picquet's voice and her story.

While Jacobs highlights the sexual threat so many enslaved women face without stressing their color, Mattison attempts to elevate the connection he envisions between sexual vulnerability and \"whiteness\" over Picquet's own emphasis on recuperating familial, particularly maternal, relations. Nevertheless, she has clearly dismissed her master's parting advice that she go North but not \"marry any one but a mechanic\" or, again, \"let any one know who I was, or that I was colored\" (23). She ignores his dying wish that she use her light skin to enact her new freedom. Neither her color nor his paternity of her children will overdetermine her racial affiliations in the North, as they hadn't in the South, where \"the conditions of all subordination reserved for mulattosno matter how well [they] may be dodged in particular circumstances[were] identical to those reserved for unadulterated black bodies\" (Barrett 429).

The struggle over Picquet's and Mattison's construction of \"white blackness\" in conjunction with gendered sexuality is evident from the initial pages. The narrative opens with an engraving of Picquet (Fig. 1). Using it, Mattison almost immediately establishes [End Page 513] himself as an active evaluator rather than an unobtrusive narrative facilitator by announcing in an asterisked footnote that \"the cut on the outside title page is a tolerable representation of the features of Mrs. P., though by no means a flattering picture\" (5). The image is a staid representation that resists being construed as tantalizing even as it is at odds with the header on each page, The Octoroon Slave and Concubine. No stray locks escape, no bare flesh peeps through the thin and revealing clothing Mattison is so eager to have Picquet describe. As Barbara McCaskill notes, \"when a face fair-of-skin peered from the page . . . the frontispiece engraving began the process of confronting white America with the terrible taboo of race mixing\" (\"Yours Very Truly\" 516). 10 Mattison almost certainly solicited the \"cut\" from Picquet [End Page 514] to bring home his concerns about \"the deep moral corruption\" white families experience \"resulting from the institution of slavery\" (50). Considering his dissatisfaction, however, it is doubtful that he arranged the sitting. Letters reprinted in The Octoroon refer to daguerreotypes arranged by and exchanged between mother and daughter before Mattison and Picquet met (35). 11 We can surmise that by submitting the image used for the engraving, Picquet resists reenacting the fetishized presentation of the flushed, nubile, loose-haired young mulatta on the block popularized in Uncle Tom's Cabin when the slave mother Susan advises her daughter Emmeline to brush her hair back \"smooth and neat and not havin' it flying about in curls; looks more respectable so\" despite the girl's innocent remonstrance that she \"don't nearly look so well that way\" (Stowe 388-90). 12 Picquet recognizes that enslaved women are placed in front of viewers not only to be bought, as she explains to Mattison derisively, but as spectacle, \"to be seen\" (17). She stresses these dynamics of visual objectification, of women bought later to be recirculated (with resulting babe in arms) as erotic and economic promise to those in the actual audience or in the extended one made available by print culture's larger reach.

Picquet's image reproduces this tension between property, propriety, and the fetishization of a familial tale of economic and bodily promise. It urges us to consider Bridget Cook's question: \"[H]ow are images of racialized spectacle . . . able to make successful interrogations of their own construction? In what ways can images of spectacle be used to support a reading that challenges the social order's dominant racial meaning?\" (70). Picquet's iconographic resistance, her very unrevealing image, is paradigmatic, for \"one convention of the nineteenth-century slave narrative was the inclusion of a frontispiece drawing or interior illustration that depicted the Black author in garments symbolic of dignity, restraint, eloquence, reflection and cultivation\" (McCaskill, \"A Stamp\" 81). Mattison's framing, however, elevates the national disgrace of miscegenation over any such presentation of black eloquence or agency. As Anthony Barthelemy puts it, Picquet is constrained in her expression of the \"contrapuntal tale of filial dedication and maternal devotion\" that characterizes this narrative, even though she tries to regulate the image that introduces her newly cast(e) story and to thwart Mattison's desire to offer a reproduction that \"flatters,\" that situates Louisa once again as the commodified object of a sexual gaze (xl).

Carla Peterson contends that as the object of the white male gaze \"the mulatta renders female sexuality available,\" legitimizing the act of seduction and rape (Doers 155). In literary representations \"the libidinal surplus . . . is doubled by an economic surplus, [End Page 515] and her story results from the convergence of two plots that produces the narrative crisis\" (155). Mattison's story mirrors Louisa's mother's, among others; one passed on from mother to daughter as genealogical void, as Castronovo might put it. Picquet breaks the mold of rape, sale, and perpetual and pathetic servitude by stressing survival over slavery and power over pathos; by freeing her mother, she eventually transforms her from fungible public thing (her mother's master wants Picquet to pay $1,100 or \"exchange Property of equal value\") into a private and individual being (Octoroon 33).

Mattison's and Picquet's divergent textual interests are underscored by his penultimate chapter \"Conclusion and Moral of the Whole Story,\" a near endless chronology of \"gentlemanly\" misconduct resulting in ever-lighter offspring. Yet the resolution of neither Picquet's nor her mother's story, which he tags on, is necessary for Mattison's conclusion or moral. Though he claims he is Picquet's fiscal agent, she doesn't seem to even inform him of her success in freeing her mother. \"Since the preceding was stereotyped,\" he admits, \"the following has been sent us, marked in the Cincinnati Daily Gazette of October 15, 1860\":

NOTICEThe undersigned takes this the first opportunity of expressing her thanks to those ladies and gentlemen . . . that have accomplished through their kind aid the freedom of her mother, Elizabeth Ramsey, from slavery, by paying to her owner, Mr. A. C. Horton, of Texas, cash in hand, the sum of $900, collected by myself in small sums from different individuals . . .
I beg leave further to express my gratitude by thanking you all for your kindness, which will be engraved on my heart until death. My mother also desires to say that she is also most grateful to you all, and that if any of those friends who have assisted her to her freedom, feel disposed to call on her at my residence on Third Street near Race (No.135) she will be happy to see them and thank them personally.
Very Respectfully, yours, etc. LOUISA PICQUET (53)
Picquet's announcement renders null and void her interest in the yet-to-be-published narrative and undermines Mattison's legitimacy as the freedom facilitator he purports to be, placing his other interests in fuller relief. Picquet reasserts her narrative authority by both resolving the narrative crises of \"libidinal and economic surplus\"(the convergence of his story of miscegenation and hers of motherhood) and by placing the end of her story offstage, so to speak. She thus both sidesteps and comments upon Mattison's [End Page 516] self-placement as a middleman slave \"buyer\" of sorts and wrests her mother from public view as spectacle while she creates an alternative audienceone that has contributed to her cause and wants to see, quite literally, her mother free.

Had Picquet been able to redirect the context of reception, perhaps her mother's picture would grace the narrative, as Picquet might like it to appear on the subscription book she carried when she met Mattison. She might offer the much-discussed daguerreotype she receives of Ramsey and Picquet's younger brother John, \"both taken on one plate.\" That image would mirror her mother's request to \"have your ambrotipe [sic] taken also your children and send them to me,\" for Ramsey \"would giv [sic] this world to see you and my sweet little children\" (35, 31). Such a sitting/setting, mother and child, was quite popular; had Mattison been attuned to Picquet's agenda, he might have chosen it. Yet these images, requested for their own pleasure and perusal and not for others' voyeuristic gaze, would disrupt the explicitly sexual charge that fuels the sale of enslaved women for gentlemen's \"own use.\" They would stress a maternal economics in addition to the concomitant patriarchal erotics often projected, romantically and artificially, onto the mulatta for sale and resituate Ramsey (and Picquet) in the ostensibly protected and private sphere of domestic sentiment that photos of mothers and children symbolized.

Mattison's textual framing of the frontispiece transfers the attempted dignity of Picquet's oppositional pose, the subject-granting meaning of the portrait-sitting context, into the realm of ethnography. Enwezor Okwui and Octavio Zaya's reading of Richard Avedon's photo \"William Casby, born a slave,\" the important portrait reproduced in Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida, helps to clarify Mattison's process. They suggest that the \"important linguistic signifier,\" the title \"William Casby, born a slave,\" clearly announces that this \"is less a portrait than a sociological and anthropological study. The title points to the limitations of the photograph as a carrier of truth, for [it] needs the stabilizing factor of language employed not for clarification or as a source of knowledge but solely for the viewer's delectation\" (25). 13 Likewise, rather than presenting Picquet's face as a truth-telling icon, Mattison's linguistic markers are meant to guide his readers/viewers back to his authority as the meaning-maker of the text. For the reader/viewer who might find Picquet's bodily legibility hard to decipher, Mattison declares Picquet's racial status above the image itself; \"Louisa Picquet, the OCTOROON\" is in bold typescript, the largest on the page. The line \"A Tale of Southern Slave Life\" at the foot of the image reaffirms her previous subjugation; the \"Price 20 Cents\" in bold letters perched in the right corner announces [End Page 517] her continued status as commodity. Finally, he reinforces the muting of Picquet's voice by displacing her story with his authorship; the book, \"by Rev. H. Mattison, A.M. pastor of Union Chapel, New York,\" is \"published by the author.\"

Mattison announces himself as a self-generating subject located by geography, education, profession, and authorship. Yet his \"Mrs. P.\" stands as a depersonalized variable and as a precursor to the dynamics critiqued by the contemporary (Black Muslim) X. 14 When Mattison writes \"the cut is a tolerable representation of Mrs. P,\" his truncation erases not her master's name but her husband's (Octoroon 5). In this way, Mattison highlights the ways in which \"legal enslavement removed the African-American male not so much from sight as from the mimetic view as a partner in the prevailing social fiction of the Father's name, the Father's Law\" (Spillers 80). Jutting \"Mrs.\" against the symbolic \"P\" (Property, sexual Production, P***y) only places in relief Mattison's erection of (his own) white phallogocentric power over and above Picquet's will to choose a (black) partner and (new) name. Mattison's anthropological framing underscores that Picquet's genealogy is symbolized by a \"matrix of nonhistory\" that signifies \"emptiness and absence, illegitimacy and silence,\" to recall Castronovo's characterization.

4. Looking Fly and Runaway Advertisements
Revisiting Mattison's opening pages also replicates the struggle over property, ownership, and narrative representation illustrated in descriptions of slaves that found wide audiencefugitive slave advertisements. The first chapter, \"Louisa Picquet, the Octoroon Slave,\" opens: \"Louisa Picquet . . . was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and is apparently about thirty-three years of age. She is a little above the medium height, easy and graceful in her manners, of fair complexion and rosy cheeks, with dark eyes, a flowing head of hair with no perceptible inclination to curl, and every appearance, at first view, of an accomplished white lady. No one, not apprised of the fact, would suspect that she had a drop of African blood in her veins; indeed, few will believe it, at first, even when told of it\" (5). Mattison unveils the tension between enslaved people's desires to represent themselves freely and as free and their masters' desires to capture their likeness in language that recasts them as property. 15 His words overlap almost precisely with those in the broadside poster Dr. Flint uses when his slave girl runs away or that Dr. James Norcom, the \"real\" Dr. [End Page 518] Flint, used in his advertisements in a Norfolk paper: \"She is a light mulatto, 21 years of age, about 5 feet 4 inches high . . . having on her head a thick covering of black hair that curls naturally, but which can be easily combed straight. She speaks easily and fluently, and has an agreeable carriage and address. Being a good seamstress, she has been accustomed to dress well, and has a variety of very fine clothes, made in the prevailing fashion . . . \" (Jacobs 215, 274n1). Norcom stresses some of Jacobs's \"graceful manners,\" closely mirroring Mattison's language.

Other examples of the advertisements posted for women runaways are worth our attention, as they underscore the similarity of a core format that some of The Octoroon's readers would find familiar. Yet another Harriet is \"a light mulatto girl about 19 years old, and five feet high. She is stout built, has straight course hair, which she usually wears tucked up with a comb, large blue eyes and a flesh mole on her right cheek. . . . Her mother is living in NY, it is probable she will try to get to that place\" (Parker 662). Another advertisement announces: \"RUNAWAY from the subscriber . . . negro girl. . . HARRIET, belonging to John DavisShe is supposed to be lurking in the neighborhood where she has a mother livingshe is a bright mulatto, 19 years old, of an audacious impudent temper, slothful and dirty habitsbut notwithstanding all these qualities, a great favorite of some people who call themselves gentlemen\" (746). John Davis, the former owner of one of the \"slothful\" favorites, offers subjective \"qualities\" instead of \"objective\" corporeal characteristics: telltale somatic signs that signify slavery. In Stealing A Little Freedom: Slave Runaways in North Carolina, 1775-1840 (1994), Freddie Parker notes that it is remarkable \"that owners were so keenly aware of so many parts of their slaves' anatomy\" (93). Subtle features and \"an awareness of the minute scars, bruises, and marks of all kinds in obscure places on their slaves' body reflected a desire that they be able to recognize their property if they ran away or were stolen\" (93). Yet this familiarity also speaks to a desire for classification, an obsession with recognizing the body as the essential teller not only of racial status but of racial difference. As one legal critic notes, witnesses at trials where slaves tried to prove their free status by claiming whiteness \"sought to certify their testimony as authoritative by asserting their longstanding observation of the 'negro' race with their ownership and mastery over enslaved 'negros.' In this manner, both lawyers and witnesses linked knowledge of racial identity, expertise and white men's identity as masters\" (Gross 131). The enslaved body's availability and the ability to make it public demonstrate the power such masters possessed, just as privatizing how owners [End Page 519] might gain such familiarity with the details of enslaved bodies illustrates the rights of privacy and protection (of reputation as much as of property) that owners enjoyed.

The latter two advertisements stress each runaways' maternal connections, even though maternity is not connected to sentimental affective desireused to argue that slaves should be freebut as practical information, identifying markers, used to claim property rather than to proclaim humanity. Nonetheless, this locates us within the maternal nexus of a black mulatta genealogy. Despite blue eyes and hair that can be made straight, none of these women are presumed to be passing; rather, readers are exhorted to look for them at their (darker) mothers' homes. The signifying chain slave-owner John Davis strings together, linking \"lurking\" with \"mother\" and these with \"impudent,\" \"favorite,\" \"slothful,\" and \"gentlemen,\" only makes gendered sense if the racial signifier of his description is clearly \"black.\" The inability of domestic sentiment's linkage of mothers and daughters in near-sacred union to disquiet the informational nature in these advertisements speaks to the difference race makes. If we give credence to their masters' instincts, these light-skinned runaways physically link black mothersand not white \"fathers,\" figurative or actualwith freedom.

Once identified, it is easy to align the formulaic language of runaway advertisementsage, height, color, mannerswith Mattison's description of Picquet; this helps to disclose the tension between his interest in the great favorites of some people who call themselves gentlemen, and hers in uniting with her mother. The details of physical appearances all point to anatomical concerns that mirror the bodily attention paid to persons-as-property rather than the more spiritual character-driven descriptions of white women that omit age and close attention to the body in order to preserve their reputed delicacy. As Shawn Michelle Smith puts it, \"as physical appearance was readily represented and circulated in the age of mechanical reproduction, interior essence was posed as an elite, sacred realm only accessible to (and perhaps only possessed by) members of the privileged middle classes\" (61). Mattison's language, then, doesn't grant Picquet agency as an \"accomplished white lady,\" but reasserts his and his privileged readers' ultimate authority to describe and proscribe. Her \"easy and graceful manners,\" \"fair complexion,\" and \"rosy cheeks\" don't align her with even objectified white womanhood; in the signifying chain Mattison constructs, these descriptors situate her not as a lady but as a symbolic fugitive slave.

For readers not familiar with the discursive topology of slave advertisements, Mattison's language poses as an explication of the [End Page 520] image that opens the text and as an iconographic attempt to embody Picquet's story by offering a visual and textual bridge of identification and empathy to white readers. Even for those who have never seen a broadside, Mattison offers an ethnographic invitation to scrutinize and objectify in order to find the points of difference, the anthropological thing that is not like the others. When Mattison notes that Mrs. P. has \"every appearance, at first view, of an accomplished white lady,\" he invites his readers to take a second look, to stop and stare. She has, he tells us, \"a flowing head of hair with no perceptible inclination to curl.\" The adjective is telling; the distinction between \"no inclination to curl\" and \"no perceptible inclination\" is the liminal space ostensibly clarified by scientific racism (as popular in the North as in the South).

Mattison's more subtle assertion of his racial expertise allies him with nineteenth-century authors and scientists who, by \"advertising the signs of deviance that were assumed to mark the body as a visual testament to abnormality, helped to instantiate an unreliable but pervasive optical model of identity\" that Mattison will try to stabilize further (Robinson 718). Mattison as pseudoanthropologist is akin to Dr. Latrobe in Iola Leroy, among others, whom Harper mocks for declaring, mistakenly, that to practiced eyes \"there are tricks of blood which always betray\" white niggers (229). Like Mattison, Dion Boucicault's popular protagonist Zoe in the 1859 play The Octoroon also avers that discerning eyes will recognize the somatic clues of a \"poisoned\" heritage: \"Look at these fingers; do you see the nails are of a bluish tinge?\" she moans, confessing her parentage to the white man who wants to marry her (111). \"Look in my eyes; is not the same color in the white? . . . Could you see the roots of my hair you would see the same dark, fatal mark,\" Zoe continues (111). This belabored testimony is what delivers Zoe's blackness, as Brody contends, for in appearance, manner, and form she is not \"black\"; it must be written on her (50). Mattison affirms the essential racial difference that Boucicault both reflects and further popularizes and that Harper will later challenge. As an \"expert\" at reading the hidden significations of the mulatta body, he also implies that he has seen in full flush what Picquet can only attempt to pull back in the cut she submitsand that by following his lead, readers too can uncover \"true\" racial meaning.

Laura Wexler suggests that the sentimental readers who also made up Mattison's audience were hungry for images as codifications of class and identity. Considering their fascination with photography, she argues that these images \"repeatedly invoked the materiality of appearances to justify their claim to dominance and their every incursion into the private space of others. Anxious for [End Page 521] separation, for a visible difference in display and deportment that could squelch any challenge to the distinctive privileges they claimed, middle-class people must have found in the very numbers of family photographs that filled their homes an assurance that real family life was coincident with the kind of families the photographs showed\" (66-67). Critics including McCaskill have noted that the white skin of some slaves acted as a visibly clear symbol of the wrongs of slavery that in itself made the moral suasionist argument without displaying the scars of what Lerone Bennett calls the \"Negro exhibit\" of bodily exposure to abolitionist or potentially sympathetic audiences (137). In addition to the erotic invitation of empathic connection and identification, for white readers and audiences the mulatta body is as often an invitation to reread and recuperate the essential signs of racial difference displayed in the penumbras, rather than epidermis, of the women on display. 16 Indeed, by announcing what his language suggests could be interpreted fraudulently as accomplished whiteness, Mattison offers to help readers recognize putatively authentic visual and racial codes. He thus invites them to identify, not with Louisa, but with the still safe and stable boundaries of their own racial status and classification.

5. Crafting Images of Race, Gender, and Desire in Running a Thousand Miles
Mattison framed the epidermal and epistemological uncertainty Picquet's image reproduced in an era when viewing (and classifying) unidentifiable bodies was all the rage. The Octoroon appeared in the wake of Boucicault's hit play (of the same name) in the US; it opened to full houses in Great Britain in 1861, the year after Craft's Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom was published. Boucicault's wife, Agnes Robertson, a \"white\" woman, played the tragic Zoe on both continents. The transracial permeability of Robertson's performance echoes white stars' success as Eliza in theatrical productions of Uncle Tom's Cabin; it also finds an analogy in Robertson's success in male \"breeches\" parts in other transcontinental hits. 17

Craft and her husband also captivated the transatlantic public's attention. Newspapers throughout the US and Great Britain described the details of the Crafts' escape, and some reveled in revealing details that \"would stick in any southerner's craw\" (McCaskill, William and Ellen 6). The audacity, indeed élan, with which the couple staged their escape from the deep South in late 1848, and the public attention they garnered, infuriated [End Page 522] the slavocracy. The Crafts executed their plan to pass over the Mason-Dixon line by having Ellen dress as a \"Mr. William Johnson,\" a wealthy, invalid, young planter, while her husband posed as his dedicated slave. As Mr. Johnson was a \"most respectable looking gentleman,\" the two escaped on the overground railroad, quite literally, staying at the very best hotels as they rode first class to freedom. Abolitionists cheered; these were relatively well-situated slavesWilliam, a skilled craftsman, Ellen, a favored and protected house \"servant\"who proved that slavery was insupportable in any state. And the Crafts continued to make that point, joining the abolitionist community in Boston and lecturing with antislavery societies in the US and later throughout Great Britain, where Ellen was the first formerly enslaved woman to visit since Phillis Wheatley in 1772. In multiple mediums, abolitionists such as Lydia Maria Child, William Still, William Lloyd Garrison, William Wells Brown, and Colonel Thomas Wentworth Higginson continued to tell the Crafts' story, and Ellen's/Mr. Johnson's image appeared everywhere. 18 Indeed, in 1857, a full eight years after their escape, and six years after the Fugitive Slave Law forced them into exile in a case that again made them objects of national attention, the Leeds Anti-Slavery Society sold an illustrated youth edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin \"on the same page as a notice for a shilling portrait of Ellen wearing masculine garments\" (11). When a 12-year fascination with their story culminated in publication, the frontispiece featured this startling if familiar image (Fig. 2).

Situating Picquet's opening image in relation to representations of Ellen Craft further highlights how epidermal and epistemological uncertainty are wed to questions of mulatta genealogies and racial will. That in all of the literature on the Crafts there are no extant images of them together underscores the ways in which Ellen's body has been appropriated into a white mulatta genealogy, one that does not align her with the familial allegiances and racial critiques that cause them, quite explicitly, to run (McCaskill, \"Yours Very Truly\" 510). 19 Their narrative is chock full of white bodies of various disjunctive genealogies and legal-racial standings that purposefully evoke the very epistemological and familial anxiety that Mattison seeks to master in The Octoroon. The Crafts interweave their story with their (extended) families', their community's, and with the specter of their coming (slave or free?) children always haunting the text. Although family photographs and \"portraits of couples,\" as they were titled, were popular in this era, the extensively reprinted engraving of \"Mr. Johnson\" abstracts Ellen from the filial context of parental responsibility that gave unwanted meaning to their marriage, just as it also excludes [End Page 523] the couple from the visual circle of normative familial sentiment from which African Americans were barred. As Wexler puts it: \"[P]eople outside of the magic circle of nineteenth-century domesticity . . . posed an interesting problem of exclusion in relation to such uses of photography. . . it is a problem that can be illuminated by examining the relation of these Others to the regime of sentiment, taken as an aggressive, rather than a merely private, social practice\" (67). 20 William's absence from Ellen's side, sharing the frame, banishes them from the \"magic\" circle of normative domestic union, even as it simultaneously contains the threat of visually interracial (and/or) transgendered devotion. Seeing Ellen/ Mr. Johnson alone, in or out of class, race, and gender drag, does not reference her desire for her husband at all.

A joint representation would symbolize what will become a paradigmatic literary rejection of white superiority and affirmation of racial loyalty by those who, despite their skin color, refuse to \"walk on the side of the oppressor\" and instead, \"thank God,\" [End Page 524] are \"with the oppressed,\" as Emily Garie in The Garies and Their Friends (1857) proclaims in a letter to her passing brother defending her marriage to the decidedly brown Charlie Ellis (Webb 336). 21 In 1861, Boucicault contended that \"octoroon girls, proud of their white blood, revolt from union with the black and are unable to form marriages with the white.\" 22 Ellen Craft revises, indeed revolts against, this contention by asserting her desire to make such a union and by protesting her and William's inability to do so because of laws prohibiting their legal union as slaves. Picturing the Crafts together would underscore Ellen's rejection of the myth of racialized desire and also raise the specter of illicit sexuality in multiple senses, inviting \"authentic\" white women viewers not only to be shocked and outraged at the couple's (and Ellen's mother's) treatment under slavery, but also to identify a bit too closely for (some's) comfort with Ellen and with her desire for an African-American man. Indeed, in the absence of any representation of the Crafts as a couple, one way to read Mr. Johnson's visual popularity is to consider how race, gender, and class crossings that can be framed and contained do not constitute the threat that the image of the phenotypically \"white\" Ellen with her phenotypically \"black\" husband might pose. Passing (through), in Ellen's case, is a transgression that obtains curio status. The more threatening transgression, on the other hand, is the legitimate (visual) miscegenation whose absence speaks volumes about the story others wished to tell about the Crafts.

Even the engravings that most closely approximate the two Crafts together reveal their out of familial context (Fig. 3). When these engravings were reprinted in William Still's Underground Railroad in 1872, Ellen's and William's appear side by side. 23 Yet, they are individual cameos; neither the Crafts nor the images actually touch or interact, and besides their size and arrangement, there is no sign that they are related or together. Indeed, though both Ellen and William engage the viewer's gaze directly, it is impossible to meet one's eyes without excluding the other's. Seated as if they were sculpture busts, they look past each other to engage the viewer separately. Again, the visual representations of the Crafts reveal the cultural limitations projected onto their agency that erase their racial and sexual will.

To abolitionists like Stowe, photographs, \"engravings or pictorial texts authenticated Ellen's trauma\" (McCaskill, \"Yours Very Truly\" 515). While they certainly serve that purpose for much of her audience, the body of Craft images also obfuscates Ellen's personal trauma, grounding it in a familiar empathic arena based on superficial phenotypical convergence with her white audience that she, herself, pointedly rejects. Ellen is no \"obliging octoroon,\" as [End Page 525] Brody describes the prototypical figure (53). 24 Indeed, despite her nearly universal acceptance on both sides of the Atlantic by those of a wide range of castes and colors, Ellen articulates her racial politics clearly. Finally over the Mason-Dixon line, when staying with Quakers she had assumed were light-skinned blacks, she answers her husband's reassurance that \"it is all right, these are the same\" by responding, \"no, it's not all right, and I am not going to stop here. I have no confidence whatever in white people\" (Craft 316). When asked by the London Daily News, \"do you really think that the slaves are intelligent enough to take care of themselves?,\" she is said to have retorted \"at present, they take care of themselves and their masters too\" (Sterling, Black Foremothers 3 Cool

. Moreover, she disdainfully rejects white prejudiceand the possibility of her own light-skinned privilegeby claiming her \"black manthe nigger?\" husband, as one amazed hotel clerk put it, at every public turn (Craft 326, 328).

Read outside of the context of a white mulatta genealogy, Ellen's trauma is not about the disjunction between (the assumptions that accompany) her skin tone and (the assumptions about) her experience as a slavethat is, it does not refer to the classic explanation of white audiences' response to light-skinned ex-slave women. Rather, her trauma is grounded in the constraints on her familial choices and freedom. It is the inability to extricate herself from the actualized mythological Southern \"family\" to make the transfer from being \"one of the family\" to having her own family that causes the couple to realize their challenges to racism, ownership, and slavery. 25 Ellen's trauma, then, cannot be represented [End Page 526] in extant individual images. Rather, the images further isolate her from the actual cause of her distress: her inability to choose a (black) husband and parent their children in freedom.

6. Can I Get a Witness? Photography and the Eye of God
This era of celebrated and sometimes unrecognized passing reaffirmed obsessions with fixing racial identities that were actually mobile and diffuse. Amy Robinson suggests that \"recognition typically serves as an accomplice to ontological truth-claims of identity in which claiming to tell who is or is not passing is inextricable from knowing the fixed contours of a pre-passing identity\" (723). Robinson's further interest in \"the more subtle claim of telling in the absence of knowing,\" when the data of passing is \"excavated from its epistemological certainty,\" is relevant here (723). We can chart the connection between racial uncertainty and anxiety in The Octoroon and in Running a Thousand Miles because, though neither woman ever passes over, it is her will, not dominant mastery of codes of racial legibility, that prevents it. Thus, the passing threat that stands in for the agency of putatively subordinate women like Craft and Picquet resonates throughout these texts as a (white) audience/author generated one just as surely as the success of the runaways to be a freeBlackcouple animates the visually repressed story in Running; likewise, the possible failure to gain release for Picquet's mother generates the principal narrative energy in Picquet's counternarrative. When it is possible for whites, in outrage and in error, to certify the whiteness of blacks (as the military officer who pretends to know \"Mr. Johnson, know his kin like a book\" when the Crafts need the miracle this man provides), 26 then one preoccupation of readers like Mattison, I'd contend, is to reassert the certainty of the connection between racial telling and knowing (Sterling, Black Foremothers 17).

For those who wished to codify racial difference, the technological innovation and popularity of antebellum photography offered a way to resolve tensions between ontology and epistemology. Garnering vast ideological influence, photography soon became so wildly popular as to be described as \"daguerreotypomania\" (Cathy Davidson, qtd. in Smith 13). Alan Trachtenberg notes that photography came into being \"not just as a practice of picture-making but as a word, a linguistic practice. It was not very long before 'daguerreotype' became a common verb that meant telling the literal truth of things. . . . The very words photography and daguerreotype provided a way of expressing ideas about how the world can be knownabout truth and falseness, appearance [End Page 527] and reality, accuracy, exactitude, and impartiality\" (17). By the late 1850s, the era of the handheld, single-image daguerreotype was in decline, though its multiple meanings persisted as technology developed. That by this time engravings were based on photographs rather than drawings broadened the mass acceptance of the relationship between image and truth. Antebellum photographs were printed on wood blocks and \"were in universal use as the standard\" manner for illustration, making for much greater accuracy than had ever before been possible (Ivins 28, 35). The final product was a woodcut; the popular abbreviation is the word Mattison uses when he laments that \"the cut on the outside title page is a tolerable representation of the features of Mrs. P., though by no means a flattering picture\" (5).

If antebellum photography was widely touted as an antidote to illusion in an increasingly unstable and unreadable mid-century America, it also heightened \"the problem of racial discernment\" the octoroon posed (Brody 50). Images of women like Craft and Picquet simultaneously provided an ultimate proving ground for the form yet threatened to disrupt the very assumptions on which its authority was based. Photography offered a technological, popularized, but sacred counter to illusions of multiple kinds. It was widely considered the \"eye of God\" that provided an absolute truth, an idea that held sway even as voices offered other interpretive paradigms.

The picture of Ellen as \"Mr. Johnson\" symbolizes the theater of racial-status-gender identity transposition. Yet the audience's ability to recognize this well-circulated image renders the play of the pass completely transparent and so nullifies the cultural threat to putative white purity. In this case, the well-known story of Johnson's \"authentic\" identity delivers racial authority rather than the ostensible transparency of the image itself. Mr. Johnson/ Ellen's face was sufficiently well-known to convey racial meaning implicitly, without the linguistic markers offered by Avedon, for example, or by Mattison. 27 Most of the audience could identify the dissonance between the pictorial representation, a white planter, and its human referent, a runaway woman. In other words, the image is not passing at all. Robinson contends that the structure of passing is a triangular one in which \"the passer, the dupe, and a representative of the in-groupenact a complex narrative scenario in which a successful pass is performed in the presence of a literate member of the in-group\" (723). When the \"visibility of the apparatus of passing, the machinery that enables the performance,\" was available, \"Mr. Johnson's\" viewers could choose between locations: those in the know or those outside of it. Those who chose to identify as literate members, \"in-group\" clairvoyants, [End Page 528] unlike those duped in the narrative and during the escape, could reassert the connection between racial telling and knowing. It is the pleasure and power implicit in that racially reconstructive act, perhaps, that helped make the cut successful as a curio and commodity. Moreover, viewers could gain this literacy without giving up their racial locations, whether they were radically egalitarian or aligned with pseudoscientists like Harper's fictional Dr. Latrobe. Gazing at the engraving of Mr. Johnson, then, recalls the way the daguerreotype also functions as a looking glass, where the shifting optical focus allows \"the viewer to see his or her own image [or in this case ideology] superimposed over the photographic one\" (Trachtenberg 26). This cut can cut both ways; it can represent the \"truth\" of the mythology, or superiority, of racial difference.

The opening image of The Octoroon allows us to consider how reading and recognition, sin and sacredness intersect, as well as to consider how, seen through the lenses of a developing photographic discourse, a racially inflected religious context meets a legalistic one. One of Mattison's earlier publications, Spirit-Rapping Revealed, was an 1853 expose. 28 He visited such unseemly subjects, he avers, \"to vindicate the Sacred writings as the only reliable standard of truth\" (Spirit-Rapping 4). He goes on to proclaim: \"In the progress of the expose, it was thought best to cite numerous quotations from the writings of the spirit-rappers. . . . Many of these quotations, I am aware, are of the most pernicious character; and if found in any other book than a professed unveiling of a dark and iniquitous system, their repetition would be not only an offense against good taste, but a questionable antidote to error. But under the circumstance, I had no alternative but to leave the infidelity and licentiousness of the system to be admitted upon my bare assertion, or to support every charge by indubitable proof\" (4). Mattison's polemic against spirit rapping could be replicated, almost word for word, to justify his lascivious obsession with interracial sex and violence. By the time he published The Octoroon, photography had become one way to provide \"indubitable proof,\" to pit the eye of God against the sinful illusions, the \"infidelity and licentiousness,\" that practices like race mixing and spirit rapping symbolized.

In both Spirit-Rapping Unveiled and The Octoroon, Reverend Mattison justifies his penchant for exposing \"inside views\" by invoking sacred considerations. \"Alas, for those telling mulatto, and quadroon, and octoroon faces,\" he declaims, after numbering no less than 10 instances of miscegenous behavior in his \"conclusion and moral of the whole story\"; \"They stand out unimpeached, and still augmenting as God's testimony to the deep moral pollution of the Slave States\" (Octoroon 51). In this context, [End Page 529] we can read his placement of Picquet's opening image as \"God's testimony,\" infused with the authority of a new technology widely proclaimed to be the real Master's eye. Yet, for Mattison, this hybridity projects \"a strategic taxonomy that constructs purity as a prior (fictive) ground\" (Brody 12). Again, the telling \"mulatto, quadroon, and octoroon faces\" allow him to reemphasize the difference attached to key mitochondrial markers like Picquet's seemingly straight hair. Mattison manages the disruptive tension of Picquet's phenotypical \"whiteness\" as he had countered the radical gender equality that characterized spiritualism and spirit rapping; 29 he links his phallogocentric authority to multiple sources; he merges the scientific with the sacred, his eye/I and the I/eye of God.

Photography bridges the sacred and secular and finds itself in the discursive arena of the court insofar as it is able to give witnessto acquit or convicton the basis of reliable evidence. \"What we want in a witness,\" writes Reverend H. J. Morton in the Philadelphia Photographer (1864), is \"capacity and opportunity for accurate observa

Powell · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2174 }

Foreman assumes that the "white mulatta" or "mixed white" is merely an exotic variety of "African American." That is a racist assumption. It makes as much sense to condemn Jews for passing as "Aryan" (white).

Powell · Guru Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 2174 }