BAR Book Forum: C. Riley Snorton’s “Black on Both Sides”

C. Riley Snorton

26 May 2021

The inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and “fungible” also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity.

“The demarcation and annexation of territories and states evinced how slavery and settler colonialism structured official discourses of nation building and foreign policy.”

The following is an excerpt from C. Riley Snorton’s book, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity. It is used with permission of the author and the University of Minnesota Press. Copyright 2017 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota.

Chapter 2

Trans Capable Fungibility, Fugitivity, and the Matter of Being

“[The] New World . . . marked a theft of the body—a willful and violent. . . severing of the captive body from its motive will, its activedesire. Under these conditions, we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”—Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”

“Fungible,” according to its etymology, first appeared in the English language in Henry Colebrooke’s Treatise on Obligations and Contracts, Part 1, in 1818. Colebrooke, having spent a considerable period of his life as a colonial bureaucrat and judge in India, returned to England to write about the particularities of British contract law; he also wrote about Hinduism and Hindu philosophy before his death, in 1871. Fungible articles, which he delineated according to their characteristic quantifiability—“alike liquidate and exigible”—required legal definition in relation to matters of compensation.[1] Yet, Colebrooke maintains, “even things, which are not fungible, may be subjects of compensation; being due under general obligation respectively as cattle, slaves, horses.”[2] The legal treatment of slaves and animals as both “subjects of compensation” and “not fungible” indicates, at least in part, the anxiogenic time in which the Treatisewas produced. By the time of publication, Denmark–Norway (1803), Haiti (1804), the United Kingdom (1807), the United States (1808), Mexico (1810), Chile (1811), the Netherlands (1814), Uruguay (1814), Venezuela (1816), Spain (1818), France (1818), and Portugal (1818) had all passed legislation criminalizing transatlantic slave-trading activity. In some of these instances, slavery was also legally disestablished.

Although the United States formally abolished the importation of people for the purposes of enslavement in 1808, the internal slave trade remained legally intact until 1865. Some states, either by federal ordinance or through state legislation, passed laws that annulled or gradually phased out the legal practice of slavery within their territories. Alternately expressed in terms of “compromises,” “provisos,” and “clauses,” the demarcation and annexation of territories and states evinced how slavery and settler colonialism structured official discourses of nation building and foreign policy, articulating a grammar rife with euphemism to disavow the violent processes by which land and persons would find primary legal expression as property. The variegated landscape of enslavement—its applications, abrogations, and diffuse rationales—staged the grounds for fungibility to emerge as a legal intercession intra-and internationally. How, then, would the “slave,” as “not fungible” and as a “subject of compensation,” come to emblematize a series of crises in imperial sovereignty, value, and ontology in the twilight of formal slavery? Relatedly, how did the legal categorization of the slave, in Saidiya Hartman’s terms, link “the figurative capacities of blackness [with] the fungibility of the commodity”?[3] If, as Hortense Spillers explains in the epigraph, the capacity for gender differentiation was lost in the outcome of the New World, ordered by the violent theft of body and land, it would stand to reason that gender indefinitenesswould become a critical modality of political and cultural maneuvering within figurations of blackness, illustrated, for example, by the frequency with which narratives of fugitivity included cross-gendered modes of escape.[4] Spillers named this process “ungendering,” the not accidental coincident of “fungible” in the twilight of formal slavery—also described as the transition from slavery to freedom or from slaving economies to the free market—which prompts an understanding of the phenomena she identifies in terms of the transitive expressivity of gender within blackness.[5]

In this regard, captive flesh figures a critical genealogy for modern transness, as chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of being. Given that the ungendering of blackness is also the context for imagining gender as subject to rearrangement, this chapter examines how fungibility became a critical practice-cum-performance for blacks in the antebellum period. To suppose that one can identify fugitive moments in the hollow of fungibility’s embrace is to focus on modes of escape, of wander, of flight that exist within violent conditions of exchange. Transitive—as in fungible passing into fugitive—and transversal—as in fugitivity intersecting fungibility, this chapter explores the fugitive (and at once fungible) narratives of black people—born free or into captivity—in the era of slavery’s formal transition. Here, the transitivity and transversality of fungibility and fugitivity find expression in a line of a poem by Fred Moten, wherein the figures under principal review in this chapter “ran from it and [were] still in it.”[6] Fugitive narratives featuring “cross-dressed” and cross-gender modes of wander and escape, most often described in terms of “passing,” function as a kind of map for a neglected dimension of what Spillers defined as the semiotic terrain of black bodies under captivity, wherein gender refers not to a binary system of classification but to a “territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”[7]

William Still notes in his preface to The Underground Rail Road (1872) the different ways fugitives “disguised in female attire” or “dressed in the garb of men” made use of gender fungibility as a contrivance for freedom.[8] Providing numerous examples of this occurrence, Still’s monograph included accounts of the escapes of Clarissa Davis of Virginia, alias Mary D. Armstead, in 1854; Maria Ann Weems of the District of Columbia, alias Jo Wright, in 1855; and Ellen Craft of Georgia, alias William Johnson, in 1848. Barbara McCaskill also describes how Harriet Tubman once “disguised a Black man as a bonneted woman in order to obstruct his arrest and re-enslavement by Northern deputies,”[9] and Harriet Jacobs narrated her cross-gender fugitive practice, as told from the perspective of the pseudonymous protagonist Linda Brent, in Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, published in the United States in 1861.[10] Prior to these examples, northern white readers would have encountered the story of Mary Jones, alias Peter Sewally, also referred to as the Man-Monster or as Beefsteak Pete. Jones, although born free in New York City, was imprisoned in 1836 on charges of grand larceny in conjunction with pickpocketing.[11] This polyonymous figure, along with a later namesake, Mary Ann Waters, who appeared in a pickup notice—a genre of slaving media meant to notify enslavers of the location of their escaped property—in 1851, illustrated how the transitive and transversal relations between blackness and transness were narrated reiteratively in this period in terms of “cross-dressing and theft,” not only as they both gave expression to the particularities of their criminalized acts but also as they pertained to the fungible, fugitive deeds carried out by actors figured as property-cum-persons.[12]

“Harriet Tubman once ‘disguised a Black man as a bonneted woman in order to obstruct his arrest and re-enslavement by Northern deputies.’”

The first part of this chapter focuses on the two Marys and their emergence in the antebellum white press; the subsequent sections turn to Brent/Jacobs’s Incidents and William Craft’s Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, The Escape of William and Ellen Craft from Slavery to explore how the fungibility of gender mapped the terrain of these fugitive passages. Even as the cross-gender aspects of the escapes titillated abolitionist audiences, they also required resignification in order to present these incidents as examples of the extreme measures fugitives took to escape the problems of slavery rather than as a contingency of a contemporaneous pseudoscientific project that linked blackness with gender and sexual polymorphous perversity. Most often this was achieved by framing such cross-gendered modes of escape in terms of cunning wit on the part of the fugitive actor, who manages to successfully assume and maintain an unnatural performance of artifice. In this narration, passing expresses a form of agency as well as a promise of restoration, which is to say that passing—as a limited durational performance—signals a “return” to a natural-cum-biological mode of being. This narratological strategy shaped how passing would be deployed as an interpretive frame for all manners of trans-identificatory practices—both contemporaneously and reiteratively into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

No less performative but lacking a clear biologized semiotic referent, fungibility in this chapter expresses how ungendered blackness provided the grounds for (trans) performances for freedom. By describing their acts as performances for rather than of freedom, I am suggesting that the figures under review here illustrate how the inhabitation of the un-gender-specific and fungible also mapped the affective grounds for imagining other qualities of life and being for those marked by and for captivity. Brent/Jacobs referred to this vexed affective geography as “something akin to freedom” that, perhaps paradoxically, required a “deliberate calculation” of one’s fungible status.[13] Rather than regarding Jones, Waters, Jacobs, and the Crafts as recoverable trans figures in the archive, this chapter examines how the ungendering of blackness became a site of fugitive maneuvers wherein the dichotomized and collapsed designations of male-man-masculine and female-woman-feminine remained open—that is fungible—and the black’s figurative capacity to change form as a commoditized being engendered flow. As the title “Trans Capable” suggests, disability figures prominently in this archive, and disability theory is indispensable for analyzing, for example, the visual and textual maneuvers by which Ellen and William Craft would become William Johnson and his servant, just as it was with rendering the lives of Anarcha, Lucy, Betsey, and the unnamed others as they were circumscribed and written out of James Marion Sims’s archives in the preceding chapter. Together, this chapter and its companion, “Anatomically Speaking” (chapter 1), explore how transness became capable, that is, differently conceivable as a kind of being in the world where gender—though biologized—was not fixed but fungible, which is to say, revisable within blackness, as a condition of possibility.

C. Riley Snorton is Professor of English Language and Literature and is jointly appointed in the department and the Center for Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University of Chicago.

[1] Henry Colebrooke, Treatise on Obligations and Contracts, Part 1 (London: Black, Kingsbury, Parbury, & Allen, 1818), 193.

[2] Ibid. (emphasis in original). Colebrooke discusses the legal status of the slave in some depth in chapter 3 of the treatise, defining the slave as unable to enter into “contract or agreement, towards any person, whether a stranger or his own master. . . . For the master has a right to all the goods of his slave, and all his labour, work and service, by the very condition of slavery” (30). This description of the “very condition of slavery” also sensitizes my reading of Sims’s archive in chapter 1.

[3] Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 25–26.

[4] Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67.

[5] Ibid. For a particularly cogent reading of how the attribution of “transition” obscured developing and established relations of power, read Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2015).

[6] Fred Moten, The Feel Trio (Tucson: Letter Machine, 2014), 65 (emphasis in original).

[7] Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67.

[8] William Still, The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters, &c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in the Efforts for Freedom (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates,1872), 1.

[9] Barbara McCaskill, “‘Yours Very Truly’: Ellen Craft—the Fugitive as Text and Artifact,” African American Review 28, no. 4 (1994): 510.

[10] As Farah Jasmine Griffin notes in her introduction to the Barnes &Noble Classics edition of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (New York: Barnes& Noble Books, 2005), xiii–xxvi, the narrative—as transposed by Lydia Maria Child—was published a year later (1862) in the United Kingdom under the title The Deeper Wrong.

[11] Jonathan Ned Katz notes that the New York Sun reported that “Mary Jones also went by the names ‘Miss Ophelia,’ ‘Miss June,’ and ‘Eliza Smith.’” Love Stories: Sex between Men before Homosexuality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 81.

[12] The phrase “cross-dressing and theft” appears in Katz’s discussion of Jones in ibid.

[13] Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. L. Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861), 83–85.

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