- Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Capital:In Barbara Chase Riboud's "Central Park"
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
—The Declaration of Independence (1776)
In her new novel, "Central Park", Barbara Chase-Riboud continues her provocative exploration of the multiple standards inherent in national and civic principles. Against the backdrop of Gilded Age New York, Chase-Riboud recreates the story of Hannah Elias, a black courtesan turned prosperous businesswoman, to interrogate the determination and deceit by which individuals, cities, and countries become great. The novel is filled with conduct unbecoming to both ladies and gentlemen: while Elias earns her living as a prostitute, or member of the Sisterhood, her clients belong to the unspoken brotherhood of white, male, and predominantly Protestant businessmen who build their fortunes on the backs of Greater New York. Yet it is Elias who eventually faces prosecution, a development Chase-Riboud attributes to the character's insistence on and success in claiming the American ideals of unalienable rights and self-invention. For rather than being content to accept the rudimentary citizenship allowed early twentieth-century African Americans or pursue the domestic happiness traditionally gendered as feminine, Elias dares to strike out on the modern (and often racialized as white and gendered as masculine) quest for life, liberty, and the pursuit of capital. This essay will examine how Chase-Riboud (1) parses the façades on which national, social, and racial identities are built and (2) negotiates how many narratives of identity and self-determination—including Hannah's own—cross the line between exception and exploitation.
In Hannah Elias, Chase-Riboud has found a fitting successor to the protagonists of her previous novels. Whereas, as Suzette Spencer notes, the slave status of Sally Hemings, the eponymous heroine of Chase-Riboud's 1979 debut novel, indelibly restricts her autonomy in her relationship with Thomas Jefferson, Elias seems to enjoy exceptional self-determination in her movement from prostitute to mistress (508). Elias's story also resonates with yet departs from that of Joseph Cinque, the Amistad revolt leader depicted in Echo of Lions (1989). Ashraf Rushdy contends that, in her representation of Cinque's engagement with John Quincy Adams and the United States legal system, Chase-Riboud reveals that "there are diverse places for politics . . . —the body, the court, and the nation" ("Representing the Constitution" 275). In effect, when Adams urges the United States Supreme Court to consider Cinque and his fellow Africans as humans rather than property, he is also urging the justices to contemplate the soundness of the nation as established [End Page 1014] by the Constitution. While the body, the court, and the nation also define the terrain on which Hannah Elias's chronicle unfolds in "Central Park," the relationship between humanity and property differs markedly in the novel's early twentieth-century context. Indeed, Elias's personhood is reaffirmed rather than threatened through her association with material goods because, despite the perceptions of her white lovers, she belongs to no one but herself. And, finally, the perceived exoticism of Saartjie Baartman, the titular figure of Chase-Riboud's 2004 novel Hottentot Venus, becomes the means through which she and other African-descended peoples are decontextualized and dehumanized, yet Elias's apparent foreignness is the key to her entry into the circuits of modern power. All four stories—Hemings's, Cinque's, Baartman's, and Elias's—intersect with constructions of nationhood and modernity, but it is Elias who most successfully capitalizes, literally and figuratively, on this intersection.
The Historical Hannah: From Philadelphia Negro to Gilded Age Enigma
From the middle of 1904 to the early part of 1905, the pages of the New York Times were abuzz with the blackmail case that retired glass manufacturer John R. Platt brought against the mysterious Hannah Elias. Platt, a white octogenarian, alleged that the thirty-six-year-old Elias had extorted $685,385 from him. He claimed to have first met the younger woman in the Tenderloin in the 1880s and to have...