A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life (review)

“But nowhere do hearts betray themselves more unguardedly than in the private boudoir, where the hairdresser’s mission makes her a daily attendant. Why, then, should not the hairdresser write, as well as the physician and clergyman? She will tell her story in simpler language; but it will be none the less truthful, none the less strange,” writes Eliza Potter in her preface to A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life, originally published in 1859. Potter, a free woman of color, immediately and explicitly frames the narrative of A Hairdresser’s Experience in her authority to tell it, highlighting the importance of a black working woman’s experience in nineteenth-century society. She chronicles and describes her travels as one of Cincinnati’s most popular hairdressers for prominent white families and provides a powerful social critique on class, race, and gender in antebellum America.

Xiomara Santamarina provides a thorough and insightful introduction to this fully annotated edition of A Hairdresser’s Experience, grounding the life narrative as “an account of work, race, and femininity.” Santamarina’s work on Potter precedes this text, with essays and a book on black working women in the nineteenth-century, and as a scholar, Santamarina diligently sheds much light on what is little known about Potter, a feat following in the footsteps of Jean Fagan Yellin’s groundbreaking research on the life and text of Harriet Jacobs. Thanks to the Schomberg Library of Nineteenth-Century Black Women Writers and to work done by black feminist literary scholars such as Frances Smith Foster, Claudia Tate, and Nellie McKay to recover “lost” black women, the discourse on nineteenth-century black women, which traditionally has been informed by slavery in the American South, has been broadened and expanded. What is remarkable about A Hairdresser’s Experience is the revelation of how Potter, as insider-outsider, shapes her identity and destiny, transgressing not only norms set by a white racist supremacist society but also literary norms set by the nineteenth-century African American canon and its focus on “racial freedom, literacy, and equality” to ultimately achieve her own personhood.

With the aid of historical records, Santamarina dates Potter’s birthdate between 1812 and 1820. Unlike traditional openings of nineteenth-century life narratives by black women, A Hairdresser’s opening chapter “My Debut” does not begin with specific reference to birthplace or a description of her childhood followed by a chronological timeline of struggles; while Potter tersely mentions being brought up in New York and working at an early age for wealthy families, she unabashedly claims in the second paragraph of her opening chapter that she was “at liberty to choose my own course” and thus “determined to travel, and to ratify my long-cherished desire to see the world—and especially the Western world” (3). The “Western World” Santamarina notes is the Midwest, and Potter, according to Santamarina, sees herself as participating in the Western migration, allowing for a gendered and racialized participant in nineteenth-century United States ideology of Manifest Destiny. It is Potter’s opening announcement that clearly signals a departure from nineteenth-century traditional black literary and rhetorical conventions.

Organized as a series of sketches of Potter’s visits to different geographical locations and the accompanying experiences “dressing” hair for elite white women A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life reads more like a travel narrative than an autobiography, a generic label Santamarina gives it, though arguably travel narratives and autobiographies are not necessarily mutually exclusive; black women’s autobiography is often a hybrid genre, and, ultimately, defining clear genre divisions may be less important than having textual space that describes and documents black women’s experiences, particularly those of a woman who has a rich awareness of her own mobility, a cultural authority as a free working woman of color, and an expertise on elite white femininity.

Moreover, Potter directs more attention towards the lives and actions of others than herself. While Santamarina notes that...