Am I Not a Husband and a Father?: Re-membering Black Masculinity, Slave Incarceration, and Cherokee Slavery in The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave

Shortly after escaping his last experience of slavery, fugitive slave Henry Bibb reveals this striking obstacle to his final achievement of freedom in The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849): running into an image of himself in Missouri:

The greatest of my adventures came off when I arrived at Jefferson City. There I expected to meet an advertisement for my person; it was there I must cross the river or take a steamboat down; it was there I expected to be interrogated and required as to whether I was actually a free man or a slave. If I was free, I should have to show my free papers; and if I was a slave I should be required to tell who my master was. (emphasis added)

(166)

In doing so, Bibb frames both the frustration and achievement of freedom as one that is specifically representational, a hyperbolic and potentially perilous game of show and tell. Taking on a vigorous life of its own, this “advertisement for [his] person” runs ahead, around, and before him in the slave state of Missouri and, further, threatens to destroy Bibb’s own life, ensnaring him in a discursive net before human agents physically capture him. As Maurice Wallace argues in Constructing the Black Masculine (2002), African American males’ identities have been bound within a system of spectragraphia: the constant framing of their lives, photographically and discursively, within a racialist gaze that denies them a full and complex humanity. Fugitive slave advertisements, he suggests, constitute one site for these kinds of figurative and literal arrests (83). When Bibb meets himself in print, it is just such a spectragraphic image that will check his progress. If Bibb is to challenge this literal two-dimensional likeness of himself, he must employ alternative representations and fight undesirable constructions of himself with desirable ones. The passage proposes two seemingly opposed ways to do this. Bibb can show “free papers,” inscriptions that authorize his bodily mobility in Missouri, or, more provocatively, he can resist capture by telling who is master is. Alternatively, by presenting himself as restrained and contained in socially acceptable ways, Bibb can forge the “free papers” that will paradoxically permit his self-directed movement in the North.

Following this paradoxical formula for fugitive slave resistance, I argue that Bibb’s depictions of imprisonment in Kentucky penal structures and his refractions of slavery to the Cherokee in Indian Territory constitute crucial ways in which he uses bondage to avert unwanted attention, thus hiding himself in plain sight. Relying on what Mark Anthony Neal might call the “legibility” or unambiguous cultural meaning of courageous and sympathetic models of white masculinity found in prison writing and Indian captivity narratives (Looking 4), Bibb challenges the insidious “advertisements” circulating in Missouri and the world surrounding the text, certifying his status as a “free” subject. For Bibb, the realization of freedom is inextricably and explicitly tied to the status of his wife and children—an important revision of the lone, male escapee imagined in the contemporaneous accounts of Frederick Douglass and Williams Wells Brown.² As Charles Heglar has compellingly argued, the central drama of the text emerges from “the suspense of whether [Bibb] can successfully rescue his slave family” (xxxii) since, in a work of approximately twenty chapters, Bibb finds individual freedom in the North by the fourth chapter (Bibb 56). More specifically, Bibb’s retrieval of his family also sets the stage for another suspenseful rescue: the reclamation of his status, as he expresses in the fifth chapter of his account, as a “husband and father” (83). His essays (literary and otherwise) into the Upper and Deep South on behalf of his wife and child revise the masculinizing imperatives of abolitionist ideology—emblematized in the familiar abolitionist refrain, “Am I Not a Man and a Brother?”—by posing an equally important and connected question, “Am I not a Husband and a Father?”

This reclamation project is acutely contextualized and complicated by...