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5 “I Made Up My Mind to Act Both Deaf and Dumb” Displays of Disability and Displays of Disability and Slave Resistance in the Slave Resistance in the Antebellum American South Antebellum American South DEA H. BOSTER I N 1839, Jacob D. Green, a domestic slave and errand boy on a large plantation in Maryland, made his first attempt to run away from his master. The resourceful Green had begun to use deception and tricks at a young age to torment his white masters and get revenge on fellow slaves who humiliated or wronged him, but, in Green’s words, “I firmly believed to run away from my master would be to sin against the Holy Ghost.” However, after his wife of six years—a former concubine of their master—and the couple’s children were sold away without warning, Green immediately began to plan his escape, earning money by selling stolen chickens and lying to obtain a horse from his master’s father-inlaw .1 On his way to Delaware, Green fell asleep in a barn, where seven white men discovered him after he fell out of the hayloft. The men demanded to know who Green was and why he was there, but Green refused to reply, even after the men brought him before a magistrate. His silence indicated to the men that Green might be mute, an assumption that Green decided to use to his advantage: “When I remembered I had not given evidence of speech, I determined to act as if I was dumb; and when the magistrate called to me, I also thought deafness was often united with dumbness, and I made up my mind to act both deaf and dumb, and when he called, ‘Boy, come here,’ I took no notice, and did not appear to hear . . . and so effectually that he discharged me, convinced I was a valueless deaf and dumb nigger.”2 72 Î Dea H. Boster Although Green was later arrested and returned to his master in Maryland, his successful ruse of being deaf and dumb—and, by association , “valueless”—is a telling example of the power that slaves had to perform disability in antebellum Southern society. Green’s feigned muteness was arguably not “visible” the way a limp or deformed limb would be, but it was highly conspicuous; his refusal to answer his white captors’ questions was, in the antebellum South, a serious offense that could have resulted in an arrest, a whipping, or both. By making his feigned impairment so prominent in the encounter, Green challenged his white oppressors to render his “disabled” body invisible again and succeeded when they turned him loose instead of whipping him, charging him with trespass, or publicizing his capture. For many slaves, there were significant advantages to being considered “disabled,” and displays of feigned, exaggerated, or self-inflicted disability in their bodies was an important way for slaves to negotiate control over the bodies and resist the authority of their masters.3 The success of “passing” as disabled lay in the ability of slaves to perform the most obvious signs of disability, making those signs impossible to ignore and tapping into pervasive concerns about “disorderly bodies.” Almost paradoxically, performing disability—a condition normally associated with dependence and powerlessness—and forcing white authority figures to contend with their conditions could allow slaves to achieve a degree of independence and control in many different situations.4 Slaves “passing” as disabled to resist their bondage did so by relying on complex intersections between race, gender, social class and the physical body in the antebellum American South.5 Historians since the 1970s have debated the prevalence of such performances, mainly in the context of slave malingering. In their statistical study Time on the Cross, Robert Fogel and Stanley Engerman claimed that feigned illness was rare among slaves on the plantations they analyzed, and white observers did not always assume that ill slaves were malingerers; instead, they argued, planters “were generally more concerned about losing slaves or impairing their health through the neglect of real illness.”6 However, many other historians—including Herbert Gutman, Kenneth Stampp, Peter Wood, Eugene Genovese, Todd Savitt, and Sharla Fett—have argued against this view, claiming that malingering was a pervasive and effective tool of day-to-day resistance and was a prominent concern for slaveholders and the doctors they employed to care for their slaves.7 These authors discuss the dis- “I Made Up My Mind to Act Both Deaf and Dumb” D 73...

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