A Hairdresser's Experience in High Life

APPENDIX A: Biographical Information on Eliza Potter (1820?–1893)

Appendix A Biographical Information on Eliza Potter (1820?–1893) To date, Eliza Potter, like other nineteenth-century black women workers and lightly documented populations, remains elusive in historical records. It has not been possible to corroborate many of her biographical claims, in large part because we do not know the hairdresser’s maiden name and because she bore two relatively common married names, Johnson and Potter. It would be especially exciting to corroborate the remarkable circumstances of Potter’s arrest and extradition from Cincinnati to stand trial in Louisville, Kentucky, on the charge of aiding a fugitive slave. Despite an extensive search of extant Ohio extradition records, court records, city directories, Kentucky court records, and local periodicals—including the Cincinnati Journal, the Cincinnati Commercial, the Philanthropist (an abolitionist paper)—it has not been possible to locate outside evidence of this event. As the annotations illustrate, however, it has been possible to document many of the events, dates, people, and locations to which she refers, so it appears that we can trust her memories and her representations on the whole. A comment to one client in New Orleans suggests the possibility that Potter kept some kind of a journal that would have helped her keep track of the different resorts she visited over a period of several years. However, this is just speculation. An 1853 marriage record that testifies to Eliza Johnson’s marriage to Howard Potter is of particular interest: if she married in Buffalo, NewYork, during her western migration as she claims, this record shows that Potter had married a second time (at least) at the time she published A Hairdresser’s Experience in High Life. Given her provocative labeling—early in her narrative—of marriage in general as a “weakness,” this subsequent marriage raises questions about her views on marriage. Was she opposed to marriage in principle as an independent working woman, or did her description of this first marriage as a “weakness” speak to Potter’s extreme youth at the time? If she was born in 1820 as she claims, and she was put on trial in Louisville in 1834 (according to new evidence), Potter would have been less than fourteen years old at the time of this first marriage. The more likely explanation for the improbability of this marriage at such a young age is that Potter moved her birth date forward by an unknown number 180 Appendix A of years, in which case she might have been in her mid- or late-teens at the time that she married in Buffalo. To date, a search of nineteenth-century census records has yielded only four entries for Potter: two for 1860 and two for 1880. Curiously, the 1860 entries place her in two different cities—Cincinnati and Niagara Falls, New York—seventeen days apart (June 11 and 28). This is not surprising given her job mobility, but the fact that she is listed with her stepchildren—Kate (b. 1849?) and James (b. 1851?)—does suggest that Potter moved closer to the Canadian border. Having been based in Cincinnati for some twenty years (only appearing in the 1857, 1858, 1860, and 1861 Cincinnati City directories , however), Potter may have felt compelled to move after publishing her book: perhaps she was perceived as breaching client confidentiality. Though for the most part local newspapers did not question her descriptions of Cincinnatians’ anxieties about class and elite femininity, Potter’s revelations may have ruptured the sensitive client ties she had built over the years. If she did indeed lose her customary client base, Potter may have decided to leave Cincinnati instead of cultivating other potential clientele . This rupture in her social network would be consonant with the well-known consequences of Elizabeth Keckley’s fall from grace with her employers, the Abraham Lincoln family, after the former slave published her 1868 memoirof employment in the White House, Behind the Scenes. An important question emerges from the two 1860 census listings for Potter: the Cincinnati entry lists her birthplace as New York; the Niagara Falls entry lists it as Virginia . Her initial relation of the trip west from New York lends credence to the New York birthplace (b. 1820). In addition, her comparison of New York in the 1850s to an earlier time points strongly to her previous residence as a youth in the city. However, the fact that Virginia is the birthplace listed when she resides in Niagara Falls, close to the Canadian border, and that she briefly mentions visiting...