The morning road air was like a new dress

Flight is multidimensional, constant, and never static.
– Neil Roberts

The historical self

Ayana Jackson’s work is a form of historical self-portraiture. Adopting different guises, she re-performs and reimagines the many pasts that emerge out of archives of Black history. Labouring under the sign of the future, 2017, is part of a larger body of work collectively titled Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment. Where Jackson’s earlier works critiqued the ways in which we look at images of suffering in the colonial archives (see footnote 1). A counterpoint to the difficulty of Jackson’s earlier work, Intimate Justice … elaborates the small moments of joy in the private archives that this work references. She sits like an odalisque, reclines in a velvet love seat, twirls in a skirt and poses in profile against printed textile backdrop.

In these performances (for the camera), she restores a sense of agency to a population deprived of freedom. The artist writes that ‘even within captivity there must have been stolen moments of reprieve, pleasure, self-nurturing sensuality, fragility and love’(C&, 2017). By reconstructing moments of intimacy and enjoyment, she refuses the basic premise of chattel slavery – that the enslaved did not own themselves. To me, these images recall a moment in Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God (1900); the garments of character Jamie become a symbolic part of her defiant departure: ‘The morning road air was like a new dress. That made her feel the apron tied around her waist. She untied it and flung it on a low bush beside the road and walked on, picking flowers and making a bouquet’ (Hurston, 1900/1991, 41).

In the image Labouring under the sign of the future, Jackson appears to be running. Her dress is cinched at the waist by a corset of cream silk, over which she wears a black velvet jacket with the collar turned out to reveal pale lining. The skirts that she clasps are of a soft, pinkish satin with a pattern of maroon flowers and worn over layers of frilly petticoats.

The fashionable self

Fashion is history; it drags, jettisons and renews the past. Fashion is hierarchy; signalling social status, it tells us (and others) what we are meant to be. And finally, fashion is choreography; garments both constrain and enable bodies, shaping the way to stand, walk and sit. Fashion is inevitably entangled with gender – it is the garment that lends the body gender, not the other way around.

Middle-class white feminism has long critiqued the ways in which garments shape bodies, heightening some physical attributes and diminishing others. Tight corsets and heavy bustles constrict bodies to construct gender. They accentuate those features of the body associated with femininity. Pushing out here and tucking in there, they manipulate, choreograph and discipline the body. In the nineteenth century, the (implicitly white upper- and middle-class) feminine form was immobile. (This is not entirely limited to the nineteenth century. To this day, immobility appears to be an essential trope of femininity – high heels hinder walking and running.)

Femininity has been constructed around the figure of the white woman. The cliché of the nineteenth-century woman is perhaps nowhere better embodied than in the fictional figure of Scarlett O’Hara, the Southern belle in Margaret Mitchell’s 1936 novel Gone With the Wind and the 1939 film of the same name, whose frills and flounces were made possible by an enslaved underclass. The centring of the category of ‘woman’ on the white female body, to the exclusion of other bodies, complicates critiques of femininity. Indeed, in her influential essay ‘Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe’, Hortense Spillers argues that the conditions of slavery and its aftermath degendered Black women, categorising them as strong and therefore ‘un-feminine’ (Spillers, 1987). Spillers reclaims this legacy as the basis of a feminist stance.

Marronage

Jackson wears precisely those garments that inhibit movement, and yet the image captures her in motion. Despite its stiffness, the corseted dress does not hold her still. She appears to be running, whipping her skirts behind her, which billow and swirl like wings.

There was a commonality between nineteenth-century garments and photography: both demanded varying degrees of stillness. The motion blur marks this image as a contemporary pastiche of a nineteenth-century photograph. In her use of twenty-first-century technology, Jackson pushes back against the stillness of this visual archive and its sedentary determinism. Academic Tina M. Campt writes that the stillness of photographic archives is only cosmetic (Campt, 2017: 11). There is movement beneath the surface of historical photographs discernible as subsonic vibration – a muscular equilibrium, poise, movement in waiting. It is as though Jackson sensed the delayed movement in the archive and coaxed it out into the open. These works are an elaboration of the archive, a projection of something that photographs of the time could not capture. The moment here – the length of time it takes for a shutter to open and snap closed – is time taken back.

We might understand this stolen moment as a ‘petit marronage’, a term that describes everyday acts of truancy from plantations, and which academic Neil Roberts uses to model a private, subjective but nonetheless politically potent form of escape (Roberts, 2015). Jackson’s work cultivates those flickers of internal lives not defined entirely within and by the structures of the claim. They are moments of self-possession and interiority that resist the constraints of the all-encompassing plantation. Jackson chases after something that by its very definition cannot be caught. Where previous work reconstructs, and in so doing indicts the residual violence found in the archive, this work squeezes into its crevices to retrieve and celebrate quiet forms of resistance. We might borrow Campt’s words here and describe the series as ‘quotidian reclamations of interiority, dignity, and refusal marshaled by black subjects in their persistent striving for futurity’(Campt, 2017: 11) Among the collection of images making up this series, Labouring under the sign of the future is the only one that shows her running, as if she is fleeing the frame of the camera (others show Jackson dancing or in repose). Within the broader theme of stolen moments, this image tilts towards a more permanent form of freedom – a grand marronage.

Passing

Fashion played a role in many forms of escape. Perhaps the most famous example of the use of clothing as a means of flight is that of Ellen and William Craft, who fled to the North by dressing as a white gentleman and his Black servant. While William posed as a Black servant, Ellen cropped her hair and encased her right arm in a sling to mask her inability to sign her name (illiteracy being a mark of the enslaved, since teaching the enslaved to read and write was illegal in Georgia). The Crafts’ escape depended upon Ellen’s ability to cross lines – of race, gender and class – and to inhabit the visual signs of freedom.

While Ellen’s double passing – as both white and as a man – was extraordinary, many fugitives from slavery used garments as instruments of escape in varying degrees: there were instances in which enslaved men and women would pass as free people of colour, either blending in to urban communities of the Antebellum South, or making their way North.

The act of passing depends on an intimate knowledge of those whom one is trying to imitate. Because of this it was the slaves kept closest to the plantocracy who had the greatest opportunity to flee it; that is, those who did not work in the field but in the house. Often, owners would dress house slaves to signal wealth – this marked the enslaved as ornamental (Marshall, 2010). Throughout the system of slavery, the plantocracy consumed elite culture and acquired ostentatiously beautiful things. But possessing these objects was about more than beauty. The word ornament refers to decoration, but it comes with an inflection – that something has no function – as in, ‘it’s just ornamental’. Ornament represents luxury because it reflects what economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen termed the ‘conspicuous consumption’ of a class that could afford to own ‘useless’ things (Veblen, 1912). Displays of wealth are born out of anxiety, a desire to show that one has both taste and means.

In 1735 South Carolina introduced sumptuary laws decreeing that ‘any sort of apparel whatso[e]ver, finer, other, or of greater value than negro cloth, duffils, kerseys, osnabrigs, blue linen, check linen or coarse garlix, or callicoes, checked cottons, or Scotch plaids’ could not be worn by slaves ( I740 code, 4I2, quoted in Wiecek, 1977: 268). These laws sought to create visible distinctions between the free and unfree. As miscegenation and manumission gave rise to a population of free people of colour, such laws also served as a palliative against the existential threat posed by this erosion of the visible marks of freedom and unfreedom. These laws, however, were hardly enforced, and owners continued to ‘dress up’ their slaves.

Whether a reflection of white slave-owning status, a mark of favour within an intimate and coercive hierarchy, or a reflection of a particular slave’s craft, the garments also helped fugitives to ‘blend in’ to free society. Just as fashion can be a tool of the powerful used to demarcate social status, class, gender, freedom and unfreedom, sumptuary laws also create the conditions of resistance: garments are code, and as such they can be used as camouflage. Fine clothing was a tool that could be used for the purposes of oppression, but which also might be deployed as a technology to achieve freedom. The garments that Jackson wears in this photograph are not the loose, coarse fabrics South Carolina’s sumptuary laws would have demanded enslaved women wear. The image itself, with its enigmatic title, invites imaginative speculation.

An accumulation of hours

Each photograph is taken in an instant, each garment is an accumulation of hours. Imagine the many hours spent on each piece of fabric being folded and stitched into a complex garment, each pleat and tuck a testament to precision and patience. Perhaps this figure is a seamstress who knew that her flight from slavery was not only for her, but for generations to come. Perhaps she laboured quietly for months, waiting for the right moment to inhabit these signs of freedom. Or perhaps her flight was sudden and unexpected, a moment in which she grabbed something she was making for a woman who claimed ownership over her, and went without a second thought. In this speculative moment, she no doubt fled for her life, but also for a future that exceeded her lifetime. The work’s eponymous ‘future’ is unspecified – it could be two minutes or two centuries hence. This work is a historical re-enactment, a moment from the past tumbling into the future.

The sign of the future

Last year the artist Alisha B. Wormsley erected a billboard in Pittsburgh reading ‘There are black people in the future’. This simple claim to the future upset so many people – just as the claim that the Black Lives Matter movement offends a contingent of ordinary white supremacists – that it was taken down before the close of the exhibition. The public’s outrage and the deference paid to it by the sign’s removal reveals that the labour of freedom is never done. Jackson’s photograph enacts a labour of personal, generational and cultural survival into the future, an insistent refusal of the system in which Black people were ‘never meant to survive’.

Notes

Abolitionist and former slave Frederick Douglass was the subject of some 160 photographs, and used photography as a mechanism by which to counter racist stereotypes. See John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd & Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century’s Most Photographed American, Norton and Company, New York, 2015.

References in order of appearance

C&, ‘Ayana V. Jackson: Intimate Justice in the Stolen Moment’, C&, <https://www.contemporaryand.com/exhibition/ayana-v-jackson-intimate-justice-in-the-stolen-moment/>, accessed 13 August 2019

Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1900), Harper Collins, New York, 1991

Hortense Spillers, ‘Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an American grammar book’, Diacritics, ‘Culture and countermemory: the “American” connection’ edition, vol. 17. no. 2, Summer 1987, pp. 64–81.

Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images, Duke University Press, Durham, 2017

Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2015

Amani Marshall, ‘“They will endeavor to pass for free”: enslaved runaways’ performances of freedom in Antebellum South Carolina’, Slavery & Abolition, vol. 31, no. 2, 2010, pp. 161–80

Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions, The Macmillan Company, New York, 1912

South Carolina: I740 code, 4I2, quoted in William M. Wiecek, ‘The statutory law of slavery and race in the thirteen mainland colonies of British America’, The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 34, no. 2, 1977

This essay first appeared in Annika Aitken, Dr Isobel Crombie, Megan Patty, Dr Maria Quirk and Myles Russell-Cook (eds) She Persists: Perspectives on Women in Art and Design. Melbourne: National Gallery of Victoria, 2020.