Resisting (through) the Eye: Antebellum Visual Regimes, the Slave Narrative’s Rhetoric of Visibility, and African American Strategic Pastoral

Abstract

This chapter turns to the pastoral and its involvement in antebellum African American expressions of environmental knowledge. Conceptualizing the idea of a “strategic pastoral,” seen in moments in which pastoral elements become part of a doubled (visual) perspective in slave narratives, provides a means for examining how this writing technique enables an articulation of environmental knowledge, social critique, and utopian hope. Through a variety of texts and with a specific focus on the narratives by Frederick Douglass (1845) and Henry Box Brown (1849), this chapter demonstrates where, how, and with what effects slave narratives strategized pastoral elements. This also suggests an alternative framework for thinking about the (anti)pastoral in ecocritical readings of African American literature.

Theocritus’s “Idyll 11,” one of the foundational texts of the pastoral tradition, presents us with the lovelorn figure of Polyphemus the Cyclops, mourning and starving in mad love for Galatea the sea-nymph. Framed by Theocritus’s lyrical I addressing the doctor-poet Nicias, Polyphemus’s monologue in Sicily, the setting of the Idylls, expresses his pain at being rejected by his beloved as well as the assumed reasons of this rejection:Verse

Verse I fell in love with you, my sweet, when first you came With my mother to gather flowers of hyacinth On the mountain, and I was your guide. From the day I set eyes on you up to this moment, I’ve loved you Without a break; but you care nothing, nothing at all. I know, my beautiful girl, why you run from me: A shaggy brow spreads right across my face From ear to ear in one unbroken line. Below is a Single eye, and above my lip is set a broad flat nose. (lines 25–33)

As a whole, “Idyll 11” carries the earmarks of prototypical pastoral. It deals in an idealizing manner with a one-eyed herdsman who “pasture[s] a thousand beasts” (line 37) and is driven by a nostalgic longing, as Theocritus is looking back onto his childhood in Sicily. Furthermore, “Idyll 11” implies a retreat-and-return pattern through the poet’s and doctor-poet’s framing comments that serve to contrast an urban (Alexandrian) audience with Polyphemus, who epitomizes the rustic way of life of a Sicilian shepherd-bard who plays the “pipe better than any Cyclops here” (line 38).

More than that, however, the cited passage hints at yet another (often overlooked¹) aspect of the pastoral. Rather than merely emblematizing a somewhat comical form of pastoral involving the idea of a Cyclops who wishes “to learn to swim” in order to live with a sea-nymph (line 60),² Theocritus’s text paradigmatically expresses a link between the pastoral and the visual. The scene exposes such a connection on multiple levels. On the one hand, the figures of Theocritus and Nicias allow for an external gaze on the Cyclops-shepherd in his rustic setting, as they become mediators who enable an urban audience to access and visualize both the monologue-scene and its frame. On the other hand, “Idyll 11” problematizes seeing in Polyphemus himself; through the Cyclops, the scene paradigmatically shifts its focus to visuality as such, symbolized by the characteristic “single eye.” The visual, in this respect, becomes a complex theme in two ways. First, because Polyphemus’s literal one-sightedness epitomizes the subjectivities, idiosyncrasies, limits and potential deficiencies involved in pastoral looking; second, because the one eye in itself is not only looking but is also being looked at. The Cyclops himself and an implied audience consider the single eye as bodily distortion and as mark of a fundamental difference. The “shaggy brow spread[ing],” in conjunction with the “lip set [on] a broad flat nose,” are intimately connected not only with Polyphemus’s own way of looking, but also with his visually produced position (lines 31; 33). Thus, the idyll emphasizes the visual as an integral part of the “ancient cultural tool” of the pastoral from the outset (Gifford 46). The Cyclops’s one eye emblematically hints at the complexity of relationships that potentially arise out of the accumulation of observers and their positions within pastoral frameworks, it self-consciously draws attention to a visual dimension of the pastoral.

In this chapter, I suggest that this link between pastoral and visual hinted at in Theocritus’s Ur-text is vital to a strategic use of the pastoral through which antebellum African American slave narratives could articulate environmental knowledge. To this end, I first sketch more broadly how visual regimes of the period were tied to the emergence of the genre and what I call its “rhetoric of visibility,” by examining a variety of (historical) sources ranging from lectures by Frederick Douglass to abolitionist writing and (pseudo-)scientific racism. Subsequently, I turn to two narratives by Henry Box Brown (1849) and Frederick Douglass (1845), which, read through the context of visual relations and pastoral theory by Susan Snyder (1998), exemplify where, how, and with what effects slave narratives strategized pastoral elements and expressed environmental knowledge. One particular reason for choosing Douglass’s text is that his narrative has often been used as an example of African American antipastoral, which helps me highlight an alternative perspective that I believe the idea of an African American “strategic pastoral” affords. In this sense, my selection of texts for this chapter reflects not only my general aim in Part I to broadly illustrate facets of a foundational African American environmental knowledge, but also my intention to contribute, at this point, to debates over the antipastoral in African American literature more generally.

Chapter 2 employed the concept of heterotopia to show how antebellum slave narratives articulated environmental knowledge through space. By contrast, in Chap. 3, I turn to a mode, the pastoral, which is deeply connected with what could be seen as the opposite of heterotopic space, namely the normalizing, controlling space of the plantation, and to its (problematic) involvement in African American expressions of environmental knowledge. A spatial articulation of environmental knowledge in connection with the plantation was difficult for various reasons in fugitive slave narratives. To begin, positively portraying engagements with non-human nature on or through plantation settings potentially conflicted with an abolitionist purpose of depicting the most abominable facets of the dreaded system and with narrators’ general need to represent themselves as human as opposed to nature. Even though there is much evidence that suggests that the enslaved developed diverse forms of environmental knowledge, whether, with more agency, in heterotopic spaces or through forcibly being the true cultivators of the land, communicating this knowledge in connection with iconic spaces of enslavement like the plantation was not politically viable. The aim, after all, was to point out the moral evil and injustice of the “peculiar institution,” so that a discourse and depictions that cherished non-human nature became associated rather with spaces that could be set against its systemic, normalizing plantationscapes, i.e. with (heterotopic) spaces that lay beyond or on the edge of the plantation. Spatially, environmental knowledge primarily found expression where the plantation system (or the generic confines of the fugitive slave narrative) suffered cracks, as it temporarily relinquished control, e.g. in the provision ground, was overcome through flight, or broke down altogether; it lay on the outskirts of the plantation (as well as abolitionist discourse), in heterotopic (literary) space.

Another reason why environmental knowledge was difficult to represent in connection with plantation space has to do with the aesthetic and ideological ties of the plantation with the pastoral. The pastoral was a prominent literary mode throughout the antebellum period, and played a central role in nineteenth-century U.S. American culture, as various scholars (Leo Marx, Lawrence Buell) have shown.³ More importantly, however, from an African American perspective, it has a long colonial history and “a highly problematic racial dimension” (Garrard 54), and is connected to the manner in which the natural world, very often through the image of the Southern plantation, has been used to subjugate blacks. Linked to the plantation, especially (but not exclusively) through the genre of the plantation pastoral,⁴ the pastoral turned enslaved blacks into passive parts of the plantation landscape, mystified their hardships (while refraining from ascribing blame), and produced powerful and long-lasting racial stereotypes.

Here, in the link between plantation and pastoral, lies one of the main reasons for the scholarly claims of an antipastoralism in African American literature (cf. Chap. 1, n. 25). If therefore, as Michael Bennett suggests, “[s]slavery changed the nature of nature in African American culture, necessitating a break with the pastoral tradition developed within European American literature” (205), this break is central to antebellum African American representations of plantation space, especially in fugitive slave narratives. Articulating environmental knowledge through this (as opposed to heterotopic) space was fraught with risk. Writers had to disconnect themselves from a (pastoral) nature discourse of the plantation that made them a docile part of this space in justification of their enslavement, had to avoid any ambivalence that could have a “pastoral echo,” thereby potentially giving value to the plantation and solidifying their racially produced social position. What Richard Wright notes much later in 12 Million Black Voices (1941) concerning the problems of representing plantation space is (minus the movie and the radio) also true for an antebellum context:

To paint the picture of how we live on the tobacco, cane, rice, cotton plantations is to compete with mighty artists: the movies, the radio, the newspapers, the magazines, and even the Church. They have painted one picture: idyllic, romantic; but we live another; full of fear of the Lords of the land, bowing and grinning when we meet white faces, toiling from sun to sun, living in unpainted wooden shacks that sit casually and insecurely upon the red clay. (35)

It was necessary for antebellum writers of fugitive slave narratives to stress the latter “picture” in order to overcome the former and argue against the peculiar institution. In any case, it was immensely difficult to express environmental knowledge by appreciatively presenting relations to non-human non-discursive materialities in connection with plantation space, as this always involved the risk of evoking the aesthetic, and thereby the emotional and ideological dimensions of a (plantation) pastoral framing.

This chapter traces some of the ways in which fugitive slave narratives nevertheless strategically employed pastoral elements to articulate environmental knowledge not so much spatially, but by playing with visual perspectives. While I understand ‘pastoral elements’ in what Lawrence Buell calls a broader “Americanist” sense as such writing that potentially “celebrates the ethos of nature/rurality over against the ethos of the town or city” (“American Pastoral Ideology” 23),⁵ my definition of ‘strategic pastoral’ for this chapter is therefore more specific. By African American strategic pastoral, I mean such moments in which pastoral elements become part of a doubled (visual) perspective that, at points, enables an articulation of environmental knowledge, social critique, and utopian hope. Strategic pastoral, understood in this sense, is one of those points where the convergence of the environmental and the political dimensions of African American literature becomes most clearly visible.

My argument is not thereby opposed to notions such as Lance Newman’s “radical pastoral” (i.e. a pastoral that radicalizes a traditional pastoral topos to “suit new circumstances” (10)), or to scholarly claims about an African American antipastoral, since such claims do not categorically deny the existence of pastoral elements (in the broader sense) but stress how they are disengaged. Nevertheless, my readings through the notion of a “strategic pastoral” suggest expanding the scope of antipastoral readings of African American literature in the sense of interrogating more concretely some of the strategic forms and implications of this disengagement. The aim is to flesh out what it means when Lawrence Buell, in his “scattergram of examples” in The Environmental Imagination (1995), proposes that black literature shows that African Americans “can gain control of the pastoral apparatus” (44, 43). To this end, I treat the primary texts of this chapter through the lens of the visual to trace a characteristic perspectival doubling, and employ a basic distinction made by Susan Snyder between “temporal” and “spatial” aspects of the pastoral (cf. 3–11). In Pastoral Process (1998), her study of Renaissance pastoral, Snyder distinguishes what she calls two modes:

In the first mode, pastoral bliss is back then, but in the second it is over there. The pastoral scene as spatially conceived provides an alternative to the life of effort and competition, a vacation of sorts but also a set of contrary values. […] [It provides] a short-term haven but not permanent residence. But as temporally conceived in the poems and sequences examined in this book, pastoral bliss is lost forever. It survives only as a frustrating memory, a marker of present alienation—or at best as a foreshadowing of life after death. The revivifying powers of pastoral-in-space are available in the here and now. (3)

Pastoral, understood in this sense, may, on the one hand, refer to an “alternative space,” imply a form of provisional refuge or temporary retreat (Arcadian); on the other hand, the pastoral opposition may be temporally connected to a “lost past” (Golden Age). While both of these modes, which are not “exclusive categories” (3), are significant in the texts by Douglass and H.B. Brown, my readings demonstrate that a temporal mode is more viable for expressing environmental knowledge in the context of plantation settings. Moreover, whereas the spatial dimension of African American strategic pastoral is often connected to antipastoral, its temporal dimension involves not only a form of Golden Age pastoral in Snyder’s sense, but is also potentially future-oriented, as it links a doubled vision enabled through the slave narrative’s rhetoric of visibility to a doubling of time. Besides serving at certain points as a means for articulating environmental knowledge, the slave narrative’s strategic pastoral is also a vehicle for criticizing the peculiar institution and expressing a utopian hope for a world without slavery.

Antebellum Visual Regimes and the Slave Narrative’s Rhetoric of Visibility

The early- to mid-nineteenth-century U.S. saw significant shifts in visual culture,⁶ which are an important context for the functioning of a strategic pastoral in the fugitive slave narrative and central to the discourses that formed around racial slavery and abolition more generally. In what Finseth describes as a broadly waged “war of words and images” over the peculiar institution (1), some of those involved explicitly articulated their take on the central role of the visual. Douglass himself, for instance, drew attention to the significance of shifts in visual culture, especially with respect to the invention of the daguerreotype, as speeches such as his 1861 “Pictures and Progress” suggest, where he argues that

[a] very pleasing feature of our [new] pictorial relations is the very easy terms upon which all may enjoy them. The servant girl can now see a likeness of herself, such as noble ladies and even royalty itself could not purchase fifty years ago. Formerly, the luxury of a likeness was the exclusive privilege of the rich and great. But now, like education and a thousand other blessings brought to us by the advancing march of civilization, such pictures, are placed within easy reach of the humblest members of society. (455)

Being possibly the most photographed man (and certainly the most photographed African American) of the nineteenth century, Douglass not only confesses himself a fierce believer in the democratizing potential of Daguerre’s invention.⁷ Rather, he comes to the fore as one of the most acute theorists of the visual of his time, who thoroughly investigated “man [as] the only picture-making animal in the world” (“Lecture on Pictures,” unpaginated). Writing as one who had been enslaved, he hints at the ways in which fugitive slave narratives must be read in the context of dominant discourses that relied on certain ideas about vision. The “eye of the slave” (a phrase Douglass himself used in his Narrative) mobilized in these texts did not emerge in a vacuum but was circumscribed by a set of powerful discursive and visual practices that influenced the rapid development of the genre in the 1830s and 1840s. A reconsideration of these decades, which saw an explosion in publications of such texts as the abolitionist movement gained unprecedented strength and a more radical rhetoric, shows how antebellum African American writing became intertwined with black (eye-)witnessing through slave testimony⁸ and saw the emergence of what I want to call a “rhetoric of visibility” in the fugitive slave narrative.

Understanding how and in what contexts formerly enslaved African Americans came to look and employ a rhetoric of visibility requires considering more broadly the ways in which they were being looked at. In this respect, two kinds of “visual regimes”⁹ mark the ways in which vision fundamentally interlinks with an African American experience in the antebellum period. On the one hand, visual regimes occurred in terms of Southern spatial settings that applied certain modes of seeing to the end of surveilling and exploiting slave labor. On the other, there existed a broader racialized visual regime that involved a gaze on the black as the observed and a set of premises underlying antebellum visual concepts and practices.

The effects of the first kind of visual regime in settings of enslavement that arranged vision strategically in such ways as to secure effective slave labor are frequently described in fugitive slave narratives. One of the most explicit depictions of such arrangements can be found in Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). In one scene in particular, set on a small Maryland plantation where the young Douglass had been sent in order to be disciplined by the “negro-breaker” Edward Covey, the author-narrator vividly describes the workings of a visual regime under slavery:

There was no deceiving him [Covey]. His work went on in his absence almost as well as in his presence; and he had the faculty of making us feel that he was ever present with us. […] He seldom approached the spot where we were at work openly, if he could do it secretly. He always aimed at taking us by surprise. […] it was never safe to stop a single minute. His comings were like a thief in the night. He appeared to us as being ever at hand. He was under every tree, behind every stump, in every bush, and at every window, on the plantation. […] he would turn short and crawl into a fence-corner, or behind some tree, and there watch us till the going down of the sun. (Douglass, Narrative 44)

Scholarly work on the Covey-episode has traditionally focused on the fierce physical battle that erupts between Douglass and the ‘slave-breaker,’ a fight in which, Douglass assures readers, the slaveholder “had drawn no blood from me, but I had from him,” and that is depicted by the author-narrator as the pivotal turning point of his passage from slavery to freedom (50). Read along these lines, the above passage acts as a prequel to this climactic scene and is part of Douglass’s engagement with notions of manhood that is captured in his famous chiasmic statement “You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (47).

By far fewer scholars, however, have considered the ways in which Douglass’s experience at Covey’s plantation attests to a particular setting and mode of surveillance reminiscent of a Foucauldian “infinitely generalizable mechanism of panopticism” (216).¹⁰ This mechanism, famously described in Discipline and Punish on the basis of Jeremy Bentham’s late-eighteenth century prison design as a panoptic mode of power (cf. 195–209), is present throughout the scenery Douglass depicts. Although the gaze is not, as in Bentham’s model, “unverifiable” (cf. 201)—after all, the enslaved know all too well that it is Covey whom the punishing eye belongs to—there are at least three features of a quasi-panoptic technique in the spatial setup described by Douglass. First, space itself is inscribed by the gaze; the panoptic idea that “stones […] can make people docile” (172) is, in Douglass’s case, expanded to include not only a consciously designed built environment but also the non-human natural world, since “every stump,” “every bush” and “every window” is being made complicit (Narrative 44). Second, visibility is employed in a panoptic way to “see constantly and to recognize immediately” (Foucault 200). For the enslaved, “it was never safe to stop a single minute” since Covey “appeared to us as being ever at hand” (Narrative 44). Third, the gaze is profoundly one-sided, asymmetrical. An enslaved individual becomes, in Foucault’s words, “the object of information, never a subject of communication” (200). Douglass and his fellow enslaved are bound up in a disciplinary world set up by the master that aims for both purest exploitation of the body and utmost docility of the soul, the latter being, after all, Covey’s primary goal and that on which his very livelihood as a well-known “negro-breaker and slave-driver” depends (Narrative 53).

Taken together, these features, which may be most explicit in Douglass but are present in a large number of antebellum slave narratives,¹¹ attest to the involvement and effects of panoptic mechanisms within practices of the peculiar institution. This is neither to suggest panopticism as homogeneously woven into the multiple forms of New World racial slavery, which included a wide range of regionally differing practices, nor to imply an unproblematic link between the autobiographical word and historical truth.¹² However, the recurrence of depictions attesting to the application of surveillance techniques and the resemblance such techniques show to panoptic supervision lend weight to the assumption that there was yet another dimension of atrocities involved and documented by formerly enslaved writers as part of an “anti-slavery gothic space of paralyzing terror” (Newman 57). In addition to the various “stock” abuses of the peculiar institution, ranging from the iconic physical punishments to psychological, sexual and moral cruelties, and in conjunction with the spatially confining practices and topographies I have delineated earlier, there was also an abuse via the visual. A first kind of antebellum visual regime therefore lies in a particular form of “visual violence” of racial slavery that a considerable number of formerly enslaved individuals contemplated in their narratives and that, as Douglass’s example shows, increased the difficulty of expressing positive relations to a non-human natural world that was harnessed and could be perceived as part of a (panoptic) controlling apparatus.

At the same time, this visual violence experienced by the enslaved was intricately connected with broader modes of racialized vision that pervaded antebellum culture more extensively both in geographical terms and in terms of manifesting across various (and politically disparate) discourses ranging from (pseudo-)scientific racism to autobiography criticism or even Transcendentalism. This broader and more fundamental visual regime evolved primarily around two premises, namely an assumed immediacy between seeing and knowing, and the idea of a disembodiment of visual perception. On this basis, and in conjunction with antebellum notions about race, a dominant racialized vision emerged that posed the black body as “the observed,” and that is critical for the role of the visual as well as the pastoral in the slave narrative.

Consider, as a most drastic instance that exemplifies how the visual shaped and could racialize cultural practices at the time, polygenist (pseudo-)scientific racism, which gained prominence in the first half of the nineteenth century through the works of Samuel George Morton, George Robbins Gliddon, Josiah Nott and Louis Agassiz.¹³ This “American School of Polygenesis,” unified by a belief in the idea that human races or, in their terminology, “human types,” had separate origins, did not simply employ a prescriptive rhetoric. That is, its proponents did not merely impose a hierarchical structuring on the ‘human family’ that was “almost wholly devoted to the research paradigm of Anglo-Saxon, Teutonic superiority” (Graves 4)—this in itself makes it an obviously highly relevant context of the slave narrative—but they did so by creating forms of knowledge centrally based on underlying assumptions about vision. U.S. polygenism relied heavily on the incitement of a specific way of looking as it fundamentally connected the idea of seeing-as-knowing to its truth-claims.

A prominent example illustrating how this specific way of looking functioned may be found in Morton’s monumental Crania Americana, published in Philadelphia in 1839. This work of “craniometry,” highly popular at its time and much admired by Morton’s fellow polygenists Nott and Gliddon, is remarkable with respect to its involvement of the visual. Crania Americana consists primarily of two parts: roughly the first half of Morton’s book, preceded by a letter to John S. Phillips, a member of the “Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia,” presents Morton’s (pseudo-)scientific discourse on more than 100 human skulls he had collected in the 1830s. This section is the place where we find what might be expected, namely explicit claims about essentially differing human “types,” seemingly well-grounded in Morton’s simplifying and twisted logic that primarily relied on quantitative measurements of brain capacities of his objects of inquiry. By contrast, the second half of Morton’s book exhibits—owing to the volume’s gigantic dimension—almost life-size illustrations of the skulls he had assembled and painstakingly examined. It presents, page after page, and without additional commentary apart from brief labelings, images of each of the crania treated in the discussion of the first part.

The way in which Crania Americana thus seeks to assure its scientific objectivity on the basis of deliberately inciting acts of seeing is representative of (pseudo-)scientific racism’s reliance on the visual in the creation of its racial knowledge. In the prefixed “Letter,” Morton sets the stage for his theater to the eye, when he writes that “it appeared to me the wiser plan to present the facts unbiased by theory, and let the reader draw his own conclusions” by engaging the “evidence” of the second part (i). His book therefore, from the outset, plays on a dominant visual rationale; it reaches out to its readers themselves to visualize, to visually rationalize and “draw his [or her] own conclusions” on the basis of what they find presented in the latter pages of the volume (i). By bracketing his essentialist claims (first part) within the admonition and incitement of a link between eye and truth (Morton’s “Letter”), and the actual images as evidence for the observing reader’s eye (second part), Morton relies on the workings of a broader, underlying poetics of knowledge that poses the disembodied eye as the organ of truth par excellence.

In this respect, the volume may be read as part of a larger shift towards more “subjective” forms of vision in Western cultures that Jonathan Crary traces in Techniques of the Observer (1990). Morton’s book, by seeking to withdraw itself from the observation process and by stating the recipient’s eye itself as the key to (racial) truth, participates in a transformative process of a “reorganization of vision in the first half of the nineteenth century […] that produced a new kind of observer” and that turned away from an older model of vision (2–3).¹⁴ According to Crary, the camera obscura had been the epitome of this older model which had conceptualized vision as “objective,” and which was gradually replaced from the beginning of the nineteenth century on by a new model that saw vision as a more “subjective” act that depended on the individual’s eye or new optical devices such as the stereoscope or the phenakistiscope. Morton’s work can be located within this broad shift: in order to regain a presumably objective truth that may have been lost at least in the sense of being accessible via an objective, completely disembodied eye, it is both a step towards a more subjective eye and one that is yet bound to arrive at an objective truth. Assuming that vision is indeed subjective (the text wants to leave individual readers see for themselves), Morton’s tract is nevertheless based on the assumption that there exists an inherent connection between what an eye perceives and a fixed, objective capital-T “Truth” about what it must eventually see. Truth may not be available through an objective eye, but it objectively exists and becomes available through “properly” directed subjective vision. In this sense, Morton’s and many of the American School’s productions exemplify a heavy (and broadly culturally significant) reliance on an unquestioned, “naturalized” connection between a disembodied observing eye and “Truth,” which, in this case, was explicitly deployed within processes of (pseudo-)scientific racialization.

The poetics of knowledge through which the fugitive slave narrative emerged was thus profoundly shaped by a set of general and transversally existing ideas on vision reflected in this example that further added to the manifold complexities faced by fugitives writing and publishing their texts in the context of a patronizing abolitionism. As they told or wrote down their stories, formerly enslaved narrators not only had to deal with portraying the panoptic facets that had often been part of their experience of the peculiar institution. Rather, the fugitive slave narrative must also be read as resisting (through) the eye of a fundamentally racialized socio-visual terrain that was marked by two premises about vision that interlinked with the racial views of the antebellum period. First, an overwhelmingly assumed immediacy between seeing and knowing, i.e. the notion of an automatic availability of true knowledge of the observed through the beholding eye. Second, and despite an ongoing subjectivization of observership in the sense Crary proposes, a pervasive residual idea of disembodiment within thereby often presumably “objective” acts of vision. These two premises converged in a fundamentally racializing asymmetry of looking that is most obvious in (but by no means restricted to) discourses of scientific racism, which equated the black with the observed and denied an observer-status.

In this context, the fugitive slave narrative employed what may be called a “rhetoric of visibility,” which emerged out of an abolitionism that politicized formerly enslaved (eye-) witnessing, but which could also provide a means of black resistance to antebellum visual regimes including the potential to play with pastoral perspectives. Abolitionism as such relied heavily on “the visible,” as one of its overarching goals was to expose to a (Northern) eye the various abuses and the moral evil of the peculiar institution. Theodore Dwight Weld’s 1839 American Slavery As It Is, for instance, a seminal abolitionist text that compiled various testimonies from the South, illustrates a preoccupation with visibility, when it stresses the central importance of moving eye-witnesses to “speak what they know, and testify to what they have seen” (9–10). Weld goes on to clarify that “[t]estimony respects matters of fact, not matters of opinion: it is the declaration of a witness as to facts, not the giving of an opinion as to the nature or qualities of actions” that was crucial to the antislavery project (110, emphasis in original). To act in this way as expositors of the truth by visualizing the peculiar institution became an earmark of abolitionist discourse from the 1830s on, even more so in the context of scandals over a number of fake narratives (cf. Starling 226–230).

At the same time, aiming to achieve their central goal of exposing the despised institution through a rhetoric of visibility meant abolitionists’ increasing employment of those who had actually eye-witnessed the accursed system from inside, the formerly enslaved. There was, in the words of a commentator in the Liberator (March 9, 1838), a strong necessity for such “profound eye-witnesses,” for “the few competent narrators of slavery as it exists in our country” (qtd. Blassingame/McKivigan xvii). Thereby shifting the rhetoric of visibility from (predominantly white) abolitionists to formerly enslaved eyewitnesses implied a profound change, namely the introduction of a formerly enslaved black observer. As abolitionists increasingly made use of the “eyes of the slaves,” the black body entered the scene as a legitimized observer, not merely—as the dominant racial logic of the delineated antebellum visual regimes implied—as an observed.

Consider, for example, the emphasis that the prospectus and preface to Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (1837) place on the formerly enslaved’s own act of visual perception. Readers of this narrative, the prospectus proposes,

will see here portrayed in the language of truth, by an eye witness and a slave, the sufferings, the hardships, and the evils which are inflicted upon the millions of human beings, in the name of the law of the land and of the Constitution of the United States. (qtd. Starling 107)

The explicit aim of Ball’s text is “to give a faithful portrait” and to “introduce the reader […] to a view of the cotton fields, and exhibit, not to his imagination, but to his very eyes, the mode of life to which the slaves on the southern plantations must conform” (Ball xi, emphasis mine). Even though transmitted, in Ball’s case, by an amanuensis envisioning himself as a faithful “recorder of the facts detailed to him by another,” the ‘eye of the slave’ thus fuses into abolitionist discourse (xi). In fact, the “I saw,” the “I have seen with my own eyes” or the “I have witnessed,” earmarks of the fugitive’s rhetoric of visibility, become just as common in the genre as the stock “I was born” with which the majority of the narratives started out. Through this “ocular permeation of language” (Jay, Downcast Eyes 2), the fugitive slave narrative not only gave the formerly enslaved a voice, as a host of scholars have emphasized. Rather, it also marked the moment of instating a formerly enslaved black eye as a new player in the field of documented visual perception and observation.

This is not to suggest that a black, formerly enslaved observer was not bound up in a patronizing and objectifying network pervaded by broader racialized visual regimes, even in the cases where fugitives’ accounts were “written by themselves.” Although some abolitionists may have embraced, as Stauffer points out, “an ethic of a black heart” that sought to overcome racism in addition to slavery, there was no general disengagement in abolitionism of the racializing visual regime that marked the antebellum period (1). As abolitionists’ benevolent projects bore the marks of their racial ideologies, Douglass and other formerly enslaved agents of abolitionist societies such as William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown or Henry Bibb were still primarily regarded as “living, speaking, startling proof” in and of themselves (Salem Register, qtd. Sekora 498). They were often degraded to being the mere props of what Ernest calls the “performances in the theater of antislavery culture” (Liberation Historiography 187), where the logic of the black as the observed was re-enacted through anti-slavery practices that fixated on the black body and its scars as signs of the despised system.¹⁵ Furthermore, the very moments in which the black observer’s look manifested in discourse through written and published accounts were highly mediated, as they were circumscribed by what Olney has referred to as formulaic “master outline” (“I Was Born” 152).¹⁶ As Sekora describes, fugitive slave narratives’ black voices were “sealed within a white envelope,” and there is no denying that this “white envelope” included also the ‘granted’ (because deemed necessary) acts of documenting visual perception (502). Metaphorically speaking, the formerly enslaved black observer’s eye may have been theirs, but the eyelids that determined when it had to have opened and what it had to have looked at were often held within patronizing constraints.

Nonetheless, and despite such restrictions, the “slave’s eye” was there.¹⁷ A formerly enslaved black observer emerged and bore a significant transformative potential with respect to the delineated visual regimes, as it not only unhinged a ubiquitous logic of the black as the object of vision, but also enabled a subversive critique of the premises underlying antebellum visual regimes. How the slave narrative, considered as the discursive event of the entry of a formerly enslaved black observer, presented a general critique of dominant antebellum assumptions about vision through its very existence as eye-witness-account may be surmised, for example, from considering a letter by a former slaveholder, A.C.C. Thompson. Written as a response to Douglass’s 1845 Narrative, and published in the Delaware Republican in the same year, Thompson’s letter accuses Douglass’s Narrative of exhibiting a “glaring impress of falsehood on every page,” and seeks to “give the public some information respecting the validity of this narrative” (88). Crucially, however, the author seeks to justify his claims on the grounds of his own status as an eye-witness, claiming to give a first-hand knowledge of the individuals depicted in Douglass’s book whom he has been “acquainted with” (88). Thus itself engaging in a rhetoric of visibility, Thompson’s response becomes immersed in the very “visual battleground” first opened up by the fugitive’s eye. He claims to “speak truth” and begins to catalogue his observations, e.g. that Douglass had been “an unlearned, and rather an ordinary negro,” Thomas Lamdin a “good-natured and harmless” fellow, and Thomas Auld of “irreproachable Christian character.” Ultimately, Thompson concludes, “I have given a true representation of the persons connected with the aforesaid Narrative, and I respectfully submit the fact to the judgment of an impartial public” (89–91).

Read in the context of the delineated visual regimes, the letter thus not only exemplifies the controversies that typically surrounded antebellum slave narratives, but also reveals a deeper subversive potential of the formerly enslaved observer’s eye. By relying on visibility, Thompson’s letter hints at the ways in which seeing itself, or, more precisely, the fundamental assumption of seeing as knowing, was effectively subverted in the very act of attacking and thereby not denying the unreliability of the eye. If Douglass, backed up by Garrison and others’ “white envelope,” claimed to have seen and tell truth, and Thompson likewise claimed to have seen and tell truth, then the “impartial public”—significantly, those are the words on which Thompson’s letter ends—becomes the ultimate end that is faced with the dilemma of a pure discourse that subverts the act of seeing as inherently connected to truth. The constellation itself, in which the formerly enslaved observer sees, in combination with the attacks on such acts of seeing that played out on the very same ground of a rhetoric of visibility, bears the potential to deconstruct the basic assumptions of this ground. The black observer, through the genre of the fugitive slave narrative, became part of a general challenge of the link between a subject’s vision and truth. Hence, if, as Crary notes, “[t]hroughout the first half of the nineteenth century, an extensive amount of work […] was coming to terms in various ways with the understanding that vision […] could no longer claim an essential objectivity or certainty” (“Incapacities” 60), then the fugitive slave narrative’s emergence played a vital role in this broader process in a U.S. context. As the formerly enslaved observer’s eye entered into discourse and had to be negotiated, underlying premises concerning vision themselves became unsettled—attacking the “slave’s eye” meant, at the same time, an attack on the truth-seeking eye itself.

African American Strategic Pastoral in the Fugitive Slave Narrative

The emergence of a black observer through the rhetoric of visibility of the slave narrative not only had the potential to unsettle dominant antebellum visual regimes, but also intersected with a strategic use of the pastoral. Although the representation of plantation slavery was generically circumscribed, narrators signified through pastoral elements by playing with visual perspectives in creative and subversive ways to express environmental knowledge and utter social critique. As noted above, this is not to suggest that there is no antipastoral in the diegetic worlds of the fugitive slave narrative when reconsidered in the context of visual regimes and a rhetoric of visibility. To be sure, one finds a host of antipastoral elements ranging from the recurring images of violence and backbreaking labor in the “field of blood and blasphemy,” pervaded by “heart-rending shrieks” (Douglass, Narrative 17, 14), to landscapes of flight often replete with a threatening wilderness and slave-hunting posses, and frequently positive representations of cities in opposition to injurious rural environments.¹⁸ Thus, insofar as they contributed to the creation of “an anti-slavery gothic space of paralyzing terror” (Newman 57), the perspectives that slave narratives engaged often either ignored pastoral impulses altogether or portrayed potentially pastoral scenes and landscapes in antipastoral terms by focusing on and criticizing the atrocious aspects of slavery.

At the same time, however, and in addition to depictions of trauma-ridden Southern landscapes that deployed antipastoral imagery, a strategic use of the pastoral emerged in connection with the slave narrative’s rhetoric of visibility. Strategic pastoral occurs when pastoral elements come into play and converge with other “lenses.” There was the potential for a “pastoral vision” in the genre, i.e. for moments in which pastoral elements attain a significant function within the context of the slave narrative’s visual politics by becoming part of perspectival shifts. More specifically, I want to suggest, pastoral elements were involved in a characteristic “double vision” in the slave narrative. Vision often became twofold where pastoral elements were used, it came to oscillate between two perspectives, “two eyes,” so to speak, one being that of the pastoral, the other that of the enslaved. Understood in this way, strategic pastoral, beyond offering ways to express environmental knowledge, could be a vehicle for criticizing the peculiar institution and hint at a future when slavery might be overcome.

A first text that illustrates the functioning of African American strategic pastoral is Henry Box Brown’s 1849 Narrative of Henry Box Brown. Judged by the mere quantity of negatively connoted descriptions of non-human (plantation) nature, this narrative, which won fame due to Brown’s ingenious escape via mailing himself in a crate to Philadelphia, may well be read as an antipastoral text. The author-narrator frequently uses an antipastoral lens and recounts early on how his mother explains slavery by drawing a parallel between being ripped apart as a family and the way in which “leaves are stripped from off the trees of the forest,” thereby inhibiting the development of idealizing impulses with respect to both family relationships and rural environments (Narrative 15). In this vein, Brown repeatedly laments the “plains of Southern oppression,” describing how the captives’ cries “are wafted on every Southern gale to the ears of our Northern brethren, and the hot winds of the South reach our fastnesses amid the mountains and hills of our rugged land, loaded with stifled cries and choking sobs of poor desolate women, as her babes are torn one by one from her embrace” (36). In such moments, Brown’s narrative deploys antipastoral to depict a gothic Southern ‘prison-house,’ a gruesome topography in which “the purple streams of the slave’s blood flow ceaselessly and rapidly o’er our land, gushing forth from every hill-side” (90).

Brown’s strategic pastoral, however, goes beyond such antipastoral imagery, as his depictions of plantationscapes at points include pastoral elements that are more complex in their interaction with his general objectives. This strategic use of pastoral elements can be deciphered along the spatial and temporal dimensions of the pastoral. One of the climactic scenes of Brown’s Narrative which describes the incident that motivates the author-narrator’s decision to take flight, is particularly revealing in this respect. The passage portrays the day Brown’s wife and children are suddenly sold away from him. Here is a pivotal event that according to Brown reveals the most devastating and dehumanizing aspect of Southern enslavement, as there is “no comparison with those internal pangs which are felt by the soul when the hand of the merciless tyrant plucks from one’s bosom the object of one’s ripened affections” (Life ii). On the outset, however, the text passage depicts a summer day in pastoral terms:

It was on a pleasant morning, in the month of August, 1848, that I left my wife and three children safely at our little home, and proceeded to my allotted labor. The sun shone brightly as he commenced his daily task, and as I gazed upon his early rays, emitting their golden light upon the rich fields adjacent to the city, and glancing across the abode of my wife and family, and as I beheld the numerous companies of slaves, hieing [sic!] their way to their daily labors, and reflected upon the difference between their lot and mine, I felt that, although I was a slave, there were many alleviations to my cup of sorrow. (Brown, Narrative 50)

Although somewhat compromised by “a cup of sorrow,” a pastoral eye is, at first, dominant in the narrator’s perception. A “gaze upon the early rays emitting their golden light” appears possible for Brown, and is complemented by the family idyll of “a parting kiss upon the lips of my faithful wife” and pressing “to my bosom the little darling cherubs” (51). Additional features that clearly mark this moment as an allusion to the pastoral tradition are the contrast between country and “adjacent” city and the way in which Brown figures as a leisurely observer of field hands (“I beheld the numerous companies of slaves”), not as a worker of the land.

Significantly, however, Brown’s text does not suggest that the pastoral is spatially available. On the contrary, an Arcadian mode, the notion of a spatial pastoral retreat (Snyder), is speedily disengaged, as Brown rhetorically interrupts the scene by directly addressing the reader who might have been soothed by the pastoral image, to foreshadow the horrid news that “[y]our wife and smiling babes are gone” (cf. 50, 51). Both its general tendency to depict Southern landscapes through antipastoral and gothic imagery and the employment of pastoral elements only to disengage their potential as a refuge highlight how Brown’s text works to decouple the pastoral in plantation contexts from what Snyder identifies as its spatial mode. Brown’s text suggests that there is no such “alternative to the life of effort and competition,” not even a “short-term haven” for the enslaved (Snyder 3). An enslaved individual may imagine the “alleviations to my cup of sorrow” and dream of a refuge in connection with plantationscapes, but this does not make them spatially available under the system (Brown, Narrative 50). This, of course, does not mean that either Brown’s or other slave narratives suggest that this dream has no value or that there were no other-spaces beyond the plantation that could act in such ways (as Chap. 2 has suggested). Nevertheless, the spatial mode of the pastoral is clearly disengaged at such points and, in this text, becomes linked to the antipastoral, which enables Brown to highlight the inescapability of the Southern “prison house.” Here, his strategic pastoral works as a means of criticizing the peculiar institution for its carceral character and for the inhumaneness of its quasi-panoptic visual and spatial control, and supports Brown’s exposure of its hypocrisy in pretending its benevolent character, while ripping apart families.

Additionally, the cited passage reveals facets of Brown’s strategic pastoral that pertain to its temporal dimension. There are in this respect two central components, the evocation of a Golden Age memory of a childhood before recognizing the meanings of enslavement, and a doubling of temporality that is closely linked to the doubled vision of this moment and that ultimately gives Brown’s strategic pastoral a utopian potential. The former corresponds with Snyder’s ideas about a temporal mode of pastoral: in this case, Snyder writes, “pastoral bliss is lost forever. It survives only as a frustrating memory, a marker of present alienation—or at best foreshadowing a life after death” (3). Brown’s narrative does not directly portray, but implies such a moment of past “pastoral bliss.” Recall his ‘introduction’ to slavery through his mother: “At an early age, my mother would take me on her knee, and pointing to the forest trees adjacent, now being stripped of their thick foliage by autumnal winds, would say to me, ‘my son, as yonder leaves are stripped from off the trees of the forest, so are the children of slaves swept away from them by the hands of cruel tyrants’” (Brown, Narrative 15). Even though Brown at this point seems to represent the moment of its ending, he implies a Golden Age primal scene during childhood, before a realization of what it meant to be enslaved took place. In fact, Brown suggests that, even with this maternal initiation, a pastoral vision might still have seemed possible for some time, since his assertion that there were “many alleviations to my cup of sorrow” implies a potentially ongoing, still cherished childhood innocence and naivety; he does not, after all, expect his wife and children to be sold (50). Significantly, it is a fall from precisely this innocence and naivety in an encounter with the reality against which his mother’s words had cautioned him that stands out in the climactic scene. Brown employs a temporal dimension of Golden Age pastoral that is present early on in his narrative to represent his fall from a juvenile “pastoral bliss” more drastically and to emphasize the cause of this fall: slavery. At this point, his strategic pastoral helps to highlight both the unnaturalness of the peculiar institution and the humanness of the enslaved in two senses. First, by showing through his Golden Age memory that a pastoral appreciation of non-human (plantation) nature and the development of primal forms of environmental knowledge may be a marker of being human that is wrenched from him by the unnatural institution of slavery; second, by suggesting that emotional attachments among kin are likewise a sign of humanness, which an unnatural social system like the peculiar institution destroys.

Aside from this involvement of the idea of an innocent (pastoral) time before the realization of enslavement, the play with temporality that marks the pivotal scene itself is perhaps the most intriguing and creative aspect of Brown’s strategic pastoral. The passage cited above self-consciously draws attention to the centrality of time by giving a fairly specific date (“the month of August, 1848” (50)), which not only highlights the importance the narrator ascribes to this particular moment, but is all the more significant considering the scarcity of information concerning time (e.g. of birth) that is characteristic of the genre. What is even more striking, however, and illustrates the potential of the temporal dimension of Brown’s strategic pastoral is the way in which his use of a doubled visual perspective—the enslaved eye/the pastoral eye—is linked to a temporal simultaneity—of the enslaved’s time/pastoral time. Brown’s strategic pastoral not only engages a “back then” of Snyder’s temporal mode (3), but also performs a simultaneity of a pastoral vision and the enslaved’s vision. Evidence of this lies, first, in the fact that there is no smooth transition between the two perspectives (no retreat-return pattern, in classic pastoral terms), but a drastic interruption. The pastoral image, perceivable for a brief moment, is violently disrupted, pulled back into a reality and visual perspective of the enslaved (which has never really been left) that the plantation pastoral omits. Instead of remaining in his pastoral frame, Brown’s horrid revelation to the reader of the news that his “wife and smiling babes are gone” (51) is followed by a phrase that sets the perspectival record straight by echoing the title of Weld’s American Slavery As It Is: “And this is Slavery, its certain, necessary and constituent part. […] This is Slavery” (52). The return of a dominant rhetoric of visibility at this point not only highlights that the pastoral cannot be accessed from the perspective of the enslaved (i.e. become spatial, a refuge), but also stresses the simultaneity of two visual frames as the one interferes with the other.

Brown’s narrative technique underpins this doubling of temporality. He presents pastoral elements precisely at that moment in the diegetic time of the story when his “wife and smiling babes” are sold (even if he discovers this only later) (50). The moment of a pastoral vision/time, in other words, coincides with the moment of an enslaved individual’s vision/time that leads to the former’s collapse; Brown pastoralizes as his family is abducted. In classical narratological terms, discourse-time (pastoral portrayal) and story-time (life under slavery) fall together, as a discursive event (pastoral) and a plot event (selling) coincide, creating their simultaneity. One strategic effect of this technique is the creation of an immediacy between the reader and an enslaved individual’s experience. As the text envisions the landscape for the former through a (probably well-known) plantation pastoral perspective, yet emphasizes the simultaneously existing perspective of the enslaved that is (spatially) denied this experience, Brown both emotionally engages his readership and stresses the pastoral’s status as a white privilege. His use of a doubled vision and time strategically grants access to an established pastoral framework in order to captivate his readers, but does not let them walk away without the implied charge that while they are allowed to pastoralize, enslaved families are being abducted.

Another significant outcome and part of Brown’s strategy of using a doubled timeframe is that it allows him to play with a utopian potential of the pastoral. He hints at this potential further down in his narrative, when he explains why he will continue to advocate on behalf of the enslaved. At this point, Brown implies that the pastoral lens he has employed cannot correspond with pastoral space, “for as long as three millions of my countrymen pine in cruel bondage, on Virginia’s exhausted soil, and in Carolina’s pestilential rice swamps; in the cane-breaks of Georgia, and on the cotton fields of Louisiana and Mississippi, and in the insalubrious climate of Texas” (56). Even though Brown leaves no doubt that the pastoral could never become spatial under slavery, the fact that it can nevertheless be engaged as part of a doubled lens through the slave narrative’s rhetoric of visibility, and Brown’s “for as long as” in this quote hint at the ways in which his pastoral dream signifies hope. His (temporal) strategic pastoral does not merely engage in a “foreshadowing of life after death” or suggest a “back then” (Snyder 3), but also becomes future-oriented and more openly political as it hints at a time when the peculiar institution may be overcome. While a more profane strategy of Brown’s doubling of vision and time lies in temporarily providing his readers with a familiar pastoral gaze to open up their eyes all the more roughly to the lot of the enslaved, his text also engages a political potential and utopian dimension of the pastoral.

Taken as a whole, Brown’s text hints at a variety of ways in which writers of slave narratives employed strategic pastoral. One dominant element of Brown’s strategic use of pastoral is the way in which it links what Snyder calls a spatial mode of pastoral to the antipastoral. Antipastoral in slave narratives may therefore be subdivided into two types: there is antipastoral in the sense of antipastoral imagery, which becomes visible when rural Southern landscapes, in Gifford’s definition of antipastoral, “are not in any way idealized; in fact, they are often harsh and and [sic!] unattractive” (54). At the same time, however, Brown (and others) use antipastoral in the sense of engaging and speedily disengaging pastoral elements. They mobilize “the pastoral apparatus” (L. Buell, Environmental Imagination 43) to provide evidence of the spatial unavailability or inaccessibility of an Arcadian refuge, a strategy that helps criticize slavery’s atrocious means of visual and social control. Additionally, Brown plays with the temporal dimension of pastoral elements in a twofold sense. On the one hand, his doubled vision evokes a Golden Age scene to hint at more positively connoted relations of enslaved African Americans to nature, to suggest the development of a primal environmental knowledge, and to represent slavery’s unnaturalness. On the other hand, Brown’s narrative links this doubled vision to a simultaneity of the pastoral and the enslaved’s perspectives to emotionally engage readers in his experience and hint at a future without slavery.

The doubled vision of African American strategic pastoral is also present in the second text I want to consider as an example, Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). The fact that this work has often been read as “a fascinating anti-pastoral” (Bennett 198) invites a reading that highlights some of the ways in which the notion of a strategic pastoral goes beyond the antipastoral to expand our perspective on African American engagements of the “pastoral apparatus” (L. Buell, Environmental Imagination 43). To be sure, numerous incidents and descriptions within Douglass’s Narrative support its assessment as antipastoral text. One finds, for instance, the celebration of the liberating potential of the city (especially Baltimore) as opposed to the country (an aspect that Bennett stresses), the repeated emphasis on the hardships experienced with respect to work-life in the fields, or a discourse portraying nature as complicit in enslavement, for instance, in the Covey-episode discussed earlier in this chapter. Two depictions in particular appear to be strikingly antipastoral yet can also be read, with additional implications, in terms of African American strategic pastoral and environmental knowledge.

First, there is the description of Colonel Lloyd’s garden where tarred fences symbolize the inaccessibility of Southern pastoral to the enslaved:

Colonel Lloyd kept a large and finely cultivated garden, which affordad almost constant employment for four men, besides the chief gardener, (Mr. M’Durmond). This garden was probably the greatest attraction of the place. During the summer months, people came from far and near—from Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis—to see it. It abounded in fruits of almost every description, from the hardy apple of the north to the delicate orange of the south. This garden was not the least source of trouble on the plantation. […] Scarcely a day passed, during summer, but that some slave had to take the lash for stealing fruit. The colonel had to resort to all kinds of stratagems to keep his slaves out of the garden. The last and most successful one was that of tarring his fence all around, after which, if a slave was caught with any tar upon his person, it was deemed sufficient proof that he had either been into the garden or had tried to get in. In either case, the was severely whipped by the chief gardener. (Douglass, Narrative 20)

In terms of strategic pastoral, the scene deploys pastoral elements in describing the garden’s fruit and rural beauty, which attracts visitors from “far and near,” and is iconic of the link between a spatial mode (and unavailability) of pastoral and antipastoral. If we take the garden as a pastoral space, it does not, despite all its beauty, figure as a refuge but as white privilege and a trigger of punishments. Pastoral space, Douglass’s portrayal of the garden makes abundantly clear, is a reflection of the social system and spatial and visual regimes of the antebellum South. As in Brown’s case, Douglass’s strategic pastoral at this point figures in the form of an antipastoral that goes beyond mere antipastoral imagery, as it employs pastoral elements to highlight the unavailability and inaccessibility of Arcadian space under plantation rule, thereby criticizing slavery’s inhumane carceral topographies.

Crucially, however, his strategic use of pastoral elements in describing Colonel Lloyd’s garden also enables Douglass to express African American environmental knowledge. To begin, the text passage implies a form of environmental knowledge of the “four men” (enslaved, for all we know) who are employed to keep the garden. Although there is a “chief gardener,” these “four men” no doubt need to have gained expertise in botany and gardening, as the place could otherwise not have become the “greatest attraction” of the plantation (20). Hence, in the midst of the atrocious regime that keeps “the hungry swarms of boys” out of the garden (i.e. makes the pastoral spatially inaccessible) (20), we also find this group of men who, in pastoral terms, are not only “sheep” but also “shepherds,” and who are not only being forced but able to maintain the place. Moreover, it is significant how their knowledge bears a mark of resistance even if they are part of its devastating regime. Consider, in this respect, where the Colonel’s visitors come from, namely not simply from “far and near” but from “Baltimore, Easton, and Annapolis,” i.e. from urban areas (20). Such spaces are vital, as arguments concerning African American antipastoral suggest, to a black literary tradition that “has constructed the rural-natural as a realm to be feared for specific reasons and the urban-social as a domain of hope” (Bennett 198). While speaking for this assessment, Douglass’s quote highlights that the garden—as atrocious as its rural regime is and as spatially unavailable as its pastoral remains—and the environmental knowledge necessary for its maintenance could become part of regional forms of resistance that extend beyond the plantation. Practically speaking: if (white) visitors came from the (nearby) cities, it is likely that they brought enslaved African American servants, who could contribute to forging larger, highly efficient and empowering communicative networks among the enslaved. In this sense, reading the scene as strategic pastoral that expresses environmental knowledge suggests that Douglass’s use of pastoral elements not only points out the unavailability of a spatial refuge to highlight the atrocious character of slavery, but also hints at a subversive potential of environmental knowledge involved in links between a rural “realm to be feared” and an urban “domain of hope” (Bennett 198).

A second revealing passage that illustrates facets of Douglass’s strategic pastoral that pertain to a spatial mode can be found in his account of his grandmother’s fate:

[M]y grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all his children, having seen the beginning and end of all of them, and her present owners finding she was of but little value, her frame already racked with the pains of old age, and complete helplessness fast stealing over her once active limbs, they took her to the woods, built her a little hut, put up a little mud chimney, and then made her welcome to the privilege of supporting herself there in perfect loneliness; thus virtually turning her out to die! (Narrative 37)

The description is particularly striking when read as an antipastoral mirror image to Romantic conceptions of nature, for instance in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden (1854). Instead of seeking refuge and renewal in the close by nature of the woods, as in Thoreau’s case, the old woman is banned. If we interpret the “little hut” with its “little mud chimney” in the “woods” as part of a pastoral middle landscape, the scene highlights not only how the plantation zone related to what lay beyond its confines, but also stresses again that even with the material availability of a potential other-space, an Arcadian spatial refuge was not possible through the lens of the plantation. That is to say, Douglass demonstrates, on the one hand, how the plantation system was rooted in the notion of a material abundance ready for exploitation, which included both its de-humanized chattel and the non-human non-discursive material world. The uppermost criterion in this respect was the use-value of both, so that disposing of an old woman (deemed unfeasible materiality), who had lost this value, in the woods beyond the plantation (deemed unfeasible materiality) was just as stunningly logical under the system as it will be ethically inexplicable to us. On the other hand, Douglass’s portrayal at this point, as in the case of Colonel Lloyd’s garden, highlights once more that a spatial dimension of the pastoral cannot be established or represented in the context of the plantation. Significantly, the instance shows that this is true even for a space beyond the plantation, out of an immediate reach of masters and overseers, which could potentially lend itself to heterotopic interpretation. Douglass’s representation insists at this point that a heterotopic function is not representable through a perspective in which the pastoral is connected with the plantation: after all, the worn-out woman moves into the woods at the master’s will, not her own. Her removal from plantation space comes as the master’s curse, not as a revelation, which leaves her only with “the moans of the dove, and by night the screams of the hideous owl” in her lonely hut “before a few dim embers” (38).¹⁹ A kind of temporary “short-term haven” through the pastoral is impossible once more (Snyder 3); the spatial mode of the pastoral is tied to the antipastoral.

Apart from such forms of spatial (anti)pastoral, Douglass’s narrative also presents instances of a strategic use of pastoral elements that involve a temporal dimension. To begin, like Brown’s text, the 1845 Narrative employs a Golden Age mode of pastoral in Snyder’s sense, which is even more pronounced in Douglass’s later version, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). At points, Douglass’s strategic pastoral in the Narrative hints at an innocent childhood past, prior to entering “the blood-stained gate” to “the hell of slavery” that his witnessing of a whipping of an aunt represents (15). The author-narrator describes, for instance, that his first job as a child was to “drive up the cows at evening, keep the fowls out of the garden, keep the front yard clean,” and that he spent “most of my leisure time […] in helping Master Daniel Lloyd in finding his birds, after he had shot them” (25). In such moments, Douglass suggests an innocent engagement with his plantation surroundings, a form of Golden Age experience that also involved gaining environmental knowledge about flora and fauna, even if this happens within the exploitative logic of the plantation system, as the killing of the birds highlights. With the greater freedom he had in composing his second book, he becomes even more outspoken with respect to this kind of “back then” pastoral (Snyder 3), presenting the plantation itself as “a scene of almost Eden-like beauty” (Douglass, My Bondage 67). Consider the following description:

Outside this select inclosure, were parks, where […] rabbits, deer, and other wild game, might be seen, peering and playing about, with none to molest them or make them afraid. The tops of the stately poplars were often covered with the red-winged black-birds, making all nature vocal with the joyous life and beauty of their wild, warbling notes. These all belonged to me, as well as to Col. Edward Lloyd, and for a time I greatly enjoyed them. (62–63)

The way in which Douglass claims that “these all belonged to me” (even as this turns out to be the temporary illusion of an enslaved child) suggests an empowering epistemological appropriation of his surroundings. Since it is unlikely that the ideas expressed in My Bondage came to Douglass without earlier foundation, and more likely that they could not easily be included in his first text, the shift towards more explicitness regarding depictions of non-human nature in itself reflects the generic confines of the antebellum slave narrative (cf. Newman 57–60). More importantly, however, Douglass’s appropriation of his environs highlights the significance ascribed to an environmental knowledge linked to a primal pastoral stage, which, though more implicitly, is also part of the Narrative. In this respect, his claim that flora and fauna “belonged to me” in My Bondage seems all the more relevant for one who does not ‘belong’ to himself by default, as one who is devastated by not being able to tell how old he is, like “the larger part of the slaves [who] know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs” (Narrative 12). While Douglass notes that being deprived of the “privilege” of telling ones age “was a source of unhappiness to me even during childhood” (12), his Golden Age scenes at the same time highlight that a ‘belonging’ at this stage was constructed in part through environmental knowledge, not only by himself but by the enslaved more generally. Many of them, Douglass reveals, told their time of birth by referring to “planting-time, harvest-time, cherry-time, spring-time, or fall-time” (12), thereby using designations that are marked by the trauma of enslavement (since they also correspond with enforced work cycles), but at the same time hint at an intimate connection to non-human nature that could help create some form of identity. Even with this ambivalence, the “back then” pastoral Douglass employs hints at a deep involvement with the non-human natural world at an early age and at the presence of an environmental knowledge rooted in African American culture as a potentially empowering part of the identities of the enslaved. In this respect, the Golden Age images that are part of Douglass’s strategic pastoral are akin to, but at the same time, and especially in the 1855 text, much more explicit in their articulation of environmental knowledge than Brown’s.

Moreover, Douglass’s narrative, too, engages a utopian potential as part of its strategic pastoral. Consider in this context one of the most famous scenes of the text, which reveals the simultaneity of pastoral vision/time and enslaved vision/time. Standing on the banks of the Chesapeake Bay, Douglass contemplates:

Those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white, so delightful to the eye of freemen, were to me so many shrouded ghosts, to terrify and torment me with thoughts of my wretched condition. I have often, in the deep stillness of a summer’s Sabbath, stood all alone upon the lofty banks of that noble bay, and traced, with saddened heart and tearful eye, the countless number of sails moving off to the mighty ocean. The sight of these always affected me powerfully. (Narrative 46)

While scholars have repeatedly and intensely focused on what follows, namely Douglass’s famous apostrophe, this passage was rarely taken as representing an act of vision as such, an act of seeing and relating to the world in its very materiality. Doing this, the setting would at first glance qualify, as in the case of the pivotal scene of Brown’s Narrative, as an appreciable rural site that involves pastoral elements (“lofty banks of that noble bay” (46)). The scenery potentially “celebrate[s] the ethos of nature/rurality” (“American Pastoral Ideology” 23), and the text to some extent expresses this potential in the apostrophe, where we catch glimpses of a harmonious pastoral imagery in the depiction of “the gentle gales” that “merrily” move the ships at a distance (Douglass, Narrative 46).

Douglass’s text, again, employs a doubled visual perspective that coincides with a simultaneity of pastoral and the enslaved’s time. In comparison with Brown, however, this simultaneity is suggested less by a sudden interruption (Brown’s address to the reader) or an intersection of discourse-time and story-time, and more continuously, as Douglass’s language smoothly shifts between what he explicitly describes as two kinds of visual perception. Standing on the “lofty banks” he does indeed see “those beautiful vessels, robed in purest white,” and even explicitly alludes to the potential appeal of the bay scene for a pastoral depiction in imagining what this sight must be like for the “eye of the freemen” (46). Instead of taking this position, however, not only his mind but essentially his vision remains tied to the very materiality connected to the seeing eye; his capability of sight is inevitably bound to his moment, to his body, to his situation. The enslaved observer’s eye in itself is, Douglass emphasizes, “tearful,” becoming a materially altered visual organ, and it is the very materiality of this visual organ—the tear-water within his eyes—that ultimately denies the pastoral mode for an appreciation of the waters stretching out outside of his body and before his eyes. While Douglass’s strategic pastoral thereby marks the pastoral as a white privilege and criticizes the (visual) chains of the peculiar institution, the scene also articulates environmental knowledge and engages in a utopian hope. With respect to environmental knowledge, the portrayal highlights a capacity of more freely employing pastoral lenses on the edge of the plantation zone, especially where bodies of water are involved (something that also happens in Henry Bibb’s narrative, with respect to the Ohio River (29–30)). Here is, in a sense, a link between a hermeneutics of freedom I have described in Chap. 2 and a strategic pastoral. Regarding a utopian (political) potential, on the other hand, Douglass’s strategic pastoral is arguably even more pronounced than Brown’s, if we read this moment as a prequel and inspiration for his fighting Covey in the pivotal scene that follows. While one may regard Douglass’ strategic pastoral as expression of a general liberating potential of his (and other narrators’) doubled vision in the sense that it implies the possibility of imagining an alternative world without slavery, the plot development of the Narrative itself suggests a more radical strategic involvement of the pastoral in his process of gaining freedom. If we take the Chesapeake apostrophe as a turning point within his character’s development, this implies that the fight and victory over Covey that promptly follow in the text are also the result of embracing an empowering double vision that involved the pastoral. Moreover, Douglass’s appreciation of the water and waterways that is perceivable through the Chesapeake apostrophe’s pastoral elements hints at an (environmental) knowledge connected to his work by the waterside in Baltimore, a knowledge that eventually enabled his escape. In both senses, Douglass’s strategic pastoral itself is involved in opening up the possibility of his chiasmus, of gaining manhood, and, ultimately, of freedom.

I wish to conclude by emphasizing that to consider how African American writers “gain[ed] control of the pastoral apparatus” (L. Buell, Environmental Imagination 43) involves more than turning to black literature’s (indisputable) antipastoral impulse. This is not to deny in any sense that the relation of antebellum African American writers of slave narratives to the pastoral as well as to non-human nature more generally was marked by trauma. Due to what Outka has described as a “conflation of blackness with nature” (25), or what Marjorie Spiegel refers to as the “dreaded comparison,” which marked justifications of the peculiar institution, one finds a general urge in the fugitive slave narrative to move out of nature and into ‘civilization’ in order to validate one’s humanity. There is an “anti-nature writing tendency” in this sense (Outka 172), since the genre displays at its core a move towards what ecofeminist Val Plumwood has termed a “hyper-separation” from non-human nature as part of its overall strategy of turning the racially de-humanized black body into a “civilized” human.²⁰

Nevertheless, this leaves the more general question how adequate descriptions of African American writers’ use of the “pastoral apparatus” as ‘antipastoral’ in fact are (Buell, Environmental Imagination 43). In this respect, two points of caution regarding the notion of an overwhelming antipastoral in the African American literary tradition come to mind. First, it seems problematic to describe African American literature as ‘antipastoral,’ if we use ‘pastoral’ in a broad sense to refer to all such forms of writing that potentially “celebrate the ethos of nature/rurality over against the ethos of the town or city” (Buell, “American Pastoral Ideology” 23). We may run the risk, through this terminology, of evoking the idea of an absence of literary engagements with nature more generally or, which would be worse, of reinforcing a (false) stereotype of a general African American disinterestedness in environmental issues. After all, “it has been easy,” as bell hooks reminds us in “Touching the Earth” “to forget that black people were first and foremost a people of the land” (30).

A second point of critique that is of more practical relevance is that the notion and term “antipastoral,” when taken in too narrow a sense, may foreclose more concrete analyses for (eco-)critics of African American literature. One may unduly de-emphasize those moments in which black authors did employ pastoral elements in complex ways, and overlook to what specific ends and with what effects this happened. My aim in this chapter was in this respect to provide a starting point that highlights that not all strategic pastoral (even in the context of the fugitive slave narrative) is an antipastoral use of pastoral elements, and thereby to contribute to providing alternatives that terminologically and conceptually reflect the complexity of African American relations to the pastoral. Adding to scholarship that turns to the adoption of classical pastoral texts by modern African American writers (e.g. M. Lewis),²¹ or notions of a “radical pastoral” (e.g. Newman, esp. 8–21), the idea of a strategic pastoral may enable more reflection on African Americans’ use of the “pastoral apparatus” (L. Buell). In this respect, my readings have shown not only how visual perspectives can be taken into account productively as a context for reconsidering the strategic use of pastoral elements in the antebellum fugitive slave narrative, but also how the pastoral interconnects with a tradition of environmental knowledge. On the one hand, Brown, Douglass and others strategically employ the pastoral through a rhetoric of visibility, creating a doubled lens. If, therefore, as Garrard has suggested, “[n]o other trope is so deeply entrenched in Western culture” as the pastoral (33), this trope became “entrenched” in the African American literary tradition via the visual, by becoming an additional lens within the rhetoric of visibility of the fugitive slave narrative. On the other hand, the strategic pastoral is one way in which environmental knowledge could be articulated and thereby an important foundational means of claiming and changing relationships between the (black-identified) human and non-human nature. A strategic pastoral, as problematic as it is from an antebellum African American perspective as a mode intimately connected with the oppressive ideology that ensured the enslavement of black people, attained multiple functions, since it could lead to articulations of environmental knowledge, but was also an important means of criticizing slavery and the de-humanization of blacks. In this sense, the strategic pastoral highlights the convergence of the political and the environmental in African American literature.