Queerness on the Move: Fugitive Tra(ns)versals in U.S. Runaway Slave Advertisements

In December of 1829, W. Wilkie, a South Carolinian tavern keeper, placed a notice in his local newspaper detailing the recent, unsanctioned departure of two people he had previously enslaved. The escapees—described as “negro fellows” Jim and April—had “absconded” earlier that month from Rantole’s Tavern, where the latter was well-known and had long worked as a hostler and house servant. The former, Wilkie notes, had a history of running away, and when previously enslaved by a David Turner of Beaufort, South Carolina, had been “apprehended in women’s apparel” and found to be going by the name Sally Turner. Wilkie warned that ‘Jim’ might be planning to make a return to their former home, where they had retained connections (and perhaps to their former alias as well

In this, Sally Turner was not alone. Wilkie’s advertisement—one of the thousands archived via the U.S. national database Freedom on the —parallels dozens of other pre-Emancipation runaway notices that detailed the uniquely gendered ways bondspeople resisted enslavement, often via the adoption of new names and cross-gender attire. Figures like Wilkie would often publish these ads following the escapes of individuals they enslaved, providing details about fugitives’ apparel, age, height, and physical appearance in order to enable neighbors, law enforcement agents, and fellow enslavers to identify and capture escapees. These advertisements map both the policing of the enslaved as they moved into and out of bondage, as well as the policing of Black gender, with enslavers making note of any non-normativity they These ads also reveal the ways the enslaved and self-liberated, in the years preceding the conclusion of the American Civil War, created space for themselves to stage resistant performances that critiqued and expanded on existing norms—performances this work takes up, in all their various forms.

These acts often marked instances of what Uri McMillan might term “fugitive transvestism. In “Crimes of Performance,” McMillan deploys “this particular idiom…to refer to fugitive slaves’ employment of performance skills to escape slavery via… transgender and cross-class impersonations. For self-emancipators like Turner, these skills included the ability to plan and execute successful escapes predicated on a kind of willfully opaque gender mutability. In so doing, they undermined understandings of the enslaved as objects lacking the capacity to resist, instead deploying “techniques of subversion [that] led to multiple dramatic roles for [the self-liberated] that far exceeded their legal status in the United States as fungible commodities or as forms of property with no rights. In other words, via their explicit rejection of bondage, these self-emancipators were also tacitly rejecting enslavers’ curtailment of their agency, utilizing cross-gender performance as “a mechanism through which to claim dissident citizenship. By repeatedly fleeing their sites of enslavement, wearing gender-bending ensembles and bearing new, chosen names, Sally Turner and their contemporaries counted
themselves among the numerous enslaved people who “accomplished surreptitious escapes from slavery via forms of…gender disguises, occasionally in surprising configurations.

It is not clear, however, that self-emancipators always understood their liberatory gender performances as “impersonations” or their cross-gender apparel as “disguises.” If, for figures like Sally Turner “performance function[ed] as a mode through which the body acquire[d] meaning, then it is worth considering what these individuals’ bodies might have meant to them. Their escapes indicate, for instance, that self-liberators imagined their bodies as more than vessels for violence and exploitation, acquired or created to labor. It is possible, then, that those like Turner who staged escapes indicating defiant orientations to nineteenth century racial and gender norms understood their performances as more than matters of utility, but rather as manifestations of what K. Marshall Green and Treva Ellison dub “tranifesting. By withholding bodies compelled to toil and adorning them in gendered attire that vitiated hegemonic impositions, many self-emancipators “enact[ed] a resistance to the political and epistemic operations that would encapsulate, and capitalize for others, the fruits of [their] labor. Additionally, these acts highlighted how for enslavers “gender emerge[d] as much from such contingent social formations as plantation capitalism as from the biological body” whereas through their seizure of insurgent mobility—the enslaved themselves “challenge[d] the categories of man and woman as ontological givens. That is, self-liberators like Sally Turner tranifested ways of being and moving through the world that allowed them to “mobilize across contradictions, divisions, and containment strategies produced by…large-scale organizations of power” (namely, the institution of U.S. chattel slavery) “that worked to limit [their] capacity to lay claim to their own bodies and genders.

These tranifestations, as well as enslavers’ reactionary and often panicked responses to them, emblematized by their strategic placement of runaway slave ads, illustrated that in spite of the entrenched racial logics of the era, the reality of Black gender in the nineteenth century was that it was constantly in flux. As C. Riley Snorton notes in Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity, “although the perception that ‘race’ and ‘gender’ [were] fixed and knowable terms [was] the dominant logic of identity —and although the enslaved’s “ungendered bodies were widely understood as possessing no genders that were legible or required acknowledgement—“cross-gender modes of escape…engender[ed] a way of seeing fungible flesh as a mode for fugitive action.

These convergences of subversive gender and spatial mobility constitute what I term fugitive tra(ns)versals: agential acts that enabled the enslaved to not only traverse the space of the pre-Emancipation United States but also transverse, transect, and destabilize hegemonic notions of normative gender. In this way, we might understand many of these figures’ performances as forms of transgender embodiment, not only in their divergence from cisnorms but also in the way they allowed self-emancipators to trans hegemonic gender, literally moving around, through, and away from it. That these performances coalesced with and catalyzed countless enslaved people’s escapes from bondage indicates that their significance lay not only in the tranifestations they represented or the liberation they enabled, but in the confluence of the two, as gender subversion and self-negotiated freedom informed and substantiated one another. Using this lens allows us to move beyond readings of escape that limn enslaved people’s diverse gender performances solely as matters of necessity and instead consider the possibility that these performances were indicative of the queer capaciousness of Black gender during the epoch of U.S. chattel slavery, as well as the agential possibilities that capaciousness engendered.

In keeping with this, I avoid in this work falling into the same tropes of deadnaming and misgendering that characterizes the runaway slave ads analyzed herein; instead, I take seriously the enslaved and self-liberated’s own identifications and refer to them throughout using their chosen names and they/them pronouns. The latter is not done to, as Cameron Awkward Rich puts it, “relitigate [these figures’] identities…strip them of their historical contexts, or reify understandings of Black people as always and necessarily incapable of achieving binary gender. Rather, I seek to honor the ways many of these individuals “traveled in their lives, and now in the archives, under multiple public identities, including multiple names, pronouns, and gender expressions.

This traveling—away from sites of bondage, out of the ostensible control of enslavers, and toward subversive reclamations of corporeal and gendered agency—was necessarily marked by ambiguity. Those seeking to self-emancipate did so under the threat of re-capture, retributive violence, and planter surveillance that was only heightened by the occurrence of non-normative gender performance. Tracing their tra(ns)versals, then, necessitates the careful reevaluation of runaway ads intended to normatively narrate and curtail the insurgent mobility of these figures. In other words, it is necessary to, as Saidiya Hartman puts it, reclaim this “archival material for contrary purposes. In so doing, it becomes possible to map the ways self-liberators like Sally Turner marked both freedom and Black gender as mutable spaces of possibility.

Criminal Crossings

It is possible to plot the limitations of these possibilities in the fugitive tra(ns)versals of Mary Ann Waters, a Black trans woman who was arrested and brought to a Baltimore jail in September of 1851. Identified in the pick-up notice detailing their arrest as a likely “runaway,” Waters is described (like their contemporary Sally Turner) as a “Negro Man” who “calls himself Mary Ann…[is] about twenty-eight years of age, 5 feet 2 ½ inches high…and has a scar on his left ear. The use of masculine pronouns and insistence on categorizing Mary Ann as a man underscore local law enforcement’s evident discomfort with Water’s self-identificatory claims. Rather than acknowledge their intentional self-gendering—marked not only by their chosen name but also their attire, which included “a dark figured mousseline de laine dress, blue velvet mantilla, white satin bonnet, and figured scarf—jailor William Counselman worked to negate Waters’ gender autonomy.

Though he conceded that Mary Ann claimed to be a freeperson and had “been hiring out in the city of Baltimore as a woman for the last three years,” Counselman still opted to limn Waters as male fugitive property and encouraged their enslaver to “come forward…pay charges, and take said negro away. These elisions highlight the ways Mary Ann was rendered, as Vanessa Holden puts it, “at once conspicuous and In “Living Free: Self-Emancipated Women and Queer Formations of Freedom,” Holden contends that Counselman’s narrative linking of Waters’ presumed escape to their wearing of women’s attire makes clear that “Waters’ self-possession was as transgressive as [their] gender presentation and claim to each marked them as seizing insurgent possession of genders and freedoms they were never meant to access.

This same tension is evident in W. Wilkie’s earlier descriptions of Sally Turner. Especially telling in his account are the ways Turner’s apparent gender subversions are discursively bound to accusations of criminality. In his runaway ad, Sally’s enslaver refers not only to Turner’s history of queer self-styling, but also to their reputation as a “noted thief.” Given Sally’s recurrent attempts at self-emancipation across multiple sites of enslavement and geographic locales, it is possible that the theft Wilkie referenced was less about Turner’s stealing of material objects and more about their repeated theft of themself, the ostensible property of their enslaver. 

In other words, theft in the presence and context of potentially queer gender, “described the manner with which [self-liberated] Blacks were seen as being in illicit possession of themselves and their As Snorton explains, the decision of enslaved persons like Sally Turner to reject not only bondage but also the strictures of hegemonic, cisheteronormative gender represented a brand of “fugitivity [that] conjoined matters of imagination and theft. For Wilkie, Sally’s alleged larceny was inextricable from their furtive gender performances, just as these performances, for Turner, were necessarily bound to their acquisition of freedom. Sally’s personal and political imagination—culminating in an act of fugitive tra(ns)versal—allowed them to conceive of a life unfettered by the onus of imposed names, gender, or labor, and that in and of itself marked them as dangerous to the status quo Wilkie and his contemporaries sought desperately to maintain.

In this, the narratives of Mary Ann Waters, Sally Turner, and countless others are linked: their stories reveal not only the ways enslavement could be and was resisted, but also how “chattel persons gave rise to an understanding of gender as mutable and as an amendable form of —often to the disdain and dismay of their former enslavers. Though many of the runaway slave ads and pickup notices published prior to Emancipation worked to frame these individuals’ fugitive tra(ns)versals as little more than criminal crossings, these tra(ns)versals work to bring into focus the multiple ways Black gender was created and expressed throughout the era of U.S. chattel slavery.

Dandies, Fops, and Swinging Walks

In this, the gender expressions of a self-emancipated South Carolinian server known as George prove particularly illustrative. In the frenzied 1835 runaway advertisement George’s enslaver J.W. Clark published in the Charleston Mercury following their escape, seeking information and offering an unusually high one-thousand-dollar reward, Clark notes that George had been given free papers by a white man of their acquaintance and was likely bound for either New York or Boston. He added that George was “a dark mulatto, about 18 years old, not very stout made, a little knock-kneed, [who] walk[ed] and talk[ed] very pertly and [was] quite a dandy in his dress” before speculating that the escapee would change clothes frequently, as “he had plenty of money when he Though there is much of note in this account, George’s classification as a ‘dandy’ is particularly compelling.

As Monica Miller notes in Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, Black dandies “are queer subjects who deconstruct limiting binaries” in that they “disrupt and destabilize conceptions of masculinity and In portraying George this way, then, Clark marked the person he previously enslaved as a something of a slippery figure, not only in their stealthy escape from bondage, but also in their ambiguous performances of masculinity. George’s dandyism and their self-emancipatory flight thus worked in tandem to reveal the scope of their fugitive tra(ns)versal: they ostensibly perceived of neither their styling nor their labor as being beholden to the limiting impositions of hegemonic expectation.

Clark’s ad also exposes the tensions George represented, as their former enslaver wrestled with his obvious sense of betrayal at the loss of a servant he seemed to perceive as invaluable (made evident by his large reward offer and repeated placing of the same runaway notice). The hotelier notes that prior to their disappearance, George had been waiting tables at Clark’s for nearly a decade—presumably without issue—and therefore could only have absconded under the ‘inducement’ of some third party. However, he later concedes that George appears to have formulated and communicated a plan of escape ahead of their departure, indicating a willingness to flee irreducible to outside influence.

Furthermore, George’s dandyism, which their enslaver may initially have viewed as a harmless fondness for self-adornment, one he had indulged by allowing George to retain large sums of spending money, took on a different inflection in the wake of the enslaved server’s exodus. No longer just a fashionable and perhaps somewhat vain subordinate, George had consciously rendered themself “a threat to the supposed natural aristocracy, [both] hypermasculine and feminine…an outsider broadcasting [their] alien In other words, in choosing to leave Clark’s hotel without their enslaver’s consent or knowledge, George had made the transition from well-dressed pet to dandified threat.

Clark’s positioning of the person he had previously enslaved as a kind of problem, whose movements and gender performances prompted surveillance, highlights how the figure of the self-emancipator “indexes processes of racialization in which race is a materialization of hegemony’s disciplining of unruliness and In The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender, Marquis Bey takes up the problematizing of Black gender and agency in which figures like Clark engaged, contending that in fact “problems are not problematic. Indeed, they problematize and open space for In George’s case, this space enabled them to stage tangible rejections of not only their slave status, but also of the gender expectations of the pre-Emancipation U.S. South, underscoring that “Blackness animates and instrumentalizes gender always toward its —especially in moments of stealth resistance.

The same is true for another self-liberated Carolinian known to their enslaver Andrew Allison as Lunnon. Allison placed a newspaper advertisement seeking the arrest of his runaway “negro boy” in early September of 1821, describing the escapee in language very similar to that used by J.W. Clark: “[Lunnon] is apparently about 25 years old, is very fond of dress, very foppish, and assumes an air of importance among other negroes, but when spoken to by a white man, affects a great deal of (emphasis mine). Once again, the notion of foppishness or dandyism features alongside a detailing of physical attributes, signaling Allison’s acute awareness of Lunnon’s gender unfixity. Though the enslaver attempts to frame this sartorial subversion as an artifice, nothing more than a weapon for Lunnon to wield against other Black people in a bid for superiority, this framing is undercut by Allison’s own portrayal of the person he enslaved.

Despite the narrative of deference set forth toward the beginning of Allison’s advertisement—wherein Lunnon’s “air of importance” is limited to the intraracial and supplanted with politeness and reverence in the presence of white people—Allison goes on to recount that Lunnon “was formerly the property of James Ramsay, Esq. of Rowan County, N.C. from whom he ran away, and was absent nearly three years, during which time he was in the Forks of Yadkin, and passed under the assumed named of free Klick The fact of their previous elopement and taking on of a chosen name would seem to indicate that Lunnon (referred to from this point as Klick) was less invested in the good opinion of the dominant class than they were in their own agency and mobility. That is, Klick’s ‘foppishness’ was not, as Allison represented it, an empty affectation meant to distinguish them from other enslaved laborers; rather, it was a performance that marked them, as well as other Black dandies of the era as “creatures of invention who continually and characteristically [broke] down limiting identity markers and propose[d] new, more fluid categories within which to constitute In Klick’s case, these included insurgent categories ranging from freeperson to gender iconoclast.

Enslavers’ observations of bonded people’s tra(ns)versals were not limited to descriptions of fancy dress and over-the-top self-styling: they also often extended to more embodied markers that aligned with, as Jacqueline Urla and Jennifer Terry put it, the “historically and culturally specific belief that deviant social behavior (however that is defined) manifests in the…body, as a cause or an effect, or perhaps as merely a suggestive In the case of the self-emancipated, this suggestive trace could be and often was located in something as simple as the way a person walked.

To that end, the runaway slave ad placed by enslaver D. Barbour in late 1846 is illustrative. In it, Barbour seeks the return of his “mulatto man Sam,” described as being “six feet high…stout and rough looking, with very little beard and swings himself when he This final detail conforms to (stereo)typical ideas about the ways queer men carry themselves, though the language Barbour uses is (perhaps intentionally) vague, rendering his meaning somewhat ambiguous. What is interesting, however, is that in addition to commenting on Sam’s ‘swinging’ walk, the advertisement published notifying the New Orleans community of their escape features an accompanying stereotype of an enslaved person in motion, carrying a small bundle and wearing a long dress. Read together, the image and the text work to not-so-subtly effeminize Sam, depicting them as a potentially queer, unquestionably defiant deserter. In this way, the daring Sam showed in self-liberating from Barbour’s property is mirrored in this account by the equally audacious way they moved through the world.

The former enslaver of a self-emancipator named Carolina spins a similar tale in an 1809 ad placed on his behalf in the Wilmington Gazette. The notice announces the unsanctioned departure of “three negro men, belonging to the estate of Capt. John Green[:] Moses, Harry, and Carolina”—the latter of which is described as “about 28 years old, slender made, [with a] narrow long face” and a tendency to “swing himself very much when he Like Sam, Carolina is singled out not only for the fact of their flight, but also the style of their gait. The queerness of a ‘negro man’ with a woman’s name and a swinging walk seizing emancipation renders that seizure all the more complex, adding an additional layer of unruliness. Neither Carolina’s labor, gender, or movement existed under the umbrella of their enslaver’s control—a fact that likely produced no small amount of anxiety for Captain John Green.

This same brand of anxiety marks the runaway ad published by Upton Bruce of Maryland in the spring of 1804. Specifically, Bruce’s resentment at the departure of the person he had previously enslaved as well as his acute awareness of the escapee’s numerous, gendered idiosyncrasies shape the account he provides:

Run away from the subscriber…a young, likely, and very dark mulatto fellow, named PHIL. He is about 5 feet 9 or 10 inches high of a thin, spare make; rather a round face, looks bold, and is about 20 years of age…He is an artful, cunning fellow, reads his testament tolerably well, and plays occasionally on the file; is pert and saucy, has a valt [sic] share of pride, thinks highly of himself; very tenacious of his opinions, never in the wrong, and will chatter and dispute from sun to sun, rather than confess a fault. He is smart and active, talk[s] quick, and by his high pert matter, makes himself easily distinguished. It is possible he may have procured a pass, and it is supposed he went off with a thick chunky mulatto fellow from the same neighborhood. If those who may accidentally fall in with this fellow, knew how kind and gentle has been the treatment shewn him, and how base and ungrateful has been the return, they would feel an impulse that would prompt, nay urge them to secure him…He is a little round shouldered, with an erect head, has a quick, swinging, consequential walk [emphasis

Both unusually long and meticulously detailed, Bruce’s advertisement highlights “with what spirit of revenge…owners pursue[d] slaves who with Bruce calling for Phil’s return despite his acknowledgement of the escapees’ perceived shortcomings. As Daina Ramey Berry notes in The Price for Their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation, enslavers’ commodification of bondspeople was multifaceted and consistent, compelling them to seek retention and control over those they enslaved even when these figures challenged their authority and rejected hegemonic gender. In the case of Phil, this rejection constituted a fugitive tra(ns)versal—their insistence on moving through the world as a smart, stylish, swinging sybarite, a queer figure driven neither by gratitude nor the desire to conform, was concomitant to and constitutive of their fugitive flight. Rather than capitulate to racialized (and generally racist) ideas of slave loyalty, Phil dared to talk back and run away, disappearing with a ‘mulatto fellow’ with whom their relationship was as opaque as their gender performance.

In fact, the extent of Phil’s subversion was so great that it is impossible to ascertain which of their offenses Bruce found most egregious: their high, pert manner; swinging, consequential walk; thanklessness in the face of ‘kind and gentle’ treatment; or simply their refusal to remain enslaved. In the narrative Phil’s enslaver constructs, these transgressions are inextricable from one another—the fugitive’s desertion is compounded by their inappropriate self-assurance and non-normative gender performances.

Each of these narratives is illustrative of the ways many self-liberators tra(ns)versed the pre-Emancipation South with a kind of foppish, swishing, swinging swagger that marked them as rebels long before their actual escapes from bondage. Like their contemporaries Sally Turner and Mary Ann Waters, these individuals claimed both gender and freedom as spaces of potential and possibility.

Cross-Gender Passing Performances

In July of 1822, John Scott of Georgia placed an ad documenting the unusual escape of an enslaved “mulatto negro woman, named Polly, about twenty years old, light-colored hair…[and] some months advanced in He speculated that Polly had eloped under the auspices of a white man named George W. Harvy, the former overseer of Polly’s enslaver, Major Thomas B. Scott. The two had apparently been romantically involved for some time, and Scott suspected that they would attempt to travel as husband and wife, since Polly was white-passing. Though the power dynamics characterizing the fugitives’ connection cast doubt on the possibility of a consensual relationship between them—given that, as Hershini Young notes, “the exclusion of slaves from the social contract renders ‘consent’ absurd within the context of —Polly does appear to have willingly run off with George Harvy, if for no other reason than to bolster their chances of a successful escape.

What stands out about Scott’s account is that in addition to his physical descriptions of Polly, he notes that “from the circumstance of her taking away with her a number of articles of men's clothing, the above described woman will doubtless attempt to travel in the character of a man—perhaps as a brother of He adds that Polly in disguise “would probably represent a man near the size of Harvy, being a large By potentially passing at the level of both race and gender, then, Polly “manipulated [their] physical body into a multidimensional surface that temporarily evaded and escaped its gendered and raced —allowing them greater mobility and an additional means by which to avoid detection.

In this way, Polly’s story shares several important parallels with that of fellow self-emancipators Ellen and William Craft. In 1848, more than two decades after Polly’s daring departure, the married couple fled the Georgia plantations on which they had been enslaved and migrated north to Philadelphia—an experience detailed at length in their autobiography Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom; or, the Escape of William and Ellen Craft, published in 1860. As in the case of Polly and Harvy, the Crafts’ escape was facilitated by the fact of Ellen being “nearly in appearance and disguising themself as a white man, which allowed them to pose as their husband’s enslaver and purchase train tickets to the North. In both instances, the act of passing represented a conduit out of captivity, understood not as a lasting indication of gender expansiveness on the part of Polly and Ellen, but rather as fleeting “cross-gendered modes of escape [demonstrating] cunning wit on the part of the fugitive These modalities were often framed, then, as clever, but not queer.

For Ellen and Polly, enslavers’ focus on these acts of “passing”—over physical, legal, and social boundaries and across racial lines—served to frame understandings of identity “not only in terms of real versus artificial, but also, and perhaps always, as proximal and That is, in both their gender and racial crossings, Ellen and Polly were imagined as figures engaging in forms of utile if temporary “fugitive rendered threatening by its liberatory potentiality.

Even in instances in which self-emancipators’ “passing” extended only to gender and not race, white surveillance of these performances persisted. This is evident in the narrative of Bill Wanet, a formerly enslaved laborer who fled from their enslaver Dr. T.B. Carr in 1861 after being accused of murder. The runaway ad published following their departure describes Bill as “about five feet eight inches in height, aged about fifty five, dark copper colour, bowlegged, thick set, and bald head[ed]” before adding that the former bondsperson had “been a runaway for three years past, during which time he ha[d] been lurking in and around Wilmington, frequently passing off as a woman, and…full of schemes for dodging Once again, the act of cross-gender passing is presented as a matter of necessity—a ‘scheme’ to prevent apprehension. Bill is positioned in this account as a crafty chameleon, altering their appearance to forestall retribution for their alleged violence.

It is noteworthy that the person who placed the notice of Bill’s escape was not Wanet’s enslaver, but rather the then-mayor of Wilmington, John Dawson. A staunch supporter of the Confederacy (as well as a hypervigilant and somewhat fearful observer of Black sentiment and mobility), Dawson would likely have read Bill’s actions as a troubling harbinger of how the then-ongoing Civil War would embolden enslaved persons like Bill. Mere months after Wanet’s self-emancipation, Dawson published another piece in the Daily Journal, encouraging citizens to engage in “a day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer” and to “suspend their ordinary business…to evince their gratitude to Almighty God…and their entire dependence on Him for…hope to achieve in their battle against Union forces and Black liberation. Still later, in July of 1865, Dawson, along with several Wilmington City Commissioners penned a letter to the provisional governor of North Carolina warning that it was “generally belived [sic]…that some insurrectionary movement [was being] contemplated by the colored citizens of this Town and vicinity, aided and abetted by United States colored troops, and further encouraged by their Preachers and Teachers.” The officials added that Wilmington’s “colored population [were] assuming a somewhat dictatorial spirit, and [becoming]

A figure like Bill Wanet likely represented the personification of this insolence. Assumed guilty of both murder and gender subversion, Wanet’s wearing of women’s attire emblematized the ways Black people leading up to and during a (for Dawson) painful moment of national transition challenged convention at every level, including the sartorial. Like Ellen Craft and their contemporary Polly, self-emancipators like Bill used clothing and cross-gender performance to subvert enslavers’ surveillance and the institution of slavery itself.

These subversions did not always prove successful, however, as in the case of North Carolinian self-emancipator Abraham. In early 1851, the formerly enslaved escapee was apprehended on a train travelling South, along with a white woman named Mary King (alias Mary Hudson). The pickup notice detailing the two’s arrest—notably entitled “A Young Woman in Limbo”—speculates that “the connection between the lady and her companion [likely] extended farther than travelling It explains that the pair had been attempting to reach Washington City on the Richmond and Fredericksburg Railroad, and had made it as far as Milford Depot before getting caught.

Most striking in this account is the advertisement’s description of Abraham, who is portrayed as a “large strapping fellow,” who was nonetheless discovered “dressed in female The move to portray the fugitive as both imposing in stature and sartorially emasculated is paradoxical but unsurprising. Given that Abraham’s escape from bondage represented the realization of several planter anxieties—specifically the loss of enslaved property, the possibility of miscegenation, and the opacity of Black gender—it was perhaps inevitable that Abraham’s captors would work to depict them as a threat.

Especially threatening was the escapee’s connection with their accomplice Mary, the niece of Abraham’s erstwhile enslaver, Matthew Mcauley, Jr. Mcauley hailed from a prominent Southern family: his father, Matthew Sr., was an Irish immigrant who had gone on to become a lieutenant in the Continental Army. Later he donated, along with his brother William, two hundred and fifty acres of land to the University of North Carolina and also lent slave labor to aid in the construction of the institution’s pre-Civil War Since then, Mcauley Jr. had fallen on lean times, filing for bankruptcy in October of though he seems to have rebounded by 1850, when slave schedules record him as being in possession of at least ten bonded laborers, including an unnamed one matching Abraham’s That his niece would risk not only this tenuous financial recovery but also the family reputation by absconding with one of the people he enslaved would almost certainly have been viewed as a relinquishing of both propriety and pride.

The disdain women like Mary—who willingly took up and took off with a Black enslaved person—would have faced is evident in the pickup ad’s depiction of her. The notice describes Mary as being about twenty-five or thirty years of age before adding that “she is not good-looking, and chews What is interesting about this portrayal is that it is not only insulting but subtly masculinizing, utilizing Mary’s plain looks and penchant for tobacco to narratively place her outside of nineteenth century notions of normative white womanhood. Read alongside her companion’s donning of “female attire,” this ad (unintentionally) invites readers to regard Abraham and Mary as a kind of queer couple, whose cross-dressing, tobacco chewing gender digressions remain inscrutable even at the moment of apprehension and challenge the presumption that such acts of gender digression were always matters of necessity.

Other advertisements from this period evoke the same ambiguity, with Black escapees engaging in cross-gender escapes that might easily have stemmed as much from existing queerness as they did shrewd stealth. To that end, the 1859 runaway ad published following the escape of three North Carolinian bondspeople, including a blacksmith named Willie, proves illustrative. Describing them as a “Negro man…[of] dark gingercake color, very large eyes, and a high broad forehead,” Willie’s enslaver Seth Ward goes on to note that the escapee had “been runaway for nearly four years, and [was] probably in Wake or in the vicinity of [Ward’s] Years earlier, in the days after Willie’s initial flight, Ward had placed a similar advertisement in the Weekly Standard, in which he speculated that the person he had previously enslaved was “no doubt…passing himself off as a free When Willie transitioned to a different kind of passing, however, Ward’s desire to regain control over the fugitive seems to have intensified.

In his second ad, Ward explains that he had “reasons to believe that said negro man WILLIE [was] passing about dressed in women's As in the case of fellow self-emancipator Abraham, it is unclear whether Willie’s fugitive tra(ns)versal—undertaken in women’s attire—represented a strategic move to avoid detection or an indication of queerly gendered agency. Either way, this turn of events appears to have galvanized Seth Ward, prompting him to increase his initial offer of a fifty-dollar reward for the fugitive’s safe return to a staggering “$300 for [Willie], taken dead or

Regardless of the motivations behind the formerly enslaved escapee’s (literally) boundary-crossing performance, this performance had allowed Willie to successfully evade their enslaver for nearly half a decade, and that alone rendered them a threat, worth as much to Ward in chains as they were in a casket. Willie’s story, then, is emblematic of the ways that, throughout the epoch of U.S. chattel slavery, “gender indefiniteness [became] a critical modality of political and cultural maneuvering within figurations of Blackness, illustrated…by the frequency with which narratives of fugitivity included cross-gendered modes of In other words, the strategies employed by escapees like Abraham and Willie reflect not only the savvy of these individuals, but also their positioning within a lineage of enslaved Black people who imagined gender as an expansive and endlessly alterable space. Their freedom (however fleeting) was not only facilitated by their gender creativity, but shaped by it.

This understanding lends critical context to the stories of self-emancipators like Mariah, who escaped their New Orleanian captors in the late 1830s. Mariah’s enslaver, H.F. Wade posted an ad in his local paper following Mariah’s disappearance, offering a five-hundred-dollar reward and a lengthy description of the fugitive:

Ranaway from the subscriber, on Saturday the 18th of March last, a negro girl named MARIAH; aged from 28 to 30 years, about 5 feet 4 or 5 inches in height, heavy made, a dark griffe, large mouth, and in the habit of laughing when spoken to. She speaks French a little, and is slightly pitted with the small pox. She will probably try to pass herself off as a hairdresser, or as a boy, as she has frequently dressed herself in boy’s clothes, and has her hair cut for the purpose [emphasis

Striking about this account is that, unlike others like it, the language used leaves little room for ambiguity. Mariah’s wearing of men’s apparel is not presented as merely a pretext to escape bondage, but rather an ongoing act of queer self-styling, supplemented by the further masculinizing move to cut their hair short in order to be more easily read “as a boy.”

In this way, Mariah’s fugitive tra(ns)versal underscores that for the bonded and self-liberated, as Christopher S. Lewis points out, “queerness [was] not solely…an imposition that enslaved people may have strategically redirected toward liberation, but also…a potentially self-determined orientation leading to and self-expression. In some ways, Wade’s portrayal works to undercut Mariah’s seizing of this brand of self-determination by echoing the dubious perception of Black queer gender held by those elsewhere tasked with describing fugitives like Sally Turner and Mary Ann Waters. Mariah’s embrace of masculinity is construed as an artifice, a passing performance that in no way negates the escapee’s status as a “negro girl” on the lam. Wade writes about the person he previously enslaved in such a way as to invite readers to regard Mariah as simultaneously failing to achieve normative femininity and incapable of accessing transmasculinity.

This framing narratively renders the “masculine expressions” of figures like Mariah acts which “may appear to affirm racist discourse of Black gender failure;” however, when read through a queer lens, “these expressions and their reproduction through writing [in fact work to] challenge cultural beliefs in race, sex, and gender as scrutable traits with fixed In spite of their enslaver’s attempts to dismiss the fugitive’s self-identifications, Mariah’s vestiary idiosyncrasies, cross-gender performances, and escape from bondage marked them as a queer transgressor able to evade Wade’s control on multiple levels. This is made especially evident toward the end of his runaway ad, as he speculates that the fugitive would “doubtless deny to whom she —a supposition that is particularly noteworthy given that the matter of Mariah’s ownership seemed to be an unsettled one.

In June of 1836, mere months after Mariah’s escape, Wade married a fellow Louisianan referred to in legal documents simply as Mrs. Terrill. At the time of their union, Terrill was already in possession of “a profitable boarding house, and…the furniture therein, four or five slaves, a tract of land in the parish of Terrebonne, and…the property No. 55 Tehoupitoulas —the site of the boarding house and the address listed in Wade’s 1837 runaway advertisement. It is unclear whether Mariah was among the ‘four or five slaves’ Terrill brought into the marriage, but given Wade’s propensity for staking claim to his wife’s property (ultimately resulting in litigation with her children), this is not outside the realm of possibility. Did Mariah flee the boarding house in which they were enslaved ahead of their mistress’ wedding in order to avoid acquiring a new enslaver? Or did they, in spite of Wade’s anxiety about them denying to whom they belonged, decide that they—with their short hair and ‘boy’s clothes’—in fact belonged only to themself?

Another New Orleanian’s break from bondage raises similar questions, and highlights the ways enslaved people were able to seize the space of gender not solely as a means of escape, but also a realm of possibility. In early 1849, enslaver George A. Botts posted an ad noting the unsanctioned departure of Brazile, who had absconded the previous summer. Botts describes the fugitive as “a regular attendant of the balls [who] speaks French and English, is about 21 years old, a dark mulatto or copper color, has a Roman nose, rather slender, [and is a] genteel He adds that since their disappearance, Brazile had been “seen dressed in women’s clothes several times in the This depiction is striking for several reasons, not the least of which is Botts’ seeming acknowledgment that, given the escapee’s presence at local balls and frequent sightings around town, it is likely that Brazile sought to remove themself from their enslaver’s property, but not necessarily the city of New Orleans.

Edward E. Baptist, in conversation with Annette Richards and Paul Fleming, frames this decision as Brazile’s attempt at “writing [their] own against Bott’s efforts to regain control over them. This narrative reclamation manifested in Brazile’s

self-presentation, in [their] gender performance…in [their] ability to get into the interstices of New Orleans society and use—no doubt with the help of lots of both enslaved and free people of color[—] the complexity of that city’s structure in the 1840s, its cultural and social structure, to remain literally in the same city, a relatively small city, and out of the reach of George

Like their contemporary Mariah, Brazile made the interesting and ultimately telling decision to remain near the site of their enslavement, as the unique space of mid-nineteenth century New Orleans, though riddled with risk, offered a place for queer sociality and cross-gender performance. The self-liberator’s movement—between French and English, freedom and unfreedom, masculinity and femininity—represented a brand of fugitivite tra(ns)versal that rejected the hegemonic and allowed for other, queerer possibilities to take shape.

The many, varied, cross-gender performances of escapees like Brazile exposed the unfixity of enslaved Black gender, revealing it to be as alterable as a fugitive’s clothing or slave status. In other words, these performances—concomitantly both queer and utile—demonstrated that freedom might consist not only of reclaiming one’s body and labor, but also of cutting one’s hair, changing one’s name, or donning a perfectly tailored mousseline de laine dress.

Conclusion

In the summer of 1840, North Carolinian enslaver J.Q.A. Leach posted a notice in his local paper advertising the recent escape of “his negro fellow Wilson” and offering a one-hundred-dollar reward for their return. He noted that “from authentic information, which [he had] lately received, there [was] no doubt but that [Wilson was] now lurking in the neighborhood, with a debased white woman, or with an unprincipled white man” and was likely “disguised in female As in the case of Sally Turner, Wilson’s fugitive tra(ns)versal—along with their implied interracial relationship with an ambiguous white accomplice—are presented as indications of the escapee’s dangerousness and dishonesty. This portrayal is rendered even more ominous by Leach’s insistence that upon departure, Wilson armed themself with a gun and likely other “unlawful weapons,” all in an effort to “make his way immediately to some free

In his write-up, Leach approaches each of these transgressions as equally concerning and even potentially ruinous. Wilson’s escape is framed not as a mere loss of property, but also a worrying tear in the social fabric of the antebellum South. In an especially telling plea to the public, Leach expresses his hope “that all true friends to the safety of society and to the preservation of discipline and order among [the] slave population, [would] strenuously exert themselves to apprehend this Though certainly melodramatic, this request emblematized the attitudes figures like Wilson were made to confront in their bids for liberation. With enslavers already positioning them as thieves, ingrates, criminals, and threats, the specter of gender insurgency made self-emancipators vulnerable to additional scrutiny. Regardless, these individuals persisted with a brand of defiance that marked Black people and Black gender as ungovernable.

In the face of impossible odds, countless self-emancipators like Wilson sought to liberate themselves from a bloody institution designed to sustain itself on their labor and submission—often utilizing various forms of queer performance to do so. In seizing both freedom and gendered self-determination, Wilson and their many contemporaries marked themselves as subjects rather than objects, people rather than chattel. The choice to queerly swing through the world in boy’s clothing and tailored dresses; to undertake tra(ns)versals across boundaries both real and constructed; and to flee to the North with their dandyism intact underscored the enslaved’s myriad strategies to reject and evade not only bondage, but hegemonic gender as well.