Spiral
Experienced User
Joined: 03 Jan 2008
{Posts: 106 }
Location: TnT
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 Posted: Sat 25 Jul 2009 23:27 Post subject: The Mercurial Nature and Abiding Power of Race |
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| Quote: | There are many ways to expose the mercurial nature of racial classification. Scholars of U.S. history might note, for example, that the category of "mulatto" first appeared in the federal census of 1850 and then disappeared in 1930, or they might discover that immigrants who had not thought of themselves as "black" at home in the Caribbean found themselves classified as such upon passage to the United States. Such episodes serve to unmask the instability of racial systems, yet simply marshaling evidence to prove taxonomies fickle tells only a partial story. In an effort to tell a fuller story about the workings of "race"—by which I mean principally the endeavors of racial categorization and stratification—I focus here on historical actors who crossed geographical boundaries and lived their lives within different racial systems. A vision that accounts for the experiences of sojourners and migrants illuminates the ways in which racial classification shifts across borders and thus deepens arguments about racial construction and malleability. 1 1
At the same time, however, the principal argument of this essay moves in a different direction. We tend to think of the fluid and the mutable as less powerful than the rigid and the immutable, thereby equating the exposure of unstable racial categories with an assault on the very construct of race itself. In a pioneering essay in which Barbara J. Fields took a historical analysis of the concept of race as her starting point, she contended that ideologies of race are continually created and verified in daily life. More recently, Ann Laura Stoler has challenged the assumption that an understanding of racial instability can serve to undermine racism, and Thomas C. Holt has called attention to scholars' "general failure to probe beyond the mantra of social constructedness, to ask what that really might mean in shaping lived experience." Hilary McD. Beckles affirms that "the analysis of 'real experience' and the theorising of 'constructed representation' constitute part of the same intellectual project." Drawing together these theoretical strands, I argue that the scrutiny of day-to-day lives demonstrates not only the mutability of race but also, and with equal force, the abiding power of race in local settings. Neither malleability nor instability, then, necessarily diminishes the potency of race to circumscribe people's daily lives. 2 2
On one level, people who hold authority (courtroom judges, employers, even neighborhood gossips) impose classification on subordinates. They determine who can marry whom and how to label the children, whom to hire for which jobs and whom to deny work, with whom to socialize and whom to ostracize. But the assignment of individuals to lesser categories can be ambiguous or transitory, and part of the abiding power of racial classification lies precisely, I argue, within this mercurial quality. To put it more concretely, that power lies within the ability of legal, economic, and social authorities to assign and reassign racial categories to oppressive ends; as Nell Irvin Painter has written, the purpose of such categorization is "to rank people and keep them in place." On another level, though, communities, families, and individuals seek to resist such authority by naming and defining themselves, an endeavor that entails the assignment of others to various racial categories. To name and define others is also to establish one's own superior station, and so these efforts on the part of rulers and subjugated alike work to create, reshape, and reinforce ideologies of race: who is worthy or superior, who is depraved or inferior. Together, these endeavors work continually to determine, destabilize, and ultimately to sustain racial hierarchies. No matter how chimerical we prove "race" to be, that wisdom alone remains inadequate to diminish the might of racism, for the power of race lies within the very fact of malleability. 3 3
The nature of the power that lies within the capricious exercise of racial categorization in everyday life can best be illustrated by exploring the experiences of particular historical actors in particular geographical settings. The transnational family story to be told here centers on a journey across racial lines and national borders. Such travels, metaphorical and literal, expose both the volatility and the potency of racial classification. The geographical and temporal markers are New England and the British Caribbean in the nineteenth century, although the questions are transportable to other places and times. The protagonist is an Anglo-American working-class woman named Eunice Connolly. Born in 1831 to a struggling Massachusetts family, Eunice married a local carpenter at seventeen, just before her alcoholic father deserted her mother. Marriage offered no respite from labor, and, like other wage-earning women, Eunice would work in a mill, take in washing, clean other people's houses, and sell hats she fashioned out of palm leaves. In the late 1850s, Eunice's husband set out to try his luck in the booming Gulf port city of Mobile, Alabama. In 1860, Eunice joined him there, but the couple's aspirations collided with the Civil War, and, with luck running low, Eunice's husband joined the Confederate Army. Seven months pregnant, Eunice and her young son boarded a train for the arduous journey back to New England. Through four years of war, she eked out a living in New Hampshire, barely able to support herself and two children; she had little knowledge of her husband's whereabouts, and wartime Confederate aid did not extend to Northern wives. Soon after Union victory, word arrived that Eunice's husband had died fighting for the South. 4 4
Years of poverty and despair abated only with her marriage to William Smiley Connolly, the story's second protagonist. Smiley (as he was called) was born on Grand Cayman Island in 1833, just before the emancipation of slaves in the British West Indies. Of mixed African and European descent, his family settled with other freedpeople on the unclaimed acres of the island's eastern end. Over the next decades, Connolly men accumulated land and became successful mariners. Smiley built and captained his own schooners, engaging in the turtle, coffee, and cattle trades. He married a Caymanian woman, but at some point that union dissolved. Documents remain silent as to where or how the widow Eunice met the sea captain Smiley, but the couple wed in 1869 just outside of Lowell, Massachusetts, and swiftly sailed for Grand Cayman. For eight years, Eunice made her home there, keeping house and caring for her children, attending church and sailing on the bay, all the while sending reassuring letters back to New England. In 1877, on a voyage to the Bay Islands of Honduras, Eunice, Smiley, and their children were struck by a hurricane and drowned off the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua. 5 5
The two Atlantic World sites that provide the principal settings for this story could hardly appear more dissimilar. If northern New England stood at the center of much of nineteenth-century history-in-the-making—transatlantic capitalist expansion and industrialization, the creation of a powerful nation in the American Civil War—the Cayman Islands occupied a space on the margins of history, peripheral to the British Empire. Measuring about twenty miles long and less than a hundred miles square, Grand Cayman is the largest of three islands (with Little Cayman and Cayman Brac) situated south of Cuba and northwest of Jamaica. The islands remained under the administrative rule of Jamaica in the nineteenth century, and Caymanian men sailed to Kingston to buy and sell goods, even to collect their mail. With soil too poor to nourish a staple crop, Cayman (like Bermuda, the Bahamas, and British Honduras, among others) never supported a plantation economy. At emancipation, the thousand or so slaves who had worked on farms and as domestics constituted a majority of the population. Turtle-fishing and wrecking (the liberation of goods from shipwrecked vessels) continued as the islands' major industries, and all residents, including former slavemasters who chose to stay, worked the land without benefit of imported indentured labor. There are no records or traces of indigenous people. 6 6
To nineteenth-century visitors, Cayman seemed remarkably secluded. One Scottish missionary, who arrived the same year as Eunice Connolly, described the "sequestered" islands as a "lonely" place of "extreme isolation." Yet at the same time, Cayman provides a revealing example of the ways in which one small place could be connected to a more expansive geographical arena. Many of the men were mariners who traveled not only to Jamaica and Honduras but also to Cuba, the Florida Keys, New Orleans, Mobile, New York, and Boston. In 1872, this same missionary found his church services filled with women whose husbands, fathers, and sons were "at sea or in foreign countries." Moreover, because the land was surrounded by coral reefs, frequent shipwrecks brought in both foreign goods and forever-stranded outsiders. From the seventeenth century onward, the islands witnessed an amalgam of cultures, with a flow of European pirates, settlers, and sailors, enslaved and free people of African descent, and its own seafaring population. A woman born in 1899 told how one of her grandfathers was a slave from Africa, while the other was a shipwrecked seaman from Ireland. According to one linguistic analysis, natives spoke a "mixture of an archaic form of English with fragments of Negro dialect, Spanish forms, and expressions common to the Southern United States, as well as a remarkable number of nautical words." Caymanians, an elderly resident recently agreed, have been "traveling the world from the beginning." 7 7
Lives that raise questions about the day-to-day workings of racial classification and stratification across national bounds, coupled with a small body of direct evidence, warrant a certain willingness to embrace speculation. The six surviving letters that Eunice wrote from the West Indies include evidence that other communications never arrived in New England, and none of the mail that Eunice received in the Caribbean outlasted the tropical climate. Six much shorter letters survive from Smiley Connolly, including two penned in North America. But both Eunice and Smiley, along with most of their correspondents, kept ideas about race largely to themselves, and other evidence has proven scarce as well. Like hundreds of thousands of working-class women in the nineteenth century, Eunice and her family seldom appear in the historical record beyond the most commonplace documents (a birth or marriage certificate, a census listing, a muster roll). In Cayman, members of the Connolly family can be found in vital records that begin only in the 1880s, as well as in the memories of islanders born in the early twentieth century who have participated in the Memory Bank project of the Cayman Islands National Archive. 8
In trying to discern the lived experiences of my protagonists, then, some of my analysis necessarily relies more on context and extrapolation than on the evidence of conventional historical documentation. In particular, my own conversations with Connolly and Conolly descendants (the name is spelled both ways) have yielded scattered fragments about Smiley (a few recall hearing that he and an American woman drowned in the terrible hurricane of 1877) but have proven more fruitful concerning Smiley's father, brothers, and three sons from his first marriage. From childhood, these descendants, most of whom still reside in East End, where Eunice disembarked in 1869, listened to narratives of family, local, and island history, absorbing the ways in which parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents described themselves and others in terms of ancestry or color or local status. Thus do I at times rely openly on their language and reflections in efforts to speculate about the nineteenth-century lives of Eunice and Smiley Connolly, about the ways in which they were classified by others and endeavored to embody categories to their own satisfaction. 9
Ancestry, color and appearance, class status, gender, and behavior: all of these perceptions and assessments intertwined in the lives to be investigated here. Scholars of race most often contend that ancestry was the principal determinant of racial categorization in the nineteenth-century United States. In this view, the U.S. system was largely a binary one, built on the polar categories of "black" and "white," with American Indians and Asian immigrants occupying a place outside of that central duality. A system that placed all people of mixed African and European ancestry into the category of "black" worked to deny separate classifications for people of mixed descent. This feature worked also, theoretically, to erase sex across the color line and to preclude any fluidity of racial identification, since intermediate categories were subsumed within a monolithic blackness. Whiteness in nineteenth-century North America, then, was not intended to be a description of color but rather an unfragmentable quality that marked a person off from African lineage. In 1860, a Connecticut court maintained that the phrase "persons of color" in its "common, ordinary and popular meaning" included "those who have descended in part" from African ancestors, and that African ancestry and whiteness were mutually exclusive. In turn, scholars have contrasted this binary structure with the non-binary system of the nineteenth-century British Caribbean that recognized categories in between "black" and "white." With greater fluidity (though with no less prejudice against darkness), class and complexion openly counted in the pursuit of racial stratification in the West Indies, and individuals of known African ancestry could move closer to the category of "white" precisely because color and especially class status were deeply bound up with racial rankings. 8 10
Yet by drawing the distinction between the United States and the Caribbean too sharply, we miss an opportunity to understand the ways in which the largely binary North American system offered a margin of latitude: not only for those who were able to reject an imposed subordinate ranking by means of "passing" but also for authorities (whether courtroom judges or neighborhood gossips) who aimed to enforce oppression by imposing rankings that did not depend on a person's ancestry. The "one-drop rule" in North America was never legally firm in the nineteenth century, and although it often prevailed informally, the experiences of Eunice and Smiley Connolly in New England make clear that racial classification could be challenged by factors other than genealogy. As in the British Caribbean, class status and personal associations could affect the shadings of one's racial classification and subsequent treatment in local, daily life. 9 11
Eunice's journey across racial boundaries was not simply a metaphorical crossing of the color line, rendering her a white woman married to a black man. Rather, the courtship and marriage to Smiley Connolly set in motion circumstances that, as shall become apparent, at first denied Eunice the privileges of white womanhood in her New England neighborhood and then, as she came to be part of a community of former Caribbean slaves, brought her closer—though in a surprising way—to the embodiment of white womanhood than she had ever been before. It was the crossing of national borders that made possible this contradictory sequence of events. This essay investigates, in turn, Eunice's status in Civil War New England, Smiley's status in the West Indies and the ways he was perceived in post–Civil War New England, and finally, Eunice Connolly's transformative experiences upon marriage to an African Caribbean captain, both in New England and the British Caribbean. Each of these episodes reveals how the malleability of racial classification could work to fortify and invigorate the workings of racial hierarchy. 12
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Much more here :http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/ahr/108.1/ah0103000084.html |
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