September 2000

     Sigmund Freud declares: "when you meet a human being, the first distinction you make is 'male or female?' and you are accustomed to make the distinction with unhesitating certainty" (qtd in Garber 1). "Drag," "cross-dressing," "gender-bending," "passing"-- all of these acts call into question what one is "accustomed" to as Freud suggests; but if the things that we are most certain about are potentially questionable, our gender, then what happens to the other categories to which we feel we unhesitatingly belong? What about categories of race, power, class, education, master, servant? Today, cross-dressing narratives tend to suggest men in sparkly gowns and make-up-- put there for entertainment purposes, the drag queen highlights the fictions of femininity while emphasizing them. The drag queen is deliberately fake-- we are not supposed to accept that his/her "glam" as any kind of realism but instead as imitation, a flattery and performative act, primarily there to entertain us. But "passing," the art of actually being accepted as the "other" which you are performing, is a different sort of act. The convincing "passer" can make us question our judgment, our very ability to discern between what is "real" and what is "fake;" that he/she can do this is the reason why sometimes the convincing passer risks his/her life when discovered ⁽¹⁾ . Humans do not like our assumptions challenged and can respond sometimes with violence when we feel those primal assumptions have been breached. When we combine this challenge and this anxiety to the challenges of abolitionism in the nineteenth century-- examining narratives in which men and women "pass" as opposite gender, opposite class, opposite race -- we find an intriguing phenomenon which inverts and challenges the very structures of power in a way that makes those who hold that power more uncomfortable than they can realize.

     I will begin our exploration by quoting two scenes from novels in which slaves use the strategy of cross-dressing to escape. I will quote them at some length since they bear repeating; after a summary of the scenes, I will discuss their relevance. The first of these scenes is from Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin . ⁽²⁾ While Stowe's novel is obviously not by an African-American writer, the fact that so many African-American writers later challenge and respond to the roles that Stowe creates, as well as the fact that her novel (for good or bad) has helped define what race in our country means, makes Uncle Tom's Cabin an important place to start. Stowe knew a good story when she heard it, the narrative must be based, at least in part, on the story of William and Ellen Craft. Even if the narrative is not based on the Crafts, the story of a light-skinned slave escaping by passing at least as white frequently appeared in the newspapers, as Stowe's Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin tells us: ⁽³⁾

Run away from the subscriber, on the 25th May, a VERY BRIGHT MULATTO BOY, about 20 or 22 years old, named WASH. Said boy, without close observation, might pass himself for a white man, as he is very bright--has sandy hair, blue eyes, and a fine set of teeth. [. . .]Although he is like a white man in appearance, he has the disposition of a negro, and delights in comic songs and witty expressions. (Online, see end-notes)

Whether Stowe knew of the Crafts' escape is of much less important than that she imagines the possibilities for subversion in the story of a slave who would dare to "pass."

     In this scene, escapee Eliza and her husband George, who are both very light-skinned slaves (probably quadroons), are crossing into Canada by virtue of passing not only as white, but by subverting other societal expectations. Eliza has cut her hair and, "laughing" and "blushing" asks her husband "There, an't I a pretty young fellow?" After some discussion and worrying about whether they actually will get free in Canada, George says "well, indeed [. . .] you are a pretty little fellow. That crop of little, short curls, is quite becoming. Put on your cap. So-- a little to one side. I never saw you look quite so pretty." Soon after, their son enters "dressed in girls' clothes" to which Eliza says "what a pretty girl he makes" while the child "stood gravely regarding his mother in her new and strange attire, observing a profound silence, and occasionally drawing deep sighs, and peeping at her from under his dark curls." Eliza comments "so, then,. . . and I must stamp, and take long steps, and try to look saucy" to which George replies "there is, now and then, a modest young man; and I think it would be easier for you to act that character." When warned that "there have been men down, warning all the packet captains against a man and woman, with a little boy" George replies, "well, if we see any such people we can tell them." The slave catchers, who are prepared to see the couple passing as white, are fooled by their passing-- as both white and, in Eliza's case, male-- saying "I've watched every one of them that came on board. . . and I know they're not on this boat" (333). This is probably the most interesting part of this scene-- the fact that the whites who are out to catch the escaping slaves, while ready for trickery, are not quite ready to admit to the potential for subversions of every expected role-- and this prejudice is what the escapees use to aid in their successful escape. I will reserve further comment on this scene, however, until we see one other.

     The second scene is from William Wells Brown's novel Clotel, ⁽⁴⁾ (which was, in part, a response to Stowe's novel) based very strongly on both Brown's autobiographical experiences and those of other slaves he met and observed. In this scene Clotel, another very light skinned slave woman (and grand-daughter to Thomas Jefferson) escapes with her friend and fellow-slave William, whose comment "you look a good deal like a man with your short hair" and her reply "Oh, I have often been told that I would make a better looking man than a woman" inspires in the two their successful scheme for escape:

Under the assumed name of "Mr. Johnson," Clotel went to the clerk's office and took a private state room for herself, and paid her own and servant's fare. Besides being attired in a neat suit of black, she had a white silk handkerchief tied round her chin, as if she was an invalid. A pair of green glasses covered her eyes; and fearing that she would be talked to too much and thus render her liable to be detected, she assumed to be very ill. (170)

Brown provides us with a supposed newspaper account description of the escape written by an "eye-witness:" who says he "found that he [Clotel as the escaping cross-dresser] was a slight build, apparently handsome young man, with black hair and eyes, and of a darkness of complexion that betokened Spanish extraction" (171). This scene, and the description of the escape of two slaves pulled off because one of them is cross-dressed, is based almost directly on the real-life narrative of William and Ellen Craft, who Wells knew, and who told Wells their story on the abolitionist lecture circuit in England at least twelve years before William Craft published Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. Brown also wrote about the Crafts not only in his fiction but in his own non-fiction narrative American Fugitive in Europe (Furman 124).

     Critics have noticed that Brown used the Crafts' narrative in his own work, but few have commented on why he felt that their story was so appealing both to himself and to his audience. Why does this scene of crossing into freedom via crossing into borderlands of gender and race appear so frequently, and why is it so appealing to audiences? Why does each writer reset the scene a bit? Stowe's scene shows Eliza as somehow even more feminine and "pretty" while in her gender bending excursion with her son as a pretty little girl (who somehow seems to know his masculinity is being compromised as he sighs and peers out from under curls). Critic Marjorie Garber does explain that "Eliza's sexual appeal for her husband is enhanced at this moment by her male disguise, as well as by the danger in which escape will put them both" (286), but Garber's discussion focuses more on the implied eroticism of the scene than on why Stowe needed to cast this scene this way. Garber's understanding of possible sexual excitement suggested behind George's noting of Eliza's "prettiness" is more a 20 ^th Century recasting of the scene than an understanding of Stowe's 19 ^th Century purpose for putting it there. Basically, Stowe makes Eliza's cross dressing a way of being essentially more female and wifely; this is crucial for her mostly female audience because by allowing those women readers to identify with Eliza, she makes them uncomfortably aware of their own potential status, their own shared and potentially threatened femininity. At the same time they admire the cleverness of the scheme, they will be made aware of their own unwillingness to "crop" their hair, and the sacrifice will seem very personal. Eliza is "recuperated in her appropriate gender as George Harris' wife" (Ginsberg 12) because wife is the category which is the most powerful tool in Stowe's arsenal against the "essentialism" of slavery. She uses an essentialism of one kind, the "essential" female desire for security, to call into question the essential rightness of another unequal system. The appeal of the Craft's cross-dressing story for Stowe, then, is its ability to make her own narrative more powerful, more convincing, and more challenging to her readers. As Raymond Hedin points out in "Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative," "the notion of woman as slave tapped the incipient, feminist indignation that was already linking the women's rights movement and the anti-slavery movement" (Sekora/Turner 27). Finally, this powerful image, of the woman who subverts her race as well as gender, to seize power, could not have been lost on Stowe's audience.

     Similarly, years before the Crafts publish the story themselves, Brown rewrites the event to powerfully point out that it is not only the domestic sphere that is compromised by slavery's continued existence, but that the sphere of the most powerful figures in society-- the white male's supremacy-- is called into question when one so low in status can easily "cross" into such a role. This is why Brown's version of this scene in Clotel mostly features the perceptions of others and a so-called objective newspaper story and physical description. By using institutions of white male power (the newspaper account) to show a subversion of that power, Brown's version calls into question the superficiality of the definitions upon which the system is based, suggesting that those superficial elements that signify "white" and "male" are easily compromised.

What this Re-Vision Accomplishes

In her article "The Slave Narrative and the Black Literary Tradition," Martha K. Cobb argues that:

The slave narrative represents a fusion of [. . .] predominant themes. The first is the struggle for freedom, both psychic and physical. The second is the resolving of oppositions, the polarities that confront slave life from birth to death: order and disorder, black and white, slave and free, ignorance and knowledge, poverty and wealth, despair and hope. (38)

Cobb asserts that the slave narrative can be "count[ed] . . . as an early form whose themes probe deeply into the black experience of life in the Americas" (36). What I am most interested in exploring, in the light of Cobb's second theme "the resolving of oppositions" and "polarities" are these scenes, which defy several of those polarities by firmly remaining in the liminal states between "black and white" "slave and free" "ignorant and knowing" as well as (one that she does not mention) "male and female." Because it is not easily resolved within typical binaries and oppositions, the reappearance of this narrative creates new categories, which are less a "fusion" than they are a realization of the inherent slipperiness of all defining categories. The Crafts' story appears as both "truth" and "fiction," both historic narrative and novel. Does this mean that the slave narrative, long recognized as a historical document, is more a proto-novel and shaping of "truth" for effect than has been previously noted? Does early African American fiction further question even the categories of fiction and "true" narrative?

     The Crafts' story undermines those boundaries and polarities which are supposed to be essential to an understanding of identity (and which appear in Brown's and Stowe's novel) merging them into a fiction in which the escape to freedom seems tantalizingly easy and of few real dangers, (or dangers narrowly avoided). This blending of the categories causes all "essential truths" to be repeatedly called into question. This awareness of the continuum on which these categories actually reside, which explodes the binaries, accounts for the appeal and consequent re-appearance of this cross-dressed escape. The appeal is not merely the comedy inherent in the subversions of two slaves pretending to be master and servant, and "hoodwinking" those who would catch them. The appeal is not even just that of "pulling one over" on the rich whites who the slaves encounter along the way, some of whom even go so far as to "fall in love" with the invalid gentleman. Perhaps it is something else entirely.

Running a Thousand Miles -- and Then Some

     That the narrative is based on a real-life story only makes the gaps, rewrites, and omissions, (even exaggerations) that appear between the fiction and the "reality" more intriguing. What is, then, the "real" narrative? In the introduction to the 1969 Arno Press reprint of Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom, Florence B. Freedman declares of the Craft's story:

Among the narratives of fugitive slaves, one is unique . A few slave girls fled disguised as boys, and a few families escaped in their masters' coaches. Most slaves, however, fought and clawed their way to freedom through swamps or forests, with slave catchers and bloodhounds in close pursuit, or crated in boxes and secreted in the holds of ships, were half-suffocated and starving when discovered by captors or liberators. Unlike the others Ellen and William Craft traveled publicly in first-class accommodations on trains and steamers. (i-- italics mine)

The uniqueness, where the Crafts are "unlike the others" is acknowledged and commented upon (although not enough to make it seem that they were completely out-of-danger through their entire escape) and this uniqueness is obviously the mode of escape: the cross-dressing, and the fact that it enables the two to escape together, with relative ease and in relative comfort. It is true that the situation was not as unique as Freedman implies, and that "cross-dressing as a means of eluding detection [. . .] was not unique to this couple," that "'men disguised in female attire and women dressed in the garb of men have under very trying circumstances triumphed in thus making their way to freedom" (Still, qtd in McCaskill 509). Even Harriet Jacobs dresses briefly in "drag" during her escape, wearing "sailor's clothes" and "walking rickety" like a man (112). But the way that the Crafts escape, boldly riding "on trains and steamers" and convincing bystanders of their identity, is a strategy of extreme ingenuity and potential for disruption of "norms."

     In 1848, as described by William Craft in the narrative published twelve years after their escape to freedom, the Crafts, disguised as male master and servant, traveled from Macon, Georgia to Philadelphia. What makes their escape particularly innovative and successful is Ellen Craft-- who, because of her light complexion was able to very convincingly pass as white, but who also managed to pass as male, and a rich one at that. Ellen also manages to pass as literate (or, to use Cobb's binary, knowing) by hiding her inability to write under a bandaged hand and asking others to sign hotel registers for her. ⁽⁵⁾ Craft sketches for his audience several very amusing scenes in which whites, not realizing that they are talking to an escaping slave, confide to what they think is one of their own about the duplicity and deception of blacks. These scenes are Craft's (and in Clotel' s similar scene, Wells') way of suggesting to the reader, and slave owners especially, that what they "know" about anything could be wrong; if they cannot trust their own senses to pick out the "African" blood, then what can they trust? Where are their assurances? If, as the epigraph to this paper's quoted slave advertisement tells us, a slave can have a "complexion so nearly white that it is believed a stranger would suppose there was no African blood in him"(Ginsberg 1) then how can they separate white and black, and justify their own so-called superiority?

     Craft's narrative is more than a mere retold story, meant to entertain; it is already well-known enough by the time he publishes his version that one would wonder why he bothers. The reason, of course, is this: Craft must write his own narrative, despite the fact that his story is no longer new to most of his audience, because he is aware that his and his wife's experiences cast all "essential" categories into question in a way that is particularly productive to his own goals of obtaining freedom.

These are the woodcuts that accompanied Craft's narrative, which show Ellen as quite feminine, and a bit matronly.

     Ellen's act of crossing boundaries is not so much one of deception but of mastery-- in passing without question as both male and white, Ellen Craft overcomes the distinctions that whites, and especially slave-owning male whites, believed were incorruptible. She calls into question categories of whiteness/blackness, master/slave, male/female, and independence/ dependency. This is why in her narrative, and those based on her story, the slave catchers (and those who would reinforce the situation that keeps them in power and others out of power) cannot and will not even consider the possibility that she could be other than what she appears to be. This is why Eliza and George are barely even glanced at aboard the escaping vessel to Canada, and why Stowe ultimately found the idea of the possibilities of "passing" so attractive. While perhaps expecting a "white" couple, the slavers, who really should be prepared for their quarry to try anything, do not even consider the possibility that two apparently white, apparently male people might be their prey. They cannot afford to question the stability of "white" and "male." If they question appearances then they question their own surety that those categories are firm; perhaps those roles would not exist at all but in their own minds. And the appearance, however tentative, of those questions is dangerous to all boundaries , as Elaine K. Ginsberg warns us:

Allowing the possibility that "maleness" or "whiteness" or ethnicity can be performed or enacted, donned or discarded, exposes the anxieties about status and hierarchy created by the potential of boundary trespassing. For both the process and the discourse of passing challenge the essentialism that is often the foundation of identity politics, a challenge that may be seen as either threatening or liberating but in either instance discloses the truth that identities are not singularly true or false but multiple and contingent. (4)

Not only does Ellen Craft escape into freedom but she rewrites herself as the ultimately free-- white, male, slave-owner, long before her husband's version of the story. ⁽⁶⁾ She rewrites herself by performing a role that frees her, which she could perform successfully with or without her husband's help. In so doing she calls all roles into question. As McCaskill points out:

     Ellen's metamorphosis accomplished more than merely a shorter haircut and a switch from skirts to trousers. With its transformation of an enslaved, deprivileged, outcast, racially tainted, genetically inferior quadroon woman into the free, privileged, racially pure, genetically superior white man [see image at left, from the original woodcuts published with the Craft's narrative, as a frontispiece]-- a transformation occurring without any chemistry or catalysts other than intellect, Providence, and will-- the Crafts' incredible scheme contested those sorry prejudices and spurious persuasions for enslavement based on assumptions of gender, class, and race. (511)

     She does this by manipulating the prejudices, assumptions, and expectations of the "master." This is what mere discussions of the gender subversion and/or the race crossing miss-- that Ellen Craft is a liminal figure that must not be easily categorized. She does not merely subvert gender or sexuality-- she immediately dresses as female as soon as she is safe and "free" and does not dress as male except to temporarily seize the male(s) power. As a result, she clearly is not interested in challenging our notions of the feminine alone; she uses whatever power strategies she can to wrest power for herself, then "passes" back to the very category she has called into question: wife. She does not merely subvert categories of race, either-- and she shows us that the very labels "white" "black" and "passing" are in the minds not of the person who is being labeled, but the person who is doing the labeling. Ellen's very acts challenge all such categories-- if they do not exist but in the mind of the beholder, they do not exist, necessarily, at all.

     This explains why William Craft must write his version of the tale; he must insist that "My wife had no ambition whatever to assume this disguise, and would not have done so had it been possible to have obtained our liberty by more simple means" (qtd in Garber 285). He must illustrate her becoming female, weak, and feminine as soon as possible-- she must be recast into her feminine role by the male narration because otherwise, she might even challenge the role of domesticated wife in which Craft later affirms her, thereby challenging those primal "male/female" roles which even abolitionists needed.

     Throughout his narrative, Craft is aware of the way she challenges roles; his use of masculine pronouns to refer to his wife is more than just humor, more than, as Freedman insists him getting "so caught up with their deception and disguise that he always refers to Ellen as 'my master' and 'he'"(ii). This idea has been explored by Ellen M. Weinauer, who explains that "the urbane surface of Craft's narrative is broken throughout by anxious claims, efforts to contain Ellen's unruly gender identity with an insistence on her 'true' womanhood" (48). But as Weinauer further explains, this reassertion of her female character is not merely to assert her essential wifely femininity, as in Stowe's casting of Eliza, but to further challenge the power behind the white male and thus, the roles that are assumed to be inevitable. Ellen's "ability to assume so successfully the identity of a white man," as well as Craft's need to capitalize on the sensational appeal of that action, reveals "the different ways 'freedoms' are negotiated, achieved, or denied" (53). It also reveals "the fluid, complex, and always vexed relationship between gender and race in the American journey toward emancipation" (53). This revelation of the fluidity of these roles posits the question, what roles are stable? Are there any? Not only does the Crafts' narrative and Stowe and Brown's versions of it (or similar passing narratives) call into question categories of race but of fiction and non-fiction, of history and fantasy, and of all those binaries that we typically like to see the world comfortably within. His is an awareness that if one can fool those who hold power, one could, perhaps, upset all those binaries and hierarchies.

What Now? Strategies for Viewing these Shifting Identities

     So, what does this examination of this narrative of "passing" and correspondingly "crossing" into categories other than which are seen as somehow "essential" reveal? Perhaps one important way of looking at these texts is as teaching tool. Darwin T. Turner, in his essay "Uses of the Antebellum Slave Narrative in Collegiate Courses in Literature" argues for the inclusion of the slave narrative as "autobiography," as "travel narrative," as "history" as " picaresque ," and as "rhetorical models" for teachers who use "'relevant' documents . . . as materials for reading and as springboards for oral and/or written discussion" (128-130). He discusses ways the narratives should be analyzed thematically, from themes of "courage" and "oppression" to themes of "love" and "freedom" (130). He even includes the potential for the "traditional" look at slave narratives and early fiction such as Brown's as " objet d'arts " (127).

     All of these categories are incredibly relevant to the slave narrative but I think one of the most important pedagogical uses of these narratives is one that is aware of the slipperiness of all of these categories. We should read and teach these narratives in a manner that not only seeks an understanding of the way race and gender are constructed, (which is how most critics seem to want to read the Crafts' story) but of the way identities themselves are constructed within these (and indeed all) important nineteenth (and obviously all) century texts. Raymond Hedin argues:

The relationship between the form and social focus is important not only for the slave narrative but for later black fiction as well. Literary form in its many aspects has continued to take on functions and implications derived from the particular problems of blacks and black writers; hence the formal qualities of black writing should not be judged simply by the criteria derived from mainstream varieties of literature, but by the particular problems the black writer was confronting. (33)

Further, Annette Niemtozow, in her article "The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative" points out that "autobiographers use techniques of fiction" in their autobiography (107) but tends to miss the converse, that fiction writers also use techniques of autobiography in their fiction (as Brown does, repeatedly). There is a social consciousness, and a self-awareness in Brown's Clotel in the way he uses the Crafts' biography, as well as in the way Stowe uses the biography she was well-exposed to via the slave lecture circuit to inform her fiction. This self-awareness is a crucial part of the social issues and problems that this literature actively confronts, and must be a crucial part of the discussion of these literatures. Rather than mere critiques of the form, structure, and historicity of the slave narrative, and of the novel based heavily upon the narratives, we must become aware of the way these narratives, like the stories they tell of boundary crossings of many kinds, slip and cross and pass through categories of fiction and literature that we find all-too settled. Traditional judgments of "fine" literary work, and of the validity of the historical data from the slave narrative should not be the only criteria which are considered in teaching and reading these narratives. Rather than take the Beatles well-worn advice and "get back to where we once belonged," we should, the way these novels and narratives do, question the very notion of belonging anywhere.

Another image of Craft, found on the Internet. The website author does not credit where this photo is from, but it is interesting that Craft is pictured as much more feminine, younger, and very light.

Notes

1. For more information on a modern story illustrating the dangers of successful gender passing, see Elaine Ginsberg's discussion of the story of Brandon Teena (Teena Brandon) in the introduction to Passing and the Fictions of Identity.

2. The following quotations are from the Norton Critical Edition of Uncle Tom's Cabin, p. 333.

3. Quotations from the Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin are from the online edition of the text, found at: <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/uncletom/key/kyhp.html>.

4. The following quotations are from the Arno Press reprint of the 1853 first edition of the novel, p. 168.

5. A necessity for a white slave-owner, as Lindon Barrett explains in "Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom.

6. There is even some suggestion that perhaps Ellen herself "wrote" the entire escape -- critic Ellen Weinauer tells us that Josephine Brown (William Wells Brown's daughter and biographer) retells her version of the Craft's idea with Ellen as the mastermind.

Brown gives the following genesis of the plan of escape: "'Now William' said the wife, 'listen to me, and take my advice, and we shall be free in less than a month'" (76). "The wife" proceeds to counter all "the husband's" objections with clever devices and a few shaming remarks: "Come, William, . . . don't be a coward! Get me the clothes, and I promise you we shall both be free in a few days" (77).

As Weinauer explains, "The discrepancy between this representation of Ellen -- forceful, cunning, and active rather than reactive -- and that of Craft's narrative is intriguing. (Endnote, 54).

Works Cited

Barrett, Lindon. "Hand-Writing: Legibility and the White Body in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom." American Literature 69(2):315-36.

Brown, William Wells. Clotel. Intro, Jean Fagan Yellin. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Cobb, Martha K. "The Slave Narrative and the Black Literary Tradition." The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner,. Western Illinois Univ, 1982. 36-44.

Craft, William and Ellen. Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. Intro, Florence B. Freedman. New York: Arno Press, 1969.

Doyle, Mary Ellen. "The Slave Narratives as Rhetorical Art." The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner,. Western Illinois Univ, 1982. 83-95.

Furman, Marva J. "The Slave Narrative-- Prototype of the Early Afro-American Novel." The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner,. Western Illinois Univ, 1982. 120-126.

Garber, Marjorie. Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing & Cultural Identity. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Ginsberg, Elaine K., Editor. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Durham: Duke UP, 1996.

Hedin, Raymond. "Strategies of Form in the American Slave Narrative." The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner,. Western Illinois Univ, 1982. 25-35.

Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Jean Fagan Yellin, Editor. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1987.

McCaskill, Barbara. "‘Yours Very Truly': Ellen Craft: The Fugitive as Text and Artifact." African American Review. 28(4):509-29.

Niemtozow, Annette. "The Problematic of Self in Autobiography: The Example of the Slave Narrative." The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner,. Western Illinois Univ, 1982. 96-109.
Sekora, John and Darwin T. Turner, Editors. The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Western Illinois Univ, 1982.

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Editor, Elizabeth Ammons. New York: Norton Critical Edition, 1994.

---. A Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin. Online. Editors, Linck Johnson, Deborah McDowell, et al. University of Virginia. Available: <http://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/utc/ uncletom/key/kyhp.html> Accessed: December 13, 1999.

Turner, Darwin T. "Appendix One: Uses of Antebellum Slave Narratives in Collegiate Courses in Literature." The Art of the Slave Narrative: Original Essays in Criticism and Theory. Eds. John Sekora and Darwin T. Turner,. Western Illinois Univ, 1982. 127-134.

Weinauer, Ellen M. "‘A Most Respectable Looking Gentleman': Passing, Possession, and
Transgression in Running a Thousand Miles for Freedom. Passing and the Fictions of Identity. Editor, Elaine K. Ginsberg. Durham: Duke UP, 1996. 37-56.

Photo Credit
Sculley, Suzanne. On The Shoulders of Giants: Women of History 1770-1870. Online. Available: <http://www.womenofhistory.com>. Accessed: December 13, 1999.