Rescue, Recover, (Re)inscribe

All my life, I have felt a certain fascination for historical photographs. As I meandered through museums and libraries or explored ghost towns and historical sites, it has been the photographs that draw me in, staring curiously at the stern black-and-white faces that seem so distant and yet so familiar. What qualities do these images possess that so possess me? In them, I sense whispers from white, unmoving lips, the secret commonplaces that filled their daily lives, mysteries of a time and place now closed away in the dim storage-bins of archive and memory.

Photo courtesy The Atlantic

These are the faces of history; these are the faces of our history. And these yellowed, aging faces of history are not silent: as Malea Powell (Beyond the Archives) reminds us, “History isn’t a dead and remembered object; it is alive and it speaks to us.” But what does it say?

Sometimes, history speaks of things we don’t want to hear. Sometimes, it may show us truths about ourselves we don’t want to know. Among the darkest chapters of our unwanted histories, American slavery lingers like an inky stain on the national consciousness, one that many would simply rather forget to remember. In the course of my recent studies, I have read the narratives of escaped slaves, of abolitionists, and even of novelists who re-imagine our past for us in vivid textual detail. But nothing I have read so far has captured my attention the way that a single photograph, discovered through happenstance, has done.

This photograph features three children, with markedly Caucasian features, combed and neatly dressed and staring determinedly into the camera. The caption beneath the image reads “Rebecca, August and Rosa. Slave Children from New Orleans.” The composition of this photograph and its caption are, in my estimation, intended to shock. These light-skinned children, some with long, silky hair, are slaves? These children do not fit the image of the bestial, black-skinned African. These children tell a far more complicated story. These children have “white” fathers; these children have slave mothers. According to the law of their day, children, regardless of parentage, “shall be held bond or free only according to the condition of the mother.” From a photograph, they speak to a history of oppression and violence, of suffering and silence. From a photograph, they speak to a future of the same.

Yet the voices that these innocents have been given are not their own – they have been exploited as propaganda for abolitionists, determined to force their Northern audiences to admit the depravity that their complicity allows. They have been used, for “a greater good,” some say, but used nonetheless. The have been appropriated, re-presented and, in the process, erased from our collective memories. 

When feminist rhetorical scholars speak of “rescue, recovery and (re)inscription,” are these and others like them the needy ones that come to mind? If they could speak – if we could listen – what do you suppose we would hear?