Acting the Part

ED AYERS: In the 19th century, epilepsy was considered a serious disability, and it was thought to be especially prevalent among enslaved people, but if we dig a little bit deeper, the historical record shows a more complicated story.

DEA BOSTER: I have read accounts of slaves who admitted having feigned seizures in a variety of ways—choking, frothing at the mouth, convulsing—and some who claimed that they had witnessed such fits in other people, and they knew how to mimic them.

ED AYERS: This is historian Dea Boster. She says that white slave owners were terrified of epilepsy, which helps explain why slaves found ways to use those fears to their own advantage.

Slavery, of course, was itself a violent, disabling system with backbreaking work, beatings and medical neglect, but the hidden history Boster uncovers shows that even able-bodied slaves exploited white anxieties about disability. Boster tells a story of a child whose seizures saved her from a terrible fate.

DEA BOSTER: In 1843, a 15-year-old female slave in Richmond, Virginia, named Virginia, was found guilty for the crime of arson, which for slaves was a capital offense, and she was sentenced to hang. But her master, a man named Archibald Govan, appealed to the governor for clemency, and he was able to convince the governor to have her sentence commuted. So, instead of being executed, Virginia was supposed to be sold.

And, on the day that Govan picked her up at the city jail to transport her to slave trader Bacon Tait’s jail, she experienced what Govan described as an epileptic fit. There’s nothing to indicate she had a history of it, but she had such fits, or episodes, regularly for almost two months before both the slave trader and a physician he had hired threw up their hands and said, “We can’t sell her. She has no value. You have to take her home.”

So, a slave, a young girl, who had been found guilty in a Richmond court of a capital crime—was sentenced to die—was saved. Her life was saved. She wasn’t sold. She was returned to her family.

ED AYERS: How would they know that she had epilepsy?

DEA BOSTER: Well, that’s a very good question. It was a not a very well understood disease category at the time, and they never exactly explained in any of the correspondence I read what the fits actually looked like. They just used the word “epileptic.”

ED AYERS: Yeah, we can’t know what really happened, but we can’t help but be struck by this seemed very advantageous to her for those fits to strike her when they did. So, where there other times that you know of that people were able to use disability or feigned disability to their advantage?

DEA BOSTER: Oh, absolutely, in a variety of instances. I mean, when you think about the day-to-day negotiations of slavery, slaves who could use agency not so much for out-right rebellion but to negotiate the terms of their labor and how they interacted with their masters, there are examples of slaves who sabotaged their own body at market to prevent a sale to an undesired master.

My favorite example, though—and it’s a very unique one—of a slave who utilized a masquerade of disability to her advantage was Ellen Craft, who, in 1848, escaped with her husband, William, from Macon, Georgia, to Philadelphia.

ED AYERS: And that’s a long way to escape [laughs] as enslaved people, right?

DEA BOSTER: It is. What’s really remarkable about the Craft story is that they traveled on public transportation the entire way.

ED AYERS: Wow.

DEA BOSTER: Yeah.

ED AYERS: So, I’m guessing disability played a role in this? Can you explain?

DEA BOSTER: Absolutely. So, the Crafts devised a plan where Ellen, who was fairly light-skinned—presumably, she was the daughter of her master, her white master—she disguised herself as a white slave-holding man, and gave herself the persona Mr. Johnson, and her husband, William, who was slightly older than she, disguised himself as Mr. Johnson’s servant.

And the cover story was that they were going to Philadelphia to seek medical treatment and, in order to cover up—

ED AYERS: For Mr. Johnson?

DEA BOSTER: For Mr. Johnson, yes. In order to cover up Ellen’s femininity, her voice, the fact that she could not read or write, because as a slave she had never been trained how to read and write, they utilized a variety of disabling characteristics.

So, they put shaded green glasses over her eyes to feign a problem with her eyesight. They wrapped her head in poultices. When an acquaintance who knew her as a slave tried to strike up a conversation with her, she feigned deafness so that she wouldn’t have to respond. And, most importantly, they bound her right arm in a sling so that she would have an excuse not to register her name for hotels and such along the way because she didn’t know how.

ED AYERS: So, it’s interesting that they used disability to make themselves invisible and, in some ways, in inaudible [laughs] on their escape from the South.

DEA BOSTER: And they could exploit the reactions to disabling injuries, whether it was revulsion, whether it was repression, horror, disgust, pity, sympathy.

ED AYERS: It’s fascinating how enslaved people, such as Virginia or the Crafts, were able to use disability as a way to actually buy a little bit of space in a society that otherwise left them so little.

DEA BOSTER: And, certainly, that tells us an awful lot about expectations of disability and ideas about disability in antebellum society more generally. The more visible or apparent a disability is, the greater the impulse to render that individual invisible. So, I think that actually helps lend complexity to this issue, to understand exactly how disability can work on so many levels in American society and in American history.

[MUSIC]

ED AYERS: Dea Boster is a historian at Columbus State Community College and author of African-American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800 to 1860.

[MUSIC]